CHAPTER XXIV.
Sweeping and dusting.
Great preparations were making all Saturday and Monday for the expected gathering. From morning till night Miss Fortune was in a perpetual bustle. The great oven was heated no less than three several times on Saturday alone. Ellen could hear the breaking of eggs in the buttery, and the sound of beating or whisking, for a long time together; and then Miss Fortune would come out with floury hands, and plates of empty egg- shells made their appearance. But Ellen saw no more. Whenever the coals were swept out of the oven, and Miss Fortune had made sure that the heat was just right for her purposes, Ellen was sent out of the way, and when she got back there was nothing to be seen but the fast-shut oven door. It was just the same when the dishes, in all their perfection, were to come out of the oven again. The utmost Ellen was permitted to see was the napkin covering some stray cake or pie that by chance had to pass through the kitchen where she was.
As she could neither help nor look on, the day passed rather wearily. She tried studying; a very little, she found, was enough to satisfy both mind and body in their present state. She longed to go out again and see how the snow looked, but a fierce wind all the fore part of the day made it unfit for her. Towards the middle of the afternoon she saw with joy that it had lulled, and, though very cold, was so bright and calm, that she might venture. She had eagerly opened the kitchen door to go up and get ready, when a long weary yawn from her old grandmother made her look back. The old lady had laid her knitting in her lap, and bent her face down to her hand, which she was rubbing across her brow, as if to clear away the tired feeling that had settled there. Ellen's conscience immediately brought up Alice's words "Can't you do something to pass away a tedious hour now and then?" The first feeling was of vexed regret that they should have come into her head at that moment; then conscience said that was very selfish. There was a struggle. Ellen stood with the door in her hand, unable to go out or come in. But not long. As the words came back upon her memory "A charge to keep I have" her mind was made up; after one moment's prayer for help and forgiveness, she shut the door, came back to the fireplace, and spoke in a cheerful tone
"Grandma, wouldn't you like to have me read something to you?"
"Read!" answered the old lady "laws a me! I don't read nothing, deary."
"But wouldn't you like to have me read to you, Grandma?"
The old lady, in answer to this, laid down her knitting, folded both arms around Ellen, and, kissing her a great many times, declared she should like anything that came out of that sweet little mouth. As soon as she was set free, Ellen brought her Bible, sat down close beside her, and read chapter after chapter; rewarded even then by seeing that, though her grandmother said nothing, she was listening with fixed attention, bending down over her knitting as if in earnest care to catch every word. And when at last she stopped, warned by certain noises downstairs that her aunt would presently be bustling in, the old lady again hugged her close to her bosom, kissing her forehead and cheeks and lips, and declaring that she was "a great deal sweeter than any sugar-plums;" and Ellen was very much surprised to feel her face wet with a tear from her grandmother's cheek. Hastily kissing her again (for the first time in her life), she ran out of the room, her own tears starting, and her heart swelling big. "Oh! how much pleasure," she thought, "I might have given my poor Grandma, and how I have let her alone all this while! How wrong I have been! But it shan't be so in future!"
It was not quite sundown, and Ellen thought she might yet have two or three minutes in the open air. So she wrapped up very warm and went out to the chip-yard.
Ellen's heart was very light; she had just been fulfilling a duty that cost her a little self-denial, and the reward had already come; and now it seemed to her that she had never seen anything so perfectly beautiful as the scene before her the brilliant snow that lay in a thick carpet over all the fields and hills, and the pale streaks of sunlight stretching across it between the long shadows that reached now from the barn to the house. One moment the light tinted the snow-capped fences and whitened barn-roofs; then the lights and the shadows vanished together, and it was all one cold, dazzling white. "Oh, how glorious!" Ellen almost shouted to herself. It was too cold to stand still; she ran to the barnyard to see the cows milked. There they were all her old friends Streaky and Dolly, and Jane and Sukey, and Betty Flynn sleek and contented; winter and summer were all the same to them. And Mr. Van Brunt was very glad to see her there again, and Sam Larkens and Johnny Low looked as if they were too, and Ellen told them with great truth she was very glad indeed to be there; and then she went in to supper with Mr. Van Brunt and an amazing appetite.