“It’s all very well now,” she said, “while the warm weather lasts; but in winter Longwood is simply grewsome. The wind never stops blowing day nor night. It howls and it roars and it screams, till I feel as if every nerve in my body were on the point of snapping in two. And the snow, ugh! And the wind, ugh! And burglars! Every night of our lives they come,—or I think they come,—and I lie awake and hear them sharpening their tools and forcing the locks and murdering the cook and kidnapping Baby, till I long to die, and have done with them forever! Oh, Nature is the most unpleasant thing!”
“Burglars are not Nature,” objected Katy.
“What are they, then? Art? High Art? Well, whatever they are, I do not like them. Oh, if ever the happy day comes when Deniston consents to move into town, I never wish to set my eyes on the country again as long as I live, unless—well, yes, I should like to come out just once more in the horse-cars and kick that elm-tree by the fence! The number of times that I have lain awake at night listening to its creaking!”
“You might kick it without waiting to have a house in town.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t dare as long as we are living here! You never know what Nature may do. She has ways of her own of getting even with people,” remarked her friend, solemnly.
No time must be lost in showing Boston to Katy, Rose said. So the morning after her arrival she was taken in bright and early to see the sights. There were not quite so many sights to be seen then as there are today. The Art Museum had not got much above its foundations; the new Trinity Church was still in the future; but the big organ and the bronze statue of Beethoven were in their glory, and every day at high noon a small straggling audience wandered into Music Hall to hear the instrument played. To this extempore concert Katy was taken, and to Faneuil Hall and the Athenaeum, to Doll and Richards’s, where was an exhibition of pictures, to the Granary Graveyard, and the Old South. Then the girls did a little shopping; and by that time they were quite tired enough to make the idea of luncheon agreeable, so they took the path across the Common to the Joy Street Mall.
Katy was charmed by all she had seen. The delightful nearness of so many interesting things surprised her. She perceived what is one of Boston’s chief charms,—that the Common and its surrounding streets make a natural centre and rallying-point for the whole city; as the heart is the centre of the body and keeps up a quick correspondence and regulates the life of all its extremities. The stately old houses on Beacon Street, with their rounded fronts, deep window-casements, and here and there a mauve or a lilac pane set in the sashes, took her fancy greatly; and so did the State House, whose situation made it sufficiently imposing, even before the gilding of the dome.
Up the steep steps of the Joy Street Mall they went, to the house on Mt. Vernon Street which the Reddings had taken on their return from Washington nearly three years before. Rose had previously shown Katy the site of the old family house on Summer Street, where she was born, now given over wholly to warehouses and shops. Their present residence was one of those wide old-fashioned brick houses on the crest of the hill, whose upper windows command the view across to the Boston Highlands; in the rear was a spacious yard, almost large enough to be called a garden, walled in with ivies and grapevines, under which were long beds full of roses and chrysanthemums and marigolds and mignonette.
Rose carried a latch-key in her pocket, which she said had been one of her wedding-gifts; with this she unlocked the front door and let Katy into a roomy white-painted hall.
“We will go straight through to the back steps,” she said. “Mamma is sure to be sitting there; she always sits there till the first frost; she says it makes her think of the country. How different people are! I don’t want to think of the country, but I’m never allowed to forget it for a moment. Mamma is so fond of those steps and the garden.”
There, to be sure, Mrs. Redding was found sitting in a wicker-work chair under the shade of the grapevines, with a big basket of mending at her side. It looked so homely and country-like to find a person thus occupied in the middle of a busy city, that Katy’s heart warmed to her at once.
Mrs. Redding was a fair little woman, scarcely taller than Rose and very much like her. She gave Katy a kind welcome.
“You do not seem like a stranger,” she said, “Rose has told us so much about you and your sister. Sylvia will be very disappointed not to see you. She went off to make some visits when we broke up in the country, and is not to be home for three weeks yet.”
Katy was disappointed, too, for she had heard a great deal about Sylvia and had wished very much to meet her. She was shown her picture, from which she gathered that she did not look in the least like Rose; for though equally fair, her fairness was of the tall aquiline type, quite different from Rose’s dimpled prettiness. In fact, Rose resembled her mother, and Sylvia her father; they were only alike in little peculiarities of voice and manner, of which a portrait did not enable Katy to judge.
The two girls had a cosey little luncheon with Mrs. Redding, after which Rose carried Katy off to see the house and everything in it which was in any way connected with her own personal history,—the room where she used to sleep, the high-chair in which she sat as a baby and which was presently to be made over to little Rose, the sofa where Deniston offered himself, and the exact spot on the carpet on which she had stood while they were being married! Last of all,—
“Now you shall see the best and dearest thing in the whole house,” she said, opening the door of a room in the second story.— “Grandmamma, here is my friend Katy Carr, whom you have so often heard me tell about.”
It was a large pleasant room, with a little wood-fire blazing in a grate, by which, in an arm-chair full of cushions, with a Solitaire-board on a little table beside her, sat a sweet old lady. This was Rose’s father’s mother. She was nearly eighty; but she was beautiful still, and her manner had a gracious old-fashioned courtesy which was full of charm. She had been thrown from a carriage the year before, and had never since been able to come downstairs or to mingle in the family life.
“They come to me instead,” she told Katy. “There is no lack of pleasant company,” she added; “every one is very good to me. I have a reader for two hours a day, and I read to myself a little, and play Patience and Solitaire, and never lack entertainment.”
There was something restful in the sight of such a lovely specimen of old age. Katy realized, as she looked at her, what a loss it had been to her own life that she had never known either of her grandparents. She sat and gazed at old Mrs. Redding with a mixture of regret and fascination. She longed to hold her hand, and kiss her, and play with her beautiful silvery hair, as Rose did. Rose was evidently the old lady’s peculiar darling. They were on the most intimate terms; and Rose dimpled and twinkled, and made saucy speeches, and told all her little adventures and the baby’s achievements, and made jests, and talked nonsense as freely as to a person of her own age. It was a delightful relation.
“Grandmamma has taken a fancy to you, I can see,” she told Katy, as they drove back to Longwood. “She always wants to know my friends; and she has her own opinions about them, I can tell you.”
“Do you really think she liked me?” said Katy, warmly. “I am so glad if she did, for I loved her. I never saw a really beautiful old person before.”
“Oh, there’s nobody like her,” rejoined Rose. “I can’t imagine what it would be not to have her.” Her merry little face was quite sad and serious as she spoke. “I wish she were not so old,” she added with a sigh. “If we could only put her back twenty years! Then, perhaps, she would live as long as I do.”
But, alas! there is no putting back the hands on the dial of time, no matter how much we may desire it.
The second day of Katy’s visit was devoted to the luncheon-party of which Rose had written in her letter, and which was meant to be a reunion or “side CHAPTER” of the S.S.U.C. Rose had asked every old Hillsover girl who was within reach.