The Little Colonel's Holidays Part 5

Bradley laughed so loudly over the success of his joke, that Betty came out smiling to see what was the matter, and was surprised to see Lloyd marching indignantly into the house, her head held high and her face very red.

"Well, I didn't do anything but give her a handful of angleworms," said Bradley, in reply to Betty's demand for an explanation. "Molly heard her say that she despised worms, and that nothing could make her touch one or put it on a hook. I was just showing her for her own good that there is nothing to be afraid of in a harmless little fishing-worm, and she had to go off and get mad. Girls are such touchy things. They make me tired."

Long experience had taught Betty that the best thing to do, when Bradley was in a teasing mood, was to keep out of his way, so she turned without a word and went in search of Lloyd. As she did so, the rain that they had been expecting all morning came dashing against the window-panes in torrents. Suddenly it grew so dark one could scarcely see to read without lighting a lamp.

"Come up to my room, Lloyd," called Betty, stopping at the parlour door, with Davy tagging behind her. "It's lighter up there, and I love to be close up under the roof when the rain patters on it."

"Wait till I finish washing my hands," answered Lloyd, looking up with a disgusted face. "Ugh! I can't wash away that horrid squirmin' feelin', even with a nail-brush."

As Davy climbed the stairs after them he caught Lloyd by the dress.

"Say!" he exclaimed in a half whisper, "it was Molly that told Bradley to put those worms on you. She dared him to, and they're laughing about it now, down in the kitchen."

It was on the tip of Lloyd's tongue to say, "They're both of them mean, hateful things, and I'll get even with them if it takes all the rest of my visit to do it." But before the words could slip out she remembered the definition, "Putting up with anything that happens to you without making a fuss about it."

"There couldn't anything nastier happen than fishin'-worms," she said to herself, "so this must be one of the times I need patience the very most."

Although the lesson was remembered in time to keep her from getting into a rage, it did not put her into a good humour. It was a very unhappy little face that looked out of the gable window, against which the autumn rain was dashing. Her head ached from all its b.u.mps and bruises, and her eyes wore as forlorn an expression as if she were some unhappy Crusoe, cast away on a desert island with no hope of rescue.

Davy perched himself on the trunk and awaited developments. Betty looked around the room in search of something to brighten the dull day; but the bare walls offered no suggestion of entertainment. Lloyd's fingers drumming restlessly on the window-pane, and the patter of the rain on the roof, were the only sounds in the room.

"I wondah if it's rainin' where Joyce and Eugenia are," said the Little Colonel, after awhile, breaking the long silence.

"Oh, let's write to them," cried Betty, eagerly. "One can write East and one can write West, and we'll tell them all that has happened in the Cuckoo's Nest since we came back to it."

Davy slid off the trunk in silent disapproval when the writing material was brought out, and the girls began their letters. The scratching of the pens across the paper and the dismal dripping of the rain was too monotonous for him, and he felt forced to go below in search of livelier companionship.

CHAPTER VI.

MOLLY'S STORY.

THEY had been writing a long time, when the Little Colonel looked up with a mischievous smile. "Joyce will think that this is a wondahful place," she said. "I've told her all about my bein' chased by a Barley-bright witch, and how ugly she was, and what Davy said about her goin' through keyholes. It sounds so real when I read it ovah that I could half-way make myself believe that she is one. I'm goin' to slip across into her room now, and see if I can't find the broomstick that she rides around on at night. If there'd just be a black cat sittin' on her pillow, I could almost believe what Davy said about her hoodoo word.

Wouldn't she be mad if she knew what was in this letter? I told Joyce how mean she'd acted about the fishin'-worms too, and how she's scowled at us evah since we came."

Betty looked up with a preoccupied smile, for she had long ago finished her letter to Eugenia and was busy with some verses that she was trying to write about the rain. The rhymes were falling into place almost as easily and musically as the rain-drops tinkling down the eaves, and her face was flushed with the pleasure of it. She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she did not understand what Lloyd was saying, and smiled a reply without the faintest idea of what it was that she proposed to do.

Lloyd laid down her pen, and, tiptoeing across the narrow pa.s.sage that divided Betty's room from Molly's, opened the door and looked in. She had thought that the parlour bedroom down-stairs was queer, and that Betty's room was pitifully bare and common, but such cheerlessness as this she had certainly never seen before, and scarcely imagined.

It was an attic-like room over the kitchen, with such a low sloping ceiling that she could touch it with her hand, except when she stood in the middle of the room. There was a rough, unpainted floor, a cot, a dry-goods box covered with newspaper, on which stood a tin basin and a broken-nosed water-pitcher. Some nails, driven along the wall, held a row of clothes, and a chair with both rockers broken off was propped against the wall. Lloyd looked around her with a shiver. The only bright spot in the room was a bunch of golden-rod in a bottle, and the only picture, a page torn from an ill.u.s.trated newspaper, and pinned to the wall.

Wondering what kind of a picture such a creature as the Barley-bright witch would choose to decorate her room, Lloyd walked across to examine it. It was the front page from an old _Harper's Weekly_. The date caught her eye first: December 25, 1897. And then she found herself looking into a room still more pitiful than the one in which she stood, for the pictured room was part of an old New York tenement, and sobbing in the corner was a ragged, half-starved little waif, heartbroken because Santa Claus had pa.s.sed her by, and she had found an empty stocking on Christmas morning.

Lloyd could not see the face hidden in the tattered ap.r.o.n, which the disappointed little hands held up. She could not hear the sobs that she knew were shaking the thin little shoulders, but she felt the misery of the scene as forcibly as if the real child stood before her. As she stood and looked, she knew that if all the troubles and disappointments of her whole life could be put together, they would be as only a drop compared to the grief of the poor little creature in the picture.

"Oh, Betty!" she called. "Come heah quick! I want to show you something."

The distress in Lloyd's voice made Betty hurry across the pa.s.sage with her pen in her hand, wondering what could be the matter.

"Look!" exclaimed Lloyd, pointing to the picture. "How can Molly keep such a thing in her room? Do you s'pose she was evah like that? It's enough to make her cry every time she looks at it."

"Maybe she used to be like that," said Betty, examining the picture carefully, "and maybe she keeps it here to remind her how much better off she is now than she used to be."

"I can't see that her room is much nicer," said Lloyd, looking around with an expression of disgust.

"It always has been used as a sort of storeroom," explained Betty. "This is the first time I've been in here since I came back, and I didn't know how it had been fixed for Molly. Cousin Hetty hasn't any time or money to spend making it look nice. Besides, she is only in here for a little while. She is to have my room when I go away. If I'm abroad all winter, and with Joyce next summer, and at Locust going to school the year after, as G.o.dmother has planned, I suppose I'll never be back here again to really live. I'm going to make a new pincushion and a cover for my bureau, and put a white curtain at the window before I leave. Maybe it will look as fine to Molly as my white and gold room did to me at the House Beautiful. It isn't any wonder she feels jealous of us, when she hasn't a single nice thing in the whole world."

"Maybe I oughtn't to have written such spiteful things about her to Joyce," said Lloyd, whose heart began to soften and whose conscience p.r.i.c.ked as she turned again to the picture.

But even while they were planning the changes they would make in the gable room for Molly, there was a stealthy step on the stairs, and Molly herself stood in the door, glaring at them like an angry tigress.

"How _dare_ you!" she cried, stamping her foot in a furious rage. "How dare you come in here spying on me and making fun of my things and looking at my picture! You sha'n't look at my little Dot when she is so miserable. You sha'n't put eyes on her again!"

With a white angry face she dashed past them, tore the picture from the wall, and with it held tightly against her threw herself face downward on the cot.

"We were not spying on you," began Lloyd, indignantly. "We were not making fun of your things!"

"I know better. Get out of this room, both of you! This minute!" cried Molly, lifting her white face in which her angry eyes burned like flames. Then she buried her head in her pillow, sobbing bitterly: "If y-you were an or-orphan--and hadn't but one thing in the world, you wouldn't want p-people to come sp-spying on _you_, that way."

Puzzled and almost frightened at such an outburst, the girls retreated to the doorway, and then as she continued to storm at them they went back to Betty's room. They could hear her sobbing even with the door shut. Presently Betty said: "I'm going in there again, and see if I can find out what's the matter. I am an orphan, too, and maybe I can coax her to tell me, when she knows how sorry I am for her."

People wondered sometimes at Betty's way of walking into their hearts; but sympathy is an open sesame to nearly all gates, and sympathy was Betty's unfailing key. It was always ready in her loving little hand.

Presently, when Molly's wild burst of angry sobbing had subsided somewhat, Betty ventured back to her. Lloyd heard a low murmuring of voices, first Betty's and then Molly's, as one little orphan poured out her story to the other. It was nearly an hour before Betty came back to her room. Lloyd had written another letter while she waited, and now sat leaning against the window-sill, listening to the monotonous drip-drop-drip-drop from a leaky spout above the window.

"Well, what was it?" she asked, eagerly, as Betty opened the door.

"Oh, you never heard anything so pitiful," exclaimed Betty, sitting down on her bed and drawing her feet up under her comfortably before she began. "It is just like a story in a book.

"Molly says that when she was little her father was a railroad conductor, and she and her mother and grandmother and baby sister lived in a little house at the edge of town. It was near enough the railroad track for them to wave to her father, from the front door, whenever his train pa.s.sed. He could come home only once a week. She and Dot thought he was the best father anybody ever had, for he never came home without something in his pockets for them, and he rode them around on his shoulders and played with them all the time he was in the house. He was always bringing things to their mother, too, a pretty cup and saucer or a pot of flowers, or something to wear; and as for the old grandmother, she spent her time telling the neighbours how good her son was to her.

"But Molly says one summer they moved away from the house by the railroad track and took a smaller one in town, where there wasn't any garden and trees, and where there wasn't even any gra.s.s, except a narrow strip in the front yard. Her father had lost his place as a conductor, and was out of work for a long time. By and by they sold their piano and the carpets and the nicest chairs. Then they moved again. This time it was to a cottage without even a strip of gra.s.s. The front door opened out on the pavement and there was no place for them to play except on the streets. Their father never brought anything home to them any more, and never played with them. They couldn't understand what made him so cross, or what made their mother cry so much, until one day she heard some of their neighbours talking.

"She and Dot were waiting in the corner grocery for a loaf of bread, and she heard one woman say to another, in a low tone, 'Those are Jim Conner's children, poor little kids. My man says he used to be one of the best conductors on the road, but he lost his job when he took to getting drunk every Sat.u.r.day night. He's going down-hill now, fast as a man can go. Heaven only knows what'll become of his family if he doesn't put on the brakes soon.'

"Then Molly knew what was the matter, and she didn't make her mother cry by asking any more questions when they moved again the next week.

That time they had only two rooms up-stairs over a barber shop, and Molly's mother died that summer. Then her father drank harder than ever, and never brought any money home, and by fall they had sold nearly everything that was left, and moved into one room in an old tenement-house, up two flights of stairs.

"Their grandmother had to go away every morning to look for work. She was too old to wash, or she might have had plenty to do. Sometimes she got odd jobs of cleaning, and sometimes she made b.u.t.tonholes for a pants factory. It took nearly all the money she could make to pay the rent of that room, and often and often, Molly said, there were days when they had nothing but sc.r.a.ps of stale bread to eat. Sometimes there wasn't even that, and she and Dot would be so cold and hungry that they would huddle together in a corner and cry. She said it made her feel so awful to hear poor little Dot sobbing for something to eat, that she would have gone out on the streets and begged, but their grandmother always locked them up when she went away."

"What for?" interrupted Lloyd, who was listening with breathless attention.

"She was afraid that their father would come home drunk and find them alone. He didn't live with them any more, but several times, before she began locking them up, he staggered in, and frightened them dreadfully.

Their ragged clothes and their half-starved looks seemed to make him furious. It hurt his conscience, I suppose, and that made him want to hurt somebody. Molly says he beat them sometimes till the neighbours interfered. More than once he shut them up in a dark closet, trying to make them tell where their grandmother kept her money. They couldn't tell him, for she didn't have any money, but he kept them shut up in the dark, hours at a time.

"One night he came in crosser than they had ever seen him, and threw things around dreadfully. He struck his old mother in the face, beat Molly, and threw a stick of wood at little Dot. It just missed putting out her right eye, and made such a deep cut over it that they had to send for a doctor to sew it up. He said she would carry the scar all her life, and he could not see how the blow had missed killing her.