WAKING UP
The Ledwiths took apartments in Boston
for a month. They packed away the furniture they
wanted to keep for upper rooms, in the attics of their
house at Z-. They had an auction
of all the furniture of their drawing-room, dining-room,
library, and first floor of sleeping-rooms. Then
they were to let their house. Meanwhile, one
was to be fixed upon and fitted up in Boston.
In all this Mrs. Megilp advised, invaluably.
“It’s of no use to move
things,” she said. “Three removes
are as bad as a fire; and nothing ever fits in to
new places. Old wine and new bottles, you know!
Clear all off with a country auction. Everybody
comes, and they all fight for everything. Things
bring more than their original cost. Then you’ve
nothing to do but order according to your taste.”
Mr. Oldways had invited both his nieces
to his own house on their arrival. But here again
Mrs. Megilp advised, so judiciously.
“There are too many of you;
it would be a positive infliction. And then you’ll
have all your running about and planning and calculating
to do, and the good old gentleman would think he had
pulled half Boston down about his ears. Your
sister can go there; it would be only generous and
thoughtful to give way to her. There are only
three of them, and they are strange, you know, to every
thing, and wouldn’t know which way to turn.
I can put you in the way of rooms at the Bellevue,
exactly the thing, for a hundred and fifty a month.
No servants, you see; meals at the restaurant, and
very good, too. The Wedringtons are to give them
up unexpectedly; going to Europe; poor Mrs. Wedrington
is so out of health. And about the house; don’t
decide in a hurry; see what your uncle says, and your
sister. It’s very likely she’ll prefer
the Aspen Street house; and it would be out
of the way for you. Still it is not to be refused,
you know; of course it is very desirable in many respects;
roomy, old-fashioned, and a garden. I think your
sister will like those things; they’re what
she has been used to. If she does, why it’s
all comfortably settled, and nobody refuses. It
is so ungracious to appear to object; a gift horse,
you know.”
“Not to be refused; only by
no means to be taken; masterly inactivity till somebody
else is hooked; and then somebody else is to be grateful
for the preference. I wish Mrs. Megilp wouldn’t
shine things up so; and that mother wouldn’t
go to her to black all her boots!”
Desire said this in secret, indignant
discomfort, to Helena, the fourth in the family, her
chum-sister. Helena did very well to talk to;
she heard anything; then she pranced round the room
and chaffed the canary.
“Chee! chee! chee! chiddle,
iddle, iddle, iddle, e-e-ee! Where do you keep
all your noise and your breath? You’re great,
aren’t you? You do that to spite people
that have to work up one note at a time. You
don’t take it in away down under your belt, do
you? You’re not particular about that.
You don’t know much, after all. You don’t
know how you do it. You aren’t learning
of Madame Caroletti. And you haven’t learned
two quarters, any way. You were only just born
last spring. Set up! Tr-r-r-r-e-e-ee!
I can do that myself. I don’t believe you’ve
got an octave in you. Poh!”
Mrs. Ripwinkley came down from the
country with a bonnet on that had a crown, and with
not a particle of a chignon. When she was married,
twenty-five years before, she wore a French twist, her
hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as
it did away from her forehead, and two
thick coiled loops were knotted and fastened gracefully
at the top. She had kept on twisting her hair
so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned
naturally under her fingers into their places.
The color was bright still, and it had not thinned.
Over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or crimp;
but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face
young. Mrs. Ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils
till she had burned it off; and now tied on a friz,
that came low down, for fashion’s sake, and
left visible only a little bunch of puckers between
her eyebrows and the crowsfeet at the corners.
The back of her head was weighted down by an immense
excrescence in a bag. Behind her ears were bare
places. Mrs. Ledwith began to look old-young.
And a woman cannot get into a worse stage of looks
than that. Still, she was a showy woman a
good exponent of the reigning style; and she was handsome she
and her millinery of an evening, or in the
street.
When I began that last paragraph I
meant to tell you what else Mrs. Ripwinkley brought
with her, down out of the country and the old times;
but hair takes up a deal of room. She brought
down all her dear old furniture. That is, it
came after her in boxes, when she had made up her
mind to take the Aspen Street house.
“Why, that’s the sofa
Oliver used to lie down on when he came home tired
from his patients, and that’s the rocking-chair
I nursed my babies in; and this is the old oak table
we’ve sat round three times a day, the family
of us growing and thinning, as the time went on, all
through these years. It’s like a communion
table, now, Laura. Of course such things had
to come.”
This was what she answered, when Laura
ejaculated her amazement at her having brought “old
Homesworth truck” to Boston.
“You see it isn’t the
walls that make the home; we can go away from them
and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with
us. The little things that we have used, and
that have grown around us with our living, they
are all of living that we can handle and hold on to;
and if I went to Spitzbergen, I should take as many
of them as I could.”
The Aspen Street house just suited
Mrs. Ripwinkley, and Diana, and Hazel.
In the first place, it was wooden;
built side to the street, so that you went up a little
paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the door;
and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came
in, was laid out in narrow walks between borders of
blossoming plants. There were vines against the
brick end of the next building, creepers
and morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners;
and a little martin-box was set upon a pole in the
still, farther corner.
The rooms of the house were low, but
large; and some of the windows had twelve-paned sashes, twenty-four
to a window. Mrs. Ripwinkley was charmed with
these also. They were like the windows at Mile
Hill.
Mrs. Ledwith, although greatly relieved
by her sister’s prompt decision for the house
which she did not want, felt it in her conscience
to remonstrate a little.
“You have just come down from
the mountains, Frank, after your twenty-five years’
sleep; you’ve seen nothing by and by you will
think differently. This house is fearfully old-fashioned,
fearfully; and it’s away down here on
the wrong side of the hill. You can never get
up over Summit Street from here.”
“We are used to hills, and walking.”
“But I mean that
isn’t all. There are other things you won’t
be able to get over. You’ll never shake
off Aspen Street dust, you nor the children.”
“I don’t think it is dusty.
It is quiet, and sheltered, and clean. I like
it ever so much,” said Mrs. Ripwinkley.
“O, dear, you don’t understand
in the least! It’s wicked to let you go
on so! You poor, dear, simple little old soul!”
“Never mind,” said Mrs.
Megilp. “It’s all well enough for
the present. It pleases the old gentleman, you
know; and after all he’s done, he ought to be
pleased. One of you should certainly be in his
neighborhood. He has been here from time immemorial;
and any place grows respectable by staying in it long
enough from choice. Nobody
will wonder at Mrs. Ripwinkley’s coming here
at his request. And when she does move,
you see, she will know exactly what she is about.”
“I almost doubt if she ever
will know what she is about,” said Laura.
“In that case, well,” said
Mrs. Megilp, and stopped, because it really was not
in the least needful to say more.
Mrs. Megilp felt it judicious, for
many reasons, that Mrs. Ripwinkley should he hidden
away for awhile, to get that mountain sleep out of
her eyes, if it should prove possible; just as we rub
old metal with oil and put it by till the rust comes
off.
The Ledwiths decided upon a house
in Shubarton Place that would not seem quite like
taking old Uncle Titus’s money and rushing away
with it as far as city limits would allow; and Laura
really did wish to have the comfort of her sister’s
society, in a cozy way, of mornings, up in her room;
that was her chief idea about it. There were
a good many times and things in which she scarcely
expected much companionship from Frank. She would
not have said even to herself, that Frank was rusty;
and she would do her faithful and good-natured best
to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her
of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would
not do her Bath-brick polishing out on the public
promenade.
They began by going together to the
carpet stores and the paper warehouses; but they ended
in detailing themselves for separate work; their ideas
clashed ridiculously, and perpetually confused each
other. Frank remembered loyally her old brown
sofa and chairs; she would not have gay colors to
put them out of countenance; for even if she re-covered
them, she said they should have the same old homey
complexion. So she chose a fair, soft buff, with
a pattern of brown leaves, for her parlor paper; Mrs.
Ledwith, meanwhile, plunging headlong into glories
of crimson and garnet and gold. Agatha had her
blush pink, in panels, with heart-of-rose borders,
set on with delicate gilt beadings; you would have
thought she was going to put herself up, in a fancy-box,
like a French mouchoir or a bonbon.
“Why don’t you
put your old brown things all together in an up-stairs
room, and call it Mile Hill? You could keep it
for old times’ sake, and sit there mornings;
the house is big enough; and then have furniture like
other people’s in the parlor?”
“You see it wouldn’t be
me.” said Mrs. Ripwinkley, simply.
“They keep saying it ‘looks,’
and ‘it looks,’” said Diana to her
mother, at home. “Why must everything look
somehow?”
“And every_body_, too,”
said Hazel. “Why, when we meet any one in
the street that Agatha and Florence know, the minute
they have gone by they say, ‘She didn’t
look well to-day,’ or, ’How pretty she
did look in that new hat!’ And after the great
party they went to at that Miss Hitchler’s,
they never told a word about it except how girls ‘looked.’
I wonder what they did, or where the good time
was. Seems to me people ain’t living, they
are only just looking; or is this the same
old Boston that you told about, and where are the
real folks, mother?”
“We shall find them,”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley, cheerily; “and the real
of these, too, when the outsides are settled.
In the meantime, we’ll make our house say, and
not look. Say something true, of course.
Things won’t say anything else, you see; if you
try to make them, they don’t speak out; they
only stand in a dumb show and make faces.”
“That’s looking!” said Hazel.
“Now I know.”
“How those children do grow!”
said Mrs. Ripwinkley, as they went off together.
“Two months ago they were sitting out on the
kitchen roof, and coming to me to hear the old stories!”
“Transplantin’,” said Luclarion.
“That’s done it.”
At twelve and fourteen, Hazel and
Diana could be simple as birds, simpler
yet, as human children waiting for all things, in
their country life and their little dreams of the world.
Two months’ contact with people and things in
a great city had started the life that was in them,
so that it showed what manner of growth it was to
be of.
And little Hazel Ripwinkley had got
hold already of the small end of a very large problem.
But she could not make it out that
this was the same old Boston that her mother had told
about, or where the nice neighbors were that would
be likely to have little tea-parties for their children.