"Verging on to thirty! More likely verging on to forty," Mrs. Biggs said, with a savage click of the needles with which she was knitting Tim a sock. "I know her age, if she does try to look young and wear a sailor hat, and ride a wheel in a short gown! I'd laugh to see me ridin' a wheel, and there ain't so much difference between us neither. I know, for we went to school together. She was a little girl, to be sure, and sat on the low seat and learnt her a-b-c's. I was four or five years older, and sat on a higher seat with Amy Crompton, till the Colonel took her from the district school and kep' her at home with a governess."
Mrs. Biggs was very proud of the acquaintance she had had with Amy Crompton, when the two played together under the trees which shaded the school-house the Colonel had built as expiatory years before, and she continued: "Amy, you know, is the half-cracked lady at the Crompton House who sent the hat and slippers. She's been married twice,—run away the first time. My land! what a stir there was about it, and what a high hoss the Colonel rode. Who her second was nobody knows,—some scamp by the name of Smith,—that's your name, and a good one, too, but about the commonest in the world, I reckon. There's four John Smiths in town, and Joel Smith, who brings my milk, and George Smith I buy aigs of, and forty odd more. They say the Colonel hates the name like pisen. Won't have anybody work for him by that name. Dismissed his milkman because he was a Smith, and between you and I, I b'lieve half his opposition to you was your name. Why, it's like a red rag to a bull."
"I didn't know he was opposed to me personally," Eloise said, and Mrs. Biggs replied, "Of course not; how could he be? He never seen you. It's the normal, and bein' put out of office—he and Ruby Ann. They've run things long enough. They say he did swear offel at the last school meetin' about normals and ingrates and all that,—meanin' they'd forgot all he'd done for 'em; but, my land, you can't b'lieve half you hear. I don't b'lieve nothin', and try to keep a close mouth 'bout what I do b'lieve. I ain't none o' your gossips, and won't have folks sayin' the Widder Biggs said so and so."
Here Mrs. Biggs stopped to take breath and answer a rap at the kitchen door, where George Smith was standing with a basket of eggs. Eloise could hear her badgering him because he charged too much and because his hens did not lay larger eggs, and threatening to withdraw her patronage if there was not a change. Then items of the latest news were exchanged, Mrs. Biggs doing her part well for one who never repeated anything and never believed anything. When George Smith was gone she returned to her seat by Eloise and resumed her conversation, which had been interrupted, and which was mostly reminiscent of people and incidents in Crompton, and especially of the Crompton House and its occupants, with a second fling at Ruby Ann.
CHAPTER VIII
MRS. BIGGS'S REMINISCENCES
"Maybe I was too hard on Ruby Ann," she said, measuring the heel of Tim's sock to see if it were time to begin to narrow. "She's a pretty clever woman, take her by and large, but I do hate to see a dog frisk like a puppy, and she's thirty-five if she's a day. You see, I know, 'cause, as I was tellin' you, there was her and me and Amy Crompton girls together. I am forty, Amy is thirty-eight or thirty-nine, and Ruby Ann is thirty-five."
Having settled Ruby's age and asked Eloise hers, and told her she looked young for nineteen, the good woman branched off upon the grandeur of the Crompton House, with its pictures and statuary and bric-à-brac, its flowers and fountains, and rustic arbors and seats scattered over the lawn. Eloise had heard something of the place from a school friend, but never had it been so graphically described as by Mrs. Biggs, and she listened with a feeling that in the chamber of her childhood's memory a picture of this place had been hung by somebody.
"Was it my father?" she asked herself, and answered decidedly, "No," as she recalled the little intercourse she had ever had with him. "Was it my mother?" she next asked herself, and involuntarily her tears started as she thought of her mother, and how unlikely it was that she had ever been in Crompton.
Turning her head aside to hide her tears from Mrs. Biggs, she said, "Tell me more of the place. It almost seems as if I had been there."
Thus encouraged, Mrs. Biggs began a description of the lawn party which she was too young to remember, although she was there with her mother, and had a faint recollection of music and candy and lights in the trees, and an attack of colic the night after as a result of overeating.