“What are you laughing at, Kitty? You
cackle like a young hen with her first egg.”
So spoke Mrs. Tynan to her daughter, who alternately
swung backwards and forwards in a big rocking-chair,
silently gazing into the distant sky, or sat still
and “cackled” as her mother had said.
A person of real observation and astuteness, however,
would have noticed that Kitty’s laughter told
a story which was not joy and gladness—
neither good humour nor the abandonment of a luxurious
nature. It was tinged with bitterness and had
the smart of the nettle.
Her mother’s question only made her laugh the
more, and at last Mrs. Tynan stooped over her and
said, “I could shake you, Kitty. You’d
make a snail fidget, and I’ve got enough to
do to keep my senses steady with all the house-work—and
now her in there!” She tossed a hand behind
her fretfully.
Quick with love for her mother, as she always was,
Kitty caught the other’s trembling hand.
“You’ve always had too much to do, mother;
always been slaving for others. You’ve
never had time to think whether you’re happy
or not, or whether you’ve got a problem—that’s
what people call things, when they’re got so
much time on their hands that they make a play of
their inside feelings and work it up till it sets them
crazy.”
Mrs. Tynan’s mouth tightened and her brow clouded.
“I’ve had my problems too, but I always
made quick work of them. They never had a chance
to overlay me like a mother overlays her baby and
kills it.”
“Not ‘like a mother overlays,’ but
‘as a mother overlays,’” returned
Kitty with a queer note to her voice. “That’s
what they taught me at school. The teacher was
always picking us up on that kind of thing. I
said a thing worse than that when Mrs. Crozier”—her
fingers motioned towards another room—“came
to-day. I don’t know what possessed me.
I was off my trolley, I suppose, as John Sibley puts
it. Well, when Mrs. James Shiel Gathorne Crozier
said—oh, so sweetly and kindly—’You
are Miss Tynan?’ what do you think I replied?
I said to her, ’The same’!”
Rather an acidly satisfied smile came to Mrs. Tynan’s
lips. “That was like the Slatterly girls,”
she replied. “Your father would have said
it was the vernacular of the rail-head. He was
a great man for odd words, but he knew always just
what he wanted to say and he said it out. You’ve
got his gift. You always say the right thing,
and I don’t know why you made that break with
her—of all people.”
A meditative look came into Kitty’s eyes.
“Mr. Crozier says every one has an imp that
loves to tease us, and trip us up, and make us appear
ridiculous before those we don’t want to have
any advantage over us.”
“I don’t want Mrs. Crozier to have any
advantage over you and me, I can tell you that.
Things’ll never be the same here again, Kitty
dear, and we’ve all got on so well; with him
so considerate of every one, and a good friend always,
and just one of us, and his sickness making him seem
like our own, and—”
