Rosemary Part 11

words apparently failed Jack and he began to sputter.

"Got him, Jack?" the doctor leaped the hedge lightly and ran diagonally across the lawn to the back of the Welles's house.

"Him?" growled Jack in disgust. "Him! Look at this--" and he flashed a pocket light that revealed to the astonished Doctor Hugh the tear-streaked face of Sarah.

"For the love of Mike!" gasped her brother. "Have you been taking Jack's worms?"

"Yes she has," Jack answered for her. "She's been dumping the can out every night. And if she does it again I'll shake her if she is a girl."

"Hold on, hold on," said Doctor Hugh pacifically. "Let's get the hang of this; why did you empty Jack's can of worms, Sarah?"

"It--it hurts them to be jabbed with a hook," wept Sarah.

"Like fun it does," retorted Jack scornfully. "Worms haven't any feelings, hardly."

"Well fishes have and if you haven't any worms you can't catch fishes," stormed Sarah. "I will too throw away your worms."

"You will not!" flashed Jack, taking a step toward her.

Sarah, the defiant, turned and fled toward her brother. He put his arm about her and found that she was shaking with nervous sobbing.

"I'll see you to-morrow, Jack," he said quietly. "There is no use in rousing the whole neighborhood. Come on, Sarah, we're going home."

He lifted the little girl in his arms and strode across the gra.s.s, entering the door of the house noiselessly and depositing her in a large arm chair in the office. Then he went into the kitchen, warmed a gla.s.s of milk and made her drink it.

"Now tell me all about it," he said, sitting down at his desk to face her. Sarah, he knew, had a horror of being "fussed over" and he did not dare pet her though he wished his mother were there to cuddle the pathetic little figure in her arms.

"I emptied the can every night, after Jack went to bed," said Sarah. "That's all. He doesn't care how much he hurts them, but I do."

"But how could you stay awake from eight till ten o'clock?" asked the doctor curiously, "and how could you come down stairs without waking s.h.i.+rley or being seen by Aunt Trudy or Winnie?"

"I didn't go to bed, that is not really," confided Sarah. "I lay down with all my clothes on, because Rosemary always comes in to see that our light is out before she goes to bed. But after nine o'clock I stayed up till I saw Jack shut the kitchen door of his house and then I knew he was through digging worms."

"Didn't you ever go to sleep before Rosemary came in to look at you?" asked her brother. "Not once?"

"Not once," said Sarah firmly. "I put three of s.h.i.+rley's building blocks under my back so I couldn't. And when I got up I sat on the window sill so if I went to sleep I'd wake up when I fell out."

"Well you are thorough," admitted the doctor. "Weren't you afraid Aunt Trudy would come in and find you sitting up? Or hear you falling out of the window?"

"I didn't fall," declared Sarah, matter-of-factly. "And Aunt Trudy never comes to see if we are in bed. Mother used to, every night."

"I see," the doctor frowned a little. "Well, Sarah, you'll have to let Jack's worms alone after this. I'm not going to argue with you about the feelings of the worms or the fish (you'll get that point better when you are a little older) but I'll put it to you this way; they're Jack's worms and you mustn't touch what belongs to him. And, also, you can't go about making people think as you do. If you don't believe in fis.h.i.+ng, all right; you are at perfect liberty not to fish. But you have no call to try to stop other people from fis.h.i.+ng.

Jack may not approve of the way you keep your rabbits. He may think they should be turned loose and allowed to destroy the garden. If he came over here night after night and let your rabbits out, think how angry you would be. Do you see, dear? You do what you feel to be right and let the other fellow keep tabs on his own conscience."

Sarah thought a few minutes.

"Well, I will," she sighed reluctantly. "Worms are awfully nasty things, anyway, Hugh. I had to pick some of them out of the can with my fingers, because they wouldn't come out."

"Then we're all serene again," said her brother cheerfully. "And now it is after eleven and high time you were asleep."

Sarah gave him a quick, shy kiss at the head of the stairs and vanished into her room. She was always chary of caresses and her mother declared that she could count the times Sarah had voluntarily kissed her.

The last two weeks of July were an unbroken "hot spell." Eastsh.o.r.e was ordinarily comfortable in the summer time but the heat wave that gripped the country made itself felt and not all the pleasant effect of wide lawns and old shade trees could counteract the hot, humid nights and the blazing, parched days. An occasional thunder shower did its best to bring comfort, but the heat closed in again after each gust, seemingly more intense than ever. It was a trying test for tempers and dispositions and the Willis household began to develop "nerves."

"I should think you children could manage to remember to shut the screens doors behind you," remarked Doctor Hugh one morning at the breakfast table. "If there is one thing positively unendurable, it is flies in the house!"

Winnie put down the cream pitcher beside his cup of coffee with an emphasis that threatened to spray him with its contents.

"You'd better be speaking to Sarah," she said grimly. "I'm about wore out, arguing with her. She won't let me use the fly-batter at all and why? Because it is cruel to kill the dear darling little flies that tramp all over our food with their filthy feet!"

Rosemary giggled. She sat in Aunt Trudy's place, cool and neat in a blue gingham dress, her charming bobbed head making a pretty picture silhouetted against the light of the window behind her. The warm weather had reconciled Rosemary to the loss of her hair. Aunt Trudy often pleaded a headache mornings and Rosemary took her place at the silver tray and poured her brother's coffee.

"Don't let me hear any more such nonsense," said he sternly now.

"Keep the screens closed, Winnie, and kill any flies that get in.

Sarah, you are not to interfere in any way--and don't scowl like that."

For reply Sarah kicked the table leg to the peril of her gla.s.s of milk and s.h.i.+rley's.

"You'll find yourself sent away from the table in another minute,"

her brother warned her. "Eat your breakfast and behave yourself."

"You'll be sorry when I'm dead," said Sarah, her voice plaintive with self-pity.

s.h.i.+rley thought the moment auspicious to make a reach for a hot biscuit. Over went her gla.s.s of milk and her fat little hand landed in the b.u.t.ter dish. The telephone bell saved her, as far as Doctor Hugh was concerned, and when he came back to tell Rosemary that he would not be home till dinner time and to give her a list of the time and places when he could be reached during the day, Winnie had removed all traces of the accident.

"I guess you must think I'm a was.h.i.+ng machine," she grumbled after the doctor had gone. "That's the tenth clean runner we've had on the table this week. If we were using table cloths every meal I'd have to give up--no living woman could keep this family in table cloths!"

"Sarah, are you going to make the beds this morning?" asked Rosemary, on her way to sweep the porch, a duty she had a.s.sumed.

"No, I'm not," returned Sarah with characteristic candor. "It's too hot. Let 'em air till night. I want to play in the sand-box."

"Ray Anderson and me's going to play in the sand-box," said s.h.i.+rley.

"You can't come--you take all the toys."

"Oh, s.h.i.+rley, how cross you are!" cried Rosemary, aghast at the frown on s.h.i.+rley's pretty forehead. "Don't be so cranky, darling.

Sarah will play in one end of the box and you play in the other."

But Sarah, her nose in the air, announced that she wouldn't "have a thing to do with the old sand-box," and she departed to sit in the swing and read, leaving Rosemary to make the beds or "let them air"

as she decided.

Rosemary finished sweeping the porch and had just begun to make her own bed, when her aunt called her.

"s.h.i.+rley and that little Anderson boy are making so much noise, I can't rest," Aunt Trudy complained. "I should think you could tell them to play quietly, Rosemary. And I wish you wouldn't practise this morning, dearie; my head is splitting and the piano does annoy me so. This afternoon I'll take my sewing out under the tree and you may have two hours to yourself, if you like."

Rosemary went down and suggested to s.h.i.+rley and Ray that they make sand pies instead of building a railroad, knowing from experience that sand pies was a comparatively quiet play. Then she dusted her beloved piano with a little lump in her throat. Mother had loved to hear her practise and had liked to sit on summer mornings in a chair close by, sewing and listening. Mother was an accomplished musician and she knew and noted her little daughter's enthusiastic progress.

One reason that Rosemary practised so steadily through the warm weather in spite of discouragement was her determination to surprise her mother by her improvement when that dear lady came back to them.

"It's a shame you have all the beds to do, Rosemary," said Winnie, coming up for a salve from the medicine closet in the bathroom and discovering Rosemary wearily putting the bedrooms to rights. "I've burned my finger on that silly hot water heater again. I've told the doctor and told him to have the plumber stop in and fix it, but he forgets every time."