LUCLARION
How Mrs. Grapp ever came to, was the
wonder. Her having the baby was nothing.
Her having the name for it was the astonishment.
Her own name was Lucy; her husband’s
Luther: that, perhaps, accounted for the first
syllable; afterwards, whether her mind lapsed off
into combinations of such outshining appellatives as
“Clara” and “Marion,” or whether
Mr. Grapp having played the clarionet, and wooed her
sweetly with it in her youth, had anything to do with
it, cannot be told; but in those prescriptive days
of quiet which followed the domestic advent, the name
did somehow grow together in the fancy of Mrs. Luther;
and in due time the life-atom which had been born
indistinguishable into the natural world, was baptized
into the Christian Church as “Luclarion”
Grapp. Thenceforth, and no wonder, it took to
itself a very especial individuality, and became what
this story will partly tell.
Marcus Grapp, who had the start of
Luclarion in this “meander,” as
their father called the vale of tears, by
just two years’ time, and was y-clipped,
by everybody but his mother “Mark,” in
his turn, as they grew old together, cut his sister
down to “Luke.” Then Luther Grapp
called them both “The Apostles.” And
not far wrong; since if ever the kingdom of heaven
does send forth its Apostles nay, its little
Christs into the work on earth, in
these days, it is as little children into loving homes.
The Apostles got up early one autumn
morning, when Mark was about six years old, and Luke
four. They crept out of their small trundle-bed
in their mother’s room adjoining the great kitchen,
and made their way out softly to the warm wide hearth.
There were new shoes, a pair apiece,
brought home from the Mills the night before, set
under the little crickets in the corners. These
had got into their dreams, somehow, and into the red
rooster’s first halloo from the end room roof,
and into the streak of pale daylight that just stirred
and lifted the darkness, and showed doors and windows,
but not yet the blue meeting-houses on the yellow
wall-paper, by which they always knew when it was really
morning; and while Mrs. Grapp was taking that last
beguiling nap in which one is conscious that one means
to get up presently, and rests so sweetly on one’s
good intentions, letting the hazy mirage of the day’s
work that is to be done play along the horizon of dim
thoughts with its unrisen activities, two
little flannel night-gowns were cuddled in small heaps
by the chimney-side, little bare feet were trying
themselves into the new shoes, and lifting themselves
up, crippled with two inches of stout string between
the heels.
Then the shoes were turned into spans
of horses, and chirruped and trotted softly into their
cricket-stables; and then what else was
there to do, until the strings were cut, and the flannel
night-gowns taken off?
It was so still out here, in the big,
busy, day-time room; it was like getting back where
the world had not begun; surely one must do something
wonderful with the materials all lying round, and such
an opportunity as that.
It was old-time then, when kitchens
had fire-places; or rather the house was chiefly fire-place,
in front of and about which was more or less of kitchen-space.
In the deep fire-place lay a huge mound of gray ashes,
a Vesuvius, under which red bowels of fire lay hidden.
In one corner of the chimney leaned an iron bar, used
sometimes in some forgotten, old fashioned way, across
dogs or pothooks, who knows now? At
any rate, there it always was.
Mark, ambitious, put all his little
strength to it this morning and drew it down, carefully,
without much clatter, on the hearth. Then he
thought how it would turn red under those ashes, where
the big coals were, and how it would shine and sparkle
when he pulled it out again, like the red-hot, hissing
iron Jack-the-Giant-Killer struck into the one-eyed
monster’s eye. So he shoved it in; and forgot
it there, while he told Luke very much
twisted and dislocated, and misjoined the
leading incidents of the giant story; and then lapsed
off, by some queer association, into the Scripture
narrative of Joseph and his brethren, who “pulled
his red coat off, and put him in a fit, and
left him there.”
“And then what?” says Luke.
“Then, O, my iron’s
done! See here, Luke!” and taking
it prudently with the tongs, he pulled back the rod,
till the glowing end, a foot or more of live, palpitating,
flamy red, lay out upon the broad open bricks.
“There, Luke! You daresn’t put your
foot on that!”
Dear little Luke, who wouldn’t, at even four
years old, be dared!
And dear little white, tender, pink-and-lily foot!
The next instant, a shriek of pain
shot through Mrs. Grapp’s ears, and sent her
out of her dreams and out of her bed, and with one
single impulse into the kitchen, with her own bare
feet, and in her night-gown.
The little foot had only touched;
a dainty, timid, yet most resolute touch; but the
sweet flesh shriveled, and the fierce anguish ran
up every fibre of the baby body, to the very heart
and brain.
“O! O, O!” came the
long, pitiful, shivering cries, as the mother gathered
her in her arms.
“What is it? What did you
do? How came you to?” And all the while
she moved quickly here and there, to cupboard and press-drawer,
holding the child fast, and picking up as she could
with one hand, cotton wool, and sweet-oil flask, and
old linen bits; and so she bound it up, saying still,
every now and again, as all she could say, “What
did you do? How came you to?”
Till, in a little lull of the fearful smart, as the air was
shut away, and the oil felt momentarily cool upon the ache, Luke answered her,
“He hed I dare-hn’t, and ho I did!”
“You little fool!”
The rough word was half reaction of
relief, that the child could speak at all, half horrible
spasm of all her own motherly nerves that thrilled
through and through with every pang that touched the
little frame, hers also. Mothers never do part
bonds with babies they have borne. Until the
day they die, each quiver of their life goes back
straight to the heart beside which it began.
“You Marcus! What did you mean?”
“I meant she darsn’t;
and she no business to ’a dars’t,”
said Mark, pale with remorse and fright, but standing
up stiff and manful, with bare common sense, when
brought to bay. And then he marched away into
his mother’s bedroom, plunged his head down into
the clothes, and cried, harder than Luclarion.
Nobody wore any new shoes that day;
Mark for a punishment, though he flouted
at the penalty as such, with an, “I guess you’d
see me!” And there were many days before poor
little Luclarion could wear any shoes at all.
The foot got well, however, without
hindrance. But Luke was the same little fool
as ever; that was not burnt out. She would never
be “dared” to anything.
They called it “stumps”
as they grew older. They played “stumps”
all through the barns and woods and meadows; over
walls and rocks, and rafters and house-roofs.
But the burnt foot saved Luke’s neck scores
of times, doubtless. Mark remembered it; he never
“stumped” her to any certain hurt, or
where he could not lead the way himself.
The mischief they got into and out
of is no part of my story; but one day something happened things
do happen as far back in lives as that which
gave Luclarion her clew to the world.
They had got into the best parlor, that
sacred place of the New England farm-house, that is
only entered by the high-priests themselves on solemn
festivals, weddings and burials, Thanksgivings and
quiltings; or devoutly, now and then to set the shrine
in order, shut the blinds again, and so depart, leaving
it to gather the gloom and grandeur that things and
places and people do when they are good for nothing
else.
The children had been left alone;
for their mother had gone to a sewing society, and
Grashy, the girl, was up-stairs in her kitchen-chamber-bedroom,
with a nail over the door-latch to keep them out while
she “fixed over” her best gown.
“Le’s play Lake Ontario,” says Marcus.
Now Lake Ontario, however they had
pitched upon it, stood with them for all the waters
that are upon the face of the earth, and all the confusion
and peril of them. To play it, they turned the
room into one vast shipwreck, of upset and piled up
chairs, stools, boxes, buckets, and what else they
could lay hands on; and among and over them they navigated
their difficult and hilarious way. By no means
were they to touch the floor; that was the Lake, that
were to drown.
It was Columbus sometimes; sometimes
it was Captain Cook; to-day, it was no less than Jason
sailing after the golden fleece.
Out of odd volumes in the garret,
and out of “best books” taken down from
the secretary in the “settin’-room,”
and put into their hands, with charges, of a Sunday,
to keep them still, they had got these things, jumbled
into strange far-off and near fantasies in their childish
minds. “Lake Ontario” included and
connected all.
“I’ll tell you what it
is,” said Marcus, tumbling up against the parlor
door and an idea at once. “In here!”
“What?” asked Luke, breathless,
without looking up, and paddling with the shovel,
from an inverted rocking-chair.
“The golden thing! Hush!”
At this moment Grashy came into the
kitchen, took a little tin kettle from a nail over
the dresser, and her sun-bonnet from another behind
the door, and made her way through the apartment as
well as she could for bristling chair-legs, with exemplary
placidity. She was used to “Lake Ontario.”
“Don’t get into any mischief,
you Apostles,” was her injunction. “I’m
goin’ down to Miss Ruddock’s for some ’east.”
“Good,”; says Mark, the
instant the door was shut “Now this is Colchis,
and I’m going in.”
He pronounced it much like “cold-cheese,”
and it never occurred to him that he was naming any
unusual or ancient locality. There was a “Jason”
in the Mills Village. He kept a grocer’s
shop. Colchis might be close by for all he knew;
out beyond the wall, perhaps, among the old barrels.
Children place all they read or hear about,
or even all they imagine, within a very limited horizon.
They cannot go beyond their world. Why should
they? Neither could those very venerable ancients.
“’Tain’t,”
says Luclarion, with unbeguiled practicality.
“It’s just ma’s best parlor, and
you mustn’t.”
It was the “mustn’t”
that was the whole of it. If Mark had asserted
that the back kitchen, or the cellar-way closet was
Colchis, she would have indorsed it with enthusiasm,
and followed on like a loyal Argonaut, as she was.
But her imagination here was prepossessed. Nothing
in old fable could be more environed with awe and mystery
than this best parlor.
“And, besides,” said Luclarion,
“I don’t care for the golden fleece; I’m
tired of it. Let’s play something else.”
“I’ll tell you what there
is in here,” persisted Mark. “There’s
two enchanted children. I’ve seen ’em!”
“Just as though,” said
Luke contemptuously. “Ma ain’t a witch.”
“Tain’t ma. She don’t
know. They ain’t visible to her. She
thinks it’s nothing but the best parlor.
But it opens out, right into the witch country, not
for her. ’Twill if we go. See if it
don’t.”
He had got hold of her now; Luclarion
could not resist that. Anything might be true
of that wonderful best room, after all. It was
the farthest Euxine, the witch-land, everything, to
them.
So Mark turned the latch and they crept in
“We must open a shutter,” Mark said, groping
his way.
“Grashy will be back,” suggested Luke,
fearfully.
“Guess so!” said Mark.
“She ain’t got coaxed to take her sun-bonnet
off yet, an’ it’ll take her ninety-’leven
hours to get it on again.”
He had let in the light now from the south window.
The red carpet on the floor; the high
sofa of figured hair-cloth, with brass-headed nails,
and brass rosettes in the ends of the hard, cylinder
pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors
and drawers glittering with hanging brass handles;
right opposite the door by which they had come in,
the large, leaning mirror, gilt garnished
with grooved and beaded rim and an eagle and ball-chains
over the top, all this, opening right in
from the familiar every-day kitchen and their Lake
Ontario, it certainly meant something that
such a place should be. It meant a great deal
more than sixteen feet square could hold, and what
it really was did not stop short at the gray-and-crimson
stenciled walls.
The two were all alone in it; perhaps
they had never been all alone in it before. I
think, notwithstanding their mischief and enterprise,
they never had.
And deep in the mirror, face to face
with them, coming down, it seemed, the red slant of
an inner and more brilliant floor, they saw two other
little figures. Their own they knew, really, but
elsewhere they never saw their own figures entire.
There was not another looking-glass in the house that
was more than two feet long, and they were all hung
up so high!
“There!” whispered Mark.
“There they are, and they can’t get out.”
“Of course they can’t,” said sensible
Luclarion.
“If we only knew the right thing
to say, or do, they might,” said Mark.
“It’s that they’re waiting for, you
see. They always do. It’s like the
sleeping beauty Grashy told us.”
“Then they’ve got to wait a hundred years,”
said Luke.
“Who knows when they began?”
“They do everything that we
do,” said Luclarion, her imagination kindling,
but as under protest. “If we could jump
in perhaps they would jump out.”
“We might jump at ’em,”
said Marcus. “Jest get ’em going,
and may-be they’d jump over. Le’s
try.”
So they set up two chairs from Lake
Ontario in the kitchen doorway, to jump from; but
they could only jump to the middle round of the carpet,
and who could expect that the shadow children should
be beguiled by that into a leap over bounds?
They only came to the middle round of their
carpet.
“We must go nearer; we must
set the chairs in the middle, and jump close.
Jest shave, you know,” said Marcus.
“O, I’m afraid,” said Luclarion.
“I’ll tell you what!
Le’s run and jump! Clear from the
other side of the kitchen, you know. Then they’ll
have to run too, and may-be they can’t stop.”
So they picked up chairs and made
a path, and ran from across the broad kitchen into
the parlor doorway, quite on to the middle round of
the carpet, and then with great leaps came down bodily
upon the floor close in front of the large glass that,
leaned over them, with two little fallen figures in
it, rolling aside quickly also, over the slanting
red carpet.
But, O dear what did it?
Had the time come, anyhow, for the
old string to part its last fibre, that held the mirror
tilting from the wall, or was it the crash
of a completed spell?
There came a snap, a strain, as
some nails or screws that held it otherwise gave way
before the forward pressing weight, and down, flat-face
upon the floor, between the children, covering them
with fragments of splintered glass and gilded wood, eagle,
ball-chains, and all, that whole magnificence
and mystery lay prostrate.
Behind, where it had been, was a blank,
brown-stained cobwebbed wall, thrown up harsh and
sudden against them, making the room small, and all
the enchanted chamber, with its red slanting carpet,
and its far reflected corners, gone.
The house hushed up again after that
terrible noise, and stood just the same as ever.
When a thing like that happens, it tells its own story,
just once, and then it is over. People are different.
They keep talking.
There was Grashy to come home.
She had not got there in time to hear the house tell
it. She must learn it from the children.
Why?
“Because they knew,” Luclarion
said. “Because, then, they could not wait
and let it be found out.”
“We never touched it,” said Mark.
“We jumped,” said Luke.
“We couldn’t help it,
if that did it. S’posin’ we’d
jumped in the kitchen, or the flat-irons
had tumbled down, or anything? That
old string was all wore out.”
“Well, we was here, and we jumped; and we know.”
“We was here, of course; and
of course we couldn’t help knowing, with all
that slam-bang. Why, it almost upset Lake Ontario!
We can tell how it slammed, and how we thought the
house was coming down. I did.”
“And how we were in the best
parlor, and how we jumped,” reiterated Luclarion,
slowly. “Marcus, it’s a stump!”
They were out in the middle of Lake
Ontario now, sitting right down underneath the wrecks,
upon the floor; that is, under water, without ever
thinking of it. The parlor door was shut, with
all that disaster and dismay behind it.
“Go ahead, then!” said
Marcus, and he laid himself back desperately on the
floor. “There’s Grashy!”
“Sakes and patience!”
ejaculated Grashy, merrily, coming in. “They’re
drownded, dead, both of ’em; down
to the bottom of Lake Ontariah!”
“No we ain’t,” said
Luclarion, quietly. “It isn’t Lake
Ontario now. It’s nothing but a clutter.
But there’s an awful thing in the best parlor,
and we don’t know whether we did it or not.
We were in there, and we jumped.”
Grashy went straight to the parlor
door, and opened it. She looked in, turned pale,
and said “’Lection!”
That is a word the women have, up
in the country, for solemn surprise, or exceeding
emergency, or dire confusion. I do not know whether
it is derived from religion or politics. It denotes
a vital crisis, either way, and your hands full.
Perhaps it had the theological association in Grashy’s
mind, for the next thing she said was, “My soul!”
“Do you know what that’s a sign of, you
children?”
“Sign the old thing was rotten,” said
Marcus, rather sullenly.
“Wish that was all,” said
Grashy, her lips white yet. “Hope there
mayn’t nothin’ dreadful happen in this
house before the year’s out. It’s
wuss’n thirteen at the table.”
“Do you s’pose we did it?” asked
Luke, anxiously.
“Where was you when it tumbled?”
“Right in front of it. But we were rolling
away. We tumbled.”
“’Twould er come down
the fust jar, anyway, if a door had slammed.
The string’s cut right through,” said Grashy,
looking at the two ends sticking up stiff and straight
from the top fragment of the frame. “But
the mercy is you war’n’t smashed yourselves
to bits and flinders. Think o’that!”
“Do you s’pose ma’ll think of that?”
asked Luclarion.
“Well yes; but it
may make her kinder madder, just at first,
you know. Between you and me and the lookin’-glass,
you see, well, yer ma is a pretty strong-feelin’
woman,” said Grashy, reflectively. “‘Fi
was you I wouldn’t say nothin’ about it.
What’s the use? I shan’t.”
“It’s a stump,”
repeated Luclarion, sadly, but in very resolute earnest.
Grashy stared.
“Well, if you ain’t the
curiousest young one, Luke Grapp!” said she,
only half comprehending.
When Mrs. Grapp came home, Luclarion
went into her bedroom after her, and told her the
whole story. Mrs. Grapp went into the parlor,
viewed the scene of calamity, took in the sense of
loss and narrowly escaped danger, laid the whole weight
of them upon the disobedience to be dealt with, and
just as she had said, “You little fool!”
out of the very shock of her own distress when Luke
had burned her baby foot, she turned back now, took
the two children up-stairs in silence, gave them each
a good old orthodox whipping, and tucked them into
their beds.
They slept one on each side of the
great kitchen-chamber.
“Mark,” whispered Luke,
tenderly, after Mrs. Grapp’s step had died away
down the stairs. “How do you feel?”
“Hot!” said Mark. “How do you?”
“You ain’t mad with me, be you?”
“No.”
“Then I feel real cleared up
and comfortable. But it was a stump, wasn’t
it?”
From that time forward, Luclarion
Grapp had got her light to go by. She understood
life. It was “stumps” all through.
The Lord set them, and let them; she found that out
afterward, when she was older, and “experienced
religion.” I think she was mistaken in the
dates, though; it was recognition, this later
thing; the experience was away back, at
Lake Ontario.
It was a stump when her father died,
and her mother had to manage the farm, and she to
help her. The mortgage they had to work off was
a stump; but faith and Luclarion’s dairy did
it. It was a stump when Marcus wanted to go to
college, and they undertook that, after the mortgage.
It was a stump when Adam Burge wanted her to marry
him, and go and live in the long red cottage at Side
Hill, and she could not go till they had got through
with helping Marcus. It was a terrible stump
when Adam Burge married Persis Cone instead, and she
had to live on and bear it. It was a stump when
her mother died, and the farm was sold.
Marcus married; he never knew; he
had a belles-lettres professorship in a
new college up in D-. He would
not take a cent of the farm money; he had had his
share long ago; the four thousand dollars were invested
for Luke. He did the best he could, and all he
knew; but human creatures can never pay each other
back. Only God can do that, either way.
Luclarion did not stay in -.
There were too few there now, and too many. She
came down to Boston. Her two hundred and eighty
dollars a year was very good, as far as it went, but
it would not keep her idle; neither did she wish to
live idle. She learned dress-making; she had
taste and knack; she was doing well; she enjoyed going
about from house to house for her days’ work,
and then coming back to her snug room at night, and
her cup of tea and her book.
Then it turned out that so much sewing
was not good for her; her health was threatened; she
had been used to farm work and “all out-doors.”
It was a “stump” again. That was all
she called it; she did not talk piously about a “cross.”
What difference did it make? There is another
word, also, for “cross” in Hebrew.
Luclarion came at last to live with
Mrs. Edward Shiere. And in that household, at
eight and twenty, we have just found her.