O, how Roxy, standing at the key-hole, trembled to see her mother lean her head on her father’s shoulder and sob, and to see tears on her father’s cheeks! O, what a wicked, wicked girl! It was thieving; in some way it was even worse than that; as if she had committed a—a forgery, maybe, Roxy thought. She was conscious she had done something unusually daring and dreadful.
She stole off up stairs, shut herself in, and cried as hard as she could cry. Afterward her little brain began to busy itself in many directions. She tried to fancy herself shamed and pointed at, afraid to go to school, afraid to go down to the store, ashamed to go to the table, with no right to laugh, and play, and stay around near her mother, never again to dare ask her father to ride when he was going off with the horses.
So lonely and gloomy, she tried to think what it was possible to do. At last, as in the morning, a daring thought occurred to her suddenly. She made up her mind in just one minute to do it.
When her mother called, she went down to supper at once. The boys were gone. Nobody but she and father and mother; and the three had very red eyes, and said nothing, but passed things to each other 064in a kind, quiet way, that seemed to Roxy like folks after a funeral—perhaps it did to the rest of them. Roxy was fanciful enough to think to herself, “Yes, it is my funeral. We have just buried my good name.”
Silently, one with a white face, the other with a red one, Roxy and her mother did up the work. Then Roxy went up to her room again. She took a sheet of foolscap, and made it into four sheets of note paper. She wrote and printed something on each sheet, and folded all the sheets into letters. Then she went down stairs. Two of the little letters she handed to her mother. Then, bonnet in hand, she stole out the front door. At the gate she looked down the road toward the village, up the road toward Mr. Markham’s. She started toward Mr. Markham’s. She got over the road marvelously; for the child was wild to get the thing over with. She was going up the path to the house when she saw Mr. Markham hoeing in the garden. She went to him, thrust a note into his hand, and was off like a dart.
It was a long, hard, lonely run down to the village. How lonely in the grove at the hollow tree! How like a thief, with the bundles openly on her arm! No little girl’s pocket would hold them, nothing but a great Judas-bag. She went straight to the stone store. 065It was just sunset. How thankful she was to find nobody in the store but Mr. Hampshire himself, reading the evening paper. He looked up, and recognized the red little face. He glanced at the bundles as she threw them, with a letter, down on the counter, and whisked out through the door. He called after her, “Here, here, Roxy; here, my dear! Come back. I have some figs for you!”
But no Roxy came back. He heard her little heels clattering down the sidewalk fast as they could go. So he got up and read the letter, for it was directed to himself.
Here are the four notes Roxy wrote:—
“Dear Father: I Will paye you every Cent if I Live. I shall always be a Good Girl, and never hanker after Only what I have Got. Please forgive Me, and Not Talk It Over with Mother. It will make her Sick. Roxy.”
“Dear Mother: Please love me until I am Bad once More. If I ever, Ever, should be Bad again, then you may give me Up. Don’t get Sick. Roxy.”