MRS. ABBOTT’S EXPLANATION.
Perhaps it was a little bit of diplomacy on Mrs. Abbott’s part that
provided an occupation out of the house for Miss Stubbs, while she
talked of her very seriously to some of the scholars. Lily, who was as
quick to act upon her good impulses as upon any others, had told her
teacher frankly what had occurred. Mrs. Abbott received her confession
sorrowfully, but made no comment at the time, simply asking the girl to
call to her room those who had been present at the conversation.
Delia, Katie, Fannie Holmes, Bell Burgoyne, and Lily Dart, the Friendly
Five, as they called themselves, took their seats rather shamefacedly,
and waited to hear what Mrs. Abbott had to say.
If it had been any one but Mrs. Abbott the girls would have thought her
afraid to begin. She certainly seemed much less composed than usual.
She looked out of the window thoughtfully, rose and walked half a dozen
times across the room, then took her seat again, looked keenly at the
girls for a moment, and said:
“I hardly know whether or not to tell you something that will explain
the presence in our school of a girl who is very different--I do not
pretend to say she is not--from all who have ever been here. I hope I
may help her by telling you, but sometimes I am afraid I shall do more
harm than good by being frank.”
Here she hesitated, and the girls, who were wildly curious, were afraid
she had arrived at the conclusion not to tell them any thing. She
noticed their inquiring looks and smiled.
“I have made your lively imaginations expect more of a story than I
really have to tell,” she said. “Last July, as you already know, I
took Ethel and Candace for a six weeks’ stay in the Catskills. The
hotel was on one mountain and faced another. In the deep valley between
were several little houses, not clustered together for neighborly
companionship, as you might suppose they would be in such a place, but
each standing quite alone in what they call a ‘burnt-off’ clearing.
The mountain air, while it strengthened me, made me wakeful, and,
delightfully still as the place was, I could never sleep after the
first ray of daylight broke through the sky. There were such glorious
cloud effects that I thought I might as well turn my early wakefulness
to good account; so the dawn of day always found me in shawls and
wrapper sitting at the window of my bedroom.
“The clouds hang very near the earth among those heights; so in
watching them I did not have to lift my eyes too high to see what
was going on about me, although there was not much to see, except an
occasional ox-team or a man on his way somewhere. But I began to notice
after a while that one of the earliest living things astir after the
birds was a little girl who brought a big pail up the hill, went around
to the back door of the hotel, and presently came back with the pail
filled with water, carrying it down the precipitous path quickly but
with great care not to spill all its contents, as certainly any one not
used to perpendicular paths would have done.
“To have made the journey thus loaded would have been a task for most
people, but this little water-bearer came again and again. I have known
her to carry down her load eleven times before the first bell rang to
warn the hotel guests that it was time to leave their beds and prepare
for breakfast.
“I am not fond of exercise before breakfast, but I grew so interested
in the little water-carrier that one morning I dressed myself very
early and went out, meeting her, as I expected, swinging her empty pail
and repeating something to herself as if she were learning a lesson.
She was larger when I stood on her level than when I saw her from the
window, and sufficiently strong not to have minded carrying two or
three pails of water--but eleven!
“‘It is hard work for you,’ I said, sympathetically, after wishing her
good-morning. ‘O, my, no,’ she said, brightly; ‘jest suppose I had the
empty pails to carry down and the full ones to fetch up!’
“I admired her happy philosophy and asked which of the houses she
carried her pails of water to, and was surprised enough when she told
me it was to all of them. I learned later that the well at the hotel
was the only one in the vicinity, and, the supply of rain-water being
inadequate, the people in the four little homes I could catch glimpses
of through the trees were willing to give a cent for each pail of water
brought to them!
“At mountain hotels fruit on the breakfast-table is not usual; so the
boarders were very glad to engage wild raspberries from the same girl,
who gathered them, with the help of three little brothers, after she
had finished her water-carrying.
“I used to walk on the piazza with Ethel every morning while Candace
was eating her breakfast, and sometimes still longer, when the grass
seemed too damp for more distant rambling, and as we turned the corner
and walked down the end of the dining-room we could see through the
windows of the kitchen beyond it great baskets of dirty dishes carried
in and emptied upon a table and piled up ready for washing. At a sink
close by a fat woman was perpetually washing dishes, which she handed
as fast as rinsed to two girls who wiped and piled them upon another
table. The dish-washing and wiping always seemed very attractive to
Ethel, and she made every excuse to stay longest on that part of the
piazza. At last from frequent observation of the process and the
workers I began to discover that my little water-carrier was one of the
dish-wipers.
“I made arrangements when we first went to the hotel for hiring a
strong wagon and a very steady old horse, and Ethel and I went every
fair day for a long, lovely drive among the beautiful mountains. One
day our trustworthy horse was attacked with a kind of rheumatic
lameness which his owner admitted he was liable to have occasionally,
but which would not last long. We waited patiently through several
rainy and cloudy days, but when one came that seemed more perfect
than any other day could be I felt as if I could wait no longer,
and consulted the landlord about hiring another horse. I think, to
exonerate that very cautious and conservative man, I must confess that
I was a little self-willed, and engaged a coltish creature that he
absolutely condemned. But I have driven nearly every day for so many
years that I had perhaps too great an estimate of my own powers.
“We started on our drive, picking out the least precipitous roads,
where all nearly approached the perpendicular for at least some portion
of their way, and so far from seeming coltish our slow-moving horse
might have been a grandfather.”
There was a prevailing opinion at Coventry school that Mrs. Abbott was
rather fond of telling a story, and knew how to tell it well. Perhaps
it was the strong interest she herself felt in every thing she said to
her girls, or perhaps it was the great love they felt for her that made
them now listen so intently that if the celebrated pin that is always
mentioned in connection with attentive audiences had dropped it might
have made quite a clatter, and yet certainly there was nothing very
exciting about what she had said so far, as Kate Ashley found when she
tried to put it into her inevitable diary.
“Elfie was in high spirits,” pursued Mrs. Abbott, “and laughed and sang
as we drove along the shady roads, that were almost cold, the shade was
so dense.
“We were within a mile or two of home when we came to a little log
hut we had often seen before, but could rarely pass without stopping,
because we knew it was the place to buy the most delicious maple-sugar
that could be found in that region. The lame old woman sitting in the
door rose up and came to the carriage, helping out Elfie, who had
twelve cents, the price of a pound cake of sugar, clutched in her hand.
“I shall always be devoutly thankful that the child did get out, for
before she had even stepped into the house behind the old woman a man
whom I had not seen fired his gun at a squirrel close behind us, and
in an instant the startled horse dashed away with me, paying no heed
to all my efforts to hold him in. The road was up-hill for a little
way, but I well remembered that there was a long, steep pitch after
that, and I drew the reins with all the strength I had and settled
myself into the middle of the seat so I should not be quite so easily
thrown out. When we reached the top of the hill the downward pace was
terrible. He seemed not to run, but to take great plunging leaps. His
very first jump pulled the reins out of my hands, and I crouched down
on the floor, grasping the seat and expecting every instant to be
thrown out. I suppose I did not spend much time in this way, but it
seemed like an hour that I clung there with a dreadful death apparently
quite certain, for the road was narrow, with a steep, stony descent on
one side. At the bottom of the terrible hill there was a short bit of
road as nearly level as any road ever is among those mountains, then
a fork, one road taking straight up another hill, the other making a
sharp, sudden turn toward a plank bridge that had been injured by late
storms and was considered impassable.
“If the horse, whose bounds seemed to be getting a little less
impetuous, went straight up the other hill, possibly, hope whispered to
me, I might be saved; but if he took that awful turn--I turned sick
when I thought of what would come then!
“In those few terrible seconds before we reached the foot of the hill
I saw--although I was not conscious till afterward that I saw any
thing--the hotel standing boldly out upon its clearing, with people
walking and sitting upon its broad piazza, and, just before the bit of
level road I was approaching, a little black house, with a group of
children playing beneath a tree and a girl hanging a heavy quilt upon a
clothes-line. The noise of the wheels made her turn her head. I cannot
remember what she did then, but I have been told that she made a dash
for the road, and, when my horse came to the spot where to turn was
death, she stood at the point of danger, right in the middle of the
road, with the dark, wet calico quilt held up in her extended arms. If
she had moved it it would have added to the horse’s terror and driven
him into a mad bolt at the precipice on the other side of the road,
but held as the girl held it it simply made, as she hoped it would, a
barrier to keep him from taking the turn.
“My horse’s pace grew less fearful then, even on the level space, and
before we reached the top of the steep ascent it had moderated so
greatly that two men at the top in a loaded wagon sprang from their
seat at sight of my danger and stopped him without much difficulty.”
Mrs. Abbott stopped for a moment, overcome by the recollection of
her exciting adventure, while the girls, who had almost forgotten
to breathe while they listened, crowded about her with caresses and
murmurs of thankfulness that she had been saved.