The Wrong Twin

by Harry Leon Wilson

When at last they all sang "Bringing in the Sheaves," and were ably dismissed by Lyman Teaford, who could be as solemn here as he was gay in a parlour with his flute, Winona took the Merle twin across the room to greet the Whipple stepmother and the Whipple girl. Wilbur regarded the scene from afar. Winona seemed to be showing off the Merle twin, causing him to display all his perfect manners, including a bow lately acquired.

The Wilbur twin felt no slight in this. He was glad enough to be left out of Winona's manoeuvres, for he saw that they were manoeuvres and that Winona was acting from some large purpose. Unless it wanted its money back, the Whipple family had no meaning for him; it was merely people with the Whipple nose, though, of course, the stepmother did not have this. He paused only to wonder if the girl would have it when she grew up—she now boasted but the rudiments of any nose whatsoever—and dismissed the tribe from his mind.

He waited for Winona and Merle a block up the street from the church. Winona was silent with importance, preoccupied, grave, and yet uplifted. Not until they reached the Penniman gate did she issue from this abstraction to ask the Wilbur twin rather severely what lesson he had learned from the morning sermon. The Wilbur twin, with immense difficulty, brought her to believe that he had not heard a word of the sermon. This was especially incredible, because it had dealt with the parable of the prodigal son who spent all his substance in riotous living. One would have thought, said Winona, that this lesson would have come home to one who had so lately followed the same bad course, and she sought now to enlighten the offender.

"And he had to eat with the pigs when his money was all gone," Merle submitted in an effort to aid Winona.

But the Wilbur twin's perverse mind merely ran to the picture of fatted calf, though without relish—he did not like fat meat.

It was good to be back in a human atmosphere once more, where he could hear his father's quips. The Penniman Sunday dinner was based notably on chicken, as were all other Sunday dinners in Newbern, and his father, when he entered the house, was already beginning the gayety by pledging Mrs. Penniman in a wineglass of the Ajax Invigorator. He called it ruby liquor and said that, taken in moderation, it would harm no one, though he estimated that as few as three glasses would cause people to climb trees like a monkey.

The Wilbur twin was puzzled by this and would have preferred that his present be devoted solely to making a new man of Judge Penniman, but he laughed loyally with his father, and rejoiced when Mrs. Penniman, in the character of the abandoned duchess, put her own lips to the glass at his father's urging. The judge did not enter into this spirit of foolery, resenting, indeed, that a sound medicinal compound should be thus impugned. And Winona was even more severe. Not for her to-day were jests about Madame la Marquise and her heart of adamant. Dave Cowan tried a few of these without result.

Winona was still silent with importance, or spoke cryptically, and she lavished upon the Merle twin such attention as she could give from her own mysterious calculations. One might have gathered that she was beholding the Merle twin in some high new light. The Wilbur twin ate silently and as unobtrusively as he could, for table manners were especially watched by Winona on Sunday. Not until the blackberry pie did he break into speech, and even then, it appeared, not with the utmost felicity. His information that these here blackberries had been picked off the grave of some old Jonas Whipple up in the burying ground caused him to be regarded coldly by more than one of those about the table; and Winona wished to be told how many times she had asked him not to say "these here." Of course he couldn't tell her.

Dinner over, it appeared that Winona would take Merle with her to call upon poor old Mrs. Dodwell, who had been bedridden for twenty years, but was so patient with it all. She loved to have Merle sit by her bedside of a Sunday and tell of the morning's sermon. They would also take her a custard. The Wilbur twin was not invited upon this excursion, but his father winked at him when it was mentioned and he was happy. He could in no manner have edified the afflicted Mrs. Dodwell, and the wink meant that he would go with his father for a walk over the hills—perhaps to the gypsy camp. So he winked back at his father, being no longer in Sunday-school, and was impatient to be off.

In the little house he watched from a window until Winona and Merle had gone on their errand of mercy—Merle carrying nicely the bowl of custard swathed in a napkin—and thereupon heartily divested himself of shoes and stockings. Winona, for some reason she could never make apparent to him, believed that boys could not decently go barefoot on the Lord's Day. He did not wish to affront her, but neither would he wear shoes and stockings with no one to make him. His bare feet rejoiced at the cool touch of the grass as he waited in the front yard for his father. He would have liked to change his Sunday clothes for the old ones of a better feel, but this even he felt would be going too far. You had to draw the line somewhere.