Annie Laurie and Azalea

by Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Azalea looked at him with her soul in her eyes.

“Mercy me,” she sighed. “How well I understand kidnappers!”

Then she remembered that she had once been kidnapped herself, and that she had not liked it at all.

“Oh, Jonathan,” she cried, looking at him critically, “it seems impossible that anything as soft and lovely as you are can grow up to be just a hard, common, big man! If only I could put you in some kind of a preserve jar and keep you the way you are, I’d just give anything. Tired of sitting still? Well, come to Azalea, and we’ll go exploring. It’s a pretty house, isn’t it? But my goodness, you ought to have seen it a little while ago! It was as dull as Monday washday.

“Then, when it was decided that your papa and mamma were coming here to live, we all turned in and worked like sixty to make it look nice. Haystack Thompson—that’s the man that throws you up so high, you know—prepared it with his own hands. But you make up your mind we didn’t let him pick out the paper. Haystack is a dear, but he couldn’t be trusted to pick out wall paper. No, sir, my friends Carin and Annie Laurie and I did that. Brown for the sitting room, and green for the dining room, and pink and pale blue for the bedrooms.

“And we got these pretty print hangings and covers—at least, Mrs. Carson paid for them and we picked them out. And Ma McBirney wove these rugs—brown for the sitting room and green for the dining room. Aren’t they beauties? And Mr. Carson had the furniture done at his shop—the very best he could make. And Sam Disbrow, he brought this fern, and somebody else sent the palm, and Carin gave the pictures, and Annie Laurie made the table cover, and I don’t know what all. You see, some of these people don’t belong to your church at all, Jonathan. They just gave these things because you were so sweet that they couldn’t bear to have you come into any but a pretty house. Dear me, boy, stop pulling my hair! You treat me just as if I were a step-child. And I’m not. I’m your pretend cousin—which is ever and ever so much nicer than being a real cousin, because you do your own picking out.”

Jonathan replied after his own manner, and the morning wore on pleasantly. Azalea put the potatoes and the stew over to cook, and made some apple sauce. Then she set the table; and “toted” Jonathan some more. For once she forgot to think. The sad little thoughts that would mope around in the back of her mind, because she was, after all, a child without a father or a mother, kept entirely out of sight that morning. She was so busy that she could waste no time whatever on merely thinking; and the first thing she knew she saw the people pouring along the street from church.

Annie Laurie drove by with her aunts and her father, and waved to Azalea. Sam Disbrow walked by with his father, and Azalea thought what a dull time Sam had of it, with that heavy looking father with his hanging head and big, rolling eyes, both going home to a mother who was always sick, and to that queer sister of Sam’s, who had too much work to do, and who never seemed to want to talk with anybody. And then the Carson carriage rushed by with black Ben driving, and Mr. Carson, so handsome and straight, beside him, and Carin and Mrs. Carson on the back seat in their beautiful furs, smiling and bowing to everybody.

Then the McBirney wagon came, with Mr. and Mrs. Summers in with Pa and Ma McBirney and Jim. And Azalea was thanked and kissed, and had the pain of seeing Jonathan tear himself away from her to rush to his mother’s embrace, and then Azalea went out and got in with her foster parents, and Pa McBirney hissed to his horses in an odd way he had, and they started for their long drive up the mountain.

“It sure is a mighty curious thing how that man goes on, Mary,” said Mr. McBirney to his wife as they were driving by the prosperous dairy farm of Simeon Pace. “He’s jest rolling up money, but no one can tell what he does with it. Heller, the banker, he says nary a cent of it comes his way. Pace don’t believe in banks—got stung some time I reckon, and lost his nest egg by the busting of a bank. Anyhow, he hangs on to what he gets nowadays. It beats all to see anyone so old-fashioned. Heller says he supposes he hides it away in his old stocking or buries it in the yard. I suppose I’m something of a mossback myself, but anyway I know enough to bank my money when I get it—which ain’t any too often.”