CHAPTER XI

CYNTHY’S NEIGHBORS

After the entertainment there followed a siege of cold weather that pretty well “froze up everybody,” as Shad said. A still coldness without wind settled over the hills. No horses could stand up on the icy roads. Mr. Ricketts was held up with the mail cart for three days, and when the road committee started out to remedy matters, they got as far as Judge Ellis’s and turned back. None of the girls could get to school, so they made the best of it. Even the telephone refused to respond to calls. On the fourth day Mr. Peckham managed to break through the roads with his big wood sled, and riding on it was Sally muffled to the eyebrows.

“Unwind before you try to talk,” Kit exclaimed, taking one end of the long knit muffler. “How on earth did you get through?”

“It isn’t so bad,” Sally replied in her matter-of-fact way, warming her hands over the kitchen fire. “And our hill is fine for coasting. The boys have been using it. Father’s going to break the road through for the mail cart, and on his way back we can all get on and ride back. You don’t need any sleds. We’ve got a big bob.”

Jean and Helen hesitated. Winter at the Cove had never meant this, but Doris pleaded for them all to go, and Kit was frankly rebellious against this spirit in the family.

“Jean Robbins,” she said, “do you really think it is beneath your dignity to slide down hill on a bobsled? You won’t meet one of Bab Crane’s crowd. Come along.”

“It’s so cold,” Helen demurred, from her seat by the sitting-room fire with a book to read as usual.

“Cold? You’re a couple of cats, curled up by the fire. Bundle up and let’s have some fun.”

“Do you all a pile of good,” Mrs. Gorham said placidly. “You just sit around and toast yourselves ’stid of getting used to the cold. Get out and stir around. Look at Sally’s red cheeks.”

So laughing together, they all wrapped up warmly and went out to get on the wood sled when it came back. The hill over by the sawmill was not so steep, but it swept in long, undulating sections, as it were, clear from the top of Woodchuck Hill down to the bridge at Little River. The Peckham boys had been sliding for a couple of days, and had worn a fair sized track over the snow and ice.

“There’ll be fine skating when the snow clears off a bit,” Billy called out. “We’ve got a skating club, and you’ll have to join. Piney’s the best girl skater. Jiminy, you ought to see her spin ahead. We skate on the river when it’s like this and you can keep on going for miles.”

“Do you know, girls,” Jean said on the way back, “I think we stay in the house too much and coddle ourselves just as Mrs. Gorham says. I feel simply dandy now. Who’s for the skating club?”

Even Helen joined in. It seemed to take the edge off the loneliness, this co-operation of outdoor fun and sport. The end of the week found the river clear and ready for skating. Jean never forgot her first experience there. It was not a straight river. It slipped unexpectedly around bends and dipping hillsides, curving in and out as if it played hide-and-seek with itself, Doris said, like the sea serpent that met its own tail half way around the seven seas.

Up near the Greenacre bridge Astrid and Ingeborg met them with Hedda. Helen, the fanciful, whispered to Jean how splendid it was to have real daughters of the northland with them, but Jean laughed at her.

“Cousin Roxy would say ‘fiddlesticks’ to that. I’m sure they were all born right on this side of the briny deep, you little romancer.”

“It doesn’t matter where they were born,” answered Helen, loftily. “They are the daughters of vikings somewhere back. Just look at their hair and eyes.”

It really was a good argument, Jean thought. They had the bluest eyes and the most golden hair she had ever seen. Sally skated up close to her and began to talk.

“Father says when his father was a boy, there were gray wolves used to come down in wintertime from Massachusetts, and they’ve been chased by them on this river when they were skating.”

“My father tells of wolves too,” Astrid said in her slow, wide-eyed way. “Back in Sweden. He says he was in a camp in the forest on the side of a great mountain, and the men told him to watch the fires while they were hunting. While he was there alone there came a pack of wolves after the freshly killed game. He stood with his back to the fire and threw blazing pine knots at them to keep them back. While the fire kept up they were afraid to come close, but he could see the gleam of their eyes in the darkness all around him, and hear them snap and snarl to get at him. Then the men and dogs returned and fought them. He was only thirteen.”

“Oh, and his name should have been Eric the Bold, son of Sigfried, son of Leofric.” Kit skated in circles around them, her muff up to her face as she talked. “You’ve got such a dandy name, Astrid, know it?”

“It is my grandmother’s name,” Astrid answered in her grave unsmiling way.

“But it means a star, the same as Stella or Estelle or Astarte or Ishtar. We’ve been studying the meanings of proper names at school, and it’s so fascinating. I wish I had been named something like Astrid. I’d love to be Brunhilde.”

Jean watched them amusedly. Kit and Helen had always been the two who had loved to make believe they were “somebody else,” as Helen called it. “Let’s play we’re somebody else,” had been their unfailing slogan for diversion and variety, but Jean lived in the world of reality. She was Jean Robbins, living today, not Melisande in an enchanted forest, nor Berengaria, not even Kit’s favorite warrior maid, Jeanne D’Arc. Helen could do up the supper dishes all by herself, and forget the sordid details entirely making believe she was the Lady of Tripoli waiting for Rudel’s barque to appear, but Jean experienced all of the deadly sameness in everyday life. She could not sweep and dust a room and make believe she was at the spring exhibitions. She could not face a basket of inevitable mending, and imagine herself in a castle garden clad in clinging green velvet with stag hounds pacing at her heels.

When they had first come to the country to live, it had been comical, this difference in the girls’ temperaments. Mrs. Robbins had wanted a certain book in her room upstairs, after dark, and had asked Helen to run up after it. And Helen had hesitated, plainly distressed.

“For pity’s sake, Helenita, run along,” Jean had said laughingly. “You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?”

“I don’t know,” Helen had answered, doubtfully. “Maybe I am. I’m the only one in the family with imagination.”

Sometimes Jean almost envied the two their complete self-absorption. She was never satisfied with herself or her relation to her environment. Seeing so many needs, she felt a certain lack in herself when she shrank from the little duties that crowded on her, and stole away her time. She had brought up from New York a fair supply of material for study, and had laid out work ahead for the winter evenings, but the days were slipping by, and time was short. Her pads of drawing paper lay untouched in her desk drawer. Not a single new pencil had been used, not a stick of crayon touched. The memory of Daddy Higginson driving his herd of cattle cheered her more than anything when she felt discouraged. And after all, when she thought of the California trip and what a benefit it would be to her father, that thought alone made her put every regret from her, and face tomorrow pluckily.

“I’m half frozen,” Doris said suddenly, just as they swung around a bend of the river, and faced long levels of snow-covered meadows. “Oh, girls, look there.” She stopped short, the rest halting too. Crossing over the frozen land daintily, following a big antlered leader, were five deer. Straight down to the river edge they came, only three fields from the girls.

“They’ve got a path to their drinking place,” said Sally. “Don’t move, any of you.”

“Oh, I wonder if ours is there,” Doris whispered. “He hasn’t been with the cows since the storm passed, but I know I could tell him from the rest. He had a dark patch of brown on his shoulder.”

“There’s only one with antlers,” Sally answered. “I hope the hunters won’t find them. I never could bear hunters. Maybe if we had to depend on them for food it would be different, but when they just come up here and kill for fun, well, my mother says she just hopes some day it’ll all come back to them good and plenty.”

“Yes, and who eats squirrel pie with the rest of us,” her brother teased. “And partridge too. She’s only talking.”

“Don’t fight,” Helen told them softly. “Isn’t that a house over there where the smoke is?”

“It’s Cynthy Allan’s house,” Ingeborg looked around warningly as she spoke the name. “I’m not allowed to go there. She’s queer.”

“Isn’t that interesting,” Kit cried. “I love queer people. Let’s all go over and call on Cynthy. How old is she, Ingeborg?”

“Oh, very old, over seventy. But she thinks she is only about seventeen, and she’s always doing flighty things. She’s lived out in the woods all summer, and she ran away from her family.”

“She won’t hurt you, I suppose,” Sally explained. “Mother says she just worked herself crazy. Once she started to make doughnuts and they found her hanging them on nails all over her kitchen, the round doughnuts, I mean. Lots of them. So folks have been afraid of her ever since.”

“Just because she made a lot of doughnuts and hung them around her kitchen? I think that’s lovely,” Kit cried. “What fun she must have had. Maybe she just did it to nonplus people.”

“I don’t know,” Sally said doubtfully. “She took to the woods after that, and now she lives in the house along with about fourteen cats.”

“I shall call on Cynthy today, won’t you, Jean?”

“I’d like to get warmed up before we skate back,” Jean agreed. “I don’t suppose she’d mind. If you don’t want to, Ingeborg, you could wait for us.”

Ingeborg thought waiting the wiser plan, but the rest of them took off their skates, and started up over the fields towards the little grey house in the snow. There were bare rose bushes around the front door and lilacs at the back. Several cats scudded away at their approach and took refuge in the woodshed, and at the side window there appeared a face, a long, haggard, old face, supported on one old, thin hand that incessantly moved to hide the trembling of the lips. Kit, on the impulse of the moment, waved to her, and smiled.

“Gee, I hope she’s been cooking some of those doughnuts today,” said one of the Peckham boys.

Jean tapped at the door. It was several minutes before it opened. Cynthy looked them over first from the window before she took any chances, and even when she did deign to lift her latch, the door only opened a few inches.

“Could we please come in and get warm?” asked Jean in her friendliest way.

“What did you stick out in the cold and get all froze up for?” asked Cynthy tartly. But the door opened wider, and they all trooped into the kitchen. Out of every rush bottomed chair there leaped a startled cat. The kitchen was poorly furnished, only an old-fashioned painted dresser, a wood stove, a maple table, and some chairs, but the braided rugs on the floor made little oases of comfort, and the fire crackled cheerfully, throwing sparkles from the copper tea kettle.

“Ain’t had nobody to draw me no well water today,” Cynthy remarked apologetically. “Else I wouldn’t mind making you a cup of tea, such as it is. Warm you up a mite anyhow.”

Steve Peckham grabbed the water pail and hustled out to the well, and his brother made for the woodshed to add to the scanty supply in the woodbox.

“Ain’t had nobody to cut me no wood for a spell nuther,” Cynthy acknowledged. “You won’t find much out there ’ceptin’ birch and chips. Sit right down close to the fire, girls.” She looked them all over in a dazed but interested sort of way. “Don’t suppose—” she hesitated, and Kit flashed a telepathic glance at Jean. It wasn’t possible Cynthy was still in the doughnut making business, she thought. But the old lady went on, “Don’t suppose you’d all like some of my doughnuts, would ye? They’re real good and tasty.”

Would they? They drew up around the old maple table while Cynthy spread a red tablecloth over it, and set out a big milkpan filled with golden brown doughnuts. Jean found a chance to say softly, she hoped Miss Allan would come up to Greenacres soon, and sample some of their cooking too.

“Ain’t got any hat to wear,” Cynthy answered briefly. “Never go anywheres at all, never see anybody. Might just as well be dead and buried. Anyhow, it’s over two and a half miles to your place, ain’t it? Used to be the old Trowbridge place, only you put a fancy name on it, I heard from the fishman. Don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for him coming ’round once a week. I never buy anything, but he likes to have a few doughnuts, and I like to hear all the news. I’d like to see how you’ve fixed up the old house. When nobody lived there, I used to go down and pick red raspberries. Fearful good ones over in that side lot by the barn.”

“We made jam of them last year,” Kit exclaimed, eagerly. “I’ll bring some down to you, sure.”

“Wish I did have a hat to wear,” went on Cynthy, irrelevantly. “Wish I had a hat with a red rose on it. I had one once when I was a girl, and it was so becoming to me. Wish I had another just like it.”

“There’s a red silk rose at home among some of Mother’s things. I know she’d love you to have it. She’ll be home soon, and I’ll bring it down to you when I find the rose.”

The very last thing that Cynthy called from the door as they all trooped down the path, was the injunction to Kit not to forget the rose.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” she said enthusiastically to Jean, as they skated home. “She must be seventy or eighty, Jean, but she longs for a red rose. I don’t believe age amounts to a thing, really and truly, except for wrinkles and rheumatism. I’ll bet two cents when I’m as old as Cynthy is, I’ll be hankering after pink satin slippers and a breakfast cap with rosebuds.”

Jean laughed happily. The outing had brought the bright color to her cheeks, and it seemed as if she felt a premonition of good tidings even before they reached the house up on the pine-crowned hill. She was singing with Doris as they turned in at the gateway and went up the winding drive, but Kit’s eagle eye discovered signs of fresh tracks in the snow.

“There’s been a team or a sleigh in here since we went out,” she called back to them, and all at once Doris gave an excited little squeal of joy, and dashed ahead, waving to somebody who stood at the side window, the big, sunny bay window where the plant stand stood. Then Kit ran, and after her Helen, and Jean too, all speeding along the drive to the wide front steps and into the spacious doors, where the Motherbird stood waiting to clasp them in her arms.