A Little Girl in Old Salem Part 17

Then came a very busy time. There was preserving that every housewife attended to for winter use, pickling of various kinds, for there was no canning stock in those days to eke out. There were some queer fruits from India, and preserved ginger in curious jars that are highly esteemed to this day, but they were luxuries. Then a house-cleaning season, not as bad as the spring, but still bad enough. And flower seeds to be saved, garden seeds to be dried, so the beautiful quilt was rolled up in a thick sheet and put away for the present.

The little girl had made quite friends with the Upham children and went over there to tea all alone, but she felt very strange. They played tag and blind-man's buff, but Cynthia thought puss in the corner the most fun. Bentley was a nice big boy and very well mannered. Polly talked over her school and brought out her needlework, which was to be the bottom of a white frock. It would be only two yards round and she had almost a yard worked. Then she was making a sampler, with an oak and acorn vine around it, and it was to have four different kinds of lettering on it.

"I don't know when I shall get it done," she said with a sigh.

Betty declared Dame Wilby was crosser than ever and Priscilla Lee wasn't coming back, nor Margaret Rand, and she was coaxing mother to let her go elsewhere.

After a while Cynthia declared she must go home. Cousin Chilian had said he would come for her, but the clock was striking nine and he had not come. He sometimes _did_ forget.

Bentley took his hat and walked beside her in quite a mannish way.

"I do hope you will come again," he said. "You were so pleasant when you were caught, and I do hate to have girls saying all the time, 'Now that isn't fair,' and squirming out."

"But if you're playing you must take the best and the worst. I liked puss in the corner and didn't mind being the left-out p.u.s.s.y. I thought it was quite fun to hunt a corner again."

Then they met Cousin Chilian, who had been playing a rather prolonged game of chess with a visitor. But Bentley kept on with them, and said good-night with a polite bow, adding, "She must come again, Mr.

Leverett, we had such a very nice time."

"And wasn't he nice!" exclaimed the child eagerly. "He is like some of the grown-up men. I like big boys much better than the little ones."

He smiled to himself at that.

Now there came cool nights and mornings, but the world was beautiful in its turning leaves, the fragrance of ripening fruit, and the late gorgeous-colored flowers. They took delightful walks and found so many curious places. Sometimes Bentley Upham met them and joined in their walks and talks. He thought the little girl knew a great deal. And that she had been in India, and China, and ever so many of the islands, was wonderful.

"Don't you ever sew?" he asked one afternoon, as they were rambling about.

"I don't like it much;" and she glanced up with fascinating archness. "I suppose I shall have to some day, but Cousin Leverett thinks there is time enough."

"I'm glad you don't," in a hearty tone. "I don't have any good of Polly any more. What with her white frock, and some lace she is making for a cape, and forty other things, she never has time for a game of anything, or a nice walk. And she doesn't care about study, though her lessons are so different. I don't know another girl who studies Latin, and it's so nice to talk it over. How rapidly you must have learned."

He looked at her in admiration.

"Oh, I knew some of it before I came here. There was a chaplain in Calcutta who was--well, not exactly ill, but not well; and father took him with us on the vessel when he went for certain things, and he staid with us afterward. He used to read aloud, and it sounded so splendid!

Then he taught me. But Cousin Leverett said it wasn't quite right, so I am going over it. And he is teaching me a little French."

"You know they think women don't need to know much beside housekeeping and sewing. I just hate to hear about ruffles cut on the straight or bias, and I couldn't tell what Dacca muslin, or jaconet, or dimity was to save myself. And eyelet work and French knots and run lace--that's what the big girls who come to see Polly talk about. But I like books, and studies, and different countries. I'd like to travel. But I don't know that I want to be a sea captain."

They found some queer old houses that were odd enough. Mr. Leverett said they were almost two hundred years old, and that at first the place kept the old Indian name, Naumkeag. But the Reverend Francis Higginson gave it a new name out of the Bible--"In Salem also is His tabernacle." The early pilgrims built a chapel at once.

"How close the houses are!"

It was a row that had survived the hand of improvement. There was a huge central chimney-stack, big enough for a modern factory, and the house seemed built around it. The second story overhung the first, and in some of them were small dormer windows looking like bird houses. And the little panes of greenish gla.s.s seemed to make windows all framework.

Cynthia was much interested in the Roger Williams house, and the story of the old minister.

"Why, I thought religion made people good and pleasant----" Then she checked herself, for often Cousin Elizabeth was _not_ pleasant. And she seemed more religious than Cousin Eunice. And Cousin Chilian rarely scolded or said a cross word--he never talked about religion, but he went to church on Sunday; they all did. She studied the Catechism, she could learn easily when she had a mind to, but she didn't understand it at all. She shocked Elizabeth by her irreverent questions. There was the old horn-book primer with--

"In Adam's fall We sinned all."

"I don't see how that could be when we were not there!" she said almost defiantly.

"It means the nature we inherited."

"But I don't think that fair!"

"You don't know, you never can understand until you are in a state of grace. Don't ask such impertinent questions. You are a little heathen child."

Then she asked Cousin Chilian what "a state of grace" meant.

"I think it is the willingness to do right, to be truthful, kindly, obliging. It is all comprised in the Golden Rule--to love G.o.d with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, not to do anything to him that you would not like to have done to yourself, and to do to him whatever you would like him to do for you. That is enough for a little girl."

"That sounds like Confucius," she said thoughtfully.

But she went back to Roger Williams when Bentley said he was one of his heroes.

"What did he do?" she asked, interested.

"Well, he founded the City of Providence. And if William Penn is to be honored for founding a city of brotherly love, Roger Williams deserves it for establis.h.i.+ng a city where different sects should agree without persecuting each other. You see, they banished him from Salem back to England because he thought a man had some right to his own opinions, so long as he wors.h.i.+pped G.o.d. So he went to Providence instead. He walked all the way with just his pocket compa.s.s to guide him, and how he must have worked to make a dwelling-place for himself and his friends in the dead of winter! There were some Quakers already there, who had been banished from other settlements, and they all resolved to be friendly.

Yes, I call him a hero!"

Cynthia studied the house with the little courtyard and the great tree shading it.

"Polly said it was the Witch House," she remarked.

"That was because there were trials for witchcraft. You are too young to hear about that," Chilian said decisively, with a glance at Bentley.

CHAPTER VIII

SORROW'S CROWN OF SORROW

Occasionally they went down to the warehouse, and while Chilian was busy some of the captains or mates would speak to her. They knew about her father and one sad fact she did not know. For she had settled in her mind that Captain Corwin would bring him back and that it would take a long, long while. So she tried to be content and if not teasing or fretting was one of the ways of being good, she tried her utmost to keep to that. She was too brave to tell falsehoods to s.h.i.+eld herself from any inadvertent wrongdoing, even if Cousin Elizabeth did sometimes say:

"You ought to be soundly whipped. To spare the rod is to spoil the child."

She thought if anybody ever did whip her she should hate him all the rest of her life. Servants and workmen were beaten in India, and it seemed degrading. She did not know that Cousin Chilian had insisted that she should never be struck. He was understanding more every day how her father had loved her, and finding sweet traits in her unfolding.

She liked these rough bronzed men to touch their odd hats to her and call her Missy. Some of them had seen her in Calcutta and knew her father. And when she said, "It takes a long, long while to go there and come back, but when Captain Corwin brings him he is going to live here and will never go to sea any more"--"No, that he never will, missy;" and the sailor drew his hand across his eyes.

Oh, how full the wharves were with s.h.i.+pping! Flags and pennons waved, and white sails; others, gray with age and weather, flapped in the wind.

She liked to see them start out; she always sent a message by them in the full faith of childhood. And there were the fishermen in the cove lower down. Fis.h.i.+ng was quite a great business.

Cousin Giles had made his visit and spent two whole days down in the warehouse, when they had not taken her. But she helped Cousin Eunice cut the stems of the sweet garden herbs for drying, and the others for perfumery. There was lavender, the blossoms had been gathered long ago, and sweet marjoram and sweet clover. She always gathered the full-blown rose leaves and sewed them up in little bags and laid them among the household stores. Everything was so fragrant. Cynthia thought she liked it better than sandalwood and the pungent Oriental perfumes.

Then came the autumnal storms, when the vessels hugged the docks securely at anchor. The house was chilly all through and fires were in order. Some two or three miles below there was a wreck of an East Indiaman, and for days fragments floated around. Some lives were lost, and the little girl shuddered over the accounts.