THE SKATE MENDING TOOK A LONG TIME

The
Young Ship Builder

BY SOPHIE SWETT

AUTHOR OF
“A CAPE COD BOY,” “CAPTAIN POLLY,” ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN HENDERSON BETTS

THE PENN PUBLISHING COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA
MCMXVIII

Copyright 1902 by Sophie Swett
The Young Shipbuilder

CONTENTS

The Young Shipbuilder

CHAPTER I
WE AND THE “ALIENS”

It might be thought that people who lived on Groundnut Hill, in Palmyra, would have no more story to tell than the needy knife-grinder, but as Hiram Nute, the essence-peddler, says, “Wherever there’s human nater and the Lord’s providence, there’s apt to be consid’able goin’ on.”

Perhaps there was more “goin’ on” in our family from the fact that the human nature is somewhat mixed. There is sure to be an astonishing variety in any large family, I have observed, even when there are not, as in ours, two sets of children. But the queer differences with us are all set down to the fact of mother’s second marriage. She was Deacon Partridge’s daughter, and she married the Rev. Cyrus Dill, who was the “stated supply” at Palmyra, the summer that she was nineteen. He received a call to a small church in a large city, and three children were born there, Cyrus, Octavia and I. I am Bathsheba. They named me after my Grandmother Dill, because she was a woman who feared the Lord. It was my father’s behest, and was so set down in his will—he died just after I was born. The will was pasted into the family Bible. Every one said it was a beautiful will, because, while he had scarcely any material possessions, he yet bequeathed so much.

Grandma Partridge and my mother always cried over it on rainy Sundays, and to my infant mind it was a scarcely less sacred thing than the scriptures themselves.

When I was sixteen, I was so light-minded as to wish that Grandma Dill could have been a woman who feared the Lord and had a pretty name, too.

Long before that time grandma had to weep alone over the will, for mother had married the young artist who had pitched his white umbrella tent all summer on the green slope of our orchard, and painted old “Blue” in its brooding stillness, and with its shifting shadows, and the beautiful vista of the river through our Norway pines.

An artist! The name savored of unconventionality to grandma, and of shiftlessness as well, to grandpa. But they gave in—to mother’s dimple—stern Uncle Horace said. He declared, furthermore, this severe relative of ours, that grandpa would never have been coerced by the dimple, if he had not been enfeebled in body and mind by his inveterate foe, asthma.

Grandma, we learned, as we grew up, was suspected of secretly favoring the match. She cried and feared that it was not marrying in the Lord, for the young artist had been reared in a different faith from ours; but,—dear grandma!—she loved a romance. Stories were not favored in those days, by the strictest of the sect to which we belonged, and grandpa was of the strictest. She read them privately, sometimes, with a deep sense of guilt. When, by great good fortune—and some one’s oversight—I found one in the Sunday-school library, she would ask me, with wistful eagerness, if it were “a pretty story.” And although I never saw her read it, she knew “how it ended” while I was still at the beginning.

I suppose it was a pretty story, a very pretty drama of human life, that was played before grandma’s eyes in that summer when Royce Dupont painted pictures on our orchard slope, and “leaf by leaf the rose of youth came back” to mother. And in spite of her religious misgivings—he had a bewildering veneration for the saints—and in spite of her loyalty to the dead, grandma had a furtive joy in it.

They were married in the autumn, and her artist husband took mother abroad with him, leaving the children, Cyrus and Octavia and me, to comfort and make things lively for grandpa and grandma. And our half-sister and half-brother were born in Paris. That is why Palmyra people will call them French children, although their father was an Englishman by birth and only from very remote ancestors was there a drop of French blood in his veins.

In less than five years mother came back widowed, to the Groundnut Hill farm, bringing with her Estelle and David, children of two and three. Cyrus was twelve by that time, and Octavia ten, and I was nine, a tall slip of a girl, loving my patchwork and my knitting, and to help Loveday stamp the butter, much better than I loved my book; and yet wrestling with many more problems than any one wot of under my sandy-thatched poll.

People said that I looked very much like my father, and perhaps that was why my mother clung to me with passionate, half-remorseful tenderness, and wished to take me with her when she married and went abroad.

Grandfather had set his face firmly against that. A vague impression remained with me, gathered, perhaps, from Loveday’s remarks, that he did not wish to give me over to my stepfather’s saints. I had seen his paintings of them, in strange robes of scarlet, violet and yellow; and Loveday had whispered darkly of idolatry, a phrase quite beyond my comprehension, but which made me cry in my bed at night for fear of the painted saints.

Loveday would read to me on Sunday afternoons about the homely fishermen who had left their nets upon the Galilean shores to follow in the footsteps of our Lord. She told me that these were the real saints, as they were on earth, and we could not hope to know how they looked in the blessed company beyond. I was comforted, but a horror of saints and of those who painted them remained with me for years.

I set down these childish vagaries because I think a story is only of value in so far as it is a transcript of real life, and I mean this to be as frank as if it were a diary, which no eyes but my own should ever see. And small things went far toward the shaping of character on Groundnut Hill—as they do everywhere in this dimly-apprehended scheme of things.

Something of my horror of those painted saints must have been in time swallowed up by curiosity, for I remember that when I was ten, a year after mother’s return with our new brother and sister, I attempted to transform one of the boys into a saint, according to my unfading recollection of my stepfather’s paintings, by draping his shoulders with some old yellow flannel that hung upon the clothes-line. It was out on the wide lawn, and Cyrus was deep in his Latin book, lying under the great butternut tree. Three-year-old Rob, Uncle Horace’s son, was there, for Uncle Horace had married late in life, when one would no more have expected tender emotions to develop in him than one would have expected one of our Druid-like old Norway pines to blossom with wild roses, and his young wife had died, leaving him an infant son.

I draped the folds of yellow flannel about them in as stately a fashion as I could, but I must confess that there was no semblance of sainthood about them, nor even anything cherubic, as one might have expected of their baby faces. They insisted upon thinking I meant them to play king, and strutted about with grotesque airs. Loveday came out and reproved me sharply for having vain imaginations, and for not having forgotten the heathenish pictures; for to my shamefaced astonishment, she understood just what I was doing.

Dear Loveday! our spiritual, as well as our temporal welfare lay very near her heart. Perhaps the relation she bore to us could scarcely be understood outside of New England, and at that time even it was a survival of the customs of an earlier date—to say nothing of the fact that Loveday was unique. She was ignorant, she was full of prejudices and crude notions, and yet there has sometimes come to me, in these later years, a doubt whether Loveday’s ignorance, with the intuitions with which love lighted it—love to God and man—were not better than all the wisdom of the schools.

She had been the “hired girl” when she was twenty; at forty she was the housekeeper, and the reins of domestic management, always held somewhat slackly in grandma’s gentle hands, had slipped, almost without any one’s consciousness, into hers.

And Hiram Nute still continued to woo her, as he had done twenty years before. “He hadn’t never slacked up a mite on his courtin’,” Loveday herself admitted. And our “hired man” was relieved of the tasks of churning, taking in the clothes and chopping wood, during Hiram’s periodical visits, for Loveday would never permit him to come unless he made himself useful.

She said matrimony was an ordinance of the Lord, but there ’peared to be consid’able many that was ready to serve him that way compared to them that was ready to do their duty just where he had sot ’em. And as for seein’ them blessed young ones brought up on saleratus bread and slim morals, she couldn’t do it. This was by no means intended as a reflection upon grandma, but upon the “back folks,” whom Palmyra was forced to depend upon for “help.”

Grandma’s hands were wholly filled now by the care of grandpa, whose feebleness increased year by year, and also, alas! by mother’s need of her constant attention, for a delicacy of the lungs had developed in our mother, and her strength failed rapidly. She took her illness lightly, declaring that it was only the result of the change from the sunny south of France to bleak New England air. But even on the healthful Palmyra hills we knew the meaning of that dread word, consumption, and we older children understood when the neighbors whispered it to each other with bated breath.

Perhaps it may have been vague thoughts of that country to which I knew my mother was going soon, that made my mind revert to the painted saints. In spite of the ill-success of my first experiments, and in spite of Loveday’s rebuke—for I was a wilful young person in those days—I took advantage of Cyrus’ absorption in his book to try to make for him a costume similar to that in the pictures.

The shadows of the butternut tree were heavy; one shaft of yellow sunset light pierced them and fell directly upon the boy. Finally, becoming aware that I was dressing him in some fantastic way, he arose with—not a scowl, even at thirteen Cyrus was too dignified to scowl—but a sternly rebuking expression upon his face.

The shadows were heavy, as I have said, and the shaft of light was dazzling. In the one moment that he stood there I saw, with a thrill of mingled triumph and dismay, that I had evolved one of the painted saints. But not one of them had such a face as this! Of course, my later understanding comes to my aid in interpreting its expression, but it struck my childish mind with a sense of awe.

A narrow, dark face, heavily browed, and the high forehead overhung by masses of black hair as straight as an Indian’s. Only our Cyrus, and we had always been obliged to admit that he was a homely boy! But it was an intense, ascetic, loftily spiritual face. Something in the absurd toggery, transfigured by the strange effect of light and shadow, and associated with my dim recollections of the saintly faces, had shown it to me vaguely as a child of ten could see it. Years afterward, when I saw a painting of St. John the Baptist on the wall of Estelle’s studio, in a flash Cyrus came back to me, as he had looked that night under the old butternut tree.

St. John the Baptist! “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!” A prophet with a warning cry. And Cyrus, we used to think, was one who thought he knew exactly what the way of the Lord was.

But if I go on in this way the end of my story will slip in at the beginning; or at least I shall show what we all were so plainly that every one will see just what must have happened. For character is destiny, although it does sometimes seem as if circumstances got the upper hand!

Estelle, a toddling mite of three, in trying to make cheeses with her small pink skirts, as she had seen me do, for my diversions were apt to be of a more practical nature than the evolution of painted saints, had tipped herself over into a thistle-bed, just outside the gate, and was screaming lustily.

Cyrus threw off his robe and rushed to the rescue. He set the distracted little maid upon her feet, and extracted the thistle-spears from her corn-silk locks, with a not ungentle hand. But he looked and spoke sternly—so sternly that the child’s piteous cries were redoubled. He led or rather dragged her toward the house, saying severely that bed was the place for naughty little girls. Strangely, as I thought, neither mother, nor Loveday, nor grandma, nor even Viola Pringle, now installed as Loveday’s assistant, appeared at the sound of the small, wrathful voice.

But the youngsters, Dave and Rob, showed themselves rescuing knights to the distressed damsel. They fell with sturdy fists upon Cyrus, who weakened, not so much from a desire to return to his Latin, as I was shrewdly aware, as from a discouraged feeling that the household discipline was somewhat lax.

The small boys installed the weeping little maid in their somewhat rickety little wagon, and drew her, shrieking with delight, up and down the garden path, between the rows of nodding hollyhocks.

There came a sudden, subdued cry for Cyrus from the door. He was wanted to run with all speed for the doctor. Mother had had a hard fit of coughing, and there was blood upon her handkerchief.

We thought but little of this, then, we children. Grandma was apt to be full of alarms. Moreover, we had the strong, odd, childish assurance that things must always come out right; founded in some strange prescience, is it? or only in the happy lack of life’s experience? Surely things would turn out all right, and we would be quite happy again, although, sometimes, in desperate troubles, not until one had had a good cry.

But that was the beginning of the end. Very soon after we were motherless children, although grandma said we were not to feel so, but always as if she were looking down upon us from the sky. And she impressed this so firmly upon little Estelle’s mind, that the next summer, when she was four, the child ran away, upon her chubby legs, and toiled almost to the summit of old “Blue,” to get to Heaven and find mother. For old “Blue’s” misty peak melted into the blue of the sky.

We were almost crazed with fear, for there was a tradition of wild-cats still upon the mountain. The whole town turned out to search for her, and it was late in the night when we found her. Footsore and rain-soaked and hungry, the child’s only regret was that she had failed to find Heaven and mother. She wept for days, and would not be comforted. To this day I never hear the hymn about “The dizzy steep of Heaven” without associating it in my mind with the rugged ascent of old “Blue” and little Estelle’s weary climb. Many steep ascents lay before the little feet that climbed that day, but it seemed likely that she would take them all alike gallantly and fearlessly.

“There’s consid’able to that young one, anyhow.” That was what Loveday said. Grandpa had never taken to “the new children,” as he called them, but from the day of little Estelle’s mountain-climb he liked her better.

“She may be some like our folks,” he said, hopefully. “He’s like his father—he’ll be an alien among us always.” And he shook his fine, old gray head solemnly over little Dave.

It was out on the porch, and grandma sat near him with her knitting. Dave—he was six then—suddenly raised an impertinent little grinning face over the porch railing, as if he understood. Grandma leaned over and patted the little face playfully, tenderly, and stroked the curly-thatched head.

Grandpa’s voice grew husky with its weight of evil prophecy:

“Mark my words! he’ll bring trouble on himself and on the whole family after I’m gone. I depend on you, Cyrus, to do all you can for him.”

Cyrus, seated upon the step, as usual with a book, looked up in a kind of bewildered surprise. Except to severely rebuke them for being noisy, and to keep his treasures carefully away from their predatory fingers, I think Cyrus had been scarcely conscious of the children’s existence.

Now the blood rose slowly to his sallow face and departed, leaving it pale and set. Cyrus proverbially took things hard. Yet if grandpa had lived to give other warnings and charges, the impression that this charge had made might have faded—although Cyrus was tenacious, as well as intense. But grandpa died within a week, suddenly, of heart disease, caused by asthma, and Cyrus immediately took serious charge of little David’s education and morals, and never minded the snubbings that he brought down on his devoted head from grandma, and even from Loveday, who didn’t think much of a big boy’s ideas of domestic discipline.

These two episodes, not very important in themselves—of my receiving an impression that connected Cyrus always vaguely in my mind with the saints and of grandpa’s charge to Cyrus concerning little David—stand out in the background of my mind, because, I suppose, of their connection with crises and changes in our lives.

After grandpa was gone, Loveday recalled often his feeling about the “alien” children.

“There’s own folks that ain’t own folks, and strangers that is,” said Loveday, sententiously. “The Lord knows best, and it’s for us to do our duty.”

CHAPTER II
CYRUS SACRIFICES HIMSELF FOR THE SAKE OF THE “ALIENS”

“I’ve thought it all over and there’s no other way. I must give up going to college,” Cyrus announced in his slow, positive way.

It was six years after grandpa had given him the charge to care for little Dave, for I must resist the great temptation to linger on the days when childhood filled the earth for us with “the light that never was on sea or land.”

Those days seemed to come to an end all at once for Cyrus and Octavia, and even for me, when grandpa died. For financial trouble came and we feared losing even the dear old roof over our heads.

Grandpa had been a shipbuilder. The firm of David Partridge & Son was known all over the State and, in fact, much farther than the State. Although the business of shipbuilding had declined in our State, even before grandpa entered it, yet he prospered for a time. The weaknesses of disease and old age caused his failure—the same causes that had made him yield to mother’s dimple—at least so Uncle Horace solemnly declared. He had never yielded to Uncle Horace, but had always been determined to keep him in leading-strings and consequently, Uncle Horace had felt but little interest in the business, devoting himself to raising stock on his fine farm.

But when grandpa died, and his affairs were found badly involved, Uncle Horace immediately undertook to manage the business and retrieve the losses. And it was Cyrus, eighteen-year-old Cyrus, whom he consulted; they went over the books together. It was the family opinion that Uncle Horace and Cyrus were alike. They both had strong individualities and were extremely reserved and self-contained; otherwise I could never see any resemblance. Certainly Uncle Horace had never given them any reason to hope that their desire of making a minister of him would be accomplished, while almost from childhood Cyrus’ bent had been in that direction, and we all understood that it was beginning to be his heart’s desire.

I knew that grandma prayed every day that she might live to hear Cyrus preach the gospel; that Octavia self-denyingly saved her school-money—she had secured the Mile End school to teach by the time she was sixteen—and that Loveday made her clover-stamped, “gilt-edged” butter and the Groundnut Hill cheese, by which we were getting famous, all with the one idea of paying Cyrus’ college expenses.

I even picked berries to make preserves to sell, with Estelle helping me until her chubby hands and arms were torn and bleeding from the blackberry thorns. She was as stout-hearted as an Indian and never complained. And we put the money into her red-apple bank to send Cyrus to college; and proud enough we both were.

After all that, after the sending of Cyrus to college had been the family impetus for years and Cyrus had been prepared at the Corinth Academy—I drove him over with old Abigail, the white mare, every day—with old Parson Grover to add the finishing touches to his Latin and Greek, one may imagine how I felt to have Cyrus tell me, quietly, that he had decided not to go to college after all!

It was in the counting-room, down at the shipyard; shall I ever forget the day? It was summer and the sky with its clouds and the river with its sails were a lovely symphony in blue and white, with an atmosphere of breeze and sunshine. Some lumbermen on a raft were singing “Sweet Marie,” and the children, Dave and Estelle, were shouting with glee as they tumbled off a teeter into the piles of soft and fragrant sawdust.

“You know I am slow,” Cyrus continued, while I was trying to get my breath after the shock of astonishment I had felt when he told me that he was not going to college. He had arisen from the desk where he had been jotting down figures and stood, very erect and pale, by the window. He was only nineteen, but I thought admiringly that he already looked like a minister. “It would be a great while before I should have any success, if I ever did. And I couldn’t think of going into the ministry to make money.”

“Money!” I echoed in amazement. “Why, we are all getting where we can take care of ourselves!” And I wondered if he did not know that even I, whose talents were only domestic ones, was to supply the Palmyra canning factory with preserves and the new summer hotel with strawberries and eggs.

“The business isn’t prospering,” said Cyrus slowly. “Uncle Horace will never have any interest in it.”

“You don’t like it either,” I said, and Cyrus permitted himself to make a little weary grimace. But he caught himself up the next minute.

“It would be a pity to have it go out of the family,” he said. “I can’t help but think how grandfather would hate to have the business fail.”

“He never seemed to think of that,” I said. “He only wanted you to be a minister. Mother, too, wanted you to be one—like father.”

Cyrus smiled a little bitterly, and pointed through the open window where Dave appeared upon a lofty teeter, high in the air, his slender figure outlined against the blue of the sky, the sunlight glinting on his curly yellow poll.

“We’ll send him to college,” he said. “See here!” He drew a letter from his pocket. “This is from his teacher, Miss Raycroft, saying she can do nothing with him, and I’ve had a polite suggestion from the committee that it would be just as well to keep him at home, as he disturbs the order and discipline of the school by drawing pictures, chiefly caricatures, upon the books and walls and blackboards.”

I was dumb with dismay. We knew that there was a little mischief in David. He would draw pictures; the fly-leaves of all the books that he used were spoiled, and travelers stopped to laugh at the grotesque figures in red chalk or black paint that adorned the barn door. But that Dave’s mischief could be taken as seriously as this I had never expected.

“I’ve known that this was what it would come to,” said Cyrus gloomily. “You remember what grandfather said? It’s alien blood. They’ll never be like us, either of them.” Estelle’s side of the teeter was up now; her yellow curls were afloat in the heavenly ether, her gleeful laugh came ringing down to us. “She won’t mind what any one says to her, Loveday says, and I’ve noticed it, too.”

It struck me that Cyrus was taking things too hard. It seemed a little funny, that a boy of his age should have thought so seriously about the misbehavior of children. Cyrus seemed to read my thoughts.

“You may think these are small things,” he said, “but they show the alien blood. We always behaved pretty well—even you.”

I dropped upon a stool. Cyrus did sometimes take one’s breath away. If a little mild indignation flamed in my bosom it was speedily quenched by a recollection of the time when Cyrus pulled me—almost by my hair—out of the mud pool in Quagmire swamp, where I had been strictly forbidden to go. I had a vague, painful suspicion that if I should rake up all the past I might be grateful to Cyrus for including me in the “pretty well-behaved,” in spite of his painfully qualifying “even.” The entry in my diary that night was the sage reflection that the impression of our misdeeds remained more strongly with others than with ourselves.

“This kind of behavior,” pursued Cyrus in a judicial tone, “means irresponsibility. They will have to be taken care of for a long time, if not for always. The New England energy and thrift will never be found there. The boy will think that making pictures is the business of life.”

“Sometimes it is. Pictures sell,” I ventured, feeling in myself a broadness of spirit that was almost reckless, and remembering, with a vague dismay, the painted saints.

“Only those by very great artists,” said Cyrus practically. “The rank and file of the profession are apt to be out at the elbows.”

I listened admiringly, he was so confident in wisdom, but I wondered dimly how he knew, for very few artists had ever found their way to Palmyra.

“You know how it was, once,” Cyrus continued hesitatingly. “Grandfather had to provide.”

I suppose I had gathered the fact vaguely, from the talk of my elders, but childhood blessedly depreciates practical cares. And what more appropriate, as it seemed to me, than that grandpa, whom I thought the greatest potentate on earth, should pay everybody’s bills?

“I don’t disparage art,” continued Cyrus loftily, and I thought that sounded well whatever it might mean. “But I am looking at the practical side of things and I can’t help seeing that the aliens have got to be taken care of. We are, as you say, where we can provide for ourselves. I could work my way through college.” Cyrus was very tall as he said this. “But I must devote myself to the business. If that fails I must try something else to provide for them. You know what I promised grandfather about him.”

It was the boy who rankled. Cyrus had never liked him. Girls were, at best, an inscrutable evil; one learned to put up with them.

“But they don’t cost much now,” I said eagerly, “and the farm pays.”

Cyrus shook his head. “Only fairly well. Leander Green manages it as well as it can be done, with Loveday’s help.”

“And mine,” I added eagerly.

Cyrus’ small, near-sighted eyes widened, and there was, I fancied, a flicker of a smile under his moustache; but the moustache was not as yet large enough to hide much of anything, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt, especially as he immediately said quite heartily:

“I know you do help, Bathsheba, and I am glad to see that you understand the work that properly belongs to a woman.”

He might have been grandpa or dear old Parson Grover, only that neither of them had so much dignity. He reminded me of the answer that grandpa made him, once, when he asked if he (grandpa) was as old as he when a certain event happened.

“My dear Cyrus, I never was as old as you!” said grandpa.

“But there is no use in talking. You see how it is!” Cyrus went on with a touch of impatience. “My duty lies here. I shall be a shipbuilder, of more or less success—I am afraid it will be less.”

“It is a very great pity that mother married again!” said I.

I am always very outspoken when I am deeply moved. I expected that Cyrus would reprove me. Instead, he walked with hasty strides to and fro across the office, and an unwonted color flamed in his cheeks that were as swarthy, almost, as an Indian’s.

“Those children are chains about our wrists, and they always will be!” he said, almost fiercely.

The screen door was suddenly flung open and the “chains” appeared. They were ten and nine, now, and a pretty pair, with our mother’s blonde coloring. The girl had a vivacity, and they both had a supple grace that made them quite unlike the other Palmyra children, quite unlike what we had been at their age. It seemed un-American and was, perhaps, an inheritance from some remote French ancestor, or at least, from ancestors more accustomed to the gay world than were ours. There was a vague tradition that the artist, their father, was of lofty lineage. I had always felt that this unlikeness of the children to ourselves jarred upon Cyrus and Octavia, while to me it was a fascination.

“We made ourselves in the sawdust,” announced Estelle, “and Dave came fat—as fat as a doughnut boy when he puffs all up in the pan. Perhaps it was because his sawdust was so fine and soft. But his clothes are big and baggy. They don’t fit anyway.”

The child had a fine scowl of scorn between her delicate brows as she looked at Dave’s clothes, which, what with grandma’s conscientious economy and Loveday’s lack of tailor skill, certainly did all that clothes could do to conceal his lithe grace of form.

“I came as lean as a daddy-long-legs,” added Estelle. “This is one of my skimpy dresses. One good thing, it will wear out soon! Loveday said there must be two for me out of every one of Octavia’s. Oh, how I wish Octavia didn’t like purple and green!”

The dress was a cross-barred muslin, ugly of color and design. Octavia was near-sighted, devoted to books, and almost wholly indifferent to dress, and yet with a serene impression that she always looked well and a tendency toward striking effects.

“I’ve got through with the other one like this.” The child heaved a long sigh of relief. “It got a beautiful great tear on a fence nail, so zigzag that even Loveday couldn’t mend it. Oh, Bashie, you will get through with your blue spot soon, won’t you, and the sash! The blue spot is so pretty and your dresses are so nice because they won’t make two!” she said fervently, as she clung to my arm.

I had sometimes had a guilty sense of being too small to suit the household economies, but now I felt a sympathetic satisfaction that there would be but one dress of the blue spot.

“Can’t you get a little sense into her head, Bathsheba?” said Cyrus, wearily, and with a severe glance at the graceful little figure in its ungainly hugely-flowered gown.

Estelle, alas! promptly made a face at him, one of her naughtiest, most mocking and defiant. One would scarcely have believed that there could be such wicked gleams from such soft, blue eyes!

And Dave took from his pocket a weapon known to Palmyra as a bean-slinger with which it was his habit to promptly avenge Estelle. I drew the children hastily away.

“They are only children,” I said aside to Cyrus. But he was not in a mood to take them lightly. The situation, which it seemed to me that he exaggerated, was evidently very real and bitter to him. He was giving up his heart’s desire, he was giving himself to monotonous, uncongenial work, and to-day, at least, he could not be called the cheerful giver whom the Lord loveth.

I was sick at heart and rebellious against Providence for Cyrus’ sake. It was an overturning of the proper, the natural order of things that he should not go to college and be a minister. As long as I could remember I had known that this was to be Cyrus’ lot in life. The plan had been sealed by the sacred wish of the dead. We all bore with Cyrus’ sometimes excessive assumption of dignity—what Uncle Horace permitted himself to call “bumptiousness”—on this ground. We felt that the children must not be allowed to make a noise when he was reading or studying, Loveday felt that he must have fine pocket handkerchiefs and the lion’s share of the preserves. And this was not because he was the finest scholar at the Academy, proud as we were of that fact, nor yet because dear old Mr. Grover had told us, with a quaver of tearful joy in his voice, that Cyrus’ Latin verses were wonderful, that never before had he known such Latin verses to be written by a boy of his age. No, it was because Cyrus was going to be a minister. We reverenced the calling. I think there was an especial reverence for it in Palmyra, and we felt it the more because our great-grandfather had been the first minister of the town and it was also sacred to us as the calling of the father whom we had never known.

Cyrus seemed almost a minister already. Had not he been called upon to lead the prayer meeting one evening when the minister was away and Deacon Barstow had a sore throat? And although Octavia was pale with fear lest he should break down or say something that he ought not, and I felt grandma’s little frame beside me shake like a leaf in the wind, yet Cyrus was calm and dignified, and every one said that he did beautifully and exclaimed, “What a minister he will make!”

And after all Cyrus was not going to be a minister! There was a strangling lump in my throat and my eyes smarted with unshed tears as I tried to look, at Estelle’s vehement bidding, at the depressions that their small bodies had made in the heaps of fresh and fragrant sawdust.

These impressed me suddenly with a vague resemblance to little graves, and with a swift revulsion of feeling I seized the children and hugged them. They might be little “aliens” and they were costing much, but I loved them.

“You were very, very naughty to Cyrus,” I said to Estelle, who was not very responsive to sentiment at the best, and was now unpleasantly sticky from peanut taffy. “If you knew, if you understood, I am sure you couldn’t be. He is very good and very unhappy. He isn’t going to be a minister!”

The lump in my throat choked me now, but I had to conquer it, for we were out of the shipyard and walking in the road, where curious eyes might see my tears.

“Cyrus isn’t going to be a minister?” repeated Estelle, reflectively. “Well, I shouldn’t think it would be much fun anyway; though people would give him all their nice things when he was invited to tea. I would much rather be a tin-peddler, or an essence-peddler, then I could put drops of essence of peppermint on all my lumps of sugar.”

“Why is a girl always so greedy?” inquired Dave, dispassionately. “But, really, when you come to think of what jolly things there are to do—killing Indians, and riding buffaloes, and being a pirate like Captain Kidd, it does seem kind of queer that a fellow should want to be a minister! But, then, it’s just like Cyrus to want to tell people what they ought to do and how bad they are when they can’t talk back.”

And these were children who went to Sunday-school, who read their verses and said their prayers every day! I felt a chilling dismay. I knew that it was not easy to recall the real ideas of one’s childhood, but surely we had never been like these small heathens!

“Oh, don’t you know, can’t you understand, that to teach people the gospel, to help them to be good, is better, higher than any of those things?” I cried, with desperate earnestness.

“Could Cyrus make people good?” asked Estelle reflectively. “He makes me bad some way; worse than anybody does, except Iky Barstow who calls me a hopper-grass. And then he thinks I am bad all the time, when I am really kind of mixed.”

“He thinks a fellow ought to like ’rithmetic,” said Dave meditatively, winding the string about his top, as we walked along, “and chop wood instead of going fishing. I suppose that’s the way all ministers begin,” he added, wagging his yellow head solemnly—as if preaching were the result of a long indulgence in erroneous opinions.

“But he’s got to be a minister, you know,” said Estelle, stopping suddenly in the road and giving a final severe twist to the rope that she had made of her apron—she was a nervous little thing, and tried Loveday’s patience by knotting and twisting her strings and her clothes. “He’s got to, because there’s our berry money in my bank. I—I put my bantam money in there, too.”

The color came and went in the child’s face as I gazed at her.

“Yes, that was why I sold my bantams. I didn’t tell. I wanted Cyrus to be a minister so much. I guess I was better last year. I had a temptation last week to spend the money for chocolate creams and a parasol with lace on it. But I couldn’t smash the bank because your berry money was in it, too. We’ll go back and tell Cyrus about the money and then he’ll know he must go to college and be a minister.” She seized my arm in her imperative little way.

“No, we won’t go back to Cyrus,” I said. “But I am going to see Mr. Grover, and you may go with me if you like. I want him to tell Cyrus that he isn’t seeing things in the right light.”

I talked to the child, partly because my overfull sixteen-year-old heart must find an outlet, partly because I wished to soften her heart towards Cyrus and make her feel, so far as a child could, the sacrifice he was making.

“He thinks it is his duty to take care of you and Dave,” I said bluntly. In my exalted mood of pity for Cyrus I felt as if she ought to know it.

“Take care of us? Mercy! That would be worse than having Loveday. And how ridiculous! Why I darned one of his stockings last week, myself. Loveday showed me. I wanted to, because you put a china egg into the toe.”

I sighed impatiently. Were all children as stupid as this? Had I been mistaken in thinking her intelligent?

But she was silent as we walked up the minister’s garden path and in the shadow of the tall old elm trees I saw the color come and go upon her sensitive little face.

Dave had caught sight of the Barstow boys and gone in pursuit of them.

The old minister had just come out upon the porch to rest in the shade, but he didn’t look in the least as if we disturbed him. He took off his straw hat to me as if I were sixty instead of sixteen, and he kissed Estelle’s sticky little hand.

But when I had told him my trouble, plunging headlong into the subject, as was my habit, for the first time in my life Parson Grover disappointed me.

“Cyrus has talked the matter over with me, my dear, and I think the boy is quite right,” he said. “When God has filled our hands with duties he doesn’t mean us to go in search of others.”

Here was Loveday’s doctrine again! “People should do their duty where the Lord had sot ’em!”

“Surely you don’t think there is only one way to serve Him,” added the old man gently. “The fields white for the harvest are of many kinds and often, often they lie close to the reaper’s hand.”

He said much more about the impossibility of knowing in what direction Cyrus’ talent might lie, while he was still so young, of the development that resulted from doing one’s simple duty, and of the Guiding Hand that never failed.

And I was comforted a little, if I was not altogether convinced.

“Would it make Cyrus like Mr. Grover to be a minister?” inquired Estelle, when we had walked half way homeward in silence. “I shall find out whether the blackberries are ripe in the Notch pasture to-morrow, and I shall get old Mrs. Trull to let me pick her geese at Christmas to earn money.”

The child’s little peaked face was aglow with eagerness. But I was not thinking of her then.

I went to Uncle Horace that very afternoon. He was the trustee of grandpa’s estate and the guardian of us all. I asked him just how things were and if it were necessary for Cyrus to give up going to college.

Uncle Horace looked at me with a quizzical smile from under his great shaggy eyebrows.

“I went to college,” he said. We were in his office at the stock farm, and he pointed to his diploma hanging among the prints of fine horses and cattle.

“But Cyrus is different,” I said with only half-smothered indignation. “He wants to be a minister. Grandpa meant that he should be a minister.”

Uncle Horace’s face darkened and he drummed on the table with his long, heavy fingers.

“I don’t see how it could be managed, just as things are,” he said. “And he has a head for business; that is, he knows that two and two make four, which is more than can be said of most boys of his age. And he has mastered the details already, so that he would be a real loss. He isn’t very quick at his books, either; he would never make his mark as a scholar or a preacher. Oh, yes, I know about the Latin verses, but they don’t prove much of anything. There is no market for Latin verses.”

A market for them, as if they were beeves or swine!

I was so full of indignation that I went away without a word. Uncle Horace called after me from the doorway:

“I’ll tell you who will have to be sent to college, because he’ll never be good for anything without it. Cyrus knows it as well as I do. It’s that little Dave.”

CHAPTER III
A LITTLE ALIEN’S WOES

It was Dave who was to go to college. Cyrus was resolutely determined to sacrifice himself to the little “aliens” and to the carrying on of grandfather’s business. And since he was aided and abetted by Uncle Horace, and even dear old Parson Grover, who had sympathized with Cy’s desire to be a minister, declared that “the boy was quite right,” there was clearly nothing for the rest of us to say.

Grandma had grown somewhat childish by this time—as well as being childlike and lovely, as she always was—and wept for joy that Cyrus was not going away where his food might not be wholesomely prepared or his flannels properly aired. We had planned to break the shock of disappointment to her by telling her that it was thought that Cyrus had great business abilities and the shipbuilding might prosper, as it had done in the old times. But neither the ministry, for which she had so longed for Cyrus, nor the business were of so much consequence to grandma now, as was the fact that Cyrus would be at home and could play checkers with her in the evenings. He was so patient!—leaving his books without a murmur, although he had but little time for them now, and exercising an ingenuity to allow her to beat him, which I am sure would have constituted him a “champion” player.

Octavia was utterly dismayed. She had thought Cyrus was like our father, for whose memory she cherished a deep reverence, and on that account it was a matter of course that he should be a minister. Octavia had family pride and she thought it fitting that the family which gave its first minister to Palmyra should continue to furnish ministers rather than shipbuilders to the world.

She was deeply religious, too, and she seemed to fear that the god of this world had blinded Cyrus’ eyes to his duty, and blinded ours as well, that we could be resigned to his defection.

“Dave or Rob may be a minister,” I said hopefully. “Cy is planning already, to send Dave to college, and Rob will go, too, although just now Uncle Horace sneers at colleges.”

“It seems likely that it will be Dave who will be the minister!” said Octavia, who permitted herself to be sarcastic upon occasion. It had cut her dreadfully that Dave had been expelled from school for mischief.

“No one can tell when a boy is ten, what he may become,” I said with indignation. But my heart was heavy. I was driving Octavia to school and it was a dreary morning. Old Abigail’s white shape loomed ghostly through a heavy fog. Octavia’s long thin face looked white and melancholy, under the limp roses on her hat. There is nothing like a fog to make you feel your troubles and show them, too, and we have the heaviest of fogs on our river.

But I added, more lightly than I felt: “A little mischief like Dave’s doesn’t count.”

“It’s the alien blood I’m afraid of,” Octavia responded. “His father was so—so different from us. And he hasn’t that sense of responsibility that Cyrus had, even at his age. As for Rob, I’m afraid his asthmatic tendency will always make him delicate. Of course we have always thought Cyrus the hope of the family. And we have always known that the children would be a trouble—but to ruin ourselves for them, like this——!”

Octavia was growing vehement—we are all a little inclined to be that at times—but my attention was diverted from her by a sudden little jerking of the wagon from behind. It was the canopied beach wagon. Estelle liked to sit in the back with her long legs dangling out. Octavia had decreed that she should not drive as far as her schoolhouse with us unless she would sit properly upon the seat. I saw the small graceful figure spring out at the turn of the road. It did not run, and no gleeful laugh of defiance came back to us. It was a limp and dejected little figure that pulled its hat over its eyes as it walked.

“That child again,” said Octavia, following my gaze with an annoyed expression. “She never pays the least attention to what is said to her! Some day she will get hurt, jumping out in that way. And how it looks!”

“But Octavia, she must have heard,” I exclaimed in dismay.

“Heard what?” said Octavia, who, although she was a teacher, had no perception of the acuteness of children, at least of this child.

“About alien blood, and—Dave. That they were a trouble, and that we were ruining ourselves for them!” I replied with some irritation.

“She wouldn’t understand if she did hear,” said Octavia easily. “You exaggerate those children’s intelligence, Bathsheba. If she had understood I should almost think it would be a good thing for her. She really ought to have a little realizing sense of what is being done for her! I was a responsible human being when I was nine. Even you were more sensible than she is.”

Even me! There it was again! We are a frank family.

“If being responsible in tender years makes one hard and unfeeling when one grows up, I hope I wasn’t so,” I answered tartly.

Octavia said not another word, for she never will quarrel nor bicker. I wasn’t quite just. Octavia isn’t hard; she is only slow of perception and doesn’t readily put herself into other people’s places. Is not a lack of sympathy in good people often only a lack of imagination?

I was unjust, but I couldn’t express any contrition, my heart was so sore. I felt that there were, at this moment, heavy woes weighing upon the little sensitive spirit whose too keen ears took in every word of its elders, as few people realize that a child’s ears ever do.

On my way back I was tempted to stop at the schoolhouse and ask the teacher to allow Estelle to go home with me. It seemed cruel to let the little sore heart go uncomforted. But on second thought I refrained. In view of Dave’s misdemeanors I disliked to do anything that might make the children troublesome to their teachers. After all, childhood’s impressions were fleeting. The romp at recess might drive away all painful thoughts.

In fact when the child came home her face was bright, and I dismissed my misgivings. But that night I was awakened from sleep by a piteous little voice, close at my ear, that said, “Bashie, what is alien? I can’t sleep for thinking.”

I sprang up. “It’s a nasty, horrid word that means—that doesn’t mean much of anything, dearie!” I said, and I tried to draw her into bed and make her cuddle down by me, as she did sometimes when a whippoorwill—which she never liked—sang persistently on the roof, or a screech-owl—“nowls” she called them—hooted in the Balm of Gilead tree by her window. But she would not come. She stood there, in her little white nightgown and a moonbeam fell across her face and showed the hair all tossed back from her high forehead, as Loveday said she always pushed it back when she was full of naughtiness.

“It means—it means that Dave and I don’t belong here like the rest of you!” she said. “We’re the other family. The children at school say so! And we’re a trouble to you! We’re why Cyrus can’t go to college and be a minister. You said so yourself!”

I remembered that I did say so and I could have bitten my tongue out for my brutal carelessness.

When “the leaves of the judgment books unfold” and the countless stabs of careless tongues are revealed, we may be guiltily amazed to see how deeply they have pierced the children’s hearts.

“And she said”—went on the piteous little voice, “Octavia said that we hurt you—spoiled everything! Bashie, is it true? Is that what children do when they are aliens?”

Of course I tried to comfort her with soft words. I drew her in beside me and cuddled her. There were strangling sobs in my throat and my eyes were wet, but she was quiet and tearless.

“She’s jest as still and sot as the meetin’ house,” Loveday was in the habit of saying. Loveday had never even heard of Hosea Bigelow! “She’s more’n all these, as the boys say, but ’tain’t easy to make her out, and she ain’t a-goin’ to down her head for nobody!”

Estelle fell asleep after an hour or more and then sighs and broken sobs came from her lips; and she tossed about restlessly all night as if with troubled dreams. I was only sixteen, and sixteen in Palmyra is not so old as it is where life flows in broader channels, but I knew enough of life to make my heart yearn over the proud little soul that would always carry an undaunted front to the world—and get the deeper scars thereby, though so bravely hidden.

Many times, in the years that came after, I remembered that night and its sequel. There seemed likely to be no sequel, the next morning. The child was like herself and apparently only careful and troubled about her white turkey, that had an irresponsible habit of leading her delicate brood into far pastures where thunder-storms might be their death. Dave, it must be admitted, was of but little help to her in the arduous business of turkey-raising. He took its difficulties lightly and made himself very unpleasant to the gobbler. Her usual small but exacting affairs seemed to engross Estelle that morning, but the next morning we discovered that there had been a mysterious disappearance!

Two small beds had not been slept in, and neither Dave nor Estelle were to be found. Viola was sent by Loveday to call them when it was long past breakfast time—for Loveday had a weakness about letting them lie in bed, declaring that only “ingy-rubber legs” could stand the running that they did. Viola returned wide-eyed and with her face so pale that the freckles stood out upon it like little spatters of mud.

“They’re gone, ma’am!” she shouted in grandma’s ear. “They’re all gone, for their little clothes are all pulled over and they must each have took a bundle!”

And the idea of a bundle seemed so to impress Viola with the finality of their departure that she threw her apron over her head and gave way to violent weeping.

Then began as great a panic in the house and in the town as on that other day when Estelle had climbed old “Blue” to find Heaven and her mother. For a while the only information we could gather was to the effect that a drover, crossing the bridge to Palmyra shortly after eleven o’clock, the night before, had seen, by the light of a waning moon, two small figures going in the opposite direction. One small figure had fled in evident alarm at sight of his cattle. This was positive identification. The only two things of which Estelle admitted that she was afraid were thunder and cows.

Parties had started for the other side of the river in hot pursuit of the little fugitives when Uncle Horace was seen to put forth from the farther shore in his rowboat with what seemed to be two small persons in the stern. Loveday, who had repaired with the old spy-glass to the upper piazza, descried a glint of yellow locks and, presently, Estelle’s Sunday hat with the tall white feather. Even in her stress of emotion the child had not been able to forego the tall white feather that had been her joy.

At about the same time a shout went up from the party on the bridge and Cyrus and I heard it, as we were distractedly climbing old “Blue” forcing our way into thickets and peering down the sides of precipitous rocks.

When we were certain that they were safe, Cyrus, I regret to say, became a little cross.

“One might think it was enough to be the burden that they are without making themselves a constant plague!” he said.

“She is such a sensitive little thing,” I murmured apologetically.

“Sensitiveness is very apt to be only another name for vanity and selfishness,” said Cyrus sharply.

“Cyrus, they are only children,” I said indignantly. But Cyrus was wiping his near-sighted eyes that smarted from the strain and the exposure to the unusually hot September sun, and would not listen to me. He strode off to the shipyard without waiting to hear where the wanderers had been or how it had fared with them.

Grandma kissed them and cried over them and insisted upon giving them flaxseed tea and cough-drops. Loveday gave them their breakfast with a face of stern displeasure—but she made the griddle-cakes that they loved, which was just like Loveday.

“We had to, we were such a trouble and we didn’t belong here.” That was the only explanation that Estelle vouchsafed to give, and that was only to me.

“We went to find aliens, like us,” she said. That was when I had her all to myself in the seclusion of the orchard. “I was afraid they were something like Indians, but Dave said they must be some kind of French, because we were born in France. Dave didn’t want to go but I made him. Then he would come back. Sometimes he is a very stubborn person.” The little transparent brow wrinkled itself anxiously over this astonishing peculiarity of Dave’s—whom, although he was nearly two years her senior, she had always kept in leading-strings.

After a pause Estelle continued: “We were going to the Port to find a ship to take us to France, but when we came in sight of Uncle Horace’s house there was a light in Rob’s window. It was after eleven o’clock—it is so long before Leander stops snoring,” and it was our hired man’s boast that while he snored he was never sound asleep but could hear every footfall in the house—“so we knew that Rob must be having one of his bad times with asthma. Dave feels orfly when Rob has those, you know, and Rob always wants him to tell him pirate stories. It’s queer that Rob never reads those stories himself nor ones about giants; but when he has the asthma he wants Dave to tell him about pirates and giants and about the old witch that had three elegant daughters. I told Dave that story myself. Well, Dave wouldn’t go on. When we got so near that we could hear Rob’s horrid, hard breathing through his open window, Dave just blubbered. He ran up and pounded on the door and Uncle Horace himself let him in and said he was orfly glad he had come. Uncle Horace doesn’t like us, either; I suppose because we’re aliens.

“He scowled fearfully when he saw me and the bundles. Then he laughed a little. Some people hurt your feelings worse when they laugh than when they scowl. ‘So you are at the bottom of this—this little midnight excursion?’ he said to me. And he said something to Dave out of the Bible; something about Adam letting Eve make him eat the apple. I think he was the more mad with me because he was disappointed that Dave hadn’t come on purpose to see Rob. He wants everybody to think everything of Rob although he is often very cross to him himself.”

I thought the nine-year-old eyes were quite too keen, and it was a relief when she enforced her position by adding, “Octavia says so, anyway.”

“He took away our bundles and Marcella, the housekeeper, put me to bed. It was in the next room to Rob’s and I could hear his breathing and hear Dave telling the stories. I went to sleep and woke up again and he was still going on—such a sleepy-head as Dave is, too. He will do anything for Rob; he always would, even before his asthma was so bad. If he catches a big trout he lets Rob pretend that he caught it, and he tried to get me to do Rob’s arithmetic for him, when it was cheating. He would have done it himself if he could. And yet for himself I don’t think Dave ever cheats. You see, it is very hard for me to keep Dave straight when Rob isn’t—well, isn’t so very particular.” The little peaked face was grave with responsibility.

“Are you the girl who persuaded her brother to run away?” I said solemnly.

She burst into tears, and threw her arms around my neck.

“Was it bad when I only wanted to get where we belonged, and weren’t in the way?” she said. “And I left my berry and my bantam money behind, in my apple bank, in hopes that Cyrus would go to college after we were gone.”

I talked to her for a long time, but I could see that I influenced her only when I told her what a great helper she could be to us all. When I convinced her of that she smiled like an April sun and promised never to run away again. And from that day it was pitiful to see her wait upon and try to propitiate Cyrus, who either was or assumed to be as loftily unconscious of her present attentions as he had been of her previous “making faces.”

This was the only result of the children’s troublesome escapade, except that we were careful never to speak of them as “aliens” again, and we all of us had, I think, a little snugger place for them in our hearts, even Uncle Horace, although he shook his head and said the girl showed that she had something besides Partridge-blood in her veins.

I am not sure whether the comradeship between Dave and Rob increased from that time, or whether we only observed it more. But they were constantly together and Estelle, I knew, still kept an increasing vigilance over the trout-catching and the arithmetic. She was extremely quick at mathematics, herself, and she really succeeded in making Dave ambitious in that direction, but chiefly, I think, that he might be able to help Rob by fair means.

Rob was hindered so much by his attacks of asthma that it was difficult to say whether he was really dull or only backward. Dave, although less than two years his senior, was reluctantly preparing for college while Rob was still in the grammar school. Cyrus had by this time set his heart upon having Dave go to college.

There had been no more expulsions from school and he was more than a fairly good scholar. The days when he covered all available surfaces with chalk or paint or pencil drawings were long since over. In fact it was not long after the running away that I came upon Estelle as she thrust into the blazing wood-fire her plump and precious, though dilapidated, Mother Goose book. I rescued it thinking the child would surely repent so dreadful a sacrifice.

“No, I mean it,” she said firmly, although tears were running down her cheeks. “I told Dave I would if he would not draw any more except the drawing-book lessons. See I—I did those.”

On the margin of the leaves of the Mother Goose book figures were drawn, droll little old women, bunchy babies, cats and dogs and hens. Only one thing struck me, then, that the drawings were very queer, that they were unlike the drawings of the Palmyra children.

She looked at me with a wistful inquiry as I turned over the leaves. When I had finished she gripped the fat little well-thumbed book firmly and laid it again upon the glowing coals.

“You like to draw then, don’t you?” I said sympathetically, for the struggle was pitiful.

She nodded, with firmly compressed lips. Then she turned her back upon the burning book and said in a voice sternly kept from shaking:

“It’s a waste of time; Loveday says so. And it may lead to worser things—smoking and cheating.”

“But you are not likely to do those things,” I said, struggling for control of myself between laughter and tears.

“Oh, I am thinking of Dave!” she said with surprise at my stupidity. “It is to stop him from drawing that I have given it up.”

This sacrifice had apparently produced an effect, for Dave’s good behavior and attention to his books dated from about that time.

He passed his college examination successfully. We even whispered a hope to one another that Dave would become a minister. There was no sarcasm about it now; even Cyrus forbore to be a wet blanket when I ventured to express the hope to him.

All through Dave’s first year in college we had encouraging accounts of him. If there was nothing especially brilliant about his scholarship, and if he were paying a little more attention to athletic sports than Cyrus approved of, at least he was behaving well, and even showing something of the religious instinct that might be expected to be his inheritance from a long line of devout ancestors—on his mother’s side.

So it was, that what happened only two months after the beginning of his sophomore year was a blow that came upon us like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.

Rob had been sent to a preparatory school in the same town with Dave’s college. We had heard that Rob was ill and had feared to hear worse tidings from him. But it was the unexpected that happened.

CHAPTER IV
THE FAMILY DISGRACED

It was on Thanksgiving Day—of all times!—that the blow fell.

We thought a great deal of Thanksgiving on Groundnut Hill. No grief, or change, or low estate was ever allowed to interfere with our joyous feasting, nor I hope with our thankfulness. If the latter ever did fail it was not because our dear ones had gone away to the better land, or because the wolf—that dreadful, traditional wolf—was nearing our door; it was when Dave came home at that Thanksgiving time!

At first we were delighted, although we younger ones soon recognized the fact that his explanation of his change of plans was embarrassed and unsatisfactory. Cyrus’ face had darkened as soon as Dave opened the door, although he was genial with the good-will of the season and, we more than half suspected, from the fact that Alice Yorke was spending the Thanksgiving holidays with Estelle. It quite took away one’s breath to think that Cyrus would look twice at a girl, but we all saw, or fancied we did, that he thought Alice Yorke different altogether from other girls.

Cyrus didn’t think that Dave had any right to come home without asking leave anyway. And perhaps he ought not, since he had arranged to stay with Rob, who was not strong enough to bear the journey home, having just recovered from a severe bout with his old enemy, asthma, which we had hoped, and the doctor thought, he had outgrown.

Thanksgiving eve was rainy and blustering. After nightfall the rain changed to sleet and was flung against the windows by angry gusts of wind. Dave had walked from the station, and he looked as if he were clad in a glittering coat of mail when he opened the back door directly into the great kitchen. I thought the glitter was what made his face look so pale.

We had come out into the kitchen after supper, Estelle and Alice Yorke and I, for Hiram Nute had come up on his semi-annual visit, and we had not quite outgrown our childish delight in inspecting his wares. Always at Thanksgiving Loveday permitted him to accept grandma’s standing invitation to pay a visit to the farm. There was a regular ceremony attending these visits, arranged, I am sure, by Loveday.

He presented grandma with a bottle of essense of peppermint, one of us girls with a bottle of perfumery of his own manufacture—selection of the receiver presumably made by Loveday,—and Cyrus with a bottle of bear’s oil for the hair. This latter presentation must have been, we thought, a concession made by Loveday to his own weakness, for she well knew that Cyrus’ whole soul revolted from hair oil. I was convinced of Cyrus’ growth in grace when I saw him receive this tribute amiably and only surreptitiously present it to Leander Green.

Another inevitable ceremony attending the Thanksgiving visit was Hiram’s tuning of the old parlor organ, which had been relegated to the hall as long ago as when mother’s piano had come into the parlor. Cyrus played on it, sometimes, by ear, and we used it when the choir rehearsed at our house; and Loveday felt a comfortable pride in having Hiram keep it in good order. Hiram was a Jack-of-all-trades. He called it having “a talent for combernations.”

“This trade or that may fail ye, but get ye a good combernation and there ye be,” Hiram was continually saying.

The hair was growing sparse and gray on Hiram’s long, narrow head in these days, and his Adam’s apple was more prominent, but otherwise he was the Hiram of our childhood and I for one had never ceased to hail his coming with delight.

The bottle of perfumery had been presented to Octavia this year. Loveday insisted upon strict impartiality, although Octavia was known to be of the opinion that the best of all smells is no smell. And Cyrus—Cyrus, who never condescended to linger in the kitchen—had come out ostensibly to receive his bear’s oil, really as I believed, because Alice Yorke was there.

He was actually making a little joke about the hair oil—Cyrus, who in all his twenty-eight years had scarcely been known to make a joke—and his dark, ascetic face was all alight as his eyes rested on Alice Yorke, when the door opened suddenly and Dave stood there in the suit of glittering mail that seemed to make his face so white.

Cyrus’ face darkened like a thunder-cloud, but he had to seem to share in the delight that we all showed. Every one ought to be at home Thanksgiving eve, and Dave was such a dear, lovable fellow, even if we older ones had never quite rid ourselves of the feeling that he was not one of us and that we didn’t quite understand him. We assailed him with a confused chorus of questions. How had he happened to come, after all? Was Rob better? And why did he not come, too? And why had he not let us know he was coming, that we might meet him at the station?

He was embarrassed and reticent, but then Dave was always provokingly reserved at times. It remained uncertain whether Rob was better or not, and why he didn’t come, too. But then Rob’s illness was always a painful subject to Dave; it was a Damon and Pythias affair with those two, an affection that had grown with their growth and strengthened with their strength.

When Uncle Horace had persisted in his determination to send Rob away to school, somewhat against his will, having apparently changed his mind about the advantages of a college education and being certainly ambitious for Rob, as he had never been for himself, we knew that he depended upon Dave to take care of him. He never admitted this, for he was sensitive about Rob’s delicacy of constitution and as severe and exacting with him as if he were strong.

Dave was a big blond fellow now, as tall as Uncle Horace, and so healthy and handsome and wholesome that it did one’s heart good to look at him. I could see, sometimes, that the contrast between Dave and his puny Rob cut Uncle Horace to the heart.

The dear boy was a little queer and constrained to-night. For a while his manner cast a chill even upon my heart, and I am the optimistic one. But I reflected that it is not easy to explain yourself to a whole kitchen full of people and before a strange girl with the very brightest eyes you ever saw! And it is, of course, still less easy when your severe older half-brother, who acts as your mentor and pays your bills, is frowning at you in plain sight of the bright eyes.

When grandma had given him her welcome the color came into the dear boy’s face, and I was proud to have Alice Yorke see how handsome he was. We of the first family were all plain. We all have a nose that belongs to the Partridge stock and we don’t like it any the better because it is said to have come to this country in the first ship after the Mayflower. It is a nose that has certainly shown the true Pilgrim spirit of persistence. Dave and Estelle both have features of classic regularity. Indeed a summer visitor to Palmyra had scandalized Loveday by calling Dave a young Greek god. She said that “if he wa’n’t always all that a boy ought to be she didn’t want it said that he favored heathen mythologers.”

Alice Yorke had never seen him. She was a new friend of Estelle’s, having only lately come to Palmyra to live. Her father was a doctor and had taken the practice of old Dr. Fogg, who had been gathered to his fathers the summer before. She was just Estelle’s age—eighteen—a brunette with irregular features, a little “tip-tilted” nose and a wide mouth, with tiny uneven milk-white teeth. Nothing about her was remarkable except a pair of black eyes that were deep and soft and bright, all at once. She had a fascinating little lisp and seemed simple-hearted and childlike. Loveday said that she had “a way with her.” The quality which we call charm is always indescribable.

We were merry enough that night, and if I caught sight now and then of a cloud upon Dave’s face, it was generally when Cyrus’ near-sighted eyes were fixed upon him in a severely scrutinizing way that they had.

Alice Yorke had a light and sweet little voice, full of sentiment, such as I have only heard elsewhere in so great a degree in an Irish voice, and which one, strangely, never hears except in a youthful voice. She sang the old songs and hymns that grandma liked, “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” “Mary of the Wild Moor,” “How Happy is the Man Who Hears Instruction’s Warning Voice,” and “Gently Lord, Oh, Gently Lead Us.” And grandma joined in at the last, in her high-keyed, quavering old voice, which still had a pathetic trace of sweetness, like that which lingers in the higher tones of a worn-out harp.

Cyrus sang, too, and his strong bass seemed to uphold the light soprano, as the ether upholds the fluttering bird.

“I have such a slight voice,” Alice Yorke said, turning to Cyrus at the close of a song with a pretty deprecating air.

“But I never heard a sweeter one,” he answered. And we did think that Cyrus was coming on!

I caught the flicker of a smile under Dave’s blond moustache—a very imposing moustache for nineteen, but in fact Dave was almost twenty.

Cyrus caught the flicker also, and I saw the color leap up under his dark skin. In almost any other family there would have been some chaffing. I said to myself that if Rob had come home he might have led Dave into some such enormity, for Dave, big as he was, could still be led as Estelle had led him; and Rob was no respecter of persons. But, in truth, we had never found our brother Cyrus a person with whom to jest.

Later we had Leander in with his fiddle—which he always called “she” and regarded with great affection—and Hiram Nute to sing “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose,” and “Wandering Willie,” in a clear, high tenor, which cracked a little on the upper notes.

And none of us were merrier than grandma, to whom Dave’s coming had been a delightful surprise. Although she leaned upon Cyrus, and his devotion was a beautiful thing to see, and was fond of every one of her grandchildren, yet, as we all knew, it was Dave who was the very pulse of her heart. It was long before we saw her so merry again!

Uncle Horace came to the Thanksgiving next day, and Parson Grover, who was a widower now, and had Marilla Gooch to keep house for him—and she was suspected by Loveday of frying his beefsteak and not properly airing his sheets. Then there were Great-Uncle Silas, grandmother’s brother, and his wife, old and childless, and Cousin Sarah Saunders and her seven children from the Port.

Grandma sat with Cyrus on one side of her and Dave on the other, and a pink flush like the rose of youth burned in her soft, seamy cheeks.

Uncle Horace, at the foot of the table, had the minister on one side of him and on the other Dr. Yorke, Alice’s father, a snowy-haired little man whose black eyes were as keen as his daughter’s were bright.

Parson Grover said a lengthy grace; it was a habit of his and one not to be foregone at Thanksgiving, of course. It was the grace after meat that grandfather always preferred—because it was easier to get the children into a subdued and devotional mood after a meal than before. Parson Grover alluded to each one of us almost by name. He returned thanks for our joy in the unexpected return of the noble youth who had shown by his coming that his most highly prized pleasures were found by the home hearthstone “and in the affections of his family.”

I peeped—I may as well confess it. Dave did always so dislike to be brought into notice in that way, and he had now become accustomed to less primitive manners than those of Palmyra and unused to dear Parson Grover’s fatherly familiarity.

I had expected that he would look disturbed but I was not prepared for the white misery in his face. He sprang to his feet almost before Parson Grover had said Amen.

“I can’t listen to that—that about me, you know,” he said, and it was evident that there was a boyish lump in his throat, although he held his voice so firm.

“I ought to have told before why I came home, but I hated to spoil the Thanksgiving. You must not take it too hard, grandma, there are others to do honor to—to grandpa and the old name”—now the young voice shook—“but I—I have been expelled from college.”

A great shock is always more or less benumbing. We stared at him incredulously. There was even a feeble smile upon grandma’s face. She did not seem to understand at all. Since Dave was speaking it must be something pleasant to hear. If anything had happened to Dave at college it must be something that would make us proud. She looked over her glasses inquiringly at the faces around the table, and what she saw there made the faint pink color waver in her cheeks.

“What were you saying, Davy dear? Rob isn’t worse? You didn’t come home to bring ill news? If—if they haven’t treated you well at college——”

Uncle Horace coughed, the hard, dry cough that spoke volumes and was his most characteristic utterance. It was a kind of résumé and reminder of all the dismal prophecies he had ever uttered. There was even a faint smile flickering about his thin mouth, as if he enjoyed the situation.

I flashed an irate glance at him, but what did he care? He cracked an almond between his long, powerful fingers, and continued to smile in the dead, oppressive silence that followed Dave’s confession. I positively did not dare to look at Cyrus.

“It’s more than you think, grandma. They have sent me away from the college. I can never go back. I wish—I wish I could have kept you from feeling so!”

He said it with a boyish stammering and I recalled the day when Miss Raycroft and the committee had sent him home from the Palmyra school.

Poor Dave! would he always be a boy? I did not yet realize that it must be a serious offense that he had committed, a far more serious one than the drawing of Miss Raycroft on the blackboard in the guise of the old woman who was going to sweep the cobwebs from the sky!

“It was a pity not to think of that before,” said Cyrus in a cold, hard voice.

“I have been a disgrace to you; whatever you choose to say to me is all right,” said Dave, and his own voice was a little hard. “Perhaps it would have been better for me to go away somewhere, far enough for you never to hear of me again. But it seemed to me more the part of a man, and for grandma’s sake, too, for me to face the music. Perhaps there will be something that a fellow of my brawn and muscle can do in the shipyard. At least I am not weak physically.”

By this time grandma had gone to his side, giving great thumps with her cane and making it fly so that I feared for the dishes, and Cyrus got a whack upon his knee. She hung upon Dave’s arm—she was so tiny a body that it seemed as if he might almost put her into his pocket—and she stroked his large hand with her two small ones.

“If they have treated you badly they shall answer for it! The best boy, always, and Deacon Partridge’s grandson! Some evil-minded, envious person has done you harm. Cyrus will see to it! Cyrus will set it right!”—for by this time Cyrus had become the Grand Mogul to grandma.

She stood there, stroking and patting his hand and saying comforting words. It was a little absurd, of course, and a deep flush had swept over Dave’s pale face, but I saw Alice Yorke’s beautiful eyes fill with tears.

“You are mistaken, grandma. The college authorities are quite right, from their point of view. What I did was against the rules.” It looked like a flush of shame that now so deeply dyed Dave’s face—such a boyish face in spite of the moustache!

Grandma’s sweet face blanched under his look. Its childish expression seemed to vanish and the old, serious dignity to come back.

“Was it against—against God’s rules, Davy?” she asked, and although her voice was firm I could see her small frame tremble as she awaited his answer.

“I—I can’t say, grandma.” He said this hesitatingly and after a moment of dead silence.

Cyrus drew a long hard breath and the gleam of hope faded out of his face; it had been hope and my heart warmed to Cyrus. Nothing could deepen the cynical certainty that had appeared in Uncle Horace’s face, from the first, but he glowered at Dave now in an annihilating way from under his shaggy eyebrows. There was neither consideration nor mercy for Dave to be expected from him. He would not have shown them to his son, for whom it was evident that he had a strong feeling in his own hard way.

“You will know all about it from the President,” Dave continued, with an effort that made his young voice hard and cold like Uncle Horace’s own. “There is no appeal to be made. Nothing can be said that will do any good. I am simply expelled and disgraced.”

“And ruined for life!” broke in Uncle Horace bitterly. He was looking moodily into his plate and he seemed unconscious of the presence of others; in fact, Uncle Horace never cared before whom he spoke his mind.

Cyrus hastily rose and drew grandma’s arm within his own.

“Perhaps it would be better to leave the discussion of this family affair until some more fitting occasion,” he said, with his most chilling dignity. “One can’t help feeling that a little better taste might have been shown in choosing a time for the confession of disgrace.” He added this in a low tone to Dave, but every one whose ears were at all sharp could hear it.

“I rather think you’re right about that,” said Dave, in a voice that he would not soften and which therefore sounded defiant. “I didn’t intend to make a scene, but it seemed to me that what Mr. Grover said of me obliged me to own up. It came out before I thought.”

“A little theatrical scene often arouses sympathy,” Uncle Horace remarked with his cool sneer. And grandma burst into tears, the pitiful, feeble tears of old age.

“Now, Horace, aren’t you ashamed?” quavered Great-Uncle Silas, who was ninety and tender of heart. “Phoebe, don’t you take on so! (to grandma). Boys will be boys. ’Twas peccydilloes, I’ll warrant; nothing but peccydilloes.”

“I never heard anything but good reports of the French children,” said Cousin Sarah Saunders, in a dry tone. “At least, not since they were young ones. It ’peared to me they had done remarkable well considering.”

Cousin Sarah Saunders had had many misfortunes and was not of the kind that sweetens in adversity. She was “real good in sickness, if she did carry her pincushion inside out,” Loveday said.

“My dear, dear friend,” said Parson Grover, with a quaver in his voice. “I think our friend is right in suggesting that we should use gentleness and—and consideration in dealing with the young and not condemn unheard——”

“We have been waiting to hear,” interrupted Uncle Horace, finishing his nuts. No one but he would have interrupted Parson Grover.

“I cannot deny,” said the minister mildly, “that it is a trying misfortune for a family that has always carried itself so honorably and uprightly, but—but the boy seems so frank and manly! May we not hope there are extenuating circumstances?”

Cyrus had taken grandma out of the dining-room and the others were following, Estelle walking proudly, her arm within Dave’s. She was not very tall—we did not think that she had quite gotten her full growth, although she was eighteen—but her fair head was finely set and her hauteur was quite impressive.

The minister’s gentle, placating voice went on as we went out of the room and the strains of “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” on Leander’s fiddle came from the kitchen as a curious accompaniment. For long afterwards I could not hear that air without having the pang of that moment vaguely repeated.

Grandma retired to her own room, and Estelle disappeared with Dave. Uncle Horace, with a sudden change of manner, endeavored to draw the minister and Uncle Silas and Dr. Yorke into a political discussion, in which effort he was seconded by Cyrus, who was not, however, as successful as the older man in feigning to be wholly forgetful of the painful episode and quite at his ease.

Cousin Sarah Saunders rambled on inconsequently, with reminiscences of the disastrous results of second marriages and second families. She addressed herself to Alice Yorke and to whomsoever would listen, and I knew that Cyrus, while he struggled to preserve his dignity, was being stabbed by small thorns. But that knowledge went only a little way toward making me forgive him for being so hard to Dave.

None of the guests stayed long. Cousin Sarah Saunders and her seven were the last to go, and I hastened their departure a little by loading them down with nuts and cake and candy.

As soon as the door closed upon them I hastened to find Dave and Estelle, leaving Uncle Horace and Cyrus to a conference which they evidently did not wish to share with any one.

Dave’s door was locked and he would not open it.

“Go away now, Bathsheba, do go away!” came in a hoarse, muffled tone.

When anything went wrong with the aliens they had always wanted to have it out by themselves, while the rest of us, even Cyrus as a boy, shared our woes. I found Estelle prone upon her bed. The face she turned to me was flushed and miserable, but not tear-stained.

“Did he tell you?” she cried. “Such dreadful things! Going to races and borrowing money to pay his bets! Those are the things that they accuse him of. And he won’t deny them!”