The Bay State Monthly. Volume 2, No. 3, December, 1884

ELIZABETH.[9 - Copyright, 1884, by Frances C. Sparhawk. All rights reserved.]

A ROMANCE OF COLONIAL DAYS

BY FRANCES C. SPARHAWK, Author of "A Lazy Man's Work."

CHAPTER III.

IDLESSE

"Don't move your head, Elizabeth, keep it in that position a little longer," said Katie Archdale, as she and her friend sat together the morning after the sail. "I wish an artist were here to paint you so; you've no idea how striking you are."

"No, I have not," laughed the other, forgetting to keep still as she spoke, and turning the face that had been toward the window full upon her companion. The scene that Elizabeth's eyes had been dwelling upon was worthy of admiration; her enthusiasm had not escaped her in any word, but her eyes were enraptured with it, and her whole face, warmed with faint reflection of the inward glow, was beautiful with youth, and thought, and feeling.

"Now you've spoilt it," cried Katie, "now you are merely a nice-looking young lady; you were beautiful before, perfectly beautiful, like a picture that one can look at, and look at, and go away filled with, and come back to, and never tire of. The people that see you so worship you, but then, nobody has a chance to do it. You just sit and don't say much except once in a while when you wake up, then you are brilliant, but never tender, as you know how to be. You give people an impression that you are hard. Sometimes I should like to shake you."

Elizabeth laughed.

"That's the way you worship me," she answered. "I suspected it was a strange kind of adoration, largely made up of snubbing."

"It's not snubbing," retorted Katie, "it is trying to rouse you to what you you might be. But I am wasting my breath; you don't believe a word I say."

"I should like to believe it," returned the girl, smiling a little sadly. "But even if I did believe every word of it, it would seem to me a great deal nicer to be like you, beautiful all the time, and one whom everybody loves. But there's one thing to be said, if it were I who were beautiful, I could'nt have the pleasure I do in looking at you, and perhaps, after all, I shouldn't get any more enjoyment out of it."

"Oh, yes, you would," retorted the other, then bit her lips angrily at her inadvertence. A shrewd smile flitted over Elizabeth's face, but she made no comment, and Katie went on hurriedly to ask, "What shall we do to amuse ourselves to-day, Betsey?" Another slight movement of the hearer's lips responded. This name was Katie's special term of endearment, and never used except when they were alone; no one else ever called her by it.

"I don't know," she said. "Let us sit here as we are doing now. Move your chair nearer the window and look down on the river. See the blue-black shadows on it. And look at the forests, how they stretch away with a few clearings here and there. A city behind us, to be sure, a little city, but before us the forests, and the Indians. I wonder what it all means for us."

"The axe for one, the gun for the other," retorted Katie with a hardness which belief in the savageness and treachery of the red man had instilled into the age. "The forests mean fortune to some of us," she added.

"Yes," answered Elizabeth slowly, finding an unsatisfactory element in her companion's summary.

"Do you mean that we shall have to shoot down a whole race? That is dreadful," she added after a pause.

"You and I have nothing to do with all that," returned Katie.

Elizabeth waited in despair of putting the case as she felt it.

"I was thinking," she said at last, "that if we have a whole land of forests to cut down and of cities to build up, somehow, everything will be different here from the Old England. I often wonder what it is to be in this New World. It must be unlike the Old," she repeated.

"I don't wonder," returned Katie, "and that's just what you shouldn't do. Wonder what you're going to wear to-morrow when we dine at Aunt Faith's, or whether Master Harwin will call this morning, or Master Waldo, or wonder about something sensible."

"Which means, 'or if it's to be Master Archdale,'" retorted Elizabeth, smiling into the laughing eyes fixed upon her face, and making them fall at the keenness of her glance, while a brighter rose than Katie cared to show tinted the creamy skin and made her bend a moment to arrange the rosette of her slipper. The movement showed her hair in all its perfection, for at this early hour it had not been tortured into elaborateness, but as she sat in her bedroom talking with her guest, was loosely coiled to be out of the way, and thus drawn back in its wavy abundance showed now burnished, and now a darker brown, as the sunlight or the shadow fell upon it.

"He's not always sensible," she answered, lifting her head again with a half defiant gesture, and smiling. Katie's smile was irresistible, it won her admirers by the score, not altogether because it gave a glimpse of beautiful teeth, or because her mouth was at its perfection then, but that it was an expression of childlike abandonment to the spirit of the moment, which charmed the gay because they sympathized with it and the serious because it was a mood of mind into which they would be glad to enter. "Stephen has not been quite himself lately, rather stupid," and she looked as if she were not unsuspicious of the reason.

"Too many of us admirers, he thinks?" laughed Elizabeth. "For he is bright enough when he takes the trouble to speak, but generally he doesn't seem to consider any one of sufficient importance to amuse."

"That is not so," cried Katie, "you are mistaken. But you don't know Stephen very well," she added. "What a pity that you are not living here, then you would, and then we should have known each other all our lives, instead of only since we went to school together. What good times we had at Madam Flamingo's. There you sit, now, and look as meekly reproving as if you had'nt invented that name for her yourself. It was so good, it has stood by her ever since."

"Did I? I had forgotten it."

"Perhaps, at least, you remember the red shawl that got her the nickname? It was really something nice,—the shawl, I mean, but the old dame was so ridiculously proud of it and so perpetually flaunting it, she must have thought it very becoming. We girls were tired of the sight of it. And one day, when you were provoked with her about something and left her and came into the schoolroom after hours, you walked up to a knot of us, and with your air of scorn said something about Madam Flamingo. Didn't it spread like wildfire? Our set will call that venerable dame 'Flamingo' to the end of her days."

"I suppose we shall, but I had no recollection that it was I who gave her the name."

"Yes, you gave it to her," repeated Katie. "You may be very sure I should not have forgotten it if I had been so clever. Those were happy days for all their petty tribulations," she added after a pause.

Elizabeth looked at her sitting there meditative.

"I should think these were happy days for you, Katie. What more can you want than you have now?"

"Oh, the roc's eggs, I suppose," answered the girl. "No, seriously, I am pretty likely to get what I want most. I am happy enough, only not absolutely happy quite yet."

"Why not?"

"Our good minister would say it was not intended for mortals."

"If I felt like being quite content I should not give it up because somebody else said it was too much for me."

"Oh, well," said Katie, laughing, "it has nothing to do with our good Parson Shurtleff, anyway."

"I thought not. What, then?"

The other did not answer, but sat looking out of the window with eyes that were not studying the landscape. Whether her little troubles dissolved into the cloudless sky, like mist too thin to take shape, or whether she preferred to keep her perplexities to herself is uncertain, but when she spoke it was about another reminiscence of school days.

"Do you remember that morning Stephen came to see me?" she began. "Madam thought at first that Master Archdale must be my father, and she gave a most gracious assent to my request to go to walk with him. I was dying of fun all the time, I could scarcely keep my face straight; then, when she caught a glimpse of him as we were going out of the hall, she said in a dubious tone, 'Your brother, I presume, Mistress Archdale?' But I never heard a word. I was near the street door and I put myself the other side of it without much delay. So did Stephen. And we went off laughing. He said I was a wicked little cousin, and he spelled it 'cozen;' but he didn't seem to mind my wickedness at all." There was a pause, during which Katie looked at her smiling friend, and her own face dimpled bewitchingly. "This is exactly what you would have done, Elizabeth," she said. "You would have heard that tentative remark of Madam's, of course you would, and you would have stood still in the hall and explained that Stephen was your cousin, instead of your brother, and have lost your walk beyond a doubt, you know the Flamingo. Now, I was just as good as you would have been, only, I was wiser. I, too, told Madam that he was my cousin, but I waited until I came home to do it. The poor old lady could not help herself then; it was impossible to take back my fun, and she could not punish me, because she had given me permission to go, nor could she affirm that I heard her remark, for it was made in an undertone. There was nothing left for her but to wrap her illustrious shawl about her and look dignified." "Do you think Master Harwin will come to-day?" Katie asked a few moments later, "and Master Waldo? I hope they will all three be here together; it will be fun, they can entertain each other, they are so fond of one another."

"Katie! Katie!"

The girl broke into a laugh.

"Oh, yes, I remember," she said, "Stephen is your property."

"Don't," cried Elizabeth, with sudden gravity and paleness in her face. "I think it was wicked in me to jest about such a sacred thing. Let me forget it."

"I wont tease you if you really care. But if it was wicked, it was a great deal more my doing, and Master Waldo's, than your's or Stephen's. We wanted to see the fun. Your great fault, Elizabeth, is that you vex yourself too much about little things. Do you know it will make you have wrinkles?"

This question was put with so much earnestness that Elizabeth laughed heartily.

"One thing is sure," she said, "I shall not remain ignorant of my failings through want of being told them while I'm here. It would be better to go home."

"Only try it!" cried Katie, going to her and kissing her. "But now, Elizabeth, I want to tell you something in all seriousness. Just listen to me, and profit by it, if you can. I've found it out for myself. The more you laugh at other people's absurdities the fewer of your own will be noticed, because, you see, it implies that you are on the right standpoint to get a review of other people."

"That sounds more like eighty than eighteen."

"Elizabeth, it is the greatest mistake in the world, I mean just that, to keep back all your wisdom until you get to be eighty. What use will it be to you then? All you can do with it will be to see how much more sensibly you might have acted. That's what will happen to you, my dear, if you don't look out. But at eighteen—I am nineteen—everything is before you, and you want to know how to guide your life to get all the best things you can out of it without being wickedly selfish—at least I do. Your aspirations, I suppose, are fixed upon the forests and the Indian, and problems concerning the future of the American Colonies. But I'm more reverent than you, I think the Lord is able to take care of those."

Elizabeth looked vaguely troubled by the fallacy which she felt in this speech without being quite willing or able to bring it to light.