Part 9 (1/2)

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.