"I DON'T SEE WHY."
The "little red" was at the door of the Green Cottage. Frank Scherman
had got the refusal of it the night before, and early in the morning
Madam Routh's compliments had come to Mrs. Linceford, with the request,
in all the form that mountain usage demanded, that she and the young
ladies would make part of the expedition for the day.
Captain Jotham Green, host and proprietor, himself stood at the horses'
heads. The Green Cottage, you perceive, had double right to its
appellation. It was both baptismal and hereditary, surname and given
name,--given with a coat of fresh, pale, pea-green paint that had been
laid on it within the year, and had communicated a certain tender,
newly-sprouted, May-morning expression to the old centre and its
outshoots.
Mrs. Green, within, was generously busy with biscuits, cold chicken,
doughnuts fried since sunrise, and coffee richly compounded with cream
and sugar, which a great tin can stood waiting to receive and convey,
and which was at length to serve as cooking utensil in reheating upon
the fire of coals the picnickers would make up under the very tassel of
Feather-Cap.
The great wagons were drawn up also before the piazza of the hotel; and
between the two houses flitted the excursionists, full of the bright
enthusiasm of the setting off, which is the best part of a jaunt,
invariably.
Leslie Goldthwaite, in the hamadryad costume, just aware--which it was
impossible for her to help--of its exceeding prettiness, and of glances
that recognized it, pleased with a mixture of pleasures, was on the
surface of things once more, taking the delight of the moment with a
young girl's innocent abandonment. It was nice to be received so among
all these new companions; to be evidently, though tacitly, _voted_ nice,
in the way girls have of doing it; to be launched at once into the
beginning of apparently exhaustless delights,--all this was superadded
to the first and underlying joy of merely being alive and breathing,
this superb summer morning, among these forests and hills.
Sin Saxon, whatever new feeling of half sympathy and respect had been
touched in her toward Miss Craydocke the night before, in her morning
mood was all alive again to mischief. The small, spare figure of the
lady appeared at the side-door, coming out briskly toward them along
the passage, just as the second wagon filled up and was ready to move.
I did not describe Miss Craydocke herself when I gave you the glimpse
into her room. There was not much to describe; and I forgot it in
dwelling upon her surroundings and occupations. In fact, she extended
herself into these, and made you take them involuntarily and largely
into the account in your apprehension of her. Some people seem to have
given them at the outset a mere germ of personality like this, which
must needs widen itself out in like fashion to be felt at all. Her
mosses and minerals, her pressed leaves and flowers, her odds and ends
of art and science and prettiness which she gathered about her, her
industries and benevolences,--these were herself. Out of these she was
only a little elderly thread-paper of a woman, of no apparent account
among crowds of other people, and with scarcely enough of bodily bulk or
presence to take any positive foothold anywhere.
What she might have seemed, in the days when her hair was golden, and
her little figure plump, and the very unclassical features rounded and
rosy with the bloom and grace of youth, was perhaps another thing; but
now, with her undeniable "front," and cheeks straightened into lines
that gave you the idea of her having slept all night upon both of them,
and got them into longitudinal wrinkles that all day was never able to
wear out; above all, with her curious little nose (that was the exact
expression of it), sharply and suddenly thrusting itself among things in
general from the middle plane of her face with slight preparatory hint
of its intention,--you would scarcely charge her, upon suspicion, with
any embezzlement or making away of charms intrusted to her keeping in
the time gone by.
This morning, moreover, she had somehow given herself a scratch upon
the tip of this odd, investigating member; and it blushed for its
inquisitiveness under a scrap of thin pink adhesive plaster.
Sin Saxon caught sight of her as she came. "Little Miss Netticoat!" she
cried, just under her breath, "_with_ a fresh petticoat, _and_ a red
nose!" Then, changing her tone with her quotation,--
"'Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower,
Thou'st met me in a luckless hour!'
Thou always dost! What _hast_ thou gone and got thyself up so for, just
as I was almost persuaded to be good? Now--_can_ I help that?" And she
dropped her folded hands in her lap, exhaled a little sigh of vanquished
goodness, and looked round appealingly to her companions.
"It's only," said Miss Craydocke, reaching them a trifle out of breath,
"this little parcel,--something I promised to Prissy Hoskins,--and
_would_ you just go round by the Cliff and leave it for me?"
"Oh, I'm afraid of the Cliff!" cried Florrie Arnall. "Creggin's horses
backed there the other day. It's horribly dangerous."
"It's three quarters of a mile round," suggested the driver.
"The 'little red' might take it. They'll go faster than we, or can, if
they try," said Mattie Shannon.
"The 'little red' 's just ready," said Sin Saxon. "You needn't laugh.
That wasn't a pun. But oh, Miss Craydocke!"--and her tone suggested the
mischievous apropos--"what _can_ you have been doing to your nose?"
"Oh, yes!"--Miss Craydocke had a way of saying "Oh, yes!"--"It was my
knife slipped as I was cutting a bit of cord, in a silly fashion, up
toward my face. It's a mercy my nose served, to save my eyes."
"I suppose that's partly what noses are for," said Sin Saxon gravely.
"Especially when you follow them, and 'go it blind.'"
"It was a piece of good luck, too, after all," said Miss Craydocke, in
her simple way, never knowing, or choosing to know, that she was snubbed
or quizzed. "Looking for a bit of plaster, I found my little parcel of
tragacanth that I wanted so the other day. It's queer how things turn
up."
"Excessively queer," said Sin solemnly, still looking at the injured
feature. "But, as you say, it's all for the best, after all. 'There _is_
a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' Hiram, we
might as well drive on. I'll take the parcel, Miss Craydocke. We'll get
it there somehow, going or coming."
The wagon rolled off, veils and feathers taking the wind bravely, and
making a gay moving picture against the dark pines and gray ledges as it
glanced along. Sin Saxon tossed Miss Craydocke's parcel into the "little
red" as they passed it by, taking the road in advance, giving a saucy
word of command to Jim Holden, which transferred the charge of its
delivery to him, and calling out a hurried explanation to the ladies
over her shoulder that "it would take them round the Cliff,--the most
wonderful point in all Outledge; up and down the whole length of New
Hampshire they could see from there, if their eyes were good enough!"
And so they were away.
Miss Craydocke turned back into the house, not a whit discomfited, and
with not so much as a contrasting sigh in her bosom or a rankle in her
heart. On the contrary, a droll twinkle played among the crow's-feet at
the corners of her eyes. They could not hurt her, these merry girls,
meaning nothing but the moment's fun, nor cheat her of her quiet share
of the fun either.
Up above, out of a window over the piazza roof, looked two
others,--young girls, one of them at least,--also, upon the scene of
the setting-off.
I cannot help it that a good many different people will get into my
short story. They get into a short time, in such a summer holiday, and
so why not? At any rate, I must tell you about these Josselyns.
These two had never in all their lives been away pleasuring before. They
had nobody but each other to come with now. Susan had been away a good
deal in the last two years, but it had not been pleasuring. Martha was
some five or six years the younger. She had a pretty face, yet marked,
as it is so sad to see the faces of the young, with lines and
loss--lines that tell of cares too early felt, and loss of the first
fresh, redundant bloom that such lines bring.
They sat a great deal at this window of theirs. It was a sort of
instinct and habit with them, and it made them happier than almost
anything else,--sitting at a window together. It was home to them
because at home they lived so: life and duty were so framed in for
them,--in one dear old window-recess. Sometimes they thought that it
would he heaven to them by and by: that such a seat, and such a quiet,
happy outlook, they should find kept for them together, in the Father's
mansion, up above.
At home, it was up three flights of stairs, in a tall, narrow city
house, of which the lower floors overflowed with young, boisterous half
brothers and sisters,--the tide not seldom rising and inundating their
own retreat,--whose delicate mother, not more than eight years older
than her eldest step-daughter, was tied hand and foot to her nursery,
with a baby on her lap, and the two or three next above with hands
always to be washed, disputes and amusements always to be settled, small
morals to be enforced, and clean calico tiers to be incessantly put on.
And Susan and Martha sat upstairs and made the tiers.
Mr. Josselyn was a book-keeper, with a salary of eighteen hundred
dollars, and these seven children. And Susan and Martha were girls of
fair culture, and womanly tastes, and social longings. How does this
seem to you, young ladies, and what do you think of their upstairs life
together, you who calculate, if you calculate at all, whether five
hundred dollars may carry you respectably through your half-dozen city
assemblies, where you shine in silk and gossamer, of which there will
not be "a dress in the room that cost less than seventy-five dollars,"
and come home, after the dance, "a perfect rag"?
Two years ago, when you were perhaps performing in tableaux for the
"benefit of the Sanitary," these two girls had felt the great enthusiasm
of the time lay hold of them in a larger way. Susan had a friend--a dear
old intimate of school-days, now a staid woman of eight-and-twenty--who
was to go out in yet maturer companionship into the hospitals. And
Susan's heart burned to go. But there were all the little tiers, and the
ABC's, and the faces and fingers.
"I can do it for a while," said Martha, "without you." Those two words
held the sacrifice. "Mamma is so nicely this summer, and by and by Aunt
Lucy may come, perhaps. I can do _quite_ well."
So Martha sat, for months and months, in the upstairs window alone.
There were martial marchings in the streets beneath; great guns
thundered out rejoicings; flags filled the air with crimson and blue,
like an aurora; she only sat and made little frocks and tiers for the
brothers and sisters. God knew how every patient needle thrust was
really also a woman's blow for her country.
And now, pale and thin with close, lonely work, the time had come to
her at last when it was right to take a respite; when everybody said it
must be; when Uncle David, just home from Japan, had put his hand in his
pocket and pulled out three new fifty-dollar bills, and said to them in
his rough way, "There, girls! Take that, and go your lengths." The war
was over, and among all the rest here were these two women-soldiers
honorably discharged, and resting after the fight. But nobody at
Outledge knew anything of the story.
There is almost always at every summer sojourn some party of persons who
are to the rest what the mid-current is to the stream; who gather to
themselves and bear along in their course--in their plans and pleasures
and daily doings--the force of all the life of the place. If any
expedition of consequence is afoot, _they_ are the expedition; others
may join in, or hold aloof, or be passed by; in which last cases, it is
only in a feeble, rippling fashion that they go their ways and seek some
separate pleasure in by-nooks and eddies, while the gay hum of the main
channel goes whirling on. At Outledge this party was the large and merry
schoolgirl company with Madam Routh.
"I don't see why," said Martha Josselyn, still looking out, as the
"little red" left the door of the Green Cottage,--"I don't see why those
new girls who came last night should have got into everything in a
minute, and we've been here a week and don't seem to catch to anything
at all. Some people are like burrs, I think, or drops of quicksilver,
that always bunch or run together. We don't _stick_, Susie. What's the
reason?"
"Some of these young ladies have been at Madam Routh's; they were over
here last evening. Sin Saxon knows them very well."
"You knew Effie Saxon at school, too."
"Eight years ago. And this is the little one. That's nothing."
"You petted her, and she came to the house. You've told her stories
hundreds of times. And she sees we're all by ourselves."
"She don't see. She doesn't think. That's just the whole of it."
"People ought to see, then. You would, Sue, and you know it."
"I've been used to seeing--and thinking."
"Used! Yes, indeed! And she's been _used_ to the other. Well, it's queer
how the parts are given out. Shall we go to the pines?"