So Penelope was left alone, victorious, if you please to call it so. She wasn’t quite sure. Indeed, to herself she said:
“Mother is provoking. If she really is going to take that view of the case, I must act with decision. For, mother or no mother, I’m going to head off any acquaintance between Jacqueline and that rough child from the Meadows, even if I have to alter all our summer plans to do it.”
CHAPTER XXIII
THROUGH THE DARKNESS
All unconscious of Cousin Penelope’s musings, Caroline stretched herself in the fresh cool bed, in her pretty room. She thought of the party next day, and all the lovely days, brimful of music and happiness, that were to follow. For Jackie had promised that she should stay there undisturbed at The Chimnies, until Aunt Edie came at the end of summer.
How kind Jackie was, and how good, and how brave! She wasn’t afraid of cows, or Cousin Penelope, or boys, or the dark. Caroline, for instance, would have been frightened to death to go the three miles in the black night down into the Meadows. But Jackie had just whistled and walked away, as unconcerned as anything. No, there was no one in the world so good or so brave as Jackie. With that worshiping thought uppermost in her mind, Caroline fell asleep, as safe and sheltered as care and love could make her.
Meantime the brave Jackie, with her heart in her throat, was making the best of her way through the vast blackness of the onion fields, back to the Conway farm.
The first of the walk wasn’t so bad. On Longmeadow Street she met people, by ones and twos and threes, on their way to prayer meeting or to the Post Office. She could see, too, the light from house windows that streamed across the broad, well-tended lawns. She enjoyed the luxury of pitying herself, all alone in the dark, with no one to care, while other children, in those lighted houses, were being tucked up in bed.
But after she left the last houses of the village, Jacqueline stopped enjoying the drama of the situation which she had chosen. The fields stretched round her endlessly. The sky was black as despair, and all stuck with stars that were sharp as screams of rage. The edges of the sky were tucked in behind the coal black mountains, from which the Indians in old days used to swoop down upon the settlement.
Jacqueline caught her breath, and looked hurriedly over her shoulder. Of course there were no Indians nowadays. They couldn’t be lurking that moment in the fields. The onions grew too low to hide an ambuscade. It was only the wind that made their tops rustle in a queer way that pumped the blood out of her heart and set it throbbing against her ear-drums.
No one could hide in the onion fields, she knew. But in the little gullies where the brooks flowed that drained the fields—that was a different matter. Every time she drew near a culvert, she ran as fast as she could upon her tired legs, through the heavy dust, until the danger point was passed. Even if there weren’t any Indians, there were Polish field-hands. Good, honest men, most of them, Aunt Martha maintained. But some of them were worthless and drunken. There was a half-witted Kaplinsky boy, too, who sometimes chased younger children, with horrid, half-articulate threats.