Janice Day at Poketown Part 10

Janice had followed the little girl to the doorway. She saw but dimly the store itself and the shelves of dusty merchandise. From the back room where he had been sitting with his violin, a gray, thin, dusty-looking man came quickly and seized Lottie in his arms.

"Child! child! how you frighten me!" he murmured. Then he looked over the little girl's head and blinked through his spectacles at Janice in the doorway.

"I'm certainly obliged to ye," he said. "She--she gets away from the house and I don't know it. I--I can't watch her all the time and she ain't got no mother, Miss. I certainly am obliged to ye for bringing her home."

"She was down on the old wharf at the foot of the street, trying to wake the echo from the woods across the inlet," said Janice, gravely.

The gray man hugged his daughter tightly, and his eyes blinked like an owl's in strong daylight, as he peered through his spectacles at Janice. "She--she loved to go there--always," he murmured. "I go with her Sundays--and when the store is closed. But she is so quick--in a flash she is out of my sight."

"Can--can nothing be done for her?'" questioned Janice, in a whisper.

"She cannot hear you--now," said Hopewell Drugg, gloomily, shaking his head. "And the doctors here tell me she is almost sure to be dumb, too. If I could only get her to Boston! There's a school for such as her, there, and specialists, and all. But it would cost a pile of money."

"You play the fiddle, father," commanded little Lottie. "And make it quiver--make it cry, father! Then _I_ can hear it."

He set her down carefully, still shaking his head. Her strange little voice kept repeating: "Play for her, father! Play for her, father!"

Hopewell Drugg picked up the violin and bow from the end of the counter. He leaned against the counter and tucked the violin under his chin. There was only a brown light in the dusky store, and the dust danced in the single band of sunlight that searched out a knot hole in the wall of the back room--the shed between the store proper and the cottage in the rear.

"Darling, I am growing old, Silver threads among the gold----"

The old violin wailed out the tune haltingly. The deaf and blind child caught the tremulo of the final notes, and she danced up and down and clapped her little hands.

"I can hear that! I can hear that!" she muttered, her lips writhing to form the sounds.

Janice felt the tears suddenly blinding her. "I'll come back and see you again--indeed I will!" she said, brokenly, and hugging and kissing little Lottie impetuously, she released her and ran out of the ugly, dark little store.

It is doubtful if Hopewell Drugg even heard her. The violin was still wailing away, while he searched out slowly the minor notes of the old, old song.

CHAPTER VIII

A BIT OF ROMANCE

"Hopewell Drugg? Ya-as," drawled Aunt Almira. "He keeps store 'crosstown. He's had bad luck, Hopewell has. His wife's dead--she didn't live long after Lottie was born; and Lottie--poor child!--must be eight or nine year old."

"Poor little thing!" sighed Janice, who had come home to find her aunt just beginning her desultory preparations for supper, and had turned in to help. "It is so pitiful to see and hear her. Does she live all alone there with her father?"

"I reckon Hopewell don't do business enough so's he could hire a housekeeper. They tell me he an' the child live in a reg'lar mess!

Ain't fittin' for a man to keep house by hisself, nohow; and of course Lottie can't do much of nothing."

"Is he an old man?" queried Janice. "I couldn't see his face very well."

"Lawsy! he ain't what you'd call old--no," said Aunt 'Mira. "Now, let me see; he married 'Cinda Stone when he warn't yit thirty. There was some talk of him an' 'Rill Scattergood bein' sweet on each other onc't; but that was twenty year ago, I do b'lieve.

"Howsomever, if there _was_ anythin' betwixt Hopewell and 'Rill, I reckon her mother broke up the match. Mis' Scattergood never had no use for them Druggs. She said they was dreamers and never did amount to nothin'. Mis' Scattergood's allus been re'l masterful."

Janice nodded. She could imagine that the bird-like old lady she had met on the boat could be quite a.s.sertive if she so chose.

"Anyhow," said Aunt 'Mira, reflectively, "Hopewell stopped shinin'

about 'Rill all of a sudden. That was the time Mis' Scattergood was widdered an' come over here from Middletown to live with 'Rill.

"I declare for't! 'Rill warn't sech an old maid then. She was right purty, if she _had_ been teachin' school some time. Th' young men use ter buzz around her in them days.

"But when she broke off with Hopewell, she broke off with all.

Hopewell was spleeny about it--ya-as, indeed, he was. He soon took up with 'Cinda--jest as though 'twas out o' spite. Anyhow, 'fore any of us knowed it, they'd gone over to Middletown an' got married.

"'Cinda Stone was a right weakly sort o' critter. Of course Hopewell was good to her," pursued Aunt 'Mira. "Hopewell Drugg is as mild as dishwater, anyhow. He'd be perlite to a stray cat."

Janice was interested--she could not help being. Miss Scattergood, it seemed to her, was a pathetic figure; and the girl from Greensboro was just at an age to appreciate a bit of romance. The gray, dusty man in the dark, little store, playing his fiddle to the child that could only hear the quivering minor tones of it, held a place in Janice's thought, too.

"What do you do Sat.u.r.day mornings, Marty?" asked the visitor, at the breakfast table. Janice had already been to the Shower Bath and back, and the thrill of the early day was in her veins. Only a wolfish appet.i.te had driven her indoors when she smelled the pork frying.

Marty was just lounging to his seat,--he was almost always late to breakfast,--and he shut off a mighty yawn to reply to his cousin:

"Jest as near like I please as kin be."

"Sat.u.r.day afternoon, where I came from, is sort of a holiday; but Sat.u.r.day morning everybody tries to make things nice about the yard--fix flower-beds, rake the yard, make the paths nice, and all that."

"Huh!" grunted Marty. "That's work."

"No, it isn't. It's fun," declared Janice, brightly.

"What's the good?" demanded the boy.

"Why, the folks in Greensboro vie with each other to see who shall have the best-looking yard. Your mother hasn't many flowers----"

"Them dratted hens scratch up all the flowers I plant," sighed Aunt 'Mira. "I give up all hopes of havin' posies till Jason mends the henyard fence."

"Now you say yourself the hens only lay when they're rangin' around, 'Mira," observed Uncle Jason, mildly.

"Ya-as. They lay," admitted Aunt 'Mira. "But I don't git more'n ha'f of what they lay. They steal their nests so. Ol' Speckle brought off a brood only yesterday. I'd been wonderin' where that hen was layin'

for a month."

"But, anyway, we can rake the yard and trim the edges of the walk,"

Janice said to Marty.

"Ya-as, we kin," admitted Marty, grinning. "But will we?"

Janice, however, never lost her temper with this hobbledehoy cousin.

Marty could be coaxed, if not driven. After breakfast she urged him out to the shed, and they overhauled the conglomeration of rusted and decrepit hand tools, which had been gathered by Uncle Jason during forty years of desultory farming.

"Here're three rakes," said Marty. "All of 'em have lost teeth, an'--Hi tunket! that one's got a broken handle."

"But there are two which are usable," laughed Janice. "Come on, Marty.