GEODES.
A great cliff-side rearing itself up, rough with inaccessible crags,
bristling with old, ragged pines, and dark with glooms of close cedars
and hemlocks, above a jutting table of rock that reaches out and makes a
huge semicircular base for the mountain, and is in itself a
precipice-pedestal eighty feet sheer up from the river-bank; close in
against the hill front, on this platform of stone, that holds its foot
or two of soil, a little, poor unshingled house, with a tumbledown
picket-fence about it, attempting the indispensable dooryard of all
better country-dwellings here where the great natural dooryard or
esplanade makes it such an utter nonsense,--this is the place at which
the "little red" drew up, ten minutes later, to leave Prissy Hoskins's
parcel.
Dakie Thayne jumped down off the front seat, and held up his arms to
help Leslie out over the wheel, upon her declaring that she must go and
do the errand herself, to get a nearer look at Hoskins life.
Dakie Thayne had been asked, at Leslie's suggestion, to fill the vacant
sixth seat beside the driver, the Thoresbys one and all declining. Mrs.
Thoresby was politic: she would not fall into the wake of this
schoolgirl party at once. By and by she should be making up her own
excursions, and asking whom she would.
"There's nothing like a boy of that age for use upon a picnic, Mrs.
Linceford," Leslie had pleaded, with playful parody, in his behalf, when
the lady had hinted something of her former sentiment concerning the
encroachments and monopolies of "boys of that age." And so he came.
The Haddens got Jim Holden to lift them down on the opposite side, for a
run to the verge of the projecting half-circle of rock that, like a
gigantic bay-window or balcony in the mighty architecture of the hills,
looked up and down the whole perspective of the valley. Jim Holden would
readily have driven them round its very edge upon the flat, mossy sward,
but for Mrs. Linceford's nerves, and the vague idea of almost an
accident having occurred there lately which pervaded the little party.
"Creggin's horses had backed," as Florrie Arnall said; and already the
new comers had picked up, they scarcely knew how, the incipient
tradition, hereafter to grow into an established horror of the "Cliff."
"It was nothing," Jim Holden said; "only the nigh hoss was a res'less
crittur, an' contrived to git his leg over the pole; no danger with
_his_ cattle." But Mrs. Linceford cried out in utter remonstrance, and
only begged Leslie to be quick, that they might get away from the place
altogether.
All this bustle of arrival and discussion and alighting had failed,
curiously, to turn the head of an odd, unkempt-looking child,--a girl of
nine or ten, with an old calico sun-bonnet flung back upon her
shoulders, tangled, sunburnt hair tossing above it; gown, innocent of
crinoline, clinging to lank, growing limbs, and bare feet, whose heels
were energetically planted at a quite safe distance from each other, to
insure a fair base for the centre of gravity,--who, at the moment of
their coming, was wrathfully "shoo-ing" off from a bit of rude
toy-garden, fenced with ends of twigs stuck up-right, a tall Shanghai
hen and her one chicken, who had evidently made nothing, morally or
physically, of the feeble inclosure.
"I wish you were dead and in your gravies!" cried the child, achieving,
between her righteous indignation and her relenting toward her uncouth
pets at the last breath, a sufficiently queer play upon her own word.
And with this, the enemy being routed, she turned face to face with
Dakie Thayne and Leslie Goldthwaite, coming in at the dilapidated gate.
"They've scratched up all my four-o'clocks!" she said. And then her
rustic shyness overcame suddenly all else, and she dragged her great toe
back and forth in the soft mould, and put her forefinger in her mouth,
and looked askance at them from the corners of her eyes.
"Prissy? Prissy Hoskins?" Leslie addressed her in sweet, inquiring
tones. But the child stood still with finger in mouth, and toe working
in the ground, not a bit harder nor faster, nor changing in the least,
for more or less, the shy look in her face.
"That's your name, isn't it? I've got something for you. Won't you come
and get it?'" Leslie paused, waiting; fearing lest a further advance on
her own part might put Prissy altogether to flight. Nothing answered in
the girl's eyes to her words; there was no lighting up of desire or
curiosity, however restrained; she stood like one indifferent or
uncomprehending.
"She's awful deef!" cried a new voice from the doorway. "She ain't that
scared. She's sarcy enough, sometimes."
A woman, middle-aged or more, stood on the rough, slanting door-stone.
She had bare feet, in coarse calf-skin slippers, stringy petticoats
differing only from the child's in length, sleeves rolled up to the
shoulders, no neck garniture,--not a bit of anything white about her.
Over all looked forth a face sharp and hard, that might have once been
good-looking, in a raw, country fashion, and that had undoubtedly always
been, what it now was, emphatically Yankee-smart. An inch-wide stripe of
black hair was combed each way over her forehead, and rolled up on her
temples in what, years and years ago, used to be called most
appropriately "flat curls,"--these fastened with long horn side-combs.
Beyond was a strip of desert,--no hair at all for an inch and a half
more toward the crown; the rest dragged back and tied behind with the
relentless tightness that gradually and regularly, by the persistence of
years, had accomplished this peculiar belt of clearing. It completed her
expression; it was as a very halo of Yankee saintship crowning the woman
who in despite of poverty and every discouragement had always hated, to
the very roots of her hair, anything like what she called a "sozzle;"
who had always been screwed up and sharp set to hard work. She couldn't
help the tumbledown fence; she had no "men-folks" round; and she
couldn't have paid for a hundred pickets and a day's carpentering, to
have saved her life. She couldn't help Prissy's hair even; for it would
kink and curl, and the minute the wind took it "there it was again;" and
it was not time yet, thank goodness! to harrow it back and begin in her
behalf the remarkable engineering which had laid out for herself that
broad highway across all the thrifty and energetic bumps up to
Veneration (who knows how much it had had to do with mixing them in one
common tingle of mutual and unceasing activity?) and down again from ear
to ear. Inside the poor little house you would find all spick and span,
the old floor white and sanded, the few tins and the pewter spoons
shining upon the shelf, the brick hearth and jambs aglow with fresh
"redding," table and chairs set back in rectangular tidiness. Only one
thing made a litter, or tried to; a yellow canary that hung in the
window and sang "like a house afire," as Aunt Hoskins said, however that
is, and flung his seeds about like the old "Wash at Edmonton," "on both
sides of the way." Prissy was turned out of doors in all pleasant
weather, so otherwise the keeping-room stayed trim, and her curly hair
grew sunburnt.
"She's ben deef ever sence she hed the scarlet-fever. Walk in," said the
woman, by no means satisfied to let strangers get only the outside
impression of her premises, and turning round to lead the way without
waiting for a reply. "Come in, Prissy!" she bawled, illustrating her
summons with what might be called a beckoning in broad capitals, done
with the whole arm from finger-tips to shoulder, twice or thrice.
Leslie followed over the threshold, and Prissy ran by like a squirrel,
and perched herself on a stool just under the bird-cage.
"I wouldn't keep it if 't warn't for her," said Aunt Hoskins
apologetically. She was Prissy's aunt, holding no other close domestic
relation to living thing, and so had come to be "Aunt Hoskins" in the
whole region round about, so far as she was known at all. "It's the only
bird she can hear sing of a morning. It's as good as all outdoors to
her, and I hain't the heart to make her do without it. _I_'ve done
without most things, but it don't appear to me as if I _could_ do
without them. Take a seat, do."
"I thank you, but my friends are waiting. I've brought something for
Prissy, from Miss Craydocke at the hotel." And Leslie held out the
package which Dakie Thayne, waiting at the door, had put into her hand
as she came in.
"Lawful suz, Prissy! if 't ain't another book!" cried the good woman, as
Prissy, quick to divine the meaning of the parcel, the like of which she
had been made accustomed to before, sprang to her aunt's side within
hearing of her exclamation. "If she ain't jest the feelingest and
thoughtfullest--Well! open it yourself, child; there's no good of a
bundle if you don't."
Poor Prissy was thus far happy that she had not been left in the
providence of her little life to utter ignorance of this greatest
possible delight--a common one to more outwardly favored children--of a
real parcel all one's own. The book, without the brown paper and string,
would have been as nothing, comparatively.
Leslie could not but linger to see it untied. There came out a book,--a
wonderful big book,--Grimm's Tales; and some little papers fell to the
floor. These were flower seeds,--bags labeled "Petunia," "Candytuft,"
"Double Balsam," "Portulaca."
"Why, Prissy!" shouted Miss Hoskins in her ear as she picked them up,
and read the names; "them's elegant things! They'll beat your
four-o'clocks all to nothin'. It's lucky the old Shank-high did make a
clearin' of 'em. Tell Miss Craydocke," she continued, turning again to
Leslie, "that I'm comin' down myself, to--no, I _can't_ thank her! She's
made a _life_ for that 'ere child, out o' nothin', a'most!"
Leslie stood hushed and penetrated in the presence of this good deed,
and the joy and gratitude born of it.
"This ain't all, you see; nor't ain't nothin' new. She's ben at it these
two year; learnin' the child to read, an' tellin' her things, an'
settin' her to hunt 'em out, and to do for herself. She was crazy about
flowers, allers, an' stories; but, lor, I couldn't stop to tell 'em to
her, an' I never knew but one or two; an' now she can read 'em off to
me, like a minister. She's told her a lot o' stuff about the rocks,--_I_
can't make head nor tail on't; but it'd please you to see her fetchin'
'em in by the apern-full, an' goin' on about 'em, that is, if there was
reely any place to put 'em afterwards. That's the wust on't. I tell you,
it _is_ jest _makin_' a life out o' pieces that come to hand. Here's the
girl, an' there's the woods an' rocks; there's all there was to do with,
or likely to be; but she found the gumption an' the willingness, an'
she's done it!"
Prissy came close over to Leslie with her book in her hand. "Wait a
minute," she said, with the effort in her tone peculiar to the deaf.
"I've got something to send back."
"_If_ it's convenient, you mean," put in Aunt Hoskins sharply. "She's as
blunt as a broomstick, that child is."
But Prissy had sprung away in her squirrel-like fashion, and now came
back, bringing with her something really to make one's eyes water, if
one happened, at least, to be ever so little of a geologist,--a mass of
quartz rock as large as she could grasp with her two hands, shot through
at three different angles with three long, superb, columnar crystals of
clear, pale-green beryl. If Professor Dana had known this exact
locality, and a more definite name for the "Cliff," wouldn't he have had
it down in his Supplement with half a dozen exclamation points after the
"beryl"!
"I found it a-purpose!" said Prissy, with the utmost simplicity, putting
the heavy specimen out of her own hands into Leslie's. "She's been
a-wantin' it this great while, and we've looked for it everywheres!"
"A-purpose" it did seem as if the magnificent fragment had been laid in
the way of the child's zealous and grateful search. "There were only the
rocks," as Aunt Hoskins said; in no other way could she so joyously have
acknowledged the kindness that had brightened now three summers of her
life.
"It'll bother you, I'm afeard," said the woman.
"No, indeed! I shall _like_ to take it for you," continued Leslie, with
a warm earnestness, stooping down to the little girl, and speaking in
her clear, glad tone close to her cheek. "I only wish _I_ could find
something to take her myself." And with that, close to the little
red-brown cheek as she was, she put the period of a quick kiss to her
words.
"Come again, and we'll hunt for some together," said the child, with
instant response of cordiality.
"I will come--if I possibly can," was Leslie's last word, and then she
and Dakie Thayne hurried back to the wagon.
The Haddens had just got in again upon their side. They were full of
exclamations about the wonderful view up and down the long
valley-reaches.
"You needn't tell _me_!" cried Elinor, in high enthusiasm. "I don't care
a bit for the geography of it. That great aisle goes straight from Lake
Umbagog to the Sound!"
"It is a glorious picture," said Mrs. Linceford. "But I've had a little
one, that you've lost. You've no idea, Leslie, what a lovely tableau you
have been making,--you and Dakie, with that old woman and the blowzy
child!"
Leslie blushed.
"You'll never look prettier, if you try ever so hard."
"Don't, Mrs. Linceford!"
"Why not?" said Jeannie. "It's only a pity, I think, that you couldn't
have known it at the time. They say we don't know when we're happiest;
and we _can't_ know when we're prettiest; so where's the satisfaction?"
"That's part of your mistake, Jeannie, perhaps," returned her sister.
"If you had been there you'd have spoiled the picture."
"Look at that!" exclaimed Leslie, showing her beryl. "That's for Miss
Craydocke." And then, when the first utterances of amazement and
admiration were over, she told them the story of the child and her
misfortune, and of what Miss Craydocke had done. "_That_'s beautiful, I
think," said she. "And it's the sort of beauty, may be, that one might
feel as one went along. I wish I could find--a diamond--for that woman!"
"Thir garnits on Feather-Cap," put in Jim the driver.
"Oh, _will_ you show us where?"
"Well, 't ain't nowhers in partickler," replied Jim. "It's jest as you
light on 'em. And you wouldn't know the best ones when you did. I've
seen 'em,--dead, dull-lookin' round stones that'll crack open,
chock--full o' red garnits as an egg is o' meat."
"Geodes!" cried Dakie Thayne.
Jim Holden turned round and looked at him as if he thought he had got
hold of some new-fashioned expletive,--possibly a pretty hard one.
They came down, now, on the other side of the Cliff, and struck the
ford. This diverted and absorbed their thoughts, for none of the ladies
had ever forded a river before.
"Are you sure it's safe?" asked Mrs. Linceford.
"Safe as meetin'," returned Jim. "I'd drive across with my eyes shot."
"Oh, don't!" cried Elinor.
"I ain't agoin' ter; but I could,--an' the hosses, too, for that
matter."
It was exciting, nevertheless, when the water in mid-channel came up
nearly to the body of the wagon, and the swift ripples deluded the eye
into almost conviction that horses, vehicle, and all were not gaining an
inch in forward progress, but drifting surely down. They came up out of
the depths, however, with a tug, and a swash, and a drip all over, and a
scrambling of hoofs on the pebbles, at the very point aimed at in such
apparently sidelong fashion,--the wheel-track that led them up the bank
and into the ten-mile pine woods through which they were to skirt the
base of the Cairn and reach Feather-Cap on his accessible side. It was
one long fragrance and stillness and shadow.
They overtook the Routh party at the beginning of the mountain-path. The
pine woods stretched on over the gradual slope, as far as they would
climb before dinner. Otherwise the midday heats would have been too much
for them. This was the easy part of the way, and there was breath for
chat and merriment.
Just within the upper edge of the woods, in a comparatively smooth
opening, they halted. Here they spread their picnic, while up above, on
the bare, open rock, the young men kindled their fire and heated the
coffee; and here they ate and drank, and rested through the noontide.
Light clouds flitted between the mountains and the heavens, later in the
day, and flung bewildering, dreamy shadows on the far-off steeps, and
dropped a gracious veil over the bald forehead and sun-bleak shoulders
of Feather-Cap. It was "weather just made for them," as fortunate
excursionists are wont to say.
Sin Saxon was all life, and spring, and fun. She climbed at least three
Feather-Caps, dancing from stone to stone with tireless feet, and
bounding back and forth with every gay word that it occurred to her to
say to anybody. Pictures? She made them incessantly. She was a living
dissolving view. You no sooner got one bright look or graceful attitude
than it was straightway shifted into another. She kept Frank Scherman at
her side for the first half-hour, and then, perhaps, his admiration or
his muscles tired, for he fell back a little to help Madam Routh up a
sudden ridge, and afterwards, somehow, merged himself in the quieter
group of strangers.
By and by one of the Arnalls whispered to Mattie Shannon,--"He's sidled
off with her, at last. Did you ever know such a fellow for a new face?
But it's partly the petticoat. He's such an artist's eye for color. He
was raving about her all the while she stood hanging those shawls among
the pines to keep the wind from Mrs. Linceford. She isn't downright
pretty either. But she's got up exquisitely!"
Leslie Goldthwaite, in her lovely mountain dress, her bright bloom from
enjoyment and exercise, with the stray light through the pines
burnishing the bronze of her hair, had innocently made a second picture,
it would seem. One such effects deeper impression, sometimes, than the
confusing splendor of incessant changes.
"Are you looking for something? Can I help you?" Frank Scherman had
said, coming up to her, as she and her friend Dakie, a little apart from
the others, were poising among some loose pebbles.
"Nothing that I have lost," Leslie answered, smiling. "Something I have
a very presumptuous wish to find. A splendid garnet geode, if you
please!"
"That's not at all impossible," returned the young man. "We'll have it
before we go down,--see if we don't!"
Frank Scherman knew a good deal about Feather-Cap, and something of
geologizing. So he and Leslie--Dakie Thayne, in his unswerving devotion,
still accompanying--"sidled off" together, took a long turn round under
the crest, talking very pleasantly--and restfully, after Sin Saxon's
continuous brilliancy--all the way. How they searched among loose drift
under the cliff, how Mr. Scherman improvised a hammer from a slice of
rock; and how, after many imperfect specimens, they did at last "find
a-purpose" an irregular oval of dull, dusky stone, which burst with a
stroke into two chalices of incrusted crimson crystals,--I ought to be
too near the end of a long chapter to tell. But this search and this
finding, and the motive of it, were the soul and the crown of Leslie's
pleasure for the day. She did not even stop to think how long she had
had Frank Scherman's attention all to herself, or the triumph that it
was in the eyes of the older girls, among whom he was excessively
admired, and not very disguisedly competed for. She did not know how
fast she was growing to be a sort of admiration herself among them, in
their girls' fashion, or what she might do, if she chose, in the way of
small, early belleship here at Outledge with such beginning,--how she
was "getting on," in short, as girls express it. And so, as Jeannie
Hadden asked, "Where was the satisfaction?"
"You never knew anything like it," said Jeannie to her friend Ginevra,
talking it all over with her that evening in a bit of a visit to Mrs.
Thoresby's room. "I never saw anybody take so among strangers. Madam
Routh was delighted with her; and so, I should think, was Mr. Scherman.
They say he hates trouble; but he took her all round the top of the
mountain, hammering stones for her to find a geode."
"That's the newest dodge," said Mrs. Thoresby, with a little sarcastic
laugh. "Girls of that sort are always looking for geodes." After this,
Mrs. Thoresby had always a little well-bred venom for Leslie
Goldthwaite.
At the same time Leslie herself, coming out on the piazza for a moment
after tea, met Miss Craydocke approaching over the lawn. She had only
her errand to introduce her, but she would not lose the opportunity. She
went straight up to the little woman, in a frank, sweet way. But a bit
of embarrassment underneath, the real respect that made her
timid,--perhaps a little nervous fatigue after the excitement and
exertion of the day,--did what nerves and embarrassment, and reverence
itself will do sometimes,--played a trick with her perfectly clear
thought on its way to her tongue.
"Miss Graywacke, I believe?" she said, and instantly knew the dreadful
thing that she had done.
"Exactly," said the lady, with an amused little smile.
"Oh, I _do_ beg your pardon," began Leslie, blushing all over.
"No need,--no need. Do you think I don't know what name I go by, behind
my back? They suppose because I'm old and plain and single, and wear a
front, and don't understand rats and the German, that I'm deaf and blind
and stupid. But I believe I get as much as they do out of their jokes,
after all." The dear old soul took Leslie by both her hands as she
spoke, and looked a whole world of gentle benignity at her out of two
soft gray eyes, and then she laughed again. This woman had no _self_ to
be hurt.
"We stopped at the Cliff this morning," Leslie took heart to say; "and
they were so glad of your parcel,--the little girl and her aunt. And
Prissy gave me something to bring back to you; a splendid specimen of
beryl that she has found."
"Then my mind's at rest!" said Miss Craydocke, cheerier than ever. "I
was sure she'd break her neck, or pull the mountain down on her head
some day looking for it."
"Would you like--I've found--I should like you to have that, too,--a
garnet geode from Feather--Cap?" Leslie thought she had done it very
clumsily, and in a hurry, after all.
"Will you come over to my little room, dear,--number fifteen, in the
west wing,--to-morrow sometime, with your stones? I want to see more of
you."
There was a deliberate, gentle emphasis upon her words. If the grandest
person of whom she had ever known had said to Leslie Goldthwaite, "I
want to see more of you," she would not have heard it with a warmer
thrill than she felt that moment at her heart.