AT THE GATE OF THE GIANT SCISSORS
Each of the girls answered Joyce's letter, but the Little Colonel's was
the first to find its way to the little brown house in Plainsville,
Kansas.
"Dear Joyce," she wrote. "We were all dreadfully disappointed yesterday
morning when mother and Papa Jack came back from Madame's villa, and told
us that she could not let us stay there. She has some English people in
the house, and could not give us rooms even for one night. She said that
we must be disappointed also about seeing Jules, for his Uncle Martin has
taken him to Paris to stay a month. I could have cried, I was so sorry.
"Ever since we left home I have been planning what we should do when we
reached the Gate of the Giant Scissors. I wanted to do all the things that
you did, as far as possible. I was going to have a barbecue for Jules,
down in the garden by the pagoda, and to have some kind of a midsummer
fête for the peasant children who came to your Christmas tree.
"Madame was sorry, too, that she couldn't take us, when she found that we
were your friends, and she asked mother to bring us all out the next day
and have tea in the pagoda. As soon as mother and Papa Jack came back,
they took us to see Sister Denisa at the home of the Little Sisters of the
Poor. I wish you could have seen her face shine when we told her that we
were friends of yours. She said lovely things about you, and the tears
came into her eyes when she told us how much she missed your visits, after
you went back to America.
"Next day we went to Madame's, and she took us over to the Ciseaux place
to see Jules's great-aunt Désirée. She is a beautiful old lady. She talked
about you as if you were an angel, or a saint with a halo around your
head. She feels that if it hadn't been for you that she might still be
only 'Number Thirty-nine' among all those paupers, instead of being the
mistress of her brother's comfortable home.
"After we left there, we passed the place where Madame's washerwoman
lives. A little girl peeped out at us through the hedge. Madame told her
to show the American ladies the doll that she had in her arms. She held it
out, and then snatched it back as if she were jealous of our even looking
at it. Madame told us that it was the one you gave her at the Noel fête.
It is the only doll the child ever had, and she has carried it ever since,
even taking it to bed with her. She has named it for you.
"Madame said in her funny broken English, 'Ah, it is a beautiful thing to
leave such memories behind one as Mademoiselle Joyce has left.' I would
have told her about the Road of the Loving Heart, but it is so hard for
her to understand anything I say. I think you began yours over here in
France, long before Betty told us of the one in Samoa, or Eugenia gave us
the rings to help us remember.
"We took Fidelia Sattawhite with us. She is the girl I wrote to you about
who was so rude to me, and who quarrelled so much with her brothers on
shipboard. I thought it would spoil everything to have her along, but
mother insisted on my inviting her. She feels sorry for her. Fidelia acted
very well until we went over to the Ciseaux place. But when we got to the
gate she stood and looked up at the scissors over it, and refused to go
in. Madame and mother both coaxed and coaxed her, but she was too queer
for anything. She wouldn't move a step. She just stood there in the road,
saying, 'No'm, I won't go in. I don't want to. I'll stay out here and wait
for you. No'm, nothing anybody can say can make me go in.'
"Down she sat on the grass as flat as Humpty Dumpty when he had his great
fall, and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't have made
her get up till she was ready. We couldn't understand why she should act
so. She told Betty that night that she was afraid to go through the gate.
She remembered that in the story where the old king and the brothers of
Ethelried came riding up to the portal 'the scissors leaped from their
place and snapped so angrily in their faces that they turned and fled.
Only those who belong to the kingdom of loving hearts could enter in.' She
told Betty that she knew she didn't belong to that kingdom, for nobody
loved her, and often she didn't love anybody for days. She was afraid to
go through the gate for fear the scissors would leap down at her, and she
would be so ashamed to be driven back before us all. So she thought she
would pretend that she didn't want to go in. She had believed every word
of that fairy tale.
"We had a beautiful time in the garden. We went down all the winding paths
between the high laurel hedges where you used to walk, and almost got
lost, they had so many unexpected twists and turns. The old statues of
Adam and Eve, grinning at each other across the fountain, are so funny. We
saw the salad beds with the great glass bells over them, and we climbed
into the pear-tree and sat looking over the wall, wondering how you could
have been homesick in such an interesting place.
"Berthé served tea in the pagoda, and because we asked about Gabriel's
music, Madame smiled and sent Berthé away with a message. Pretty soon we
heard his old accordeon playing away, out of sight in the coach-house, and
then we knew what kind of music you had at the Noel fête. Sort of wheezy,
wasn't it? Still it sounded sweet, too, at that distance.
"We took Hero with us, and he was really the guest of honour at the party.
When Madame saw the Red Cross on his collar and heard his history, she
couldn't do enough for him. She fed him cakes until I thought he surely
would be ill. It was a Red Cross nurse who wrote to Madame about her
husband. He was wounded in the Franco-Prussian war, too, just as was the
Major. Madame went on to get him and bring him home, and she says she
never can forget the kindness that was shown to her by every one whom she
met when she crossed the lines under the protection of the Red Cross.
"She had met Clara Barton, too, and while we were talking about the good
she has done, Madame said, 'The Duchess of Baden may have sent her the
Gold Cross of Remembrance, but the grateful hearts of many a French wife
and mother will for ever hold the rosary of her beautiful deeds!' Wasn't
that a lovely thing to have said about one?
"We start to London Thursday, and I'll write again from there. With much
love from us all, Lloyd."
The long letter which Lloyd folded and addressed after a careful
re-reading, had not been all written in one day. She had begun it while
waiting for the others to finish dressing one morning, had added a few
pages that afternoon, and finished it the next evening at bedtime.
"Heah is my lettah to Joyce, mothah," she said, as she kissed her good
night. "Won't you look ovah it, please, and see if all the words are
spelled right? I want to send it in the mawnin."
Mrs. Sherman laid the letter aside to attend to later, and forgot it until
long after Lloyd was asleep, and Mr. Sherman had come up-stairs. Then,
seeing it on the table, she glanced rapidly over the neatly written pages.
"I want you to look at this, Jack," she said, presently, handing him the
letter. "It is one of the results of the house party for which I am most
thankful. You remember what a task it always was for Lloyd to write a
letter. She groaned for days whenever she received one, because it had to
be answered. But when Joyce went away she said, 'Now, Lloyd, I know I
shall be homesick for Locust, and I want to hear every single thing that
happens. Don't you dare send me a stingy two-page letter, half of it
apologising for not writing sooner, and half of it promising to do better
next time.
"'Just prop my picture up in front of you and look me in the eyes and
begin to talk. Tell me all the little things that most people leave out;
what he said and she said on the way to the picnic, and how Betty looked
in her daffodil dress, with the sun shining on her brown curls. Write as
if you were making pictures for me, so that when I read I can see
everything you are doing.'
"It was excellent advice, and as Joyce's letters were written in that way,
Lloyd had a good model to copy. Joyce, being an artist, naturally makes
pictures even of her letters. When Betty went away and began sending home
such well-written accounts of her journey, I found that Lloyd's style
improved constantly. She wrote a dear little letter to the Major, last
week, telling all about Hero. I was surprised to see how prettily she
expressed her appreciation of his gift."
Mr. Sherman took the letter and began to read. In two places he corrected
a misspelled word, and here and there supplied missing commas and
quotation marks. There was a gratified smile on his face when he finished.
"That is certainly a lengthy letter for a twelve-year-old girl to write,"
he said, in a pleased tone, "and cannot fail to be interesting to Joyce.
The letters she wrote me from the Cuckoo's Nest were stiff, short scrawls
compared to this. I must tell my Little Colonel how proud I am of her
improvement."
His words of praise were not spoken, however. He expressed his
appreciation, later, by leaving on her table a box of foreign
correspondence paper. It was of the best quality he could find in Tours,
and to Lloyd's delight the monogram engraved on it was even prettier than
Eugenia's.
"Why did Papa Jack write this on the first sheet in the box, mothah?" she
asked, coming to her with a sentence written in her father's big,
businesslike hand: '_There is no surer way to build a Road of the Loving
Heart in the memory of absent friends, than to bridge the space between
with the cheer and sympathy and good-will of friendly letters._'
"Why did Papa Jack write that?" she repeated.
"Because he saw your last letter to Joyce, and was so pleased with the
improvement you have made," answered Mrs. Sherman. "He has given you a
good text for your writing-desk."
"I'll paste it in the top," said Lloyd. "Then I can't lose it." "'There is
no surer way,'" she repeated to herself as she carried the box back to her
room, "'to bridge the space between ... with the cheer and sympathy and
good-will.'"
There flashed across her mind the thought of some one who needed cheer and
sympathy far more than Joyce did, and who would welcome a friendly letter
from her with its foreign stamp, as eagerly as if it were some real
treasure. Jessie Nolan was the girl she thought of, an invalid with a
crippled spine, to whom the dull days in her wheeled chair by the window
seemed endless, and who had so little to brighten her monotonous life.
"I'll write her a note this minute," thought Lloyd, with a warm glow in
her heart. "I'll describe some of the sights we have seen, and send her
that fo' leafed clovah that I found at the château yestahday, undah a
window of the great hall where Anne of Brittany was married ovah fo'
hundred yeahs ago. I don't suppose Jessie gets a lettah once a yeah."
When that note was written, Lloyd thought of Mom Beck and the pride that
would shine in the face of her old black nurse if she should receive a
letter from Europe, and how proudly it would be carried around and
displayed to all the coloured people in the Valley. So with the kindly
impulse of her father's text still upon her, she dashed off a note to her,
telling her of some of her visits to the palaces of bygone kings and
queens.
Eugenia came in as she finished, but before she closed her desk she jotted
two names on a slip of paper. Mrs. Waters's was one. She was a little old
Englishwoman, who did fine laundry work in the Valley, and who was always
talking about the 'awthorne' edges in her old English home.
"I'll write to her from London," Lloyd thought. "If we should get a sight
of any of the royal family, how tickled she would be to hear it."
The other name was Janet McDonald. She was a sad, sweet-faced young
teacher whom Miss Allison always called her "Scotch lassie Jane." "I don't
suppose she'd care to get a letter from a little girl like me," thought
Lloyd, "but I know she'd love to have a piece of heather from the hills
near her home. I'll send her a piece when we get up in Scotland."
The letter that Eugenia sent to Joyce was only a short outline of her
plans. She knew that the other girls had sent long accounts of their trip
through Touraine, so hers was much shorter than usual.
"Papa has decided to send me to a school just outside of Paris
this year," she wrote, "instead of the one in New York, so it
will be a long time before I see my native land again. He will
have to be over here several months, and can spend Christmas and
Easter with me, so I can see him fully as often as I used to at
home.
"It is a very select school. Madame recommends it highly, and I
am simply delighted. A New York girl whom I know very well is to
be there too, and we are looking forward to all sorts of larks.
Thursday we are to start to London for a short tour of England
and Scotland. Then the others are going home and papa and I
shall go by Chester for my maid. Poor old Eliot has had a
glorious vacation at home, she writes. She is to stay at the
school with me. We shall be so busy until I get settled that I
shall not have time to write soon; but no matter how far my
letters may be apart, I am always your devoted EUGENIA."