The Collected Works of Susan Coolidge: 7 Novels, 35+ Short Stories, Essays & Poems (Illustrated). Susan Coolidge
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should like some to dress the parlor with if they could be had.”
“I’ll see what I can find, and send you a load.”
I don’t know why this very simple little talk should have made an impression on Lieutenant Worthington’s mind, but somehow he did not forget it.
“‘Don’t let us talk any more about me,’” he said to himself that night when alone in his cabin. “I wonder how long it would be before the other one did anything to divert the talk from herself. Some time, I fancy.” He smiled rather grimly as he unbuckled his sword-belt. It is unlucky for a girl when she starts a train of reflection like this. Lilly’s little attempt to pique her admirer had somehow missed its mark.
The next afternoon Katy in her favorite place on the beach was at work on the long weekly letter which she never failed to send home to Burnet. She held her portfolio in her lap, and her pen ran rapidly over the paper, as rapidly almost as her tongue would have run could her correspondents have been brought nearer.
“Nice, December 22.
“Dear Papa and everybody,—Amy and I are sitting on my old purple cloak, which is spread over the sand just where it was spread the last time I wrote you. We are playing the following game: I am a fairy and she is a little girl. Another fairy—not sitting on the cloak at present—has enchanted the little girl, and I am telling her various ways by which she can work out her deliverance. At present the task is to find twenty-four dull red pebbles of the same color, failing to do which she is to be changed into an owl. When we began to play, I was the wicked fairy; but Amy objected to that because I am ‘so nice,’ so we changed the characters. I wish you could see the glee in her pretty gray eyes over this infantile game, into which she has thrown herself so thoroughly that she half believes in it. ‘But I needn’t really be changed into an owl! ‘she says, with a good deal of anxiety in her voice.
“To think that you are shivering in the first snow-storm, or sending the children out with their sleds and india-rubbers to slide! How I wish instead that you were sharing the purple cloak with Amy and me, and could sit all this warm balmy afternoon close to the surf-line which fringes this bluest of blue seas! There is plenty of room for you all. Not many people come down to this end of the beach, and if you were very good we would let you play.
“Our life here goes on as delightfully as ever. Nice is very full of people, and there seem to be some pleasant ones among them. Here at the Pension Suisse we do not see a great many Americans. The fellow-boarders are principally Germans and Austrians with a sprinkling of French. (Amy has found her twenty-four red pebbles, so she is let off from being an owl. She is now engaged in throwing them one by one into the sea. Each must hit the water under penalty of her being turned into a Muscovy duck. She doesn’t know exactly what a Muscovy duck is, which makes her all the more particular about her shots.) But, as I was saying, our little suite in the round tower is so on one side of the rest of the Pension that it is as good as having a house of our own. The salon is very bright and sunny; we have two sofas and a square table and a round table and a sort of what-not and two easy-chairs and two uneasy chairs and a lamp of our own and a clock. There is also a sofa-pillow. There’s richness for you! We have pinned up all our photographs on the walls, including Papa’s and Clovy’s and that bad one of Phil and Johnnie making faces at each other, and three lovely red and yellow Japanese pictures on muslin which Rose Red put in my trunk the last thing, for a spot of color. There are some autumn leaves too; and we always have flowers and in the mornings and evenings a fire.
“Amy is now finding fifty snow-white pebbles, which when found are to be interred in one common grave among the shingle. If she fails to do this, she is to be changed to an electrical eel. The chief difficulty is that she loses her heart to particular pebbles. ‘I can’t bury you,’ I hear her saying.
“To return,—we have jolly little breakfasts together in the salon. They consist of coffee and rolls, and are served by a droll, snappish little garçon with no teeth, and an Italian-French patois which is very hard to understand when he sputters. He told me the other day that he had been a garçon for forty-six years, which seemed rather a long boyhood.
“The company, as we meet them at table, are rather entertaining. Cousin Olivia and Lilly are on their best behavior to me because I am travelling with Mrs. Ashe, and Mrs. Ashe is Lieutenant Worthington’s sister, and Lieutenant Worthington is Lilly’s admirer, and they like him very much. In fact, Lilly has intimated confidentially that she is all but engaged to him; but I am not sure about it, or if that was what she meant; and I fear, if it proves true, that dear Polly will not like it at all. She is quite unmanageable, and snubs Lilly continually in a polite way, which makes me fidgety for fear Lilly will be offended, but she never seems to notice it. Cousin Olivia looks very handsome and gorgeous. She quite takes the color out of the little Russian Countess who sits next to her, and who is as dowdy and meek as if she came from Akron or Binghampton, or any other place where countesses are unknown. Then there are two charming, well-bred young Austrians. The one who sits nearest to me is a ‘Candidat’ for a Doctorate of Laws, and speaks eight languages well. He has only studied English for the past six weeks, but has made wonderful progress. I wish my French were half as good as his English is already.
“There is a very gossiping young woman on the story beneath ours, whom I meet sometimes in the garden, and from her I hear all manner of romantic tales about people in the house. One little French girl is dying of consumption and a broken heart, because of a quarrel with her lover, who is a courier; and the padrona, who is young and pretty, and has only been married a few months to our elderly landlord, has a story also. I forget some of the details; but there was a stern parent and an admirer, and a cup of cold poison, and now she says she wishes she were dying of consumption like poor Alphonsine. For all that, she looks quite fat and rosy, and I often see her in her best gown with a great deal of Roman scarf and mosaic jewelry, stationed in the doorway, ‘making the Pension look attractive to the passers-by.’ So she has a sense of duty, though she is unhappy.
“Amy has buried all her pebbles, and says she is tired of playing fairy. She is now sitting with her head on my shoulder, and professedly studying her French verb for to-morrow, but in reality, I am sorry to say, she is conversing with me about be-headings,—a subject which, since her visit to the Tower, has exercised a horrible fascination over her mind. ‘Do people die right away?’ she asks. ‘Don’t they feel one minute, and doesn’t it feel awfully?’ There is a good deal of blood, she supposes, because there was so much straw laid about the block in the picture of Lady Jane Gray’s execution, which enlivened our walls in Paris. On the whole, I am rather glad that a fat little white dog has come waddling down the beach and taken off her attention.
“Speaking of Paris seems to renew the sense of fog which we had there. Oh, how enchanting sunshine is after weeks of gloom! I shall never forget how the Mediterranean looked when we saw it first,—all blue, and such a lovely color. There ought, according to Morse’s Atlas, to have been a big red letter T on the water about where we were, but I didn’t see any. Perhaps they letter it so far out from shore that only people in boats notice it.
“Now the dusk is fading, and the odd chill which hides under these warm afternoons begins to be felt. Amy has received a message written on a mysterious white pebble to the effect—”
Katy was interrupted at this point by a crunching step on the gravel behind her.
“Good afternoon,” said a voice. “Polly has sent me to fetch you and Amy in. She says it is growing cool.”
“We were just coming,” said Katy, beginning to put away her papers.
Ned Worthington sat down on the cloak beside her. The distance was now steel gray against the sky; then came a stripe of violet, and then a broad sheet of the vivid iridescent blue which one sees on the necks of peacocks, which again melted into the long line of flashing surf.
“See that gull,” he said, “how it drops plumb into the sea, as if bound to go through to China!”
“Mrs. Hawthorne calls skylarks ‘little raptures,’” replied Katy. “Sea-gulls seem to me like grown-up raptures.”