The Copy-Cat and Other Stories Part 3

Meantime Lily and Amelia walked down the street until they came to a certain vacant lot intersected by a foot-path between tall, feathery gra.s.ses and goldenrod and asters and milkweed. They entered the foot-path, and swarms of little b.u.t.terflies rose around them, and once in a while a protesting b.u.mblebee.

"I am afraid we will be stung by the bees," said Amelia.

"b.u.mblebees never sting," said Lily; and Amelia believed her.

When the foot-path ended, there was the riverbank. The two little girls sat down under a clump of brook willows and talked, while the river, full of green and blue and golden lights, slipped past them and never stopped.

Then Lily proceeded to unfold a plan, which was not philosophical, but naughtily ingenious. By this time Lily knew very well that Amelia admired her, and imitated her as successfully as possible, considering the drawback of dress and looks.

When she had finished Amelia was quite pale. "I am afraid, I am afraid, Lily," said she.

"What of?"

"My mother will find out; besides, I am afraid it isn't right."

"Who ever told you it was wrong?"

"n.o.body ever did," admitted Amelia.

"Well, then you haven't any reason to think it is," said Lily, triumphantly. "And how is your mother ever going to find it out?"

"I don't know."

"Isn't she ill in her room? And does she ever come to kiss you good night, the way my mother does, when she is well?"

"No," admitted Amelia.

"And neither of your grandmothers?"

"Grandmother Stark would think it was silly, like mother, and Grandmother Wheeler can't go up and down stairs very well."

"I can't see but you are perfectly safe. I am the only one that runs any risk at all. I run a great deal of risk, but I am willing to take it,"

said Lily with a virtuous air. Lily had a small but rather involved scheme simply for her own ends, which did not seem to call for much virtue, but rather the contrary.

Lily had overheard Arnold Carruth and Johnny Trumbull and Lee Westminster and another boy, Jim Patterson, planning a most delightful affair, which even in the cases of the boys was fraught with danger, secrecy, and doubtful rect.i.tude. Not one of the four boys had had a vacation from the village that summer, and their young minds had become charged, as it were, with the seeds of revolution and rebellion. Jim Patterson, the son of the rector, and of them all the most venturesome, had planned to take--he called it "take"; he meant to pay for it, anyway, he said, as soon as he could shake enough money out of his nickel savings-bank--one of his father's Plymouth Rock chickens and have a chickenroast in the woods back of Dr. Trumbull's. He had planned for Johnny to take some ears of corn suitable for roasting from his father's garden; for Lee to take some cookies out of a stone jar in his mother's pantry; and for Arnold to take some potatoes. Then they four would steal forth under cover of night, build a camp-fire, roast their spoils, and feast.

Lily had resolved to be of the party. She resorted to no open methods; the stones of the fighting suffragettes were not for her, little honey-sweet, curled, and ruffled darling; rather the time-worn, if not time-sanctified, weapons of her s.e.x, little instruments of wiles, and tiny dodges, and tiny subterfuges, which would serve her best.

"You know," she said to Amelia, "you don't look like me. Of course you know that, and that can't be helped; but you do walk like me, and talk like me, you know that, because they call you 'CopyCat.'"

"Yes, I know," said poor Amelia.

"I don't mind if they do call you 'Copy-Cat,'" said Lily, magnanimously.

"I don't mind a bit. But, you see, my mother always comes up-stairs to kiss me good night after I have gone to bed, and tomorrow night she has a dinner-party, and she will surely be a little late, and I can't manage unless you help me. I will get one of my white dresses for you, and all you have to do is to climb out of your window into that cedar-tree--you know you can climb down that, because you are so afraid of burglars climbing up--and you can slip on my dress; you had better throw it out of the window and not try to climb in it, because my dresses tear awful easy, and we might get caught that way. Then you just sneak down to our house, and I shall be outdoors; and when you go up-stairs, if the doors should be open, and anybody should call, you can answer just like me; and I have found that light curly wig Aunt Laura wore when she had her head shaved after she had a fever, and you just put that on and go to bed, and mother will never know when she kisses you good night. Then after the roast I will go to your house, and climb up that tree, and go to bed in your room. And I will have one of your gingham dresses to wear, and very early in the morning I will get up, and you get up, and we both of us can get down the back stairs without being seen, and run home."

Amelia was almost weeping. It was her worshiped Lily's plan, but she was horribly scared. "I don't know," she faltered.

"Don't know! You've got to! You don't love me one single bit or you wouldn't stop to think about whether you didn't know." It was the world-old argument which floors love. Amelia succ.u.mbed.

The next evening a frightened little girl clad in one of Lily Jennings's white embroidered frocks was racing to the Jenningses' house, and another little girl, not at all frightened, but enjoying the stimulus of mischief and unwontedness, was racing to the wood behind Dr. Trumbull's house, and that little girl was clad in one of Amelia Wheeler's ginghams. But the plan went all awry.

Lily waited, snuggled up behind an alder-bush, and the boys came, one by one, and she heard this whispered, although there was no necessity for whispering, "Jim Patterson, where's that hen?"

"Couldn't get her. Grabbed her, and all her tail-feathers came out in a bunch right in my hand, and she squawked so, father heard. He was in his study writing his sermon, and he came out, and if I hadn't hid behind the chicken-coop and then run I couldn't have got here. But I can't see as you've got any corn, Johnny Trumbull."

"Couldn't. Every single ear was cooked for dinner."

"I couldn't bring any cookies, either," said Lee Westminster; "there weren't any cookies in the jar."

"And I couldn't bring the potatoes, because the outside cellar door was locked," said Arnold Carruth. "I had to go down the back stairs and out the south door, and the inside cellar door opens out of our dining-room, and I daren't go in there."

"Then we might as well go home," said Johnny Trumbull. "If I had been you, Jim Patterson, I would have brought that old hen if her tail-feathers had come out. Seems to me you scare awful easy."

"Guess if you had heard her squawk!" said Jim, resentfully. "If you want to try to lick me, come on, Johnny Trumbull. Guess you don't da.r.s.e call me scared again."

Johnny eyed him standing there in the gloom. Jim was not large, but very wiry, and the ground was not suited for combat. Johnny, although a victor, would probably go home considerably the worse in appearance; and he could antic.i.p.ate the consequences were his father to encounter him.

"Shucks!" said Johnny Trumbull, of the fine old Trumbull family and Madame's exclusive school. "Shucks! who wants your old hen? We had chicken for dinner, anyway."

"So did we," said Arnold Carruth.

"We did, and corn," said Lee.

"We did," said Jim.

Lily stepped forth from the alder-bush. "If," said she, "I were a boy, and had started to have a chicken-roast, I would have HAD a chicken-roast."

But every boy, even the valiant Johnny Trumbull, was gone in a mad scutter. This sudden apparition of a girl was too much for their nerves.

They never even knew who the girl was, although little Arnold Carruth said she had looked to him like "Copy-Cat," but the others scouted the idea.

Lily Jennings made the best of her way out of the wood across lots to the road. She was not in a particularly enviable case. Amelia Wheeler was presumably in her bed, and she saw nothing for it but to take the difficult way to Amelia's.

Lily tore a great rent in the gingham going up the cedar-tree, but that was nothing to what followed. She entered through Amelia's window, her prim little room, to find herself confronted by Amelia's mother in a wrapper, and her two grandmothers. Grandmother Stark had over her arm a beautiful white embroidered dress. The two old ladies had entered the room in order to lay the white dress on a chair and take away Amelia's gingham, and there was no Amelia. Mrs. Diantha had heard the commotion, and had risen, thrown on her wrapper, and come. Her mother had turned upon her.

"It is all your fault, Diantha," she had declared.

"My fault?" echoed Mrs. Diantha, bewildered. "Where is Amelia?"

"We don't know," said Grandmother Stark, "but you have probably driven her away from home by your cruelty."

"Cruelty?"

"Yes, cruelty. What right had you to make that poor child look like a fright, so people laughed at her? We have made her some dresses that look decent, and had come here to leave them, and to take away those old gingham things that look as if she lived in the almshouse, and leave these, so she would either have to wear them or go without, when we found she had gone."

It was at that crucial moment that Lily entered by way of the window.

"Here she is now," shrieked Grandmother Stark. "Amelia, where--" Then she stopped short.

Everybody stared at Lily's beautiful face suddenly gone white. For once Lily was frightened. She lost all self-control. She began to sob. She could scarcely tell the absurd story for sobs, but she told, every word.