Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗

“That’s mine. Top Notch. Mr. Dugald built it. That’s where I study.”

“Why, it’s the cutest thing I ever saw!” Sidney was already at the bottom of the narrow ladder that led to the house. “Can I go up? I feel just like Alice in Wonderland, as though I’d have to take a pill to get small enough to squeeze in.”

“Oh, no, you won’t. It’s big enough for two.”

The structure had been cleverly contrived; plankings securely nailed to the spreading branches gave indeed ample space for two and even more; there were comfortable seats and wide unshuttered windows, a rough table and a secret shelf that looked like part of the wall until one unlocked and let down a little door and revealed a neat row of books. A “wing” of the house, added to another branch, Sidney declared, was “upstairs.”

Sidney sat down on one of the seats and Lavender sat on the other.

“Why, this is the best yet!” Sidney cried with a long breath. “I don’t see how Mr. Dugald thinks of the nice things he does.”

“He’s the best sort that ever lived.” Lavender asserted with a little break in his voice. “I don’t know why he bothers ’bout me. But he found out that I came over here and sort o’ camped among those ruins down there and I used to hide my things in that old oven so’s Aunt Achsa wouldn’t find them. He knew why, too. Y’see it bothers Aunt Achsa a lot to have me want to read and study so much—she’s afraid I’ll get to thinkin’ of going away. She don’t know, y’see, that I am going, some day. So then Mr. Dugald helped me build Top Notch. There are all my books.”

Sidney ran her eye over the different volumes; among them were stories of seafaring adventure and books on travel and science, a dictionary, a Bible—and a volume of Browning’s poetry. Sidney’s hand shot out toward this last, then quickly dropped to her side.

Lavender saw the gesture. “I like poetry,” he explained shyly. “I’m kinda afraid of it—I mean I don’t understand it and I wish I did. Mr. Dugald says he don’t, either. But there’s something about the way poetry goes that’s like music—it makes a sound. It’s like the ocean, moving and beating, and kind o’ like your heart. And sometimes the words hurt, they’re so beautiful. I wish I knew more about poetry.”

Sidney felt shivery cold all over and hot at the same moment. She kept her eyes on the square that was the open window. She knew she ought to tell the truth to Lavender—right now. But, oh, she couldn’t. Yet she must! She had almost summoned the right words to begin when Lavender rose and stepped toward the ladder.

“I brought you here so’s you’d know ’bout it and use it when you want to—the books’n everythin’. Only don’t let Mart come. She’d make fun of it. Here’s where I hide the key to the shelf. S’long. I got to get down to Rockman’s.” Lavender abruptly slipped down the ladder and ran out of sight among the dunes.

Left alone in the Top Notch Sidney felt a guilty remorse sweep over her. Lavender had shared with her his sanctum sanctorum, he had admitted his love of poetry and she had sat silent and had not told him the truth.

Like music—like the waves of the ocean beating—like one’s heart—words that hurt, his shy sentences rang in her ears. Probably he had found it hard to tell her for fear she might laugh. Laugh—why, suddenly she knew that that was really the way poetry seemed to her! She just made herself believe she hated it when she did not hate it at all. Music—she could hear Isolde’s soft drawling voice reading from one of father’s books and it was indeed music. She had all that treasure that she could share with Lavender, hungry for the beautiful, and yet she had sat mum. Oh, she had been horrid, stingy. And he was sharing Top Notch with her.

Quite naturally Sidney, brooding secretly over her shortcomings, fell back upon the long-neglected “Dorothea.” And she took “Dorothea” at once to Top Notch, the better to pour out her feelings undisturbed. She covered a whole page with her appreciation of Lavender’s confidence and her utter unworthiness of such tribute. Then the fascination of Top Notch brought her to Mr. Dugald.

“I wish the girls knew him. He’s so much nicer than any of their suitors, than even any of Vick’s.” Let it be recorded here that Sidney paused and chewed her pencil and pondered the difficulties of bringing about an acquaintance between Mr. Dugald and any one of her three sisters. Romance was never far from Sidney’s imaginings; she invariably endowed every young man who came to the Romley house for any sort of a reason with deep purposes of wooing. But this situation offered obstacles to even Sidney’s imagination for miles separated Mr. Dugald from the charms of her sisters; there seemed no way in which he could meet them.

However, obstacles only stimulated Sidney. “I know,” she wrote furiously, “I’ll pick out one of them and talk about her all the time and wish and wish in my heart and just make something happen. Now, which one, dear Dorothea, is the important thing for me to decide.”

From point of romance Vick offered the most possibilities—there was so much about Vick to talk about. But Mr. Dugald did not seem Vick’s sort. Vick liked what she called “smooth” men and Mr. Dugald was most certainly not that. And, anyway, Vick would simply have to have a rich man to give her all the things she said she intended having and Mr. Dugald was not rich or he’d have more fashionable clothes. No, Vick was out of it. Isolde—well, he wasn’t Issy’s sort, either. Sidney did not know just what Issy’s sort was like but she did not think it was like Mr. Dugald. Anyway, she did not want Issy to have him. She wanted Trude to have him, dear old peachy Trude who had never had any beau except her Lost Love.

“I shall talk about dear Trude and all her nice points. I shall even say she is beautiful for she is in the eyes of love and I like to talk about Trude, anyway. So from this day forth I shall gather the threads of Destiny into my white hands and weave a beautiful pattern of love and happiness.”

Forthwith Sidney began her weaving and found it amazingly easy. She talked through supper about Trude and took it as a promising sign that Mr. Dugald himself asked her all sorts of questions as though he “thirsted” to know more. And Sidney answered generously. She walked with him after supper to the postoffice in order to talk more about Trude. The next day she produced a very unflattering snapshot of Trude and left it on the kitchen table and later gloated in secret over its disappearance, though of course Aunt Achsa might have burned it up in her tireless cleaning and straightening.

After that Trude’s name crossed the conversation of the little family frequently and quite naturally. Mr. Dugald called her “Truda” and knew that she was staying with the Whites on Long Island and that she was the prop of the entire Romley family and never thought of herself at all and that she wasn’t as pretty as Vick or Isolde but really, nicer—Sidney quite opened her heart. And then one morning when she was helping Mr. Dugald clean his brushes she told him of Trude’s Lost Love. Not much about it for the reason that she herself knew only a little and also because a strange look went suddenly over Mr. Dugald’s face.

“Put on the brakes, little sister. Aren’t you letting me into secrets that perhaps your Trude would not want me to know?”

Sidney’s face flamed. She knew Mr. Dugald was right. “Oh, I should not have told you. I—just got started and didn’t think. Can’t you forget what I said as though I didn’t say it?” she pleaded.

“I’ll forget what you said,” Mr. Dugald promised, knowing perfectly well that he could not and from that day on he never asked any more questions of Sidney concerning her family.

“I’m not playing fair,” he said to himself but not to her.

To “Dorothea” Sidney confided her chagrin. “I didn’t say much—just that Trude had had one heartbreaking affair with a man she met at Mrs. White’s and that I didn’t believe she’d gotten over it yet. I read a book once where it said pity was akin to love and I thought if Mr. Dugald knew that Trude’s heart was broken he would feel very sorry for her. But he looked so embarrassed that I knew I had not been maidenly as Isolde would say and I blushed furiously. He promised to forget it and I think he will. But, oh, perhaps I have defeated my dear purpose for now when I speak of Trude he looks funny as though he was afraid of what I was going to say next. I am in despair.”

The sound of voices, one unmistakably Mr. Dugald’s, disturbed Sidney’s musings. She thrust “Dorothea” into the secret shelf and locked it. Then she peeped out of the window.

Mr. Dugald and Miss Letty Vine approached down the narrow path of hard sand straight toward the willows. Sidney’s first impulse was to call to them; in the next moment she realized that they had no intention of climbing to Top Notch. Miss Vine wore heavy gloves on her hands and carried a trowel and a basket and was making little jumps here and there among the weeds in search of “specimens.”

Sidney sat very still and watched her. She thought Miss Letty the most interesting person, anyway. She always looked like the figurehead of a ship come to life, as Mr. Dugald had described her. She was very tall and bony, with huge bones that made lumps in her shoulders and elbows and even at her knees; her temples protruded and her cheek-bones and her jaw. She had long fingers with prominent knuckles.

Miss Letty always wore a style of dress that she had evolved for herself long ago and that was plainly built for comfort rather than style or beauty. She held any grace of trimming as “froppery” and scorned it, going always unadorned. She wore her “learning” just as she wore her clothes. That she had gone to school in Boston and studied music there no one would ever know from anything she said. One just thought of Miss Letty as being born with knowledge, the way she was born capable. “Capable from the cradle,” Aunt Achsa sometimes said.

Everyone liked Miss Letty in spite of the bones and the sharp tongue and the freakish dresses, and no one knew exactly why; it might have been her eyes which were kindly and had little twinkles deep-set within their irises, or her way of knowing the thing to do and going ahead and doing it. Everyone respected Miss Letty and acknowledged her worth at once.

Now Mr. Dugald was lounging against one of the rotting timbers of the house-that-had-been and sketching Miss Letty on the pad which he always carried in the pocket of his old coat. He thought Miss Letty most interesting, too. He spent considerable time at her house and often took long walks with her.

While Sidney watched, Miss Letty sat down stiffly by Mr. Dugald’s side and looked with interest at the sketch.

“That’s about the thousandth one you’ve made, isn’t it? And you can’t seem to get any of them bad enough.”

“I can’t get into it what I want,” Dugald Allan laughed, tearing off the sheet and crumpling it in his hand. “You see