“Have it your brother,” said I in a surly fashion.
When we had got the baby down from the tree, Ellen finished me by looking at me with her sincere, sweet eyes in which there was a hint of tears, and saying softly: “Once I had a little brother who died.” That was all. She turned her face away; I turned my face away; our hands met. It was as though she was explaining to me her insistence on the Sweeney baby.
It was her look and this silent and averted hand-clasp that brought me to my feet in a very torrent of feeling when Alec Yorke, an engaging youth of eleven summers, came ramping through the orchard shouting:—
“Oh, you’ll get it! You’ll get it! Mrs. Sweeney’s given Ted a good one already—she’s after you!”
It was not the gusto in his tone at her ultimate fate that irritated me, but this taking away of Ellen’s baby brother.
“Mrs. Sweeney’s got nothing to do with this baby!” I cried. “It’s Ellen’s brother!”
I bent down and picked up a stone and threw it at Alec. Ellen did the same. In one second we had performed one of those amazing sleights of hand that are so frequent and so disconcerting at this moment of girlhood. A moment before we had been swimming along the upper levels of sentiment and crossing the tender, heart-breaking line of the love of women for little children; now our teary mistiness vanished and we were back at the green-apple-hearted moment of childhood. That afternoon I had already been a young lady with all the decorous manners of eighteen; I had been no age,—just a woman whose heart is touched with pity and affection; and now I was just stern, hard twelve, and I threw a rock at my little friend, Alec Yorke. So did Ellen.
Together, with hoots and pebbles, we drove the invading male from our midst. Ellen, I remember, had a “Yip! Yip! Yip!” which was blood-thirsty and derisive at once. She barked it out like a terrier gone mad. I remember also her crying out in a ferocious agony of desire: “Oh, if I get near you, won’t I spit on you!”
These were her first words to Alec. He said in later years that their first meeting was indelibly engraven on his memory. He retreated over the fence vanquished by superior force, but with his head well up and his thumb to his gallantly tilted nose. Here Ellen turned to me, the light of victory flashing from her eyes, which fought with my interrogatory gaze, filled with tears again, and at last sought the distance.
“I never had a little brother,” she muttered thickly.