Understood Betsy Part 7

Uncle Henry, indeed, noted it only to say, "Seventh-grade reading!" He turned to Aunt Abigail. "Oh, Mother, don't you suppose she could read aloud to us evenings?"

Aunt Abigail and Cousin Ann both laid down their sewing to laugh! "Yes, yes, Father, and play checkers with you too, like as not!" They explained to Betsy: "Your Uncle Henry is just daft on being read aloud to when he's got something to do in the evening, and when he hasn't he's as fidgety as a broody hen if he can't play checkers. Ann hates checkers and I haven't got the time, often."

"Oh, I LOVE to play checkers!" said Betsy.

"Well, NOW ..." said Uncle Henry, rising instantly and dropping his half-mended harness on the table. "Let's have a game."

"Oh, Father!" said Cousin Ann, in the tone she used for Shep. "How about that piece of breeching! You know that's not safe. Why don't you finish that up first?"

Uncle Henry sat down again, looking as Shep did when Cousin Ann told him to get up on the couch, and took up his needle and awl.

"But I could read something aloud," said Betsy, feeling very sorry for him. "At least I think I could. I never did, except at school."

"What shall we have, Mother?" asked Uncle Henry eagerly.

"Oh, I don't know. What have we got in this bookcase?" said Aunt Abigail. "It's pretty cold to go into the parlor to the other one." She leaned forward, ran her fat fore-finger over the worn old volumes, and took out a battered, blue-covered book. "Scott?"

"Gosh, yes!" said Uncle Henry, his eyes s.h.i.+ning. "The staggit eve!"

At least that was the way it sounded to Betsy, but when she took the book and looked where Aunt Abigail pointed she read it correctly, though in a timid, uncertain voice. She was very proud to think she could please a grown-up so much as she was evidently pleasing Uncle Henry, but the idea of reading aloud for people to hear, not for a teacher to correct, was unheard-of.

The Stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,

she began, and it was as though she had stepped into a boat and was swept off by a strong current. She did not know what all the words meant, and she could not p.r.o.nounce a good many of the names, but n.o.body interrupted to correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by the strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward swiftly from one clanging, sonorous rhyme to another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time to the rise and fall of her voice and now and then stopped his work to look at her with bright, eager, old eyes. He knew some of the places by heart evidently, for once in a while his voice would join the little girl's for a couplet or two. They chanted together thus:

A moment listened to the cry That thickened as the chase drew nigh, Then, as the headmost foes appeared, With one brave bound, the copse he cleared.

At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out wide, and the child felt as though the deer had made his great leap there, before her eyes.

"I've seen 'em jump just like that," broke in Uncle Henry. "A two-three-hundred-pound stag go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of thistledown in the wind."

"Uncle Henry," asked Elizabeth Ann, "what is a copse?"

"I don't know," said Uncle Henry indifferently. "Something in the woods, must be. Underbrush most likely. You can always tell words you don't know by the sense of the whole thing. Go on."

And stretching forward, free and far,

The child's voice took up the chant again. She read faster and faster as it got more exciting. Uncle Henry joined in on

For, jaded now and spent with toil, Embossed with foam and dark with soil, While every gasp with sobs he drew, The laboring stag strained full in view.

The little girl's heart beat fast. She fled along through the next lines, stumbling desperately over the hard words but seeing the headlong chase through them clearly as through tree-trunks in a forest. Uncle Henry broke in in a triumphant shout:

The wily quarry shunned the shock And TURNED him from the opposing rock; Then das.h.i.+ng down a darksome glen, Soon lost to hound and hunter's ken, In the deep Trossach's wildest nook His solitary refuge took.

"Oh MY!" cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down the book. "He got away, didn't he? I was so afraid he wouldn't!"

"I can just hear those dogs yelping, can't you?" said Uncle Henry.

Yelled on the view the opening pack.

"Sometimes you hear 'em that way up on the slope of Hemlock Mountain back of us, when they get to running a deer."

"What say we have some pop-corn!" suggested Aunt Abigail. "Betsy, don't you want to pop us some?"

"I never DID," said the little girl, but in a less doubtful tone than she had ever used with that phrase so familiar to her. A dim notion was growing up in her mind that the fact that she had never done a thing was no proof that she couldn't.

"I'll show you," said Uncle Henry. He reached down a couple of ears from a big yellow cl.u.s.ter hanging on the wall, and he and Betsy sh.e.l.led them into the popper, popped it full of snowy kernels, b.u.t.tered it, salted it, and took it back to the table.

It was just as she was eating her first ambrosial mouthful that the door opened and a fur-capped head was thrust in. A man's voice said: "Evenin', folks. No, I can't stay. I was down at the village just now, and thought I'd ask for any mail down our way." He tossed a newspaper and a letter on the table and was gone.

The letter was addressed to Elizabeth Ann and it was from Aunt Frances.

She read it to herself while Uncle Henry read the newspaper. Aunt Frances wrote that she had been perfectly horrified to learn that Cousin Molly had not kept Elizabeth Ann with her, and that she would never forgive her for that cruelty. And when she thought that her darling was at Putney Farm...! Her blood ran cold. It positively did! It was too dreadful. But it couldn't be helped, for a time anyhow, because Aunt Harriet was really VERY sick. Elizabeth Ann would have to be a dear, brave child and endure it as best she could. And as soon ... oh, as soon as ever she COULD, Aunt Frances would come and take her away from them.

"Don't cry TOO much, darling ... it breaks my heart to think of you there!

TRY to be cheerful, dearest! TRY to bear it for the sake of your distracted, loving Aunt Frances."

Elizabeth Ann looked up from this letter and across the table at Aunt Abigail's rosy, wrinkled old face, bent over her darning. Uncle Henry laid the paper down, took a big mouthful of pop-corn, and beat time silently with his hand. When he could speak he murmured: An hundred dogs bayed deep and strong, Clattered an hundred steeds along.

Old Shep woke up with a snort and Aunt Abigail fed him a handful of pop-corn. Little Eleanor stirred in her sleep, stretched, yawned, and nestled down into a ball again on the little girl's lap. Betsy could feel in her own body the rhythmic vibration of the kitten's contented purr.

Aunt Abigail looked up: "Finished your letter? I hope Harriet is no worse. What does Frances say?"

Elizabeth Ann blushed a deep red and crushed the letter together in her hand. She felt ashamed and she did not know why. "Aunt Frances says, ... Aunt Frances says, ..." she began, hesitating. "She says Aunt Harriet is still pretty sick." She stopped, drew a long breath, and went on, "And she sends her love to you."

Now Aunt Frances hadn't done anything of the kind, so this was a really whopping fib. But Elizabeth Ann didn't care if it was. It made her feel less ashamed, though she did not know why. She took another mouthful of pop-corn and stroked Eleanor's back. Uncle Henry got up and stretched.

"It's time to go to bed, folks," he said. As he wound the clock Betsy heard him murmuring:

But when the sun his beacon red....

CHAPTER VII

ELIZABETH ANN FAILS IN AN EXAMINATION

I wonder if you can guess the name of a little girl who, about a month after this, was walking along through the melting snow in the woods with a big black dog running circles around her. Yes, all alone in the woods with a terrible great dog beside her, and yet not a bit afraid. You don't suppose it could be Elizabeth Ann? Well, whoever she was, she had something on her mind, for she walked more and more slowly and had only a very absent-minded pat for the dog's head when he thrust it up for a caress. When the wood road led into a clearing in which there was a rough little house of slabs, the child stopped altogether, and, looking down, began nervously to draw lines in the snow with her overshoe.

You see, something perfectly dreadful had happened in school that day.

The Superintendent, the all-important, seldom-seen Superintendent, came to visit the school and the children were given some examinations so he could see how they were getting on.

Now, you know what an examination did to Elizabeth Ann. Or haven't I told you yet?

Well, if I haven't, it's because words fail me. If there is anything horrid that an examination DIDn't do to Elizabeth Ann, I have yet to hear of it. It began years ago, before ever she went to school, when she heard Aunt Frances talking about how SHE had dreaded examinations when she was a child, and how they dried up her mouth and made her ears ring and her head ache and her knees get all weak and her mind a perfect blank, so that she didn't know what two and two made. Of course Elizabeth Ann didn't feel ALL those things right off at her first examination, but by the time she had had several and had rushed to tell Aunt Frances about how awful they were and the two of them had sympathized with one another and compared symptoms and then wept about her resulting low marks, why, she not only had all the symptoms Aunt Frances had ever had, but a good many more of her own invention.

Well, she had had them all and had them hard this afternoon, when the Superintendent was there. Her mouth had gone dry and her knees had shaken and her elbows had felt as though they had no more bones in them than so much jelly, and her eyes had smarted, and oh, what answers she had made! That dreadful tight panic had clutched at her throat whenever the Superintendent had looked at her, and she had disgraced herself ten times over. She went hot and cold to think of it, and felt quite sick with hurt vanity. She who did so well every day and was so much looked up to by her cla.s.smates, what MUST they be thinking of her! To tell the truth, she had been crying as she walked along through the woods, because she was so sorry for herself. Her eyes were all red still, and her throat sore from the big lump in it.

And now she would live it all over again as she told the Putney cousins.