Before Marthy got upstairs, I mustered and dragooned sufficient courage to enable me to visit the room. Still trembling and full of loathing at what I must see, I turned over the pillow. The red flannel was there--and the raw cotton--and inside of all, IT--Frank no longer--as cold as a stone!

I took it up with the tongs and threw it out of the window--and said never a word about it to anybody.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Chapter XII

My Prize Beet

[Ill.u.s.tration]

I had been seven years old for so long that I alluded to myself habitually as "almost eight." We had our governess now, Miss Davidson, a handsome, amiable, and somewhat sentimental Bostonian recommended by a Richmond friend of my father. Four other girls studied with us. Two of them, Paulina and Sarah Hobson, were our second cousins. They stayed at our house from Monday morning until Friday evening, going home for Sunday, unless the weather were bad. Madeline and Rosa Pemberton were day scholars, the Pemberton plantation adjoining ours.

I was the youngest of the six, and while I fancy that I was rather a favorite with Miss Davidson, I endured much from the girls on account of my inferiority in age, as well as because of my "old-fashioned, conceited ways." That was one reason I spoke of being almost eight. I was trying to grow up to what they complained of as "getting above"

myself.

The frank brutality of school children of both s.e.xes, as contrasted with the unselfish forbearance (or the show of it) and the suave courtesy of well-bred men and women, is an instructive study in the evolution of ethics. The youngest boy or girl in cla.s.s or college is the weakest wolf in the pack, the under dog in the fight. I had all of a little girl's natural desire for new playfellows and the dreamer's pa.s.sion for more material for castle-building. The prospect of "the school" was ravishing. I constructed scenes and rehea.r.s.ed conversations, with the cast of coming actors, until the quartette must have been super-or sub-human, had they come up to one t.i.the of my requirements.

In plain and very homely fact, they were four commonplace, provincial girls of average natural intelligence, in age varying from twelve to fourteen. They studied because they would be called upon to recite, and recited fairly well for fear of reproof and bad marks should they be derelict. Out of school, books and bookish thoughts were cast to the four winds of heaven. Their talk was cheery chatter, as brainless as the rattle of gra.s.shoppers in the summer gra.s.s.

Mary 'Liza towered above them in scholastic attainments, although the junior of the youngest of them, keeping at the head of every cla.s.s with unostentatious ease. I am afraid that I may have done my orphaned cousin seeming injustice in former chapters of this autobiography. Her temper was even, and her nature was finer than her prim, priggish ways would have led the casual acquaintance to suppose. She was ultra-conscientious, and naturally so exemplary that her good behavior was a snare. She could not sympathize with my temptations to naughtiness and many falls from good-girlhood. I mention this to introduce what was a surprise to me at the time. She never joined in the persecutions of me that were the labor and the pastime of the other girls. It would have been asking too much to expect her to champion me openly. I was affectionately grateful to her for holding herself aloof when baiting me was the amus.e.m.e.nt of the hour.

My mother had lamented that I took life so much to heart. It took itself to my heart now, uninvited. I was headstrong and headlong, hot in love, and honest in hatred; with a brain full of absurd fancies, all of which were beloved by their author. I had browsed at will in my father's library, poring by the hour over books twenty years too old for me, yet, by mental cuticular absorption, taking in and a.s.similating much that contributed to the formation of taste and character. My familiar use of language that sounded pedantic because I got it from books, my frequent references to characters I had known in print, were gibberish and vanity of vanities to my new a.s.sociates. My very plays were unintelligible to girls who had never heard of William Wallace, and Robert Bruce, and Thaddeus of Warsaw, or read, on Sunday afternoons, of Tobias and the Angel, Judith and Holofernes, and Christiana and her children.

Not one of the four had an intellectual ambition. Mary 'Liza's scholarship did not excite their envy because she was quiet and inoffensive. Proficiency in her studies was "one of her ways." I was talkative and aggressive, and needed taking down. They set themselves systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young and raw as I was, I was too wise to tell tales on them. By the time I was four years old that lesson was rubbed into my consciousness by the gruesome rhyme:--

"Tell-tale t.i.t!

Your tongue shall be slit, And every dog in our town Shall have a little bit!"

This apparently tedious preamble yet leads by an air-line to the first Agricultural Fair ever held at Powhatan Court House. The date was October fifteenth, and all the gentlemen and ladies in the county were entreated to send exhibits of plantation products and feminine handiwork. Enthusiasm ran from homestead to homestead with the speed and heat of a March fire in pine woods. Cattle, tobacco, grain, vegetables, fruit, flowers, bedquilts, poultry, bees, knitting, embroideries,--nothing was talked of but the finest specimens of these that would be "in strong and beauteous order ranged," upon the important day.

Madeline Pemberton had "done" a chair-cover in cross-st.i.tch that her mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of sh.e.l.l-pattern, openwork stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a dropped st.i.tch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing and embroidery were taught by governesses then. Sarah Hobson had pieced a crib quilt containing one thousand and twelve tiny squares. I was supposed to be left out in the cold. I would not knit, and to sew I was ashamed because I did it so badly. n.o.body paid any attention to me when comparing notes and queries touching the great show.

Yet I nursed an ambition of my own to which no one was privy except Spotswoode, a gray-headed, and proverbially taciturn field-hand, without whose knowledge and cooperation the purpose could not have been carried out.

Wandering, one July afternoon, on the outskirts of a corn-field--the same in which I once lost Musidora--I happened upon a "volunteer"

mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of a mile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif, then and there, I dug what I called "my little garden" about it, Spotswoode tugging up the stoutest roots and clearing out the wire-gra.s.s. With an occasional hand's turn and toss from him I cultivated the vagrant into extraordinary size and vigor. Not a day pa.s.sed in which I did not visit it. Not a blade of gra.s.s or a weed was allowed to invade the charmed circle, and many a spadeful of fresh mould, black with fatness, was worked about the swelling tuber by my kind field-hand. He knew that it was to be sent to the Fair in the fulness of time, and believed with me that "not another beet there could hold a candle to it."

As the air thickened and heated with rumors of the prodigies to be revealed on the fifteenth to the lasting honor of Old Powhatan, it was harder and harder to keep what I knew to myself. I had purposed not to reveal the secret until my father's wagons were in loading with other mammoth esculents and his finest corn and tobacco. Then--so ran the programme--I would march up, bearing my beet with me. It was to be dug up and cleaned by Spotswoode on the evening of the fourteenth, and kept safely in hiding for me. I could depend upon his literal obedience, albeit he never had an original idea.

Temptation befell, and overcame me, on the afternoon of October thirteenth, a date I was not likely, thenceforward, to forget. All six of us girls were gathered in the porch, listening to, and relating, stories of what this one had raised, and that one had made. Mr.

Pemberton had a seven-hundred-pound pig, and Mr. Hobson a rooster more beautiful than a bird of Paradise. The syrup of Mrs. Hobson's preserves was as clear as spring water, and Mrs. Pemberton's water melon-rind sweetmeats had as good as taken the prize.

Paulina Hobson sat on the top step of the porch. She was very fair, and her hair was nearly as white as her skin. She was fourteen years old, and wore a gra.s.s-green lawn frock. Her eyes were of a paler green, she had a nasty laugh, and her teeth were not good.

"Isn't it nice that all five of us are going to send something?" she said complacently. "You know that n.o.body but exhibitors can go into the tent for the first hour--from eleven to twelve--so's they can see everything before the crowd gets in. Who'll you stay with, Miss Molly Mumchance, when we all leave you?"

I had not spoken while the talk went on, for fear something might slip out and betray me, prematurely, but I took fire at this.

"I'm going in, myself!" I snapped out.

"Oh, you are? What are you going to exhibit, may we ask?" with her nasty laugh.

"The biggest beet in the world! It measures a yard around."

"Hoo! hoo! hoo!" squealed Paulina so loudly that my father, who was coming in the gate with my mother, Miss Davidson, Uncle Carter, and Aunt Eliza, said pleasantly:--

"What is the joke, young ladies? Mayn't we laugh, too?"

Madeline Pemberton answered. Miss Davidson had to reprove her every day for forwardness.

"Why, Mr. Burwell,"--laughing with affected violence,--"Molly says she is going to send some beets to the Fair that measure ever so many yards around."

"I didn't!" cried I, in a pa.s.sion. "You know that isn't true!"

My father moved toward me.

"What _did_ you say, daughter?"

I hung my head. If I told, where would be the surprise and the visioned triumph?

"What did you say, Molly?" repeated my father, in quiet gravity.

"I said _one_ beet, and that it measured one yard," stammered I, reluctantly.

"That was bad enough. When so many older people are trying to see who can tell the biggest story, little girls ought to be especially careful."

His eyes did not go to Madeline, but his emphasis did. The thought of being cla.s.sed with her lent me coherence and courage. I looked up.

"I have one beet, father, that is a yard 'round. I raised it myself. If you don't believe me, you can ask Spotswoode."

"I don't ask my servants if my daughter is telling the truth. Where is your beet?"

I pointed.

"Away over yonder--the other side of the corn-field."

Paulina and Rosa t.i.ttered, Madeline giggled,--then all three pretended to smother the demonstration with their handkerchiefs and behind their hands. Mary 'Liza looked scared and sorry. My father took hold of my hand.

"Take me to see it!"

The others fell into Indian file behind us, as we marched outside of the garden fence and past the Old Orchard where the rays of the sinking sun shot horizontal shafts under the trees to our very feet, and so to the corn-field. I did not glance behind to see who entered it after us, but pushed right ahead between the stalks, the stiff blades switching my cheeks. When we neared the "garden," I ran forward, flushed and impatient, not to display my prize, but to clear myself by proving my words. An envious, jagged blade slashed my forehead as I tore by. I did not feel it at the moment, or for half an hour after it began to bleed.

For--_the beet was gone!_