Read CHAPTER II of Real Folks, free online book, by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, on ReadCentral.com.

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.