When I first knew Little Sister she was only two years old, for just two years before a terrible gloom had settled over the Rutherford home when Little Sister’s mother, the Colonel’s daughter, had died. Death is a terrible, bitter, hollow mockery to those who live. Some day, in another world, we shall see things differently. In this, “cabined, cribbed, confined” in our puny environments, we see only “through a glass darkly,” and so God help us.
As I said, she was the old Colonel’s only daughter—the fairest, frailest, most lovely and most intellectual—a bride one year, and we buried her the next. That’s all, except Little Sister, a fair, frail, hot-tempered, sensitive—all brain and nerve—little tot who came to take her mother’s place. Her bright blue eyes, pale-pink face and red-flaxen hair kept one thinking of perpetual sunsets and twilights. She was a fac simile of her mother—intellect, impulsiveness, loveliness, all except one thing—temper. She was fire and powder there. A flash, an explosion—then she was sobbing for forgiveness in your arms. That was Little Sister.
“I can’t see where in the world she gets her temper from,” Grandmother Rutherford said when two-year-old Little Sister slapped her squarely in the face one day and then hung sobbing around the old lady’s neck as if the blow had broken her own heart.
“Col. Rutherford,” she would add impressively, “this child ought to be spanked till she is conquered.”
“Don’t do it, mother,” said Uncle John, while Little Sister gave him a grateful look through her tears; “don’t do it; that is not the way to train race colts. A conquering, your way, would spoil her. She will need all of that temper, if it is brought under control, to get through life with, and land anywhere near the wire first. Besides, with her sensitiveness, don’t you see she is suffering now more than if we had punished her? If she were a plug, now, she would slap you and never be sorry till you made her sorry with a switch. But conscience beats hickory, and gentleness is away ahead of blows.”
And Uncle John would catch the two-year-old up and take her out to see the colts. At sight of these she would forget all other trouble. Her love for horses was as deep in her as the Rutherford blood. When she saw the colts it was comical to see the great burst of sunshiny laughter that spread all over her conscience-stricken face, while two big tears—such big ones as only little heart-broken two-year-olds can originate—were rolling slowly down her nose.
“Oh, Uncle John,” she would say gleefully, “now, ain’t they just too sweet for anything? Do let me get down and hug them, every one.” And Uncle John would let her if he had to catch every one himself.
The clear-cut way she talked English reminds me that there were two things about Little Sister that always astonished me—her intellect and her great sense of motherhood. I could readily see how she inherited the first, but could never understand how so tiny a thing had such a great big mother-heart. She loved everything little—everything born on the farm. The fact that anything in hair, hide or feathers had arrived was an occasion of jollification to her.
“Oh, do let me see the dear little thing,” would be the first thing from Little Sister that greeted the announcement. And she generally saw it; at least, if Uncle John was around. It is scarcely necessary to add that during the spring of the year, on a farm as large as the Rutherford place, she was kept in one continual state of happy excitement.
One day they missed her from the house, and Uncle John quickly “tracked” her to the cow barn, for it occurred to him he had only the day before shown her the Short-horn’s latest edition—a big, double-jointed, ugly, hungry male calf, who slept all day in the bedded stall like a young Hercules, and only waked up long enough to wrinkle his huge nose around and mentally make the remark the Governor of North Carolina is said to have made to the Governor of South Carolina. But Little Sister had declared he was “perfectly lovely.” That is where Uncle John found her. She had climbed over the high stall gate, unaided, and, after becoming acquainted, she had given young Hercules, as a propitiary offering, her own beautiful string of beads and placed them around his tawny neck.