We Girls: a Home Story Part 2

"But," said mother, in her most conciliatory way, "it must be two or three months, Winny, before we move, if we do go; and I should be glad to have you stay and help us through."

"Ah, sure, I'd do annything to hilp yiz through; an' I'm sure, I taks an intheresht in yiz ahl, down to the little cat hersel'; an' indeed I niver tuk an intheresht in anny little cat but that little cat; but I couldn't go live where it wud be so loahnsome, an' I can't be out oo a plaashe, ye see."

It was no use talking; it was only transposing sentences; she "tuk a graat intheresht in us, an' sure she'd do annything to hilp us, but she must just be lukkin out fer hersel'." And that very day she had the kitchen scrubbed up at a most unwonted hour, and her best bonnet on,--a rim of flowers and lace, with a wide expanse--of ungarnished head between it and the chignon it was supposed to accommodate,--and took her "afternoon out" to search for some new situation, where people were subject neither to sickness nor removals nor company nor children nor much of anything; and where, under these circ.u.mstances, and especially if there were "set tubs, and hot and cold water," she would probably remain just about as long as her "intheresht" would _not_ allow of her continuing with us.

A kitchen exodus is like other small natural commotions,--sure to happen when anything greater does. When the sun crosses the line we have a gale down below.

"_Now_ what shall we do?" asked Mrs. Holabird, forlornly, coming back into the sitting-room out of that vacancy in the farther apartments which spreads itself in such a still desertedness of feeling all through the house.

"Just what we've done before, motherums!" said Barbara, more bravely than she felt. "The next one is somewhere. Like Tupper's 'wife of thy youth,' she must be 'now living upon the earth.' In fact, I don't doubt there's a long line of them yet, threaded in and out among the rest of humanity, all with faces set by fate toward our back door.

There's always a coming woman, in that direction at least."

"I would as lief come across the staying one," said Mrs. Holabird, with meekness.

It cooled down our enthusiasm. Stephen, especially, was very much quenched.

The next one was not only somewhere, but everywhere, it seemed, and nowhere. "Everything by turns and nothing long," Barbara wrote up over the kitchen chimney with the baker's chalk. We had five girls between that time and our moving to Westover, and we had to move without a girl at last; only getting a woman in to do days' work. But I have not come to the family-moving yet.

The house-moving was the pretty part. Every pleasant afternoon, while the building was upon the rollers, we walked over, and went up into all the rooms, and looked out of every window, noting what new pictures they gave as the position changed from day to day; how now this tree and now that shaded them: how we gradually came to see by the end of the Haddens' barn, and at last across it,--for the slope, though gradual, was long,--and how the sunset came in more and more, as we squared toward the west; and there was always a thrill of excitement when we felt under us, as we did again and again, the onward momentary surge of the timbers, as the workmen brought all rightly to bear, and the great team of oxen started up. Stephen called these earthquakes.

We found places, day by day, where it would be nice to stop. It was such a funny thing to travel along in a house that might stop anywhere, and thenceforward belong. Only, in fact, it couldn't; because, like some other things that seem a matter of choice, it was all pre-ordained; and there was a solid stone foundation waiting over on the west side, where grandfather meant it to be.

We got little new peeps at the southerly hills, in the fresh breaks between trees and buildings that we went by. As we reached the broad, open crown, we saw away down beyond where it was still and woodsy; and the nice farm-fields of Grandfather Holabird's place looked sunny and pleasant and real countrified.

It was not a steep eminence on either side; if it had been the great house could not have been carried over as it was. It was a grand generous swell of land, lifting up with a slow serenity into pure airs and splendid vision. We did not know, exactly, where the highest point had been; but as we came on toward the little walled-in excavation which seemed such a small mark to aim at, and one which we might so easily fail to hit after all, we saw how behind us rose the green bosom of the field against the sky, and how, day by day, we got less of the great town within our view as we settled down upon our side of the ridge.

The air was different here, it was full of hill and pasture.

There were not many trees immediately about the spot where we were to be; but a great group of ashes and walnuts stood a little way down against the roadside, and all around in the far margins of the fields were beautiful elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the un.o.bstructed sky.

The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, just where the walls were laid; that was why Grandfather Holabird had chosen the spot. There could be a cellar-kitchen; and it had been needful for the moving, that all the rambling, outrunning L, which had held the kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and disposed of as mere lumber. It was only the main building--L-shaped still, of three very large rooms below and five by more subdivision above--which had majestically taken up its line of march, like the star of empire, westward. All else that was needful must be rebuilt.

Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen. It would be inconvenient with one servant. But Grandfather Holabird had planned the house before he offered it to us to live in. What we were going to save in rent we must take out cheerfully in extra steps.

It was in the bright, lengthening days of April, when the bluebirds came fluttering out of fairy-land, that the old house finally stopped, and stood staring around it with its many eyes,--wide open to the daylight, all its green winkers having been taken off,--to see where it was and was likely to be for the rest of its days. It had a very knowing look, we thought, like a house that had seen the world.

The sun walked round it graciously, if not inquisitively. He flashed in at the wide parlor windows and the rooms overhead, as soon as he got his brow above the hill-top. Then he seemed to sidle round southward, not slanting wholly out his morning cheeriness until the noonday glory slanted in. At the same time he began with the sitting-room opposite, through the one window behind; and then through the long, glowing afternoon, the whole bright west let him in along the full length of the house, till he just turned the last corner, and peeped in, on the longest summer days, at the very front. This was what he had got so far as to do by the time we moved in,--as if he stretched his very neck to find out the last there was to learn about it, and whether nowhere in it were really yet any human life. He quieted down in his mind, I suppose, when from morning to night he found somebody to beam at, and a busy doing in every room. He took it serenely then, as one of the established things upon the earth, and put us in the regular list of homes upon his round, that he was to leave so many cubic feet of light at daily.

I think he _might_ like to look in at that best parlor. With the six snowy-curtained windows, it was like a great white blossom; and the deep-green carpet and the walls with vine-leaves running all over them, in the graceful-patterned paper that Rosamond chose, were like the moss and foliage among which it sprung. Here and there the light glinted upon gilded frame or rich bronze or pure Parian, and threw out the lovely high tints, and deepened the shadowy effects, of our few fine pictures. We had little of art, but that little was choice. It was Mr. Holabird's weakness, when money was easy with him, to bring home straws like these to the home nest. So we had, also, a good many nice books; for, one at a time, when there was no hurrying bill to be paid, they had not seemed much to buy; and in our brown room, where we sat every day, and where our ivies had kindly wonted themselves already to the broad, bright windows, there were stands and cases well filled, and a great round family table in the middle, whose worn cloth hid its shabbiness under the comfort of delicious volumes ready to the hand, among which, central of all, stood the Shekinah of the home-spirit,--a tall, large-globed lamp that drew us cosily into its round of radiance every night.

Not these June nights though. I will tell you presently what the June nights were at Westover.

We worked hard in those days, but we were right blithe about it. We had at last got an Irish girl from "far down,"--that is their word for the north country at home, and the north country is where the best material comes from,--who was willing to air her ignorance in our kitchen, and try our Christian patience, during a long pupilage, for the modest sum of three dollars a week; than which "she could not come indeed for less," said the friend who brought her. "All the girls was gettin' that." She had never seen dipped toast, and she "couldn't do starched clothes very skilful"; but these things had nothing to do with established rates of wages.

But who cared, when it was June, and the smell of green gra.s.s and the singing of birds were in the air, and everything indoors was clean, and fresh with the wonderful freshness of things set every one in a new place? We worked hard and we made it look lovely, if the things were old; and every now and then we stopped in the midst of a busy rush, at door or window, to see joyfully and exclaim with ecstasy how grandly and exquisitely Nature was furbishing up her beautiful old things also,--a million for one sweet touches outside, for ours in.

"Westover is no longer an adverbial phrase, even qualifying the verb 'to go,'" said Barbara, exultingly, looking abroad upon the family settlement, to which our new barn, rising up, added another building.

"It is an undoubted substantive proper, and takes a preposition before it, except when it is in the nominative case."

Because of the cellar-kitchen, there was a high piazza built up to the sitting-room windows on the west, which gradually came to the ground-level along the front. Under this was the woodshed. The piazza was open, unroofed: only at the front door was a wide covered portico, from which steps went down to the gravelled entrance. A light low railing ran around the whole.

Here we had those blessed country hours of day-done, when it was right and lawful to be openly idle in this world, and to look over through the beautiful evening glooms to neighbor worlds, that showed always a round of busy light, and yet seemed somehow to keep holiday-time with us, and to be only out at play in the s.p.a.cious ether.

We used to think of the sunset all the day through, wondering what new glory it would spread for us, and gathering eagerly to see, as for the witnessing of a pageant.

The moon was young, for our first delight; and the evening planet hung close by; they dropped down through the gold together, till they touched the very rim of the farthest possible horizon; when they slid silently beneath, we caught our suspended breath.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"But the curtain isn't down," said Barbara, after a hush.

No. The great scene was all open, still. Wide from north to south stretched the deep, sweet heaven, full of the tenderest tints and softliest creeping shadows; the tree-fringes stood up against it; the gentle winds swept through, as if creatures winged, invisible, went by; touched, one by one, with glory, the stars burned on the blue; we watched as if any new, unheard-of wonder might appear; we looked out into great depths that narrow daylight shut us in from. Daylight was the curtain.

"We've got the best balcony seats, haven't we, father?" Barbara said again, coming to where Mr. Holabird sat, and leaning against the railing.

"The front row, and season tickets!"

"Every one, all summer. Only think!" said Ruth.

"Pho! You'll get used to it," answered Stephen, as if he knew human nature, and had got used himself to most things.

CHAPTER II.

AMPHIBIOUS.

"What day of the month is it?" asked Mrs. Holabird, looking up from her letter.

Ruth told.

"How do you always know the day of the month?" said Rosamond. "You are as pat as the almanac. I have to stop and think whether anything particular has happened, to remember _any_ day by, since the first, and then count up. So, as things don't happen much out here, I'm never sure of anything except that it can't be more than the thirty-first; and as to whether it can be that, I have to say over the old rhyme in my head."

"I know how she tells," spoke up Stephen. "It's that thing up in her room,--that pious thing that whops over. It has the figures down at the bottom; and she whops it every morning."

Ruth laughed.

"What do you try to tease her for?" said Mrs. Holabird.

"It doesn't tease her. She thinks it's funny. She laughed, and you only puckered."

Ruth laughed again. "It wasn't only that," she said.

"Well, what then?"

"To think you knew."