Amanda, Anna Balmer Myers [english readers .TXT] 📗

and dreams never coincident? Was the romance of youth just a pretty bubble whose rainbow tints would soon be pierced and vanish into vapor? Castles in Spain—were they so ethereal that never by any chance could they—at least some semblance to them—be duplicated in reality?

“I’ll hold on to my castles in Spain!” she cried to her heart. “I’ll keep on hoping, I won’t let go,” she said, as though, like Jacob of old, she were wrestling for a blessing.

Many afternoons she brought her sewing to the front porch and sat there as Martin passed by on his way home from the day’s work at Lancaster. His cordial, “Hello” was friendly enough but it afforded scant joy to the girl who knew that all his leisure hours were spent with the attractive Isabel Souders.

Martin was friendly enough, but that was handing her a stone when she wanted bread.

One June morning she was working in the yard as he went by on his way to the bank. A great bunch of his mother’s pink spice roses was in his arm. He was earlier, too, than usual. Probably he was taking the flowers to Isabel.

“Hello,” he called to the girl. “You’re almost a stranger, Amanda.”

He was not close enough to see the tremble of her lips as she called back, “Not quite, I hope.”

“Well, Mother said this morning that she has not seen you for several weeks. You used to come down to play with the babies but now your visits are few and far between. Mother said she misses you, Amanda. Why don’t you run down to see her when you have time?”

“All right, Martin, I will. It is some time since I’ve had a good visit with your mother. I’ll be down soon.”

“Do, she’ll be glad,” he said and went down the road to the trolley.

“Almost a stranger,” mused the girl after he was gone. Then she thought of the old maid who had answered a query thus, “Why ain’t I married? Goodness knows, it ain’t my fault!” Amanda’s saving sense of humor came to her rescue and banished the tears.

“Guess I’ll run over to see Mrs. Landis a while this afternoon. It is a long time since I’ve been there. I do enjoy being with her. She’s such a cheerful person. The work and noise of nine children doesn’t bother her a bit. I don’t believe she knows what nerves are.”

That afternoon Amanda walked down the country road, past the Crow Hill schoolhouse, to the Landis farm. As she came to the barn-yard she heard Emma, the youngest Landis child, crying and an older boy chiding, “Ah, you big baby! Crying about a pinched finger! Can’t you act like a soldier?”

“But girls—don’t be soldiers,” said the hurt child, sobbing in childish pain.

Amanda appeared on the scene and went to the grassy slope of the big bank barn. There she drew the little girl to her and began to comfort her. “Here, let Amanda kiss the finger.”

“It hurts, it hurts awful, Manda,” sniffed the child.

“I know it hurts. A pinched finger hurts a whole lot. You just cry a while and by that time it will stop hurting.” She began to croon to the child the words of an old rhyme she had picked up somewhere long ago:

“Hurt your finger, little lassie? Just you cry a while! For some day your heart will hurt And then you’ll have to smile.

Time enough to be a stoic In the coming years; Blessed are the days when pain Is washed away by tears.”

By the time the verse was ended the child’s attention had been diverted from the finger to the song and the smiles came back to the little face.

“Now,” said Amanda, “we’ll bathe it in the water at the trough and it will be entirely well.”

“And it won’t turn into a pig’s foot?”

“Mercy, no!”

“Charlie said it would if I didn’t stop cryin’.”

“But you stopped crying, you know, before it could do that. Charlie’ll pump water and we’ll wash all nice and clean and go in to Mother.”

Water from the watering trough in the barn-yard soon effaced the traces of tears and a happy trio entered the big yard near the house. An older boy and Katie Landis came running to meet them.

“Oh, Amanda,” said Katie, “did you come once! Just at a good time, too! We’re gettin’ company for supper and Mom was wishin’ you’d come so she could ask you about settin’ the table. We’re goin’ to eat in the room to-night,‘stead of the kitchen like we do other times. And we’re goin’ to have all the good dishes and things out and a bouquet in the middle of the table when we eat! Ain’t that grand? But Pop, he told Mom this morning that if it’s as hot to-night as it was this dinner he won’t wear no coat to eat, not even if the Queen of Sheba comes to our place for a meal! But I guess he only said that for fun, because, ain’t, the Queen of Sheba was the one in the Bible that came to visit Solomon?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she ain’t comin’ to us, anyhow. It’s that Isabel from Lancaster, Martin’s girl, that’s comin’.”

“Oh!” Amanda halted on her way across the lawn. “What time is she coming?” she asked in panicky way, as though she would flee before the visitor arrived.

“Ach, not for long yet! We don’t eat till after five. Martin brings her on the trolley with him when he comes home from the bank.”

“Then I’ll go in to see your mother a while.” A great uneasiness clutched at the girl’s heart. Why had she come on that day?

But Mrs. Landis was glad to see her. “Well, Amanda,” she called through the kitchen screen, “you’re just the person I said I wished would come. Come right in.

“Come in the room a while where it’s cool,” she invited as Amanda and several of the children entered the kitchen. “I’m hot through and through! I just got a short cake mixed and in the stove. Now I got nothin’ special to do till it’s done. I make the old kind yet, the biscuit dough. Does your mom, too?”

“Yes.”

“Ach, it’s better, too, than this sweet kind some people make. I split it and put a lot of strawberries on it and we eat it with cream.”

“Um, Mom,” said little Charlie, “you make my mouth water still when you talk about good things like that. I wish it was supper-time a’ready.”

“And you lookin’ like that!” laughed the mother, pointing to his bare brown legs and feet and his suit that bore evidence of accidental meetings with grass and ground.

“Did they tell you, Amanda,” she went on placidly, as she rocked and fanned herself with a huge palm-leaf fan, “that we’re gettin’ company for supper?”

“Yes—Isabel.”

“Yes. Martin, he goes in to see her at Lancaster real often and he’s all the time talkin’ about her and wantin’ we should meet her. She has him to supper—ach, they call it dinner—but it’s what they eat in the evening. I just said to his pop we’ll ask her out here to see us once and find out what for girl she is. From what Martin says she’s a little tony and got money and lots of fine things. You know Martin is the kind can suit himself to most any kind of people. He can make after every place he goes, even if they do put on style. So mebbe she thinks Martin’s from tony people, too. But when she comes here she can see that we’re just plain country people. I don’t put no airs on, but I did say I’d like to have things nice so that she can’t laugh at us, for I’d pity Martin if she did that. Mebbe you know how to set the things on the table a little more like they do now. It’s so long since I ate any place tony. I said we’d eat in the room, too, and not in the kitchen. We always eat in the kitchen for it’s big and handy and nice and cool with all the doors and windows open. But I’ll carry things in the room to-night. It will please Martin if we have things nice for his girl.”

“Um-huh, Martin’s got a girl!” sang Charlie gleefully.

“Yes,” spoke up Johnny, a little older and wiser than Charlie. “I know he’s got a girl. He’s got a big book in his room and I seen him once look in it and pick up something out of it and look at it like it was something worth a whole lot. I sneaked in after he went off and what d’you think it was? Nothing at all but one of them pink lady-slippers we find in the woods near the schoolhouse! He pressed it in that book and acted like it was something precious, so I guess his girl give it to him.”

Amanda remembered the pink lady-slipper. She had seen Isabel give it to Martin that spring day when the city girl’s glowing face had smiled over the pink azaleas, straight into the eyes of the country boy.

“Charlie,” chided Mrs. Landis, “don’t you be pokin’ round in Martin’s room. And don’t you tell him what you saw. He’d be awful put out. He don’t like to be teased. Ach, my,” she shook her head and smiled to Amanda, “with so many children it makes sometimes when they all get talkin’ and cuttin’ up or scrappin’.”

“But it’s a lively, merry place. I always like to come here.”

“Do you, now? Well, I like to have you. I often say to Martin that you’re like a streak of sunshine comin’ on a winter day, always so happy and full of fun, it does abody good to have you around. Ach”—in answer to a whisper from the six-year-old baby, “yes, well, go take a few cookies. Only put the lid on the crock tight again so the cookies will keep fresh. Now I guess I better look after my short cake once. Mister likes everything baked brown. Then I guess we’ll set the table if you don’t mind tellin’ me a little how.”

“I’ll be glad to.”

While Mrs. Landis went up-stairs to get her very best table-cloth Amanda looked about the room with its plain country furnishings, its hominess and yet utter lack of real artistry in decoration. Her heart rebelled. What business had a girl like Isabel Souders to enter a family like the Landis’s? She’d like to bet that the city girl would disdain the dining-room with its haircloth sofa along one wall and its organ in one corner, its quaint, silk-draped mantel where two vases of Pampas grass hobnobbed with an antique pink and white teapot and two pewter plates; its lack of buffet or fashionable china closet, its old, low-backed, cane-seated walnut chairs round a table, long of necessity to hold plates for so large a family.

“Here it is, the finest one I got. That’s one I got yet when I went housekeepin’. I don’t use it often, it’s a little long for the kitchen table.” Mrs. Landis proudly exhibited her old linen table-cloth. “Now then, take hold.”

In a few minutes the cloth was spread upon the table and the best dishes brought from a closet built into the kitchen wall.

“How many plates?” asked Amanda.

“Why, let’s count once. Eleven of us and Isabel makes twelve and—won’t you stay, too, Amanda?”

“Oh, no! I’d make thirteen,” she said, laughing.

“Ach, I don’t believe in that unlucky business. You can just as well stay and have a good time with us. You know Isabel.”

“Yes, I know her. But really, I can’t stay. I must get