Separate accounts as well as short ones, made best friends. We knew they all thought father was unlucky to have to do with in such matters. He would still be the "limited" man of the family. It would take two thirds of his inheritance to pay off those old "57 debts.
So we took our lovely Westover summer days as things we could not have any more of. And when you begin to feel that about anything, it would be a relief to have had the last of it. Nothing lasts always; but we like to have the forever-and-ever feeling, however delusive. A child hates his Sunday clothes, because he knows he cannot put them on again on Monday.
With all our troubles, there was one pleasure in the house,--Arctura.
We had made an art-kitchen; now we were making a little poem of a serving-maiden. We did not turn things over to her, and so leave chaos to come again; we only let her help; we let her come in and learn with us the nice and pleasant ways that we had learned. We did not move the kitchen down stairs again; we were determined not to have a kitchen any more.
Arctura was strong and blithe; she could fetch and carry, make fires, wash dishes, clean knives and bra.s.ses, do all that came hardest to us; and could do, in other things, with and for us, what she saw us do. We all worked together till the work was done; then Arctura sat down in the afternoons, just as we did, and read books, or made her clothes.
She always looked nice and pretty. She had large dark calico ap.r.o.ns for her work; and little white bib-ap.r.o.ns for table-tending and dress-up; and mother made for her, on the machine, little linen collars and cuffs.
We had a pride in her looks; and she knew it; she learned to work as delicately as we did. When breakfast or dinner was ready, she was as fit to turn round and serve as we were to sit down; she was astonished herself, at ways and results that she fell in with and attained.
"Why, where does the dirt go to?" she would exclaim. "It never gethers anywheres."
"GATHERS,--_anywhere_" Rosamond corrected.
Arctura learned little grammar lessons, and other such things, by the way. She was only "next" below us in our family life; there was no great gulf fixed. We felt that we had at least got hold of the right end of one thread in the social tangle. This, at any rate, had come out of our year at Westover.
"Things seem so easy," the girl would say. "It is just like two times one."
So it was; because we did not jumble in all the a.n.a.lysis and Compound Proportion of housekeeping right on top of the multiplication-table.
She would get on by degrees; by and by she would be in evolution and geometrical progression without knowing how she got there. If you want a house, you must build it up, stone by stone, and stroke by stroke; if you want a servant, you, or somebody for you, must _build_ one, just the same; they do not spring up and grow, neither can be "knocked together." And I tell you, busy, eager women of this day, wanting great work out of doors, this is just what "we girls," some of us,--and some of the best of us, perhaps,--have got to stay at home awhile and do.
"It is one of the little jobs that has been waiting for a good while to be done," says Barbara; "and Miss Pennington has found out another.
"There may be," she says, "need of women for reorganizing town meetings; I won"t undertake to say there isn"t; but I"m _sure_ there"s need of them for reorganizing _parlor_ meetings. They are getting to be left altogether to the little school-girl "sets." Women who have grown older, and can see through all that nonsense, and have the position and power to break it up, ought to take hold. Don"t you think so? Don"t you think it is the duty of women of my age and cla.s.s to see to this thing before it grows any worse?" And I told her,--right up, respectful,--Yes"m; it wum! Think of her asking me, though!"
Just as things were getting to be so different and so nice on West Hill, it seemed so hard to leave it! Everything reminded us of that.
A beautiful plan came up for Ruth, though, at this time. What with the family worries,--which Ruth always had a way of gathering to herself, and hugging up, p.r.i.c.kers in, as if so she could keep the nettles from other people"s fingers,--and her hard work at her music, she was getting thin. We were all insisting that she must take a vacation this summer, both from teaching and learning; when, all at once, Miss Pennington made up her mind to go to West Point and Lake George, and to take Penelope with her; and she came over and asked Ruth to go too.
"If you don"t mind a room alone, dear; I"m an awful coward to have come of a martial family, and I must have Pen with me nights. I"m nervous about cars, too; I want two of you to keep up a chatter; I should be miserable company for one, always distracted after the whistles."
Ruth"s eyes shone; but she colored up, and her thanks had half a doubt in them. She would tell Auntie: and they would think how it could be.
"What a nice way for you to go!" said Barbara, after Miss Pennington left. "And how nice it will be for you to see Dakie!" At which Ruth colored up again, and only said that "it would certainly be the nicest possible way to go, if she were to go at all."
Barbara meant--or meant to be understood that she meant--that Miss Pennington knew everybody, and belonged among the general officers; Ruth had an instinct that it would only be possible for her to go by an invitation like this from people out of her own family.
"But doesn"t it seem queer she should choose me, out of us all?" she asked. "Doesn"t it seem selfish for me to be the one to go?"
"Seem selfish? Whom to?" said Barbara, bluntly. "We weren"t asked."
"I wish--everybody--knew that," said Ruth.
Making this little transparent speech, Ruth blushed once more. But she went, after all. She said we pushed her out of the nest. She went out into the wide, wonderful world, for the very first time in her life.
This is one of her letters:--
DEAR MOTHER AND GIRLS:--It is perfectly lovely here. I wish you could sit where I do this morning, looking up the still river in the bright light, with the tender purple haze on the far-off hills, and long, low, shady Const.i.tution Island lying so beautiful upon the water on one side, and dark s.h.a.ggy Cro" Nest looming up on the other. The Parrott guns at the foundry, over on the headland opposite, are trying,--as they are trying almost all the time,--against the face of the high, old, desolate cliff; and the hurtling buzz of the sh.e.l.ls keeps a sort of slow, tremendous time-beat on the air.
I think I am almost more interested in Const.i.tution Island than in any other part of the place. I never knew until I came here that it was the home of the Misses Warner; the place where Queechy came from, and Dollars and Cents, and the Wide, Wide World. It seems so strange to think that they sit there and write still, lovely stories while all this parade and bustle and learning how to fight are going on close beside and about them.
The Cadets are very funny. They will do almost any thing for mischief,--the frolic of it, I mean. Dakie Thayne tells us very amusing stories. They are just going into camp now; and they have parades and battery-practice every day. They have target-firing at old Cro" Nest,--which has to stand all the firing from the north battery, just around here from the hotel. One day the cadet in charge made a very careful sighting of his piece; made the men train the gun up and down, this way and that, a hair more or a hair less, till they were nearly out of patience; when, lo! just as he had got "a beautiful bead," round came a superintending officer, and took a look too. The bad boy had drawn it full on a poor old black cow! I do not believe he would have really let her be blown up; but Dakie says,--"Well, he rather thinks,--if she would have stood still long enough,--he would have let her be--astonished!"
The walk through the woods, around the cliff, over the river, is beautiful. If only they wouldn"t call it by such a silly name!
We went out to Old Fort Putnam yesterday. I did not know how afraid Miss Pennington could be of a little thing before. I don"t know, now, how much of it was fun; for, as Dakie Thayne said, it was agonizingly funny. What must have happened to him after we got back and he left us I cannot imagine; he didn"t laugh much there, and it must have been a misery of politeness.
We had been down into the old, ruinous enclosure; had peeped in at the dark, choked-up casemates; and had gone round and come up on the edge of the broken embankment, which we were following along to where it sloped down safely again,--when, just at the very middle and highest and most impossible point, down sat Miss Elizabeth among the stones, and declared she could neither go back nor forward. She had been frightened to death all the way, and now her head was quite gone. "No; nothing should persuade her; she never could get up on her feet again in that dreadful place." She laughed in the midst of it; but she was really frightened, and there she sat; Dakie went to her, and tried to help her up, and lead her on; but she would not be helped. "What would come of it?" "She didn"t know; she supposed that was the end of her; _she_ couldn"t do anything." "But, dear Miss Pennington," says Dakie, "are you going to break short off with life, right here, and make a Lady Simon Stylites of yourself?" "For all she knew; she never could get down." I think we must have been there, waiting and coaxing, nearly half an hour, before she began to _hitch_ along; for walk she wouldn"t, and she didn"t. She had on a black Ernani dress, and a nice silk underskirt; and as she lifted herself along with her hands, hoist after hoist sidewise, of course the thin stuff dragged on the rocks and began to go to pieces. By the time she came to where she could stand, she was a rebus of the Coliseum,--"a n.o.ble wreck in ruinous perfection." She just had to tear off the long tatters, and roll them up in a bunch, and fling them over into a hollow, and throw the two or three breadths that were left over her arm, and walk home in her silk petticoat, itself much the sufferer from dust and fray, though we did all we could for her with pocket-handkerchiefs.
"What _has_ happened to Miss Pennington?" said Mrs. General M----, as we came up on the piazza.
"Nothing," said Dakie, quite composed and proper, "only she got tired and sat down; and it was dusty,--that was all." He bowed and went off, without so much as a glance of secret understanding.
"A joke has as many lives as a cat, here," he told Pen and me, afterwards, "and that was _too_ good not to keep to ourselves."
Dear little mother and girls,--I have told stories and described describes, and all to crowd out and leave to the last corner _such_ a thing that Dakie Thayne wants to do! We got to talking about Westover and last summer, and the pleasant old place, and all; and I couldn"t help telling him something about the worry. I know I had no business to; and I am afraid I have made a snarl. He says he would like to buy the place! And he wanted to know if Uncle Stephen wouldn"t rent it of him if he did! Just think of it,--that boy! I believe he really means to write to Chicago, to his guardian. Of course it never came into my head when I told him; it wouldn"t at any rate, and I never think of _his_ having such a quant.i.ty of money. He seems just like--as far as that goes--any other boy. What shall I do? Do you believe he will?
P.S. Sat.u.r.day morning. I feel better about that Poll Parroting of mine, to-day. I have had another talk with Dakie. I don"t believe he will write; now, at any rate. O girls! this is just the most perfect morning!
Tell Stephen I"ve got a _splendid_ little idea, on purpose for him and me. Something I can hardly keep to myself till I get home. Dakie Thayne put it into my head. He is just the brightest boy, about everything! I begin to feel in a hurry almost, to come back. I don"t think Miss Pennington will go to Lake George, after all. She says she hates to leave the Point, so many of her old friends are here. But Pen and I think she is afraid of the steamers.
Ruth got home a week after this; a little fatter, a little browner, and a little merrier and more talkative than she had ever been before.
Stephen was in a great hurry about the splendid little mysterious idea, of course. Boys never can wait, half so well as girls, for anything.
We were all out on the balcony that night before dusk, as usual. Ruth got up suddenly, and went into the house for something. Stephen went straight in after her. What happened upon that, the rest of us did not know till afterward. But it is a nice little part of the story,--just because there is so precious little of it.
Ruth went round, through the brown room and the hall, to the front door. Stephen found her stooping down, with her face close to the piazza cracks.
"Hollo! what"s the matter? Lost something?"
Ruth lifted up her head. "Hush!"
"Why, how your face shines! What _is_ up?"
"It"s the sunset. I mean--that shines. Don"t say anything. Our splendid--little--idea, you know. It"s under here."
"Be dar--never-minded, if mine is!"
"You don"t know. Columbus didn"t know where his idea was--exactly. Do you remember when Sphinx hid her kittens under here last summer?
Brought "em round, over the wood-pile in the shed, and they never knew their way out till she showed "em?"
"It _isn"t_ about kittens!"
"Hasn"t Old Ma"amselle got some now?"
"Yes; four."