"Land! I should think you had enough here for the whole town."
* * *
"I'm giving to about the whole town this year. Then, you know all our cousins out West, and the raft of relations we never see except at our funerals, that live in Watchboro, and Center Watchboro, and South and North and East."
* * *
"I didn't know you remembered them Christmas."
* * *
"I don't every year, but this time I was so forehanded I thought I'd put them in with the rest."
* * *
"You don't mean to say you are remembering all the Rice family?"
* * *
"Yes, I am."
* * *
"Not all those children?"
* * *
"Oh, I've got the children's presents all ready; it's the older folks' I haven't got done. I have planned a lot of drawn work."
* * *
"You do that so beautifully," said Lottie. She was a tiny woman snugged in a lavender wool shawl. The tip of her sharp nose was red. Her blue eyes were tearful, from cold and enthusiasm. Lottie was prey to enthusiasms, even petty ones.
* * *
"I've got a lot more to do. I sha'n't try any different patterns from these here; the same with the knitted lace. That will make it easier."
* * *
Sarah Bannister clipped the last word short with a sneeze.
* * *
"Sarah, you are catching cold in this room."
* * *
"Don't know but I am. It never will heat when the wind's northwest. It's bitter outdoors to-day, too. The snow hasn't melted one mite. Look at those windows all frosted up."
* * *
"Well, Sarah, we better be going back to the sitting-room, where it's warm."
* * *
"Guess we'd better. I was going to look a little longer. I don't seem to see some things I know I've got. I do feel some as if I were catching cold. Hope to goodness I don't—just before Christmas, too. I'll get Henry to bring in some wood for the sitting-room hearth fire."
* * *
"I sort of wonder sometimes why you and Henry don't keep a man to fetch and carry," said Lottie Dodd, as the two entered the sitting-room, meeting a gust of warm air, scented with geranium and heliotrope from the window plants. "Henry is quite some older than you, and it's beginning to show."
* * *
"Oh, Henry's perfectly able to do what little chores we have. Men want some exercise."
* * *
They sat down. Sarah Bannister began to crochet, a neatly rolled-up ball of finished lace bobbing as her fingers moved. Lottie worked laboriously on a blue centerpiece.
* * *
"It certainly is lucky you are so well off, Sarah."
* * *
"Yes, I realize it is. Henry never saved much, but I have enough for both, thanks to poor father. I never spend a cent but I think of him. He used to talk so much to me about not being extravagant."
* * *
"Oh, Sarah, as if anybody could accuse you of that!"
* * *
Sarah started, but she continued talking. "Poor father used to say—I remember as if it were yesterday—'Sarah, it's easy enough to get money, for those who have the right kind of heads, and work, but it takes more than heads to keep it. That's a gift.'"
* * *
Lottie Dodd, impecunious, who had never benefited much from Sarah's riches, except in the somewhat negative way of food and cast-off clothing, looked reflectively at the large, flat, rather handsome face.
* * *
Sarah stared sharply at Lottie, who did not speak. Silence and immobility make a fool inscrutable.
* * *
Sarah suspected. "Now, you wouldn't believe, Lottie Dodd, how little some of these things in there"—she shrugged her shoulders toward the parlor—"cost."
* * *
"You don't mean it." Lottie's voice was as blatantly innocent as a lamb's.
* * *
"Yes, I bought a lot at the Five- and Ten-cent stores, and I had nice pieces of silk and satin and lace, and I mixed them in, and you'd never know. I thought of poor father every minute I was in these Five- and Ten-cent stores."
* * *
"They would have just suited your dear pa."
* * *
Again the look of suspicion was in Sarah's eyes, to disappear before the other woman's innocent expression. Then the door-bell rang with a loud clang.
* * *
"Sakes alive! Whoever can that be, such a cold afternoon?" said Mrs. Bannister.
* * *
"Maybe it's a peddler."
* * *
"Well, if it is, he vamooses. I never will allow a peddler in my house."
* * *
Sarah Bannister sneezed three times. "Let me go to the door," said Lottie Dodd. "You have caught cold, sure as fate. Let me go, dear."
* * *
In Lottie's voice was the faint, very faint inflection in which she betrayed her consciousness that she was a year and a half younger than Sarah. To Lottie that meant, when she so desired, the feebleness of age for Sarah, juvenile agility for herself.
* * *
Sarah recognized that inflection. "I rather guess I'm as able to go to the door as you," she retorted. She thrust her face almost into the other's in a way she had when irritated.
* * *
"It was only on account of your cold, dear," protested Lottie, shrinking back.
* * *
"I haven't got any cold. If you're trying to wish one on me, you can just stop. Sneezing don't prove you've got a cold. Tim!"
* * *
"Why, Sarah!"
* * *
Sarah stepped majestically doorward as the bell rang again. She walked on her heels as she had a trick of doing when feeling unusually self-sufficient. Lottie peeked around the curtain over the pots of geranium, but she could see nothing. She could hear voices, and the wind came in the cracks of the sitting-room door. The front door closed with a bang, and Lottie darted back to her chair. She expected to see Mrs. Bannister enter irate after turning away a peddler, but after Sarah entered a young girl, hardly more than a child.
* * *
"Go right to that hearth fire and sit down and get warm through," ordered Mrs. Bannister. She spoke in a stern voice, but her speech ended in a beautiful cadence. When the child was seated before the fire, which Sarah stirred to a higher blaze and piled with more wood, she gazed at the young face reflecting the red glow, and smiled in a way that made Lottie gaze wonderingly at her, and suddenly remember that years ago, so many years that she had forgotten, Sarah Bannister had lost a daughter about the age of this girl. Meantime Sarah Bannister was removing the girl's extraordinarily shabby hat, and pulling off gently her shabbier coat. The girl resisted the last a little, and her small, timid voice murmured something about her dress.
* * *
"Never mind your dress," said Sarah. "You will get warmer with these off."
* * *
As she spoke she laid the coat and hat on a chair, rather gingerly. Such rags as the coat disclosed, such rags of a red silk lining, and such a sinfully draggled feather decked the old hat. Sarah turned to look at the girl. Lottie was looking. Lottie had her mouth slightly open. Sarah gasped. The girl sitting there, meekly, almost limply, was a darling of a girl (judging from her little face). It was very pale now, but with the velvety pallor of a white flower. Her hair lay in soft rings of gold shading into brown about her small head. She wore her hair short, and it made her seem more a child. Her dress was torn about the sleeves and gaped where hooks were missing, unless pinned with obvious pins. Her little hands were stiff and red, and one continued to clasp cautiously the handle of an unspeakably shabby old bag. Suddenly she looked up, first at one, then at the other of the faces regarding her. She looked with perfect composure, so perfect that it directly made her seem older. Her great blue eyes had a womanly wise cognizance of the two women.
* * *
"How old are you?" demanded
Sarah Bannister, suddenly.
* * *
"Thirteen last May," replied the girl. Her voice was charming, with a curious appeal in it. She seemed to be begging pardon for the fact that she was thirteen last May.
* * *
Sarah Bannister, her face working as if she were about to weep, went to a little china-closet, and presently came back with a glass of home-made wine, and a square of sponge cake on a pink plate.
* * *
"Here, drink this and eat this cake," said she. "It will do you good."
* * *
She set a small table beside the girl and placed the wine-glass and the cake on it.
* * *
"Thank you, ma'am," said the girl. She began to eat and drink rather eagerly. She was evidently famished, but very gentle about it. She still retained her hold of the bag.
* * *
Lottie spoke for the first time. "What have you got in that bag?" said she, rather sharply. The girl flashed her blue eyes at her in a frightened but defiant way.
* * *
"Things to sell," she whispered.
* * *
Lottie looked at Sarah. So she was a peddler, after all. Sarah did not return Lottie's glance. She spoke to the girl.
* * *
"When you have finished your cake and wine, and get real warm, I will look at the things you have to sell," said she, softly.
* * *
"Thank you, ma'am."
* * *
Lottie began to be aggressive. "What is your name?" she asked, peremptorily.
* * *
"Don't speak so sharp, Lottie," said Sarah. "You will scare her half to death. She's nothing but a child. She was half frozen. She was standing there on the door-step, shaking from head to foot, poor little thing, half dressed, too, on such a day as this." Sarah glanced at the heap of wool and red silk rags on the chair, and remembered a nice thick wool coat in the closet of a certain chamber.
* * *
Lottie asked again, but more gently, "What is your name, little girl?"
* * *
"Joan Brooks."
* * *
"Oh, I know her," said Lottie, with an accent of slight scorn. "Her father's that broken-down minister. He fills the pulpit sometimes when Mr. Whitman has bronchitis."
* * *
"He preaches very well, too," said Sarah, kindly.
* * *
"Father is not broken down. He stands up as well as you do," said Joan, unexpectedly. Then she began to rise. "Where is my coat?" said she.
* * *
"You sit right down, child," said Sarah. "She didn't mean a thing. Of course your father isn't broken down. We always speak that way of a minister who don't preach regularly."
* * *
"Father used to preach regularly," said the girl, eagerly, "but after we moved here the church he came to preach in burned down."
* * *
"That was the little Hyde's Corner church," interpolated Lottie. Sarah nodded.
* * *
"He preached regularly there," stated Joan, "until the fire."
* * *
"What does your father do now?" asked Lottie.
* * *
"He preaches for other ministers a great deal, and between whiles he goes about taking orders for a beautiful book on the Holy Land."
* * *
Lottie looked at the geraniums, and her lips moved inaudibly, "Peddler."
* * *
"We don't have as much money as we did before the fire," stated the little girl, "and we don't have much of anything to give away. That is why—" She stopped.
* * *
Sarah caught up the bag, which Joan had placed on the floor beside her.
* * *
"Well, let us see what you have to sell," said she.
* * *
Sarah opened the bag and Lottie stood looking over her shoulder.
* * *
"My!" said Lottie, "what lovely drawnwork, and it's just the same pattern as that bureau-scarf you made for your cousin Lizzie, too!"
* * *
"And I wanted one like it for her married sister, Jennie. How much is this, Joan?"
* * *
Joan mentioned a price. Lottie paled, and her mouth dropped when Sarah Bannister, so careful of money, said she would take it. She also bought for a large sum a beautiful table-cloth with embroidered corners for the minister's wife.
* * *
"That's just like the one you made yourself for Mrs. Lester Sears," said Lottie. She thought Sarah Bannister must be losing her wits. "There's that same cornucopia in one corner, and cluster of daisies in another," she mentioned, feebly.
* * *
"I know it," said Sarah, defiantly. "Why shouldn't it be the same? It's a common pattern. I made that table-cloth for Mrs. Sears because she was so good when I was sick with the grippe, sending in things 'most every day. I wanted to make something for the minister's wife just as nice, because she and Annie Sears are so thick, and because we all know the minister isn't very popular, and I feel sort of sorry for her, but I didn't have the time or strength to make it. This is a real godsend."
* * *
"You'll have to tell her you didn't make it," remarked Lottie, maliciously.
* * *
"I am not in the habit of either telling or implying a lie," replied Mrs. Bannister. Then she turned suddenly to Joan. "My dear, who made these pretty things?"
* * *
Joan crimsoned, then paled, but she lifted clear eyes of truth to Mrs. Bannister, "A lady."
* * *
"What lady?"
* * *
"A lady."
* * *
"But what is the lady's name?"
* * *
"I would rather not tell her name."
* * *
Sarah looked at Lottie and spoke with lip-motion. "Her mother."
* * *
Even skeptical Lottie nodded. What so likely as that the broken-down minister's wife might do this exquisite work, and send her little daughter out to sell it?
* * *
Sarah was examining the table-cloth. "I am sure it is a little different from mine," she reflected. "The bunch of daisies is larger."
* * *
Lottie nodded. "Looks so to me."
* * *
Sarah laid down the table-cloth and took up some knitted lace. "This is almost exactly the pattern of mine, and I did want to knit some for Daisy Hapgood. I am so glad to get this."
* * *
The more Sarah Bannister bought, the more the little girl's face beamed. Her cheeks flushed, her blue eyes gleamed. Sarah kept gazing at her with loving admiration. As she bought everything in the bag, Joan seemed fairly quivering with delight. She held her pretty upper lip caught between her teeth, lest she break into sheer laughter.
* * *
"I will take this handkerchief with the embroidered G," said Sarah. "It is just what I wanted to tuck in a letter to Ella Giddings."
* * *
"I thought I saw one in the parlor just like that," said Lottie.
* * *
"So you did, similar. Mine has a queer little quirk at the top of the G, and that is for Emma Gleason. I wanted to make another for Ella. Lottie, do you mind going up-stairs and bringing down my little black silk shopping-bag? My purse is in it. I don't want to go through that cold hall. I have got the grippe, I almost know it," said Sarah, when the bag was empty.
* * *
While Lottie was gone, Mrs. Bannister and the girl added up items rapidly on the back of an old envelope. Sarah was economical with paper. Sarah added with zeal, and her hand was over the sum total, and she had time to shake her head with finger on lips when the door opened. The girl nodded. She was only a child, but she understood. The other lady was not to know what the things cost.
The Big Book of Christmas Page 319