A Sick Patriot.
The next morning, Aunt Stanshy was stirring at the usual hour, and her usual hour in summer was five. She did not generally expect to see Charlie down stairs until half past six. This morning, Aunt Stanshy; looked up at the clock on the high mantel-piece and saw that it was seven, then half after seven, then eight, and half after eight; but all this time there was neither sound nor sight of Charlie.
“Massy, where is that boy? I thought I would let him sleep, he was so tired, but he ought to be around now,” reflected Aunt Stanshy.
She opened the door that led up to his chamber and slowly mounted the steep, narrow, yellow stairs, turning to the right into Charlie’s sanctum. A turn to the left would have taken her to her own room. Peeping into Charlie’s room, she saw the boy fast asleep on the bed. Stealing softly across the bare floor and reaching the red and yellow home-braided rug before his bed, she looked down on the sleeping Charlie. A smile parted his lips, and be murmured something unintelligible to Aunt Stanshy. Then she laid her hand on his head, giving a little start.
“That boy took cold last night, and is a bit feverish. I’ll let him lie here a spell longer.”
Saying this, she was about to turn away, when Charlie’s eyes opened.
“That you—you, aunty?”
“Yes; why?”
“I thought it was a dream. I had a dream, and thought we gave the down-townies an awful scare.”
“You did? Was that what you were smiling at? I mean just now.”
“I guess so. And then I believe we were going to give three cheers.”
“Well, do you feel like getting up?”
“Y-e-s.”
He rose on his elbows, but sank back again.
“I guess, if you have no objection, aunty, I will lie a little longer.”
“I guess you had better, for you took cold last night out in the porch. Would you like to take your breakfast in bed, and have my little table that I lend to people who are sick in bed?”
“O, yes.”
“And would you like to have a piece of toast, a little tea, and an orange?”
“O, yes. You are the best aunty in the world.”
“Am I, dear?”
Aunt Stanshy was not very demonstrative, so that this “dear” was exceedingly precious to the warm-hearted Charlie, as was also a small hug that she gave him. While she was preparing his breakfast Charlie lay quietly in bed, and heard the sound of the rain on the slanting roof. To a tired boy in bed, and longing to have some excuse for absence from school, what music is sweeter than the sound of rain on the roof? Let it be a real north-easter sweeping in from the sea, pushing along a fleet of many clouds packed with a heavy cargo of rain, and, as it advances, let this wind sound many big, hoarse trumpets all about the houses and barns, up and down the streets! An organ in church played by Prof. Jump-up-and-down is nothing compared with such a north-easter; Charlie heard the grand music of the wind. By and by he heard Aunt Stanshy’s step on the stairs. She came slowly up, up, and then Charlie saw her turning from the entry into his room, bringing the sick-table and Charlie’s breakfast She bolstered him up in bed, putting two or three fat pillows behind his back. Then she put the little sick-table before him. One side had been hollowed in, so that an invalid could draw it close about his body. Charlie was now the invalid to do that thing. What tea! what toast! what an orange!
“Now that you have some strength, do you want to dress and then come down and sit with me in the sitting-room and see me iron?” asked Aunt Stanshy, after breakfast.
“O, yes, and not go to school?”
“No school to-day, when that cold is on you.”
Charlie crawled into his clothes and went down stairs to the sitting-room. Aunt Stanshy was ironing. She generally did her ironing in the sitting-room, as the kitchen was very small, and, on a hot day, it was so hot there that one felt like sizzling at the touch of water.
“Here are some picture-books for you.”
“O, thanks, thanks, aunty!”
“One of those picture-books is about Indian wars.”
“Did you ever see an Injun?”
“Not the raving, tearing, tomahawk kind.”
“I shouldn’t want to see that one.”
“Several years ago sort of tame ones used to come round and have baskets to sell. My great-great-grandmother had quite an adventure with the real kind once.”
“O, tell it to me!”
Opening his eyes to that peculiar width appropriate to the hearing of an Indian story, Charlie intently listened.
“My great-great-grandmother was all alone one day in the house, for the men-folks had gone to market or somewhere. She happened to be looking out of the window, when she saw an Indian looking over the fence. What a customer! He was an ugly-looking crittur, I don’t doubt. What could she do, for he might be tomahawking her in less than no time? Wimmin folks, in them days, were not like Miss Persnips, that keeps the little thread-and-needle store on the corner, without any snap to ’em. My great-great-grandmother just tore round that room at a lively rate. She slammed the shutters, she banged about the chairs. Then she pretended that there were lots of men-folks in the house, and she kept calling to Tom, Bill, Jerry, Nehemiah. O, she had a string of ’em, all on her tongue’s end! I don’t know but she pointed a gun out of the winder, man-fashion. What did that crittur do but gather up his traps and walk off as harmless as a bumble-bee when his sting is gone. I’ve heard with my own eyes my grandmother tell that story about her grandmother.”
“Heard her with your eyes?”
“Of course not! With my ears, ears. Where are yours, for pity’s sake? There is an old garrison-house on the other side of the river, and I will show it to you some time, or I will show you what is left. They have built over the garrison-house and back of it, making a farm-house of it, but there is something still to be seen.”
“What a blessed old aunty!” thought Charlie. And the wind, what grand music it made! The chimney seemed to be a big bass-viol that this north-easter played on.
At noon Aunt Stanshy said, “What will you have for dinner?”
“May I order it, the way I did at a saloon in Boston last summer? May I write what I want on paper, and put it on the table?”
“Yes, if orderin’ will make it taste better, and it seems to affect some folks’ vittles that way.”
So Charlie and Aunt Stanshy “played saloon.” He wrote his order on a slip of paper, and left it on the table for her inspection while he went up stairs. Directing her spectacles toward it, she read, with some amazement, this request:
“Please bring me for dinner, a pickle Aunt Stanshy, would be what you know nice to toast.”
“Toasted pickle!” exclaimed Aunt Stanshy, in alarm.
Charlie had now returned to the sitting-room.
“You don’t mean, Charles Pitt, a toasted pickle!”
“Why, no; ha! ha! There are two things on that paper. I said, ‘Please bring me for dinner, Aunt Stanshy, what you know to toast.’ That is on one side, and on the other, ‘A pickle would be nice,’ and I see now that you could read the words straight across, and it would mean what you say; ha! ha! I don’t expect a pickle, of course, for I am sick, you know.”
“O!”
She did not laugh. She was rather mortified to think she had not read the order aright. The noblest natures have their infirmities. Afterward, being ashamed of herself because she did not take pleasantly this unintended joke, she manifested her penitence by getting up an extra dinner for Charlie. There was more toast, and even of a finer quality. There was another orange, and there was some jelly that Aunt Stanshy took the pains to buy at Miss Persnips’s store. This was a sweet but thin-voiced little woman, who sold a variety of things in a store on the corner of the lane and Water Street.
“It is nice to be sick, Aunt Stanshy.”
“Do you think so?”
“Yes, just a grain sick.”
It was so pleasant to be in the warm, comfortable sitting-room and watch the dreary weather out in the lane. The back side of the house butted on the lane, no fence intervening. Aunt Stanshy had no objection to such a close contact, but rather liked it, declaring it to be “social.” She did not favor, though, the sociability that drunken sailors manifested several times when going from the saloons on Water Street down to their vessels at the wharf in which the lane ended. They would stagger against the house, pushing one another and bombarding it. Aunt Stanshy was on hand, though. A pail of freshly-drawn water, Arctic cold, and from an upper window, administered freely to the offenders, had been known to produce a healthy effect. Aunt Stanshy’s remedies for various troubles might be vigorous, but they were generally effective. There was not much passing in the lane, that stormy day. A fisherman, in an oil-skin suit, went by, trundling a wheel-barrow of fish to a store in town. At noon, somebody else appeared.
“There’s Mr. Walton,” said Aunt Stanshy.
“And there’s Tony with him,” said Charlie.
“Where’s his father?”
“Tony says he is in Europe.”
“He the one that people say is an Italian, and—and—nobody knows what he is up to?”
“That’s the one, aunty.”
The minister and Tony, hand in hand, passed out of sight.
“This is the kind of day when Mr. Walton’s mother will be watching the weather, looking up at the vane. People say that she has a great deal to say about the sea, and takes a great interest in sailors.”
“What for?”
“Because they say she has a son somewhere at sea.”
“And don’t any one know where he is really?”
“No; and they have hinted and suspected and guessed and done every thing, except ask old Miss Walton right out, but they can’t find out a thing. She’s close as a clam in this matter.”
By and by there appeared in the lane a drunken man. As he staggered along he was exposed to all the pitiless pelting of the wild north east rain, and moved away like a dark, forlorn shadow.
“Poor fellow!” the sympathizing Charlie exclaimed. “Who’s that, I wonder?”
“Where?”
“A drunken man in the lane.”
“If people would only take the water inside and the rum outside, sort of turnin’ things round, it would be much better, better,” said Aunt Stanshy, going to the window. She gave one look and came back to her ironing. Charlie thought he heard her sigh. He had already noticed that Aunt Stanshy never made fun of drunken people.
“Who is it?” he asked.
She did not answer, but taking up her flat-iron again, pounded the clothes with it vigorously, as if trying to call attention from herself to her work.
“Is she crying?” thought Charlie.
As if wet with her tears, her spectacles gleamed sharply. The muscles of her arms swelled as she pounded the innocent sheet before her, and Charlie was reluctant to ask again. For some time there was silence, the only interrupting sound being Aunt Stanshy’s pound—pound—pound. Charlie sat in his chair, looking steadily out upon the somber, dripping rain.
“Don’t you want to play something?”
It was Aunt Stanshy speaking. A troubled look on her face had passed away and she was ironing quietly again.
“Yes;” said Charlie, “you—you sick?”
Aunt Stanshy gave no answer to this, but asked again, “Don’t you want to play?”
“Play what?”
“Boat.”
“Boat! how!”
“O make believe, you know.”
Charlie thought in silence.
“You lend me a box, aunty?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“And that little broom you sweep with?”
The amateur ship-carpenter went to work.
“There is my mast,” said Charlie, securing the broom to the bottom of the box which he had turned over. “Now I must have sails. It is going to be a monitor, too, like what I read about in a book the other day.”
After some effort, and more tribulation, there appeared a splendid piece of naval architecture, a monitor with a turret, the deck bordered with a twine-railing, two sails hanging down from Aunt Stanshy’s small broom.
“That broom makes me think of what I learned at school when I was a girl.”
“What was that?”
“I am not much of a scholar, but I remember this. Admiral Tromp was a Dutchman, and commanded a fleet that went against the English. Tromp was so successful that he tied a broom to his mast-head and went sailing over the waters, and that meant he had swept his enemy from the sea, and if he hadn’t, he would certainly do it and make clean work of it. Over the blue waters he went skipping along, feeling dreadful big, with that broom at the mast-head. The English boys, though, came at him again and whipped him, and poor Tromp was finally killed in a sea-fight. I don’t know what became of his broom. You had better call that an English and not a Dutch broom.”
When Charlie went up stairs that night, the Neponset as he called the monitor, was still sailing in the sitting-room, its sails all set, its broom at the mast-head. He thought it was splendid to be sick.
“How long do you think this sickness may go on?” was the last question he asked Aunt Stanshy that night.
“O, if it is a slow fever, it might last several weeks, but I don’t want to discourage you.”
“Discourage!” It was magnificent. Two or three weeks of toast and jelly and oranges and many soft words, and not a few hugs! That night he was dreaming of boxes of oranges he was emptying, and of glasses of jelly big as hogsheads, out of which he was taking jelly by the shovelful! The next morning he felt—though unwilling to confess it—much better. At noon keen old Dr. Pillipot happened to come along, and Aunt Stanshy referred Charlie’s case to him. Old Dr. Pillipot bent his sharp, gray eyes down toward Charlie and made up a horrid face as he growled, “Let me see your tongue, young man. Hem! Looks quite well. Let me feel your pulse. So! Quite good. The weather has changed, and as it is mild and sunny, he might walk down to school this—afternoon.
“O dear!” groaned Charlie, when the doctor had left. “I wish I had scared his horse off when I saw him coming down the lane. You and I, aunty, did have such a nice time!”
O, the trials of this life!
Charlie, though, had a dose of comfort from Aunt Stanshy. She told him he need not go to school until the next day, and when the morning came, she said:
“I believe the Neponset took a cargo on board in the night.”
There in the shadow of the mast-head was a column of doughnuts!
“You may take them all to school with you, Charlie.”
Now he was glad that he was not sick. He disposed of six doughnuts that forenoon, and as these, if tied together, would have made good chain-shot for the monitor, and yet did not affect him unfavorably, it was proof that Charlie was restored to health.