“Girls!” Cousin Anne sadly settled the question. “I believe she’s deaf and dumb.”
“Deaf and dumb! That explains her. Oh, poor tot!” The Morning-Glory, whose dance-loving feet had been keeping time to the popping music, unrhythmically swung one of them off at a sharp angle, as if a rude pebble had struck her ankle in its silken stocking, hurting it more than Polie’s kick. “Deaf and dumb! Then she can’t hear the music. And she’s so awkward, moves so slowly and clumsily, that the other children don’t want to dance with her!.... Oh! she almost makes one cry.” Jessica brushed the blue-gray eyes that, according to her, resembled her ancestor’s in the old miniature. “See her standing still in the middle of the fun, plucking at the gathers of her gray frock, looking up at the other children, trying to find out what they’re going to do next!”
“Yes, and one of those other children will take her hand as a partner when the teacher insists, then drop it directly she looks the other way! They don’t want to dance with her silent tongue and old, broken shoes,” said Olive Deering.
“Then I’m going to dance with her, if the teacher will let me. We’ll form a set of our own, we two, if we can’t fit in anywhere! You don’t mind keeping the auto waiting a little longer, do you, Cousin Anne?”
The last words were flashed back over Jessica’s smocked shoulder, with a tremulous tilt of her upper lip that hung between a laugh and a sob. Already she was mingling with the juvenile dancers, a tall purple and white Morning-Glory amid that garden of racial buds, of little children from every clime.
The dumb child’s hand was in hers, after a few low words to the playground teacher, who abstracted one odd child from the nearest set and installed the new couple in her place. Jessica’s foot in its patent-leather pump and lilac stocking was thrust forth side by side with the rusty, out-at-toe footwear, the Morning-Glory swaying upon its inner tendril, the yearning tendril of Love, teaching the grey, cramped bud beside her to sway and step—to glide and pirouette—too.
The glide was only a clumsy shuffle. But there grew a light in the dumb child’s eyes, those eyes of purple patience, so that those who watched its dawning flicker from under the catalpa tree felt their throats tickle.
It did not go out with the final popping of the long-suffering weasel. For, now, the pianist, quite herself again, had struck up the gay, frolicking music of a Vineyard Dance. And side by side those mismatched partners, the seventeen-year-old Camp Fire Girl, the eight-year-old deaf-mute, were scampering through it, enacting all the vineyard drama of growth,—Jessica by dumb show instructing, after a fashion, the child at her side.
Hand in hand they knelt on one knee on the playground grass, making gay pretense of planting grape-seeds in the warm ground. Step by step—stamp, stamp, stamp!—they circled round, with arms uplifted, with groping fingers plucking counterfeit grapes of sunshine from imaginary vines, that violet light growing in the dumb child’s eyes, while she strove to ape each gesture and movement of her companion, as if—transfigured—she peeped through the gates ajar of fairy-land, had her first real glimpse of the joy of childhood.
Suddenly, her feet lagged; she dragged upon Jessica’s hand. She stood still. Her big eyes were uplifted to the white cloud-foam drifting across the blue sea of the July sky. Then they dropped wonderingly to her partner’s face.