Polly of the Circus | Page 8

time had enjoyed Mandy's tirades against her husband, but when she began calling shrilly out of the window to chance acquaintances for news of him, he slipped quietly into the next room to finish to-morrow's sermon. Mandy renewed her operations at the window with increased vigour when the pastor had gone. She was barely saved from pitching head foremost into the lot, by the timely arrival of Deacon Strong's daughter, who managed, with difficulty, to connect the excited woman's feet with the floor.
"Foh de Lor' sake!" Mandy gasped, as she stood panting for breath and blinking at the pretty, young, apple-faced Julia; "I was suah most gone dat time." Then followed another outburst against the delinquent Hasty.
But the deacon's daughter did not hear; her eyes were already wandering anxiously to the lights and the tinsel of the little world beyond the window.
This was not the first time to-day that Mandy had found herself talking to space. There had been a steady stream of callers at the parsonage since eleven that morning, but she had long ago confided to the pastor that she suspected their reasons.
"Dey comes in here a-trackin' up my floors," she said, "and a-askin' why you don' stop de circus from a-showin' nex' to de church and den a-cranin' afar necks out de winder, till I can't get no housework done."
"That's only human nature," Douglas had answered with a laugh; but Mandy had declared that she knew another name for it, and had mumbled something about "hypocritters," as she seized her broom and began to sweep imaginary tracks from in front of the door.
Many times she had made up her mind to let the next caller know just what she thought of "hypocritters," but her determination was usually weakened by her still greater desire to excite increased wonder in the faces of her visitors.
Divided between these two inclinations, she gazed at Julia now; the shining eyes of the deacon's daughter conquered, and she launched forth into an eager description of how she had just seen a "wondeful striped anamule" with a "pow'ful long neck walk right out of the tent," and how he had "come apart afore her very eyes," and two men had slipped "right out a' his insides." Mandy was so carried away by her own eloquence and so busy showing Julia the sights beyond the window, that she did not hear Miss Perkins, the thin-lipped spinster, who entered, followed by the Widow Willoughby dragging her seven-year-old son Willie by the hand.
The women were protesting because their choir practice of "What Shall the Harvest Be?" had been interrupted by the unrequested acompaniment{sic} of the "hoochie coochie" from the nearby circus band.
"It's scandalous!" Miss Perkins snapped. "Scandalous! And SOMEBODY ought to stop it." She glanced about with an unmistakable air of grievance at the closed doors, feeling that the pastor was undoubtedly behind one of them, when he ought to be out taking action against the things that her soul abominated.
"Well, I'm sure I'VE done all that I could," piped the widow, with a meek, martyred air. She was always martyred. She considered it an appropriate attitude for a widow. "He can't blame ME if the choir is out of key to-morrow." "Mercy me!" interrupted the spinster, "if there isn't Julia Strong a-leaning right out of that window a-looking at the circus, and her pa a deacon of the church, and this the house of the pastor. It's shocking! I must go to her."
"Ma, let me see, too," begged Willie, as he tugged at his mother's skirts.
Mrs. Willoughby hesitated. Miss Perkins was certainly taking a long while for her argument with Julia. The glow from the red powder outside the window was positively alarming.
"Dear me!" she said, "I wonder if there can be a fire." And with this pretext for investigation, she, too, joined the little group at the window.
A few moments later when Douglas entered for a fresh supply of paper, the backs of the company were toward him. He crossed to the study table without disturbing his visitors, and smiled to himself at the eager way in which they were hanging out of the window.
Douglas was a sturdy young man of eight and twenty, frank and boyish in manner, confident and light-hearted in spirit. He had seemed too young to the deacons when he was appointed to their church, and his keen enjoyment of outdoor games and other healthful sports robbed him of a certain dignity in their eyes. Some of the women of the congregation had been inclined to side with the deacons, for it hurt their vanity that the pastor found so many other interests when he might have been sitting in dark, stuffy rooms discussing theology with them; but Douglas had been either unconscious of or indifferent to their resentment, and had