Somebodys Little Girl | Page 5

playing in the sand.
She scarcely wondered why she did not leave the crib-bed to sit on the long gallery-step in a row with all the other little girls, all with their feet on the gravel, and all eating the tiny cakes that Sister Ignatius made, while Sister Angela sat on the bench under the magnolia-tree and looked at the row of little girls.
If sometimes just at waking from fitful sleep in her crib-bed there came to her just a thought, or a remembrance, of a great big soft white cat that reached its paw out and softly touched her cheek, it came to her only like the touch of fancy in a big soft white dream.
Often Only-Just-Ladies came and talked over her little white crib with Sister Helen Vincula.
Bessie Bell's little fingers were no longer pink and round now; they lay just white, so white and small, on the white spread. And Bessie Bell did not mind how quiet she was told to be, for she was too tired to want to make any noise at all.
One day it happened that an Only-Just-Lady came and said: ``Sister Helen Vincula, I want to give you a ticket to carry you away to the high mountain, and I want you to go to stay a month in my house on the mountain, and I want you to carry this little sick girl with you. And when you are there, Sister Helen Vincula, my bread-man will bring you bread, and my milk-man will bring you milk, and my market-man from the cove will bring you apples and eggs, and all the rest of the good things that come up the mountain from the warm caves.''
``For,'' the Only-Just-Lady said, ``I want this little sick girl to grow well again, and I want her little arms and legs and fingers to get round and pink again.''
Bessie Bell thought that that was a very pretty tale that the Lady was telling, but she did not know or understand that that tale was about her. Then the Only-Just-Lady said, ``Sister Helen Vincula, it will do you good, too, as well as this little girl to stay in the high mountains.
Not until all of Bessie Bell's little blue checked aprons, and all of her little blue dresses, and all of her little white petticoats, and all of her little white night-gowns, and even the tiny old night-gown with the linen thread name worked on it, had been put with all the rest of her small belongings into the old trunk with brass tacks in the leather, the old, old trunk that had belonged to Sister Helen Vincula, did Bessie Bell know that it was herself, little Bessie Bell, who was going away Somewhere.
* * * * * *

It was a very strange new world to Bessie Bell, that new world up on the High Mountain.
She did not think the grand views off the edge of the high mountain so strange. But she loved to look out on those views as she stood by Sister Helen Vincula on the graycliff; Sister Helen Vincula holding her hand very fast while they both looked down into the valleys and coves. As the shadows of evening crept up to the cliff whereon they stood, and as those shadows folded round and round the points and coves, those points and caves lying below and beyond fold over fold, everything grew purple and violet.
Everything grew so purple, and so violet, and so great, and so wide that it seemed sometimes to the little girl, standing on the cliff by Sister Helen Vincula, that she was looking right down into the heart of a violet as great, as wide--as great, as wide--as the whole world.
But this did not seem so strange to Bessie Bell, for she yet remembered that window out of which one could see just small, green, moving things, and of which great grown people had told her, ``No, Bessie Bell, there is no such window in all the world.''
So in her own way she thought that maybe after awhile that the big, big violet might drift away, away, and great grown people might say, ``No, Bessie Bell, there never was a violet in all the world like that.''
It was the people--and all the people--of that new world that seemed so strange to Bessie Bell.
There were children, and children in all the summer cabins on that high mountain.
And those children did not walk in rows.
And those children did not do things by one hours.
And those children did not wash their hands in little white basins sitting in rows on long back gallery benches.
It was strange to Bessie Bell that those children did not sit in rows to eat tiny cakes with caraway seeds in them while Sister Angela sat on the bench under