"Is it true?" asked Eunice.
"No, it"s made up, but I"m going to make believe that it"s true. She slept in the corn chamber,--it was a bedroom then,--and she had that yellow painted bedstead of Hepzibah"s.
"There was a hiding-place under the floor of the room. It was made to put things in when Indians came, or the English,--money and spoons, and things like that.
"One day when Mercy was spinning under the big elm, a man came running down the road. He was a young man, and very handsome, and he had on a sort of uniform.
""Hide me!" he cried. "They will kill me if they catch me. Hide me, quick!"
""Who will kill you?" asked Mercy.
"Then the young man told her that he had accidentally shot a man who was out hunting with him, and that the man"s brothers, who were very bad people, had sworn to have his blood.
"Then Mercy took his hand, and led him quickly up to her room, and lifted the cover of the hiding-place, and told him to get in. And he got in, but first he said, "Fair maiden, if I come out alive, I shall have somewhat to say to thee." And Mercy blushed."
"What did he mean?" asked Eunice, innocently.
"Oh, just love-making and nonsense!" put in Reuben. "Hurry up, Cynthia!
Come to the fighting. The candle"s all but burned out."
"There isn"t going to be any fighting," returned Cynthia. "Well, Mercy pulled the bedside carpet over the cover, and she set that red candle-stand on one corner of it and a chair on the other corner, and went back to her spinning. She had hardly begun before there was a rustling in the bushes, and two men with guns in their hands came out.
""Which way did he go?" they shouted.
""Who?" she said, and she looked up so quietly that they never suspected her.
""Has no one gone by?" they asked her.
""No one," she said; and you know this wasn"t a lie, for the young man did not go by. He stopped!
""There is the back door open," she went on, "and you are welcome to search, if you desire it. My father is away, but he will be here soon."
She said this because she feared the men.
"So the men searched, but they found nothing, and Mercy"s room looked so neat and peaceful that they did not like to disturb it, and just looked in at the door. And when they were gone, Mercy went up and raised the cover, and the youth said that he loved her, and that if the Lord willed, he--"
Pop! The second candle went suddenly out.
"It"s a shame!" cried Reuben, dancing with vexation. "It seems as if the blamed things knew when we most wanted them to last!"
"Oh, Reuben! don"t say "blamed.""
"I forgot. Well, blame-worthy, then. There"s no harm in that."
"We shall never know if the young man married Mercy," said little Eunice, lamentably.
"Oh, of course he did! That"s the way stories always end."
"Now, Reuben, hurry to bed, and when you are all ready, light your candle, and if you speak loud we shall hear every word."
This was Reuben"s story: "Once there was a Ghost. He had committed a murder, and that was the reason he had to go alone and fly about on cold nights in a white shirt.
"He used to look in at windows and see people sitting by fires, and envy them. And he would moan and chatter his teeth, and then they would say that he was the wind."
"Oh, Reuben! is it going to be very awful?" demanded Cynthia, apprehensively.
"Not very. Only just enough to half-scare you to death! He would put his hand out when girls stood by the door, and they would feel as if a whole pitcher of cold water had been poured down their backs.
"Once a boy came to the door. He was the son of the murdered man. The Ghost was afraid of him. "Thomas!" said the Ghost.
""Who speaks?" said the boy. He couldn"t have heard if he hadn"t been the son of the murdered man.
""I"m the Ghost of your father"s slayer," said the Ghost. "Tell me what I can do to be forgiven."
""I don"t think you can be forgiven," said the boy. Then the Ghost gave such a dreadful groan that the boy felt sorry for him.
""I"ll tell you, then," he said. "Go to my father"s grave, and lay upon it a perfectly white blackberry, and a perfectly black snowdrop, and a valuable secret, and a hair from the head of a really happy person, and you shall be forgiven!"
"So the Ghost set out to find these four things. He had to bleach the blackberry and dye the snowdrop, and he got the hair from the head of a little baby who happened to be born with hair and hadn"t had time to be unhappy, and the secret was about a goldmine that only the Ghost knew about. But just as he was laying them on the grave, a cold hand clutched--" The sentence ended in a three-fold shriek, for just at this exciting juncture the last candle went out.
"Children," said Mrs. Marsh, opening the door, "I"m afraid you"ve been frightening yourselves with your stories. That was foolish. I am glad there are no more little candles. Now, not another word to-night."
She straightened the tossed coverlids, heard their prayers, and went away. In a few minutes all that remained of the long-antic.i.p.ated treat were three little drops of tallow where three little candles had quite burned out, three stories not quite told, and three children fast asleep.
UNCLE AND AUNT.
Uncle and Aunt were a very dear and rather queer old couple, who lived in one of the small villages which dot the long indented coast of Long Island Sound. It was four miles to the railway, so the village had not waked up from its colonial sleep on the building of the line, as had other villages nearer to its course, but remained the same shady, quiet place, with never a steam-whistle nor a manufactory bell to break its repose.
Sparlings-Neck was the name of the place. No hotel had ever been built there, so no summer visitors came to give it a fict.i.tious air of life for a few weeks of the year. The century-old elms waved above the gambrel roofs of the white, green-blinded houses, and saw the same names on doorplates and knockers that had been there when the century began: "Benjamin," "Wilson," "Kirkland," "Benson," "Reinike,"--there they all were, with here and there the prefix of a distinguishing initial, as "J.
L. Benson," "Eleazar Wilson," or "Paul Reinike." Paul Reinike, fourth of the name who had dwelt in that house, was the "Uncle" of this story.
Uncle was tall and gaunt and gray, of the traditional New England type.
He had a shrewd, dry face, with wise little wrinkles about the corners of the eyes, and just a twinkle of fun and a quiet kindliness in the lines of the mouth. People said the squire was a master-hand at a bargain. And so he was; but if he got the uttermost penny out of all legitimate business transactions, he was always ready to give that penny, and many more, whenever deserving want knocked at his door, or a good work to be done showed itself distinctly as needing help.
Aunt, too, was a New Englander, but of a slightly different type. She was the squire"s cousin before she became his wife; and she had the family traits, but with a difference. She was spare, but she was also very small, and had a distinct air of authority which made her like a fairy G.o.dmother. She was very quiet and comfortable in her ways, but she was full of "faculty,"--that invaluable endowment which covers such a mult.i.tude of capacities. n.o.body"s bread or pies were equal to Aunt"s.
Her preserves never fermented; her cranberry always jellied; her sponge-cake rose to heights unattained by her neighbors", and stayed there, instead of ignominiously "flopping" when removed from the oven, like the sponge-cake of inferior housekeepers. Everything in the old home moved like clock-work. Meals were ready to a minute; the mahogany furniture glittered like dark-red gla.s.s; the tall clock in the entry was never a tick out of the way; and yet Aunt never appeared to be particularly busy. To one not conversant with her methods, she gave the impression of being generally at leisure, sitting in her rocking-chair in the "keeping-room," hemming cap-strings, and reading Emerson, for Aunt liked to keep up with the thought of the day.
Hesse declared that either she sat up and did things after the rest of the family had gone to bed, or else that she kept a Brownie to work for her; but Hesse was a saucy child, and Aunt only smiled indulgently at these sarcasms.
Hesse was the only young thing in the shabby old home; for, though it held many handsome things, it was shabby. Even the cat was a sober matron. The old white mare had seen almost half as many years as her master. The very rats and mice looked gray and bearded when you caught a glimpse of them. But Hesse was youth incarnate, and as refreshing in the midst of the elderly stillness which surrounded her as a frolicsome puff of wind, or a dancing ray of sunshine. She had come to live with Uncle and Aunt when she was ten years old; she was now nearly eighteen, and she loved the quaint house and its quainter occupants with her whole heart.
Hesse"s odd name, which had been her mother"s, her grandmother"s, and her great-grandmother"s before her, was originally borrowed from that of the old German town whence the first Reinike had emigrated to America.
She had not spent quite all of the time at Sparlings-Neck since her mother died. There had been two years at boarding-school, broken by long vacations, and once she had made a visit in New York to her mother"s cousin, Mrs. De Lancey, who considered herself a sort of joint guardian over Hesse, and was apt to send a frock or a hat, now and then, as the fashions changed; that "the child might not look exactly like Noah, and Mrs. Noah, and the rest of the people in the ark," she told her daughter. This visit to New York had taken place when Hesse was about fifteen; now she was to make another. And, just as this story opens, she and Aunt were talking over her wardrobe for the occasion.
"I shall give you this China-c.r.a.pe shawl," said Aunt, decisively.