Laddie: A True Blue Story

by Gene Stratton-Porter

"Too late!" said mother, and I could hear her throat go wrong and the choke come into her voice. "She is deeply in love with him; he hasn't found in her what he desires; probably he is not coming any more; what could you do?"

"I could go and see if there is anything I could do?"

"She may not want you. I'll write her to-morrow and suggest that you or Laddie pay her a visit and learn what she thinks."

"All right," said father.

He kissed her and went to sleep, but mother was awake yet, and she got up and stood looking down at the church and the two little white gravestones she could see from her window, until I thought she would freeze, and she did nearly, for her hands were cold and the tears falling when she examined my covers, and felt my face and hands before she went to bed. My, but the mother of a family like ours is never short of a lot of things to think of!

I had a new one myself. Now what do you suppose there was about that man?

Of course after having lived all her life with father and Laddie, Shelley would know how a man should look, and act to be right; and this one must have been right to make her bloom out in winter the way other things do in spring; and now what could be wrong? Maybe city girls were prettier than Shelley. But all women were made alike on the outside, and that was as far as you could see. You couldn't find out whether they had pure blood, true hearts, or clean souls. No girl could be so very much prettier than Shelley; they simply were not made that way. She knew how to behave; she had it beaten into her, like all of us. And she knew her books, what our schools could teach her, and Groveville, and Lucy, who had city chances for years, and there never was a day at our house when books and papers were not read and discussed, and your spelling was hammered into you standing in rows against the wall, and memory tests—what on earth could be the matter with Shelley that a man who could make her look and act as she did at Christmas, would now make her unhappy? Sometimes I wanted to be grown up dreadfully, and again, times like that, I wished my bed could stay in mother's room, and I could creep behind father's paper and go to sleep between his coat and vest, and have him warm my feet in his hands forever.

This world was too much for me. I never worked and worried in all my life as I had over Laddie and the Princess, and Laddie said I, myself, never would know how I had helped him. Of course nothing was settled; he had to try to make her love him by teaching her how lovable he was. We knew, because we always had known him, but she was a stranger and had to learn. It was mighty fine for him that he could force his way past the dogs, Thomas, the other men, her half-crazy father, and through the locked door, and go there to try to make her see, on Sunday nights, and week days, every single chance he could invent, and he could think up more reasons for going to Pryors' than mother could for putting out an extra wash.

Now just as I got settled a little about him, and we could see they really wanted him there, at least the Princess and her mother did, and Mr. Pryor must have been fairly decent or Laddie never would have gone; and the Princess came to our house to bring me things to eat, and ask how mother was, and once to learn how she embroidered Sally's wedding chemise, and social things like that; and when father acted as if he liked her so much he hadn't a word to say, and mother seemed to begin to feel as if Laddie and the Princess could be trusted to fix it up about God; and the old mystery didn't matter after all; why, here Shelley popped up with another mystery, and it belonged to us. But whatever ailed that man I couldn't possibly think. It had got to be him, for Shelley was so all right at Christmas, it made her look that pretty we hardly knew her.

I was thinking about her until I scarcely could study my lessons, so I could recite to Laddie at night, and not fall so far behind at school. Miss Amelia offered to hear me, but I just begged Laddie, and father could see that he taught me fifty things in a lesson that you could tell to look at Miss Amelia, she never knew. Why, he couldn't hear me read: