A narrow, dark face, heavily browed, and the high forehead overhung by masses of black hair as straight as an Indian’s. Only our Cyrus, and we had always been obliged to admit that he was a homely boy! But it was an intense, ascetic, loftily spiritual face. Something in the absurd toggery, transfigured by the strange effect of light and shadow, and associated with my dim recollections of the saintly faces, had shown it to me vaguely as a child of ten could see it. Years afterward, when I saw a painting of St. John the Baptist on the wall of Estelle’s studio, in a flash Cyrus came back to me, as he had looked that night under the old butternut tree.
St. John the Baptist! “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!” A prophet with a warning cry. And Cyrus, we used to think, was one who thought he knew exactly what the way of the Lord was.
But if I go on in this way the end of my story will slip in at the beginning; or at least I shall show what we all were so plainly that every one will see just what must have happened. For character is destiny, although it does sometimes seem as if circumstances got the upper hand!
Estelle, a toddling mite of three, in trying to make cheeses with her small pink skirts, as she had seen me do, for my diversions were apt to be of a more practical nature than the evolution of painted saints, had tipped herself over into a thistle-bed, just outside the gate, and was screaming lustily.
Cyrus threw off his robe and rushed to the rescue. He set the distracted little maid upon her feet, and extracted the thistle-spears from her corn-silk locks, with a not ungentle hand. But he looked and spoke sternly—so sternly that the child’s piteous cries were redoubled. He led or rather dragged her toward the house, saying severely that bed was the place for naughty little girls. Strangely, as I thought, neither mother, nor Loveday, nor grandma, nor even Viola Pringle, now installed as Loveday’s assistant, appeared at the sound of the small, wrathful voice.
But the youngsters, Dave and Rob, showed themselves rescuing knights to the distressed damsel. They fell with sturdy fists upon Cyrus, who weakened, not so much from a desire to return to his Latin, as I was shrewdly aware, as from a discouraged feeling that the household discipline was somewhat lax.
The small boys installed the weeping little maid in their somewhat rickety little wagon, and drew her, shrieking with delight, up and down the garden path, between the rows of nodding hollyhocks.
There came a sudden, subdued cry for Cyrus from the door. He was wanted to run with all speed for the doctor. Mother had had a hard fit of coughing, and there was blood upon her handkerchief.
We thought but little of this, then, we children. Grandma was apt to be full of alarms. Moreover, we had the strong, odd, childish assurance that things must always come out right; founded in some strange prescience, is it? or only in the happy lack of life’s experience? Surely things would turn out all right, and we would be quite happy again, although, sometimes, in desperate troubles, not until one had had a good cry.
But that was the beginning of the end. Very soon after we were motherless children, although grandma said we were not to feel so, but always as if she were looking down upon us from the sky. And she impressed this so firmly upon little Estelle’s mind, that the next summer, when she was four, the child ran away, upon her chubby legs, and toiled almost to the summit of old “Blue,” to get to Heaven and find mother. For old “Blue’s” misty peak melted into the blue of the sky.