"FOREVER TURNING BACK TO KISS HIM, WITH HER HANDS FULL OF FLOWERS, AND WITH THE PEACOCKS TRAILING BESIDE"
"Oh!" ejaculated Hope Carolina; and, reaching the fence with a rush, she stared down lovingly. For they were peaches, real, live, human peaches—the kind that you buy for five cents apiece, which was a great price in the hired house.
The form outside the fence straightened up then, and two oldish gray eyes looked over it into hers—the Radical Judge's eyes. "No more stones, please," they seemed to say, with a trace of embarrassment at being caught.
Hope Carolina nodded back with a lovely courtesy, as if to say in return: "Sholy not."
For this was no moment for politics. Besides, something in the watching eyes—a wistful something which spoke louder than words—had awakened all the lady in her; and there was more of it, I can tell you, than you may be inclined to believe.
Silently, with eyes still meeting eyes, they stood there for a moment; the great Radical almost shrinkingly, the fiery little Democrat with a new, sweet feeling which made her seem, for the instant, the bigger, stronger one of the two. Then, still silent, he was gone; and snatching the peaches with another ecstatic "Oh!" Hope Carolina did the thing she had dumbly promised. She kicked down the stone fort.
After she was in bed, she explained the deed to herself; for there, with reflection, had come some of the pangs that must pierce the breast of the traitor in any decent camp. You can't take peaches and throw stones too, no, not even if Democrats would almost want to hang you for not doing it!
She had come to the pits by now, and these, after more rapturous suckings, she put under her pillow for planting; for when you are six you plant everything. She did not know that another and more wonderful seed had already put forth a green shoot in her own so piteously hardened little heart.
Hope Carolina slept in a marvelous bed, almost the only thing of value, in fact, left in the hired house. Ma would not use it herself, she told dear friends, because of its memories; but as the child of the house had no recollections of other times, it seemed to her always a downy and restful nest. There were carved pineapples at the top of the high mahogany posts, and four more at the bottom of them; and when Hope Carolina lay in it in the morning, she could see everything that was going on in the Radical Judge's garden—that lovely paradise of peacocks and poplars and magnolias which had once been the dear Prestons'.
Sometimes, even before the truce of peaches, she had felt a little regret that the decencies barred out all acquaintance with Radical families. For always on the hot mornings—long, long before it was time for her to get up—there were the Radical Judge and the little crippled Grace going about among the shrubs and flowers as if they were the nicest people. And always the little pale, laughing child presented a very pretty picture in the wheeled chair, which her father pushed so patiently; forever turning back to kiss him, with her hands full of flowers, and with the peacocks trailing beside as if they had forgotten the dear Prestons entirely.
Then, the Radical Judge seemed to know bushels and bushels of fairy-stories; and when they came near the boxwood hedge, Hope Carolina would sometimes hear him begin a new one. They always began in the right way, "Once upon a time," and that seemed very remarkable, for how could a Radical Judge know the right sort of fairy-stories?
When they moved away again, the child in the enemy house would feel her throat gulp sometimes. She knew it was wrong, but oh, she would have loved to hear the end!
One morning, weeks and weeks after the peaches, when the peacocks had been gone for days,—they made too much noise, Hope Carolina knew,—when all the empty, sunburned garden seemed to say weepingly, "There will be no more fairy-tales," she woke with the morning star, and, sitting bolt up in bed, blinked wonderingly, a little painfully, in the direction of the Radical Judge's front door. It was too dark to see the knob yet, but she knew the thing must be there, the long, angelically sweet drop of white ribbon and flowers—the poetic and wistful mourning which is only hung for little dead children.
A great doctor had come down from Baltimore and gone again; and the Radical Judge's wife was still taking things to forget.
The heart of six is full of mystery. All that first morning, with a piteous earnestness, a piteous heartlessness, Hope Carolina played funeral in the front yard, in the place where the stone fort had once been and where the peach-pits were now planted. Every now and then she would stop patting the little mounds of earth—mounds of earth covered with sweet flowers, in a place as beautiful as any garden, were the chief thing in her idea of funerals—and, standing tiptoe, she would stare over the paling fence, hoping the Radical Judge would come by. At last, late in the forenoon, her dogged vigilance was rewarded; and in a moment, bonnetless, an untidy midget in low-necked pink calico which even had a hole behind—there she was out of the gate, following closely at his heels. She couldn't tell exactly why she followed him; she only knew she wanted to—perhaps to see if he thought, too, as everybody said, that the little crippled Grace was better off up in the sky. She fancied maybe he didn't, he was so different, somehow—not like the old, fierce Radical Judge at all. And when really nice white gentlemen—Democrats, who had never noticed him before—stood respectfully aside with their beaver hats off, he walked still down the middle of the dirt sidewalk, and did not seem to see them at all.
