“Gone, is he? Wal, all I can say is, Miss Sophia Russell ain’t a circumstance to Mis’ Honey on that occasion. Don’t know as I blame her, neither. That pet o’ yourn’ll be safe enough with your old uncle, Stella, an’ you’ll be out to tend to it every Sat’day, or I’ll know the reason why.”
CHAPTER X
NOBODY’S LITTLE GIRL
“It doos beat all,” declared Grandma Brown, with even more than her usual emphasis, “how blind own folks can be! I’ll lay there ain’t a man, woman nor child in Laurel township, save an’ exceptin’ Sophi’ Spellman, that don’t know Lucy’s goin’ straight into a decline. Weak lungs is in the fam’ly, to begin with; I can rec’lect when those gals’ mother an’ aunt both went off with the gallopin’ consumption. Like as not, Lucy felt her husband’s death a good deal; an’ I’ve heerd tell how that Dakoty climate keys you right up till ye can’t live anywheres else without snappin’ off short.
“She’s ben goin’ down stiddy ever sence she come back home, that’s flat; an’ here’s that sister of hers tellin’ folks as how ‘it’s jest a touch o’ bronchitis,’ an’ ‘she only wishes she had Lucy’s constertution.’
“What’s more, she has her breakfust in bed reg’lar, so I hear, for all the world like them ungodly folks in furrin parts, an’ reads French novels on the sofy while Lucy an’ Stella doos up the work. I declare for’t, Emmeline, if somebody else don’t do it pretty quick, I’ll speak to Sophi’ myself!”
Everybody knew that Grandma had succeeded in preserving to a good old age all the “spunk” and “snap” that seems to have perished, for the most part, with a past generation, and it is quite possible that, if opportunity had served, she would have faced down and outdone even the formidable Miss Sophia. Lucy’s decline, however, had been so very gradual, and her ways so quiet and uncomplaining, that even a sister might almost have been forgiven for not realizing how matters stood. As for her dear Sioux daughter, now a head taller than herself, and completing, to the eminent satisfaction of her teachers, her second year’s work in the academy, to her it had seemed a sufficient explanation of everything that “mother was growing old!” For the fifties, and even the forties, of ripe middle age do seem “old” to sixteen.
After almost three years in Laurel, Yellow Star was growing fairly certain that she truly “belonged.” Modest as she was, she could not help knowing that people liked her—all sorts of people—boys and girls and babies, intimates and strangers, sharp-tongued Grandma Brown and the gruff-spoken Doctor and “pernickety” Uncle Si. Even from Mary Maloney and Rosey Bernstein the Indian girl had wrung some measure of reluctant admiration; but, in spite of much willing service, she remained vividly conscious of being still an outsider and an interloper in the eyes of Miss Sophia.
Now at last Doctor Brown had been sent for to see Lucy Waring. Everybody in Laurel, almost, had noticed his ancient roan steed and battered top-buggy before the Spellman gate. It was impossible to deny any longer, in the face of that long-postponed confession, what all the village tongues had been wagging with for months past. Lucy had “took to her bed,” at last, and the end could not be very far off.