The three little Campions spent the morning in the kitchen, drawn by the smell of baking cake, as bees are drawn to apple-blossoms, being stepped on and bumped into, stealing almonds, scraping icing-bowls and licking the sugary, buttery batter from the wooden cake spoons, until old Chloe shooed them out as if they were chickens.
Dressed alike in brown merino frocks and bibbed black aprons edged with quilling, with long tucked drawers showing beneath their full skirts, they sat squeezed together in the door of the kitchen shed, eating the hot little try-cakes with which old Chloe tested the oven. At their feet, on the rose-red bricks, silky black Trusty sat and watched each vanishing mouthful with drooling jaws and an agony of longing in his eyes. The pale spring sunshine lay on them delicately warm; starlings, shining and black as wet ink, swayed in the tree tops; and the weeping willow, hanging over the whitewashed cabins across the road where the negro servants slept, was turning brightest yellow green. The small hot cakes with their crisp brown lace-like edgings were so delicious. Oh, everything was so nice! And Papa was coming home!
Great things were being done inside, for Uncle Willie and poor Aunt Priscilla and Cousin Lizzie and Cousin Sam were coming to dinner because it was Papa’s birthday.
“Do you really think you ought to have us, Margaret?” Cousin Lizzie had asked. “In your condition?” For Mamma was expecting another baby in two months.
It seemed to Mamma not quite—well—delicate—of Lizzie to keep reminding her of her condition. She herself never spoke of it except reluctantly in answer to Papa. There was some excuse for him, he wanted a son so intensely, and then gentlemen were different. It was a fact that complicated life, but could not be denied. But Lizzie, with her sharp eyes and sharp tongue, was dreadfully embarrassing.
“I’ll give you just what we’d have ourselves, Lizzie.” Mamma had lied gently; and she wrote out the menu and carried it about tucked into her bodice like a love letter.
“Mock turtel soup, boiled turky with oyster sauce, roasted ham, chicken-pie, roast goose with applesauce, smoke-tongue, beets, cold-slaw, squash, salsify, fried celery, almond pudding, mince pie, calf’s foot jelly, blancmange.”
There was a beautiful cut-paper trouser-frill for the roasted ham, and the crust of the chicken-pie, meltingly, tenderly brown, was ornamented with pie-crust stars and squiggles. As for the blancmange, the little girls had never seen anything so charming. It had been moulded in blown eggshells, and lay in a nest of clear amber jelly and lemon peel cut in thin strips to look like straw.
Of course, today of all days, poor Aunt Priscilla had to come to help, and that always delayed things so. She came with her beautiful Cashmere shawl all huddled about her round shoulders, and her hair spraying out of torn places in her net, and her shabby old Adelaide boots that drove Uncle Willie nearly crazy. He wanted her to dress fashionably, and she couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried. She used to tell Mamma she couldn’t, sitting and eating a piece of cake or drinking wild cherry bounce, while the tears trickled down her cheeks.
Now, when poor Priscilla appeared, Mamma said, “Botheration!” softly, under her breath; but she didn’t really mind, for Priscilla was the only one of Papa’s relations who made her feel quick and clever and sure of herself; and she moved twice as briskly, with an important little frown, as soft as a wrinkle in cream, between her eyebrows, after Priscilla came.
But she had to get her out of the kitchen, for old Chloe’s puckered black face was getting crosser every minute. So they went into the conservatory to cut some flowers for Papa’s welcoming.
Mamma loved her conservatory so! Papa said she loved it better than she loved him, but, of course, that was only his fun. There were the delicate drooping ferns; the bloodred foliage of the dragon-plant; the fuchsias, trained like umbrellas, all tasselled with crimson and purple, umbrellas gorgeous enough to hold over the heads of Chinese emperors. And begonias with crimson-lined, silver-spotted leaves; intense blue and purple velvet disks of cinerarias; creamy calla lilies; and the little pouches of the calceolarias, golden, crimson, maroon and rose colored, mottled and flecked—moneybags for the elves. All along one side were the spice-scented, winter-flowering carnations, with their flakes and veinings and marblings of color—yellow edged with a fringe of rose, rosy pink and carmine. La Pureté and La Pureté Variée. Mamma could never understand what Papa found funny in “Variegated Purity”; but then she couldn’t understand most of the jokes that amused him, although she always gave them her gentle smile, puzzled and polite.
Snip went her scissors through the stem of a tea-rose. Snip! That was a little bit of myrtle. And then back into the parlor to arrange charming unaesthetic bouquets—rosebuds and fuchsia, an airy tendril of vine, a spray of wax-white lemon blossoms, with glossy dark leaves—while Aunt Priscilla followed, talking in a mild steady trickle.
“So I had my new dress laid out on the bed, and that new fancy dinner-cap I got in Philadelphia, the black lace one with the magenta ribbons, all ready to surprise Willie. I meant to have them on when he came home to tea, but I got to reading a new book by that Mr. Wilkie Collins—‘Sister Rose; or, The Ominous Marriage,’ it’s called. I read about it in Godey’s. It said: ‘has merit and is neatly printed,’ so I knew it would be good—so anyway—what was I talking about?”
“Willie,” Mamma replied. She hadn’t been listening, but she knew that all Aunt Priscilla’s conversation rippled around that name.
“Oh, yes, Willie!” And she said the name tenderly, as if her heart was giving it a little kiss. “Well, so I hadn’t an idea how late it was; and the first thing I knew, there was Willie home and Henry Allen with
