الفصل الفصل 7 · RIVERBORO SECRETS

. RIVERBORO SECRETS

RIVERBORO SECRETS

Mr. Simpson spent little time with his family, owing to certain awkward

methods of horse-trading, or the "swapping" of farm implements and

vehicles of various kinds,--operations in which his customers were

never long suited. After every successful trade he generally passed a

longer or shorter term in jail; for when a poor man without goods or

chattels has the inveterate habit of swapping, it follows naturally

that he must have something to swap; and having nothing of his own, it

follows still more naturally that he must swap something belonging to

his neighbors.

Mr. Simpson was absent from the home circle for the moment because he

had exchanged the Widow Rideout's sleigh for Joseph Goodwin's plough.

Goodwin had lately moved to North Edgewood and had never before met the

urbane and persuasive Mr. Simpson. The Goodwin plough Mr. Simpson

speedily bartered with a man "over Wareham way," and got in exchange

for it an old horse which his owner did not need, as he was leaving

town to visit his daughter for a year, Simpson fattened the aged

animal, keeping him for several weeks (at early morning or after

nightfall) in one neighbor's pasture after another, and then exchanged

him with a Milltown man for a top buggy. It was at this juncture that

the Widow Rideout missed her sleigh from the old carriage house. She

had not used it for fifteen years and might not sit in it for another

fifteen, but it was property, and she did not intend to part with it

without a struggle. Such is the suspicious nature of the village mind

that the moment she discovered her loss her thought at once reverted to

Abner Simpson. So complicated, however, was the nature of this

particular business transaction, and so tortuous the paths of its

progress (partly owing to the complete disappearance of the owner of

the horse, who had gone to the West and left no address), that it took

the sheriff many weeks to prove Mr. Simpson's guilt to the town's and

to the Widow Rideout's satisfaction. Abner himself avowed his complete

innocence, and told the neighbors how a red-haired man with a hare lip

and a pepper-and-salt suit of clothes had called him up one morning

about daylight and offered to swap him a good sleigh for an old cider

press he had layin' out in the dooryard. The bargain was struck, and

he, Abner, had paid the hare-lipped stranger four dollars and

seventy-five cents to boot; whereupon the mysterious one set down the

sleigh, took the press on his cart, and vanished up the road, never to

be seen or heard from afterwards.

"If I could once ketch that consarned old thief," exclaimed Abner

righteously, "I'd make him dance,--workin' off a stolen sleigh on me

an' takin' away my good money an' cider press, to say nothin' o' my

character!"

"You'll never ketch him, Ab," responded the sheriff. "He's cut off the

same piece o' goods as that there cider press and that there character

and that there four-seventy-five o' yourn; nobody ever see any of 'em

but you, and you'll never see 'em again!"

Mrs. Simpson, who was decidedly Abner's better half, took in washing

and went out to do days' cleaning, and the town helped in the feeding

and clothing of the children. George, a lanky boy of fourteen, did

chores on neighboring farms, and the others, Samuel, Clara Belle,

Susan, Elijah, and Elisha, went to school, when sufficiently clothed

and not otherwise more pleasantly engaged.

There were no secrets in the villages that lay along the banks of

Pleasant River. There were many hard-working people among the

inhabitants, but life wore away so quietly and slowly that there was a

good deal of spare time for conversation,--under the trees at noon in

the hayfield; hanging over the bridge at nightfall; seated about the

stove in the village store of an evening. These meeting-places

furnished ample ground for the discussion of current events as viewed

by the masculine eye, while choir rehearsals, sewing societies, reading

circles, church picnics, and the like, gave opportunity for the

expression of feminine opinion. All this was taken very much for

granted, as a rule, but now and then some supersensitive person made

violent objections to it, as a theory of life.

Delia Weeks, for example, was a maiden lady who did dressmaking in a

small way; she fell ill, and although attended by all the physicians in

the neighborhood, was sinking slowly into a decline when her cousin

Cyrus asked her to come and keep house for him in Lewiston. She went,

and in a year grew into a robust, hearty, cheerful woman. Returning to

Riverboro on a brief visit, she was asked if she meant to end her days

away from home.

"I do most certainly, if I can get any other place to stay," she

responded candidly. "I was bein' worn to a shadder here, tryin' to keep

my little secrets to myself, an' never succeedin'. First they had it I

wanted to marry the minister, and when he took a wife in Standish I was

known to be disappointed. Then for five or six years they suspicioned I

was tryin' for a place to teach school, and when I gave up hope, an'

took to dressmakin', they pitied me and sympathized with me for that.

When father died I was bound I'd never let anybody know how I was left,

for that spites 'em worse than anything else; but there's ways o'

findin' out, an' they found out, hard as I fought 'em! Then there was

my brother James that went to Arizona when he was sixteen. I gave good

news of him for thirty years runnin', but aunt Achsy Tarbox had a

ferretin' cousin that went out to Tombstone for her health, and she

wrote to a postmaster, or to some kind of a town authority, and found

Jim and wrote back aunt Achsy all about him and just how unfortunate

he'd been. They knew when I had my teeth out and a new set made; they

knew when I put on a false front-piece; they knew when the fruit

peddler asked me to be his third wife--I never told 'em, an' you can be

sure HE never did, but they don't NEED to be told in this village; they

have nothin' to do but guess, an' they'll guess right every time. I was

all tuckered out tryin' to mislead 'em and deceive 'em and sidetrack

'em; but the minute I got where I wa'n't put under a microscope by day

an' a telescope by night and had myself TO myself without sayin' 'By

your leave,' I begun to pick up. Cousin Cyrus is an old man an'

consid'able trouble, but he thinks my teeth are handsome an' says I've

got a splendid suit of hair. There ain't a person in Lewiston that

knows about the minister, or father's will, or Jim's doin's, or the

fruit peddler; an' if they should find out, they wouldn't care, an'

they couldn't remember; for Lewiston 's a busy place, thanks be!"

Miss Delia Weeks may have exaggerated matters somewhat, but it is easy

to imagine that Rebecca as well as all the other Riverboro children had

heard the particulars of the Widow Rideout's missing sleigh and Abner

Simpson's supposed connection with it.

There is not an excess of delicacy or chivalry in the ordinary country

school, and several choice conundrums and bits of verse dealing with

the Simpson affair were bandied about among the scholars, uttered

always, be it said to their credit, in undertones, and when the Simpson

children were not in the group.

Rebecca Randall was of precisely the same stock, and had had much the

same associations as her schoolmates, so one can hardly say why she so

hated mean gossip and so instinctively held herself aloof from it.

Among the Riverboro girls of her own age was a certain excellently

named Minnie Smellie, who was anything but a general favorite. She was

a ferret-eyed, blond-haired, spindle-legged little creature whose mind

was a cross between that of a parrot and a sheep. She was suspected of

copying answers from other girls' slates, although she had never been

caught in the act. Rebecca and Emma Jane always knew when she had

brought a tart or a triangle of layer cake with her school luncheon,

because on those days she forsook the cheerful society of her mates and

sought a safe solitude in the woods, returning after a time with a

jocund smile on her smug face.

After one of these private luncheons Rebecca had been tempted beyond

her strength, and when Minnie took her seat among them asked, "Is your

headache better, Minnie? Let me wipe off that strawberry jam over your

mouth."

There was no jam there as a matter of fact, but the guilty Minnie's

handkerchief went to her crimson face in a flash.

Rebecca confessed to Emma Jane that same afternoon that she felt

ashamed of her prank. "I do hate her ways," she exclaimed, "but I'm

sorry I let her know we 'spected her; and so to make up, I gave her

that little piece of broken coral I keep in my bead purse; you know the

one?"

"It don't hardly seem as if she deserved that, and her so greedy,"

remarked Emma Jane.

"I know it, but it makes me feel better," said Rebecca largely; "and

then I've had it two years, and it's broken so it wouldn't ever be any

real good, beautiful as it is to look at."

The coral had partly served its purpose as a reconciling bond, when one

afternoon Rebecca, who had stayed after school for her grammar lesson

as usual, was returning home by way of the short cut. Far ahead, beyond

the bars, she espied the Simpson children just entering the woodsy bit.

Seesaw was not with them, so she hastened her steps in order to secure

company on her homeward walk. They were speedily lost to view, but when

she had almost overtaken them she heard, in the trees beyond, Minnie

Smellie's voice lifted high in song, and the sound of a child's

sobbing. Clara Belle, Susan, and the twins were running along the path,

and Minnie was dancing up and down, shrieking:--

"'What made the sleigh love Simpson so?'

The eager children cried;

'Why Simpson loved the sleigh, you know,'

The teacher quick replied."

The last glimpse of the routed Simpson tribe, and the last futter of

their tattered garments, disappeared in the dim distance. The fall of

one small stone cast by the valiant Elijah, known as "the fighting

twin," did break the stillness of the woods for a moment, but it did

not come within a hundred yards of Minnie, who shouted "Jail Birds" at

the top of her lungs and then turned, with an agreeable feeling of

excitement, to meet Rebecca, standing perfectly still in the path, with

a day of reckoning plainly set forth in her blazing eyes.

Minnie's face was not pleasant to see, for a coward detected at the

moment of wrongdoing is not an object of delight.

"Minnie Smellie, if ever--I--catch--you--singing--that--to the Simpsons

again--do you know what I'll do?" asked Rebecca in a tone of

concentrated rage.

"I don't know and I don't care," said Minnie jauntily, though her looks

belied her.

"I'll take that piece of coral away from you, and I THINK I shall slap

you besides!"

"You wouldn't darst," retorted Minnie. "If you do, I'll tell my mother

and the teacher, so there!"

"I don't care if you tell your mother, my mother, and all your

relations, and the president," said Rebecca, gaining courage as the

noble words fell from her lips. "I don't care if you tell the town, the

whole of York county, the state of Maine and--and the nation!" she

finished grandiloquently. "Now you run home and remember what I say. If

you do it again, and especially if you say 'Jail Birds,' if I think

it's right and my duty, I shall punish you somehow."

The next morning at recess Rebecca observed Minnie telling the tale

with variations to Huldah Meserve. "She THREATENED me," whispered

Minnie, "but I never believe a word she says."

The latter remark was spoken with the direct intention of being

overheard, for Minnie had spasms of bravery, when well surrounded by

the machinery of law and order.

As Rebecca went back to her seat she asked Miss Dearborn if she might

pass a note to Minnie Smellie and received permission. This was the

note:--

Of all the girls that are so mean There's none like Minnie

Smellie. I'll take away the gift I gave And pound her into

jelly.

_P. S. Now do you believe me?_

R. Randall.

The effect of this piece of doggerel was entirely convincing, and for

days afterwards whenever Minnie met the Simpsons even a mile from the

brick house she shuddered and held her peace.