Real Folks Part 23

"O, those lovely pink and white laurels! Yes. Where did you get such pictures, Miss Hazel?"

"O, everybody gave them to us, all summer, ever since we began. Mrs.

Geoffrey gave those flowers; and mother painted some. She did that laurel. But don't call me Miss Hazel, please; it seems to send me off into a corner."

Rosamond answered by a little irresistible caress; leaning her head down to Hazel, on her other side, until her cheek touched the child's bright curls, quickly and softly. There was magnetism between those two.

Ah, the magnetism ran round!

"For a child's picture-book, Mrs. Ripwinkley?" said Mrs. Scherman, reaching over for the laurel picture. "Aren't these almost too exquisite? They would like a big scarlet poppy just as well,--perhaps better. Or a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," she added, whimsically.

"There _is_ a clump of cat-o'-nine-tails," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "I remember how I used to delight in them as a child,--the real ones."

"Pictures are to _tell_ things," said Desire, in her brief way.

"These little city refugees _must_ see them, somehow," said Rosamond, gently. "I understand. They will never get up on the mountains, maybe, where the laurels grow, or into the shady swamps among the flags and the cat-o'-nine-tails. You have _picked out_ pictures to give them, Mrs. Ripwinkley."

Kenneth Kincaid's scissors stopped a moment, as he looked at Rosamond, pausing also over the placing of her leaves.

Desire saw that from the other side; she saw how beautiful and gracious this girl was--this Rosamond Holabird; and there was a strange little twinge in her heart, as she felt, suddenly, that let there be ever so much that was true and kindly, or even tender, in her, it could never come up in her eyes or play upon her lips like that she could never say it out sweetly and in due place everything was a spasm with her; and n.o.body would ever look at her just as Kenneth Kincaid looked at Rosamond then.

She said to herself, with her harsh, unsparing honesty, that it must be a "hitch inside;" a cramp or an awkwardness born in her, that set her eyes, peering and sharp, so near together, and put that knot into her brows instead of their widening placidly, like Rosamond's, and made her jerky in her speech. It was no use; she couldn't look and behave, because she couldn't _be_; she must just go boggling and kinking on, and--losing everything, she supposed.

The smiles went down, under a swift, bitter little cloud, and the hard twist came into her face with the inward pinching she was giving herself; and all at once there crackled out one of her sharp, strange questions; for it was true that she could not do otherwise; everything was sudden and crepitant with her.

"Why need all the good be done up in batches, I wonder? Why can't it be spread round, a little more even? There must have been a good deal left out somewhere, to make it come in a heap, so, upon you, Miss Craydocke!"

Hazel looked up.

"I know what Desire means," she said. "It seemed just so to me, _one_ way. Why oughtn't there to be _little_ homes, done-by-hand homes, for all these little children, instead of--well--machining them all up together?"

And Hazel laughed at her own conceit.

"It's nice; but then--it isn't just the way. If we were all brought up like that we shouldn't know, you see!"

"You wouldn't want to be brought up in a platoon, Hazel?" said Kenneth Kincaid. "No; neither should I."

"I think it was better," said Hazel, "to have my turn of being a little child, all to myself; _the_ little child, I mean, with the rest of the folks bigger. To make much of me, you know. I shouldn't want to have missed that. I shouldn't like to be _loved_ in a platoon."

"n.o.body is meant to be," said Miss Craydocke.

"Then why--" began Asenath Scherman, and stopped.

"Why what, dear?"

"Revelations," replied Sin, laconically. "There are loads of people there, all dressed alike, you know; and--well--it's platoony, I think, rather! And down here, such a world-full; and the sky--full of worlds. There doesn't seem to be much notion of one at a time, in the general plan of things."

"Ah, but we've got the key to all that," said Miss Craydocke. "'The very hairs of your head are all numbered.' It may be impossible with us, you know, but not with Him."

"Miss Hapsie! you always did put me down, just when I thought I was smart," said Sin Scherman.

Asenath loved to say "Miss Hapsie," now and then, to her friend, ever since she had found out what she called her "squee little name."

"But the little children, Miss Craydocke," said Mrs. Ripwinkley. "It seems to me Desire has got a right thought about it."

Mrs. Ripwinkley and Hazel always struck the same note. The same delicate instinct moved them both. Hazel "knew what Desire meant;"

her mother did not let it be lost sight of that it was Desire who had led the way in this thought of the children; so that the abrupt beginning--the little flash out of the cloud--was quite forgotten presently, in the tone of hearty understanding and genuine interest with which the talk went on; and it was as if all that was generous and mindfully suggestive in it had first and truly come from her.

They unfolded herself for her--these friendly ones--as she could not do; out of her bluntness grew a graciousness that lay softly over it; the cloud itself melted away and floated off; and Desire began to sparkle again more lambently. For she was not one of the kind to be meanly or enviously "put out."

"It seemed to me there must be a great many spare little corners somewhere, for all these spare little children," she said, "and that, lumped up together so, there was something they did not get."

"That is precisely the thing," said Miss Craydocke, emphatically. "I wonder, sometimes," she went on, tenderly, "if whenever G.o.d makes a little empty place in a home, it isn't really on purpose that it might be filled with one of these,--if people only thought."

"Miss Craydocke," said Hazel, "how did you begin your beehive?"

"I!" said the good lady. "I didn't. It began itself."

"Well, then, how did you _let_ it begin?"

"Ah!"

The tone was admissive, and as if she had said, "_That_ is another thing!" She could not contradict that she had let it be.

"I'll tell you a queer story," she said, "of what they say they used to do, in old Roman Catholic times and places, when they wanted to _keep up_ a beehive that was in any danger of dwindling or growing unprofitable. I read it somewhere in a book of popular beliefs and customs about bees and other interesting animals. An old woman once went to her friend, and asked her what she did to make her hive so gainful. And this was what the old wife said; it sounds rather strange to us, but if there is anything irreverent in it, it is the word and not the meaning; 'I go,' she said, 'to the priest, and get a little round G.o.damighty, and put it in the hive, and then all goes well; the bees thrive, and there is plenty of honey; they always come, and stay, and work, when _that_ is there."

"A little round--something awful! what _did_ she mean?" asked Mrs.

Scherman.

"She meant a consecrated wafer,--the Sacrament. We don't need to put the wafer in; but if we let _Him_ in, you see,--just say to Him it is his house, to do with as He likes,--He takes the responsibility, and brings in all the rest."

n.o.body saw, under the knitting of Desire Ledwith's brows, and the close setting of her eyes, the tenderness with which they suddenly moistened, and the earnestness with which they gleamed. n.o.body knew how she thought to herself inwardly, in the same spasmodic fas.h.i.+on that she used for speech,--

"They Mig up their parlors with upholstery, and put rose-colored paper on their walls, and call them _their_ houses; and shut the little round awfulness and goodness out! We've all been doing it!

And there's no place left for what might come in."

Mrs. Scherman broke the hush that followed what Miss Hapsie said.

Not hastily, or impertinently; but when it seemed as if it might be a little hard to come down into the picture-books and the pleasant easiness again.

"Let's make a Noah's Ark picture-book,--you and I," she said to Desire. "Give us all your animals,--there's a whole Natural History full over there, all painted with splendid daubs of colors; the children did that, I know, when they _were_ children. Come; we'll have everything in, from an elephant to a b.u.mble-bee!"

"We did not mean to use those, Mrs. Scherman," said Desire. "We did not think they were good enough. They are _so_ daubed up."

"They're perfectly beautiful. Exactly what the young ones will like.

Just divide round, and help. We'll wind up with the most wonderful book of all; the book they'll all cry for, and that will have to be given always, directly after the Castor Oil."

It took them more than an hour to do that, all working hard; and a wonderful thing it was truly, when it was done. Mrs. Scherman and Desire Ledwith directed all the putting together, and the grouping was something astonis.h.i.+ng.

There were men and women,--the Knowers, Sin called them; she said that was what she always thought the old gentleman's name was, in the days when she first heard of him, because he knew so much; and in the backgrounds of the same sheets were their country cousins, the orangs, and the little apes. Then came the elephants, and the camels, and the whales; "for why shouldn't the fishes be put in, since they must all have been swimming round sociably, if they weren't inside; and why shouldn't the big people be all kept together properly?"

There were happy families of dogs and cats and lions and snakes and little humming-birds; and in the last part were all manner of bugs, down to the little lady-bugs in blazes of red and gold, and the gray fleas and mosquitoes which Sin improvised with pen and ink, in a swarm at the end.