Ethel Morton at Chautauqua Part 15

"What, I'd like to know," demanded Roger. "Tell just one thing."

"Why--why--" Helen hesitated, trying to put her feelings into words; "why, take to-night when Grandmother found out that it was Dorothy's mother she had been taking embroidery lessons from. Somehow that seems to me romantic--to know one person and to know another person and then to find that they are relations."

Helen ended rather lamely, for Roger was shouting with laughter.

"That sounds mighty commonplace to me," he roared.

"It would sound all right if a writer worked it up in a book." James suddenly came to Helen's rescue to her great gratification. "We've got a romance in our family," he went on.

"We have!" cried Margaret. "What is it?"

"Perhaps it wouldn't seem like one to Roger," went on James, "but it always seemed to me it was romantic because it was different from the way things happen every day, and there was a chance for a surprise in it."

"I know what you mean," cried Margaret. "Great-uncle George."

"Yes," acknowledged James. "He was our father's uncle and he was a young man at the time of the Civil War. Fathers were sterner then than they are now and Uncle George's father--Dad's grandfather--insisted that he should go into a certain kind of business that he didn't like. They had some fierce quarrels and Uncle George ran off to the war and they never heard from him again."

"Didn't he ever write home?"

"They never got any letter from him," said Margaret. "His mother always blamed herself that she didn't write to him over and over again, even if she didn't get any answer, so that he would know that somebody kept on loving him and looking for him to come back. But Great-grandfather forbade her to, and I guess she must have been meeker than women are now, just as Great-grandfather was stricter."

"Father says," went on James, "that all through his boyhood he used to hope that his uncle would turn up, perhaps awfully rich or perhaps with adventures to tell about. Now I call that romantic, don't you, old man?"

ended James defiantly.

"Seems to me it would have been if he had turned up, but he didn't,"

retorted Roger, determined not to yield.

"We have a disappearance story in our family, too," said Helen. "I'd forgotten it. It's nearer than yours; it's our own aunt. Don't you remember, Roger? Mother told us about it, once."

"That's so; so we have. Now that _is_ romantic," a.s.serted Roger.

"Let's hear it and see if it beats ours," said James.

"It was our Aunt Louise, Father's and Uncle Richard's sister. She was older than they. She fell in love with a man her father didn't like."

"Ho," grunted James; "that's why you think your story is romantic--because there's some love in it."

"It does make it more romantic, of course," declared Margaret, going over to the other side.

"He was a musician and Grandfather Morton didn't think music was a man's business. People used to be funny about things like that you know."

"That was because musicians and painters used to go round with long hair looking like jays." So James summed up the causes of the previous generation's dislike of the masters of the arts.

"I don't know whether Aunt Louise's musician was long on hair or not, but he was short on cash all right," Roger took up the story.

"Grandfather said he couldn't support a wife and Aunt Louise said she'd take the chance, and so they ran away."

"She had more sand than sense, seems to me--if you'll excuse my commenting on your aunt," said James.

"She had plenty of sand. She must have found out pretty soon that Grandfather was right, but she wouldn't ask for help or come home again, and after a while they didn't hear from her any more and now n.o.body knows where she is."

"I'm like your father, James," said Helen; "I always feel that some time she may turn up and tell us her adventures."

"She must have been very brave and very loyal," murmured Margaret. "What did she look like? Was she pretty?"

"I haven't any idea. Mother never saw her. She left home before Mother and Father were married."

"Father spoke to me about her once," said Roger gravely.

"Did he really?" cried Helen. "Mother told me he hadn't mentioned her for years, it hurt him so to lose her."

"He told me she was the finest girl he ever knew except Mother, and he thought Grandfather made a mistake in not helping the fellow along and then letting Aunt Louise marry him. You see he sort of drove her into it by opposing her."

"Wouldn't it be great if both our relatives should turn up," cried Helen. "I suppose your uncle is too old now, even if he's alive, but our aunt really may."

"Then Roger'll have to admit that there's romance in real life."

"There are the chimes; we must go," said Roger as "Annie Laurie" pealed out on the fresh evening air, and the Morton brother and sister said "Good-night" to the Hanc.o.c.k sister and brother and went down the path to their own cottage where Roger left Helen and then went on up the hill to his room in the Hall of Pedagogy.

CHAPTER IX

GRANDFATHER ARRANGES HIS TIME

The Mortons breakfasted rather later than most people at Chautauqua.

This was on Roger's account. He had to put his building into perfect order before the cla.s.ses began to a.s.semble at eight in the morning. He always did some of his sweeping the afternoon before after the students had left the Hall, but there was plenty of work for him in the early hour after he had reluctantly rolled off his cot. He had grown up with the Navy and Army ideals of extreme neatness, and experience was teaching him now that if he expected to have the rooms as tidy as his father would want to see them he must go to bed early and rise not long after the sun poked his rosy head over the edge of the lake.

"Nix on sitting up to hear the chimes," he confided to the family at breakfast the morning after the Spelling Match. "Last night's the first time I've heard them in a week. That room is worth a lot to me just for the feeling it's giving me that I'm earning it, and I'm going to pay good honest work for it if it busts me."

"'Bust' means, I suppose, if you have to go to bed early and work till almost eight in the morning to do it," translated his mother. "You're quite right, my dear; that's what your father would want you to do. And none of us here have eight o'clock cla.s.ses so we can just as well as not have our breakfast at eight and have the pleasure of seeing you here opposite me."

Ever since he was a little boy Roger had sat in his father's seat when Lieutenant Morton was on duty. He felt that it was a privilege and that because of it he represented the head of the family and must shoulder some of his father's responsibilities. It made his behavior toward his mother and sisters and Ethel Blue and d.i.c.ky far more grown-up than that of most boys of his age, and his mother depended on him as few mothers except those in similar positions depend on sons of Roger's age.

Every time that Helen heard Roger mention his room she was stirred again with the desire that had filled her on the first day when Jo Sampson had offered it to him. She told herself over and over that she was doing as much as Roger, for since they only had one maid and Mary was busy all the time with the work necessary for so large a family, Helen waited on the table. She earned her meals by doing that just as much as if she were doing it in one of the boarding houses. Yet it did not seem to her just the same. She did not really want to wait on table in one of the boarding houses; she would have been frightened to death to do it, she thought, although she had been long enough at Chautauqua to see many nice young teachers and college girls in the boarding cottages and at the hotel and in the restaurant, and if they were not frightened, why should she be? Perhaps they were and didn't show it. Perhaps it was because it would take courage for her to attempt it that she wanted to so much. Whatever the reason, she could not seem to rid her mind of the idea that it would be delightful to earn money or its equivalent. This morning Roger's talk about his room roused her again.

"Mother," she said, "Margaret Hanc.o.c.k is going to take sewing from the teacher in the Hall of Pedagogy. Do you think I might, too?"

"What kind of sewing, dear? Embroidery?"

"No, Mother dear; it's the purely domestic variety; plain sewing and b.u.t.tonholes and shirtwaists and middy blouses and how to hang a skirt, if I get so far along. Don't you think I'd be a more useful girl if I knew how to do some of those things?"

"You're a useful daughter now, dear; but I think it would be a splendid thing for you to learn just the kind of sewing that we need in the family."

"That every family needs," corrected Helen.

The mother looked closely at her daughter.