Real Folks, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [the reader ebook txt] 📗

stiff, odd, uncomfortable Desire!

But the very next night Kenneth came down and stayed an hour; there was a new moon glistening through the delicate elm-tips, and they sat out on the piazza and breathed in such an air as they had not had in their nostrils for months and months.

The faint, tender light from the golden west in which the new moon lay, showed the roof and tower of the little church, Kenneth's first beautiful work; and Kenneth told them how pleasant it was up at Miss Arabel's, and of the tame squirrels that he fed at his window, and of the shady pasture-path that led away over the brook from the very door, and up among pines and into little still nooks where dry mossy turf and warm gray rocks were sheltered in by scraggy cedars and lisping birches, so that they were like field-parlors opening in and out from each other with all sorts of little winding and climbing passages, between clumps of bayberry bushes and tall ferns; and that the girls from Z---- and Westover made morning picnics there, since Lucilla Waters had grown intimate with Delia Waite and found it out; and that Delia Waite and even Miss Arabel carried their dressmaking down there sometimes in a big white basket, and stayed all day under the trees. They had never used to do this; they had stayed in the old back sitting room with all the litter round, and never thought of it till those girls had come and showed them how.

"I think there is the best and sweetest neighborliness and most beautiful living here in Z----, that I ever knew in any place," said Kenneth Kincaid; "except that little piece of the same thing in Aspen Street."

Kenneth had found out how Rosamond Holabird recognized Aspen Street as a piece of her world.

Desire hated, as he spoke, her spitefulness last night; what she had said to herself of "so many Ruths;" why could not she not be pleased to come into this beautiful living and make a little part of it?

She was pleased; she would be; she found it very easy when Kenneth said to her in that frank intimate way,--"I wish you and your mother would come over and see what Dorris will want, and help me a little about that room of hers. I told Miss Waite not to bother; just to let the old things stand,--I knew Dorris would like them,--and anything else I would get for her myself. I mean Dolly shall take a long vacation this year; from June right through to September; and its 'no end of jolly,' as those English fellows say, that you have come too!"

Kenneth Kincaid was fresher and pleasanter and younger himself, than Desire had ever seen him before; he seemed to have forgotten that hard way of looking at the world; he had found something so undeniably good in it. I am afraid Desire had rather liked him for his carping, which was what he least of all deserved to be liked for. It showed how high and pure his demands were; but his praise and admissions were better; it is always better to discern good than to fret at the evil.

"I shall see you every day," he said, when he shook hands at parting; "and Helena, if you want a squirrel to keep in your pocket next winter, I'll begin training one for you at once."

He had taken them right to himself, as if they belonged to him; he spoke as if he were very glad that he should see them every day.

Desire whistled over her unpacking; she could not sing, but she could whistle like a blackbird. When her father came up on Saturday night, he said that her eyes were brighter and her cheeks were rounder, for the country air; she would take to growing pretty instead of strong-minded, if she didn't look out.

Kenneth came round on Monday, after tea, to ask them to go over to Miss Waite's and make acquaintance.

"For you see," he said, "you will have to be very intimate there, and it is time to begin. It will take one call to be introduced, and another, at least, to get up-stairs and see that beautiful breezy old room that can't be lived in in winter, but is to be a delicious sort of camping-out for Dolly, all summer. It is all windows and squirrel-holes and doors that won't shut. Everything comes in but the rain; but the roof is tight on that corner. Even the woodbine has got tossed in through a broken upper pane, and I wouldn't have it mended on any account. There are swallows' nests in the chimneys, and wrens under the gable, and humming-birds in the honeysuckle. When Dolly gets there, it will be perfect. It just wants her to take it all right into her heart and make one piece of it. _They_ don't know,--the birds and the squirrels,--it takes the human. There has to be an Adam in every garden of Eden."

Kenneth really chattered, from pure content and delight.

It did not take two visits to get up-stairs. Miss Arabel met them heartily. She had been a shy, timid old lady, from long neglect and humble living; but lately she had "come out in society," Delia said. Society had come after her, and convinced her that she could make good times for it.

She brought out currant wine and gave them, the first thing; and when Kenneth told her that they were his and Dorris's friends, and were coming next week to see about getting ready for her, she took them right round through all four of the ground rooms, to the queer corner staircase, and up into the "long west chamber," to show them what a rackety old place it was, and to see whether they supposed it could be made fit.

"Why it's like the Romance of the Forest!" said Helena, delighted. "I wish _we_ had come here. Don't you have ghosts, or robbers, or something, up and down those stairs, Miss Waite?" For she had spied a door that led directly out of the room, from beside the chimney, up into the rambling old garret, smelling of pine boards and penny-royal.

"No; nothing but squirrels and bees, and sometimes a bat," answered Miss Arabel.

"Well, it doesn't want fixing. If you fix it, you will spoil it. I shall come here and sleep with Dorris,--see if I don't."

The floor was bare, painted a dark, marbled gray. In the middle was a great braided rug, of blue and scarlet and black. The walls were pale gray, with a queer, stencilled scroll-and-dash border of vermilion and black paint.

There was an old, high bedstead, with carved frame and posts, bare of drapery; an antiquated chest of drawers; and a half-circular table with tall, plain, narrow legs, between two of the windows. There was a corner cupboard, and a cupboard over the chimney. The doors of these, and the high wainscot around the room, were stained in old-fashioned "imitation mahogany," very streaky and red. The wainscot was so heavily finished that the edge running around the room might answer for a shelf.

"Just curtains, and toilet covers, and a little low rocking chair," said Mrs. Ledwith. "That is all you want."

"But the windows are so high," suggested Desire. "A low chair would bury her up, away from all the pleasantness. I'll tell you what I would have, Mr. Kincaid. A kind of dais, right across that corner, to take in two windows; with a carpet on it, and a chair, and a little table."

"Just the thing!" said Kenneth. "That is what I wanted you for, Miss Desire," he said in a pleased, gentle way, lowering his tone to her especial hearing, as he stood beside her in the window.

And Desire was very happy to have thought of it.

Helena was spurred by emulation to suggest something.

"I'd have a--hammock--somewhere," she said.

"Good," said Kenneth. "That shall be out under the great butternut."

The great butternut walled in one of the windows with a wilderness of green, and the squirrels ran chattering up and down the brown branches, and peeping in all day. In the autumn, when the nuts were ripe, they would be scrambling over the roof, and in under the eaves, to hide their stores in the garret, Miss Arabel told them.

"Why doesn't everbody have an old house, and let the squirrels in?" cried Helena, in a rapture.

In ten days more,--the first week of June,--Dorris came.

Well,--"That let in all the rest," Helena said, and Desire, may be, thought. "We shan't have it to ourselves any more."

The girls could all come down and call on Dorris Kincaid, and they did.

But Desire and Helena had the first of it; nobody else went right up into her room; nobody else helped her unpack and settle. And she was so delighted with all that they had done for her.

The dais was large enough for two or three to sit upon at once, and it was covered with green carpet of a small, mossy pattern, and the window was open into the butternut on one side, and into the honeysuckle on the other, and it was really a bower.

"I shall live ten hours in one," said Dorris.

"And you'll let me come and sleep with you some night, and hear the bats," said Helena.

The Ledwiths made a good link; they had known the Kincaids so well; if it had been only Dorris, alone, with her brother there, the Westover girls might have been shy of coming often. Since Kenneth had been at Miss Waite's, they had already grown a little less free of the beautiful woods that they had just found out and begun fairly to enjoy last autumn.

But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually.

Since Leslie Goldthwaite and Barbara Holabird were married and gone, and the Roger Marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in the city and travelling, the Hobarts and the Haddens and Ruth and Rosamond and Pen Pennington had kept less to their immediate Westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to Lucilla's, and to Maddy Freeman's, and the Inglesides, as often as they had induced them to go up to the Hill.

Maud Marchbanks and the Hendees were civil and neighborly enough at home, but they did not care to "ramify." So it came to pass that they were left a good deal to themselves. Olivia and Adelaide, when they came up to Westover, to their uncle's, wondered "that papa cared to build again; there really wasn't anything to come for; West Hill was entirely changed."

So it was; and a very good thing.

I came across the other day, reading over Mr. Kingsley's "Two Years Ago," a true word as to social needs in England, that reminded me of this that the Holabirds and the Penningtons and the Inglesides have been doing, half unconsciously, led on from "next" to next, in Z----.

Mr. Kingsley, after describing a Miss Heale, and others of her class,--the middle class, with no high social opportunities, and with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and unsatisfied expectations, "bewildering heart and brain with novels," for want of a nobler companionship, says this: "Till in country villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers' and tradesmens' daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children and will yield a far richer