Helen Grant's Schooldays. Douglas Amanda M.
tone that she tried hard to keep from being pert.
"That would have been different. A steady job for years, and getting higher wages all the time. I've told Jenny to engage the chance."
Years in a shop, doing one thing over and over! She recalled a sentence she had heard Mr. Warfield quote several times from an English writer, "But that one man should die ignorant who had a capacity for knowledge, this I call tragedy!" She was not very clear in her own mind as to what tragedy really was, but if one had a capacity for wider knowledge, would it not be tragedy to spend years doing what one loathed? She hated the smells of the shoe shop, the common air that seemed to envelop everyone, the loud voices and boisterous laughs. And she wouldn't mind helping someone for her board, and going to the High School. Why, she did a great deal of work here, but it seemed nothing to Aunt Jane.
The frock was finished, and she washed it out, starched it, and would iron it to-morrow morning. Then there were stockings to mend, although the two younger boys went barefoot around the farm. And she worked up to the very moment the carriage turned up the bend in the road, when she ran and dressed herself while Aunt Jane packed the old valise. The children stood around.
"Oh, Mis' Dayton, can't I come some day?" cried Fanny. "How long are you going to keep Helen?"
"Till she gets tired and homesick," was the reply.
A smile crossed Helen's lips and stayed there, softening her face wonderfully.
They shouted out their good-bys, and asked their mother a dozen questions, receiving about as many slaps in return. For the remainder of the day, Mrs. Jason was undeniably cross.
"That girl'll turn out just like her father," she said to Jenny. "She hasn't a bit of gratitude."
"And I hope the old woman will be as queer as they make them," returned Jenny with a laugh.
In the few years of her life, Helen had never been visiting, to stay away over night. This was like some of the stories she had read and envied the heroine. There was a small alcove off Mrs. Dayton's room, with a curtain stretched across. For now the house was really full, except one guest chamber. There was a closet for her clothes just off the end of the short hall, that led to the back stairs, which ran down to the kitchen, a spacious orderly kitchen, good enough to live in altogether, Helen thought.
She helped to take the dishes out to Joanna, and begged to wipe them for her.
"If you're not heavy handed," said Joanna, a little doubtful.
"Or butter-fingered," laughed Helen. "That's what we say at home. But these dishes are so lovely that it is like – well it's like reading verses after some heavy prose."
"I'm not much on verses," replied Joanna, watching her new help warily. She did work with a dainty kind of touch.
Mrs. Dayton came, and stood looking at them with a humorous sort of smile.
"She knows how to wipe dishes," said Joanna, nodding approvingly.
"It is a good deal to suit Joanna. No doubt she will excuse you this time from wiping pots and pans, and you may come out of doors with me."
The lawn – they called it that here at North Hope – presented a picturesque aspect. A party were playing croquet. Mrs. Disbrowe was walking her twenty-months'-old little girl up and down the path. Mrs. Van Dorn sat in a wicker rocking chair that had a hood over the top to shield her from the air. Her silk gown flowed around gracefully, and her hands were a sparkle of rings.
"Oh, how sweet the air is," said Helen. "There's sweet-clover somewhere, and when the dew falls it is so delightful."
"They have it in the next-door lawn and the mower was run over it awhile ago."
Helen drew long delicious breaths. No noisy children, and the soft laughs, the gay talk was like music to her. She walked across the porch.
"Mrs. Dayton said you were fond of reading aloud," began Mrs. Van Dorn. "Your voice is nice and smooth."
"Your voice is like your father's, Helen! I had not remarked it before. Only it is a girl's voice," Mrs. Dayton commented.
"I am glad it suggests his," exclaimed Helen with a pleasurable thrill.
"Where is your father?" asked Mrs. Van Dorn.
"He is dead," said Mrs. Dayton. "Both father and mother are dead."
"I was an orphan, too," continued Mrs. Van Dorn. "And I had no near relatives. It is a sorrowful lot."
"Helen has had good friends, relatives."
"That's a comfort. I heard, we all did, that you were one of the best speakers at the closing of school. It was in the paper."
"Oh, was it?" Helen's eyes glowed with gratification.
"Yes. So Mrs. Dayton suggested you might be as good as some grown-up body. That was Robert Browning's poem you recited."
"It is a splendid poem," cried Helen enthusiastically. "You can see it all; the squadron – what was left of it after the battle – and the 'brief and bitter debate,' and the order to blow up the vessels on the beach. And then Hervé Riel, just a sailor, stepping out and making his daring proposal, and going 'safe through shoal and rock!' Oh, how the captain must have stood breathless! And the English coming too late! I'm glad someone put it in stirring verse."
Helen paused with a scarlet face. She never talked this way to anyone except Mr. Warfield.
"Yes," said Mrs. Van Dorn, "I have seen the man who wrote it, talked with him and his lovely wife, who wrote verses quite as beautiful. I think you like stirring poems," in a half inquiry.
"Yes, I do," she replied tremulously, and in her girlish enthusiasm she thought she could have fallen down at the feet of the man who wrote Hervé Riel. She never had thought of his being an actual living man.
"And do you know Macaulay's 'Horatius'?"
"Oh, I don't know very much – only the poems in the reading books, and a few that Mr. Warfield had. I know most of Longfellow."
"The Center is rather behind the towns around, although it is the oldest part; settled more than a hundred years ago. But it is largely farms. The railroad passed it by some fifteen years ago, and the stations have improved rapidly. Why, we have quite a library here, and the High School for more than a half the county," explained Mrs. Dayton.
"It's not as pretty as this Hope. And the range of hills to the northeast – I suppose you call them mountains – and the river, add so much to it."
"And we have only a little creek that empties into Piqua River, and a pond in a low place, that we skate on in the winter," said Helen rather mirthfully. "I can't help wondering what the ocean is like, and the great lakes, and Niagara Falls, and the Mississippi River with all its mouths emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. And the Amazon, and the Andes."
"And Europe, and the Alps, and the lovely lakes, and the Balkans, and the Gulf of Arabia, and India, and the Himalayas, and Japan – "
"Oh, dear, what a grand world!" exclaimed Helen, when Mrs. Van Dorn paused. "I don't suppose anyone has ever seen it all," and her tone was freighted with regret.
"I have seen a good deal of it. I have been round the world, and lived in many foreign cities."
"Oh! oh!" Helen put her head down suddenly and pressed her lips on the jeweled hand. The unconscious and impulsive homage touched the old heart.
"And people who have done wonderful things, who have painted pictures, and made beautiful statues, and built bridges and churches and palaces," the girl assumed.
"Most of them were built before my time, hundreds of years ago. But I have been in a great many of them."
"And seen the Queen!"
"If you mean Queen Victoria, yes. And other queens as well. And the Empress of the French when she had her beauty and her throne."
"Oh, dear!" sighed Helen with a long breath. And Aunt Jane had called her a queer old woman; Aunt Jane, who had never even been to New York.
It was getting too dark to play croquet. Mrs. Disbrowe had gone in some time ago with her baby in her