Half a Dozen Boys/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
THEIR SUMMER OUTING.
“Island Den,” Thousand Islands,
July 27, 18—.
My dear Bess,—I know you always have been a good, kind-hearted little soul, and now I am going to throw myself on your benevolence and ask a favor of you. Say yes, that’s a dear little sister! It is just this that I want,—a two weeks’ visit from you. “Island Den” was never half so cosy as this summer, and there were never half so many pleasant people over at the hotel. The change will do you good, and I have already heard from mother, saying that she can spare you as well as not. Jack and the children want to see you as badly as I do.
But as long as I know you’ll never consent to drop all care—you’ve had too much these last months for a young thing like you—and leave that boy of yours at home, as would be ever so much better for you, bring him with you, if you think he will be contented here. Jack says two boys take up no more room than one, and Bob had better come too, to be company for him after we have talked each other to death. Isn’t he impertinent? But it is a good idea, for they will amuse each other and leave us more time. Rob has never been here, and I am quite curious to see your other charge. Do hurry to come, for I am impatient to see you. I should think you might start by the first of next week.
Jack wishes me to enclose these tickets for the journey, as a last inducement. He says I am to tell you that they will be wasted unless you use them, and that will be sure to bring you, as your frugal soul cannot bear to waste anything.
I won’t say any more, for you will be here so soon; and then how we will talk!
Your loving sister,
Alice.
This was the letter which had caused a sensation in the Carter household. Alice Carter, ten years older than Bess, had married a wealthy New York banker, and was now the mother of two little girls. “Island Den,” their luxurious summer home, was on one of the Thousand Islands, whither for years they had gone to spend the months of July and August, and keep open house for their friends.
It was now three years since Bess had been able to accept her annual invitation to go there, for it was an expensive little trip, and of late some treacherous Western loans had decidedly lessened her father’s income, and reduced the family from the comfortable position of doing just about as their rather simple inclinations led them, to the need of carefully counting the smaller expenses that so quickly absorb money,—no marked change, only they did not travel quite as much, nor keep a horse and carriage, nor have quite so many gowns, while those they had they made themselves. The more than liberal sum that Mr. Allen was paying them for the board and care of Fred was far more helpful than he had realized when he had made them the offer, although the money bargain had been by no means a determining cause in their taking Fred into their home. And, this year, Bess had felt that it would be more than ever impossible for her to go away to leave Fred, both on her mother’s account and the boy’s own, for the child clung to her more and more closely, with a devotion touching to see.
But Alice and Jack had smoothed away every difficulty, and Bess, with her conscience at rest, could now accept their threefold invitation. Now there was a prospect of change, the girl admitted to herself that she was a little tired, and well she might be, for, in addition to her other duties, she had given constant thought and care, as well as much time and countless steps, to the boy who had so grown to depend upon her. But if, at the close of a long day, the thought of her own weariness ever crossed her mind, the memory of all that the child had lost, and of the brave fight he was making against the burden of his blindness, made her scorn the thought of self, as unworthy of the courage and patient endurance she was daily preaching to the child, and gave her new strength to go on.
Rob was in raptures over the prospective journey, and, during the week before they were to start, he made almost hourly calls on Bess, to see how her preparations were coming on. The morning after he was told of his invitation and its acceptance, he was up early, and, before breakfast, had gone into the attic, scattered over the floor the usual contents of a small trunk, long past its days of active service and now only used for storage, and secretly conveyed the trunk to his own room. By dinner-time, many of his possessions were stowed away in its depths; books, games, his air-rifle, several yards of mosquito netting for butterfly-nets, a choice collection of fish-hooks, and an odd assortment of strings and small articles of hardware that filled it to the brim, leaving room for not so much as a single handkerchief. Each day he added to his hoard, to the amusement of his mother, who let him have his way until the final packing, when she should bring order out of chaos.
Fred scarcely looked forward to their going with as much pleasure as Rob, for at the idea of the journey and of meeting so many strangers, his shy sensitiveness returned in all its force, and he would gladly have spent the time alone with the servants at his father’s house, rather than run the gauntlet of the curious and thoughtless, though not unkind comments that always met him when he went among strangers.
However, it was a merry party that, one cloudy August morning, Mr. Carter escorted as far as Boston, and settled in the train for Albany, where they were to change to a sleeper. Rob, in a light summer suit, armed with a jointed fishing-pole and his tennis racket, his mother’s compromise in the affair of the trunk, led the way into the car. Mr. Carter followed with a lunch basket of noble proportions, for experience had taught Bessie that boy appetites are unfailing, and, on Fred’s account, she dared not depend on railway dining-rooms. Bess, with Fred, brought up the rear of the procession. Rob was bubbling over with fun and nonsense, so that Fred caught his spirit and answered jest with jest. As Mr. Carter left them, Bess turned and surveyed her charges with a feeling of almost maternal pride. Two more bonnie boys it would have been hard to find that day.
“I wonder if I look like their mother, or what people think I am,” she thought, as she looked from the quiet boy at her side to the lively one opposite her. “I don’t care very much— Oh, Rob, be careful,” she exclaimed aloud, as that youth, in changing the position of his fishing-pole, recklessly battered the rear of the respectable black bonnet worn by an old woman in front of him.
Rob instantly turned to offer a meek apology, but it had no effect on the irate woman, who grasped her bonnet firmly with both hands, as she exclaimed,—
“Needn’t knock a body’s head off! Folks shouldn’t take boys on the keers till they know how to behave!”
“I am very sorry, ma’am,” ventured Rob again.
“So you’d ought to be!” was the snappish rejoinder. “I hope you are ashamed of yourself to go hitting a woman old enough to be your mother with your nuisancing contraptions!” Then, with a backward glance, she added, as if to herself, “That other one looks more as if he’d behave himself somehow. I guess I’ll move round and set behind him.”
And she gathered up her belongings and moved back, where the worthy soul lent an attentive ear to all their conversation, and watched Fred with curious eyes, while from time to time she scowled disapprovingly on Rob, who was quite subdued by his misadventure.
Of course, Rob wished to take a lunch before they were fairly outside of Boston, and, equally of course, he desired to patronize every trip of the newsboy, and the vender of prize packages of cough candy, each one of which was warranted to contain a rich jewel; but on these small points Bess was firm, and he abandoned himself to the alternate pleasures of gazing out at the car window at the miles of back doors, each filled with a family as much interested in the train as if it were some rare and curious object, and of inspecting his fellow-passengers, the usual assortment. Across from them was a young Japanese, who had intensified the effect of his swarthy skin by mounting a white felt hat. With him sat a man who was so drowsy that his head constantly dropped forward on the round silver knob that headed his cane, at the imminent risk of putting out his eyes. The force of the blow never failed to waken him, and he straightened himself up with a sheepishly defiant air, as if to refute any possible denial of his wakefulness. Behind him sat a spinster of sixty, with lank side curls and a fidgety manner of moving her satchel about. There was the usual number of commercial travellers—why have they appropriated the name?—who, with their silk hats carefully put away in the racks, and replaced by undignified skull-caps, took out their note-books and wrote up the record of their last sales; there was the usual Irish mamma with five small children, who walked the entire length of the car and planted herself in the little corner seat next the door, with her offspring about her, budget in hand, ready to leave the train at a moment’s notice; and there were a few young women, each absorbed in her novel or magazine, whom Rob surveyed with disfavor, as not being as pretty as cousin Bess.
Leaning far forward, he was just describing some of these people for Fred’s benefit, when a sudden voice behind them made all three of the party start. It was the woman whose bonnet Rob had hit.
“I want to know what’s the matter with that ’ere boy,” she demanded in no gentle tone, as she pointed at Fred. “Can’t he see, or what on airth’s the matter with him?”
Poor Fred! His laugh died away, and, turning very white, he leaned back in his corner, while Bess answered their inquisitive neighbor with an icy politeness, as she gave the boy’s hand an encouraging pat. The brutal abruptness of the question was more than the child could bear, and it was long before he could speak or join in the conversation. Rob, meanwhile, was vowing vengeance. His opportunity soon came.
Directly in front of him, in the seat vacated by his enemy, sat a middle-aged man, who was carrying in his pocket a small gray kitten, probably a gift to some child at home. Rob had noticed the little animal as the gentleman came in, and from time to time he had turned to peep over at it, when its owner was absorbed in his reading. At length the man laid aside his paper, and turned to give his attention to the cat, which, however, was nowhere to be found. He began to search about for it, looking rather anxious. A sudden, naughty idea flashed into Rob’s brain. Rising with an air of polite sympathy, he inquired in a loud and cheerful voice,—
“Can’t I help you, sir? Which was it, a rattler, or just a common snake?”
The effect was instantaneous.
“Massy on us!” piped the aged heroine of the bonnet. “Snakes! Ow!” And she climbed nimbly up on the seat, an example quickly followed by her opposite neighbor. And though the cat was soon found and exhibited, the two worthy women sat sideways on the seat, their feet and skirts carefully tucked up beside them, until they left the train at Albany.
“Rob, how could you?” said Bess reprovingly, when quiet was restored.
“I don’t care, cousin Bess. She was so mean to Fred that I did it on purpose, and I sha’n’t say I am sorry.”
And Bess prudently changed the subject.
After a long delay at Albany, our travellers settled themselves anew in their sleeper. Neither of the boys had ever before travelled all night, and it seemed so cosy to go gliding away through the darkness that was slowly shutting in the landscape. There were few people in the car, and Rob prowled up and down, investigating his quarters, and making the acquaintance of the porter; while Bess chatted with Fred, at ease once more now that his dreaded neighbor had departed.
“I wish people wouldn’t say such things,” he told Bess. “Once in a while I forget, but somebody always reminds me again, and it just makes me feel as if everybody was watching me.”
“It was a cruel question, cruelly asked,” said Bess with some energy, as she pulled off her gloves and took off her hat, preparatory to a comfortable evening. “If people only knew how such remarks hurt! I wish I could save you from them, laddie.”
At this moment, Rob came back to his seat, and remarked with conscious, but impenitent pride,—
“Didn’t I just pay up that old woman? Mean old thing!”
Then he devoted his attention to the porter, as he converted the seats into diminutive bedrooms, partitioned and curtained off and sumptuously furnished with a mirror and a wall pocket.
Long after the boys were stowed away for the night, Bess could hear them whisper and giggle when a particularly loud snore from their next neighbor broke the stillness; and at each stopping-place she heard Rob’s curtain fly up, to let him look out on the silent towns.
“Doesn’t our Bess look matronly!” exclaimed Alice Rogers the next morning, when she saw Bess and her two companions coming towards her. “That one with her must be Fred Allen. Isn’t he stunningly handsome, Jack?”
“Poor little cub!” said Jack sympathetically, as he hurried forward to meet them.
After the first confused moment of greeting and hand-shaking, question and answer, Alice, a plump blonde who still kept much of her girlish beauty, turned to the boys.
“Can this be my little cousin Rob, grown up to this?” she said, as she kissed him, to his secret disgust, for Rob scorned kisses except from Bess. “And this, I think, is Bessie’s adopted boy, Fred, isn’t it? I am so glad to have you both here, for I like boys almost as well as Bess does.”
Two days later, Rob sat on the piazza at Island Den, painfully fulfilling his promise to write to his mother. Near him, Fred was swinging in a hammock, holding beside him the two-year-old daughter of the house. Little Alice had taken a violent fancy to the boy, who amused himself with her by the hour at a time. Up-stairs, in the warm August morning, the two sisters were lounging and talking “like magpies,” as Jack had said when he left them.
And this is what Rob wrote:—
Your affectionate son,
Robert Macmillan Atkinson.
P.S. I forgot to tell you that the box under my table has a worm in it that I want to have spin himself up, so don’t move it. R. M. A.
P.S. Number 2. Tell Ted I forgot to give him back his bat. It is in the corner of the closet in my room.Rob.
P.S. 3. The best worms are in the bed where the verbenas are. R.
Folded inside this letter was another, written in large letters on a grimy sheet of paper.[1]
Marian C. Rogers.
New York City.
Dear Aunty
Bess I want
to thank you,
for those nice
pctires you sent me.
In the cot oer the hill,
Lives little Jennie Gill.
She is but a tot,
As big as a dot.
How do you do?
I hope that yur doll is well.
And that your dog tray is well.
- ↑ A genuine letter, written by a child of five