Willie and Priscilla had also slipped from wealth to “enough to get on with perfectly nicely.” After serious talks from Willie and frantic endeavors to count up, that looked as if she were doing five-finger exercises, Mamma, in panic, would do something drastic, have crumb-pudding three days running, or cut up her best mantle to make a suit for Victor.
Now and then, with pain in her heart, she sold a bit of land. Willie had sold a lot of his. Slowly the tide of the outside world began to creep in around the islands of The Maples and Riverview.
The Blows had prospered. Sam always had a reputation for being “smart and sharp.” But what good was his money, when he and Lizzie were so unhappy? He shut himself up in his room almost every evening now; but, if anyone called, he would come out, walking carefully and talk a great deal, very distinctly, asking questions that had just been fully answered, and telling anecdotes to the people who had just told them to him. And Cousin Lizzie would sit looking at him, looking and looking, with eyes as bright as if red lamps were burning behind them, and never say a word.
One way that Mamma had saved was by teaching her daughters herself. Sitting around the dining-room table, they read, “spoke pieces” whose pathos reduced Lily to pleasurable tears, and did sums with a doubtfulness and wildness shared by their teacher. But these lessons would never do for Victor. He was to go to the Rectory, where Mr. Page had a school for little boys, and presently to the Academy in town—a trip in the steam-cars every day! He could hardly wait! And finally to Harvard, like Papa.
He stood in the hall of The Maples on the hot September morning of his first day of school, while his women circled around him and Caesar, with Stella hitched into the dearborn, waited at the front door. He had all new clothes for school. Loose trousers coming below his knees were buttoned with big china buttons to his full-sleeved white shirt, and over white stockings he wore heavy laced boots. He had to stick out a foot every now and then and have a good look. He was terribly proud of his boots, the soles were so thick.
One hand held a round straw hat with a blue ribbon; the other his new satchel, containing a slate, and two of Chloe’s molasses cookies to eat at the eleven o’clock recess. He felt grown-up, important, and a little confused.
“May, pet, will you just run up to Mamma’s room and get the little black fan from the table by her bed?” said Mamma, dropping on to the horsehair-covered sofa, and fanning herself with her lace pocket-handkerchief. She was going to take Victor to school, this very first morning. “Oh, Lily, his pencil! In the red glass pitcher on the sideboard—well, then, in the bowl where the nutcrackers are. Mercy, child, you’d be a good person to send looking for trouble! Maggie, you might just slip down cellar, and see if you can’t find a nice pear for him to take.”
That was Mamma’s way—to make things sound easy by saying “just.” “You might just make an angel cake, Chloe,” she would suggest; or, to one of the children, “Will you just slip over to Aunt Priscilla’s with this pat of butter?”
Downright Maggie resented it, resented, too, Mamma’s honey-sweet voice asking, “Don’t you want to help Martha dust the parlor? Don’t you want to pick strawberries this morning?” Maggie would do as she was told, but she resented having to say that she wanted to.
“I don’t want you to do it at all unless you do it willingly,” Mamma would say, her blue eyes wet. But what she really meant, though not in words, hardly with conscious feeling, was, “You must do as I wish, and say you want to, no matter whether you do or not, and then everyone—I—will be happy and comfortable.”
It wasn’t fair.
The clock on the stairs struck nine, which meant that it was half past eight. When it was nine it would whirr and strangle; and at half past nine it would strike ten. Once you got used to it, it was quite easy to follow.
The sisters ran up and down stairs, their rust-brown skirts whisked through the doorways on last scampering errands; and Mamma and Victor got into the carriage. Her claret-colored draperies rose, billowed, spread, engulfed him like the waves of the Red Sea engulfing a very small Egyptian. Caesar gathered up the reins, and they rolled off, while Maggie, May, and Lily, admiring and envious, waved as if the carriage and Stella were a ship and the turnpike was the broad blue sea.
Old Mr. Page was tying up his dahlias that the wind had blown over in the night, when the carriage drew up at the Rectory. He was a dreamy old man with long, silky silver hair, who was supposed to be a splendid teacher because he preached sermons full of Greek and Latin, and wrote beautiful poems about “Friendship” and “Nature,” signed “Rusticus,” that sometimes appeared in the “Poets’ Corner” of the Wilmington newspaper. He tried hard to be a good teacher whenever he remembered that
