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Page 36
"Oh! sooner shall my legion
Around my standard fall;
In grim Helvetic region,
Or in galumphing Gaul;
Sooner the foe enchain us,
Sooner our life-blood spill,
Than Titus Labienus
Stand longer on the hill!"
CHAPTER X.
A NEW LIFE.
"Bell," said Hildegarde, "I really think I must be a cat in
disguise."
"What do you mean, dear?" inquired Bell, looking up from her
dishpan.
"Why, I have had so many lives. This is the fifth, at the least
computation. It is very extraordinary."
Quiet Bell waited, seeing that more was coming. The two girls were
sitting on the end of a wharf, in the sparkling clearness of a
September morning. Before them stretched a great lake, a sheet of
silver, dotted as far as the eye could see with green islands.
Behind lay a pebbly beach, and farther up, nestled among a fringe
of forest trees, stood a bark hut, with broad verandahs and
overhanging eaves. Hildegarde looked up and around, her face
shining with pleasure.
"They have all been so happy--the lives," she said. "But this
surely is the most beautiful to look at. You see," here she turned
again to her companion, "first I was a little girl, and then a big
one, at home in New York; and a very singularly odious specimen of
both I was."
"Am I expected to believe this?" asked Bell, quietly.
"Oh yes! because I know, you see, and I remember just how
detestable I was. Children are so sometimes, you know, even with
the very best parents, and I certainly had those. Well, at last I
grew so unbearable that I had to be sent away. Oh, you need not
raise your eyebrows, my dear! It's very nice of you, but you never
saw me then. I don't mean that I was sent to the Reform School;
but my father and mother had to go to California, and I was not
strong, so the journey was not thought best for me; and besides,
dear mamma saw that if I was ever going to amount to anything I
must be taken away from the fashionable school and the set of
girls I was getting intimate with. I wasn't intimate with mamma
then; I didn't want to be. The other girls were not, and I thought
it would be silly; think of it, Bell! Well, I was sent, a forlorn
and furious child (fifteen years old though, the same age as dear,
sweet Gertrude), to my mother's old nurse in the country,--a
farmer's wife, living on a small farm, twenty miles from a city.
There, my dear, I first learned that there was a world outside the
city of New York. I must tell you all about it some day,--the
happy, blessed time I had with those dear people, and how I
learned to know my own dearest ones while I was away from them. I
buried that first Hildegarde, very dead, oh, very dead indeed!
Then the next summer I went to a new world, and my Rose went with
me. I have told you about her, and how sweet she is, and how ill
she was, and now how she is going to marry the good doctor who
cured her of her lameness. We spent the summer with Cousin Wealthy
Bond, a cousin of my mother's,--the loveliest old lady, living
down in Maine. That was a very new world, Bell; and oh! I have a
child there, a little boy, my Benny. At least, he is Cousin
Wealthy's Benny now, for she is bringing him up as her own, and
loves him really as if he were; but I always think of him as
partly mine, because Rose and I found him in the hospital where we
used to go to carry flowers. He had been very ill, and we got
Cousin Wealthy to let him come to her house to get well. And
through, that, somehow, there came to be a little convalescent
home for the children from the hospital,--oh, I must tell you that
story too, some day, and it is called Joyous Gard. Yes, of course
I named it, and I was there for a month this spring, before you
came, and had the most enchanting time. I took Hugh with me, and
the only trouble was that Benny was madly jealous of him, and gave
him no peace. Poor Benny! he is a dear, nice little boy, but not
like Hugh, of course, and that exasperated him past belief. It was
just like Lord Lardy and the waiter in the Bab Ballad, for Hugh
was entirely unconscious, and would smile peacefully at Benny's
demonstrations of wrath, thinking it all a joke.
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