July 28th. After wheeling me over to the Garden yesterday afternoon, Caro left me, to join in an expedition to Bare Rock. When she had gone, I discovered to my horror that I had been deposited beneath the branch of a poplar tree on which some hundreds of caterpillars had just been hatched out. They were so thick that heads, tails and sides touched everywhere, as they lay on leaves and stems; not one could move a hair’s breadth without knocking off the others or climbing over them. What they thought of my proximity I had no means of finding out; but for me it was not a joyful occasion. I could move neither my chair nor myself; so I lay there, gazing up at the wretched things till I began turning into a caterpillar myself, and felt fuzz and wriggles sprouting all over me. But before the transformation was too far advanced to be checked, I heard Caro’s voice behind me.
“Mammy Lil, I don’t want to go walking. May I stay and talk to you?”
I had been feeling specially lonesome of late. I kept telling myself I was getting morbid from long illness and solitude; but it seemed to me that Caro almost avoided me. She waited on me most thoughtfully; but her errands done, she disappeared. There was no more of that dear companionship, when she used to sit near me, reading, or embroidering, while she sang dreamily to herself, or cuddled her head against mine on the pillows in a fellowship which needed no words. Children can’t possibly understand how bereft one feels, shut out. I knew she loved me too well to hurt me; yet I had missed her, under the same roof with her, more than I had missed David far away: the boy had never shut me out like that.
But her voice was different as she asked her question now. I remembered how, years ago, she used to come out of her periods of seclusion in the parlor “nice and social,” as she would sweetly announce, and confess her little soul inside out, clear to her very toes. Before I saw her face I knew the barrier was gone, and I was to have her confidence at last.
But, first of all, I craved deliverance from the caterpillars. Some of them had hunched themselves up ominously, as if they were about to jump down and float across my nose on silken threads. I was very unhappy indeed.
Caro squealed in horror when she saw my plight, and snatched me back from my impending doom. She wheeled me across the shaven grass to the edge of the wood-tangle, and sat on a rock beside me, facing the long Valley once filled with marching men—men who marched from the disaster of outward defeat to the victory of inner conquest.
“Mammy Lil,” she inquired presently, “do you love me any more at all?”
I turned my face to her without speaking. Her eyes filled with sudden tears, and she laid her cheek against my hand.
“You’re the darlingest mother! If you weren’t, I’d be ashamed to tell you. Mammy Lil, I’ve wished sometimes I could murder myself, this last year; I’ve been so cross. It began last summer while I was home on vacation. Everybody in Chatterton made love to Milly or me last summer, except David. He was just as he always was—sweet to both of us, but specially careful of me because he was my brother. And I didn’t feel the same to him at all. I—Mammy Lil, I was as foolish about David as those boys were about us two girls: I was in love with him, over head and ears.” She paused while I stroked her hair.
“You can’t think how ashamed I was. And of course I treated him like a yellow dog. And he behaved perfectly. I was sure, though, that he didn’t suspect—he, nor any one else. And then, at the end of the summer, Cousin Jane told me that David and I were to marry. I didn’t believe you’d ever talked to her about it, of course; but I saw in a flash what it would mean to you—and that David might do it to please you. And I was afraid Cousin Jane suspected what a fool I was. And she went to David, too, and told me that, and told him she’d told me. I did want to wring Cousin Jane’s neck; and I think yet she deserved it!