Real Folks Part 2

"O! O, O!" came the long, pitiful, s.h.i.+vering 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.

n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+pwreck, 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! Hus.h.!.+"

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 p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.serted 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 bra.s.s-headed nails, and bra.s.s rosettes in the ends of the hard, cylinder pillows; the tall, carved cupboard press, its doors and drawers glittering with hanging bra.s.s 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-gla.s.s 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.