Flamsted quarries Part 6

It was marvellous how she imitated every graceful movement, every turn and twist and bow, every courtesy to the imaginary partner--Freckles had failed her entirely in this role--whose imaginary hand she held clasped high above her head; her clumsy shoes slid over the flagging as if it had been a waxed floor under dainty slippers. There was an outburst of applause; such an outburst that had the audience really worn gloves, every seam, even if French and handsewed, must have cracked under the healthy pressure.

208 beamed and, throwing back her head, suddenly flung herself into the c.o.o.n dance which, in its way, was as wild and erratic as the minuet had been stately and methodical. Wilder and wilder grew her gyrations--head, feet, legs, shoulders, hair, hands, arms, were in seemingly perpetual motion. The audience grew wildly excited. They jumped up, shouting "On-ko--on-ko!" and accompanied their shouts with the stamping of feet.

A dexterous somersault on the dancer's part ended the performance; her cheeks were flushed with exercise and excitement, her black mane was loosened and tossed about her shoulders. The audience lost their heads and even 206 joined in the prolonged roar:

"On-ko, 208--on-ko-o-o-oor! On-ko, Flibbertigibbet--some more--some more!"

"It's perfectly disgraceful," muttered Sister Agatha, and made a movement to leave the window; but Sister Angelica laid a gently detaining hand on her arm.

"No, Agatha, not that," she said earnestly; "you'll see that they will work all the better for this fun--Hark!"

There was a sudden and deep silence. 208 was evidently ready with her encore, a surprise to all but the performer. She shook back the hair from her face, raised her eyes, crossed her two hands upon her chest, waited a few seconds until a swift pa.s.senger train on the track behind the fence had smothered its roar in the tunnel depths, then began to sing "The Holy City." Even Sister Agatha felt the tears spring as she listened. A switch engine letting off steam drowned the last words, and there was no applause. Flibbertigibbet looked about her inquiringly; but the girls were silent. Such singing appeared to them out of the ordinary--and so unlike 208! It took them a moment to recover from their surprise; they gathered in groups to whisper together concerning the performance.

Meanwhile Flibbertigibbet was waiting expectantly. Where was the well earned applause? And she had reserved the best for the last! Ungrateful ones! Her friends in the stone house always praised her when she did her best,--but these girls--

She stamped her foot, then dashed through the broken ranks, making faces as she ran, and crying out in disgust and anger:

"Catch me givin' yer any more on-kos, yer stingy things!" and with that she ran into the bas.e.m.e.nt followed by Freckles who was intent upon appeasing her.

The two sisters, pacing the dim corridor together after chapel that evening, spoke again of their little wilding.

"I didn't finish what I was going to tell you about 208," said Sister Angelica. "I heard the Sister Superior tell Father Honore when he was here the other day that Mr. Van Ostend had been to see her in regard to the child. It seems he has found a place for her in the country with some of his relations, as I understand it. He said his interest in her had been roused when he heard her for the first time on the stage, and that when he found Flibbertigibbet was the little acquaintance his daughter had made, he determined to further the child's interests so far as a home is concerned."

"Then there is a prospect of her going," Sister Agatha drew a breath of relief. "Did you hear what Father Honore said?"

"Very little; but I noticed he looked pleased, and I heard him say, 'This is working out all right; I'll step across and see Mr. Van Ostend myself.'--I shall miss her so!"

Sister Agatha made no reply. Together the two sisters continued to pace the dim corridor, silent each with her thoughts; and, pacing thus, up and down, up and down, the slender, black-robed figures were soon lost in the increasing darkness and became mere neutral outlines as they pa.s.sed the high bare windows and entered their respective rooms.

Even so, a few weeks later when Number 208 left the Orphan Asylum on ----nd Street, they pa.s.sed quietly out of the child's actual life and entered the fitfully lighted chambers of her childish memory wherein, at times, they paced with noiseless footsteps as once in the barren halls of her orphanage home.

PART SECOND

Home Soil

I

A land of entrancing inner waters, our own marvellous Lake Country of the East, lies just behind those mountains of Maine that sink their bases in the Atlantic and are fitly termed in Indian nomenclature _Waves-of-the-Sea_. Bight and bay indent this mountainous coast, in beauty comparable, if less sublime yet more enticing, to the Norwegian fjords; within them are set the islands large and small whereon the sheep, sheltered by cedar coverts, crop the short thick turf that is nourished by mists from the Atlantic. Above bight and bay and island tower the mountains. Their broad green flanks catch the earliest eastern and the latest western lights. Their bare summits are lifted boldly into the infinite blue that is reflected in the waters which lap their foundations.

Flamsted lies at the outlet of Lake Mesantic, on the gentle northward slope of these _Waves-of-the-Sea_, some eighteen miles inland from Pen.o.bscot Bay. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century it was unconnected with the coast by any railroad; but at that time a branch line from Hallsport on the Bay, encouraged by the opening of a small granite quarry in the Flamsted Hills, made its terminus at The Corners--a sawmill settlement at the falls of the Rothel, a river that runs rapidly to the sea after issuing from Lake Mesantic. A mile beyond the station the village proper begins at its two-storied tavern, The Greenbush.

From the lower veranda of this hostelry, one may look down the shaded length of the main street, dignified by many an old-fashioned house, to The Bow, an irregular peninsula extending far into the lake and containing some two hundred acres. This estate is the ancestral home of the Champneys, known as Champ-au-Haut, in the vernacular "Champo." At The Bow the highway turns suddenly, crosses a bridge over the Rothel and curves with the curving pine-fringed sh.o.r.es of the lake along the base of the mountain until it climbs the steep ascent that leads to Googe's Gore, the third division of the town of Flamsted.

As in all New England towns, that are the possessors of "old families,"

so in Flamsted;--its inhabitants are partisans. The result is, that it has been for years as a house divided against itself, and heated discussion of the affairs of the Googes at the Gore and the Champneys at The Bow has been from generation to generation an inherited interest.

And from generation to generation, as the two families have ramified and intermarriages occurred more and more frequently, party spirit has run higher and higher and bitter feelings been engendered. But never have the factional differences been more p.r.o.nounced and the lines of separation drawn with a sharper ploughshare in this mountain-ramparted New England town, than during the five years subsequent to the opening of the Flamsted Quarries which brought in its train the railroad and the immigrants. This event was looked upon by the inhabitants as the Invasion of the New.

The interest of the first faction was centred in Champ-au-Haut and its present possessor, the widow of Louis Champney, old Judge Champney's only son. That of the second in the Googes, Aurora and her son Champney, the owners of Googe's Gore and its granite outcrop.

The office room of The Greenbush has been for two generations the acknowledged gathering place of the representatives of the hostile camps. On a cool evening in June, a few days after the departure of several New York promoters, who had formed a syndicate to exploit the granite treasure in The Gore and for that purpose been fully a week in Flamsted, a few of the natives dropped into the office to talk it over.

When Octavius Buzzby, the factotum at Champ-au-Haut and twin of Augustus Buzzby, landlord of The Greenbush, entered the former bar-room of the old hostelry, he found the usual Sat.u.r.day night frequenters. Among them was Colonel Milton Caukins, tax collector and a.s.sistant deputy sheriff who, never quite at ease in the presence of his long-tongued wife, expanded discursively so soon as he found himself in the office of The Greenbush. He was in full flow when Octavius entered.

"h.e.l.lo, Tave," he cried, extending his hand in easy condescension, "you're well come, for you're just in time to hear the latest; the deal's on--an A. 1 sure thing this time. Aurora showed me the papers to-day. We're in for it now--government contracts, state houses, battle monuments, graveyards; we've got 'em all, and things'll begin to hum in this backwater hole, you bet!"

Octavius looked inquiringly at his brother. Augustus answered by raising his left eyebrow and placidly closing his right eye as a cautionary signal to lie low and await developments.

It was the Colonel's way to boom everything, and simply because he could not help it. It was not a matter of principle with him, it was an affair of temperament. He had boomed Flamsted for the last ten years--its climate, its situation, its scenery, its water power, its lake-sh.o.r.e lands as prospective sites for mansion summer cottages, and the treasures of its unopened quarries. So incorrigible an optimist was Milton Caukins that any slight degree of success, which might attend the promotion of any one of his numerous schemes, caused an elation that amounted to hilarity. On the other hand, the deadly blight of non-fulfilment, that annually attacked his most cherished hopes for the future development of his native town, failed in any wise to depress him, or check the prodigal casting of his optimistic daily bread on the placid social waters where, as the years multiplied, his enthusiasms scarce made a ripple.

"I see Mis' Googe yisterd'y, an' she said folks hed been down on her so long for sellin' thet pa.s.s'l of paster for the first quarry, thet she might ez well go the hull figger an' git 'em down on her for the rest of her days by sellin' the rest. By Andrew Jackson! she's got the grit for a woman--and the good looks too! She can hold her own for a figger with any gal in this town. I see the syndicaters a-castin' sheeps' eyes her ways the day she took 'em over The Gore prospectin'; but, by A. J.! they hauled in their lookin's when she turned them great eyes of her'n their ways.--What's the figger for the hull piece? Does anybody know?"

It was Joel Quimber, the ancient pound-master, who spoke, and the silence that followed proved that each man present was resenting the fact that he was not in a position to give the information desired.

"I shall know as soon as they get it recorded, that is, if they don't trade for a dollar and if they ever do get it recorded." The speaker was Elmer Wiggins, druggist and town clerk for the last quarter of a century. He was pessimistically inclined, the tendency being fostered by his dual vocation of selling drugs and registering the deaths they occasionally caused.

Milton Caukins, or the Colonel, as he preferred to be called on account of his youthful service in the state militia and his present connection with the historical society of The Rangers, took his cigar from his lips and blew the smoke forcibly towards the ceiling before he spoke.

"She's got enough now to put Champ through college. The first forty acres she sold ten years ago will do that."

"I ain't so sure of thet." Joel Quimber's tone implied obstinate conviction that his modestly expressed doubt was a foregone conclusion.

"Champ's a devil of a feller when it comes to puttin' through anything.

He's a chip off the old block. He'll put through more 'n his mother can git out if he gits in any thicker with them big guns--race hosses, steam yachts an' fancy fixin's. He could sink the hull Gore to the foundations of Old Time in a few of them suppers I've heerd he gin arter the show. I heerd he gin ten dollars a plate for the last one--some kind of primy-donny, I heerd. But Champ's game though. I heerd Mr. Van Ostend talkin' 'bout him to one of the syndicaters--mebbe they're goin' to work him in with them somehow; anyway, I guess Aurory don't begrutch him a little spendin' money seein' how easy it come out of the old sheep pasters. Who'd 'a' thought a streak of granite could hev made sech a stir!"

"It's a stir that'll sink this town in the mud." Mr. Wiggins' voice was what might be called thorough-ba.s.s, and was apt to carry more weight with his townspeople than his opinions, which latter were not always acceptable to Colonel Caukins. "Look at it now! This town has never been bonded; we're free from debt and a good balance on hand for improvements. Now along comes three or four hundred immigrants to begin with--trade following the flag, I suppose _you_ call it, Colonel," (he interpolated this with cutting sarcasm)--"a hodge-podge of Canucks, and Dagos, and Polacks, and the Lord knows what--a darned set of foreigners, foreign to our laws, our ways, our religion; and behind 'em a lot of men that would be called windbags if it wasn't for their money-bags. And between 'em our noses are going to be held right down on the grindstone.

I tell you we'll have to bond this town to support the schooling for these foreign brats, and there's a baker's dozen of 'em every time; and there'll be tooting and dancing and singing and playing on Sunday with their foreign gimcranks,--mandolin-banjos and what-all--"

"Good heavens, my dear fellow!" the Colonel broke in with an air of impatience, "can't you see that it's this very 'stir,' as you term it, that is going to put this town into the front rank of the competing industrial thousands of America?"

The Colonel, when annoyed at the quant.i.ty of cold water thrown upon his redhot enthusiasm, was apt to increase the warmth of his patronizing address by an endearing term.

"I see farther than the front ranks of your 'competing industrial thousands of America,' Milton Caukins; I see clear over 'em to the very brink, and I see a struggling wrestling ma.s.s of human beings slipping, sliding to the bottomless pit of national dest.i.tution, helped downwards by just such darned boomers of what you call 'industrial efficiency' as you are, Milton Caukins." He paused for breath.

Augustus Buzzby, who was ever a man of peace, tried to divert this raging torrent of speech into other and personal channels.

"I ain't nothin' 'gainst Mis' Googe as a woman, but she played me a mean trick when she sold that first quarry. It killed my trade as dead as a door nail. You can't hire them highflyers to put themselves into a town their money's bankin' on to ruin in what you might call a summer-social way. I found _that_ out 'fore they left this house last week."

"Yes, and she's played a meaner one now." Mr. Wiggins made the a.s.sertion with asperity and looked at the same time directly at Octavius Buzzby.

"I know all about their free dispensaries that'll draw trade away from my very counter and take the bread and b.u.t.ter out of my mouth; and as for the fees--there won't be a chance for recording a homestead site; there isn't any counting on such things, for they're a homeless lot, always moving from pillar to post with free pickings wherever they locate over night, just like the gypsies that came through here last September."

"It's kinder queer now, whichever way you've a mind to look at it," Joel Quimber remarked meditatively. His eyes were cast up to the ceiling; his fore-fingers and thumbs formed an acute triangle over the bridge of his nose; the arms of his chair supported his elbows. "Queer thet it's allus them upper tens an' emigrants thet keep a-movin' on, fust one place then t'other. Kinder looks ez if, arter all, there warn't no great real difference when it comes to bein' restless. Take us home folks now, we're rooted in deep, an' I guess if we was to be uprooted kinder suddin', p'raps we'd hev more charity for the furriners. There's no tellin'; I ain't no jedge of sech things, an' I'm an out-an-out American. But mebbe my great-great-great-granther's father could hev'

told ye somethin' wuth tellin'; he an' the Champneys was hounded out of France, an' was glad 'nough to emigrate, though they called it refugeein' an' pioneerin' in them days."

Augustus Buzzby laid his hand affectionately on the old man's shoulder.

"You're a son of the soil, Joel; I stand corrected. I guess the less any of us true blue Americans say 'bout flinging stones at furriners the safer 'twill be for all on us."