THE THREE WEAVERS

NO better cure could have been found for Lloyd's dejection than her visit to The Beeches. It was impossible for her to brood over her troubles while Allison and Kitty were continually saying funny things, and rushing her from one interesting game to another. After a good night's sleep the events of the previous day seemed so far away that what she had considered such a disgrace had somehow lost its sting, and she wondered how she could have suffered so keenly over it.

Katie Mallard came over soon after breakfast, and they spent nearly the entire day outdoors. The air was frosty and bracing, and when Mrs.

Walton saw them come running into the house just before sundown with bright eyes and red cheeks, she felt well pleased with the success of her plan.

She was sitting in her room by a front window writing letters when the girls came rushing up the stairs into the adjoining room. Kitty carried a basket of apples, and Allison some pop-corn and the popper, and presently an appetizing odour began to steal in as the white grains danced over the open fire.

As the girls hovered hungrily around, waiting for the popping to cease, they began a lively discussion which caught Mrs. Walton's attention. She paused, pen in hand, at the mention of two names, Daisy Dale and the Heiress of Dorn. They were familiar names, for only the day before Miss Edith had showed her the pile of books found in Ida's closet, and she was waiting for a suitable time to speak of them to the girls. As she folded her letter and addressed it, she decided she would call them in a little later, when they were through with their apples and their corn, for a quiet little twilight talk. A golden afterglow gleamed above the western tree-tops, and, leaning back in her rocking-chair, she sat watching it fade out, so absorbed in a story she was thinking to tell them that she ceased to hear the girlish chatter in the next room till Lloyd's voice rang out clearly:

"I've made up my mind. I'm _nevah_ going to get married!"

"Then you'll be an old maid," was Kitty's teasing rejoinder, "and people will poke fun at you and your cats and teacups."

"I'll not have any," was the prompt reply. "I nevah expect to have any moah pets of any kind. Whenevah I get to loving anything, something always happens to it. Think of all the pets we have had at Locust.

Fritz, and the two Bobs, and Boots, and the gobblah, and the goat, and the parrot, and deah old Hero! Something happened to every one of them.

The ponies are the only things left, and the only kind of a pet I'd evah have again. If Tarbaby should die, I'd buy me a hawse, for I don't expect to be the kind of an old maid that sits in a chimney-cawnah with a tabby and a teapot. I expect to dash around the country' on hawseback and have fun even when I'm old and wrinkled and gray. I'll go to college, of co'se, and I'll have interesting people to visit me, so that I'll keep up my interest in the world and not get cranky."

"I'll come and live with you," said Allison. "I'll have a studio and devote my life to making a great artist of myself. We could buy Tanglewood, and make a moat all around the house so that we could pull up the drawbridge when we wanted to be alone or were afraid of burglars."

"Maybe it would be better for me to be an old maid, too," said Betty, musingly. "I'd have more time to write books than if I had a husband and a family to look after. And, besides, while I like to read about lovers and such things in stories, it would make me feel dreadfully foolish to have any man fall on his knees to me and say the things that Lord Rokeby and Guy said to Daisy Dale. I don't even like to write those speeches when I'm in a room by myself. I've tried lots of times, and I've about decided to skip that part in my story. I'll put some stars instead, and begin, 'A year has pa.s.sed, and Gladys and Eugene,' etc."

"I was going to ask mothah how Papa Jack did it," said Lloyd, "but aftah all that's happened, somehow I'd rathah not say anything about such things to oldah people. Miss McCannister was so horrified when she found we had talked such 'sentimental foolishness,' as she called it. I'll nevah forget the way she screwed up her lips and said, 'It wasn't considahed propah, when I was a child, for little girls to discuss such subjects.' I felt as if I had been caught doing something wicked. It mawtified me dreadfully, and I made up my mind that I'd nevah get to be fond of anybody the way Ida was, for fear I might be mistaken in them as she was."

"Everything seems to be a warning lately," said Betty. "Even the literature lessons this week. If the _Lady of Shalott_ hadn't left her weaving to look out of the window when Sir Lancelot rode by, the curse wouldn't have come upon her."

"There!" cried Allison, scrambling to her feet. "That reminds me that I haven't learned the verses that Miss Edith asked us to memorize for Monday."

She took a worn copy of Tennyson from the table, and began rapidly turning the leaves.

"I learned the whole thing yesterday," said Betty. "I can say every word of part first."

"It's easy," remarked Kitty. "I know part of it, although I'm not in the cla.s.s. I learned it from hearing Allison read it:

"'Four gray walls and four gray towers Overlook a s.p.a.ce of flowers.

And the silent isle embowers The Lady of Shalott.'

Isn't that right?"

"Yes, but that isn't Monday's lesson. It's part second we have to learn."

"Let's all learn it," proposed Katie. "It's so pretty and jingles along so easily I'd like to know it, too. You line it out, Allison, as Frazer does the hymns at the coloured baptizings, and we'll run a race and see who can repeat it first."

"There she weaves by night and day," read Allison, and then the five voices gabbled it all together, "There she weaves by night and day."

The concert recitation went on for some time, and presently the lines of the familiar old poem began weaving themselves into the story Mrs.

Walton was thinking about. The red gold of the afterglow had not entirely faded from the sky when she left her seat by the window and went into the next room. The five girls on the hearth-rug were still chanting the lesson over and over.

"Come hear us say it, mother," called Kitty, drawing up a chair for her.

"Betty learned it first."

Allison deposited the bowl of pop-corn in her lap and pa.s.sed her the basket of apples, and then flourished the popper like a drum-major's baton. "Now all together!" she cried, and the five voices rang out like one:

"There she weaves by night and day A magic web with colours gay.

She has heard a whisper say A curse is on her if she stay To look down to Camelot.

She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she.

The Lady of Shalott.

"And moving through a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear.

There she sees the highway near, Winding down to Camelot.

There the river eddy whirls, And the surly village churls And the red cloaks of market-girls Pa.s.s onward from Shalott.

"Sometimes a troop of damsels glad, An abbot on an ambling pad, Sometimes a curly shepherd lad Or long-haired page in crimson clad Goes by to Camelot.

And sometimes through the mirror blue The knights come riding two by two.

She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott."

"Why, she was an old maid! Wasn't she!" said Katie, so plaintively as they finished that they all laughed.

"That's what Allison and Betty and Lloyd are going to be, mother," said Kitty, teasingly. Lloyd, with a very red face, hastened to change the subject. She snuggled up against Mrs. Walton's knee, saying, as she looked into the glowing fire, "This is the best time of the day, when the wind goes 'Whooo' in the chimney, and it's cold and dark outdoahs and cheerful and bright inside. It's just the time for story-telling.

Don't you know one, Mrs. Walton?"

"Of course she does," Kitty answered for her. "And if you don't know one, you can make one up to order. Can't you, mamsie?"

"Your poem suggested a story," answered Mrs. Walton, and with one hand smoothing Lloyd's fair head as it rested against her knee, and the other stroking Kitty's dark one in her lap, she began:

"Once upon a time (the same time that the Lady of Shalott wove her magic web, and near the four gray towers from which she watched the road running down to Camelot), there lived three weavers. Their houses stood side by side, and such had been their equal fortunes that whatever happened under the roof of one had always happened under the roofs of the others. They wove the same patterns in their looms, and they received the same number of shillings for their webs. They sang the same songs, told the same tales, ate the same kind of broth from the same kind of bowls, and dressed in the same coa.r.s.e goods of hodden gray.

"But they were unlike as three weavers could possibly be. The first insisted on weaving all his webs a certain length, regardless of the size of the man who must wear the mantle. (Each web was supposed to be just long enough to make one mantle.) The second carelessly wove his any length that happened to be convenient, and stretched or cut it afterward to fit whomsoever would take it. But the third, with great painstaking and care, measured first the man and then the web by the inches and ells of his carefully notched yardstick.

"Now to each weaver was born a daughter, all on the same day, and they named them Hertha, Huberta, and Hildegarde. On the night after the christening, as the three men sat smoking their pipes on the same stoop, the father of Hertha said, 'Do not think me puffed up with unseemly pride, good neighbours, but wonderful fortune hath befallen me and mine this day. Clotho, the good fairy of all the weavers, was present at my Hertha's christening, and left beside her cradle a gift: a tiny loom that from beam to shuttle is of purest gold. And she whispered to me in pa.s.sing, "Good fortune, Herthold. It is written in the stars that a royal prince shall seek to wed thy child."'

"But Herthold's news caused no astonishment to his neighbours. What had happened under the roof of one had happened under the roofs of all, and the same good fortune was written in the stars for each, and the same gift had been left by each child's cradle. So the three friends rejoiced together, and boasted jestingly among themselves of the three kings'

sons who should some day sit down at their tables.

"But presently Hildgardmar, the father of Hildegarde, said, 'But there may be a slip twixt cup and lip. Mayhap our daughters cannot fulfil the required condition.'

"At that they looked grave for a moment, for Clotho had added in pa.s.sing, 'One thing is necessary. She must weave upon this loom I leave a royal mantle for the prince's wearing. It must be ample and fair to look upon, rich cloth of gold, of princely size and texture. Many will come to claim it, but if it is woven rightly the destined prince alone can wear it, and him it will fit in all faultlessness, as the falcon's feathers fit the falcon. But if it should not be ample and fine, meet for royal wearing, the prince will not deign to don it, and the maiden's heart shall break, as broke the shattered mirror of the Lady of Shalott.'

"'Oh, well,' said Herthold, when the three had smoked in silence a little s.p.a.ce. 'I'll guard against that. I shall hide all knowledge of the magic loom from my daughter until she be grown. Then, under mine own eye, by mine own measurements that I always use, shall she weave the goodly garment. In the meantime she shall learn all the arts which become a princess to know--broidery and fair needlework, and songs upon a lute. But of the weaving she shall know naught until she be grown.

That I am determined upon. 'Tis sorry work her childish hands would make of it, if left to throw the shuttle at a maiden's fickle fancy.'

"But Hubert shook his head. 'Why stew about a trifle!' he exclaimed.

'Forsooth, on such a tiny loom no web of any kind can well be woven.

'Tis but a toy that Clotho left the child to play with, and she shall weave her dreams and fancies on it at her own sweet will. I shall not interfere. What's written in the stars is written, and naught that I can do will change it. Away, friend Hildgardmar, with thy forebodings!'

"Hildgardmar said nothing in reply, but he thought much. He followed the example of the others, and early and late might have been heard the pounding of the three looms, for there was need to work harder than ever now, that the little maidens might have teachers for all the arts becoming a princess--broidery and fair needlework and songs upon the lute.

"While the looms pounded in the dwellings the little maidens grew apace.