Mary Cary Part 9

In the hall I could hear Mrs. Peet pounding on the floor with her stick.

Then her little piping voice:

"Mr. Peet, Mr. Peet, you'd better come down! There's some one at the door! You'd better come down, Mr. Peet!"

"It's just Mary Cary!" I called. "Miss Bray sent me, Mrs. Peet. She wants some cherry-bounce."

"Oh, all right, Mr. Peet. You needn't bother to come down. It's just little Mary Cary." And she opened the door a tiny crack and peeped through.

"Mr. Peet isn't very well to-night," she said. "He's taken fresh cold.

But you can come in."

I came; but I didn't want to. And if Mr. Peet had come down those steps and shaken hands I wouldn't have been surprised. It's certainly strange how something you know isn't true seems true; and Mr. Peet, dead forty years, seemed awful alive that night. Every minute I thought he'd walk in.

She likes you to think he's living at night. Every day she goes to his grave, which is in the churchyard right next to where she lives; but at night he comes back to life to her. She's so lonely, I think it's beautiful that he comes.

I make out like I think he comes, too, and I always send him my love, and ask how his rheumatism is. I tell you, Martha don't dare smile when I do it. She don't even want to.

And, don't you know, old Mrs. Peet sent me a Christmas present, too. A pair of mittens. She knit them herself. It was awful nice of her.

I don't know how big the check was that Miss Katherine's billionaire brother sent her to spend on the children's Christmas, but it must have been a corker. The things she bought with it cost money, and the change it made in the Asylum was Cinderellary. It was.

She bought a carpet for the parlor, and some curtains for the windows, and a bookcase of books.

For the dining-room she bought six new tables and sixty chairs. They were plain, but to sit at a table with only ten at it instead of forty, as I'd been sitting for many years, was to have a proud sensation in your stomach. Mine got so gay I couldn't eat at the first meal.

To have a chair all to yourself, after sitting on benches so old they were worn on both edges, was to feel like the Queen of Sheba, and I felt like her. I could have danced up and down the table, but instead I said grace over and over inside. I had something to say it for. All of us did.

Besides a present, each of us had a new dress. It was made of worsted--real worsted, not calico; and that morning after breakfast, and after everything had been cleaned up, we put on our new dresses and came down in the parlor.

And such a fire as there was in it!

It sputtered and flamed, and danced and blazed, and crackled and roared.

Oh, it knew it was Christmas, that fire did, and the mistletoe and holly and running cedar knew it, too!

At first, though, the children felt so stiff and funny in their new-shaped dresses made like other children's that they weren't natural, so I pretended we were having a soiree, and I went round and shook hands with every one.

They got to laughing so at the names I gave them--names that fit some, and didn't touch others by a thousand years--that the stiffness went.

And if in all Yorkburg there was a cheerfuller room or a happier lot of children that Christmas Day than we were, we didn't hear of it. I don't believe there was, either.

The reason we enjoyed this Christmas so was because it was on Christmas Day.

Our celebrations had always been after Christmas, and Christmas after Christmas is like cold buckwheat cakes and no syrup. Like an orange with the juice all gone.

As for the tree, it was a spanker. We were dazed dumb for a minute when the parlor doors leading into the sewing-room were opened. But never being able to stay dumb long, I commenced to clap. Then everybody clapped. Clapped so hard half the candles went out.

There wasn't a soul on the place that didn't get a present. This tree was Miss Katherine's, not the Board's, and the presents bought with the brother's money were things we could keep. Not things to put away and pa.s.s on to somebody else next year. I almost had a fit when I found I had roller-skates and a set of books too. Think of it! Roller-skates and books! The rich brother sent those himself, and I'm still wondering why.

This was Miss Katherine's second Christmas with us, but the first she had managed herself. Last Christmas she had been at the Asylum such a short time she kept quiet, and just saw how things were done. And not done. But this year she asked if she could provide the entertainment, and the difference in these last two Christmases was like the difference in the way things are done from love and duty.

And oh! love is so much the best!

I do believe I was the happiest child in all the world that day, and I didn't come out of that cloud of glory until night. Mrs. Christopher Pryor took me out.

She had come over with some of the Board ladies to see the tree and things, and as she was going home I heard her say:

"I don't approve of all this. Not at all. Not at all. These children have had a more elaborate Christmas than mine. They've had as good a dinner, a handsomer tree, and as many presents as some well-off people.

It's all nonsense, putting notions in their heads when they're as poor as poverty itself and have their living to make. I don't approve of it.

Not at all."

She bristled so stiff and shook her head so vigorous that the little jet ornaments on her bonnet just tinkled like bells, and one fell off.

Mrs. Christopher Pryor is one of the people who would like to tell the Lord how to run this earth. She could run it. That He lets the rain fall and sun s.h.i.+ne on everybody alike is a thing she don't approve of either.

As for poor people, she thinks they ought to be thankful for breath, and not expect more than enough to keep it from going out for good.

She's very decided in her views, and never keeps them to herself. It's the one thing she gives away. Everything else she holds on to with such a grip that it keeps her upper lip so pressed down on her under lip that she breathes through her nose most of the time.

She's a very curious shape. Being stout, she has to hold her head up to keep her chin off her fatness; and she goes in so at the waist, coming out top and bottom, that you would think something in her would get jammed out of place. You really would.

There are seven daughters. No sons. The boys call their place Hen-House.

There is a husband, but n.o.body seems to notice him; and when with his wife, he always walks behind.

Miss Webb says she's sorry for a man whose wife is too active in the church. Mrs. Pryor is. She leads all the responses; and as for the chants, she takes them right out of the choir's mouth and soars off with them.

I never could bear her; and when I heard her say those words to Mrs.

Marsden, I came right down to earth and was Martha Cary in a minute. I'd been Mary all day, and, like a splash in a mud-puddle, she made me Martha; and I heard myself say:

"No, Mrs. Pryor, we know you don't approve. You never yet have let a child here forget she was a Charity child, and only people who make others happy will approve."

Then I walked away as quiet as a Nun's daughter. But I was burning hot all the same, and so surprised at the way Martha spoke, so serious and unlike the way she usually speaks when mad, that I had to go on the back porch and make s...o...b..a.l.l.s and throw hard at something before I was all right again.

But I wouldn't let it ruin my beautiful day. I wouldn't.

That night, when I went to bed, I was so tired out with happiness I couldn't half say my prayers. But I knew G.o.d understood. He let the Christ-child be born poor and lowly, so He could understand about Charity children, and everybody else who goes wrong because they don't know how to go right. So I just thanked Him, and thanked Him in my heart.

And when Miss Katherine kissed me good-night and tucked me in bed, she said I'd made her have a beautiful Christmas. That I'd helped everybody and kept things from dragging, because I had enjoyed it so myself, and been so enthusiastic, and she was so glad I was born that way.

I thought she was making fun, it was so ridiculous, thanking me, little Mary Cary, who hadn't done a thing but be glad and seen that n.o.body was forgot.

But she wasn't making fun, and I went off to sleep and dreamed I was in a place called the Love-Land, where everybody did everything just for love. Which shows it was a dreamland, for on earth there're Brays and Pryors, and people too busy to be kind. And in that Love-Land everything was done the other way, just backward from our way, and yourself came second instead of first.

X

THE REAGAN BALL

It is snowing fast and furious to-day. It's grand to watch it. I love miracles, and it's a miracle to see an ugly place turn into a palace of marble and silver with diamond decorations. That's what the Asylum is to-day. I certainly would like to have seen the Reagan ball. Miss Webb says it was the best show ever given in Yorkburg, and she enjoyed it, being particular fond of freaks.