readenglishbook.com » Fiction » Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗

Book online «Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗». Author Jane Abbott



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 34
Go to page:
the old bag and start off for just anywhere. All the trips she knew anything about had some objective; one went somewhere to see somebody. Trude went to see Aunt Edith White, Isolde the Deerings. Vick always went somewhere with Godmother Jocelyn. Plainly her first step was to find someone who lived somewhere where she could want to go.

It was a pity, Sidney lamented voicelessly, that her father had shunned all their relatives the way he had the autograph seekers. Nancy had a great many; she was always going to reunions at some aunt’s or cousin’s or her mother was having a big “family” dinner. It would help her now to have a few cousins herself. They surely must have some somewhere. Everyone did. That her father had snubbed them would not make them any the less related.

She suddenly remembered a book she had found once in a box consigned to the attic in that first settling. The book for a while had fascinated her and Nancy, then they had thrown it aside for something more novel, little dreaming that it was destined to hold an important part in the shaping of Sidney’s fortunes—and misfortunes. It was a very slender little volume with an embellished binding, long since yellow with dust.

Finding it now Sidney drew the sleeve of her blouse across its cover and opened it. Its first page was given over to a curious tree from the sprawling branches of which hung round things much like grapefruits, each ring encircling one or two names. From each fruit dangled more fruit until the tree was quite overladen. A line at the bottom explained that the curious growth was the Tree of the New England Ellis Family.

At that first inspection Sidney had felt no particular sense of belonging herself to the suspended grapefruits; the only thought that had held her was how many, many years it had taken all those people to live and what a little minute to read their names. But finding an “Ann Ellis” in a corner of the tree had brought them suddenly close to her. “Ann Ellis Green”—why, that was her mother’s name. She and Nancy figured out at once that these were her mother’s ancestors—her ancestors. Nancy had supplied the word. Nancy had been deeply impressed by the Tree and the Coat-of-Arms which had come down to these Ellises from a Welsh baron of feudal times. She had urged Sidney to use it on her school papers.

But neither the Coat-of-Arms nor the Tree held any especial value to Sidney, brought up as she had been in a state of family isolation, until this moment.

Now the little book offered the reasonable possibility that each ancestor recorded therein had had children, just as that Ann Ellis in the round enclosure had had her mother and her mother in turn had had Isolde and Trude and Vick and herself. These children would be cousins—and cousins were what she needed!

She remembered certain notations that had been made in a fine script on back pages of the book. In search of cousins she now scanned these carefully, with a shivery feeling of prowling over dead bones—the writing was so queer and faded, the paper crackled and smelled so old.

“Charles Ellis, son of James by Mary Martin, second wife. Served in the 102nd Regiment at Gettysburg. Awarded the Congressional Medal for exceptional bravery under fire.”

“Priscilla Ellis gave her life in the service of nursing through the epidemic of small-pox that swept Boston in the year of 18—” Sidney read this twice with a thrill. That was adventure for you. Small-pox. She wondered if Priscilla had been beautiful like Victoria and whether she had left a sweetheart to mourn her tragic death to the end of his days. She liked to think Priscilla had had such.

That one Abner Ellis had been a Selectman for ten years did not interest her—she passed him for the next entry.

“Ann Ellis married Jonathan Green, June 10, 1874. To this happy union has been born one precious daughter, our little Ann.” Why, this “little Ann” was her own mother, of course. And the Jonathan Green who was her father had written in the book the little notes about all the Ellises so that when the “Little Ann” grew up she would know all about them and be proud—Priscilla who had died of small-pox and the ancestor with the Congressional Medal. Sidney suddenly thought it strange that her mother had cared so little for the family tree that she had left it, dusty and forgotten, in the attic. Probably that was because her mother had been too busy being a poet’s wife to bother about dead and gone Ellises.

She felt a little rush of tender remorse toward Jonathan Green—she wished he had not died when her mother was a little girl. He was her own grandfather. And he had had a tree behind him—there had doubtless been as many Greens as Ellises. She wished she knew what they had been like. And almost in answer to the thought her eyes fell upon an entry on another page, made in Jonathan Green’s fine hand.

“On this day, October 6, 1869, my brother, Ezekiel Green, sailed from Provincetown for far shores on his good ship the Betsy King which same has come into his possession as a reward for years of thrift and perseverance. God’s blessing go with him—”

There were more entries concerning the brother, Ezekiel. He and his good ship the Betsy King were reported as returning safely from the Azores, and again they had rounded Cape Horn, again had ventured to East Indian waters.

“Oh-h!” cried Sidney aloud for at the top of another page she read that the Betsy King had foundered off the Cape in the storm of ’72—with all lives. “May the soul of my beloved brother, Ezekiel Green, rest in peace with his Maker.”

Sidney forgot the Burton-Ellis tree in her breathless interest in the fate of Ezekiel Green who had “foundered” and then rested in peace. It was like a story of marvellous adventure. Her grandfather had evidently thought a great deal of this brother who had sailed the oceans wide. He had added, beneath the entry of the foundering of the Betsy King: “Our loving prayers go out in behalf of our beloved Ezekiel’s son and daughter, Asabel and Achsa. May they walk in the path their respected father trod before them!” “That’s funny,” reflected Sidney, “How can they when he sailed the wide seas!”

HER EYES FELL UPON AN ENTRY ON ANOTHER PAGE

Sidney’s brain actually crackled with lightning calculations. This Asabel and Achsa must be old but they might be still living—and at Provincetown, from whence the Betsy King had sailed. Perhaps Asabel had a boat, too. Provincetown—she looked at the map. Why, Provincetown was at the very tip end of that crooked finger of land which always seemed to be beckoning to ships to come to Massachusetts. She knew all about it—she and Nancy had read a delightful book in which a little girl had lived with two guardians who were old sea captains—like Ezekiel Green. And she, Sidney Romley, had never known that she had relatives, real flesh-and-blood relatives, lots of them, no doubt, who lived right on Cape Cod! She wished that Nancy were with her that she might tell her at once. She figured off the generations on her fingers. Ezekiel Green was her mother’s uncle, her great uncle. This son and daughter, Asabel and Achsa, were her mother’s first cousins, her second cousins. She felt suddenly proudly rich in kin.

“Cousin Achsa!” she repeated the name slowly, wondering just how she ought to pronounce it. She pictured Cousin Achsa living in a square white cupolaed house of noble dimensions that crowned a rocky eminence from which a sweeping view of ocean distances might be had.

This picture had no more than shaped itself in her mind than the resolution formed to communicate at once with Asabel and Achsa. Not a day must be lost. When one had girded oneself to set forth in quest of the Gleam one must not dally over any uncertainties.

Sidney climbed on to the box before the high desk and spread the book before her for reference in spelling her relatives’ names. Then she took out a sheet of writing paper and dipped an old pen into a bottle of ink.

Her imagination seething, it was not difficult to frame her unusual letter. Indeed, the writing of it fell into quite easy lines.

“Dear Cousin Achsa:

“You will be very much surprised to get a letter from your second cousin, Sidney Ellis Romley. But I have heard my mother speak of you often. (Let it be said in justice to Sidney that she hesitated over this outrageous fib, then decided it was justified by the necessity for tact. However, some quick calculation caused her to amend her statement.) At least my older sisters have told me that she spoke often of you. You see she died when I was a baby. My father is dead, too. I live with my sisters in Middletown. I am the youngest though I am fifteen.

“My sisters have travelled extensively but I have never gone anywhere. But this summer I am going to have the Egg which is a sum of money that comes to us each year. (Here Sidney had paused to consider whether she ought to confess that her father had been a poet. She decided she need not.) I can spend the Egg any way I want to. I think I will go somewhere on a train. I came across a family tree of the New England Ellises which told all about the Greens, too, and Ezekiel Green who is your father as you know and his good ship the Betsy King which I think was thrilling and how his soul is with his Maker and all about you and Cousin Asabel and it was so interesting, I mean the Greens, not the Ellises, that I have decided to visit you if it is convenient. I will not be any trouble. I wish you would write and tell me if I can come. I shall await your letter with trembling expectancy.

“Your most affectionate and new-found Cousin,

“Sidney Ellis Romley.”

Sidney hurried the letter into an envelope, sealed it and addressed it. For a dreadful moment she wondered if she ought to know a street number in Provincetown. This Achsa might have married and have another name. Then she remembered that Isolde always put their own address in one corner of her envelopes. She printed it on hers in square letters. “There, it’ll come back to me if it doesn’t find Cousin Achsa! But, oh, I hope it does.”

Sid-ney! Luncheon. I’ve called you three times.”

Vick’s voice, sharply rebuking, broke across Sidney’s occupation. She jumped hurriedly from her perch, tucking the letter into the pocket of her blouse. Her lips pressed together in a straight thin line of red. Life must, of course, appear to go on as usual—school and the same stupid things she did every day, Nancy, who was so distressingly short of the standard Pola had that day forever fixed. No one, her sisters least, must suspect that Adventure loomed so close. She would guard her plans carefully in her “inscrutable breast.”

CHAPTER V
 
“THE SUMMER WILL TELL WHO LAUGHS LAST!”

To use Sidney’s own thought, “things happened” with amazing swiftness. If a fairy godmother had been invited in at her christening her plans could not have prospered more.

First came Mrs. Milliken’s unpleasant announcement that the Summer Convention of the League was to be held in Middletown during July which meant that every day for two weeks would see the old house invaded by the curious and the reverent. Mrs. Milliken, in Sidney’s hearing, had gently hinted that

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 34
Go to page:

Free e-book «Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment