Читать книгу The Staying Guest - Wells Carolyn - Страница 6

When the Misses Flint saw the door shut behind Ladybird, and heard the key click in the lock, they could believe neither their eyes nor their ears.

Miss Priscilla rose and walked majestically to the door and turned the knob, fully expecting the door would open. But it would not open, of course, being locked, and the good lady, almost stupefied with anger and amazement, uttered an explosive and exasperated “Well!” and dropped into the nearest chair.

Miss Dorinda responded with a terrified and apprehensive “Well!” and then the two sisters sat and stared blankly at each other.

Miss Dorinda spoke first, timidly.

“Priscilla, don’t you think perhaps it is our duty to give a home to Lavinia’s child?”

“Duty!” exclaimed the elder sister, in a tense, restrained voice. “Duty! To keep such a vixen as that in our house? No! I confess I had some such thought during the night; but now I have only one desire, and that is, to get rid of her.”

“Yes,” said Miss Dorinda, sighing; “of course she can’t stay after this; but she seems very affectionate and loving.”

“Affectionate! Loving! Dorinda Flint, what are you talking about? Do you call it affectionate to lock us helplessly in this room?”

“No; but that was impulsive, and because she wants to stay here. I don’t think she is really a vicious child.”

“Well, I don’t want to think anything about her!”

Miss Priscilla took up a newspaper and pretended to read, so desirous was she of not appearing defeated; and, indeed, she would have stayed quietly in that room all day rather than call for assistance, or in any way show that she was at the mercy of her erratic niece.

Miss Dorinda was as much perturbed as her sister, but she made no effort to hide it. She fluttered about the room, looked out of the window, tried the door-knob, and at last sat down in a big rocking-chair and began to rock violently.

Suddenly the door burst open and Ladybird came flying in.

“Aunties,” she cried, “the house is on fire! What do you want to save most?”

“Mercy on us!” cried Miss Priscilla, rushing from the room, “let me get my Lady Washington geranium. The buds are just ready to open.”

“Where is it? I’ll get it,” said Ladybird, dancing around in great excitement.

“Up-stairs, on a stand by the south-room window; but you can’t go up – you’ll be burned to death.”

“No, I won’t,” screamed Ladybird, already half-way up-stairs; “I’ll get it. What do you want, Aunt Dorinda?”

“I don’t know, – everything! Oh, my lace handkerchief,” called the distracted lady. “And get some of your own things; and bring our fire-gowns.”

Meantime volumes of smoke rolled into the hall through the dining-room door.

Suddenly Matthew’s face appeared in the midst of the smoke.

“Don’t be frightened, ma’am,” he said; “it’s all right now. The soot got afire in the chimbley; but we’ve put it out. But if the little lady hadn’t been afther runnin’ down an’ tellin’ me that the wall felt hot, I’m thinkin’ the house wud have been burned to the ground.”

“Oh, Matthew, are you sure the fire is all out?” asked Miss Dorinda.

“And are you sure my house would have burned up but for that child?” asked Miss Priscilla.

“Yis, ma’am, sure as sure! An’ I’ll jist open the windies till the shmoke disappears.”

Then Miss Priscilla called, “Come down, Ladybird; it’s all right now.” And in a moment the child came flying down-stairs.

“I put the geranium back in its place,” she said, “and I left your lace handkerchief on your bureau, Aunt Dorinda; but I brought both your smell-salts bottles, ’cause I thought you might be faint from the scare. Now sit down and rest, won’t you?”

She hovered about her aunts, ministering to each in turn, and her caressing touch was so gentle, and her sympathy so sincere, that Miss Priscilla, who was unaccustomed to such attentions, quite forgot she had called her niece a vixen, and that, too, with good and sufficient reasons.

But after a while, as her nerves became quieted and she felt more composed, Miss Priscilla Flint determined to attempt again the dismissal of her unwelcome guest.

“Lavinia,” she said in a tone of firm decision.

“Oh, aunty, don’t call me that; it makes me feel so old and grown up!”

“It is your name, and I have no desire to call you by any other. Lavinia, you are my niece, and the child of my dead sister; but I am in no way inclined to take you into my home for that reason. You have some kind and winning ways, but you appear to have an ungovernable temper, which would make you impossible to live with. How dared you lock the door on me in my own house?”

“Why, aunty,” said Ladybird, laughing at the memory of it, “that wasn’t temper, and I didn’t mean to be rude; but truly, there was nothing else to do. Why, if you had been out on the veranda when my trunks came, you would have sent them back to Boston, and I didn’t want them to go back; so I just left you by yourselves until the man took them up-stairs.”

“You think you have outwitted me, miss, but you will find that Priscilla Flint is not so easily set aside.”

“Oh, I’m not going to set you aside, aunty; that isn’t it. I’m just going to stay here and be your little girl – yours and Aunt Dorinda’s.”

“I think, sister, we might keep her a week on trial,” said Miss Dorinda, timidly.

Miss Dorinda always said everything timidly. In this respect she was not like her niece.

“I shall not keep her a week, nor a day; and no more hours than I can help. I am going now to write a note to Mr. Marks, and tell him to come back at once for her and her trunks. So, Miss Lavinia Lovell, you may as well get yourself ready, for this time you will have to go.”

“Do you know, it doesn’t seem to me as if I would go this time,” said Ladybird, thoughtfully; “it seems to me as if I would stay here years and years, until I get to be a dear old lady like you,” and she patted the top of Miss Priscilla’s head. Then she danced out of the room, and out to the garden, singing as she went:

When the luncheon-bell rang, she danced back again, and seeing a letter on the hall-table addressed to Mr. Marks, she tore it into bits and threw it into the waste basket.

The gay good humor of their visitor was infectious, and the Flint ladies laughed and chatted over their luncheon, so that the meal was nearly over before Miss Priscilla said:

“Mr. Marks will call for you at three o’clock, Lavinia.”

“I don’t think he will,” replied the child, “because I tore up that letter you wrote to him and threw it away.”

“What!” gasped Miss Priscilla. “This is too much!”

“Well, you see, aunty, there was nothing else to do. If he’d got that letter he would have come, and I don’t want him to come, so I tore it up. Don’t write another.”

“I won’t,” said Miss Priscilla, in an ominous voice, and snapping her teeth together with a click.

But half an hour later the Primrose Hall carriage went down toward the village, and inside of it sat a very determined-looking old lady.

She went to Mr. Marks’s office and asked him to get his wagon and follow her home at once, and bring back the young miss and her luggage.

“That firebrand as I saw at your house this morning?” exclaimed the old countryman. “Wal, I guess she won’t be so easy brung.”

He chuckled to himself as he drove along the road behind Miss Priscilla Flint; and when they reached the farm-house, he waited decorously for further orders.

Then the hunt began. For Ladybird was nowhere to be found. Miss Priscilla called in vain. Then Miss Dorinda called. Then they went up and looked in the room which Ladybird had appropriated as her own.

Her three trunks stood there wide open and empty. Their contents were all around: on the bed, on the bureaus, on the chairs, and many of them on the floor. But no trace of the missing child.

Then Miss Priscilla called the servants.

“The little girl is hiding somewhere,” she explained, “and she must be found.”

“Yes, ’m,” Bridget said; and she began systematically to search the house from attic to cellar.

Matthew shook his old head doubtfully.

“I’m thinkin’ yez’ll niver find her,” he said. “She was a spookish piece, an’ the likes of her flies up chimbleys an’ out of windies an’ niver appears ag’in.”

Martha, much mystified, stared helplessly around the room, and in doing so noticed a bit of paper pinned to the pin-cushion.

She handed it to Miss Priscilla, who read:

“Oh,” groaned Miss Priscilla, “what can I do? We must find her!”

Miss Dorinda felt pretty sure, in her secret heart, that they wouldn’t find Ladybird until that strange being was ready to be found; but she continued looking about in her placid way, which did no good nor harm.

After an hour’s search, the case did seem hopeless, and Mr. Marks declared he couldn’t wait any longer; so Miss Priscilla reluctantly let him go away.

Two more hours passed; and then it was five o’clock, and still no sign from the missing child.

Although they hadn’t confessed it to each other, the Flint ladies were both a little scared.

Finally Miss Dorinda said:

“You don’t think she’d do anything rash, do you, sister?”

“From the little I’ve seen of her,” replied Miss Priscilla, “I should say that what she does is never anything but rash. However, I don’t think she has drowned herself in the brook, or jumped down the well, if that’s what you mean.”

That was what Miss Dorinda had meant, and somehow she was not very much reassured by her sister’s word.

They sat silent for a while; then Miss Dorinda, with a sudden impulse of determination such as she had never known in all her life, and, indeed, never experienced again, said:

“Priscilla, I think you are doing wrong; and you needn’t look at me like that. For once, I’m going to say what I think! This child has been sent to us, and in your secret heart you know it is our duty to keep her and do for her. The Bible says that those who neglect their own families are worse than infidels, and we have no right to turn away our kin. Your dislike of visitors has nothing to do with the matter. The child is not a visitor, as she says herself. And it makes no difference what kind of a child she is: she is our sister’s daughter, and we are bound by every law of humanity and decency to give her a home. If father were alive, do you suppose he would turn his orphan grandchild from his door? No; he would do his duty by his own: he would be just, if he could not be generous; and he would accept a responsibility that was rightly thrust upon him.”

Miss Priscilla looked at her sister in utter amazement. Dorinda had never spoken like this before, and it seemed as if the spirit of old Josiah Flint was manifesting itself in his daughter.

But if Miss Dorinda had acted in an unusual manner, Miss Priscilla proceeded to behave no less strangely.

At the close of her sister’s speech, she suddenly burst into tears; and the times in her life when Miss Priscilla Flint had cried were very few indeed.

Then the younger sister was frightened at what she had done, and tried to pacify the weeping lady.

“I know you’re right, Dorinda,” said Miss Priscilla, between her sobs; “I – I knew it all along, – and I suppose we shall have to keep her. Father would have wished it so, – and – and I wouldn’t mind it so much if she wouldn’t – wouldn’t leave the doors open.”