"This," said he.
"Oh! what is it?" she cried, jumping up.
"I made it," said Bobby.
"What is it?" insisted Celia. "Show it to me."
But Bobby thrust the package firmly into his pocket.
"Up past our house there"s a fine sand-hill to slide down," said he, "and we got a fine fort over the hill, and I know where there"s a place you can climb up on where you can see "most to Redding."
"Show me what you"ve got!" pleaded Celia.
"I will," Bobby developed his plan, "if you"ll come up and play in the fort."
"All right," agreed Celia in a breath; "I"ll tell mamma I"m going. And I"ll hunt up the others."
"I don"t want the others to go," announced Bobby boldly.
She calmed to a great stillness, and looked at him with intent eyes.
"All right," she agreed quietly after a moment.
They walked up the street together, followed by the solemn black and white dog. The shop windows did not detain them, as ordinarily. At the fire-engine house they turned under the dense shade of the maples. But by the end of the second block said Bobby:
"We"ll go this way."
He was afraid of encountering Angus, or perhaps the Fuller boys.
The sand-hill proved toilsome to Celia, but without a single pause she struggled bravely up its sliding, cascading yellow surface to the top.
Then she stood still, panting a little, her cheeks flushed, her eyes bright, the tiniest curls about her forehead wet and matted with perspiration. With a great adoration, Bobby looked upon her slender figure held straight against the blue sky. Almost--almost dared he speak. At least that is what he thought until the words rose to his lips; and then all at once he realized what a wide gulf lay between the imagined and the spoken word.
"The fort"s over this way," said he gruffly.
"Show me the package first," insisted Celia.
Bobby drew out the cards, and thrust them into her hands.
"They"re for you," he said hastily. "I did them on my printing press."
Celia was delighted and wanted to say so at length, but Bobby had his s.e.x"s aversion to spoken grat.i.tude.
"Come on, see the fort," he insisted.
He showed her the elaborate works and explained their uses, and pointed out the enemy of stumps charging patiently. Celia caught fire with the idea at once.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ALMOST--ALMOST DARED HE TO SPEAK]
"I"ll make bullets the way they did in the Colonies!" she cried.
"Have you "Old Times in the Colonies," too?" asked Bobby eagerly.
They seated themselves and talked of their books. Celia was just beginning the Alcott series. Bobby had never heard of them, and so they had to be explained. The children had romped and played games together; but they had never exchanged such ideas as their years had developed.
For once Bobby forgot the fact of his love, and its delicious pains, and its need for something which he could not place, in the unselfconscious joy of intimate communion. He drew close to Celia in spirit; and his whole being expanded to a glow that warmed him through and through. The westering sun surprised them with the lateness of the hour. At the hotel gate Celia left him.
"My, but we had a good time!" said she.
With much trepidation Bobby next day suggested in face of the whole group that he and Celia should climb the high hill from which Bobby fondly believed he could see ""most to Redding." To his surprise, and to the surprise of the others, Celia consented at once. They climbed the hill in short stages, resting formally every ten feet. Bobby they called the Guide; while Celia was a.s.signed the duty of announcing the resting-places. There was a wood-road up the hill, but they preferred the steep side. Trees shaded it; and undergrowth veiled it. Little open s.p.a.ces were guarded mysteriously and jealously by the thickets; little hot pockets held like cups the warmth of the sun. Birds flashed and disappeared; squirrels chattered indignantly; chipmunks scurried away.
Occasionally they came to dense shade, and moss, and black shadow, and low sweet shrubs a few inches high, and the tinkle of a tiny streamlet.
Once a tangle of raspberries in a little clearing fell across their way.
Bobby had never happened on these. They had been well picked over by the squaws, who sold fruit in town by the pailful, but the children managed to find a few berries, and ate them, enjoying their warm, satiny feel.
Thus they climbed for a long time. The rests were frequent, the course not of the straightest. For many years their recollection of that hill was as of a mountain. Finally the top sprang at them abruptly, as though in joke.
"Come over this way, I"ll show you," said Bobby.
He led the way to a point where the scant timber had in times past suffered a windfall. Through the opening thus made they looked abroad over the countryside. They could see the snake-fences about the farms, and the white dusty road like a ribbon and the stumps like black dots, and the waving green tops of the "wood lots" and far away the flash of the River.
Thus Bobby gained another of his great desires. Celia proved strangely acquiescent to suggestions for these excursions. Gerald"s dreaded attractions relaxed their power over Bobby"s spirit; and in corresponding degree Bobby regained the lost captaincy of his soul. The self-confidence which he lacked seeped gradually into him; and he began, though very tentatively, to recognize and respect his own value as an individual. These are big words to employ over the small problems of a child; yet in the child alone occur those silent developments, those noiseless changes which touch closest to true abstraction. Later in life our processes are stiffened by the material into forms of greater simplicity.
They explored the country about; and what the shortness of their legs denied them in the matter of actual distance, the largeness of their children"s imaginations lavished bounteously.
Bobby had explored most of it all before--the stump pastures, the wood-lots, the hills, the beach, the piers, the upper shifting downs of sand--but now he saw them for the first time because he was showing them to Celia. One day they made their way under tall beech woods, through a scrub of cedars, and found themselves on the edge of low bluffs overlooking the yellow sh.o.r.e and the blue lake. Long years after he could remember it vividly, and all the little details that belonged to it--the flash of the waters, the dip of gulls, the gentle wash of the quiet wavelets against the sh.o.r.e, the thin strip of dark wet sand that marked the extent of their influences, and, in a long curve to the blue of distance, the uneven waste of the yellow dry sand on which lay and from which projected at all angles countless logs, slabs and timbers cast up derelict by the storms of years. But at the time he was not conscious of noticing these things. In the darkness of his room that night all he remembered was Celia standing bright and fair against the shadow of ancient twisted cedars.
VI
THE LITTLE GIRL (CONTINUED)
Every Sat.u.r.day evening the Hotel Ottawa gave a hop in its dining room.
Mrs. Carleton suggested that the Ordes dine with her, and afterward take in this function. The hop proper began at nine o"clock; but the floor for an hour before was given over to the children. Mrs. Orde accepted.
Promptly at half-past six, then, they all entered the dining room.
Bobby, living in the town, had never taken a meal there. He saw a high-ceilinged, large room, filled with small, square and round tables arranged between numerous, slender, white plaster pillars. At the base of each pillar were still smaller serving tables each supporting a metal ice-water pitcher. Two swinging doors at the far end led out. Tall windows looked into the grounds where the children had been in the habit of playing.
People were scattered here and there eating. Statuesque ladies dressed in black, with white ap.r.o.ns, stood about or sailed here and there, bearing aloft in marvellous equilibrium great flat trays piled high with steaming white dishes. They swung corners in grand free sweeps, the trays tilted far sideways to balance centrifugal force; they charged the swinging doors at full speed, and when Bobby held his breath in antic.i.p.ation of the crash, something deft and mysterious happened at the hem of their black skirts and the doors flew open as though commanded by a magic shibboleth. They were tall and short, slender and stout, dark and light, but they had these things in common--they all dressed in black and white, their hair was lofty and of exaggerated waterfall, and their expressions never altered from one of lazy-eyed, lofty, scornful ennui. To Bobby they were easily the leading feature of the meal.
After dinner the party sat on the verandah a while, the elders conversing; the children feeling rather dressed up. By and by their other playmates joined them. The lights were lit, and shadows descended with evening coolness. From within came the sound of a violin tuning.
Immediately all ran to the dining room. The tables had been moved to one end where they were piled on top of one another; the chairs were arranged in a row along the wall; the floor, newly waxed, shone like gla.s.s. A small upright piano manipulated by an elderly female in gla.s.ses; a tremendous ba.s.s viol in charge of a small man, and a violin played by a large man represented the orchestra.
All the children shouted, and began to slide on the slippery floor.
Bobby joined this game eagerly, and had great fun. But in a moment the music struck up, the guests of the hotel commenced to drift in and the romping had to cease.
Gerald offered his arm to Celia, and they swung away in the hopping waltz of the period. Other children paired off. Bobby was left alone.