Chapter X: Nobody’s Little Girl

“It doos beat all,” declared Grandma Brown, with even more than her usual emphasis, “how blind own folks can be! I’ll lay there ain’t a man, woman nor child in Laurel township, save an’ exceptin’ Sophi’ Spellman, that don’t know Lucy’s goin’ straight into a decline. Weak lungs is in the fam’ly, to begin with; I can rec’lect when those gals’ mother an’ aunt both went off with the gallopin’ consumption. Like as not, Lucy felt her husband’s death a good deal; an’ I’ve heerd tell how that Dakoty climate keys you right up till ye can’t live anywheres else without snappin’ off short.

“She’s ben goin’ down stiddy ever sence she come back home, that’s flat; an’ here’s that sister of hers tellin’ folks as how ‘it’s jest a touch o’ bronchitis,’ an’ ‘she only wishes _she_ had Lucy’s constertution.’

“What’s more, she has her breakfust in bed reg’lar, so I hear, for all the world like them ungodly folks in furrin parts, an’ reads French novels on the sofy while Lucy an’ Stella doos up the work. I declare for’t, Emmeline, if somebody else don’t do it pretty quick, I’ll speak to Sophi’ myself!”

Everybody knew that Grandma had succeeded in preserving to a good old age all the “spunk” and “snap” that seems to have perished, for the most part, with a past generation, and it is quite possible that, if opportunity had served, she would have faced down and outdone even the formidable Miss Sophia. Lucy’s decline, however, had been so very gradual, and her ways so quiet and uncomplaining, that even a sister might almost have been forgiven for not realizing how matters stood. As for her dear Sioux daughter, now a head taller than herself, and completing, to the eminent satisfaction of her teachers, her second year’s work in the academy, to her it had seemed a sufficient explanation of everything that “mother was growing old!” For the fifties, and even the forties, of ripe middle age do seem “old” to sixteen.

After almost three years in Laurel, Yellow Star was growing fairly certain that she truly “belonged.” Modest as she was, she could not help knowing that people liked her—all sorts of people—boys and girls and babies, intimates and strangers, sharp-tongued Grandma Brown and the gruff-spoken Doctor and “pernickety” Uncle Si. Even from Mary Maloney and Rosey Bernstein the Indian girl had wrung some measure of reluctant admiration; but, in spite of much willing service, she remained vividly conscious of being still an outsider and an interloper in the eyes of Miss Sophia.

Now at last Doctor Brown had been sent for to see Lucy Waring. Everybody in Laurel, almost, had noticed his ancient roan steed and battered top-buggy before the Spellman gate. It was impossible to deny any longer, in the face of that long-postponed confession, what all the village tongues had been wagging with for months past. Lucy had “took to her bed,” at last, and the end could not be very far off.

It came suddenly, after all; to Yellow Star with a suddenness almost as devastating as that storm of bullets and shell out of a clear sky which had left her stranded, a nameless brown waif, on the frozen December sod, some fifteen years before.

The spring term had slipped quickly away, with Miss Ward installed as nurse and Doctor Brown calling every other day; with Miss Sophia looking grimmer and grayer than ever, and Lucy’s waxen face on the pillow relaxing into a loving smile as she repeated the daily formula which only Stella really believed:

“I shall be better to-morrow. Now the weather is getting so pleasant, I shall soon be out again.”

Then, one sultry July day, after a long “spell” of exhausting heat, there had come an alarming faintness and a “hurry call” for the Doctor. Miss Sophia was hastily sent for from the kitchen, where she had been taking the indignant Mrs. Maloney to task for “nicking” her old blue china … and presently, to poor Stella sitting, desperately anxious and unhappy, on the top step of the dark stairway, just outside her foster-mother’s door, came, not even kind-hearted Doctor Brown, but the business-like, white-capped nurse, with her curt message:

“Miss Sophia says you need not sit there any longer, Stella; Mrs. Waring is dead.”

* * * * *

Now, indeed, it was all Miss Sophia’s house, she thought; and it “pushed her out,” as she had said once when she first came to Laurel—pushed her away as with actual, bodily hands—a dark-skinned little alien, who did not “belong”! All of a sudden, she realized with dreadful sharpness that she was nothing, really, to that gentle soul who was gone, and who had pityingly taught the childish lips to call her “mother.” No, she was no Waring except in name—much less a Spellman or a Russell; those ghostly portraits in the shuttered parlor below disowned and despised her; she was only a stray—a foundling—only The-One-who-was-left-Alive.

Yellow Star sprang up and darted down the colonial stairway and out the sacred front door. The graveled, box-bordered walk echoed her flying feet, and the elm-trees, straining against a rising wind, seemed to peer anxiously after the light figure as it sped by. Then the gate clicked and she was away—away on the wings of the summer wind—not walking, scarcely even running, but _flying_ toward the only near refuge her spirit knew, the dear, green, lonely House in the Woods!

Long before she could reach it, the storm broke. It was a storm that made timid Doris cower with her face hidden, there in her own mother’s cheerful sitting-room; even the weary Doctor thanked his stars that he had gotten safe home and his horse “put up” before the rain came.

Yet it was not those silvery sheets of hissing water, drenching to the skin all who might be abroad, that one really minded—not at all! It was—ah! the play of forked lightnings, awfully bright, and the ear-splitting thunder-crash that could do no harm, one knew, but that was so dreadful for all that. Yellow Star’s Indian blood fairly curdled within her in the face of this close strife of the elements; for brave as her people truly were, the angry moods of nature were to them full of threat and awful personality. And yet, to-night, her grief was such that even the forked tongues of the “Thunder Birds” could not really terrify her, and she ran on.

In the rude shelter raised by friendly hands and connected with some of the happiest hours of her short life, there among the grave neighbor pines hiding their frightened nestlings, the girl from far Dakota cried aloud in long-forgotten Indian fashion—cried and mourned in rhythmic cadence, wild as the sobbing wind in the tree-tops—there told in her own dear tongue to those shivering sister woods all the secrets of her storm-tossed heart.

“Oh!” she cried, standing straight up in the tiny shack and flinging her strong young arms above the streaming black head with a tragic gesture, “oh, it is worse even than when I lost my own mother and was too young to know! I only knew what they told me—how they threw my poor Dakota mother into that awful pit, with no coffin and no prayer—and how I could never, never know her name or how she looked, or whether I was all the child she ever had, or anything! And the white man’s cruel bullets had torn her poor body … and yet in all her pain her last thought was for me … to keep me warm and alive. I meant to prove that I was _worth_ keeping alive … and I hoped she might, somehow, know.

“And then, there were those kind Indian women—Blue Earth’s mother, and Mrs. Driving Hawk, and the rest, who took care of me as well as they could. They were poor and very frightened and most had babies of their own, and it was very, very kind of them to feed a useless little fretting baby without any relations, whose people had nearly all been killed by the soldiers of the Great Father at Washington.

“To be sure, I have often heard my dear Mother Waring say that when she found me I was very dirty, and looked hungry and miserable. Many of the Dakota children who had mothers and fathers, too, were hungry, and ’most all were dirty, I’m afraid, back there on the reservation. It wasn’t all their fault; I know it wasn’t.

“I was about five when Mother Waring took me away; very thin and ugly, and oh! so frightened of the white people! She used to tell me about it afterward, to make me laugh. She had my ragged little Dakota dress and moccasins put away, the ones I had on the day she took me home to her house, and washed and dressed and fed me, and put me at night in a clean, white bed next her own. I cried half that first night, she told me, and begged to go back to the Indian camp, where I might curl up in a dirty quilt in any one of half a dozen smoky teepees.

“Then, after awhile, I got fat and contented, and I loved her dearly, and began to be afraid of the Indian women. But she wouldn’t have that, either; she always made me shake hands with them, and wouldn’t let me forget my own language when I learned the English. And I went to church and Sunday School and learned about Our Father who art in heaven; and after a great while Father and Mother Waring seemed just like my real father and mother on earth.

“Then dear Father Waring left us and went to heaven, too; and we came to Laurel to live. It’s been beautiful here; all but Miss Sophia. I have so many friends in Laurel—I really did begin to think I belonged—and if I could only stay long enough to graduate, there are so many things I could do.

“But now I seem to see it all. Now Mother Waring is gone, I haven’t any folks, anywhere. Miss Sophia doesn’t love me a single bit. There are just Doris and her father and mother, and Cynthia and Grandma Brown and Uncle Si and Miss Morrison—yes, Ethan too, though I haven’t seen him for ever and ever so long—all just _friends_, not folks,—and I shall be left out of everything, again. Oh, dear! I am nobody’s little girl!”

* * * * *

After supper that same evening, when the summer tempest had subsided to a gentle, purring down-pour of warm rain, and while Yellow Star, scarcely yet missed from the gloomy house of mourning, lay exhausted with crying on her bed of boughs, in her wet garments, away out in Wolcott’s Woods, her good friends were discussing her future and the practical bearings of her great loss, with true village simplicity.

“It’s jest as I say, an’ you can depend on’t,” insisted Grandma Brown. “I ain’t missed a funeral in these parts—not for forty-six years—that time I was bedfast, you recollect, Grampa? and old Deacon Hewitt went and turned up his toes. Furthermore, there ain’t ben a will made in Laurel all these years that I couldn’t tell ye the heft on’t.

“Deacon Spellman, he left that house an’ money in bank to his two darters, Lucy an’ Sophi’, an’ whichever one of ’em was to die fust the hull went to the survivor. You’ll find out it’s so; an’ everything belongs to Sophi’ Spellman now, onless Lucy an’ her husband had contrived to save suthin’ out of his pay, which wasn’t no great, it stands to reason, him bein’ not only a minister but a missionary to the heathen.”

“I don’t know but you’re right, mother,” the Doctor admitted, taking his pipe out of his mouth and resting his grizzled head on the worn leather cushions of his chair, with a tired sigh. “I do kind of hope, all the same, that some sort of provision will be made for that child to finish her schooling. I should hate to see her packed off to the Indian reservation now, when her heart’s set on graduating; and Stella deserves to graduate if ever a girl did.”

“Of course I’m right, Ezry,” observed Grandma, crisply. “And packed off she’ll be in short order, or I miss _my_ guess.”

“It seems to me Sophia will want to do what’s right by her only sister’s adopted child,” was Mrs. Brown’s gentle suggestion, while Doris cried quietly, with her head buried in the sofa pillow.

“Seems to me, Emmeline,” Grandma countered, briskly, “you’d orter know Sophi’ Spellman better by this time. She’s her granther Spellman over again; anybody outside the family connection was allers the dirt under his feet, in a manner of speakin’. Stella’s a good gal, an’ a smart gal, but she’s no kin to Sophi’ that I know of. An’ furthermore, she ain’t even white folks, an’ no Spellman by birth and nater could put up with that—not if she had the parts of an angel. Jest you wait an’ see.”

And, as usual, Grandma had the last word.