“Why, this is the best yet!” Sidney cried with a long breath. “I don’t see how Mr. Dugald thinks of the nice things he does.”
“He’s the best sort that ever lived.” Lavender asserted with a little break in his voice. “I don’t know why he bothers ’bout me. But he found out that I came over here and sort o’ camped among those ruins down there and I used to hide my things in that old oven so’s Aunt Achsa wouldn’t find them. He knew why, too. Y’see it bothers Aunt Achsa a lot to have me want to read and study so much—she’s afraid I’ll get to thinkin’ of going away. She don’t know, y’see, that I am going, some day. So then Mr. Dugald helped me build Top Notch. There are all my books.”
Sidney ran her eye over the different volumes; among them were stories of seafaring adventure and books on travel and science, a dictionary, a Bible—and a volume of Browning’s poetry. Sidney’s hand shot out toward this last, then quickly dropped to her side.
Lavender saw the gesture. “I like poetry,” he explained shyly. “I’m kinda afraid of it—I mean I don’t understand it and I wish I did. Mr. Dugald says he don’t, either. But there’s something about the way poetry goes that’s like music—it makes a sound. It’s like the ocean, moving and beating, and kind o’ like your heart. And sometimes the words hurt, they’re so beautiful. I wish I knew more about poetry.”
Sidney felt shivery cold all over and hot at the same moment. She kept her eyes on the square that was the open window. She knew she ought to tell the truth to Lavender—right now. But, oh, she couldn’t. Yet she must! She had almost summoned the right words to begin when Lavender rose and stepped toward the ladder.
“I brought you here so’s you’d know ’bout it and use it when you want to—the books’n everythin’. Only don’t let Mart come. She’d make fun of it. Here’s where I hide the key to the shelf. S’long. I got to get down to Rockman’s.” Lavender abruptly slipped down the ladder and ran out of sight among the dunes.
Left alone in the Top Notch Sidney felt a guilty remorse sweep over her. Lavender had shared with her his sanctum sanctorum, he had admitted his love of poetry and she had sat silent and had not told him the truth.
Like music—like the waves of the ocean beating—like one’s heart—words that hurt, his shy sentences rang in her ears. Probably he had found it hard to tell her for fear she might laugh. Laugh—why, suddenly she knew that that was really the way poetry seemed to her! She just made herself believe she hated it when she did not hate it at all. Music—she could hear Isolde’s soft drawling voice reading from one of father’s books and it was indeed music. She had all that treasure that she could share with Lavender, hungry for the beautiful, and yet she had sat mum. Oh, she had been horrid, stingy. And he was sharing Top Notch with her.
Quite naturally Sidney, brooding secretly over her shortcomings, fell back upon the long-neglected “Dorothea.” And she took “Dorothea” at once to Top Notch, the better to pour out her feelings undisturbed. She covered a whole page with her appreciation of Lavender’s confidence and her utter unworthiness of such tribute. Then the fascination of Top Notch brought her to Mr. Dugald.
“I wish the girls knew him. He’s so much nicer than any of their suitors, than even any of Vick’s.” Let it be recorded here that Sidney paused and chewed her pencil and pondered the difficulties of bringing about an acquaintance between Mr. Dugald and any one of her three sisters. Romance was never far from Sidney’s imaginings; she invariably endowed every young man who came to the Romley house for any sort of a reason with deep purposes of wooing. But this situation offered obstacles to even Sidney’s imagination for miles separated Mr. Dugald from the charms of her sisters; there seemed no way in which he could meet them.