The Very Small Person. Annie Hamilton Donnell
were so shiny and tender behind the glasses, and her smooth brown hair was so soft! The love in Margaret’s soul arose and took up arms for Mother.
“I love mine the best, so there!—so there!—so there!” she cried. But side by side with the love in her soul was the secret consciousness of how very much the Enemy loved her mother, too. Now, sitting sewing all alone, with the Enemy on the other side of the fence, Margaret knew she had not spoken truly then, but the rankling taunt of the curls that Mother hadn’t, and the glasses that she had, justified her to herself. She would never, never take it back, so there!—so there!—so there!
“She’s only got to the end o’ her ‘days,’—I can see clear from here,” soliloquized the Enemy, with awakening exultation. For the Enemy’s “days” were “long,”—she had finished her book-mark. The longing to shout it out—“I’ve got mine done!”—was so intense within her that her chin lost its balance on the fence-rail and she jarred down heavily on her heels. So close related are mind and matter.
Margaret resorted to philosophic contemplation to shut out the memory of the silent on-looker at the fence. She had swung about discourteously “back to” her. “I guess,” contemplated Margaret, “my days ’ll be long enough in the land! I guess so, for I honor my mother enough to live forever! That makes me think—I guess I better go in and kiss her good-night for to-night when she won’t be at home.”
It was mid-May and school was nearly over. The long summer vacation stretched endlessly, lonesomely, ahead of Margaret. Last summer it had been so different. A summer vacation with a friend right close to you all the time, skipping with you and keeping house with you and telling all her secrets to you, is about as far away as—as China is from an Enemy ’cross the fence! Oh, hum! some vacations are so splendid and some are so un-splendid!
It did not seem possible that anything drearier than this could happen. Margaret would not have dreamed it possible. But a little way farther down Lonesome Road waited something a great deal worse. It was waiting for Margaret behind the schoolhouse stone-wall. The very next day it jumped out upon her.
Usually at recess Nell—the Enemy—and Margaret had gone wandering away together with their arms around each other’s waist, as happy as anything. But for a week of recesses now they had gone wandering in opposite directions—the Enemy marching due east, Margaret due west. The stone-wall stretched away to the west. She had found a nice lonesome little place to huddle in, behind the wall, out of sight. It was just the place to be miserable in.
“I know something!” from one of a little group of gossipers on the outside of the wall. “She needn’t stick her chin out an’ not come an’ play with us. She’s nothing but an adopted!”
“Oh!—a what?” in awestruck chorus from the listeners. “Say it again, Rhody Sharp.”
“An adopted—that’s all she is. I guess nobody but an adopted need to go trampin’ past when we invite her to play with us! I guess we’re good as she is an’ better, too, so there!”
Margaret in her hidden nook heard with a cold terror creeping over her and settling around her heart. It was so close now that she breathed with difficulty. If—supposing they meant—
“Rhody Sharp, you’re fibbing! I don’t believe a single word you say!” sprang forth a champion valiantly. “She’s dreadfully fond of her mother—just dreadfully!”
“She doesn’t know it,” promptly returned Rhody Sharp, her voice stabbing poor Margaret’s ear like a sharp little sword. “They’re keeping it from her. My gran’mother doesn’t believe they’d ought to. She says—”
But nobody cared what Rhody Sharp’s gran’mother said. A clatter of shocked little voices burst forth into excited, pitying discussion of the unfortunate who was nothing but an adopted. One of their own number! One they spelled with and multiplied with and said the capitals with every day! That they had invited to come and play with them—an’ she’d stuck her chin out!
“Why! Why, then she’s a—orphan!” one voice exclaimed. “Really an’ honest she is—an’ she doesn’t know it!”
“Oh my, isn’t it awful!” another voice. “Shouldn’t you think she’d hide her head—I mean, if she knew?”
It was already hidden. Deep down in the sweet, moist grass—a little heavy, uncrowned, terror-smitten head. The cruel voices kept on.
“It’s just like a disgrace, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you s’pose it would feel that way if ’twas you?”
“Think o’ kissin’ your mother good-night an’ it’s not bein’ your mother?”
“Say, Rhody Sharp—all o’ you—look here! Do you suppose that’s why her mother—I mean she that isn’t—dresses her in checked aperns? That’s what orphans—”
The shorn head dug deeper. A soft groan escaped Margaret’s lips. This very minute, now while she crouched in the grass—oh, if she put out her hands and felt she would feel the checks! She had been to an orph—to a place once with Moth—with Her and seen the aprons herself. They were all—all checked.
At home, folded in a beautiful pile, there were all the others. There was the pink-checked one and the brown-checked one and the prettiest one of all, the one with teenty little white checks marked off with buff. The one she should feel if she put out her hand was a blue-checked.
Margaret drove her hands deep into the matted grass; she would not put them out. It was—it was terrible! Now she understood it all. She remembered—things. They crowded—with capital T’s, Things—up to her and pointed their fingers at her, and smiled dreadful smiles at her, and whispered to one another about her. They sat down on her and jounced up and down, till she gasped for breath.
The teacher’s bell rang crisply and the voices changed to scampering feet. But Margaret crouched on in the sweet, moist grass behind the wall. She stayed there a week—a month—a year—or was it only till the night chill stole into her bones and she crept away home?
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