"I"ll slip off my shoes and lie down till Babe ties up the dog in the morning," said Ross. "Then we can get away before any of the family is up."
Oh, youth--youth--youth, with its rash promises! Worn out with misery the boys slept heavily. The first sound that either heard in the morning was Babe hammering upon their bedroom door. They crouched guiltily and looked into each other"s eyes. "Let pretend we ain"t here and he"ll go away," breathed Abner.
But Babe was made of sterner stuff. He rattled the k.n.o.b. He turned it.
He put in a black face with a grin which divided it from ear to ear.
"Cady say I mus" call dem fool boys to breakfus"," he announced. "I never named you-all dat. Cady, she say dat."
"Breakfast!" echoed Ross, in a daze.
"Yessuh, breakfus"," rea.s.serted Babe, coming entirely into the room and looking curiously about him. "Ain"t you-all done been to bed at all?" wrapping his arms about his shoulders and shaking with silent ecstasies of mirth. The boys threw themselves upon him and ejected him.
"Sent up a servant to call us to breakfast," snarled Abner. "If they"d only sent their old servant to the door in the first place, all this wouldn"t "a" happened. I"m just that way when I get thrown off the track. You know how it was when I tried to repeat those things to you--I had to go clear back to the beginning when I got interrupted."
"Does that mean that you"re still hanging around here to begin over and make a call?" asked Ross, darkly. "I won"t go down to breakfast if you are."
Abner brightened a little as he saw Ross becoming wordy in his rage.
"I dare you to walk downstairs and say, "We-just-dropped-in-to-call-on-Miss-Champe"!" he said.
"I--oh--I--darn it all! there goes the second bell. We may as well trot down."
"Don"t leave me, Ross," pleaded the Jilton boy. "I can"t stay here--and I can"t go down."
The tone was hysterical. The boy with freckles took his companion by the arm without another word and marched him down the stairs. "We may get a chance yet to call on Champe all by herself out on the porch or in the arbor before she goes to school," he suggested, by way of putting some spine into the black-eyed boy.
An emphatic bell rang when they were half-way down the stairs.
Clutching their hats, they slunk into the dining-room. Even Mr.
Claiborne seemed to notice something unusual in their bearing as they settled into the chairs a.s.signed to them, and asked them kindly if they had slept well.
It was plain that Aunt Missouri had been posting him as to her understanding of the intentions of these young men. The state of affairs gave an electric hilarity to the atmosphere. Babe travelled from the sideboard to the table, trembling like chocolate pudding.
Cady insisted on bringing in the cakes herself, and grinned as she whisked her starched blue skirts in and out of the dining-room. A dimple even showed itself at the corners of pretty Alicia"s prim little mouth. Champe giggled, till Ross heard Cady whisper:
"Now you got one dem snickerin" spells agin. You gwine bust yo" dress b.u.t.tons off in the back ef you don"t mind."
As the spirits of those about them mounted, the hearts of the two youths sank--if it was like this among the Claibornes, what would it be at school and in the world at large when their failure to connect intention with result became village talk? Ross bit fiercely upon an unoffending batter-cake, and resolved to make a call single-handed before he left the house.
They went out of the dining-room, their hats as ever pressed to their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. With no volition of their own, their uncertain young legs carried them to the porch. The Claiborne family and household followed like small boys after a circus procession. When the two turned, at bay, yet with nothing between them and liberty but a hypnotism of their own suggestion, they saw the black faces of the servants peering over the family shoulders.
Ross was the boy to have drawn courage from the desperation of their case, and made some decent if not glorious ending. But at the psychological moment there came around the corner of the house that most contemptible figure known to the Southern plantation, a shirt-boy--a creature who may be described, for the benefit of those not informed, as a pickaninny clad only in a long, coa.r.s.e cotton shirt. While all eyes were fastened upon him this inglorious amba.s.sador bolted forth his message:
"Yo" ma say"--his eyes were fixed upon Abner--"ef yo" don" come home, she gwine come after yo"--an" cut yo" into inch pieces wid a rawhide when she git yo". Dat jest what Miss Hortense say."
As though such a book as _Hints and Helps_ had never existed, Abner shot for the gate--he was but a hobbledehoy fascinated with the idea of playing gentleman. But in Ross there were the makings of a man. For a few half-hearted paces, under the first impulse of horror, he followed his deserting chief, the laughter of the family, the unrestrainable guffaws of the negroes, sounding in the rear. But when Champe"s high, offensive giggle, topping all the others, insulted his ears, he stopped dead, wheeled, and ran to the porch faster than he had fled from it. White as paper, shaking with inexpressible rage, he caught and kissed the t.i.ttering girl, violently, noisily, before them all.
The negroes fled--they dared not trust their feelings; even Alicia sn.i.g.g.e.red un.o.btrusively; Grandfather Claiborne chuckled, and Aunt Missouri frankly collapsed into her rocking-chair, bubbling with mirth, crying out:
"Good for you, Ross! Seems you did know how to call on the girls, after all."
But Ross, paying no attention, walked swiftly toward the gate. He had served his novitiate. He would never be afraid again. With cheerful alacrity he dodged the stones flung after him with friendly, erratic aim by the girl upon whom, yesterday afternoon, he had come to make a social call.
HOW THE WIDOW WON THE DEACON
By William James Lampton ( -1917)
[From Harper"s Bazaar, April, 1911; copyright, 1911, by Harper & Brothers; republished by permission.]
Of course the Widow Stimson never tried to win Deacon Hawkins, nor any other man, for that matter. A widow doesn"t have to try to win a man; she wins without trying. Still, the Widow Stimson sometimes wondered why the deacon was so blind as not to see how her fine farm adjoining his equally fine place on the outskirts of the town might not be brought under one management with mutual benefit to both parties at interest. Which one that management might become was a matter of future detail. The widow knew how to run a farm successfully, and a large farm is not much more difficult to run than one of half the size. She had also had one husband, and knew something more than running a farm successfully. Of all of which the deacon was perfectly well aware, and still he had not been moved by the merging spirit of the age to propose consolidation.
This interesting situation was up for discussion at the Wednesday afternoon meeting of the Sisters" Sewing Society.
"For my part," Sister Susan Spicer, wife of the Methodist minister, remarked as she took another tuck in a fourteen-year-old girl"s skirt for a ten-year-old--"for my part, I can"t see why Deacon Hawkins and Kate Stimson don"t see the error of their ways and depart from them."
"I rather guess _she_ has," smiled Sister Poteet, the grocer"s better half, who had taken an afternoon off from the store in order to be present.
"Or is willing to," added Sister Maria Cartridge, a spinster still possessing faith, hope, and charity, notwithstanding she had been on the waiting list a long time.
"Really, now," exclaimed little Sister Green, the doctor"s wife, "do you think it is the deacon who needs urging?"
"It looks that way to me," Sister Poteet did not hesitate to affirm.
"Well, I heard Sister Clark say that she had heard him call her "Kitty" one night when they were eating ice-cream at the Mite Society," Sister Candish, the druggist"s wife, added to the fund of reliable information on hand.
""Kitty," indeed!" protested Sister Spicer. "The idea of anybody calling Kate Stimson "Kitty"! The deacon will talk that way to "most any woman, but if she let him say it to her more than once, she must be getting mighty anxious, I think."
"Oh," Sister Candish hastened to explain, "Sister Clark didn"t say she had heard him say it twice.""
"Well, I don"t think she heard him say it once," Sister Spicer a.s.serted with confidence.
"I don"t know about that," Sister Poteet argued. "From all I can see and hear I think Kate Stimson wouldn"t object to "most anything the deacon would say to her, knowing as she does that he ain"t going to say anything he shouldn"t say."
"And isn"t saying what he should," added Sister Green, with a sly snicker, which went around the room softly.
"But as I was saying--" Sister Spicer began, when Sister Poteet, whose rocker, near the window, commanded a view of the front gate, interrupted with a warning, ""Sh-"sh."
"Why shouldn"t I say what I wanted to when--" Sister Spicer began.
"There she comes now," explained Sister Poteet, "and as I live the deacon drove her here in his sleigh, and he"s waiting while she comes in. I wonder what next," and Sister Poteet, in conjunction with the entire society, gasped and held their eager breaths, awaiting the entrance of the subject of conversation.
Sister Spicer went to the front door to let her in, and she was greeted with the greatest cordiality by everybody.
"We were just talking about you and wondering why you were so late coming," cried Sister Poteet. "Now take off your things and make up for lost time. There"s a pair of pants over there to be cut down to fit that poor little Snithers boy."
The excitement and curiosity of the society were almost more than could be borne, but never a sister let on that she knew the deacon was at the gate waiting. Indeed, as far as the widow could discover, there was not the slightest indication that anybody had ever heard there was such a person as the deacon in existence.
"Oh," she chirruped, in the liveliest of humors, "you will have to excuse me for today. Deacon Hawkins overtook me on the way here, and here said I had simply got to go sleigh-riding with him. He"s waiting out at the gate now."
"Is that so?" exclaimed the society unanimously, and rushed to the window to see if it were really true.