“No, dear, no,” assured Mrs. Kendall, hurriedly. “You—you have named quite enough. And now we’ll go down to the brook. We haven’t seen half of Five Oaks yet.” And once more she tried to make the joyous present drive from her daughter’s thoughts the grievous past.
CHAPTER II
It was not long before all Houghtonsville knew the story, and there was not a man, woman, or child in the town that did not take the liveliest interest in the little maid at Five Oaks who had passed through so amazing an experience. To be lost at five years of age in a great city, to be snatched from wealth, happiness, and a loving mother’s arms, only to be thrust instantly into poverty, misery, and loneliness; and then to be, after four long years, suddenly returned—no wonder Houghtonsville held its breath and questioned if it all indeed were true.
Bit by bit the little girl’s history was related in every house in town; and many a woman—and some men—wept over the tale of how the little fingers had sewed on buttons in the attic sweat shop, and pasted bags in the ill-smelling cellar. The story of the coöperative housekeeping establishment in one corner of the basement kitchen, where she, together with Patty and the twins, “divvied up” the day’s “haul,”—that, too, came in for its share of exclamatory adjectives, as did the account of how she was finally discovered through her finding her own name over the little cot-bed at Mont-Lawn—the little bed that Mrs. Kendall had endowed in the name of her lost daughter, in the children’s vacation home for the poor little waifs from the city.
“An’ ter think of her findin’ her own baby jest by givin’ some other woman’s baby a bit of joy!” cried Mrs. Merton of the old red farmhouse, when the story was told to her. “But, there! ain’t that what she’s always doin’ for folks—somethin’ ter make ’em happy? Didn’t she bring my own child, Sadie, an’ the boy, Bobby, back from the city, and ain’t Sadie gettin’ well an’ strong on the farm here? And it’s a comfort ter me, too, when I remember ’twas Bobby who first found the little Margaret cryin’ in the streets there in New York, an’ took her home ter my Sadie. ‘Twa’n’t much Sadie could do for the poor little lamb, but she did what she could till old Sullivan got his claws on her and kept her shut up out o’ sight. But there! what’s past is past, and there ain’t no use frettin’ over it. She’s home now, in her own mother’s arms, and I’m thinkin’ it’s the whole town that’s rejoicin’!”
And the whole town did rejoice—and many and various were the ways the townspeople took to show it. The Houghtonsville brass band marched in full uniform to Five Oaks one evening and gave a serenade with red fire and rockets, much to Mrs. Kendall’s embarrassment and Margaret’s delight. The Ladies’ Aid Society gave a tea with Mrs. Kendall and Margaret as a kind of pivot around which the entire affair revolved—this time to the embarrassment of both Mrs. Kendall and her daughter. The minister of the Methodist church appointed a day of prayer and thanksgiving in commemoration of the homecoming of the wanderer; and the town poet published in the Houghtonsville Banner a forty-eight-line poem on “The Lost and Found.”
Nor was this all. To Mrs. Kendall it seemed that almost every man, woman, and child in the place came to her door with inquiries and congratulations, together with all sorts of offerings, from flowers and frosted cakes to tidies and worked bedspreads. She was not ungrateful, certainly, but she was overwhelmed.
Not only the cakes and the tidies, however, gave Mrs. Kendall food for thought during those first few days after Margaret’s return. From the very nature of the case it was, of necessity, a period of adjustment; and to Mrs. Kendall’s consternation there was every indication of friction, if not disaster.
For four years now her young daughter had been away from her tender care and influence; and for only one of those four years—the last—had she come under the influence of any sort of refinement or culture, and then under only such as a city missionary and an overworked schoolteacher could afford, supplemented by the two trips to Mont-Lawn. To be sure, behind it all had been Margaret’s careful training for the first five years of her life, and it was because of this training that she had so quickly yielded to what good influences she had known in the last year. The Alley, however, was not Five Oaks; and the standards of one did not measure to those of the other. It was not easy for “Mag of the Alley” to become at once Margaret Kendall, the dainty little daughter of a well-bred, fastidious mother.
To the doctor—the doctor who had gone to New York and brought Margaret home, and who knew her as she was—Mrs. Kendall went for advice.
“What shall I do?” she asked anxiously. “A hundred times a day the dear child’s speech, movements, and actions are not what I like them to be. And yet—if I correct each one, ’twill be a continual ‘don’t’ all day. Why, doctor, the child will—hate me!”
“As if any one could do that!” smiled the doctor; and at the look in his eyes Mrs. Kendall dropped her own—the happiness that had come to her with this man’s love was very new; she had scarcely yet looked it squarely in the face.
“The child is so good and loving,” she went on a little hurriedly, “that it makes it all the harder—but I must do something. Only this morning she told the minister that she thought Houghtonsville was a ‘bully place,’ and that the people were ‘tiptop.’ Her table manners—poor child! I ran away from the table and cried like a baby the first time I saw her eat; and yet—perhaps the very next thing she does will be so dainty and sweet that I could declare the other was all a dream. Doctor, what shall I do?”
“I know, I know,” nodded the man. “I have seen it myself. But, dear, she’ll learn—she’ll learn wonderfully fast. You’ll see. It’s in her—the gentleness and the refinement. She’ll have to be corrected, some, of course; it’s out of the question that she shouldn’t be. But she’ll come out straight. Her heart is all right.”
Mrs. Kendall laughed softly.
“Her heart, doctor!” she exclaimed. “Just there lies the greatest problem of all. The one creed of her life is to ‘divvy up,’ and how I’m going to teach her ordinary ideas of living without shattering all her faith in me I don’t know. Why, Harry,”—Mrs. Kendall’s voice was tragic—“she gazes at me with round eyes of horror because I have two coats and two hats, and two loaves of bread, and haven’t yet ‘divvied up’ with some one who has none. So far her horror is tempered by the fact that she is sure I didn’t know before that there were any people who did not have all these things. Now that she has told me of them, she confidently looks to me to do my obvious duty at once.”
The doctor laughed.
“As if you weren’t always doing things for people,” he said fondly. Then he grew suddenly grave. “The dear child! I’m afraid that along with her education and civilization her altruism will get a few hard knocks. But—she’ll get over that, too. You’ll see. At heart she’s so gentle and—why, what”—he broke off with an unspoken question, his eyes widely opened at the change that had come to her face.
“Oh, nothing,” returned Mrs. Kendall, almost despairingly, “only if you’d seen Joe Bagley yesterday morning I’m afraid you’d have changed your opinion of her gentleness. She—she fought him!” Mrs. Kendall stumbled over the words, and flushed a painful red as she spoke them.
“Fought him—Joe Bagley!” gasped the doctor. “Why, he’s almost twice her size.”