A LITTLE ALIEN’S WOES

The young ship builder by Sophie Swett is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. CHAPTER III

A LITTLE ALIEN’S WOES

It was Dave who was to go to college. Cyrus was resolutely determined to sacrifice himself to the little “aliens” and to the carrying on of grandfather’s business. And since he was aided and abetted by Uncle Horace, and even dear old Parson Grover, who had sympathized with Cy’s desire to be a minister, declared that “the boy was quite right,” there was clearly nothing for the rest of us to say.

Grandma had grown somewhat childish by this time—as well as being childlike and lovely, as she always was—and wept for joy that Cyrus was not going away where his food might not be wholesomely prepared or his flannels properly aired. We had planned to break the shock of disappointment to her by telling her that it was thought that Cyrus had great business abilities and the shipbuilding might prosper, as it had done in the old times. But neither the ministry, for which she had so longed for Cyrus, nor the business were of so much consequence to grandma now, as was the fact that Cyrus would be at home and could play checkers with her in the evenings. He was so patient!—leaving his books without a murmur, although he had but little time for them now, and exercising an ingenuity to allow her to beat him, which I am sure would have constituted him a “champion” player.

Octavia was utterly dismayed. She had thought Cyrus was like our father, for whose memory she cherished a deep reverence, and on that account it was a matter of course that he should be a minister. Octavia had family pride and she thought it fitting that the family which gave its first minister to Palmyra should continue to furnish ministers rather than shipbuilders to the world.

She was deeply religious, too, and she seemed to fear that the god of this world had blinded Cyrus’ eyes to his duty, and blinded ours as well, that we could be resigned to his defection.

“Dave or Rob may be a minister,” I said hopefully. “Cy is planning already, to send Dave to college, and Rob will go, too, although just now Uncle Horace sneers at colleges.”

“It seems likely that it will be Dave who will be the minister!” said Octavia, who permitted herself to be sarcastic upon occasion. It had cut her dreadfully that Dave had been expelled from school for mischief.

“No one can tell when a boy is ten, what he may become,” I said with indignation. But my heart was heavy. I was driving Octavia to school and it was a dreary morning. Old Abigail’s white shape loomed ghostly through a heavy fog. Octavia’s long thin face looked white and melancholy, under the limp roses on her hat. There is nothing like a fog to make you feel your troubles and show them, too, and we have the heaviest of fogs on our river.

But I added, more lightly than I felt: “A little mischief like Dave’s doesn’t count.”

“It’s the alien blood I’m afraid of,” Octavia responded. “His father was so—so different from us. And he hasn’t that sense of responsibility that Cyrus had, even at his age. As for Rob, I’m afraid his asthmatic tendency will always make him delicate. Of course we have always thought Cyrus the hope of the family. And we have always known that the children would be a trouble—but to ruin ourselves for them, like this——!”

Octavia was growing vehement—we are all a little inclined to be that at times—but my attention was diverted from her by a sudden little jerking of the wagon from behind. It was the canopied beach wagon. Estelle liked to sit in the back with her long legs dangling out. Octavia had decreed that she should not drive as far as her schoolhouse with us unless she would sit properly upon the seat. I saw the small graceful figure spring out at the turn of the road. It did not run, and no gleeful laugh of defiance came back to us. It was a limp and dejected little figure that pulled its hat over its eyes as it walked.

“That child again,” said Octavia, following my gaze with an annoyed expression. “She never pays the least attention to what is said to her! Some day she will get hurt, jumping out in that way. And how it looks!”

“But Octavia, she must have heard,” I exclaimed in dismay.

“Heard what?” said Octavia, who, although she was a teacher, had no perception of the acuteness of children, at least of this child.

“About alien blood, and—Dave. That they were a trouble, and that we were ruining ourselves for them!” I replied with some irritation.

“She wouldn’t understand if she did hear,” said Octavia easily. “You exaggerate those children’s intelligence, Bathsheba. If she had understood I should almost think it would be a good thing for her. She really ought to have a little realizing sense of what is being done for her! I was a responsible human being when I was nine. Even you were more sensible than she is.”

Even me! There it was again! We are a frank family.

“If being responsible in tender years makes one hard and unfeeling when one grows up, I hope I wasn’t so,” I answered tartly.

Octavia said not another word, for she never will quarrel nor bicker. I wasn’t quite just. Octavia isn’t hard; she is only slow of perception and doesn’t readily put herself into other people’s places. Is not a lack of sympathy in good people often only a lack of imagination?

I was unjust, but I couldn’t express any contrition, my heart was so sore. I felt that there were, at this moment, heavy woes weighing upon the little sensitive spirit whose too keen ears took in every word of its elders, as few people realize that a child’s ears ever do.

On my way back I was tempted to stop at the schoolhouse and ask the teacher to allow Estelle to go home with me. It seemed cruel to let the little sore heart go uncomforted. But on second thought I refrained. In view of Dave’s misdemeanors I disliked to do anything that might make the children troublesome to their teachers. After all, childhood’s impressions were fleeting. The romp at recess might drive away all painful thoughts.

In fact when the child came home her face was bright, and I dismissed my misgivings. But that night I was awakened from sleep by a piteous little voice, close at my ear, that said, “Bashie, what is alien? I can’t sleep for thinking.”

I sprang up. “It’s a nasty, horrid word that means—that doesn’t mean much of anything, dearie!” I said, and I tried to draw her into bed and make her cuddle down by me, as she did sometimes when a whippoorwill—which she never liked—sang persistently on the roof, or a screech-owl—“nowls” she called them—hooted in the Balm of Gilead tree by her window. But she would not come. She stood there, in her little white nightgown and a moonbeam fell across her face and showed the hair all tossed back from her high forehead, as Loveday said she always pushed it back when she was full of naughtiness.

“It means—it means that Dave and I don’t belong here like the rest of you!” she said. “We’re the other family. The children at school say so! And we’re a trouble to you! We’re why Cyrus can’t go to college and be a minister. You said so yourself!”

I remembered that I did say so and I could have bitten my tongue out for my brutal carelessness.

When “the leaves of the judgment books unfold” and the countless stabs of careless tongues are revealed, we may be guiltily amazed to see how deeply they have pierced the children’s hearts.

“And she said”—went on the piteous little voice, “Octavia said that we hurt you—spoiled everything! Bashie, is it true? Is that what children do when they are aliens?”

Of course I tried to comfort her with soft words. I drew her in beside me and cuddled her. There were strangling sobs in my throat and my eyes were wet, but she was quiet and tearless.

“She’s jest as still and sot as the meetin’ house,” Loveday was in the habit of saying. Loveday had never even heard of Hosea Bigelow! “She’s more’n all these, as the boys say, but ’tain’t easy to make her out, and she ain’t a-goin’ to down her head for nobody!”

Estelle fell asleep after an hour or more and then sighs and broken sobs came from her lips; and she tossed about restlessly all night as if with troubled dreams. I was only sixteen, and sixteen in Palmyra is not so old as it is where life flows in broader channels, but I knew enough of life to make my heart yearn over the proud little soul that would always carry an undaunted front to the world—and get the deeper scars thereby, though so bravely hidden.

Many times, in the years that came after, I remembered that night and its sequel. There seemed likely to be no sequel, the next morning. The child was like herself and apparently only careful and troubled about her white turkey, that had an irresponsible habit of leading her delicate brood into far pastures where thunder-storms might be their death. Dave, it must be admitted, was of but little help to her in the arduous business of turkey-raising. He took its difficulties lightly and made himself very unpleasant to the gobbler. Her usual small but exacting affairs seemed to engross Estelle that morning, but the next morning we discovered that there had been a mysterious disappearance!

Two small beds had not been slept in, and neither Dave nor Estelle were to be found. Viola was sent by Loveday to call them when it was long past breakfast time—for Loveday had a weakness about letting them lie in bed, declaring that only “ingy-rubber legs” could stand the running that they did. Viola returned wide-eyed and with her face so pale that the freckles stood out upon it like little spatters of mud.

“They’re gone, ma’am!” she shouted in grandma’s ear. “They’re all gone, for their little clothes are all pulled over and they must each have took a bundle!”

And the idea of a bundle seemed so to impress Viola with the finality of their departure that she threw her apron over her head and gave way to violent weeping.

Then began as great a panic in the house and in the town as on that other day when Estelle had climbed old “Blue” to find Heaven and her mother. For a while the only information we could gather was to the effect that a drover, crossing the bridge to Palmyra shortly after eleven o’clock, the night before, had seen, by the light of a waning moon, two small figures going in the opposite direction. One small figure had fled in evident alarm at sight of his cattle. This was positive identification. The only two things of which Estelle admitted that she was afraid were thunder and cows.

Parties had started for the other side of the river in hot pursuit of the little fugitives when Uncle Horace was seen to put forth from the farther shore in his rowboat with what seemed to be two small persons in the stern. Loveday, who had repaired with the old spy-glass to the upper piazza, descried a glint of yellow locks and, presently, Estelle’s Sunday hat with the tall white feather. Even in her stress of emotion the child had not been able to forego the tall white feather that had been her joy.

At about the same time a shout went up from the party on the bridge and Cyrus and I heard it, as we were distractedly climbing old “Blue” forcing our way into thickets and peering down the sides of precipitous rocks.

When we were certain that they were safe, Cyrus, I regret to say, became a little cross.

“One might think it was enough to be the burden that they are without making themselves a constant plague!” he said.

“She is such a sensitive little thing,” I murmured apologetically.

“Sensitiveness is very apt to be only another name for vanity and selfishness,” said Cyrus sharply.

“Cyrus, they are only children,” I said indignantly. But Cyrus was wiping his near-sighted eyes that smarted from the strain and the exposure to the unusually hot September sun, and would not listen to me. He strode off to the shipyard without waiting to hear where the wanderers had been or how it had fared with them.

Grandma kissed them and cried over them and insisted upon giving them flaxseed tea and cough-drops. Loveday gave them their breakfast with a face of stern displeasure—but she made the griddle-cakes that they loved, which was just like Loveday.

“We had to, we were such a trouble and we didn’t belong here.” That was the only explanation that Estelle vouchsafed to give, and that was only to me.

“We went to find aliens, like us,” she said. That was when I had her all to myself in the seclusion of the orchard. “I was afraid they were something like Indians, but Dave said they must be some kind of French, because we were born in France. Dave didn’t want to go but I made him. Then he would come back. Sometimes he is a very stubborn person.” The little transparent brow wrinkled itself anxiously over this astonishing peculiarity of Dave’s—whom, although he was nearly two years her senior, she had always kept in leading-strings.

After a pause Estelle continued: “We were going to the Port to find a ship to take us to France, but when we came in sight of Uncle Horace’s house there was a light in Rob’s window. It was after eleven o’clock—it is so long before Leander stops snoring,” and it was our hired man’s boast that while he snored he was never sound asleep but could hear every footfall in the house—“so we knew that Rob must be having one of his bad times with asthma. Dave feels orfly when Rob has those, you know, and Rob always wants him to tell him pirate stories. It’s queer that Rob never reads those stories himself nor ones about giants; but when he has the asthma he wants Dave to tell him about pirates and giants and about the old witch that had three elegant daughters. I told Dave that story myself. Well, Dave wouldn’t go on. When we got so near that we could hear Rob’s horrid, hard breathing through his open window, Dave just blubbered. He ran up and pounded on the door and Uncle Horace himself let him in and said he was orfly glad he had come. Uncle Horace doesn’t like us, either; I suppose because we’re aliens.

“He scowled fearfully when he saw me and the bundles. Then he laughed a little. Some people hurt your feelings worse when they laugh than when they scowl. ‘So you are at the bottom of this—this little midnight excursion?’ he said to me. And he said something to Dave out of the Bible; something about Adam letting Eve make him eat the apple. I think he was the more mad with me because he was disappointed that Dave hadn’t come on purpose to see Rob. He wants everybody to think everything of Rob although he is often very cross to him himself.”

I thought the nine-year-old eyes were quite too keen, and it was a relief when she enforced her position by adding, “Octavia says so, anyway.”

“He took away our bundles and Marcella, the housekeeper, put me to bed. It was in the next room to Rob’s and I could hear his breathing and hear Dave telling the stories. I went to sleep and woke up again and he was still going on—such a sleepy-head as Dave is, too. He will do anything for Rob; he always would, even before his asthma was so bad. If he catches a big trout he lets Rob pretend that he caught it, and he tried to get me to do Rob’s arithmetic for him, when it was cheating. He would have done it himself if he could. And yet for himself I don’t think Dave ever cheats. You see, it is very hard for me to keep Dave straight when Rob isn’t—well, isn’t so very particular.” The little peaked face was grave with responsibility.

“Are you the girl who persuaded her brother to run away?” I said solemnly.

She burst into tears, and threw her arms around my neck.

“Was it bad when I only wanted to get where we belonged, and weren’t in the way?” she said. “And I left my berry and my bantam money behind, in my apple bank, in hopes that Cyrus would go to college after we were gone.”

I talked to her for a long time, but I could see that I influenced her only when I told her what a great helper she could be to us all. When I convinced her of that she smiled like an April sun and promised never to run away again. And from that day it was pitiful to see her wait upon and try to propitiate Cyrus, who either was or assumed to be as loftily unconscious of her present attentions as he had been of her previous “making faces.”

This was the only result of the children’s troublesome escapade, except that we were careful never to speak of them as “aliens” again, and we all of us had, I think, a little snugger place for them in our hearts, even Uncle Horace, although he shook his head and said the girl showed that she had something besides Partridge-blood in her veins.

I am not sure whether the comradeship between Dave and Rob increased from that time, or whether we only observed it more. But they were constantly together and Estelle, I knew, still kept an increasing vigilance over the trout-catching and the arithmetic. She was extremely quick at mathematics, herself, and she really succeeded in making Dave ambitious in that direction, but chiefly, I think, that he might be able to help Rob by fair means.

Rob was hindered so much by his attacks of asthma that it was difficult to say whether he was really dull or only backward. Dave, although less than two years his senior, was reluctantly preparing for college while Rob was still in the grammar school. Cyrus had by this time set his heart upon having Dave go to college.

There had been no more expulsions from school and he was more than a fairly good scholar. The days when he covered all available surfaces with chalk or paint or pencil drawings were long since over. In fact it was not long after the running away that I came upon Estelle as she thrust into the blazing wood-fire her plump and precious, though dilapidated, Mother Goose book. I rescued it thinking the child would surely repent so dreadful a sacrifice.

“No, I mean it,” she said firmly, although tears were running down her cheeks. “I told Dave I would if he would not draw any more except the drawing-book lessons. See I—I did those.”

On the margin of the leaves of the Mother Goose book figures were drawn, droll little old women, bunchy babies, cats and dogs and hens. Only one thing struck me, then, that the drawings were very queer, that they were unlike the drawings of the Palmyra children.

She looked at me with a wistful inquiry as I turned over the leaves. When I had finished she gripped the fat little well-thumbed book firmly and laid it again upon the glowing coals.

“You like to draw then, don’t you?” I said sympathetically, for the struggle was pitiful.

She nodded, with firmly compressed lips. Then she turned her back upon the burning book and said in a voice sternly kept from shaking:

“It’s a waste of time; Loveday says so. And it may lead to worser things—smoking and cheating.”

“But you are not likely to do those things,” I said, struggling for control of myself between laughter and tears.

“Oh, I am thinking of Dave!” she said with surprise at my stupidity. “It is to stop him from drawing that I have given it up.”

This sacrifice had apparently produced an effect, for Dave’s good behavior and attention to his books dated from about that time.

He passed his college examination successfully. We even whispered a hope to one another that Dave would become a minister. There was no sarcasm about it now; even Cyrus forbore to be a wet blanket when I ventured to express the hope to him.

All through Dave’s first year in college we had encouraging accounts of him. If there was nothing especially brilliant about his scholarship, and if he were paying a little more attention to athletic sports than Cyrus approved of, at least he was behaving well, and even showing something of the religious instinct that might be expected to be his inheritance from a long line of devout ancestors—on his mother’s side.

So it was, that what happened only two months after the beginning of his sophomore year was a blow that came upon us like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky.

Rob had been sent to a preparatory school in the same town with Dave’s college. We had heard that Rob was ill and had feared to hear worse tidings from him. But it was the unexpected that happened.

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