The Heart's Country :: CHAPTER I

CHAPTER I

Ellen and her mother drove in a “shay” to take possession of the old Scudder house, which had been vacant long enough to have a deserted and haunted look. It was far back from the street and was sentineled on either side by an uncompromising fir tree. Great vans, of the kind used in that early day to move furniture from one town to another, disgorged their contents on the young spring grass, and though Mildred Dilloway and Janie Acres and I walked to the village store and back on a half-dozen errands, we saw nothing of the new little girl that day; but there remains in my mind the memory of her little mother, a youthful, black-clad figure, moving helplessly, and it seemed at random, among her household effects that squatted so forlornly in the front yard and then started on their processional walk to the house, impelled by the puissant force of Miss Sarah Grant.

Ellen’s account of this time is as follows:—

“We are going to live by ourselves, though we can’t afford it, because we are ourselves, mamma says, and will really give less trouble this way, though my aunt and uncle think not. ‘I want you to win your aunt and uncle,’ she said to me. It will be so much easier for me to win them if they don’t know me too well. That is one of her reasons for not living in the house with them. ‘They would find us so slack that we should become a thorn in their flesh.’ ‘Couldn’t we stop being slack?’ I said. Mamma looked at me, and after a long time she said, ‘You and I, Ellen, will always be slack inside. Material things don’t interest us.’ My mother doesn’t know me. I like some material things, like ploughing. I said to her: ‘Wouldn’t they be a thorn in our flesh?’ She tried not to smile, and said quite sternly: ‘Ellen, you must never think of your dear aunt and uncle in that way.’ If it is so, why shouldn’t I think so, I wonder? As soon as I saw them I knew what mother meant. They are very nice and I love them, but they have never leaned over the gate to talk to peddlers. A lost dog wouldn’t be happy in their home. We have never had any dogs but lost ones. And Aunt Sarah didn’t like Faro’s name or his ways. I like Aunt Sarah. She says just what she feels like saying. Mother doesn’t. Mother says the things she wants to feel like saying. I annoyed my Aunt Sarah by forgetting to come home to help, and mother said, ‘Oh, dear, why did you need to go and read the Bible to that woman next door when we were moving in, and I wanted your aunt to have a high opinion of you?’ I said, ‘She had the rheumatism.’ Aunt Sarah said, ‘Does she read with her knee; and how came you there anyway, Ellen?’ I said, ‘By the back door, because I like back doors and I hate going in front doors.’ Aunt Sarah looked at me very sharply and said, ‘That child of yours, Emily, is just such a child as I should expect you to have, reading the Bible to strangers who have the rheumatism when a pair of willing hands would have been useful at home.’ The way she looked at me, I knew deep inside she didn’t really mind, so I suddenly kissed her. Later mother said, ‘Mercy! I would never have dared to kiss your Aunt Sarah like that.’ I told her I knew Aunt Sarah wanted me to. ‘How can you tell?’ asked mother; but I always know things like that. It makes me feel rather vain, and vanity is a sin. My Uncle Ephraim is like a picture and so is the big house they live in. I had a moment that mamma called ‘flesh-pottish’ and longed to live there. ‘That’s just it, Ellen,’ she said. ‘They are like pictures, and you and I would be sure to injure their lovely surfaces. We are not violent, but so careless.’”

After this arduous day I remember Miss Sarah popped down in my grandmother’s sitting-room. Said she: “I’m all out of breath.” My grandmother waited for further information. “I’ve been settling,” Miss Sarah informed her with that frankness that kept all the older ladies in town in a state of twittering expectation. “I’ve been settling my do-less sister and her do-less child.” She spoke in some exasperation.

My grandmother allowed a long pause and said reflectively:—

“You’d make any one do-less, Sarah.”

And, indeed, Miss Sarah Grant was one of those energetic ladies who leave no place for the energies of others to expand. But here the wind shifted and her irritation disappeared.

“Oh, my dear,” she said, “it’s too sad. Those children are as little fit to take care of themselves and to live alone as young robins in the nest.”

“The Lord looks after such,” said my grandmother.

“Well,” replied Miss Sarah, with asperity, “you may be sure that after what I’ve seen of this world I’m not going to leave it with the Lord.” She was on terms of familiarity with the Deity that even permitted criticism of his ways. Then she said: “Send Roberta soon to see that poor, fatherless Ellen of mine.”

This my grandmother did, shortly afterwards, and I started forth on my first visit to the “poor, fatherless Ellen” at the slow and elegant gait of a hearse with plumes. We were not far removed from that period when young ladies employed their leisure by limning lachrymose females weeping over urns. We were therefore expectant of a certain pomp of mourning; long, black draperies were the least we demanded. Ellen, I learned, was in the apple orchard, and thither I bent my solemn footsteps.

It was in full bloom, one tree after another looking like bridal nosegays of some beneficent giant. All was quiet save for the droning of honey-bees. Suddenly two inches above my head there burst forth the roars of an infant of tender years. I looked up and there I beheld my tragic heroine. Her dress was of blue, checked gingham, a piece of which was caught on a twig of the apple tree and rent nearly in a three-cornered tear. One stocking was coming down in a manner unbecoming to any girl. Her hair was plaited in two neat little “plats,” as we used to call them, and tied tightly with meager ribbons; but though I took these things in at a glance, that which naturally most arrested my attention was the fact that Ellen cherished to her bosom a large, red-headed infant, whom I immediately recognized as being one of the brood of the prolific Sweeneys.

The child ceased roaring for a moment, upon which Ellen remarked to me with grave self-composure:— “How do you do? I suppose you have come to play with me, but my brother and I can’t come down for a moment until I have managed to get my dress from that twig. Perhaps you could come up and undo it, or if you could perhaps come and get him—”

“Your brother!” I cried. “That’s one of the Sweeney children.”

Ellen’s eyes flashed. “It is my brother,” she insisted. “You can see for yourself it’s my brother. Would one have taken anything but one’s brother up a tree? I have to take care of him all the time.”

Said I: “I’ve known the Sweeney boys all my life; there are seven of them and the third but one biggest always takes care of the smallest. There’s one littler ’n this.”

“Oh, there is!” said Ellen. Her brow darkened. “And I got up the tree with this large, hulking thing in my arms—and goodness knows how I ever did get up it!” She spoke with vigor and precision.

“Aha!” I cried, “you say yourself it’s a Sweeney.”

“I say nothing of the kind,” rejoined Ellen. “This is my brother. Come,” she wheedled, “why won’t you say it’s my brother?”

I bit my lip; I wanted to go, for I was not used to being made game of. Moreover, I disapproved of her present position extremely. There was I, my mouth made up, so to speak, for a weeping-willow air, lachrymose ringlets, dark-rimmed eyes, and black raiment, and I had encountered fallen stockings, torn blue gingham, and the Sweeney baby, and the whole of it together up a tree.

Ellen now looked down on me. Her generous mouth with its tip-tilted corners—an exotic, lovable mouth, too large for beauty, but of a remarkable texture and color—now drooped and her eyes filled,—filled beautifully, and yet did not brim over. And for all the droop of the mouth, the saddest little smile I have ever seen hovered about its corners.

“Won’t you please say that this is my brother?” she pleaded.

Though I knew it was the Sweeney baby and though I knew she was play-acting all of it, stubborn and downright child though I was, something gripped my heart. Though I couldn’t have then put it into words, there was a wistfulness and a heart-hunger about her that played a game with me. It was my first encounter and my first overthrow.

“Have it your brother,” said I in a surly fashion.

When we had got the baby down from the tree, Ellen finished me by looking at me with her sincere, sweet eyes in which there was a hint of tears, and saying softly: “Once I had a little brother who died.” That was all. She turned her face away; I turned my face away; our hands met. It was as though she was explaining to me her insistence on the Sweeney baby.

It was her look and this silent and averted hand-clasp that brought me to my feet in a very torrent of feeling when Alec Yorke, an engaging youth of eleven summers, came ramping through the orchard shouting:—

“Oh, you’ll get it! You’ll get it! Mrs. Sweeney’s given Ted a good one already—she’s after you!”

It was not the gusto in his tone at her ultimate fate that irritated me, but this taking away of Ellen’s baby brother. “Mrs. Sweeney’s got nothing to do with this baby!” I cried. “It’s Ellen’s brother!”

I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at Alec. Ellen did the same. In one second we had performed one of those amazing sleights of hand that are so frequent and so disconcerting at this moment of girlhood. A moment before we had been swimming along the upper levels of sentiment and crossing the tender, heart-breaking line of the love of women for little children; now our teary mistiness vanished and we were back at the green-apple-hearted moment of childhood. That afternoon I had already been a young lady with all the decorous manners of eighteen; I had been no age,—just a woman whose heart is touched with pity and affection; and now I was just stern, hard twelve, and I threw a rock at my little friend, Alec Yorke. So did Ellen.

Together, with hoots and pebbles, we drove the invading male from our midst. Ellen, I remember, had a “Yip! Yip! Yip!” which was blood-thirsty and derisive at once. She barked it out like a terrier gone mad. I remember also her crying out in a ferocious agony of desire: “Oh, if I get near you, won’t I spit on you!”

These were her first words to Alec. He said in later years that their first meeting was indelibly engraven on his memory. He retreated over the fence vanquished by superior force, but with his head well up and his thumb to his gallantly tilted nose. Here Ellen turned to me, the light of victory flashing from her eyes, which fought with my interrogatory gaze, filled with tears again, and at last sought the distance.

“I never had a little brother,” she muttered thickly.

Anger surged over me and then died as quickly as it had come. Again she had me. The quiver in her voice showed me what her sincerity had cost her, and so did her next words:—

“I wanted one so always that I just had to make-believe.”

Here one had the heart of truth, stripped of the spirit of make-believe which it had clothed in quaint and absurd garments. Again I squeezed Ellen’s hand in mine.

I tell all these things in detail because this was so Ellen. She had this dual nature which fought forever in her heart,—the passion for make-believe and the fundamental need of telling the truth,—always to herself, and often embarrassingly to those she loved.

She comments as follows on this episode, unconsciously showing me as the young prig I was:—

“The moment Roberta picked up a rock to fight for my brother, I knew I should have to tell her the truth. I saw right away how good Roberta was. She has very lovely blue eyes and her hair is so smooth and shiny that I don’t believe she musses it when she sleeps. She looked at me so straight and her eyes were so round that it was very hard work to tell her that the Sweeney baby was not my brother, but I gritted my teeth and did it. The rest was easy on account of her soft heart.”

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