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Random documents with unrelated
content Scribd suggests to you:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pegeen
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Pegeen

Author: Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd

Release date: July 17, 2019 [eBook #59935]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Marcia Brooks, Al Haines, Alex White & the

online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at
http://www.pgdpcanada.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PEGEEN ***

 PEGEEN
BY
ELEANOR HOYT BRAINERD
AUTHOR OF
MISDEMEANORS OF NANCY, Etc.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by
The Century Co.

Copyright, 1915, by The Ridgway Company

 Published, October, 1915

TO
THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER
WHO, LIKE PEGEEN, HAS THE NEIGHBORING HEART,
THIS BOOK IS LOVINGLY
DEDICATED

PEGEEN

I
“Please, sir, I’ve come to see to you,” announced the Very Small
Person.
John Archibald turned from his easel, eyed the intruder with
amazement, faintly tinged with alarm, and thought of laughing—but
did not laugh. She was such a mere wisp of a child and so
profoundly serious.
“Oh, you have, have you?” the painter remarked feebly. There
was a solemn determination about this invader of his privacy that
made him uncomfortably sure she would do whatever she had come
to do.
“Yes, sir, I’m Pegeen O’Neill. I’ll begin in the kitchen. They say it’s
a sight.”
She was taking off her battered straw hat and her wet coat and
rubbers, and rolling up the sleeves of her clean but much patched
gingham dress. The artist liked her better without the hat, though
the extraordinary mass of black tumbled curls was too heavy a frame
for the thin, sensitive, little face.
“I brought cleaning rags with me.” The child had an oddly
efficient air. One understood that she would always bring the needed
things with her. “Men never have such things around. They’re the
wastingest creatures.”
“Oh, but I do have rags around—often,” protested Archibald,
“only I’m usually wearing them.”
The weak attempt to meet the situation lightly made no
impression upon her seriousness.
“Never mind. I’ll keep you mended up now,” she said, with an air
of brisk capability.
“B-b-but,” began the painter.
“You go right on with your painting,” she advised kindly but
firmly.
“I won’t want to come in here to-day, if that kitchen’s anything
like what they say it is, ’n’ maybe it’ll clear up by to-morrow so that
you can paint outdoors and not be in my way. What time do you
have dinner?”
He looked helplessly at the clock. Meals were always a movable
feast with him. He had them when he chanced to think of them,
when the light was poor, when the work went badly, when there
happened to be something in the house to eat.
“Oh, all right,” said the Very Small Person, quite as though he
had explained all this aloud. “But I guess we’ll have our dinner at
half-past twelve. You just go right ahead until then and don’t mind
me.”
She went into the kitchen and shut the door gently behind her.
That was how it began.
John Archibald had run away from New York—and from Nadine
Ransome. The two had sapped his strength and dulled his spirit and
blurred his vision. He loved them both—and, in much the same way,
loved the beauty and the power and the indescribable, gripping
charm of them; but the soul of him had run away from them before
they had altogether had their way with it and had carried his fagged
brain and struggling heart to a place where June was busy with a
wonderful outdoor world.
There was a little shack on the edge of a wood, with a meadow
dropping away from before the doorstep to join a quiet green valley
that wandered narrowly between two lines of blue hills into dim,
purple distances. He had camped there once, with a fellow artist,
and, on a day when the city world was an ache in his brain and a
bitterness in his heart, the winding, white ribbon of valley road and
the upland meadow trail had called to him, the murmur of pine top
seas and the drip of fern-hidden springs and the silences of green
woodland dusks, had promised peace.
So he ran away.
Running away may not be heroic, but at times it is exceedingly
wise.
The shack and the land upon which it stood belonged to a colony
of Shakers who lived across the Valley among the heaven-climbing
hills, and they rented it willingly but with mild amazement.
“Thee doesn’t intend to live in it?” asked the gray-clad eldress
with the visioning eyes and the firm chin.
“When it rains,” explained the tenant. “The rest of the time I’ll
live out of doors. I’m a painter.”
“Oh, yea,—an artist!”
Her tones conveyed an understanding that unto artists all forms
of lunacy were possible.
And so the man who had run away took possession of four
rooms, a big stone fireplace, a rusty stove, a table, three rough
chairs and a decrepit pine bureau. He made an expedition to a
neighboring town, bought a comfortable willow chair, some cushions
and linen, a few dishes and cooking utensils, a broom, and a couch
hammock. With the broom he made a clumsy, half-hearted,
masculine attack upon the accumulated dirt of years. He hung the
hammock in the living-room where it served in lieu of bed, knocked
up some shelves for books, set an easel by the north window, built a
fire on the hearth, pulled the willow chair up in front of it, lighted his
pipe, and was at home—but not at peace. The place was haunted by
ghosts he had brought with him. Beneath the night noises of wood
and meadow he heard the muffled throb and roar of city streets. In
every corner lurked a shadowy face—an alluring, heartbreaking face,
with lying promises in its eyes and lying smiles on its lips.
In the open, with the sun and wind and trees and sky for
comrades, he could forget; but, when the violet dusk closed in and
the friendly, green-gold world fell a-dreaming and lost itself in faint
silver lights and creeping shadows, the old longing stirred, the old
fight began again. It always ended by his flinging out into the night
and tramping the roads and paths under the still stars or through
the storm. It is hard to be strong within four walls.
He painted in a desultory way and he made friends with shy,
wood creatures who finally accepted him as a harmless and well-
meaning neighbor, and he fished a little and read a little and cooked
a little and roamed the woods and fields a great deal, and June was
kind to him in her bountiful, burgeoning way; but she worked no
sudden cure. Nature does not hurry, even in her healing.
Yet, on the stormy morning when the Very Small Person
appeared at the shack, John Archibald, standing before a window
and watching the rain sweep down the Valley like a gray veil,
through which the glooming hills peered, shadow-like and shivering,
had admitted to himself that he was nearer in tune than he had
been in many a day.
The silver flails of the rain, beating against the swaying young
birches, made his fingers itch for a paint brush, the low-hung cloud
masses tangled in the wind-tossed locks of the pines brought a smile
to his lips, a clump of mountain laurel blurred to misty rose by the
rain curtain set his memory groping for some half-forgotten melody.
Yes: there was beauty in the world and he still had eyes for it, and
there were worse things than a leaping fire on a hearth and a
summer rain against the window panes.
He sat down before his easel and went to work with a whistled
tune on his lips. After the Very Small Person had appeared and
disappeared, he took up the work and the tune where he had left
off; but when it occurred to him that he was whistling, he stopped
abruptly. No man likes to admit to himself that he is convalescent
from a heart malady he has believed fatal.
 A particularly happy experiment with madder made him forget
that he was a passion-racked soul and set him whistling gaily once
more. The Very Small Person interrupted a carefully executed bit
from Rigoletto when she came in from the kitchen, carrying a tray
load much too big for her and went about setting the table.
Archibald looked up from his sketch, stared at her blankly,
remembered, and laughed.
“Oh, yes,” he said, whirling around on his chair and resting his
arms on its back, “you are seeing to me.”
“Yessir. Dinner’ll be ready in a minute. I couldn’t find a tablecloth,
so I took a paper napkin. S’pose you use them to get out of
washing, don’t you?”
“I do,” acknowledged the painter. “What—if it isn’t intrusive to
ask—are we going to have for dinner?”
“Well, bread ’n’ milk was all you had in the house; but I’d sort of
figured it would be that way, so I stopped at Mrs. Neal’s on my way
up. I knew you got your butter ’n’ eggs, ’n’ milk there, ’n’ I told her
you needed eggs ’n’ butter, ’n’ then, while I was there, I got a slice
of ham—their hams are fine—’n’ some fresh pot cheese ’n’ a jar of
preserves. Mrs. Neal says she’ll be glad to let us have anything she
can spare. I told her to save us a chicken for Sunday. She was real
interested about my doing your work.”
“It is interesting,” agreed Archibald.
“Yessir. She said the folks along the Valley were just downright
troubled about your living so dirty ’n’ accidental when anybody could
see you were used to having things proper. They’d all come up and
looked in through the windows when you were away, so they knew
how things were. Course they understood about you being an artist
’n’ that that was why, but Mrs. Neal said she’d feel a heap more
comfortable, knowing I was seeing to you.”
“I believe I’ll feel more comfortable, myself, after I get over the
first shock,” confessed the artist, eyeing with approval the ham and
eggs which had just been put upon the table; “but may I ask how
you came to undertake seeing to me?”
“Why, I don’t know. I heard folks talking about how shiftless and
helpless you were, ’n’ that kind of bothered me; ’n’ then she said
yesterday: ‘Pegeen, why don’t you go and take care of that ridikilus
orphan up in the shack?’ ’N’ I said, ‘Why, I don’t know.’ ’N’ she said,
‘You need somebody to take care of, ’n’ he certainly needs
somebody to take care of him, ’n’ it looks to me like a good
combination.’ ’N’ I said, ‘Well, I guess I will.’ So I came, to-day.
“She said she was sure we’d get along finely together. She’s seen
you somewhere; ’n’ she said you looked unhappy and neglected but
sort of nice, ’n’ as if you’d be a credit to me, after a while.”
“Optimistic soul,” laughed Archibald. “Who is She?”
The Very Small Person started for the kitchen after another cup
of coffee.
“Why, she’s the Smiling Lady,” she called back across her
shoulder, as she went.
The words were left hanging on the air, and the little room
seemed the brighter for them. Archibald said them over to himself
softly.
“The Smiling Lady!” Had another Mona Lisa come to light in this
Peaceful Valley?
“Pegeen,” he asked as the small girl came with his coffee, “who is
the Smiling Lady?”
She set the full cup down carefully.
“Oh, that’s just a name for her,” she explained. “I made it for her
when she first came, ’n’ it fitted her so well that the others took it
up, ’n’ now she’s the Smiling Lady all up ’n’ down the Valley; but her
other name’s Moran.”
“And does she smile prettily, Peggy?”
“It just melts the heart out of you, sir, it does—but she isn’t
always smiling, you know—not with her lips. It’s a sort of a smile
that goes with her like the words to a tune. ’N’ her hair’s all bright ’n’
ripply ’n’ smiley, ’n’ she walks so light, ’n’ she just has a way with
her. When she comes into a room you feel as if birds had begun
singing there.”
Archibald leaned back in his chair and looked at the slip of a girl,
with the thin, expressive face in which now adoration glowed
warmly.
 “Pegeen,” he said, with conviction, “when you aren’t taking care
of somebody, you write poetry?”
She looked bewildered.
“No, sir. I haven’t ever. I couldn’t.”
“Well, there’s the making of a poet in you. Did you say the
Smiling Lady’s name was Mrs. Moran?”
His voice held a tint of anxiety.
“Miss Moran, it is. She isn’t married.”
“That’s better, much better. Peggy, my child, I like the way you
take care of me.”
And that night the ghosts forgot to walk.

II
Archibald wakened, sniffed incredulously, sat up in his hammock
bed, and sniffed again.
Yes, it certainly was coffee—good coffee, and there was a
subdued rustle and stir beyond the door leading into the kitchen.
Why, of course! He was being “seen to.” Pegeen had come back.
He had not really expected her, but he might have known she
was not one to put her hand to the plow and look back.
Incidentally it might be well for him to arise and shine. The
Young Person who had adopted him had intimated that, if the
weather cleared over night, he would be expected to paint out of
doors and let her clean his quarters. When she got ready to clean
she would probably clean, and he must breakfast and make his
escape.
Queer how mad women, even very small women, were about
cleaning things. No man could stand against them when the sacred
rage possessed them. He would not think of attempting it. No more
comfortable and unashamed grubbiness. He was going to be kept
clean, whether he would or no. He had seen it in the gleam of
Peggy’s eye. When she saw to people, she saw to them.
 There was a whimsical smile on the face the man turned toward
the kitchen, but his eyes were very kind. On the whole, he was
rather glad he had been taken in hand. He liked the Very Small
Person and there was something pleasant about awakening to an
aroma of coffee and a smell of toast.
He made a hasty toilet and looked into the kitchen.
“You ready?” said Pegeen, briskly. “I forgot to ask you last night
when you wanted breakfast, so I just decided to have it at eight. I’d
have called you, only I heard you moving around. How d’ you like
your boiled eggs?”
“I have a theory that I like them cooked two minutes,” said
Archibald, humbly, “but I’ve never been able to get them that way.”
“Well, you’ll get them now. She likes hers coddled.”
“Oh, does she?”
“Yessir. I’d love to coddle you some.”
“I’ve an idea you’ll coddle me a great deal.”
Pegeen laughed.
“That’s just the way she twists things. I didn’t know anybody else
did. It makes talking lots more fun, don’t it? Most people talk right
straight ahead about sensible things and you’d as leave they’d stop
any time. I like it when sometimes you say what you don’t mean or
don’t say what you mean—not lies, you know, but all twisty, like a
guessing game—’n’ then I like the things that don’t mean things—
just sound as if they did,—snarks and goober snatches and such,
you know.
“She read me lots of those when I had measles. Measles was the
best time I’ve ever had. I went and had them right at her house
when I was staying there over Sunday once.”
She flew into the other room, set the table, and came back for
the coffee and toast.
“Now you sit down ’n’ I’ll cook that two-minute egg. We’ll have to
fix a bed for you in the little room where you’ve got your trunk, so I
can come in here and have the table all ready soon as I get here
mornings. It’s kind of messy anyway, sleeping in your dining-room.
It’d be nice if you could afford another hammock for your bedroom.
This one helps to furnish here.”
 “I’ll send for another,” said the man who was being seen to.
He got his two-minute egg, and the coffee was delicious, and the
toast was crisp and browned and hot as the toast one sees in
hungry dreams.
While he ate, Pegeen went out and came back with her hands
full of maidenhair fern.
“You might send for some vases when you’re ordering the
hammock,” she said happily, as she put the ferns in a glass of water
and set them on the table. “She says it’s wicked to let a room starve
for flowers and green things when you can’t walk a step outdoors
without finding something that would put heart into the very
lonesomest, saddest room. I always did like flowers, but I never
realized about ferns and green things till she showed me, ’n’ now I
like them most better ’n flowers. They’re so cool, ’n’ fresh, ’n’ kind of
resting. There’s always flowers or ferns or pine branches or bayberry
or something in her rooms. I guess that’s why, even when she isn’t
in them, they all seem kind of as if she must have just gone through
them, smiling in her eyes, the way she does. Is that egg all right?”
“Perfect. She must be rather a wonderful Smiling Lady. Where
does she live?”
“Right down the other side of Pine Knob. You can go over or
around, but it’s prettiest over. There’s a spring up on top with pine
trees around it and a place where you can look way out ’n’ out ’n’
out. She goes up there sometimes to watch the sunset. My, but she
does love things.”
“And people?” questioned Archibald, idly.
“Well, I should say! She’s the lovingest thing. Sometimes I think
the Loving Lady’d be a better name than the Smiling Lady, but I
guess it’s all the same thing. Loving makes smiling, don’t it?”
“Not always,” said the man. His voice rang hard, and Pegeen shot
a swift, surprised look at him.
“Well, it ought to,” she said soberly. “That’s what it’s really for—
except when people you love get sick or die—or are bad. ’N’ if
they’re bad that’s because they aren’t loving. She says if you love
hard enough you just naturally make the world smiley—only you
have to be sure it’s the real, right love, the kind of love God has.
She’s the funniest thing. She talks about God right out, as if He were
folks, ’n’ as if He and she had beautiful times together—like my
measles. ’N’ she don’t go to church so awfully much either, ’n’ once I
saw her sew on Sunday. That was when they were trying to get
some clothes ready for the Johnston twins that came unexpected. I
asked her how she was going to fix that with God—my mother was a
Presbyterian—’n’ she laughed ’n’ said she didn’t have to fix it, ’cause
sewing in His name was just as good as praying in His name, ’n’
loving was a bigger commandment ’n that one about not doing any
work, ’n’ those twins surely would need loving, with their mother
having no back bone ’n’ their father having delirious tremors.
“It’s nice out of doors now, ’n’ as soon as I wash dishes I’m going
to begin cleaning.”
“I’m off,” laughed Archibald.
“It’ll be over before dinner ’n’ I’ll only do it thorough once a
week,” she called after him encouragingly, as he went away down
the sunlit slope where the daisies made way for him.
Mrs. Neal, his nearest neighbor, who was working in her garden
as he skirted her side yard, dropped her trowel and strolled over to
the fence when she saw him coming.
She was a sociable woman. He had discovered that before and
resented it. Above all things in the world he had wanted to escape
from people, to be left alone with his bruised soul; but, oddly
enough, he was not conscious of bruises this morning, was not even
conscious of a soul, which is quite as things should be on a June
morning.
And so, to the waiting woman’s surprise, he took his pipe from
his mouth, bade her a blithe good morning, rested his elbows
comfortably on the top rail of the fence beside her own, and smiled
into her broad, astonished, and kindly face.
“My land,” said the woman. “Was it as bad as all that?”
“It was,” admitted the man.
“And here I was thinking it was a bad disposition. Just goes to
show that you never can tell.”
Mrs. Neal’s tone was self-reproachful. Her face had taken on
creases still more kindly.
 “I told Peggy she’d got her work cut out for her; but she said if
you was grouchy you needed seein’ to all the more, and that bein’
grouchy was, like as not, just not bein’ used to bein’ pleasant; but I
didn’t suppose she’d get you used to bein’ pleasant as quick as this.”
Archibald’s grin held no hurt vanity. He had evidently made an
uncommonly bad first impression, but his neighbor was plainly ready
and willing to reverse her judgment.
“And here all the time you was only lonesome,” Mrs. Neal went
on, in her fat, friendly voice. “Well, Pegeen surely is quite a kid.
Now, ain’t she?”
“She is,” agreed the man emphatically. “Tell me about her.”
The woman draped her bulk more comfortably over the fence, as
one who settles herself for a long social session. She always had
time to visit, and next to the sound of her own voice, she loved best
the sound of another person’s voice, yet she managed to accomplish
an astonishing amount of work between talks.
“Well,” she began, her eyes looking past the listening man and
down the winding road, “Peggy wasn’t born here. She came along
one day on a broken-down cart behind a broken-down horse. A baby
thing she was, only five years old, but she was taking care of folks
already. I saw ’em as they went by here and the youngster was
pulling a shawl up tight around her mother’s throat and shoulders.
Broken down worse’n the cart and horse, the woman was. I never
saw anybody more peaked and sad. Why, say, that woman’s eyes
made you ache—except when they looked at Peggy. I don’t know
but what they made you ache worse than ever then. The little smile
that came into them looked so sort of pitiful in that face of hers. You
know the kind of face—the kind that’s been pretty once and fine, but
has had the youth and prettiness and fineness all killed out of it. A
face that’s sort of a tombstone telling where everything worth while
in a life has been buried. She’d been clear outside her husband’s
class. It was easy to tell that. Land knows how she ever came to
marry him. Common, drunken brute he was. Might have been
handsome in a beefy sort of a way once, but drink had knocked that
out of him, along with any other decency he might have had. Honest
to God, if I’d ’a’ been a man I’d ’a’ started every day by going down
the road and licking that man O’Neill, just for luck; but his wife
wouldn’t have thanked me for it—nor Peg either. The woman didn’t
love him, but she had some queer idea of duty or pluck or
something hidden away in her, and she never complained and never
let any one say hard things about him to her.—Just hid what she
could, and endured what she couldn’t hide.
“I figured it that she’d run away and married a handsome,
blarneying, good-for-nothing Irishman against her family’s wishes
and in the face of all sorts of prophecies about the evil that’d come
of it, and seeing as she’d made her bed she was going to lie on it
without whining. I’ll bet her folks never knew how things went with
her.
“She tried to teach Peggy what she could and the youngster was
a good deal like her in some ways—tidy, little mite with pretty ideas
about things and lots of pluck. She ain’t a whiner, no more ’n her
mother, but it ain’t all plain pluck with Peg. She’s got just the one
good thing that her father had to give her, ’n’ that’s cheerfulness.
She’s got a disposition like one of them toy balloons, Peg has, and
it’s a good thing. If it hadn’t been for that she’d ’a’ been dead, with
all the responsibility and want and abuse she’s had to stand.
“She’s too old for her years, of course, and she’s got serious
ways and some awfully grown-up thoughts, but she’ll never die of
broken heart and broken spirit like her mother did. No, sir. You can’t
down Peg. That’s the Irish in her. She’d see something cheerful and
encouraging in a smallpox epidemic—’n’ she’d be out nursing the
sick ones too. Well, there’s no telling what the man was himself
before the drink got him. He was something a fine-souled, big-
hearted woman fell in love with, and maybe a better father might
have given Peggy something that wasn’t as handy to have around as
her cheerfulness.”
“What became of the mother?” Archibald asked. There was a
very friendly light in his eyes as he looked into the face beside him.
He was going to like this neighbor.
“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and
thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for
O’Neill. He never beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t
make a living for her and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy
whelp. Chopped her own wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it
up in the woods. The neighbors would have helped but they couldn’t
do much—didn’t dare. She was so proud she’d rather starve than
take charity. You couldn’t even offer it—just had to do what you
could in a round-about, happen-so way.
“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do
everything that got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on
her mother hand and foot, and kept things clean and cooked
whenever there was anything to cook, and got wood to keep them
all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if he was a bad child that she
loved even if he was bad.
“Then her mother died about a year ago. That did for O’Neill.
He’d been a brute to the woman, but then he’d been a brute to
himself. The drink did it, and some place back in his rotten old soul I
guess there was a clean spot that loved her. He was too drunk to
see her buried and he kept that way most of the time for two or
three months. Lord knows where he got the money for his whisky.
Peggy used to help around at the neighbors, taking care of babies
mostly. She’s a wonderful hand with babies. Some of the folks
offered to take her on and look out for her, but she wouldn’t leave
her father, and what little she made she’d use to feed him—washed
for him, too, and tried to keep his clothes mended. Her mother had
taught her to read and write and spell, and she went to school
sometimes when she could. O’Neill’d be off for two or three days at
a time and then she’d slip down to the schoolhouse. Miss Keyes, the
teacher, says Peg’s the smartest scholar she ever had.”
“Couldn’t some one interfere legally and take her away from her
father?” asked Archibald.
Mrs. Neal smiled indulgently.
“You don’t really know Peg yet,” she said. “We all worried a great
deal and did what we could to help the child, but as for taking her
away from what she thought was her duty—from somebody that
was dependent on her—well, you wait till you know Pegeen O’Neill.
“O’Neill, he settled the business himself by going off on one of
his sprees and not coming back at all. The Lord knows what became
of him. I hope he’s dead and I guess he is, but his mind had sort of
been going for a while before he left and Peggy, she has an idea that
he just lost his memory and didn’t know where he belonged, or else
he’d have come home to her.
“Grieved for him—that youngster did. Not exactly about her
being without him, but about his being without her. She was afraid
he was somewhere crazy and wasn’t being seen to properly.
“Several of us offered to take her in, after that, but what’d she
do but go over to Mrs. Potter’s. She was sick—Mrs. Potter I mean—
and had a little baby, and her husband’s work took him away most of
the time. Poison poor, they were too. Peg she said they sort of
needed her and she’d got the habit of taking care of somebody; so
she took on that job until Mrs. Potter died. Then she took care of the
baby until its mother’s folks came and got it last month. Peg felt real
bad about the baby, but Mrs. Benderby’s husband had died in the
winter and she was all alone and walking down to the village, three
miles, early every morning to get day’s work and walking home, dog
tired, at night; so Peg she said she’d just move over and see to Mrs.
Benderby.—Gets up and has fire and breakfast at half-past six for the
woman and tidies up the house and mends and has a supper waiting
for the poor soul when she comes in at night. That didn’t keep the
child busy though; so she took you on.”
“Good heavens!” protested the man. “It’s too much for her.”
“No, it ain’t,”—Mrs. Neal’s smile was reassuring. “It’s just a lark
for her at your place and she’ll have good food up there and make a
little money, and she can fix Mrs. Benderby up, night and morning,
all the same. Peg’s got to take care of something with all her might
and it may as well be you and Mrs. Benderby.”
“Well, perhaps it may,” agreed Mrs. Benderby’s fellow beneficiary,
humbly.
After that there was a little talk of June peas and lettuce and the
vicious propensities of cut worms; and then Mrs. Neal went back to
her gardening, while Archibald swung himself over a stone wall into
the road, over another wall into a clover field, and made his leisurely
way toward the most sketchable of willow-fringed brooks.
 For a while he made pretense of working, but even the brook
laughed at the faint-heartedness of his efforts and the drooping
willow boughs quivered with mirth and the sunlight stealing through
the green leaves danced over his canvas and mocked at its futility.
“Work? In June?” sang a bird in the willows and, at the idea, all
the summer world laughed with the brook.
“Smell!” whispered the clover sea, billowing away from the tree
shadows where he sat.
“Feel!” crooned the breeze, touching his cheek with cool,
caressing fingers.
“Look!” shouted the sun, driving shadow-throwing clouds across
the low meadowland and up the far blue hills.
“Listen!” lilted the bird in the branches.
Archibald gave up the struggle. Why dabble with paints? Loafing
was more glorious business.
“You’re quite right about it,” he said cheerfully to the derisive
brook. “I’m a punk painter, but the Lord knew his business when he
sketched in June. Come along and show me more of the canvas.”
He set off across the meadow, the brook chuckling its sunlit way
beside him and together they wandered down the Valley. A
companionable brook it was, full of surprises and whimsies as a
woman, running quietly through brown, sun-warmed shallows,
working itself into a fury against solid, unyielding stones, dreaming
under overhanging elders, glooming among thick clustering pine
trees, dashing noisily, recklessly, down steep slopes.
Winding and wandering, it led its comrade around the base of
Pine Knob, into a bird-enchanted woodland and whirling suddenly
around a sharp corner, swooped out into an open, birch-fringed
glade where a host of Quaker ladies powdered the grass and butter-
cups made love to them brazenly.
“There!” shouted the brook, leaping a mossy stone for sheer love
of splashing, and making rainbows in the sunlight. “What do you
think of June now?” With a gurgle of glee it romped away through
the birches, but Archibald stayed in the glade.
A girl was sitting among the Quaker ladies. Her hair was full of
golden lights. Her eyes were full of laughter. Her lap was full of
flowers and puppies and kittens. A big collie dog stood sentinel at
her shoulder. At her feet on the grass, two fat babies rolled about in
a riotous tussle with a puppy, strayed from the lapful.
A twig cracked under the man’s foot. The dog growled warningly
and the girl, glancing round, saw the intruder standing among the
birches.
Apparently she was not startled, and she was as little
embarrassed.
“Don’t pay any attention to him. It’s principle with him, not
passion,” she said, laying a quieting hand on the dog’s head.
Archibald and she might have been meeting every day for
months. Not a hint of self-consciousness ruffled her gay serenity.
She made no effort to rise—merely sat there in the sunshine with
young life rioting over her and round her and smiled up at the
stranger out of clear, fearless, brown eyes that were used to
greeting friends. There was no room for doubt. This was Pegeen’s
Smiling Lady.
Archibald’s cap was in his hand. Apology was on his lips, but
looking down at the group, he laughed instead of apologizing.
Babies, puppies, kittens—all were staring at him solemnly,
uncertainly. The collie was staring, too, with more dignity and with
deeper suspicion.
Only the Smiling Lady accepted him without reserve, had no
doubts about him.
“We came after flowers,” she said. “At least we intended to get
flowers, but there were so many of us, and some of us had such
short legs, and all of us except Sandy had such vagabond,
inconsequent souls, that we just sat down and rolled around in
flowers instead of picking them.”
“I’ve been sketching. At least I intended to sketch,” Archibald
paraphrased.
She laughed. The laugh was as satisfactory in its way as the
smile.
“Yes, it’s that kind of a day,” she admitted lazily.
She moved a wandering puppy and a kitten or two, to make
room for the man on the grassy bank beside her, but there was no
coquetry in the invitation—merely a matter-of-fact acceptance of
another companion less reliable than the collie perhaps, less
amusing than the puppies and kittens and babies, but doubtless well
meaning. There was June joy enough for all comers, and she was no
monopolist. And when Archibald had stretched himself out on his
back beside her, she evidently considered her responsibility ended,
took his well being and content for granted, and went back to
playing with her young things. The young things, after their first
surprise, accepted him in much the same tranquil way. Only Sandy,
the collie, maintained a haughty aloofness, stood manifestly on
guard.
One of the kittens made a tentative excursion along the man’s
recumbent form and curled up in a soft ball on his chest. A puppy of
inquiring and friendly turn of mind chewed two or three of the
newcomer’s fingers in turn, then gamboled awkwardly up to his
head and licked his cheek with a warm, wet tongue. A chubby,
laughing baby in sadly faded and much patched blue rompers filled
her hot little hands with Quaker ladies and scattered them
painstakingly over the front of the artist’s flannel shirt.
“Thank you, Ophelia,” murmured Archibald. “Or perhaps I should
say Hamlet,” he added doubtfully.
The Smiling Lady rescued a kitten from the strangle hold of the
other diminutive being in blue rompers, and cleared up the situation.
“There’s simply no telling in rompers,” she said. “But that’s
Rosamond strewing flowers over you and this is Jeremiah. They’re
the Johnston twins, four years old and very active, thank you. Father
Johnston is religious and Mother Johnston is romantic and each one
named a baby, but I do think Mr. Johnston might have picked out
one of the cheerful prophets. Jerry isn’t a bit of a wailer. Jerry and
Rosy aren’t such bad little names for them, though, are they?”
“Very good little names,” protested Archibald. “But how do you
know which child belongs to which name?”
“You have to go by manners, not by looks,” the Smiling Lady
explained. “Now if Jerry’s attention had been concentrated upon
you, he wouldn’t have strewn flowers over you. He’d probably have
bitten your thumb or poked a finger in your eye. You see, Jerry’s on
the way to being a man.”
“A thumb-biting, eye-poking class, I gather?”
“Forceful, let us put it—and yet so helpless, poor things! How is
Pegeen?”
“The connection is obvious,” Archibald confessed. “I am wax in
her hands. Within a week there won’t be a paint brush in the shack
that I can call my own. She’s going to keep me tidy if she has to
drive me from home in order to do it. In fact, she did drive me from
home this morning. She’s cleaning.”
“She’ll take very good care of you,” said the Smiling Lady, “and
how she will love doing it! She’ll mother you as if you were Jerry’s
age. Peggy was born for mothering.”
She had risen as she spoke.
“Sandy and I must take all these babies home before they begin
clamoring for food,” she said lightly, “and I haven’t a doubt but that
Peggy is watching the meadow path for you. Give her my love.”
She took it for granted that he knew her as she knew him.
Pegeen was sure to have talked of her and so why bother with
formalities? Yet, in spite of her frank acceptance of him, Archibald
did not offer to walk home with her.
There was a definite finality about her leave-taking, a door
quietly shut. Evidently this unconventional Young Woman made her
own laws and limitations, and Archibald, being no dullard in feminine
psychology, realized that the man who presumed upon her casual
friendliness would be likely to find the door permanently closed. So
he stood quietly and watched her going away across the sunshiny
glade.
She walked as she spoke, as she looked, as she smiled, with a
fine freedom, a blithe assurance; and though the figure that swayed
so lightly as it went away between the birches was girlishly slender,
there was a subtle hint of strength and vigor in its flowing lines.
As Archibald looked, she stooped to one of the babies, and the
man drew a sharp breath of appreciation, noting with an artist’s eye,
the gracious curves of her breast under the clinging muslin blouse,
the rhythmic length of limb, the modeling of the bare forearms, the
well-set head.
When she gathered the child into her arms, tossed it high before
cuddling it close against her shoulder, and went on her way as
swiftly and lightly as though unburdened, the watcher sighed with
satisfaction.
He was still thinking of her as he leaped the wall into his own
meadow and swung his cap over his head, in answer to the greeting
waved to him by a little figure in the doorway of the shack.
“Not so much beautiful,” he summed up, “as made up of
beauties. She’d never drive a man mad, but, holy smoke, what a
delight she might be to him in his sane moments.”

III
“Peggy,” said John Archibald, leaning his elbows on the breakfast
table, “sit down and let me talk to you.”
The girl who was headed toward the kitchen turned back
promptly and sat down across the table from him.
Then she waited tranquilly for him to talk to her. What he had to
say might be unimportant. It usually was, but she liked his talk. As
she had already explained to the Smiling Lady, it was “so sort of
foolish and snarky.”
To-day, however, he seemed inclined to seriousness.
“We’ve got to put things on a business basis, child,” he said
firmly.
“Yes, sir,”—Pegeen’s tone was docile but vastly indifferent.
“You’ve been seeing to me for a week now and you know the
worst about me. Now the question is, whether you are going to take
the job for the summer.”
The dark blue Irish eyes under Peg’s black lashes flooded with
anxiety.
“Don’t I suit, sir?” she asked.
“You suit like an easy shoe, Peggy; but do I?”
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