These were my books, my dear, dear books, and with them comes a memory of hours spent in a window-seat, of dusky evenings when the firelight lit an absorbing page, and of elderly comment heard over my head.
"How she reads!" my father said, enviously. "I was just like that when I was a boy."
"The child will have no eyes," my grandmother complained.
"She must know them by heart," my mother added.
I did know them pretty thoroughly, but when I tired of old friends I had only to climb up a shelf higher to find new ones. "j.a.pheth in Search of a Father," "The Mill on the Floss," and "Les Miserables," stood just above my head, and there were stories of children in all of these,--the most entrancing stories that opened a window into a glorious golden world of ideality and romance. It was such a wide world! People did things there. They lived and loved, and when they died the event stamped itself on my mind with a pathos that made me cry from sheer pity.
"I wish Rhoda wouldn"t read so many books," my mother said. "She excites herself over them. She is so different from other children of her age!"
She said it half complainingly and half exultingly. Somehow I knew that my mother liked me to read, and that she liked me to be a little different from other children. Sometimes she bragged about it in a mild way to chance callers.
"Rhoda reads the oddest things," I heard her tell two ladies. "When I was a little girl I liked to read "The Wide, Wide World," but she likes novels and histories."
The older visitor glanced at me up in my corner. It was "Les Miserables" that day, I remember, and their talk played on the surface of my mind while my heart was busy with Cosette.
"Does she go to school?" she asked.
"No," my mother faltered.
The ladies looked at each other.
"What! At her age! Why, who teaches her?" they demanded, in a shocked chorus.
"I do myself--sometimes," my mother answered, still falteringly.
"Take my advice," the visitor with the black eyes said, decisively, "and send that child to school. Why it"s a shame! It isn"t fair to the child."
"When she grows up she will regret it," the one with the tight mouth added.
"She isn"t strong," my mother explained. "We have kept her at home on that account; but I suppose, yes, I suppose, that she ought to go to school."
She looked at me a moment in a worried fashion, and then brightened, a trifle of her old pride returning.
"She has the greatest stock of general information," she confided, whisperingly. "She astonishes me sometimes. She does, indeed."
The two ladies shook their heads.
"I don"t approve of children knowing too much," the one with the black eyes cried.
"And novels!" the other breathed, evidently appalled.
After they were gone my mother took the book out of my hand, and read a page or two of it in a frightened way. She smoothed my hair, and looked at me anxiously.
"Why do you like this book, Rhoda?" she asked.
"Because it"s about a little girl, mother," I answered.
I crept a little closer to her.
"She hadn"t any mother," I explained, eagerly. "And a man gave her a beautiful doll, and one night, just think, he put a gold coin in her shoe! She was so surprised! Oh, mother, how I wish I could have been there! I do! I do!"
"Is that all, Rhoda?"
I nodded.
"I have always been a good mother to you, haven"t I, Rhoda?"
I rubbed my head against her arm, and kissed her hand.
"At least I"ve tried to be!" my mother cried. "And now I am going to do something that perhaps you won"t like; but you may understand some day, dear. I am going to put this book back into the bookcase, and I am going to lock the door. It is not to be opened until I give you leave."
"It isn"t my fault, is it, mother?" I asked, perplexed.
"No, it is not your fault. It"s only that I want to keep my little girl just the same in heart and mind as she has always been."
She put the book back on the shelf, and she locked the door; but she did not take away the bra.s.s key. She knew and I knew that I would never touch it.
But, oh, how I longed for my dear books! I used to creep to the door and look in at them, and it seemed to me that they appeared lonesome. I finished out the story of Cosette to suit myself, and I made stories likewise for the books which I did not know. There was one remarkable thing about my stories, and that was that n.o.body ever died; but they all lived happy forever and ever. Even when my mother read the Bible to me on Sunday nights after I was in bed I used to sit up anxiously, and pray her to end the stories in my way.
"Oh, don"t let the lions eat poor Daniel!" I would cry. "Oh, mother, mother, don"t let them eat him up!"
"Why it happened centuries ago, dear," my mother answered, half laughing.
"But I can see it," I protested. "I can see it right now!"
It was so hard to see things going wrong, and not to be able to help!
It was about this time that my mother and I did a great many lessons together, and she would offer me odd bits of useful information at unexpected moments.
"Rhoda is not very well grounded," she told my father, "but I do think, Robert, that she knows a great deal for a child of ten."
She was darning stockings as she spoke, and she turned over a very ragged one of d.i.c.k"s with a little sigh.
"I would like her to go to school. Not to the public school, but to a young ladies" seminary as I did. Don"t you think, Robert, if I were to do without a new winter coat, and we made the old carpet on the stairs last a little longer, that we might send Rhoda to Mrs. Garfield"s?"
Her face was brightening as she thought it out.
"And there"s the money in her bank," she cried, "her gold pieces that dad has given her on her birthdays and on Christmas. I don"t suppose, Robert, you"d want dad to pay for it all? He would, willingly."
"No," my father answered.
My mother"s face fell, and then lit up again.
"You are a ridiculously proud boy," she declared, fondly. "Well, at any rate, we can save my coat and the carpet."
I wanted to go to school very badly. Every day at half past ten there was a procession past our house of thirty little girls walking two and two. They all looked happy and important, and I thought how wonderful it might be if I should join their ranks.