"That old aunt," she grumbled, "she makes me awful tired. She's always pokin' round an' callin' me."

Such, indeed, seemed the present habit and intent of the prim lady who was approaching, alternately clanging a dinner-bell and calling in a tone of resolute sweetness:

"Mary, O Mary, dear."

Mary parted the branches of her tree and watched, but made no sound.

"Mary," repeated the oncoming relative, "Mary, I want to tell you something," and added as she spied her niece's abandoned sunbonnet on the gra.s.s, "I know you're here and I shall wait until you come to me."

"I _ain't_ coming," announced the Dryad, and thereby disclosed her position, both actual and mental. "I suppose it's something I've done and I don't want to hear it, so there!" Then, her temper having been worn thin by much admonishing, she antic.i.p.ated: "I _ain't_ sorry I've been bad. I _ain't_ ashamed to behave so when my mamma is sick in bed.

And I don't care if you _do_ tell my papa when he comes home to-night."

The intruding relative, discerning her, stopped and smiled. And the smile was as a banderilla to her niece's goaded spirit.

"Jiminy!" gasped that young person, "she's got a smile just like a teacher."

"Mary, dear," the intruder gushed, "G.o.d has sent you something."

The hickory flashed forth black and white and red. Mary stood upon the ground.

"Where are they?" she demanded.

"They?" repeated the lady. "There is only one."

"Why, I prayed for two. Which did he send?"

"Which do you think?" parried the lady. "Which do you hope it is?"

Even Mary's scorn was unprepared for this weak-mindedness. "The goat, of course," she responded curtly. "Is it the goat?"

"Goat!" gasped the scandalized aunt. "Goat! Why, G.o.d has sent you a baby sister, dear."

"A sister! a baby!" gasped Mary in her turn. "I don't _need_ no sister.

I prayed for a goat just as plain as plain. 'Dear G.o.d,' I says, 'please bless everybody, and make me a good girl, an' send me a goat an' wagon.'

And they went an' changed it to a baby sister! Why, I never s'posed they made mistakes like that."

Crestfallen and puzzled she allowed herself to be led back to the darkened house where her grandmother met her with the heavenly subst.i.tute wrapped in flannel. And as she held it against the square and unresponsive bosom of her ap.r.o.n she realized how the "Bible gentleman"

must have felt when he asked for bread and was given a stone.

During the weeks that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She pa.s.sed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby, while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora, that gift of G.o.d, had powerful lungs and a pa.s.sion for exercising them so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.

But the deprivation against which she most pa.s.sionately rebelled was that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife, "than Burns could have said for himself--or Coleridge."

And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength and sunny patience.

Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.

So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide s.p.a.ces of her freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and a.s.sured him that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr.

Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head with impossible nonsense."

It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not, without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however inexact, manifestly her responsibility.

"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death.

If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding.

Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in grat.i.tude for their forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least the audience, of fealty knight and ladies, bowed her small head to the swathed and shapeless feet of heaven's error and became waiting woman to a flannel bundle.

Only her dreams remained to her. She could still look forward to the glorious time of "when I'm big." She could still unbind her dun-colored hair and shake it in the sun. She could still quiver with antic.i.p.ation as she surveyed her brilliant future. A beautiful prince was coming to woo her. He would ride to the door and kneel upon the front porch while all his shining retinue filled the front yard and overflowed into the road. Then she would appear and, since these things were to happen in the days of her maturity, perhaps when she was twelve years old, she would be radiantly beautiful, and her hair would be all goldy gold and curly, and it would trail upon the ground a yard or two behind her as she walked. And the prince would be transfixed. And when he was all through being that--Mary often wondered what it was--he would arise and sing "Nicolette, the Bright of Brow," or some other disguised personality, while all his shining retinue would unsling hautboys and lyres and--and--mouth organs and play ravishing music.

And when she rode away to be the prince's bride and to rule his fair lands, her father and her mother should ride with her, all in the sunshine of the days "when I'm big"--the wonderful days "when I'm big."

Meanwhile, being but little, she served the flannel bundle even as Sir Beaumanis had served a yet lowlier apprenticeship. But she still stormed high heaven to rectify its mistake.

"And please, dear G.o.d, if you are all out of goats and wagons, send rabbits. But anyway come and take away this baby. My mamma ain't well enough to take care of it an' I can't spare the time. We don't need babies, but we do need that goat and wagon."

And the powers above, with a mismanagement which struck their pet.i.tioner dumb, sent a wagon--only a wagon--and it was a gocart for the baby, and Mary was to be the goat.

With this millstone tied about her neck she was allowed to look upon the scenes of her early freedom, and no inquisitor could have devised a more anguishing torture than that to which Mary's suffering and unsuspecting mother daily consigned her suffering and uncomplaining daughter.

"Walk slowly up and down the paths, dear, and don't leave your sister for a moment. Isn't it nice that you have somebody to play with now?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Mary. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."

"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"

"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and carrots.

Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.

The shy, quick-darting creature--half child and half humming bird--was forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never penetrate, she managed to b.u.mp her responsibility out into the orchard.

But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.

"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the gift of G.o.d would make aimless pugilistic pa.s.ses at her interlocutor.

"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground.

Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in a red dress?"

Theodora, after some s.p.a.ce spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a cheerful acquiescence.

"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."

Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her ap.r.o.n lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.

Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a high sense of honor.

At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the gift of G.o.d. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the perambulator's handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources, and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.

Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and disprized gift of G.o.d.

"Stop it, I tell you," she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. "Stop it, or mamma will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch." But Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of promise. "If you'll stop yellin' now I'll see that my prince husband lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice being a goose-girl," she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to charm. "If I didn't have to marry that prince an' be a queen I guess I'd been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it's lovely work on the hills behind a palace with all the knights ridin' by an' sayin', 'Fair maid, did'st see a boar pa.s.s by this way?' You don't have to be afraid--you'd never have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn't never see no boars, and the knights gave 'em a piece of gold an' smiled on 'em, and the sunshine shined on 'em, an' they had a lovely time."