Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

TIMOTHY FINDS A HOUSE IN WHICH HE THINKS A BABY IS NEEDED, BUT THE INMATES DO NOT ENTIRELY AGREE WITH HIM.

Meanwhile, Miss Avilda Cummins had left her window and gone into the next room for a skein of yarn. She answered the knock, however; and, opening the door, stood rooted to the threshold in speechless astonishment, very much as if she had seen the shades of her ancestors drawn up in line in the dooryard.

Off went Timothy's hat. He hadn't seen the lady's face very clearly when she was knitting at the window, or he would never have dared to knock; but it was too late to retreat. Looking straight into her cold eyes with his own shining gray ones, he said bravely, but with a trembling voice, "Do you need any babies here, if you please?" (Need any babies! What an inappropriate, nonsensical expression, to be sure; as if a baby were something exquisitely indispensable, like the breath of life, for instance!)

No answer. Miss Vilda was trying to assume command of her scattered faculties and find some clue to the situation. Timothy concluded that she was not, after all, the lady of the house; and, remembering the marble doorplate in the orchard, tried again. "Does Miss Martha Cummins live here, if you please?" (Oh, Timothy! what induced you, in this crucial moment of your life, to touch upon that sorest spot in Miss Vilda's memory?)

"What do you want?" she faltered.

"I want to get somebody to adopt my baby," he said; "if you haven't got any of your own, you couldn't find one half as dear and as pretty as she is; and you needn't have me too, you know, unless you should need me to help take care of her."

"You're very kind," Miss Avilda answered sarcastically, preparing to shut the door upon the strange child; "but I don't think I care to adopt any babies this afternoon, thank you. You'd better run right back home to your mother, if you've got one, and know where 't is, anyhow."

"I—haven't!" cried poor Timothy, with a sudden and unpremeditated burst of tears at the failure of his hopes; for he was half child as well as half hero. At this juncture Gay opened her eyes, and burst into a wild howl at the unwonted sight of Timothy's grief; and Rags, who was full of exquisite sensibility, and quite ready to weep with those who did weep, lifted up his woolly head and added his piteous wails to the concert. It was a tableau vivant.

"Samanthy Ann!" called Miss Vilda excitedly; "Samanthy Ann! Come right here and tell me what to do!"

The person thus adjured flew in from the porch, leaving a serpentine trail of red, yellow, and blue rags in her wake. "Land o' liberty!" she exclaimed, as she surveyed the group. "Where'd they come from, and what air they tryin' to act out?"

"This boy's a baby agent, as near as I can make out; he wants I should adopt this red-headed baby, but says I ain't obliged to take him too, and makes out they haven't got any home. I told him I wa'n't adoptin' any babies just now, and at that he burst out cryin', and the other two followed suit. Now, have the three of 'em just escaped from some asylum, or are they too little to be lunatics?"

Timothy dried his tears, in order that Gay should be comforted and appear at her best, and said penitently: "I cried before I thought, because Gay hasn't had anything but cookies since last night, and she'll have no place to sleep unless you'll let us stay here just till morning. We went by all the other houses, and chose this one because everything was so beautiful."

"Nothin' but cookies sence—Land o' liberty!" ejaculated Samantha Ann, starting for the kitchen.

"Come back here, Samanthy! Don't you leave me alone with 'em, and don't let's have all the neighbors runnin' in; you take 'em into the kitchen and give 'em somethin' to eat, and we'll see about the rest afterwards."

Gay kindled at the first casual mention of food; and, trying to clamber out of the basket, fell over the edge, thumping her head smartly on the stone steps. Miss Vilda covered her face with her hands, and waited shudderingly for another yell, as the child's carnation stocking and terra-cotta head mingled wildly in the air. But Lady Gay disentangled herself, and laughed the merriest burst of laughter that ever woke the echoes. That was a joke; her life was full of them, served fresh every day; for no sort of adversity could long have power over such a nature as hers. "Come get supper," she cooed, putting her hand in Samantha's; adding that the "nasty lady needn't come," a remark that happily escaped detection, as it was rendered in very unintelligible "early English."

Miss Avilda tottered into the darkened sitting-room and sank on to a black haircloth sofa, while Samantha ushered the wanderers into the sunny kitchen, muttering to herself: "Wall, I vow! travelin' over the country all alone, 'n' not knee-high to a toad! They're send in' out awful young tramps this season, but they sha'n't go away hungry, if I know it."

Accordingly, she set out a plentiful supply of bread and butter, gingerbread, pie, and milk, put a tin plate of cold hash in the shed for Rags, and swept him out to it with a corn broom; and, telling the children comfortably to cram their "everlastin' little bread-baskets full," returned to the sitting-room.

"Now, whatever makes you so panicky, Vildy? Didn't you never see a tramp before, for pity's sake? And if you're scar't for fear I can't handle 'em alone, why, Jabe 'll be comin' along soon. The prospeck of gittin' to bed's the only thing that'll make him 'n' Maria hurry; 'n' they'll both be cal'latin' on that by this time!"

"Samanthy Ann, the first question that that boy asked me was, 'If Miss Martha Cummins lived here.' Now, what do you make of that?"

Samantha looked as astonished as anybody could wish. "Asked if Marthy Cummins lived here? How under the canopy did he ever hear Marthy's name? Wall, somebody told him to ask, that's all there is about it; and what harm was there in it, anyhow?"

"Oh, I don't know, I don't know; but the minute that boy looked up at me and asked for Martha Cummins, the old trouble, that I thought was dead and buried years ago, started right up in my heart and begun to ache just as if it all happened yesterday."

"Now keep stiddy, Vildy; what could happen?" urged Samantha.

"Why, it flashed across my mind in a minute," and here Miss Vilda lowered her voice to a whisper, "that perhaps Martha's baby didn't die, as they told her."

"But, land o' liberty, s'posin' it didn't! Poor Marthy died herself more 'n twenty years ago."

"I know; but supposing her baby didn't die; and supposing it grew up and died, and left this little girl to roam round the world afoot and alone?"

"You're cal'latin' dreadful close, 'pears to me; now, don't go s'posin' any more things. You're makin' out one of them yellow-covered books, sech as the summer boarders bring out here to read; always chock full of doin's that never would come to pass in this or any other Christian country. You jest lay down and snuff your camphire, an' I'll go out an' pump that boy drier 'n a sand heap!"

Now, Miss Avilda Cummins was unmarried by every implication of her being, as Henry James would say: but Samantha Ann Ripley was a spinster purely by accident. She had seldom been exposed to the witcheries of children, or she would have known long before this that, so far as she was personally concerned, they would always prove irresistible. She marched into the kitchen like a general resolved upon the extinction of the enemy. She walked out again, half an hour later, with the very teeth of her resolve drawn, but so painlessly that she had not been aware of the operation! She marched in a woman of a single purpose; she came out a double-faced diplomatist, with the seeds of sedition and conspiracy lurking, all unsuspected, in her heart.

The cause? Nothing more than a dozen trifles as "light as air." Timothy had sat upon a little wooden stool at her feet; and, resting his arms on her knees, had looked up into her kind, rosy face with a pair of liquid eyes like gray-blue lakes, eyes which seemed and were the very windows of his soul. He had sat there telling his wee bit of a story; just a vague, shadowy, plaintive, uncomplaining scrap of a story, without beginning, plot, or ending, but every word in it set Samantha Ann Ripley's heart throbbing.

And Gay, who knew a good thing when she saw it, had climbed up into her capacious lap, and, not being denied, had cuddled her head into that "gracious hollow" in Samantha's shoulder, that had somehow missed the pressure of the childish heads that should have lain there. Then Samantha's arm had finally crept round the wheedlesome bit of soft humanity, and before she knew it her chair was swaying gently to and fro, to and fro, to and fro; and the wooden rockers creaked more sweetly than ever they had creaked before, for they were singing their first cradle song!

Then Gay heaved a great sigh of unspeakable satisfaction, and closed her lovely eyes. She had been born with a desire to be cuddled, and had had precious little experience of it. At the sound of this happy sigh and the sight of the child's flower face, with the upward curling lashes on the pink cheeks and the moist tendrils of hair on the white forehead, and the helpless, clinging touch of the baby arm about her neck, I cannot tell you the why or wherefore, but old memories and new desires began to stir in Samantha Ann Ripley's heart. In short, she had met the enemy, and she was theirs!

Presently Gay was laid upon the old-fashioned settle, and Samantha stationed herself where she could keep the flies off her by waving a palm-leaf fan.

"Now, there's one thing more I want you to tell me," said she, after she had possessed herself of Timothy's unhappy past, uncertain present, and still more dubious future; "and that is, what made you ask for Miss Marthy Cummins when you come to the door?"

"Why, I thought it was the lady-of-the-house's name," said Timothy; "I saw it on her doorplate."

"But we ain't got any doorplate, to begin with."

"Not a silver one on your door, like they have in the city; but isn't that white marble piece in the yard a doorplate? It's got 'Martha Cummins, aged 17,' on it. I thought may be in the country they had them in their gardens; only I thought it was queer they put their ages on them, because they'd have to be scratched out every little while, wouldn't they?"

"My grief!" ejaculated Samantha; "for pity's sake, don't you know a tombstun when you see it?"

"No; what is a tombstun?"

"Land sakes! what do you know, any way? Didn't you never see a graveyard where folks is buried?"

"I never went to the graveyard, but I know where it is, and I know about people's being buried. Flossy is going to be buried. And so the white stone shows the places where the people are put, and tells their names, does it? Why, it is a kind of a doorplate, after all, don't you see? Who is Martha Cummins, aged 17?"

"She was Miss Vildy's sister, and she went to the city, and then come home and died here, long years ago. Miss Vildy set great store by her, and can't bear to have her name spoke; so remember what I say. Now, this 'Flossy' you tell me about (of all the fool names I ever hearn tell of, that beats all,—sounds like a wax doll, with her clo'se sewed on!), was she a young woman?"

"I don't know whether she was young or not," said Tim, in a puzzled tone. "She had young yellow hair, and very young shiny teeth, white as china; but her neck was crackled underneath, like Miss Vilda's;—it had no kissing places in it like Gay's."

"Well, you stay here in the kitchen a spell now, 'n' don't let in that rag-dog o' yourn till he stops scratching if he keeps it up till the crack o' doom;—he's got to be learned better manners. Now, I'll go in 'n' talk to Miss Vildy. She may keep you over night, 'n' she may not; I ain't noways sure. You started in wrong foot foremost."