The Pot of Gold, and Other Stories Part 19

Patience trembled all over. "My mother is gone away. I don't know as she would want me to go," she ventured despairingly.

"He wants you to come right away," said Susan.

"I don't believe mother'd want me to leave the house alone."

"I'll stay an' rest till you git back; I'd jest as soon. I'm all tuckered out comin' up the hill."

Patience was very pale. She cast an agonized glance at Martha. "I spent the Squire's sixpence for those peppermints," she whispered. She had not told her before.

Martha looked at her in horror--then she begun to cry. "Oh! I made you do it," she sobbed.

"Won't you go with me?" groaned Patience.

"One little gal is enough," spoke up Susan Elder. "He won't like it if two goes."

That settled it. Poor little Patience Mather crept meekly out of the house and down the hill to Squire Bean's, without even Martha's foreboding sympathy for consolation.

She looked ahead wistfully all the way. If she could only see her mother coming--but she did not, and there was Squire Bean's house, square and white and ma.s.sive, with great sprawling clumps of white peonies in the front yard.

She went around to the back door, and raised a feeble clatter with the knocker. Mrs. Squire Bean, who was tall and thin and mild-looking, answered her knock. "The--Squire--sent--for--me"--choked Patience.

"Oh!" said the old lady, "you air the little Mather-gal, I guess."

Patience shook so she could hardly reply.

"You'd better go right into his room," said Mrs. Squire Bean, and Patience followed her. She gave her a little pat when she opened a door on the right. "Don't you be afeard," said she; "he won't say nothin' to you. I'll give you a piece of sweet-cake when you come out."

Thus admonished, Patience entered. "Here's the little Mather-gal,"

Mrs. Bean remarked; then the door closed again on her mild old face.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LITTLE PATIENCE OBEYS THE SQUIRE'S SUMMONS.]

When Patience first looked at that room, she had a wild impulse to turn and run. A conviction flashed through her mind that she could outrun Squire Bean and his wife easily. In fact, the queer aspect of the room was not calculated to dispel her nervous terror. Squire Bean's peculiarities showed forth in the arrangement of his room, as well as in other ways. His floor was painted drab, and in the center were the sun and solar system depicted in yellow. But that six-rayed yellow sun, the size of a large dinner plate, with its group of lesser six-rayed orbs as large as saucers, did not startle Patience as much as the rug beside the Squire's bed. That was made of a brindle cow-skin with--the horns on. The little girl's fascinated gaze rested on these bristling horns and could not tear itself away. Across the foot of the Squire's bed lay a great iron bar; that was a housewifely scheme of his own to keep the clothes well down at the foot. But Patience's fertile imagination construed it into a dire weapon of punishment.

The Squire was sitting at his old cherry desk. He turned around and looked at Patience sharply from under his s.h.a.ggy, overhanging brows.

Then he fumbled in his pocket and brought something out--it was the sixpence. Then he began talking. Patience could not have told what he said. Her mind was entirely full of what she had to say. Somehow she stammered out the story: how she had been afraid to go to Nancy Gookin's, and how she had lost the sixpence her uncle had given her, and how Martha had said she told a fib. Patience trembled and gasped out the words, and curtesied, once in a while, when the Squire said something.

"Come here," said he, when he had sat for a minute or two, taking in the facts of the case.

To Patience's utter astonishment, Squire Bean was laughing, and holding out the sixpence.

"Have you got the palm-leaf string?"

"Yes, sir," replied Patience, curtesying.

"Well, you may take this home, and put in the palm-leaf string, and use it for a marker in your book--but don't you spend it again."

"No, sir." Patience curtesied again.

"You did very wrong to spend it, very wrong. Those sixpences are not given to you to spend. But I will overlook it this once."

The Squire extended the sixpence. Patience took it, with another dip of her little skirt. Then he turned around to his desk.

Patience waited a few minutes. She did not know whether she was dismissed or not. Finally the Squire begun to add aloud: "Five and five are ten," he said, "ought, and carry the one."

He was adding a bill. Then Patience stole out softly. Mrs. Squire Bean was waiting in the kitchen. She gave her a great piece of plum-cake and kissed her.

"He didn't hurt you any, did he?" said she.

"No, ma'am," said Patience, looking with a bewildered smile at the sixpence.

That night she tied in the palm-leaf strand again, and she put the sixpence in her Geography-book, and she kept it so safely all her life that her great-grandchildren have seen it.

A PLAIN CASE.

w.i.l.l.y had his own little bag packed--indeed it had been packed for three whole days--and now he stood gripping it tightly in one hand, and a small yellow cane which was the pride of his heart in the other.

w.i.l.l.y had a little harmless, childish dandyism about him which his mother rather encouraged. "I'd rather he'd be this way than the other," she said when people were inclined to smile at his little fussy habits. "It won't hurt him any to be nice and particular, if he doesn't get conceited."

w.i.l.l.y looked very dainty and sweet and gentle as he stood in the door this morning. His straight fair hair was brushed very smooth, his white straw hat with its blue ribbon was set on exactly, there was not a speck on his best blue suit.

"w.i.l.l.y looks as if he had just come out of the band-box," Grandma had said. But she did not have time to admire him long; she was not nearly ready herself. Grandma was always in a hurry at the last moment. Now she had to pack her big valise, brush Grandpa's hair, put on his "d.i.c.ky" and cravat, and adjust her own bonnet and shawl.

w.i.l.l.y was privately afraid she would not be ready when the village coach came, and so they would miss the train, but he said nothing.

He stood patiently in the door and looked down the street whence the coach would come, and listened to the bustle in Grandma's room. There was not an impatient line in his face although he had really a good deal at stake. He was going to Exeter with his Grandpa and Grandma, to visit his aunt Annie, and his new uncle Frank. Grandpa and Grandma had come from Maine to visit their daughter Ellen who was w.i.l.l.y's mother, and now they were going to see Annie. When w.i.l.l.y found out that he was going too, he was delighted. He had always been very fond of his aunt Annie, and had not seen her for a long time. He had never seen his new uncle Frank who had been married to Annie six months before, and he looked forward to that. Uncles and aunts seemed a very desirable acquisition to this little w.i.l.l.y, who had always been a great pet among his relatives.

"He won't make you a bit of trouble, if you don't mind taking him. He never teases nor frets, and he won't be homesick," his mother had told his grandmother.

"I know all about that," Grandma Stockton had replied. "I'd just as soon take him as a doll-baby."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WATCHING FOR THE COACH.]

w.i.l.l.y Norton really was a very sweet boy. He proved it this morning by standing there so patiently and never singing out, "Ain't you most ready, Grandma?" although it did seem to him she never would be.

His mother was helping her pack too; he could hear them talking. "I guess I sha'n't put in father's best coat," Grandma Stockton remarked, among other things. "He won't be in Exeter over Sunday, and won't want it to go to meetin', and it musses it up so to put it in a valise."

"Well, I don't know as I would as long as you're coming back here,"

said his mother.

After a while she remarked further, "If father should want that coat, you can send for it, and I can put in w.i.l.l.y's other shoes with it."

w.i.l.l.y noticed that, because he himself had rather regretted not taking his other shoes. He had only his best ones, and he thought he might want to go berrying in Exeter and would spoil them tramping through the bushes and briers, and he did not like to wear shabby shoes.