Hildegarde's Neighbors

by Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards

CHAPTER X.

A NEW LIFE.

"Bell," said Hildegarde, "I really think I must be a cat in disguise."

"What do you mean, dear?" inquired Bell, looking up from her dishpan.

"Why, I have had so many lives. This is the fifth, at the least computation. It is very extraordinary."

Quiet Bell waited, seeing that more was coming. The two girls were sitting on the end of a wharf, in the sparkling clearness of a September morning. Before them stretched a great lake, a sheet of silver, dotted as far as the eye could see with green islands. Behind lay a pebbly beach, and farther up, nestled among a fringe of forest trees, stood a bark hut, with broad verandahs and overhanging eaves. Hildegarde looked up and around, her face shining with pleasure.

"They have all been so happy—the lives," she said. "But this surely is the most beautiful to look at. You see," here she turned again to her companion, "first I was a little girl, and then a big one, at home in New York; and a very singularly odious specimen of both I was."

"Am I expected to believe this?" asked Bell, quietly.

"Oh yes! because I know, you see, and I remember just how detestable I was. Children are so sometimes, you know, even with the very best parents, and I certainly had those. Well, at last I grew so unbearable that I had to be sent away. Oh, you need not raise your eyebrows, my dear! It's very nice of you, but you never saw me then. I don't mean that I was sent to the Reform School; but my father and mother had to go to California, and I was not strong, so the journey was not thought best for me; and besides, dear mamma saw that if I was ever going to amount to anything I must be taken away from the fashionable school and the set of girls I was getting intimate with. I wasn't intimate with mamma then; I didn't want to be. The other girls were not, and I thought it would be silly; think of it, Bell! Well, I was sent, a forlorn and furious child (fifteen years old though, the same age as dear, sweet Gertrude), to my mother's old nurse in the country,—a farmer's wife, living on a small farm, twenty miles from a city. There, my dear, I first learned that there was a world outside the city of New York. I must tell you all about it some day,—the happy, blessed time I had with those dear people, and how I learned to know my own dearest ones while I was away from them. I buried that first Hildegarde, very dead, oh, very dead indeed! Then the next summer I went to a new world, and my Rose went with me. I have told you about her, and how sweet she is, and how ill she was, and now how she is going to marry the good doctor who cured her of her lameness. We spent the summer with Cousin Wealthy Bond, a cousin of my mother's,—the loveliest old lady, living down in Maine. That was a very new world, Bell; and oh! I have a child there, a little boy, my Benny. At least, he is Cousin Wealthy's Benny now, for she is bringing him up as her own, and loves him really as if he were; but I always think of him as partly mine, because Rose and I found him in the hospital where we used to go to carry flowers. He had been very ill, and we got Cousin Wealthy to let him come to her house to get well. And through, that, somehow, there came to be a little convalescent home for the children from the hospital,—oh, I must tell you that story too, some day, and it is called Joyous Gard. Yes, of course I named it, and I was there for a month this spring, before you came, and had the most enchanting time. I took Hugh with me, and the only trouble was that Benny was madly jealous of him, and gave him no peace. Poor Benny! he is a dear, nice little boy, but not like Hugh, of course, and that exasperated him past belief. It was just like Lord Lardy and the waiter in the Bab Ballad, for Hugh was entirely unconscious, and would smile peacefully at Benny's demonstrations of wrath, thinking it all a joke.

"Oh, I could talk all day about Benny and Cousin Wealthy, and nice, funny Mrs. Brett, and all of them. Well, then, two years ago came our trouble, you know. Dear papa died, and we came out here, feeling very strange and lost. It was sad at first, of course; but oh, we have had such peace and happiness together, my mother dear and I! The last year, when we had grown used to doing without the dear one, and knew—but mamma always knew it—that we must make happiness for each other,—the last year has been a most lovely time. But sweet and happy as it has all been, Bell, still I have always had a small circle to love and to be with. Mamma, bless her, and at one time one set of dear friends, and at another time another; never many people at once, and life peaceful and lovely, but one day pretty much like another, you see. But since you all came, I have been in a new world altogether,—a great, merry, laughing world, with such lots of children and fun—"