“O Mrs. Langley, I don’t think he could or would do that, and anyhow I wouldn’t have him,” Anna protested. “For after all, I’m really crazy about school. I believe I like it all the better for knowing the world a bit. As a matter of fact, you know, I could give Mr. Phillips points. And I couldn’t not make up certain things. For example, there’s the Peloponnesian War. The plague began yesterday and,—O dear, like as not when I get back I shall find the whole bunch stark dead. And then there are those poor Helvetians all packed up and ready to hike with their babies and cattle and pups and duds and all,—and those blooming Roman soldiers ready to drive ’em straight back. I’ve simply got to see what happened to them. They had pluck—and yet, I can’t for the life of me understand how they had the heart to burn down their houses and their fields of grain. I dare say it showed their faith in God, but they might have wanted to show their grandchildren years afterwards where they had lived.”
“I don’t remember ever hearing about them. Are they in the Bible, Anna?” Mrs. Langley asked, and before Anna could answer, bade her tell their tale.
Surprised and delighted, the girl complied. Not at all a scholar, Anna Miller nevertheless gleaned all sorts of riches from text books that are desert wastes to the majority of young folk. And now, relating the history of the Helvetians so far as she had followed it, in the graphic account Julius Caesar gives of the unhappy impulse towards migration of these people pent up in an inland island, she made it as interesting as a fairy tale to a child. Mrs. Langley listened spell-bound. And though Anna was disappointed to have her hark back to her usual subject, even the momentary interest in something foreign to it counted for something.
“It must have been hardest of all for them to leave their graveyards behind them,” she murmured, “for mothers to leave their babies’ graves.”
“And widows their husbands’,” Anna added. “And yet, Mrs. Langley, there’s worse than that. Now my friend that I am going back to the city to see lost her husband in the summer and now she’s sick herself, and there’s her baby. If she should—well, it must be no end harder for one to think of dying and leaving one’s baby alone in the world than to move away from somewhere and leave the grave of a baby whose soul is all safe.”
“Your friend must be older than you, Anna,” Mrs. Langley observed irrelevantly.
“Two years, but we were the best of friends. She was at the ribbons with me at Mason and Martin’s and Joe was at the soda fountain. He was the nicest boy—and the thinnest! My goodness! Matches would seem as big as the pillars of the Squire Bennet place at Wenham compared with his legs. He and Bessy were married and went to housekeeping in two rooms and were happy as kings. Joe was sick after a while and Bessy came back to work beside me. Then the baby came and Joe went back to work before he was able. He looked so bum they wouldn’t have him at the soda fountain but put him in the stock-room where his poor phiz, that looked for all the world like an interrogation point, wouldn’t queer the whole concern. It must have been awfully hard for him there, but he stuck it out until last August when he died. And now poor Bessy thinks she’s dying and wants to see me.”
“I hate to have you go,” said the invalid with some warmth, and even thought to ask who was going with her.
“O, I’m going by my lone. I’m good for it. But I think I will put up my hair so as to look more responsible.”
“O Anna, don’t do that. I wouldn’t have you do that for the world!” cried Mrs. Langley. “I like it just as it is. You see it is just the colour my baby’s would have been and I was in hopes hers would be curly, too. I should never have braided hers, though.”