Gypsy Breynton Part 9

"Where's the key?" interrupted Winnie, severely; "mother hadn't ought to be kept waitin'clock."

"It's up-stairs in--in, I guess in my slippers," said Gypsy, stopping to think.

_"Slippers!"_

"Yes. I was afraid I should forget to put it up, so I put it in my slipper, because I should feel it, and remember it. Then I took off the slippers, and that was the last I thought of it."

"It was very careless," said Winnie, with a virtuous air. It was noticeable that he took good care to be out of hearing of Gypsy's reply.

Gypsy returned to her seam, and the apple-blossoms, and to her own little meditations about the china-closet key; which, being of a private and somewhat humiliating nature, are not given to the public.

The apple-tree stood in one corner of a very pleasant garden. Mr. Breynton had a great fancy for working over his trees and flowers, and, if he had not been a publisher and bookseller, might have made a very successful landscape-gardener. Poor health had driven him out of the professions, and the tastes of a scholar drove him away from out-door life; he had compromised the matter by that book-store down opposite the post-office.

The literature of a Vermont town is not of the most world-stirring nature, and it did occur to him, occasionally, that business was rather dull, but his wife loved the old home, the children were comfortable and happy, and he himself, he thought, was getting rather old to start out on any new venture elsewhere; so Yorkbury seemed likely to be the family nest for life.

It was the same methodical kind-heartedness that made him at once so thoughtful and tender a father, and yet so habitually worried by the children's little failings, that gave him his taste for beautiful flowers and shrubbery, and his skill in cultivating them. This garden was his pet enterprise. It was gracefully laid out with winding walks, evergreens, fruit-trees and flower-beds; not in stiff patterns, but with a delightful studied negligence, such as that with which an artist would group the figures on a landscape. Rocks and vines and wild flowers were scattered over the garden very much as they would be found in the fields; stately roses and dahlias, delicate heliotrope and aristocratic fuchsias, would grow, side by side, with daisies and b.u.t.tercups. But, best of all, Gypsy liked the corner where the golden russet stood. A bit of a brook ran across it, which had been caught in a frolic one day, as it went singing away to the meadows, and dammed up and paved down into a tiny pond.

The short-tufted gra.s.s swept over its edge like a fringe, and in their season slender hair-bells bent over, casting little blue shadows into the water; the apple-boughs, too, hung over it, and flung down their showers of pearls and rubies, when the wind was high. Moreover, there was a statue. This statue was Gypsy's pride and delight. It was Aladdin's Palace, the Tuilleries, Versailles, and the Alhambra, all in one. The only fault to be found with it was that it was not marble. It was a species of weather-proof composition, but very finely carved, and much valued by Mr.

Breynton. It was a pretty thing--a water-nymph rising from an unfolded lily, with both hands parting her long hair from a wondering face, that, pleased with its own beauty, was bent to watch its reflection in the water.

Altogether, the spot was so bewitching, that it is little wonder Gypsy's work kept dropping into her lap, and her eyes wandering away somewhere into dreamland.

One of those endless seams on a white skirt that you have torn from the placket to the hem, is not a very attractive sight, if you have it to mend, and don't happen to like to sew any better than Gypsy did.

She seemed fated to be interrupted in her convulsive attempts at "run-and-back st.i.tching." Winnie was hardly in the house, before Sarah Rowe came out in the garden to hunt her up.

"Oh, dear," said Gypsy, as Sarah's face appeared under the apple-boughs; "I'm not a bit glad to see you."

"That's polite," said Sarah, reddening; "I'll go home again."

"Look," said Gypsy, laughing; "just _see_ what I've got to mend, and I came out here on purpose to get it done, so I could come over to your house. You see I oughtn't to be glad to see you at all, but I am exceedingly."

Sarah climbed up, and sat down beside her upon a long, swaying bough.

"Now don't you speak a single word," said Gypsy, with an industrious air, "till I get this done."

"No, I won't," said Sarah. "What do you have to sew for, Sat.u.r.day afternoons?"

"Why, it's my mending: mother wants me to do it Sat.u.r.day morning, and of course it's a great deal easier, because then you have all the afternoon to yourself, only I never seem to get time; I'm sure I don't know why.

This morning I had my history topics to write."

"Why, I wrote mine yesterday!"

"I meant to, but I forgot; Miss Melville said I musn't put it off another day. There! I wasn't going to talk."

"Mother does my mending for me," said Sarah.

"She does! Well, I just wish my mother would. She says it wouldn't be good for me."

"How did you tear such a great place, I'd like to know?"

"Put my foot right through it," said Gypsy, disconsolately. "It was hanging on a chair, and I just stepped in it and started to run, and down I went,--and here's the skirt. I was running after the cat. I'd put her under my best hat, and she was spinning down stairs. You never saw anything so funny! I'm always doing such things,--I mean like the skirt. I do declare! you mustn't talk."

"I'm not," said Sarah, laughing; "it's you that are talking. You haven't sewed a st.i.tch for five minutes, either."

Gypsy sighed, and her needle began to fly savagely. There was a little silence.

"You see," said Gypsy, breaking it, "I'm trying to reform."

"Reform?" said Sarah, with some vague ideas of Luther and Melancthon, and Gypsy's wearing a wig and spectacles, and reading Cruden's "Concordance."

"Yes," nodded Gypsy, "reform. I never knew anybody need it as much as I. I never do things anyway, and then I do them wrong, and then I forget all about them. Mother says I'm improving. She says my room used to look like a perfect Babel, and now I keep the wardrobe door shut, and dust it out--sometimes. Then there's my mending. I came out here so's to be quiet and _keep at it_. The poor dear woman is so afraid I won't learn to do things in a lady-like way. It would be dreadful not to grow up a lady, wouldn't it?"

"Dreadful!" said Sarah; "only I wish you'd hurry and get through, so we can go down to the swamp and sail. Couldn't you take a little bigger st.i.tches?"

"No," said Gypsy, resolutely; "I should have to rip it all out. I'm going to do it right, if it takes me all day."

Gypsy began to sew with a will, and Sarah, finding it was for her own interest in the end, stopped talking; so the fearful seam was soon neatly finished, the work folded up, and the thimble and scissors put away carefully in the little green reticule.

"I lose so many thimbles,--you don't know!" observed Gypsy, by way of comment. "I'm going to see if I can't keep this one three months."

"Now let's go," said Sarah.

"In a minute; I must carry my work up first. I'm going to jump off--it's real fun. You see if I don't go as far as that dandelion."

So Gypsy sprang from the tree, carrying a shower of blossoms with her.

"Oh, look out for the statue!" cried Sarah.

The warning came too late. Gypsy fell short of her mark, hit the water-nymph heavily, and it fell with a crash into the water, where the paved bottom was hard as rock.

"Just see what you've done!" said Sarah, who had not a capacity for making comforting remarks. "What do you suppose your father will say?"

Gypsy stood aghast. The water gurgled over the fallen statue, whose pretty, upraised hands were snapped at the wrist, and the wondering face crushed in. There was a moment's silence.

"Don't you tell!" said Sarah at length; "n.o.body saw it fall, and they'll never think you did it. You just seem surprised, and keep still about it."

Gypsy flushed to her forehead.

"Why, Sarah Rowe! how can you say such a thing? I wouldn't tell a lie for anything in this world!"

"It wouldn't be a lie!" said Sarah, looking ashamed and provoked. "You needn't say you didn't do it."

"It would be a lie!" said Gypsy, decidedly. "He'd ask if anybody knew,--I wouldn't be so mean, even if I knew he couldn't find out. I am going to tell him this minute."

Gypsy started off, with her cheeks still very red, up the garden paths and down the road, and Sarah followed slowly. Gypsy's sense of honor had received too great a shock for her to take pleasure just then in Sarah's company, and Sarah had an uneasy sense of having lowered herself in her friend's eyes, so the two girls separated for the afternoon.

It was about a mile to Mr. Breynton's store. The afternoon was warm for the season, and the road dusty; but Gypsy ran nearly all the way. She was too much troubled about the accident to think of anything else, and in as much haste to tell her father as some children would have been to conceal it from him.

Old Mr. Simms, the clerk, looked up over his spectacles in mild astonishment, as Gypsy entered the store flushed, and panting, and pretty.