Tracy Park: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

'None, 'cause Tom would eat them all.'

In this reply there was a shrewdness which poor Jack never intended, and the laugh which followed his answer confused and bewildered him. There was a tutor now at Tracy Park for Jack, but Maude had been transferred to Arthur's care. This was wholly due to Jerry, who alone could have induced him to let Maude share her instruction. Arthur did not care for Maude. She was dull, he said, and would never learn her lessons. But Jerry coaxed so hard that Arthur consented at last, and when Jerry had been with him about three years, Maude became his pupil, and that of Jerry as well, for nearly every day when the lessons were over the two little girls might have been seen sitting together under the trees in the park, or in some corner of the house, Maude puzzled, and perplexed, and worried, and Jerry anxious, decided, and peremptory, as she went over and over again with what was so clear to her and so hazy to her friend.

'Oh, dear me, suz, what does ail you?' she said, one day, with a stamp of her foot, after she had tried in vain to make Maude see through a simple sum in long division. 'Can't you remember first to divide, second multiply, third subtract, and fourth bring down?'

'No, I can't. I can't remember anything, and if I could, how do I know what to divide or what to bring down? I am stupid, and shall never know anything,' was Maude's sobbing reply, as she covered her face with her slate.

Maude's tears always moved Jerry, who tried to reassure the weeping girl with the assurance that perhaps, if she tried very hard, she might some time know enough to teach a district school. This was the height of Jerry's ambition, to teach a district school and board around; but Maude's aspirations were different. She was rich. She was to be a belle and wear diamonds and satins like her mother; and so it did not matter so much whether she understood long division or not, though it did hurt her a little to be so far outstripped by Jerry, who was younger than herself.

To Arthur, Jerry was a constant delight and surprise, and nothing astonished or pleased him more than the avidity with which she took up German. This language was like play to her, and by the time she was ten years old she spoke, and read, and wrote it almost as well as Arthur himself.

'It takes me back somewhere, I can't tell where,' she said to him; 'and I seem to be somebody else than Jerry Crawford, and I hear music and see people, and a pale face is close to me, and I get all confused trying to remember things which come and go.'

Only once after her first day at the park had she enacted the pantomime of the sick woman and the nurse, and then she had done it at Arthur's request. But it was not quite as thrilling as at first; the him for whom the dying woman had prayed was omitted, and the whole was mixed with the Tramp House, and the carpet-bag, and Harold, who was now a youth of seventeen, and a student at the high school in Shannondale, where he was making as rapid progress in his studies as Jerry was at the park.

But Harold's life was not as serene and happy as Jerry's, for it was not pleasant for him to hear, as he often did, that he was a charity student, supported by Arthur Tracy. Such remarks were very galling to the high-spirited boy, and he was constantly revolving all manner of schemes by which he could earn money and cease to be dependent. All through the summer vacations, which were long ones, he worked at whatever he could find to do, sometimes in people's gardens, sometimes on their lawns, but oftener in the hay-fields, where he earned the most. Here Jerry was not infrequently his companion. She liked to rake hay, she said; it came natural to her, and she had no doubt she inherited the taste from her mother, who had probably worked in the fields in Germany.

One afternoon, when Jerry knew that Harold was busy in one of Mr. Tracy's meadows, she started to join him, for he had complained of a headache at home, and had expressed a fear that he might not be able to finish the task he had imposed upon himself. The road to the field was by the Tramp House, which looked so cool and quiet, with its thick covering of woodbine and ivy over it, that Jerry turned aside for a moment to look into the room which had so great a fascination for her, and where she spent so much time. Indeed, she seldom passed near it without going in for a moment and standing by the old table which had once held her and her dead mother. Things came back to her there, she said, and she could almost give a name to the pale-faced woman who haunted her so often.