“Can’t you get a little sense into her head, Bathsheba?” said Cyrus, wearily, and with a severe glance at the graceful little figure in its ungainly hugely-flowered gown.
Estelle, alas! promptly made a face at him, one of her naughtiest, most mocking and defiant. One would scarcely have believed that there could be such wicked gleams from such soft, blue eyes!
And Dave took from his pocket a weapon known to Palmyra as a bean-slinger with which it was his habit to promptly avenge Estelle. I drew the children hastily away.
“They are only children,” I said aside to Cyrus. But he was not in a mood to take them lightly. The situation, which it seemed to me that he exaggerated, was evidently very real and bitter to him. He was giving up his heart’s desire, he was giving himself to monotonous, uncongenial work, and to-day, at least, he could not be called the cheerful giver whom the Lord loveth.
I was sick at heart and rebellious against Providence for Cyrus’ sake. It was an overturning of the proper, the natural order of things that he should not go to college and be a minister. As long as I could remember I had known that this was to be Cyrus’ lot in life. The plan had been sealed by the sacred wish of the dead. We all bore with Cyrus’ sometimes excessive assumption of dignity—what Uncle Horace permitted himself to call “bumptiousness”—on this ground. We felt that the children must not be allowed to make a noise when he was reading or studying, Loveday felt that he must have fine pocket handkerchiefs and the lion’s share of the preserves. And this was not because he was the finest scholar at the Academy, proud as we were of that fact, nor yet because dear old Mr. Grover had told us, with a quaver of tearful joy in his voice, that Cyrus’ Latin verses were wonderful, that never before had he known such Latin verses to be written by a boy of his age. No, it was because Cyrus was going to be a minister. We reverenced the calling. I think there was an especial reverence for it in Palmyra, and we felt it the more because our great-grandfather had been the first minister of the town and it was also sacred to us as the calling of the father whom we had never known.
Cyrus seemed almost a minister already. Had not he been called upon to lead the prayer meeting one evening when the minister was away and Deacon Barstow had a sore throat? And although Octavia was pale with fear lest he should break down or say something that he ought not, and I felt grandma’s little frame beside me shake like a leaf in the wind, yet Cyrus was calm and dignified, and every one said that he did beautifully and exclaimed, “What a minister he will make!”
And after all Cyrus was not going to be a minister! There was a strangling lump in my throat and my eyes smarted with unshed tears as I tried to look, at Estelle’s vehement bidding, at the depressions that their small bodies had made in the heaps of fresh and fragrant sawdust.
These impressed me suddenly with a vague resemblance to little graves, and with a swift revulsion of feeling I seized the children and hugged them. They might be little “aliens” and they were costing much, but I loved them.
“You were very, very naughty to Cyrus,” I said to Estelle, who was not very responsive to sentiment at the best, and was now unpleasantly sticky from peanut taffy. “If you knew, if you understood, I am sure you couldn’t be. He is very good and very unhappy. He isn’t going to be a minister!”
The lump in my throat choked me now, but I had to conquer it, for we were out of the shipyard and walking in the road, where curious eyes might see my tears.