The Cinder Pond Part 13

CHAPTER XII

A HELPFUL GRANDFATHER

During that first winter, Jeanne was fairly contented. Her school work was new and kept her fairly busy, and in her cousins' bookshelves she discovered many delightful books for boys and girls. Heretofore, she had read no stories. She had been too busy rearing Mollie's family.

Shy and sensitive, for several months she made no real friends among her schoolmates. How _could_ she, with a horrible past to conceal? To be sure, when she thought of the big, beautiful lake, the summer days on the old dock, the lovely reflections in the Cinder Pond, the swallows going to bed in the old furnace chimney, the red sun going down behind the distant town, the kind Old Captain, the warm affection of Mollie's children, not to mention the daily companionship of her nice little father, it seemed as if her past had been anything _but_ horrible. But no city child, she feared, would ever be able to understand that, when even the grown-ups couldn't.

From the very first, her Uncle Charles had seemed not to like her. And sometimes it seemed to Jeannette that her Aunt Agatha eyed her coldly and resentfully. She couldn't understand it.

But James, the butler, and Maggie, the maid, sometimes gossiped about it, as the best of servants will gossip.

"It's like this," said James, seating himself on the corner of the pantry table. "Old Mr. Huntington is the real master of this house.

Young Mrs. Huntington comes next. Mr. Charles is just a puddin'-head."

"You mean figure-head," said Maggie.

"Same thing. Now, Mr. Huntington owns all this (James's comprehensive gesture included a large portion of the earth's surface), and naturally Mr. Charles expects to be the heir, when the old gentleman pa.s.ses away.

Now, listen (James's voice dropped, confidentially). There's a young nephew of mine in Ball and Brewster's law-office. One day, when he was filing away a doc.u.ment with the name Huntington on it, he mentioned me being here, to another clerk--Old Pitman, it was. Well, Old Pitman said it was himself that had made a copy of old Mr. Huntington's will, leaving all that he had to his son Charles. Now lookee here. Supposin'

old Mr. Huntington was to soften toward his dead daughter for runnin'

away with that Frenchman, and was to make a new will leavin' everything to his grand-child--that new little girl. Between you and me, she's a sight better child than them other three put together."

"He wouldn't," said Maggie. "Of course, he might leave her _something_."

"That's it. Mark my words, Mr. and Mrs. Charles can't warm to that child because they're afraid of her; afraid of what she might get. She's a frozen terror, Missus is."

"Well, they're as cold to her as a pair of milk cans, them two. Maybe that's the reason."

Possibly it was. And it is quite possible, too, that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Charles Huntington realized the reason for their lack of cordiality. Only, they were _not_ cordial.

At first, Jeanne had seen but little of her grandfather. On pleasant days he sat with his book in the fenced-in garden behind the house. On chilly days, he sat alone in his own sitting-room, where there was a gas log. But sometimes, at the table, he would ask Jeanne questions about her school work.

"Well, Jeannette, how about school! Are you learning a lot?"

"Ever so much," Jeanne would reply. "There are so many things _to_ learn."

One day, when he asked the usual question, Jeannette's countenance grew troubled.

"Next week," she confided, "we are to have written examinations in _everything_ and there are a thousand spots where I haven't caught up with the cla.s.s. Mathematics, language, United States history, and French. The books are different, you see, from the ones I had. I'll have to _cram_. Mathematics are the worst. I _can't_ do the examples."

"Suppose you bring them to me, after lunch. I used to think I was a mathematician."

That was the beginning of a curious friendship between the little girl and the very quiet old man. After that, there was hardly a day in which Jeanne, whose cla.s.s was ahead of her in mathematics, did not appeal for help.

She liked her grandfather. He seemed nearer her own age than anyone else in the house. You see, when people get to be ninety or a hundred, they are able to be friends with persons who are only seventy or eighty--a matter of twenty years makes no difference at all. Mr. Huntington was sixty-eight, which is old enough to enjoy a friendship of _any_ age.

But when people are young like Pearl and Clara, two years' difference in their ages makes a tremendous barrier. Clara was almost three years older than Jeanne, and Pearl was fourteen months older than Clara.

Harold was younger than his sisters but older than Jeanne, who often seemed younger than her years.

Pearl and Clara looked down, with scorn, upon _any_ child of twelve.

Indeed, they had been born old. Some children are, you know. Also, it seemed to their grandfather, they had been born _impolite_. For all that they called her "The Cinder Pond Savage," Jeanne's manners were really very good. She seemed to know, instinctively, how to do the right thing; that is, after she became a little accustomed to her new way of living.

And she was always very considerate of other people's feelings. So was her grandfather, most of the time. But Mrs. Huntington wasn't; and her children were very like her; cold, self-centered, and decidedly sn.o.bbish.

Jeanne was quite certain that her girl cousins had never _played_.

Harold, to be sure, occasionally played jokes on the younger members of the family or on the servants; but they were usually rather cruel, unpleasant jokes, like putting a rat in Maggie's bed, or water in Pearl's shoes, or spiders down Clara's back. For Jeanne, he reserved the pleasant torture of teasing her about her father.

"Ugh!" he would say, holding Jeanne's precious mail as far as possible from him, while, with the other hand, he held his nose, "this must be for you--it smells of fish. Your father must have sold a couple while he was writing this."

Sometimes he would point to shoe advertis.e.m.e.nts in the papers, with: "Here's your chance, Miss Savage. No need to go barefoot when your five years are up. Just lay in a whopping supply of shoes, all sizes, at one-sixty-nine."

His grandfather liked his youngest grandchild's manners. He told himself, once he even told his son, that he couldn't possibly give any affection to the daughter of "that wretched Frenchman" who had stolen _his_ daughter. Perhaps he couldn't, just at first. No doubt, he _thought_ he couldn't. But he _did_. 'Way down in his lonesome old heart he was glad that mathematics were hard for her, because he was glad that she needed his help.

"Just what are you thinking?" asked her grandfather, one day.

"I was making an example," explained Jeanne. "I've been here seven months. That leaves four years and five months; but the last two months went faster than the first two. If five years seemed like a thousand years to begin with, and the last two months--"

"I refuse," said her grandfather, with a sudden twinkle in his eye, "to tackle any such example as that."

"Well," laughed Jeanne, "here's another. Miss Wardell asked us in school today to decide what we'd like to do when we're grown up. We're to tell her tomorrow."

"Rather short notice, isn't it?"

"Ye--es," said Jeanne. "You see, ever since I visited Miss Warden's sister's kindergarten, I've thought I'd like to teach _that_. But I thought I'd like to get married, too."

"What!" gasped her grandfather.

"Get married. I should like to bring up a family _right_--with the proper tools. Old Captain says you have to have the proper tools to sew with. _I_ think you have to have the proper tools to bring up a family.

Tooth-brushes and stocking-straps, smelly soap and cold cream and underclothes."

"Have you picked out a husband?" asked her grandfather.

"That's the worst of it. You have to have one to earn money to buy the proper tools. But it's a great nuisance to have a husband around, Bridget says. She's had three; and she'd rather cook for Satan himself, she says, than a husband!"

"Jeannette! You mustn't repeat Bridget's conversations. Does Mrs.

Huntington like you to talk to the servants?"

"No," returned Jeanne, blushing a little. "But--but sometimes I just have to talk. You see--well, you see--"

"Yes?"

"Well, Bridget likes to be talked to. I'm not sure, always, that anybody else--well, it's easy to talk to Bridget."

"How about me?"

"You come next," a.s.sured Jeanne.

The next day Jeanne returned from school with her big black eyes fairly sparkling. She went at once to her grandfather's room.