"Don"t you feel well?" asked Aunt Hetty, laying one wrinkled, shaky old hand on her shoulder.
"No, Aunt Hetty," said Elly, her eyes large and sad.
"Maybe she"s hungry," suggested Agnes, in a m.u.f.fled voice from the depths of a closet.
"Are you?" asked Aunt Hetty.
"Yes," cried Elly.
Aunt Hetty laughed. "Well, I don"t know if there are any cookies in the house or not," she said, "we"ve been so busy house-cleaning. Agnes, did you bake any cookies this morning?"
Elly was struck into stupor at this. Think of not _knowing_ if there were any cookies in the house!
Agnes appeared, tiny and old and stooped and wrinkled, like her mistress. She had a big, rolled-up woolen-covered comforter in her arms, over which she nodded. "Yes, I made some. You told me to make some every Wednesday," she said. She went on, looking anxiously at Aunt Hetty, "There ain"t any moth-holes in this. Was this the comfortable you meant?
I thought this was the one you told me to leave out of the camphor chest. I thought you told me ..."
"You know where to find the cookies, don"t you, Elly?" asked Aunt Hetty, over her shoulder, trotting rapidly like a little dry, wind-blown leaf, towards Agnes and the comforter.
"Oh _yes_, Aunt Hetty!" shouted Elly, halfway down the stairs.
Aunt Hetty called after her, "Take all you want ... three or four. They won"t hurt you. There"s no egg in our recipe."
Elly was there again, in the empty pantry, before the cookie-jar. She lifted the cracked plate again... . But, oh! how differently she did feel now! ... and she had a shock of pure, almost solemn, happiness at the sight of the cookies. She had not only been good and done as Mother would want her to, but she was going to have _four_ of those cookies.
Three _or_ four, Aunt Hetty had said! As if anybody would take three if he was let to have four! Which ones had the most raisins? She knew of course it wasn"t _so very_ nice to pick and choose that way, but she knew Mother would let her, only just laugh a little and say it was a pity to be eight years old if you couldn"t be a little greedy!
Oh, how happy she was! How light she felt! How she floated back up the stairs! What a perfectly sweet old thing Aunt Hetty was! And what a nice old house she had, though not so nice as home, of course. What pretty mahogany bal.u.s.ters, and nice white stairs! Too bad she had brought in that mud. But they were house-cleaning anyhow. A little bit more to clean up, that was all. And what _luck_ that they were in the east-room garret, the one that had all the old things in it, the hoop-skirts and the sh.e.l.ls and the old scoop-bonnets, and the four-poster bed and those fascinating old cretonne bags full of treasures.
She sat down near the door on the darling little old hair-covered trunk that had been Great-grandfather"s, and watched the two old women at work. The first cookie had disappeared now, and the second was well on the way. She felt a great appeas.e.m.e.nt in her insides. She leaned back against the old dresses hung on the wall and drew a long breath.
"Well," said Aunt Hetty, "you"ve got neighbors up your way, so they tell me. Funny thing, a city man coming up here to live. He"ll never stick it out. The summer maybe. But that"s all. You just see, come autumn, if he don"t light out for New York again."
Elly made no comment on this. She often heard her elders say that she was not a talkative child, and that it was hard to get anything out of her. That was because mostly they wanted to know about things she hadn"t once thought of noticing, and weren"t a bit interested when she tried to talk about what she _had_ noticed. Just imagine trying to tell Aunt Hetty about that poor old gray snow-bank out in her woods, all lonely and scrumpled up! She went on eating her cookie.
"How does he like it, anyhow?" asked Aunt Hetty, bending the upper part of her out of the window to shake something. "And what kind of a critter is he?"
"Well, he"s rather an old man," said Elly. She added conscientiously, trying to be chatty, "Paul"s crazy about him. He goes over there all the time to visit. I like him all right. The old man seems to like it here all right. They both of them do."
"Both?" said Aunt Hetty, curving herself back into the room again.
"Oh, the other one isn"t going to _live_ here, like Mr. Welles. He"s just come to get Mr. Welles settled, and to make him a visit. His name is Mr. Marsh."
"Well, what"s _he_ like?" asked Aunt Hetty, folding together the old wadded petticoat she had been shaking.
"Oh, he"s all right too," said Elly. She wasn"t going to say anything about that funny softness of his hands, she didn"t like, because that would be like speaking about the snow-drift; something Aunt Hetty would just laugh at, and call one of her notions.
"Well, what do they _do_ with themselves, two great hulking men set off by themselves?"
Elly tried seriously to remember what they did do. "I don"t see them, of course, much in the morning before I go to school. I guess they get up and have their breakfast, the way anybody does."
Aunt Hetty snorted a little, "Gracious, child, a person needs a corkscrew to get anything out of you. I mean all day, with no ch.o.r.es, or farmin", or _any_thing."
"I don"t _know_," Elly confessed. "Mr. Clark, of course, he"s busy cooking and washing dishes and keeping house, but ..."
"Are there _three_ of them?" Aunt Hetty stopped her dudsing in her astonishment. "I thought you said two."
"Oh well, Mr. Marsh sent down to the city and had this Mr. Clark come up to work for them. He doesn"t call him "Mr. Clark"--just "Clark," short like that. I guess he"s Mr. Marsh"s hired man in the city. Only he can do everything in the house, too. But I don"t feel like calling him "Clark" because he"s grown-up, and so I call him "_Mr._ Clark."" She did not tell Aunt Hetty that she sort of wanted to make up to him for being somebody"s servant and being called like one. It made her mad and she wanted to show he could be a mister as well as anybody. She began on the third cookie. What else could she say to Aunt Hetty, who always wanted to know the news so? She brought out, "Well, _I_ tell you, in the afternoon, when I get home, mostly old Mr. Welles is out in his garden."
"_Gardin_!" cried Aunt Hetty. "Mercy on us, making garden the fore-part of April. Where does he think he"s living? Florida?"
"I don"t believe he"s exactly making garden," said Elly. "He just sort of pokes around there, and looks at things. And sometimes he sits down on the bench and just _sits_ there. He"s pretty old, I guess, and he walks kind of tired, always."
"Does the other one?" asked Aunt Hetty.
This made Elly sit up, and say very loud, "No, _indeedy_!" She really hadn"t thought before how very _un_tired Mr. Marsh always seemed. She added, "No, the other one doesn"t walk tired, nor he doesn"t poke around in the garden. He takes long tramps way back of the mountains, over Burnham way."
"For goodness" sakes, what"s he find up there?"
"He likes it. He comes over and borrows our maps and things to study, and he gets Mother to tell him all about everything. He gets Toucle to tell him about the back trails, too."
"Well, he"s a smart one if he can get a word out of Toucle."
"Yes, he does. Everybody talks to him. You _have_ to if he starts in.
He"s very lively."
"Does he get _you_ to talk?" asked Aunt Hetty, laughing at the idea.
"Well, some," stated Elly soberly. She did not say that Mr. Marsh always seemed to her to be trying to get some secret out of her. She didn"t _have_ any secret that she knew of, but that was the way he made her feel. She dodged him mostly, when she could.
"What"s the news from your father?"
"Oh, he"s all right," said Elly. She fell to thinking of Father and wishing he would come back.
"When"s he going to get through his business, up there?"
"Before long, I guess. Mother said maybe he"d be back here next month."
Elly was aware that she was again not being talkative. She tried to think of something to add. "I"m very much obliged for these cookies,"
she said. "They are awfully good."
"They"re the kind your mother always liked, when she was your age," said Aunt Hetty casually. "I remember how she used to sit right there on Father"s hair-trunk and eat them and watch me just like you now."
At this statement Elly could feel her thoughts getting bigger and longer and higher, like something being opened out. "And the heaven was removed as a scroll when it is rolled up." That sentence she"d heard in church and never understood, and always wondered what was behind, what they had seen when the scroll was rolled up... . Something inside her now seemed to roll up as though she were going to see what was behind it. How much longer time was than you thought! Mother had sat there as a little girl ... a little girl like her. Mother who was now grown-up and _finished_, knowing everything, never changing, never making any mistakes. Why, how _could_ she have been a little girl! And such a short time ago that Aunt Hetty remembered her sitting there, right there, maybe come in from walking across that very meadow, and down those very rocks. _What had she been thinking about, that other little girl who had been Mother?_ "Why" ... Elly stopped eating, stopped breathing for a moment. "Why, she herself would stop being a little girl, and would grow up and be a Mother!" She had always known that, of course, but she had never _felt_ it till that moment. It made her feel very sober; more than sober, rather holy. Yes, that was the word,--holy,--like the hymn. Perhaps some day another little girl would sit there, and be just as surprised to know that _her_ mother had been really and truly a little girl too, and would feel queer and shy at the idea, and all the time her mother had been only _Elly_. But would she _be_ Elly any more, when she was grown up? What would have happened to Elly? And after that little girl, another; and one before Mother; and back as far as you could see, and forwards as far as you could see. It was like a procession, all half in the dark, marching forward, one after another, little girls, mothers, mothers and little girls, and then more ... what for ... oh, _what for?_
She was a little scared. She wished she could get right up and go _home_ to Mother. But the procession wouldn"t stop ... wouldn"t stop... .
Aunt Hetty hung up the last bag. "There," she said, "that"s all we can do here today. Elly, you"d better run along home. The sun"ll be down behind the mountain _now_ before you get there."
Elly s.n.a.t.c.hed at the voice, at the words, at Aunt Hetty"s wrinkled, shaking old hand. She jumped up from the trunk. Something in her face made Aunt Hetty say, "Well, you look as though you"d most dropped to sleep there in the sun. It does make a person feel lazy this first warm March sun. I declare this morning I didn"t want to go to work house-cleaning. I wanted to go and spend the day with the hens, singing over that little dozy ca-a-a-a they do, in the sun, and stretch one leg and one wing till they most broke off, and ruffle up all my feathers and let "em settle back very slow, and then just _set_."
They had started downstairs before Aunt Hetty had finished this, the little girl holding tightly to the wrinkled old hand. How peaceful Aunt Hetty was! Even the smell of her black woolen dresses always had a _quiet_ smell. And she must see all those hunks of mud on the white stairs, but she never said a word. Elly squeezed her hand a little tighter.