CHAPTER FOUR

The next morning Harriet sat in Alexina's room putting criss-cross initials on a pile of unmarked little garments. It was part of the creed that clothes be marked.

Presently, as the child came to her aunt's knee for a completed garment, Harriet laid a hand on the little shoulder. Demonstration came hard and brought a flush of embarra.s.sment with it.

"Alexina," she said, "you haven't mentioned your mother!"

The child stood silent but there came a repeated swallowing in her throat while a slow red welled up over the little face.

Harriet had a feeling of sudden liking and understanding. "You would rather--you prefer not?"

The child nodded, but later, as if from some fear of appearing unresponsive, she brought an alb.u.m from her trunk and spread it open on Harriet's knee. She seemed a loyal small soul to her kinsfolk, mainly her mother's people, and turning the leaves went through the enumeration.

At one page--"Daddy," she said.

"Daddy" applied in a baby's cadence to Alexander! Daddy! It was a revelation of that part of her brother's life which Harriet had forgotten in accounting a.s.sets. "Daddy," called fearlessly, with intonation unconsciously dear and appealing. And Alexander had been that to his child!

There was no picture of Molly, but there was a torn and vacant s.p.a.ce facing Alexander. Had the child removed one? She bore resentment then? Harriet had no idea how far a child of nine could comprehend and feel the situation.

She would have been surprised at other things a child of nine can feel. If the routine of the house dragged dully to Alexina, Harriet never suspected it. The personal attention was detailed to Nelly, who divined more--Nelly, the freckle-faced, humorous-eyed house girl, taken from the Orphans' Home and trained by Harriet's mother. But, then, Nelly had been orphaned herself, and had known those first days following asylum consignment and perhaps had not forgot. Her sympathy expressed itself through the impersonal, the Blair training not having encouraged the other.

"Such a be-yewtiful dress," said she, laying out the clothes for her charge.

Which was true; no child of Molly's would have suffered for clothes, Molly loving them too well herself.

"And such be-yewtiful slippers," said Nelly, with Alexina in her lap, pulling up the little stocking and b.u.t.toning the strap about the ankle.

Alexina's hand held tight to Nelly's hard, firm arm, steadying herself. Perhaps she divined the intention. "Can I come, too, when you go to set the table?" she asked.

But Harriet never suspected. Nor again, that evening while she and Austen read under the lamp, did Harriet know that Alexina, standing at the open parlour window gazing at the children playing on the sidewalk, was fighting back pa.s.sionate tears of an outraged love and a baffling sense of injustice.

All at once a child's treble came in from the pavement.

"Can't you come play?"

Alexina turned, with backward look of eager inquiry to her aunt, who had come behind her to see who called.

"As you please; go if you want," said Harriet good-humouredly.

Austen, too, glanced out. Tip-toe on the stone curbing of the iron fence perched a little girl, spokesman for the group of children behind her.

"Who is the child?" he asked his sister.

"Her name is Carringford. She is a grand-daughter of the old Methodist minister who lives at the corner; secretary of his church board, or something, isn't he? I've noticed two or three little Carringfords playing in the yard as I go by, and all of them handsome."

Austen placed them at once. The child's mother was the daughter of the old minister, and, with husband and children, lived in the little brown house with him. An interest in the details of the human affairs about him was an unexpected phase in Austen's character. He liked to know what a man was doing, his income, his habits, his family ties.

"I know Carringford," he remarked; "he is book-keeper for Williams, a good, steady man. As you say, a handsome child, exceedingly so."

Harriet watched until the little niece joined the group outside.

"Gregarious little creatures they seem to be," she remarked. There was good-humour in her tone, but there was no understanding.

The next day was Sunday. On Monday it rained. Tuesday evening Alexina stood at the parlour window as before, looking out. The little figure looked very solitary.

"May I go play?" suddenly she asked. The voice was low, there was no note even of wistfulness, it was merely the question. There are children who suffer silently.

"Why not?" Harriet rejoined, looking up from her magazine. She was the last person to restrict any one needlessly.

The little niece went forth. The children had not come for her again.

Perhaps they did not want her, but, even with this fear upon her, go she must.

At the gate she paused and with the big house in its immaculate yard behind her, gazed up and down.

It was a quiet street with the houses set irregularly back from fences of varying patterns, and the brick sidewalks were raised and broken in places by the roots of huge sycamores and maples along the curbs.

But the cropped head of Alexina turned this way and that in vain. The street was deserted, the stillness lonesome. She swallowed hard. She knew where the little girl named Emily Carringford lived, for she had pointed out the house that first evening as they ran past in play, so Alexina slowly crossed the street, hoping Emily might be at her gate.

But first, as she went along, came a wide brick cottage, sitting high above a bas.e.m.e.nt, a porch across the front. She gazed in between the pickets of the fence, for it seemed nice in there. The ground was mossy under the trees, and the untrimmed bushes made bowers with their branches. She would like to play in this yard. Her eyes travelled on to the house. A gentleman sat in a cane arm-chair at the foot of the steps, smoking, and on the porch was a lady in a white dress with ribbons. The house looked old and the yard looked old, and so did the gentleman, but the lady was young; maybe she was going to a party, for it was a gauzy dress and the ribbons were rosy.

Alexina liked the cottage and the lady, and the big, wide yard, and somehow did not feel as lonesome as she had. She started on to find Emily, but at that moment the gate of the cottage swung out across her path. How could she know that the boy upon it, lonely, too, had planned the thing from the moment of her starting up the street?

"Oh," said Alexina, and stopped, and looked at the boy, uncomfortably immaculate in fresh white linen clothes, but he was absorbed in the flight of a bird across the rosy western sky.

"Come and play," said the straightforward Alexina. Companionship was what she was in search of.

The boy, without looking at her, shook his head, not so much as if he meant no, but as if he did not know how to say yes.

Perhaps she divined this, for approaching the gate and fingering its hasp, she asked,

"Why?"

The boy, a.s.suming a sort of pa.s.sivity of countenance as for cover to shyness, kicked at the gate, then scowled as he twisted his neck within the stiff circle of his round collar with the combative air of one who wars against starch. "There's n.o.body to play with," he said; "they've all gone to the Sunday-school picnic. I don't go to that church," nodding in the direction of a brick structure down the street.

"You go to the same one as my Aunt Harriet and my uncle," Alexina informed him. "I saw you there, and your name is William. I heard the lady calling you that, coming out."

The gate which had swung in swung out again, bringing the boy nearer this outspoken little girl, whose unconsciousness was putting him more at his ease. He had seen her at church, too, but he could not have told her so.

"What's the rest of your name--William what?"

Such a question makes a shy person very miserable, but the interest was pleasing.

"William Leroy," said the boy tersely. Then, as if in amend for the abruptness, he added: "Sometimes they call it the other way, King William, you know."

"Who do?"