Elaine Goodale Eastman

“ Doris and Cynthia were the only ones privileged to admire Ethan’s gift.
Next to the bride in the affections of rural New England stands the fair girl graduate, and that June day in Laurel was apparently quite given over to the triumphant parade of simple-hearted youth. In many a modest home, solicitous [201] mothers were robing and adorning their daughters as if for the altar itself, and that evening in the town hall it seemed as if every soul in the village, old and young, rich and poor, must be pressing into a seat or peering curiously in at open door or window. ”

“ Yellow Star’s Indian blood fairly curdled within her in the face of this close strife of the elements; for brave as her people truly were, the angry moods of nature were to them full of threat and awful personality. ”

“ For nobody knows how many hundreds of years they have plied their feminine implements—such as awl of bone and sinew of deer—and with dyed quills of the porcupine and hand-wrought of trader-bought beads, with skins tanned to a velvety softness or costly broadcloth of red and blue, have made and decorated their native finery with no mean skill, the while their tongues were busy with soft syllables of domestic chat and village gossip, after the universal feminine pattern. ”

“ Are you really going to settle down in Laurel?”
“Doctor Brown is anxious to divide his practice, but I haven’t given him my answer yet,” responded Ethan, his serious eyes upon the soft, averted cheek that had at last begun to burn with a delicate consciousness.
“You see, Stella, the place doesn’t matter much,” he went on, with tender confidence. “Any place holds duties to fill a lifetime; it’s the spirit that really counts. ”

“ Presently Stella and her teacher appeared, and the four set out at once—or five, counting in the irrepressible Sir Walter, whose care-free bark voiced the adventurous spirit of the holiday party. It was a warm Saturday in April—one of the few days when our New England spring really opens her heart to the wayfarer, and from time to time they were overtaken by country teams whose occupants gazed curiously, even pityingly, upon them. Once a farmer returning homeward with an empty lumber wagon offered the whole party “a lift,” which proposal was gracefully evaded by Miss Morrison. ”

“ The sun-brimmed solitude of a September day enfolded the two girls, Blue Earth and Yellow Star—for, although mother of a five-year-old boy, the deserted wife of Young Eagle was in reality not so much older than her friend—as they happily gathered red-and-yellow Dakota plums in the rustling thickets away up the creek. The young mother [208] was quaintly robed in a loose, wide-sleeved “Dakota gown” of Turkey red calico, while the young maid was more trimly clad in one of the plain, indigo-blue prints that she had last worn in Mrs. Sophia’s kitchen. ”

“ Cynthia proposed an armful of thick moss, while ease-loving Doris declared that for her part she preferred to bring out a hammock.
“What makes you so quiet, Jibby?” demanded Sin, as they stepped forth into the open, under the skyey roof.
“I feel in my heart what I have no words to say,” murmured the Indian girl.
“Our neighbors would be quite as well pleased, perhaps, if we were all as quiet as Stella,” suggested Ethan, quickly.
“What neighbors do you mean? Uncle Si doesn’t care how much noise we make,” remarked literal Doris. ”

“ There’s nothing else in the whole world I should like so much.”
“Yes, it was I set her up in business, and a fair sort of business it’s turning out,” chuckled the Doctor some three months later, from the depths of his shabby easy chair. “Not a fortune in it, of course; but she makes seventy-five cents or a dollar many days, with Cynthia’s help. Why aren’t you out with them, Doris? Afraid of a freckle or two [165] my girl? Well, health is beauty, and their long days in the sun and air, close to the life-giving earth, will be worth more than a fortune to them.” ”

“ Now and again her black eyes darted keenly from one subdued face to the other, as if in search of something; a [47] “trick,” Miss Sophia said, that made her “as nervous as a witch!”
The long, heavy, and, to tell the truth, rather silent and oppressive meal had come to an end at last, with pumpkin pie and Indian pudding made punctiliously after the old family recipes, and a mold of “quaking jelly,” that had been a favorite of Lucy’s from childhood. After the black coffee was brought in, Stella slid her nuts and raisins into her pocket, and rose at a nod from her foster-mother. ”

“ Glimpsed in the distance, under a sky quivering with heat and against a wide background of sunburnt grass, the whole looked more like a toy village than anything real and serious, at all events to the new-comer, who, with all her earnestness of purpose, had fallen to some degree under the spell of that colorful, elemental existence. ”

“ Ethan looked decidedly shaken, but matter-of-fact Doris remarked bluntly:
“If they did come back, they wouldn’t kill the deer for one week, but every day in the year. I thought Indians were always hunting, when they weren’t on the war-path killing people; and you needn’t say anything, Stella Waring, so there!”
However, when the open season actually came round with November, Ethan decided that he was “too busy” to take a day off in the woods, which Stella’s fancy had peopled for him with stealthy shadows, and friendly wreaths of blue smoke from well-hidden wigwams. ”

“ Now Mother Waring is gone, I haven’t any folks, anywhere. Miss Sophia doesn’t love me a single bit. There are just Doris and her father and mother, and Cynthia and Grandma Brown and Uncle Si and Miss Morrison—yes, Ethan too, [142] though I haven’t seen him for ever and ever so long—all just friends, not folks,—and I shall be left out of everything, again. Oh, dear! I am nobody’s little girl! ”

“ Doris set the ball rolling with the very old tale of the Ash and the Elm, the father and mother of mankind, as told by the Abenakis, the Indians of New England. Both trees grew in Uncle’s door-yard; and her hearers, looking up, seemed to realize for the first time the graceful femininity of the drooping elm, and the sturdiness of the more robust and straight-limbed ash-tree.
“There was once a chief who had three [189] daughters,” began Rosey, promptly, “and the youngest daughter was much the prettiest, so that all the young men wanted to marry her. ”

“ Stella prettily apologized to the agency doctor, her bright face a pleasant enough sight in his musty old office, its shelves filled with unwholesome drugs reaching from floor to ceiling. Still a “fresh-air” enthusiast, as in the old Laurel days, she had insisted upon holding long consultations with this official, until he had simply been obliged to rouse himself and forsake the old routine of doling out these same drugs to a long line of Indians,—so far, at least, as Cherry Creek was concerned. Curious, how that young woman would take a personal interest in every single case. ”

“ HERBS AND SIMPLES Miss Sophia, notwithstanding the unexpected turn that affairs had taken, had by no means relinquished her point of view. No sooner was she satisfied that Stella would not desert her post for any other offer, however flattering, than she recovered herself sufficiently to make quite clear to the girl her changed footing in the Spellman household.
“Our work is light,” she announced, coldly, “and I shall expect you to earn your board. I have no doubt you prefer to be independent, as far as possible. ”

“ Doris, prettier than ever in all the dignity of her ankle-long skirts and “Psyche knot” of honey-colored hair, noted Stella’s hesitating silence and cannily began, feeling her way:
“You know, Jibby, Grandma is getting old and feeble, and she does like you better’n ’most any one. She won’t let even me do for her as she will you, Stella [157] Waring! I don’t see how you manage to bewitch everybody the way you do.
“Uncle Si says, dummed if he wouldn’t like nothing better than for you to come out there and be his little housekeeper. ”

“ She’s getting old, you see, and she isn’t used to doing for herself, and she really does need me, girls. Don’t look like that, Cynthia; she’s my dear, dear Mother Waring’s only sister—the only near kin she had in this world—so she used to say. Girls, I know I should be perfectly happy with either of you, but I can’t leave Miss Sophia—she’s folks. ”

“ Waring’s death, Stella began to seek and to find opportunities for earning small sums of money. She delivered hats for the local milliner and gowns for the village dressmaker. She took a neighbor’s baby out in his carriage on fine days, at ten cents an errand or an airing. One April afternoon, Doctor Brown found her on her knees with basket and trowel, grubbing up dandelions in Miss Sophia’s front yard. ”

“ Miss Sophia was hastily sent for from the kitchen, where she had been taking the indignant Mrs. Maloney to task for “nicking” her old blue china ... and presently, to poor Stella sitting, desperately anxious and unhappy, on the top step of the dark stairway, just outside her foster-mother’s [135] door, came, not even kind-hearted Doctor Brown, but the business-like, white-capped nurse, with her curt message:
“Miss Sophia says you need not sit there any longer, Stella; Mrs. Waring is dead.” ”

“ Two of the very “nicest” girls in Laurel, Cynthia, whose father was supposed to be the “best fixed” merchant in town, and Doris, the busy Doctor’s only child, were already her devoted friends.
Notwithstanding the fact that she had promptly taken her place among the best scholars in the room, the girl from Dakota had not yet lost her sense of audacity in rising to recite before so imposing a company.
“Why, Stella! you don’t have to dig at your books the way you do; it’s absurd! Look at me; I haven’t opened a single one since Friday afternoon, and [41] I get along,” argued happy-go-lucky Sin. ”

“ Doctor Brown secretly believed nothing beyond the capacity of his favorite, but he conscientiously meant not to [196] encourage ambitions that it might be impossible to realize.
“Those hands of Stella’s,” he impulsively remarked one day, when her future was under discussion, letting his sage eyes rest meditatively upon the long, supple, sensitive members—“well, they do say such hands can only belong to a doctor or a musician.”
“Or a mother,” unexpectedly murmured his wife.
He gave her a quick, approving look, and again the warm blood glowed in the Indian girl’s dark cheek. ”

“ Doris and her mother had no thought but of the dear home duties and the small social triumphs that beckoned so plainly, when the pretty, only daughter should have “finished her education.” But Cynthia and Stella were of a different mold, and they passed many a happy hour in sharing their confidences and their dreams, which ranged all the way from that ranch in Dakota on Stella’s allotment, which they [195] were to run together, riding their own range triumphantly in the approved cow-girl fashion, to the glorious vision of Stella as a famous doctor and Cynthia as a great artist. ”

“ Sin was bent on braving the matter out, and, to her friends’ horror, she calmly tore off a long strip of blue serge and threw it away. “Nonsense; I never mend. Daddy’ll give me a new skirt out of the store any [102] time I ask him. I hate clothes, and I hate sewing. I’m sure I don’t know why I was born a girl.”
“What shall you wear to the dance?” asked Doris of Stella, as they strolled lovingly side by side. Cynthia, her friends thought, was in a mood that would best be ignored. ”

“ For Yellow Star had made her difficult decision—to go back to her own people and do for them what she could. There had come, in the early spring, a cry for help—another dingy scrawl in scarce legible Dakota from the Indian camp on Cherry Creek. Blue Earth had a “bad heart;” her husband, Young Eagle, had left her and gone across the Big Water with the show; she had a baby girl now, and the boy was five years old. She wanted them to “walk the white man’s road,” and she wanted The-One-who-was-left-Alive [203] to come and live with her, and teach her how to teach her children. ”

“ Modest as she was, she could not help knowing that people liked her—all sorts of people—boys and girls and babies, intimates and strangers, sharp-tongued Grandma Brown and the gruff-spoken Doctor and “pernickety” Uncle Si. Even from Mary Maloney and Rosey Bernstein the Indian girl had wrung some measure of reluctant [133] admiration; but, in spite of much willing service, she remained vividly conscious of being still an outsider and an interloper in the eyes of Miss Sophia.
Now at last Doctor Brown had been sent for to see Lucy Waring. ”

“ Blue Earth rides her spotted pony, ‘Baby,’ and I my iron-gray pacer, ‘Old Soup,’ the people call him, because he [233] goes from side to side, just like stirring something in a pot.
“It was glorious fun while the fine weather lasted. I don’t mind coyotes a bit, and I got used to the rattlesnakes after a while, remembering Ethan’s; but a five-mile ride in a Dakota blizzard isn’t any fun, especially with a child on the saddle in front of you, and you with your hands full to keep him from freezing. It’s better to just let the horse take his own course, anyway, when you can’t see the road a bit. ”

“ But, like another Cinderella, she forgot, and lingered near an open window of the large, circular dance-house, her baby asleep on her back, gazing fascinated on the gorgeous, barbaric spectacle of painted, half-clad men executing their wonderful steps and poses, till aroused by a touch on her arm and a sweet, reproachful voice in her ear. ”