The Apple-Tree Girl

Front matter

THE APPLE TREE GIRL

"OH, NEIL, I CAN'T! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!"

Page 90

Chapter 1

CHAPTER I

She was such an old-fashioned little thing2!

"And ever likely to be old-fashioned," said Aunt Hepzibah, "born up here at Marlin Mills and raised, as a body might say, right in the shadow of Micah's apple tree!"

I smiled at Aunt Hepzibah then; but thinking it over now, I begin to see that the wonderful things which happened to Charlotte Marlin might never have taken place if it hadn't been for the history of Marlin Mills and the story of Micah's apple tree.

In its day Marlin Mills had been one of the prettiest and happiest of villages. Even now it has an avenue of elms by the side of the river, which is worth going many a mile to see. History tells us that Lafayette once walked beneath those elms and talked with Washington. Five years before that Nathan Hale walked under them, too, in the winter when he taught the school at Marlin Mills. Yes, and many a beau and many a belle enjoyed their shade in the days when gentlemen powdered their hair and wore lace cuffs, and the ladies dressed themselves in panniers and danced the minuet.

Perhaps at night, when the mists arise from the river and wreathe themselves among the elms, these couples walk again, re-living hours so happy that they wish to make them immortal. For myself, I know if I were a ghost I would like nothing better than to walk under the old Marlin elms with the spirit of one I had loved, and where the moon shone through the trees to give my partner a stately bow and dance the minuet. And the beauty of it is, no living soul would be likely to interrupt us, for the history of Marlin Mills is nearly finished; its houses are falling in ruins, and it won't be many years now before the last of the Old Guard will either move or (with greater dignity) be moved away.

To the east of the village is a hill, flat-topped and stony, and on the top of this hill, overlooking the village below, stands the Marlin farm and homestead—the place where my heroine was born.

Charlotte, my heroine, was six years old when she heard the story of Micah's apple tree, and I will tell it to you exactly as it was told to her.

Aunt Hepzibah was out at the time, and Ma'm Bazin was ironing in the kitchen. Ma'm Bazin was their hired girl—a French-Canadienne of about fifty, enormously fat, full of sentiment and blessed with the gift of tongues. That afternoon Charlotte had gone into the kitchen holding her hands behind her. She watched Ma'm Bazin for a time in her old-fashioned way and then, holding out her hands, she said: "Look! Why do they call these Micah's apples?"

She had in her hand two apples. They were of a pale—I had almost said a sad—color; but here and there on the skin were small, raised spots of the shape and color of red currants.

"Hush!" cautioned Ma'm Bazin. She tiptoed to the hall door, enormously fat but full of sentiment, and then she made sure that no one was in the yard. As I have said, Charlotte was six years old, and you can imagine how she was impressed by these maneuvers.

"Nearly two hundred years ago," began Ma'm Bazin, "on this very farm, lived a farmer named Sowers and his four sons. They were lazy fellows, who do nothing but sit around and complain that a honest man he cannot prosper any more. The only work they do is to plant an orchard, being fond of the cider, and in the middle of the orchard there is one tree—a bittersweet—bearing very fine apples which everyone admires. It is a pale apple and of such peculiar flavor that when the frost she has come the neighbors drop in to say the good word, and always they stroll in the orchard to fill their pockets from the bittersweet tree.

"As the years go on, Meester Sowers and his four sons drink more and more of the cider and get more and more into debt, till one day the sheriff rap-a-rap-rap on this very door and say, if the taxes are not paid by the first of the year the place will be sold and they thrown out in the cold, cold world, lamenting. Whereat they look at each other and cry in a rage that the honest man he cannot prosper any more.

"The next day is Christmas Eve, and just after dark another visitor comes rap-a-rap-rap on the door. He has a pack on his back and they see it is Micah, the peddler, who pass' that way every winter. In those days, my dear, peddlers are well known for the money they carry, because the world she is poor and honest, and the banks have not yet come.

"Micah asks if he can stay for the night, and if nobody ever sees him again, nobody knows and nobody cares. For a peddler he is here to-day and gone to-morrow. It is only known that a few days later Meester Sowers pays his tax and other debts, and no one notices that there is one spot in the orchard where he and his sons they will never cast their eye.

"The months they come and the months they go, till the frost she falls again. Then the neighbors drop in to say the good word and stroll in the orchard to fill their pockets from the bittersweet tree. But presently they return with the full gallop and a visage white. 'Look!' they cry. 'These apples, so pale before, are covered with spots like blood!'

"What Meester Sowers say then I do not know, but the neighbors run back to the tree with shovels and picks. There in his grave at last they find poor Micah, and always after that it is called Micah's tree and Micah's apples, and always after that these spots appear as a witness that the sin which is buried at the foot of a tree it shall make itself known in the fruit."

It is an old wives' tale, of course, like the stories of fairies and witchcraft which you heard when you were a child and which have been told to children since time immemorial, yet it's a tale which is believed more than doubted throughout our part of Eastern Connecticut. So if it had its effect on Charlotte's mind, especially when she looked out of her window and gazed at Micah's tree, I don't think you can greatly blame her, or wonder if it helped to make her more old-fashioned than ever.

Such was the atmosphere in which she grew up.

Below the farm was Marlin Mills, its houses falling in, and columbines and ragged robins growing among the ruins of the dam. A handful of children still attended the school where Nathan Hale once taught; but every year the number decreased, and every year a new teacher had to be found to brave the increasing loneliness. And when Charlotte returned home from school and walked past the orchard, Micah's tree was waiting to remind her why old houses creak at night and why the wind howls down the chimney at times with such a note. And when she went in the house there was her father, old Moses Marlin, a grim, gaunt man who had never quite forgiven her because she wasn't a boy.

There are times, indeed, when I, too, have wished that she had been a boy, because she would probably have made a great inventor, or an even greater poet, brought up in such an incomparable environment. Yet on second thoughts I am always glad that she was a girl, because inventors and poets we have in plenty, but never before, I believe, did a girl set out on such a scale as Charlotte did to lead herself, a little Miss Moses, into the Promised Land.

As soon as she had mastered her Third Reader she gradually developed into a bookworm, one of the most industrious little bookworms imaginable.

"She was ten years old then," said Aunt Hepzibah, "a spindly young 'un with her hair in two pigtails, but bright as a button, even if she was so quiet. 'Pears to me there were years when I never see her unless she had a book in her hand. She seemed to live and eat and sleep with the people she read about. Times there'd be tears in her eyes, and times she'd burst out laughing. 'What's the matter now?' I'd ask her. 'Oh, it's so funny!' she'd say, and curl up 'round the book again as if she'd never let go."

It was up at the old Marlin farm where Aunt Hepzibah told me these things, and, after I had gathered a few of Micah's apples, she let me look at the books which Charlotte had read. There was a set of Longfellow, and one of Dickens, and Hawthorne was there between Charles Reade and the Waverley Novels—good, old-fashioned sets of that half-morocco binding in which our grandfathers seemed to take such deep delight. It didn't require much imagination to picture Charlotte "curled up" in her chair by the window, laughing over Sam Weller, or her eyes filling with, tears as she followed the fortunes of Evangeline. And when the twilight came I think we can both imagine her laying her book aside and looking out of the window at Micah's tree … and the village below … and the sunset over the far-off hills … dreaming the dreams which you used to dream when you were a child, and all unconsciously preparing herself for the quest of the Promised Land.

In short, if you had searched the country over it is doubtful if you could have found a scene—or a girl—more conducive to the growth of Romance. And as she grew older, and her dresses grew longer, and her straight lines and angles began to turn into tender young curves, she often found herself dreaming the Golden Dream of how the prince would presently come to court her.

Charlotte finished school in her fifteenth year, the one bright star in a small, dim lot of jewels. Twelve months before her father had taken to his bed and died in the same grim way he had lived, knowing himself the last of the Marlins and never quite forgiving her because she wasn't a boy. It was nearly a year before they found his will, and then it was discovered that he had left Charlotte the farm, and ten thousand dollars in the bonds of a creamery company which he had formed in the hope of restoring to the village some measure of its past prosperity. After a family council following the reading of the will, it was decided that Charlotte should continue her education by going to the Penfield High School, Penfield being the nearest town and Aunt Grace living there with a daughter of Charlotte's age, who was also going to start at the high school that same year.

"The change will do her good, poor child!" said Aunt Harriet, a stout lady with a critical eye and a deep voice.

Charlotte was out in the hall, quietly dusting a picture which Aunt Grace was going to take away with her, but her relations didn't dream that she was so close at hand.

"She's a nice child," said Uncle Ezra.

"But," said Aunt Grace, "so old-fashioned!"

"She's a loving little thing!" warmly cried Aunt Hepzibah. "You've no idea how I shall miss her when she's gone."

Hearing that from her station in the hall Charlotte felt her heart go out to Aunt Hepzibah, and she was just on the point of going in to her complimentary relations when they started talking again.

"She's a regular little old maid!" said Uncle Ezra.

"Well, to tell you the truth, I think it's pretty lucky she's got that money," said Aunt Grace.

"Just what I've been thinking—poor child!" said Aunt Harriet; and, dropping her voice to its deepest note, she added: "Isn't she homely!"

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

Up to that moment it is doubtful if Charlotte had ever felt the least misgiving about her personal appearance; but, as you will realize, she had reached the age where such things count, and when she looked at herself in the mirror that night she stared very solemnly indeed.

A healthy young face stared at her—a face lit up by deeply tender eyes, expressive eyebrows and rosy cheeks. And if she had the Marlin nose, which was inclined to be beaky, and the Marlin chin, which was inclined to be sensitive, for my part I think they added character to her face, and, if I had been in Charlotte's place, I wouldn't have minded them one bit.

"I don't see what's the matter," she thought, still staring at herself. "I look the same as I always do."

SHE GAZED UPON HER PROFILE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE GAZED UPON IT IN SILENCE

But that morning she had watched Aunt Grace arrange her hair with the aid of two mirrors, and it gave her an idea. She ran down to the kitchen, where a little square mirror hung over the sink. This she took to her room, and then, standing sideways in front of her dresser, she gazed upon her profile for the first time in her life—gazed upon it in silence, as though she were scrutinizing a stranger who had come to live with her and whom she didn't know whether she was going to like or not.

"It's my nose," she finally told herself in a voice that had a little break in it. "And my chin."

Poor Charlotte! Up till then, you see, she had taken her beauty for granted, the same as she had taken the length of her hair and the brightness of her eyes; and then suddenly to find that her nose was beaky like her father's had been, that her chin was inclined to favor his too, and that a supposedly loving aunt could stare around a room full of relations and whisper "Isn't she homely?"

For a long time she lay amid the ruins of her dreams, staring up into the dark, and with such a heavy feeling in her tender, young breast! As long as she could remember she had lived in a land of romance where all the men were handsome and all the maids were fair; and when she had dreamed of the future, as girls have dreamed since time immemorial, she had always imagined her prince riding along under the old Marlin elms, meeting her and falling in love with her at sight—suddenly stopping, his hand upon his heart—because she was so young and sweet and beautiful!

"And wouldn't it be awful now," she thought, almost sitting up in bed with the horror of it, "if no man ever looked at me because I'm homely, and if I had to live and die—a lonely old maid!"

Next morning Aunt Hepzibah came up to help her pack, for it had been de- cided that she should go to Penfield with her Aunt Grace.

Charlotte was very quiet for a time. "Oh, Aunt Hepzy," she said at last, "have you ever seen my cousin in Penfield, my cousin Margaret?"

"Twice," nodded Aunt Hepzibah. "Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. Is she pretty?"

"Pretty as paint," said Aunt Hepzibah promptly. "Why?"

"Oh, I don't know. I was wondering; that's all."

"Well, you'll see her soon enough. Prettiest girl in Penfield; everybody says so. Allus reminds me of Little Eva in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'—and as false as a wagonload of monkeys," concluded Aunt Hepzibah, with that impartiality of opinion which is relationship's most radiant star.

"‘False as a wagonload of monkeys'? Why—Aunt—Hepzy!"

"Well, I dunno as I ought to have said that. She may have changed since I saw her last. Anyhow, you'll see her soon enough; and after you've been there a month or two you write and tell me what you think."

As you can imagine from that, when Mr. Briggs' surrey reached Penfield that afternoon and turned down Maple Avenue, Charlotte was all eyes to see, all perceptions to perceive; and when Aunt Grace said "That's our house, next to where the man is raking leaves, and—I declare!—there's Margaret standing on the lawn," Charlotte felt as excited as though she were witnessing her first play. Margaret was a blonde with a complexion like the bloom on an Elberta peach, and features which would have reminded you of those bisque shepherdesses with which our grandmothers used to adorn their mantel shelves. Although both her parents were average folks, Margaret's figure and attitudes and manner were marked with a delicate grace, and her expression, especially when a stranger turned to look at her, had the supernal innocence which is generally associated with that picture of the little choir boy who is singing his Christmas carol in a beam of light. But all her life her parents, helped by the people of Penfield, had unconsciously conspired to spoil her, and as you've probably guessed from what Aunt Hepzibah said, they hadn't labored in vain.

From the first hour of Charlotte's arrival it seemed to be her part to act as a foil for her cousin's prettiness. And how Margaret enjoyed it! If you were to hear all the ingenious little tricks she did to shine at Charlotte's expense it would make it too long a chapter. Besides, you have probably seen the way such things are done, for they seem to be a part of human nature, like criticizing the minister or pretending that one never eats in the kitchen. You will also probably understand that, as time went on, Charlotte found herself thrown more and more upon the resources of her own company. She said little, but she used that old-fashioned head of hers a great deal; and, having such a criterion of beauty with which to compare herself, it didn't take her long to make up her mind on one important question.

"I guess Aunt Harriet was right," she sighed one night, looking at her reflection in the mirror after she had brushed her hair. "I'll never be pretty, or at least I'll never be pretty like Margaret is. Oh, well," and she drew another deep sigh, "if you're not pretty you've got to be smart. So I guess I've just got to be smart!"

And, whether or not it was nature's compensation, her studies seemed to come natural to her. She studied very hard, for one thing, thinking to herself: "I've got to be smart, or I'm nothing." For another thing, her mind wasn't disturbed and distracted by the young male students, because the young male students left Charlotte severely alone—that is, all except one poor boy, and he doesn't count, as you will very soon see.

Perhaps, too, if you reverse these reasons, you will know why Margaret was backward in her studies. Her dominant thought wasn't "How much can I learn?" but "How pretty I am!" And even if she had wished to study, the young men of Penfield would have made it difficult, so strong was the competition to walk home with her, to take her out riding, or to call in the evening and sing ballads of such a sentimental quaver that they quite harrowed the feelings of Charlotte who was studying upstairs—Charlotte was already among the leaders of her class, who had made up her mind to stand at the head or know the reason why.

"Great silly things!" she thought one night. "You'd think they'd have more sense. As if a girl doesn't amount to anything unless she's beautiful!"

A sense of injustice began to rankle in her, that sense of injustice which was ultimately to lead her to her Three Great Sums.

"I guess the books are most to blame," she thought. "They always make their heroines beautiful." Frowning a little she ran over a list of the characters that she could remember. "Dora Spenlow was awfully pretty," she thought, her nose curling a little. "And so was Agnes, and She, and Juliet, and Little Dorrit and Little Nell and Lucy Ashton and Ethel Newcome—yes, and all the others, too."

For a moment she felt a challenge in the situation, and her heart warmed within her, as hearts have warmed since time immemorial at the prospect of leading a forlorn hope against a whole world in arms.

"I don't see why heroines have to be so terribly pretty," she thought. "I don't believe it's anything but a silly custom. Probably the minstrels started it. It's the same as if every gentleman still had to go around in armor, and every old woman was a witch. Why, the way the books have it, Margaret's the only girl in Penfield who could ever be a heroine, and I don't believe there's a girl in town—no, not one!—who wouldn't make a better heroine than she!"

Which was as far as she got just then; but after that, whenever Charlotte read a short story or a book and came to the author's description of his heroine, and read something like this: "I would like to describe the beauty of Lois Mallory, but words fail me," or "Her features were crisply and delicately chiseled, as though by a master sculptor," or "She had only to enter a room to eclipse everybody there"—whenever Charlotte came to a passage like that, her beaky little nose curled in a most refreshing manner and she cried to herself, "Oh, fudge!" As you will understand, "Oh, fudge!" was one of the things which she had learned at high school; and, as time went on, other signs of a growing sense of humor began to manifest themselves in our heroine. But on the whole, Charlotte remained much the same old-fashioned girl who had been born at Marlin Mills and raised, as a body might say, under the shadow of Micah's apple tree. She read a great deal, dreamed a great deal, and studied so hard that if you could have seen her bending over her books she would have reminded you of nothing so much as a young Minerva preparing to take her rightful place with the other elect upon Olympus.

"If people could only go on learning as long as they lived," she thought one day as she closed her algebra, "wouldn't they be able to do some wonderful sums!"

That started her thinking—she wasn't old-fashioned for nothing—and presently she continued: "Nearly every- thing you do is a sort of sum. If you do it right you get the proper answer, and if you do it wrong you fail. Yes, when you look at it that way, I guess a person's whole life is a sort of sum, but you have to die to know the answer. Oh, if I could only think of a sum that would make me famous all over the world!"

After that, whenever Charlotte made up her mind to do anything difficult, she would say, "I'm going to set myself a sum," and if it was hard to do, such as taking no notice of Margaret's meanness, or memorizing Himmel und Erde in her German reader, she would say to herself: "I can do it—I can do it if I'm smart!" And she always did it, because as she always solemnly told herself: "I've got to be smart, or I'm nothing."

So it isn't surprising that, at the end of her freshman year, she stood at the head of her class, while Margaret hovered perilously near the foot. This situa- tion wasn't at all pleasing to the pretty cousin.

"Mother," she said one afternoon, "what do you suppose is the matter with Charlotte?"

Aunt Grace looked at her niece as though she were ready for anything, and then she turned to her daughter in puzzled surprise. "Nothing that I can see," she said. "Why?"

"That's what I'd like to know," said Margaret, tossing her pretty head. "I don't know whether it's her nose, or whether she's studying too hard, but nobody else in the whole school looks like her. The other girls are beginning to notice it, too, and my friends are speaking to me about it. Perhaps that's why nobody ever walks home with her; I don't know."

An angry answer prickled on Charlotte's tongue, but she bit it back, this being one of the difficult sums which she had set herself to do. "No, sir!" she thought, cocking her beaky little nose. "She can be mean if she wants to, but she isn't going to make me mean!"

Which was partly due to that epic line of Ma'm Bazin's which often came to her memory when she thought of the spots on Micah's apples: "The sin which is buried at the foot of the tree, it shall make itself known in the fruit." So, instead of losing her temper, Charlotte simply gave her cousin a particularly old-fashioned look—and went for a walk to cool off.

That was the afternoon when she ran into the Boy Who Doesn't Count.

Charlotte had often noticed him. He was in his senior year at high school, and though he was the smartest boy in his class he wasn't at all homely, having one of those keen, wistful faces which go so well with curly hair. His name was Neil Kennedy, and perhaps because he had no mother, and perhaps because his father was seldom sober for two weeks together, Neil was a bashful boy who easily blushed, especially if you met him on his paper route, or if he thought you were looking at the patches on his clothes. Charlotte met him that afternoon near the red bridge with a bundle of papers and magazines under his arm—met him so unexpectedly as he was turning out of a gate that she ran right into him and not only sent his papers and magazines flying, but nearly sent him flying after them. Of course, she helped him gather his papers together, and, of course, they couldn't help speaking.

Next day, when she saw him at school, she smiled at him and he not only smiled back, but (not being accustomed to have girls notice him that way) he blushed like a beet.

"Mother," said Margaret that afternoon, throwing her books down as soon as she reached home, "you'll have to

"WELL, CHARLOTTE'S GONE AND FELL IN LOVE WITH HIM!"

speak to Charlotte. I feel so ashamed I don't know what to do."

"What's the matter now?" asked her patient mother.

"Matter? Mmh! You know that ragged Neil Kennedy, the boy who delivers papers? Well, Charlotte's gone and fell in love with him!"

Whereupon, Micah's apples or no Micah's apples, Charlotte showed such a bright, sparkling glow of temper that Margaret shrank back and, not knowing what else to do, she burst into tears. At this Charlotte's temper went cool again and she stared at her pretty cousin, her beaky little nose so curly with disgust that it would have done you good to see it. "Yes," she gravely nodded to herself that night, "that's our beautiful heroine!" But she tried her best not to make Neil blush again, although she spoke to him whenever she saw him.

"It's too ridiculous!" she thought. "There I used to think that a rich young man would come riding along to Marlin Mills some day, and we were going to have such a romantic time together. And first I find I'm homely! And then they begin to tease me about Neil Kennedy, who delivers papers and whose father drinks!" Whereat she shook that wise little head of hers, and more in wonder than sorrow she said: "Life's a funny sum!"

Thus the two cousins grew up, one growing more old-fashioned and the other growing prettier every day. By the time they reached their senior year at high school, Margaret had developed into what can only be described as a howling beauty, and Charlotte found herself dreaming more and more often of the day when she would do that sum which she had already decided would startle the world.

"Yes, and I can, too!" she told herself one afternoon. "I feel it in me!"

She had walked out into the country to the top of Flat Rock and was watching the sunset, and as that miracle of color began to unfold itself in the west Charlotte felt in her tender young bosom such a yearning for life and success that, quite involuntarily, she threw out her arms to the distant horizon and tears brimmed to her eyes. "I'll show them!" she whispered. "I'll show them if it's everything to be pretty, and nothing else counts!"

For that, you see, had almost come to be an obsession with her; and as she stood there, watching the sunset, she saw herself, in fancy, a little Miss Moses, leading herself and her sisters into a Promised Land where pretty maids count about the same as pretty men, and the average girl can be a heroine just as well as though she were a modern Hebe.

The sunset over, she went home, thoughtfully intent upon the Great Sum which she was going to set for herself, and as graduation day drew near she spent many an hour with herself, dreaming those grand, misty dreams which are the heritage of youth and ambition, and trying to shape them into tangible form. Many a career she sketched for herself, only to erase it from her mind with an impatient shake of her head. "I ought to think of something better than that," she would say; "and I will, too, if I'm smart!"

To tell the truth, much as she tried to hide it from herself, the element of romance was always present in her dreams. She didn't want a vocation so much as she wished for an adventure—an adventure of youth and love and success; a drama, if you like—something imaginative, something to appeal to the spirit as well as to the mind.