We Girls: a Home Story Part 3

"Knew! Why shouldn't I know? It's big enough."

"Yes,--but about the whopping. And the figures are the smallest part of the difference. You're a pretty noticing boy, Steve."

Steve colored a little, and his eye twinkled. He saw that Ruth had caught him out.

"I guess you set it for a goody-trap," he said. "Folks can't help reading sign-boards when they go by. And besides, it's like the man that went to Van Amburgh's. I shall catch you forgetting, some fine day, and then I'll whop the whole over for you."

Ruth had been mending stockings, and was just folding up the last pair. She did not say any more, for she did not want to tease Stephen in her turn; but there was a little quiet smile just under her lips that she kept from pulling too hard at the corners, as she got up and went away with them to her room.

She stopped when she got to the open door of it, with her basket in her hand, and looked in from the threshold at the hanging scroll of Scripture texts printed in large clear letters,--a sheet for each day of the month,--and made to fold over and drop behind the black-walnut rod to which they were bound. It had been given her by her teacher at the Bible Cla.s.s,--Mrs. Ingleside; and Ruth loved Mrs. Ingleside very much.

Then she went to her bureau, and put her stockings in their drawer, and set the little basket, with its cotton-ball and darner, and maplewood egg, and small sharp scissors, on the top; and then she went and sat down by the window, in her white considering-chair.

For she had something to think about this morning.

Ruth's room had three doors. It was the middle room up stairs, in the beginning of the L. Mrs. Holabird's opened into it from the front, and just opposite her door another led into the large, light corner room at the end, which Rosamond and Barbara occupied. Stephen's was on the other side of the three-feet pa.s.sage which led straight through from the front staircase to the back of the house. The front staircase was a broad, low-stepped, old-fashioned one, with a landing half-way up; and it was from this landing that a branch half-flight came into the L, between these two smaller bedrooms. Now I have begun, I may as well tell you all about it; for, if you are like me, you will be glad to be taken fairly into a house you are to pay a visit in, and find out all the pleasantnesses of it, and whom they especially belong to.

Ruth's room was longest across the house, and Stephen's with it; behind his was only the s.p.a.ce taken by some closets and the square of staircase beyond. This staircase had landings also, and was lighted by a window high up in the wall. Behind Ruth's, as I have said, was the whole depth of a large apartment. But as the pa.s.sage divided the L unequally, it gave the rooms similar s.p.a.ce and shape, only at right angles to each other.

The sun came into Stephen's room in the morning, and into Ruth's in the afternoon; in the middle of the day the pa.s.sage was one long shine, from its south window at the end, right through,--except in such days as these, that were too deep in the summer to bear it, and then the green blinds were shut all around, and the warm wind drew through pleasantly in a soft shade.

When we brought our furniture from the house in the town, the large front rooms and the open halls used it up so, that it seemed as if there were hardly anything left but bedsteads and washstands and bureaus,--the very things that make up-stairs look so _very_ bedroomy.

And we wanted pretty places to sit in, as girls always do. Rosamond and Barbara made a box-sofa, fitted luxuriously with old pew-cushions sewed together, and a crib mattress cut in two and fashioned into seat and pillows; and a packing-case dressing-table, flounced with a skirt of white cross-barred muslin that Ruth had outgrown. In exchange for this Ruth bargained for the dimity curtains that had furnished their two windows before, and would not do for the three they had now.

Then she shut herself up one day in her room, and made them all go round by the hall and pa.s.sage, back and forth; and worked away mysteriously till the middle of the afternoon, when she unfastened all the doors again and set them wide, as they have for the most part remained ever since, in the daytimes; thus rendering Ruth's doings and ways particularly patent to the household, and most conveniently open to the privilege and second sight of story-telling.

The white dimity curtains--one pair of them--were up at the wide west window; the other pair was cut up and made over into three or four things,--drapery for a little old pine table that had come to light among attic lumber, upon which she had tacked it in neat plaitings around the sides, and overlapped it at the top with a plain hemmed cover of the same; a great discarded toilet-cushion freshly encased with more of it, and edged with magic ruffling; the stained top and tied-up leg of a little disabled teapoy, kindly disguised in uniform,--varied only with a narrow stripe of chintz tr.i.m.m.i.n.g in crimson arabesque,--made pretty with piles of books, and the Scripture scroll hung above it with its crimson cord and ta.s.sels; and in the window what she called afterward her "considering-chair," and in which she sat this morning; another antique, clothed purely from head to foot and made comfortable beneath with stout bagging nailed across, over the deficient cane-work.

Tin tacks and some considerable machining--for mother had lent her the help of her little "common sense" awhile--had done it all; and Ruth's room, with its oblong of carpet,--which Mrs. Holabird and she had made out before, from the brightest breadths of her old dove-colored one and a bordering of crimson Venetian, of which there had not been enough to put upon the staircase,--looked, as Barbara said, "just as if it had been done on purpose."

"It _says_ it all, anyhow, doesn't it?" said Ruth.

Ruth was delightedly satisfied with it,--with its situation above all; she liked to nestle in, in the midst of people; and she never minded their coming through, any more than they minded her slipping her three little bra.s.s bolts when she had a desire to.

She sat down in her considering-chair to-day, to think about Adelaide Marchbanks's invitation.

The two Marchbanks houses were very gay this summer. The married daughter of one family--Mrs. Reyburne--was at home from New York, and had brought a very fascinating young Mrs. Van Alstyne with her. Roger Marchbanks, at the other house, had a couple of college friends visiting him; and both places were merry with young girls,--several sisters in each family,--always. The Haddens were there a good deal, and there were people from the city frequently, for a few days at a time. Mrs. Linceford was staying at the Haddens, and Leslie Goldthwaite, a great pet of hers,--Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite's daughter, in the town,--was often up among them all.

The Holabirds were asked in to tea-drinkings, and to croquet, now and then, especially at the Haddens', whom they knew best; but they were not on "in and out" terms, from morning to night, as these others were among themselves; for one thing, the little daily duties of their life would not allow it. The "jolly times" on the Hill were a kind of Elf-land to them, sometimes patent and free, sometimes shrouded in the impalpable and impa.s.sable mist that shuts in the fairy region when it wills to be by itself for a time.

There was one little simple sesame which had a power this way for them, perhaps without their thinking of it; certainly it was not spoken of directly when the invitations were given and accepted.

Ruth's fingers had a little easy, gladsome knack at music; and I suppose sometimes it was only Ruth herself who realized how thoroughly the fingers earned the privilege of the rest of her bodily presence. She did not mind; she was as happy playing as Rosamond and Barbara dancing; it was all fair enough; everybody must be wanted for something; and Ruth knew that her music was her best thing. She wished and meant it to be; Ruth had plans in her head which her fingers were to carry out.

But sometimes there was a slight flavor in attention, that was not quite palatable, even to Ruth's pride. These three girls had each her own sort of dignity. Rosamond's measured itself a good deal by the accepted dignity of others; Barbara's insisted on its own standard; why shouldn't they--the Holabirds--settle anything? Ruth hated to have theirs hurt; and she did not like subserviency, or courting favor. So this morning she was partly disturbed and partly puzzled by what had happened.

Adelaide Marchbanks had overtaken her on the hill, on her way "down street" to do some errand, and had walked on with her very affably.

At parting she had said to her, in an off-hand, by-the-way fashion,--

"Ruth, why won't you come over to-night, and take tea? I should like you to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing, and she would like your playing.

There won't be any company; but we're having pretty good times now among ourselves."

Ruth knew what the "no company" meant; just that there was no regular inviting, and so no slight in asking her alone, out of her family; but she knew the Marchbanks parlors were always full of an evening, and that the usual set would be pretty sure to get together, and that the end of it all would be an impromptu German, for which she should play, and that the Marchbanks's man would be sent home with her at eleven o'clock.

She only thanked Adelaide, and said she "didn't know,--perhaps; but she hardly thought she could to-night; they had better not expect her," and got away without promising. She was thinking it over now.

She did not want to be stiff and disobliging; and she would like to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing. If it were only for herself, she would very likely think it a reasonable "quid pro quo," and modestly acknowledge that she had no claim to absolutely gratuitous compliment.

She would remember higher reason, also, than the _quid pro quo_; she would try to be glad in this little special "gift of ministering"; but it puzzled her about the others. How would they feel about it? Would they like it, her being asked so? Would they think she ought to go?

And what if she were to get into this way of being asked alone?--she the very youngest; not "in society" yet even as much as Rose and Barbara; though Barbara said _they_ "never 'came' out,--they just leaked out."

That was it; that would not do; she must not leak out, away from them, with her little waltz ripples; if there were any small help or power of hers that could be counted in to make them all more valued, she would not take it from the family fund and let it be counted alone to her sole credit. It must go with theirs. It was little enough that she could repay into the household that had given itself to her like a born home.

She thought she would not even ask Mrs. Holabird anything about it, as at first she meant to do.

But Mrs. Holabird had a way of coming right into things. "We girls"

means Mrs. Holabird as much as anybody. It was always "we girls" in her heart, since girls' mothers never can quite lose the girl out of themselves; it only multiplies, and the "everlasting nominative" turns into a plural.

Ruth still sat in her white chair, with her cheek on her hand and her elbow on the window-ledge, looking out across the pleasant swell of gra.s.s to where they were cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird's five-acre field, the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some new, gigantic kind of gra.s.shopper, chirping its tremendous laziness upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the front hall, through her own room and saw her there.

Mrs. Holabird never came through the rooms without a fresh thrill of pleasantness. Her home had _expressed_ itself here, as it had never done anywhere else. There was something in the fair, open, sunshiny roominess and cosey connection of these apartments, hers and her daughters', in harmony with the largeness and cheeriness and clearness in which her love and her wish for them held them always.

It was more glad than grand; and she aimed at no grandness; but the generous s.p.a.ce was almost splendid in its effect, as you looked through, especially to her who had lived and contrived in a "spy-gla.s.s house" so long.

The doors right through from front to back, and the wide windows at either end and all the way, gave such sweep and light; also the long mirrors, that had been from time unrememberable over the mantels in the town parlors, in the old, useless, horizontal style, and were here put, quite elegantly tall,--the one in Mrs. Holabird's room above her daintily appointed dressing-table (which was only two great square trunks full of blankets, that could not be stowed away anywhere else, dressed up in delicate-patterned chintz and set with her boxes and cushions and toilet-bottles), and the other, in "the girls' room,"

opposite; these made magnificent reflections and repet.i.tions; and at night, when they all lit their bed-candles, and vibrated back and forth with their last words before they shut their doors and subsided, gave a truly festival and illuminated air to the whole mansion; so that Mrs. Roderick would often ask, when she came in of a morning in their busiest time, "Did you have company last night? I saw you were all lit up."

"We had one candle apiece," Barbara would answer, very concisely.

"I do wish all our windows didn't look Mrs. Roderick's way," Rosamond said once, after she had gone.

"And that she _didn't_ have to come through our clothes-yard of a Monday morning, to see just how many white skirts we have in the wash," added Barbara.

But this is off the track.

"What is it, Ruth?" asked Mrs. Holabird, as she came in upon the little figure in the white chair, midway in the long light through the open rooms. "You didn't really mind Stephen, did you?"

"O no, indeed, aunt! I was only thinking out things. I believe I've done, pretty nearly. I guess I sha'n't go. I wanted to make sure I wasn't provoked."

"You're talking from where you left off, aren't you, Ruthie?"

"Yes, I guess so," said Ruth, laughing. "It seems like talking right on,--doesn't it?--when you speak suddenly out of a 'think.' I wonder what _alone_ really means. It doesn't ever quite seem alone. Something thinks alongside always, or else you couldn't keep it up."

"Are you making an essay on metaphysics? You're a queer little Ruth."

"Am I?" Ruth laughed again. "I can't help it. It _does_ answer back."

"And what was the answer about this time?"

That was how Ruth came to let it out.