Part 9 (1/2)
My Aunt Em'ly was invested for me with a new interest. Perhaps some day I might take after her and grow equally well-favoured. I did not remember having noticed that she was beautiful, and resolved to study her at the first opportunity.
CHAPTER II.
A SUNDAY-SCHOOL LESSON.
Going to church was a good old New England custom that in our family had borne transplanting to the West. Sunday was almost the pleasantest day in the week to me--not elbowing school-less Sat.u.r.day from its throne; not of course even comparing with the bliss of Friday just after school, but easily surpa.s.sing the procession of four dull, dreaded, droning days the ogre Monday led.
The beauty and fragrance of the summer Sabbath began in the early morning, when I went out into the garden, before putting on my Sunday frock, and picked a quant.i.ty of the old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers that grew there. I arranged them in two flat bouquets, with tall gladiolus stalks behind and smaller growths ranging down in front so that they might see and be seen, peeping over each other's heads, when placed against the wall in church.
Then after the great toilet-making of the week we were off. The drive over the prairie in the democrat wagon behind our smartest pair of plough horses was a pleasure that never grew tame from repet.i.tion. Arriving at the church, I would give my bouquets to the old stoop-shouldered s.e.xton and watch him anxiously as he ambled down the aisle with them. Perhaps my flowers--yes, the very flowers that I had dashed the dew from that morning--would be placed on the pulpit itself, not on the table below, nor yet about the gallery where sat the choir. Then indeed I felt honoured.
But wherever they might be, I could watch them all through the services, perhaps catch their fragrance from some favouring breeze, and feel that they were own folks from home.
Even sermon time did not seem long. After I had noted the text to prepare for catechism at home, I was free to dream as I chose until the rustle of relief at the close of the speaking. And the droning of bees and buzzing of flies, or the sudden clamour of a hen somewhere near would come floating in through the open window, and the odour of the flowers and the twigs of the ”ellum” tree tapping at the pane helped to make the little church a haven of restfulness.
But on the Sunday following my awakening I had no care for sounds outside, no eyes for my bouquets, though they stood at either hand of the pulpit; I got permission to sit in Aunt Keren's pew, where I could see Aunt Em'ly's face; and all through the sermon I studied it with big, round eyes.
Yes, and with sorrow growing leaden in my heart.
For I was not old enough to see in her face what it had been, nor to appreciate the fine profile that remained. Hers was not the pink-and-white of rosy girlhood, the only beauty I could understand; and wherein her toil-set features differed from those of the other drudging farmers' wives or the shut-in women of the little village, I could not see.
A lump rose in my throat; this wrinkled and aging person was the beautiful woman I might take after!
I'm afraid I returned from church that day without the consolations of religion.
There followed an anxious time of experimenting. Some one had told me that lemon juice would exorcise freckles, and surrept.i.tiously I tried it. How my face smarted after the heroic treatment, and how red and inflamed it looked! But then in a little while back came the freckles again and they stayed, too, until--but how they went, I am to tell you.
I wheedled from mother the privilege of daily wearing my coral beads--the ones my cousins Milly and Ethel Baker had sent me from New York--and had an angry fit of crying when one day, while we children were racing for the schoolhouse door at the end of recess, the string broke and they were nearly all trampled upon before I could pick them up.
Youth is buoyant. Next I begged the sheet lead linings of tea chests from the man who kept the general store, and cut them into little strips that I folded into hair-curlers, covering them with paper so that the edges should not cut. I would go to sleep at night with my short, dampened hair twisted around these contrivances, and in the morning comb it out and admire it as it stood about my head in a bushy ma.s.s, like the Circa.s.sian girl's at the circus.
Thus beautified, I happened one day to meet our white-headed old pastor!
How he stared!
”Stand still a minute, Nelly, child, and let's look at you,” he commanded.
”Why, what have you been doing to yourself?”
The good man's accent wasn't admiring; sadly I realised the failure of my attempt to compel beauty. When I reached home I sternly soaked the curl out of my hair, brushed it flat and braided it into two exceedingly tight pig-tails. Ah, me! It's easy--afterwards--to laugh at the silent sorrows of childhood, bravely endured alone. At least, it's easy for me, now!
I began to worry Ma about my clothes. I grew ashamed of red-and-black, pin-checked woollen frocks, and sighed for prettier things. One of the girls wore at a Sunday school concert a gray and blue dress with many small ruffles, that seemed to me as elegant as a d.u.c.h.ess could want. The children whispered that it had cost $20, and I wondered if I should ever again see raiment so wonderful. I knew that it was useless to ask for such a dress for myself; I should be told that I was not old enough for fine feathers.
It was our Sabbath day custom to pa.s.s directly from the church services to those of Sunday school, and drive home after these. One stormy day I was the only scholar in my cla.s.s, and when we had finished the Bible Lesson Leaflets and I was watching the long rows of bobbing heads, flaxen and dark, in the pews full of restless, wriggling children, I turned to the teacher with a question that I had long been meditating.
”Miss Coleman,” I began desperately, ”ain't there any way to get pretty?”
”I wish there were a way and I knew it,” she responded with a smile. ”But you should say 'isn't,' you know.”
”Oh, but you are pretty,” I cried, not with the intent of compliment, but as merely stating a fact.