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Read Ebook: Colección de Documentos Inéditos Relativos al Descubrimiento Conquista y Organización de las Antiguas Posesiones Españolas de Ultramar. Tomo 2 De Las Islas Filipinas I by Real Academia De La Historia Spain Editor
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Ebook has 58 lines and 5312 words, and 2 pages
Now I had seen Alec Yorke grow up; he was younger than I, and you know the scorn that a girl of thirteen can have toward a boy a year her junior and half a head shorter than she. At that time he fits into no scheme of things; there is no being on earth who arouses one's sentiment less. As a sweetheart he is impossible; equally impossible is he as an object on which to lavish motherly feelings. For me, Alec was a mere plague; he lured Ellen from me into skylarkings in which I had no part, nor did I wish to have, having, by the New England training of that day, already had my childhood taken from me. It was not mystery that I had ever connected with Alec, but a baffling sense of humor and an intensity in the way he could turn hand-springs. There was a fire in his performance of cart-wheels that seemed to let loose all that was foolish and gay, and, from the point of view of the grown-ups of the time, reprehensible in Ellen. So it was obvious to me that any mysterious doings of Alec's meant no good.
"We ought to find out," said I, "what he's about."
"Oh, Roberta!" pleaded Ellen; "then it wouldn't be a mystery any more."
"We ought to find out what he's doing," I pursued, "and get him to stop it. We should use our influence even if he is young."
We, therefore, stealthily made after Alec. He went out through a hole in the fence of the Scudder place, circled a little wood, scaled some outhouses of the Jones's, and in this circuitous method came back to old Mrs. Butler's, next door, and there he lay on his stomach in the woodshed, at a little distance. With a reappearance of guilty stealth, he looked around and seeing no one he dove suddenly into Mrs. Butler's house. Mrs. Butler was stricken with rheumatism and lived entirely on the first floor, so by the simple method of flattening our noses against the window-pane we might find out anything that was afoot. We fathomed the mystery. There stood Alec, doing old Mrs. Butler's back hair. He combed it out as best he might, while she punctuated the performance with such remarks as these: "Lor! child, remember it's hair in your hands, not a hank of yarn." Then she would groan, "Oh, the day that I lost the use of my arms over my head and must go through this!" All of which Alec bore with patience.
We made off a little shamefacedly while Ellen hissed in my ear, with fine logic: "There, Roberta Hathaway, that's what you get by snooping into people's business." We never mentioned Alec's mystery to him, though from time to time Ellen would seem maddeningly knowing.
When Mrs. Payne had been in our village less than a year and the interest of the village in the "do-less" sister of Miss Sarah had somewhat dwindled, it flamed up again. Mrs. Payne had a visitor, to our country eyes a splendid-looking, middle-aged gentleman. He put up at the little inn and called on Mrs. Payne and brought her such little trifles as a man might bestow upon a lady; sweets also he brought for Ellen, and a most elegant little needlecase with a gold thimble,--an incongruous gift, for since Ellen learned the use of the needle she had abhorred it; if she lived to-day she would have darned her stockings with a sail needle and dental floss. There went through the town, "He's courting the widow," for he came again and again, and in the mean time, according to the postmistress, there arrived letters and a package or two.
Concerning this episode Ellen writes:--
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