“I know now,” murmured Jacqueline, “why the worst thing you can say of anything is ‘darn it!’”
There were not a great many stockings, for the little Conways, and Jacqueline, too, went barelegged as much as possible, but every stocking had at least one hole, and often the holes came in places that had been darned before. Then you must be most particularly careful not to do the dull work hurriedly and leave rough places that would blister tender heels and little toes.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything,” said Grandma Conway, as she pulled out the threads that Jacqueline in her haste had drawn all puckery. “It’s as easy to do it right as wrong.”
Jacqueline pouted a little as she took back the ugly brown stocking, with her work all undone, but none the less she wove her needle carefully in and out of the frayed threads, as Grandma expected her to do. For Jacqueline, you see, liked Grandma, as she had never liked the teachers or the governesses that she had always managed to “get round.” You couldn’t “get round” Grandma, any more than you could “get round” a bas-relief. And if she made you do your work just so, she treated the boys in the same fashion. There was no partiality at the Conway farm.
So Jacqueline darned stockings on that sunny afternoon, and Grandma, in the worn rocker that Jacqueline had dragged out for her, patched garments already so often patched that you had to hunt to find the original fabric. Great wafts of warm, odorous air came from the acres of onions. The bees were murmurous about their squat, white hives. A woodpecker tapped in the tree above Jacqueline’s head. Then with a great clatter an ancient Ford came bounding along the dirt road and vanished ultimately in a cloud of silvery dust.
“My land,” chuckled Grandma, and her old eyes twinkled behind her steel-bowed spectacles. “Wouldn’t our great-grandfathers have had a conniption fit, if they’d seen a thing like that go rattlety-banging through the Meadows? They’d have jailed somebody for witchcraft, sure enough. ‘Carriages without horses’, same as old Mother Shipton prophesied.”
“Weren’t they cruel and stupid in those old times?” said Jacqueline, with her mind still full of the slaughterous doings and inhuman punishments of “The Prince and the Pauper.” “Think of anybody being silly enough to think some poor old woman was a witch!”
“Well, perhaps we wouldn’t have done much better, if we’d been living then,” said Grandma tolerantly. “You’ve got to judge folks according to their circumstances. Now take those old, ancient folks, living here on the edge of what was then a howling wilderness, and not knowing what might pop out on ’em any minute—a catamount, maybe, or like as not a painted Indian, with a scalping knife. You can’t blame ’em if their nerves got kind of raw, and they began to see things that weren’t there and believe things that weren’t so, and then raise the cry of ‘Witch!’ and go persecuting some poor neighbor.”
“Were there really ever any Indians here in Longmeadow?” asked Jacqueline, round-eyed. That there should have been Indians in the wild California canyons and in the somber deserts she could easily believe, but this New England village, with its orderly meadows and its well-trained elms, seemed the last place where gruesome tragedy could ever have been staged.
“Well, I guess there was a few, off and on,” said Grandma placidly. “Didn’t your Pa, and he a Longmeadow boy, ever tell you ’bout old Aunt Hetty Tait, that was your ever so many times great-grandmother?”