CHAPTER VII

MISS MELISSA FURTHER DISAPPROVES OF THE ROCKY FORK

Father had started on his rounds again when his daughter came down to breakfast, and Miss Calder and Liza were at table, talking politely. Liza wore a cool, faded lawn, one of her best afternoon dresses, over which her kitchen apron was tied. Miss Calder, with less of the sun in her blood, was in a black barège relieved by white sleeves and collar. Each woman seemed so sweet and fair in her way, that Bluebell hardly knew which to admire most.

Liza settled the little girl’s dress with a matronly twitch and fastened a loose hook or two: then poured out her glass of milk and helped her to bread and butter and fried chicken.

“You won’t want to go to school to-day, will you, Bluebell?” she said.

“Bluebell?” repeated Miss Calder, questioningly. “She is not commonly called Melissa?”

“Well, no,” replied Liza apologetically; “seems like her mother give her a kind of a pet name when she was a baby, because her eyes were so blue. But laws! they’re gray now to what they were before she had the whooping-cough. Whooping-cough is very hard on children. She had it two years ago, and so had Rocco, and I was worryin’ about them the whole summer.”

Bluebell had been considering the sacrifice of a school-day. She thought of her head-marks, and the probability of Perintha Pancost or Tildy Banks accumulating wealth of that kind to her detriment, in her absence. She thought of the noon play, and the geography-school excitement. Giving up school for the day, and for perhaps as many days as Miss Calder stayed, was a serious sacrifice. Still, what little girl _could_ go off to school when her friend was on a visit to the family?

“I won’t go,” said Bluebell, hoping Perintha Pancost at least might not get the head-mark.

“You must not stay at home on my account,” said Miss Melissa. “I want to see your school. Your father said he would be driving by that way in the afternoon and would fetch me home.”

“But it’s so far!” cried the little girl eagerly. “Can you walk all that way?”

“I think I should enjoy it,” replied Miss Calder, smiling. “I am quite a pedestrian.”

Bluebell at once felt it was to be an important day. Teeny and Tildy Banks would be aides-de-camp in the march. She would show her friend off before the school. Perintha Pancost needn’t take on airs about the geography-teacher. She could not remember when so distinguished a visitor had honored the school. The whole pageant flashed before her mind, even to the finale when her father’s low-seated buggy would be whirled up before the step by Ballie, and Miss Calder disappear in a cloud of dust.

So after breakfast they set out, Miss Melissa carrying a blotting-book to fill with flowers and ferns for her herbarium: a possession everybody should have, she informed Bluebell.

Bluebell carried a most superior lunch--not in the calico bag, which smelled of stale bread-crumbs and had been used rather freely in getting the “last tag” of various girls on separating for the day--but in a willow hand-basket with lids, so cumbersome that she envied Teeny and Tildy when they sallied forth with their slim reticule. However, _they_ had not company.

“And how did you like the singing-school?” inquired Miss Melissa as she and Bluebell walked down toward the run.

“It was a g’ography school. Oh, it was _so_ nice! He had them sing the countries--I wish Rocco had waked ’fore we started: I’d ’a’ learned it to her.”

“This country seems very romantic,” said Miss Calder, inhaling the air with delight. “But it needs cultivation. You should see the smooth, beautiful hills around Sharon.”

“Is that where you live, ma’am?”

“Yes, that has been my residence all my life,” said Miss Calder with nice precision. “And, my dear, you may, if you please, call me Aunt Melissa. Your mother called me Aunt Melissa.”

“Yes’m. Thank you,” murmured Bluebell. She was about to curtsy, but hesitated lest it might not be a suitable occasion. “Aunt Melissa, is Sharon a great big place--as big as Fredericktown?”

“I know nothing about Fredericktown. But Sharon is not a city. It is a delightful small town of about two thousand inhabitants.”

Bluebell silently wondered who counted the people. She had vast respect for cities and towns. She could not imagine anything ill-kept or disgusting about a town. Presently they came to the run, and Miss Melissa uttered one or two exclamations as she staggered across the stones.

“This isn’t anything to the foot-log,” said Bluebell. “But, oh, Aunt! wouldn’t it scared you last night if you’d been on Ballie when she slipped over the Narrows! It’s an awful steep place!”

“Yes,” said the lady, turning quite pale; “the man who fetched me from the cars drove along there. He assured me that there was no other road, or I never should have allowed it.”

“But there _is_ another road.”

“He said there was none. And I have trembled ever since to think of returning. I trust your father does not ride that way often?”

“Oh, yes, I guess he does.”

Miss Melissa trembled now to think how soon the little speaker might become doubly orphaned.

“We rode that way last night,” repeated Bluebell, “and a runway horse come by and pushed us off! Ballie was all off but her fore feet, Aunt, and she just jumped back! I was scared,” she pursued, plodding along innocently, her dark bare arms dropping with their load of basket; “but I showed my Irish pluck and didn’t make any fuss. I didn’t make any, either, when father left me on Ballie and went in to Ridenour’s. A man come along and made her plunge so she would have run away or throwed me off if I hadn’t held tight!”

“Indeed,” said Miss Melissa faintly. But a most determined look grew in her shocked, affectionate face. “The poor children,” she ruminated, “will not only have the bringing-up of boys, but their very lives will be continually endangered by their absorbed young father, if I do not interfere.”

“You see we had to go to Mary Ann Furnace to ’tend to a man that fell over the Narrows and got hurt,” Bluebell went on; but by this time they had reached the Banks’, and Teeny and Tildy were waiting.

Teeny walked beside Miss Calder, trying to feel quite a grown woman and striking her dignified heels against her own dress at every step; but Tildy hung back and helped Bluebell with the basket. Tildy felt a motherly patronage for the smaller girl. They were chums, though Bluebell’s arm had to reach up to Tildy’s waist, and Tildy’s arm lay most comfortably on Bluebell’s shoulder. Whatever else might be in Tildy’s disposition, she was a devoted partisan. These friends seldom disagreed. Bluebell accepted Tildy’s solemn dictum with credulous readiness, and was usually her partner when the school marched, or in the delightful rainy-day game of “Round and round in a green sugar-tree, one cold and frosty morning.”

There were, however, two things which Bluebell felt she could not yield to Tildy, and these were the spelling-prize, and their one disputed “piece” on Friday afternoon when “speaking” was in order.

To be sure, there were plenty of other pieces which might have been added to their repertory, such as “_My bird is dead, says Nancy Ray_,” “_Twinkle, twinkle, little star_,” and “_I like to see a little dog_,” all fresh as the lips that mumbled them in class; but both Tildy and Bluebell would speak “_Mary had a little lamb_,” or they wouldn’t speak anything! They both loved and doted on this piece: they not only knew it by heart, but each claimed it with a jealousy passing that of authorship. If Mr. Pitzer called Bluebell’s name first, she flew to the middle of the floor and shrilled “_Mary had a little lamb_,” with a triumphant wag of her head at Tildy. If Tildy had the first opportunity, the case was reversed, and Bluebell, with a sense of injury, declined to contribute to the afternoon’s literary exercises. The sweet-hearted schoolmaster smiled at their weekly controversy, and perhaps the scholars got tired of the ever-recurring lamb; but the literary range of the school was not very wide, and there were other repetitions than Bluebell’s and Tildy’s.

The schoolward-going group this time walked with decorum past the downs. But Miss Calder made frequent pauses on mossy logs while the others brought her forage of ferns. They chewed sassafras leaves and peeled long withes of spicewood. She could see distant laurel heights through breaks in the woods, and they made a long detour to get her bunches of the pinky-white blossoms. So it was actually late in the forenoon when they came to the foot-log by Halls mill. Though Miss Melissa had walked with spirit, she shrank from the boiling Rocky Fork, and asked for the bridge, and even proposed going back rather than trust the giddy foot-log. But this was not to be heard of, and Teeny distinguished herself for firmness. She took tight hold of the fluttering lady’s hand, and Tildy walked behind steadying her by the dress. So after a tilt and a shriek or two, they brought her safely to the other side in time for her to witness Bluebell’s intrepid passage of the log, laden with all the baggage of the party except the blotting-book, which Tildy went back to bring.

Then they all moved upon the mud-chinked school-house. Miss Melissa’s gentle face expressed a refusal to be reconciled to this as an institution of learning. She was a professor’s daughter, and had spent her days in an academic atmosphere. She had even taught in the Young Ladies’ Institute one year after her graduation, in order to ground herself more firmly in polite knowledge. This was a long time ago; but all her life her society had embraced college-bred people. So to speak, Miss Melissa had never come in contact with the common schools of her native land.

Mr. Pitzer got down from his desk and met them at the door; and Bluebell, who had been whispering over to herself all the way from the foot-log a formula of introduction, there kindly suggested by Miss Calder, turned red as the old-fashioned roses on the master’s desk, and felt her breath broken short by every beat of her heart. But she came out bravely with the introduction:

“Miss Pitzer, allow me to present you to Mr. Calder.”

Then she dropped her own curtsy and hid her face in her calico bonnet as she hung it up. For some of them _would_ laugh, and she was wrapped in flames of mortification.

However, Miss Calder made a grand impression, and the schoolmaster walked back three steps to make his bow longer. Then he handed her to his chair on the platform, and he himself took a lower seat, leaving Bluebell’s friend to appear the autocrat of the school. She looked around at the chinked walls and ink-splashed, knife-marked desks, at the sincere, reflective, bovine eyes which always distinguish country children--eyes that seem as full of woodsy sweets as the violets. And she looked at the flushed schoolmaster, who pushed his spectacles quite into his hair, and puckered his mouth into very wise shapes while he went on explaining to Joe Hall and the big boy who ciphered with him a deep problem in common or vulgar fractions. It might have been that Mr. Pitzer was out of his depth, though he was a great schoolmaster; or that the explanation was too pompous. Miss Calder’s eyebrows went up in the very least degree, though not for the world would this gentle creature have hurt the self-esteem of any one. After Joe Hall and the big boy had marked the extent of their next lesson with their thumb-nails, the schoolmaster said some learned things to Miss Calder about the importance of mathematics: and as this was a very apt class he hoped to take it through the book. And she asked him if the course embraced Algebra and Geometry, and was going on to mention Trigonometry and the Calculus, when she observed the poor schoolmaster grow red and stammer. He did not want to be put to shame before his pupils, but spoke out with a humble spirit:

“No, madam, my researches have never extended so far.”

And something in the old man’s tone touched her so keenly that she was shocked with herself, and wondered if she, Melissa Calder, had been rude! Such a fear drove her to the extreme of kindness and gentleness. When the schoolmaster found she was a living and breathing graduate--alumnæ were as scarce as authors then--his deference towards her became much greater. The true-hearted old gentleman loved knowledge; he begged that she would make a few remarks to the school, which would be much better than a continuation of the exercises. Miss Melissa blushed; but everybody who entered a school in those days felt bound to “make remarks” if called upon to do so. So Miss Melissa began:

“Young ladies and gentlemen”--which made the little boys giggle and nudge each other; but as her soft, fine, cultivated voice went on, they all listened and were drawn to her, except, perhaps, a few who thought Bluebell Garde felt herself proprietress of a lion.

Bluebell felt indeed happy. Her reading-class was called after the schoolmaster beamed his satisfaction over Miss Melissa’s talk, and she read her loudest and glibbest. Then noon came on, and there never was a more delightful noon. The hot day brought rank, sharp smells from everything: even the dog-fennel along the road yielded a pungent fragrance, and jimson-flowers were not to be despised.

Miss Melissa was pressed into the swing by an ardent group, and flung up a few times among the leaves, where her white curls danced like sensitive spiral springs. And all the big girls sat around her to eat their dinners, and talked quite as if they had known her all their lives. But Perintha Pancost mimicked her behind a tree, and refused to be caught, when Bluebell Garde, the Blackman, patted her one, two, three, right on her back! Perintha also had brought the first summer pippins in her reticule, and she gave bites to every girl in school except Bluebell and Tildy Banks.

The afternoon was devoted to festivity. Mr. Pitzer felt that so distinguished a visitor must be entertained. Miss Calder might disapprove of him, with everything else she had seen at Rocky Fork, but she could not help liking the old master.

Pieces were “spoke,” as a matter of course. Joe Hall, in a shrill, confident voice, told them he had

“Stood beneath a hollow tree, The wind it hollow blew: He thought upon the hollow world And _all_ its hollow crew!”

without one misanthropic shade in his apple face. Two of the boys had a dialogue, in which a tiny Mr. Lennox looked up to a lubberly Peter Hurdle and told him he was a contented boy and quite a phil-os-o-pher. And two of the girls had a dialogue which sounded like one end of a telephonic conversation as it is heard nowadays; for one girl shouted that she had lost her thimble, Mary, and would you please lend her yours; in reply to which you heard only a murmur. There was quite a colloquy, and the silent girl evidently gave a great deal of good advice, but listen as you might you could only get it by inference from what the loud-voiced girl said. Then John Tegarden shouted “_The boy stood on the burning deck_,” until he came to the most exciting part, when his memory failed and he retreated mumbling and injured, not so much by the trick it had served him, as by Joe Hall, who ducked his head and imitated John’s slouching, disappointed attitude. John picked some clay out of the wall and watched for an opportunity to shy it at Joe, but reflected that it might hurt; and being the tenderest-hearted boy in the world, he crumbled it slowly away and watched Teeny Banks lead out a group of embarrassed damsels and station them in a circle around herself, it being understood that she was the mother and these her daughters gathered in an easy family group to discuss the seasons. One declared her rhymed preference for Spring, another for Summer, a third for Autumn, and a fourth for Winter, when Teeny chimed in with a sweet monotone informing them that each season in its round held certain delights, and they must see the Creator’s hand in all.

Well was it for Tildy and Bluebell that Mary’s disputed lamb was not called out that day. For Doctor Garde drove up just at this stage of the proceedings, and Miss Calder bade the schoolmaster adieu, and the schoolmaster went outside to see her in the buggy, the wind blowing the hair from his dear old forehead, while during his absence several charges of paper wads were exchanged across the house, to the scandal of the big girls who picked the missiles from their hair or dresses, and with impressive shakes of the head threatened to “tell master.”

There was too much electricity in the air, and the school was too boisterous to settle down to routine again that afternoon. All besought Mr. Pitzer to let them have “spelling-school,” even Bluebell, who had declined riding home on account of her head-mark; and the smiling schoolmaster consented.

They decided to “choose up and spell down,” instead of “choosing across.” Then Joe Hall and Amanda Willey, being nominated by the schoolmaster, approached each other and took his ferule between them. Joe grasped it above Amanda’s hand, and Amanda grasped it above Joe’s hand, and this continued until Joe’s hand came last at the top. This result entitled him to the first choice; and he and Amanda, taking their stations with backs against opposite walls, he chose:

“Bluebell Garde.”