However, the house was still new to her, if not in its pantry, at least in its bureaus and wardrobes, and when she had spent the first evening hour counterfeiting the softly whimpered quavers of a little screech-owl that snivelled its woes from a tree in the back-yard, the happy thought came to her innocent young mind to try on the best she could find of her mistress's gowns and millinery. By hook and by crook, combined with a blithe assiduity, she managed to open doors and drawers, and if mimicry is the heaven of aspiring laziness, the maid presently stood unchallenged on the highest plateau of a sluggard's bliss. She minced before the mirror, she sank into chairs, she sighed and whined, took the attitudes given or implied by the other Daphne's portrait down-stairs, and said weary things in a faint, high key.
And then—whether the contagion was in the clothing she had put on, or whether her make-up and her acting were so good as to deceive Calliope herself—inspiration came; the lonely reveler was moved to write. Poetry? No! "Miss it ag'n!" She began a letter intended to inform "Mr. S. Cunnelius Leggett," that while alike by her parents and by Mrs. March she was forbidden to see "genlmun frens," an unannounced evening visitor's risks of being shot by Mr. March first, and the question of his kinship to the late Enos settled afterward, were probably—in the popular mind—exaggerated. The same pastime enlivened the next evening and the next. She even went farther and ventured into verse. Always as she wrote she endeavored to impersonate in numerous subtleties of carriage the sweet songstress whose gowns she had contrived—albeit whose shoes she still failed—to get into. And so, with a conscience void of offence, she was preparing herself to find out, what so many of us already know, that playing even with the muse's fire is playing with fire, all the same.
XLIX.
MEETING OF STOCKHOLDERS
At sunrise of the twenty-second, Barbara started from her pillow, roused by the jarring thunder of a cannon. As it pealed a second time Fannie drew her down.
"It's only Charlie Champion in the square firing a salute. Go to sleep again."
As they stepped out after breakfast for a breath of garden air, they saw John March a short way off, trying to lift the latch of Parson Tombs's low front gate. He tried thrice and again, but each time he bent down the beautiful creature he rode would rear until it seemed as if she must certainly fall back upon her rider. The pastor had come out on his gallery, where he stood, all smiles, waiting for John to win in the pretty strife, which the rider presently did, and glanced over to the Halliday garden, more than ready to lift his hat. But Fannie and Barbara were busy tiptoeing for peach blossoms.
"Good-morning, Brother March; won't you 'light? I declare I don't know which you manage best, yo' horse aw yo' tempeh!" The parson laughed heartily to indicate that, however doubtful the compliment, his intentions were kind.
"Good-morning, sir," said John in the gateway as his pastor came bareheaded toward him; and after a word or two more of greeting—"Mr. Tombs, there's to be a meeting of stockholders in the parlor of the hotel at ten o'clock. My friend, Mr. Fair, got here yesterday evening, and we want him to see that we mean business and hope he does."