THE IRON AGE
They 'ad a pryer for our 'eathen 'earts
As they washed us down with suds,
An' thort as we 'ad a bran' new soul
W'en they'd burnt our 'Ounds-Ditch duds.
THE IRON AGE
PEGGY was certainly a tomboy. She openly scoffed at "The Pansy Stories" and "Little Wives" and "The Wide, Wide World," but strange to say, devoured all such books as "The Boys' Own Annual," "Deadwood Dick," "The Headless Horseman; or The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch," and any literature on Indians, dire adventure, and bloodshed which came into her hands.
And many tears were shed over poor Miss Peggy, and many were the solemn and supposedly impressive lectures read to her. But for all those lectures she continued to slide down the banisters, and openly whistle before company. In fact Miss Peggy did not approve of company, and was never happier than when staring the rector's nervous wife out of countenance.
Peggy took an unholy delight in tumbling on the hay in the stables, though Hawkins, the coachman, always was at pains to point out to her that 'orses could never heat 'ay as was trampled on, and artfully, but uselessly, insinuated that a species of horrible green snake abounded in the mows.
She killed mice and toads without a jot of fear, and could whittle with a jack-knife like a boy. When she cut her finger she tore a piece from the hem of her petticoat, bound up the wound, and went on with her work. She had climbed every tree in the garden, as one might easily know from the tell-tale holes always in her stockings. She also had a passion for scaling the grapevine arbour, against orders, because from the top she could look down into the next yard and make faces at the old gardener there, who was under dark suspicion of having poisoned a Shanghai rooster that had been Peggy's dearly beloved pet for one happy year.
Teddie, or rather Master Edward Branbury Bronson, who lived two doors distant, was her bosom friend and confidant, and poor Teddie it was she slapped, and bullied, and berated, and ordered about in a way that was wonderful to behold. But Teddie's mother was warned by kindly and interested neighbours that the little boy ought not to come in contact with such a wild and unruly child as Peggy. So she straightway forbade the weeping and broken-hearted Teddie to speak to his old playmate, whose parents, she sighed, had utterly ruined the poor child's character.
But Peggy made a telephone of a ball of waxed string and two tomato tins, and after much climbing of walls and fences and ruining of skirts, it was duly stretched from garden to garden.
Over this telephone the parted lovers registered vows of constancy and carried on the most delightful and absorbing conversations. And Teddie might never have felt his exile had not the old gardener in the intervening yard discovered the string and innocently made use of it for tying up his currant bushes. For this unpardonable act the old gardener was accosted daily and vindictively with mysterious and unaccountable volleys of stones from one side of the garden and green apples from the other. The stones, of course, came from Peggy's side. Miss Peggy never believed in doing things by halves.
Then followed three weeks of terrible loneliness, which might have ended either tragically or in an out-and-out elopement, had not the unstable Peggy purchased a brindled street pup for eight pennies, three silver spoons carried away from the table for purposes of exchange in general, and the gardener's wheelbarrow, whose disappearance, by the way, Hawkins could never account for.
But the brindled pup was currish and cowardly and mongrel to the backbone, and after being overfed and kicked and scuffed and dragged reluctantly about by Peggy for one week, he made his timely escape and was seen no more.
Then Peggy fell on evil days, and everything in some way went wrong with her. If she was locked up in the Blue Room she drew figures on the wall paper, and if she was sent to bed without dinner—for Peggy dined at night—she would groan so loudly and so eloquently with stomach-aches that her father would end up by bringing her a load of good things, for which she would fall on his neck and kiss him a dozen times under his prickly old moustache and make him sit down on the bed and tell her about Custer's Last Stand, while she devoured the last bite and shook the crumbs out of the sheets and turned over and went to sleep quite contented and quite unpunished. More than once, therefore, poor Peggy's mamma wept long and bitterly at her child's unregenerate ways, while Peggy's father admitted she was a little she-devil, and ought to be shut up in a convent, or sent somewhere. Just where he did not know.
So when Peggy's Aunt Frances came to their house for a month or two she was looked upon as the god from the machine in the destiny of Peggy. Frances was just out of her teens, true as steel, and the one being whom Peggy looked up to in awe. This was, as she frankly admitted to Ali Baba, because her Aunt Frankie was beautiful, like the angels in the church windows that always filled her with a mysterious veneration, and also because her Aunt Frankie liked Ali Baba. Ali Baba he had always been called, ever since he told Peggy the stories of the Forty Thieves, though his right name was Dr. Thomas Etherington, which did n't count with Peggy.
Now, Ali Baba had been wise in his generation and had realised that he must have Peggy as his friend at court.
When candies and boxes of flowers came to the house they were always for Miss Peggy. The candies she gorged herself upon, and the flowers she flung away, not knowing they were afterwards surreptitiously gathered up by her Aunt Frankie, for reasons poor little Peggy could never know and perhaps never understand.
To make sure of such a powerful ally, Ali Baba made open and uninterrupted love to Peggy, who in return daily soiled his collars, rumpled up his hair, went through his pockets, climbed on his shoulders, and in time even forgot to think of her long-lost Teddie.
The woman who secretly treasured Ali Baba's flowers was a wise little lady, and understood, of course, and said nothing.
But as time went on, one fine day she and her Ali Baba fell out, as all young people will. Peggy may or may not have been at the bottom of it, for the working of a woman's heart is an inscrutable mystery to man.
"Good-night—and good-bye," cried Ali Baba's sweetheart imperiously, through her tears. "I can—I can never see you again. Hereafter," with a pitiful little gulp, "hereafter our paths must part. And if you call I shall not be in—there!"
"Very well, dear, if you're bound to be silly," said Ali Baba, cheerily. "But I'm coming up to play with Peggy every day. Now if I loved you, Peggy, you would n't throw me over, would you, little one?"
A sudden pallor swept over the listening child's face. Poor little Peggy, she did n't know that the tenderness of tone in that question was meant for other ears. She clung to Ali Baba in a moment's passion of affection. Then she slipped away from him, in shamed silence, as a woman might.
"And shan't we have fun though, eh, Peggy?" said Ali Baba.
Peggy looked at the other girl, and saw the unspoken misery on her face. Then Ali Baba caught her up in his big arms and she forgot again.
"Won't we, though! And Hawkins won't be here, and we'll play trolley cars in the brougham, and we'll unbury the dead cat and have another funeral, and you can throw green apples at the Browns' gardener."
"And we'll play hare and hounds," said Ali Baba, "and piggie-in-the-hole, and French and English, and—and all the rest! And you'll be my girl after this, my sure-enough girl, and never go back on me, and you'll wait for me, and we'll marry each other some day and be happy ever afterwards."
When Ali Baba went away, Peggy sat wrapped in thought for some time. A new world had opened up for her. She sighed.
"You don't really care, do you, Aunt Frankie?" she asked with great gravity.
The woman, who was gazing absently out of the window, shook her head, and seemed to swallow something that stuck in her throat.
"Teddie was such a baby, you know, Aunt Frankie! And you won't care if I don't ask you to come when we unbury the cat?"
Again the other shook her head, but this time with a smile.
"And you don't mind me being his sure-enough girl after this, do you?" Then there was a pause. "It's just as well, you know, Aunt Frankie, because he often said he'd wait and marry me if I truly wanted him to. And Ali Baba, dear old Ali Baba, is so nice." There was another long pause. "Aunt Frankie, don't you think it's—it's piggy of mamma to keep me in these hor'ble short skirts?"
But the other went away without answering, and left the child still wrapped in thought.
When Ali Baba came as he had promised, Peggy's aunt had locked herself in her room, and Ali Baba accordingly did not play with as light a heart as usual. And Peggy, too, was not the old Peggy. A most wonderful change had taken place. The holes in her stockings were all carefully mended, and Susette, Peggy's French maid, had been commanded to lay out an entire clean dress for her, a command unique in the régime of Susette.
The second day that Ali Baba came there was a still more mysterious change in Peggy. She carried her hands awkwardly. When Ali Baba kissed her there was a tingle in the touch—the first her childish lips had ever felt. She wore her hated new boots that squeaked, and Susette had been made to sew an extension on her meagre petticoat. For the first time in her life she had felt ashamed of her legs. Her hair was slicked down with water, and she was silent and ill at ease.
She did not try to climb up Ali Baba that day as if he were an apple-tree, and when he called her Peggy she told him with great gravity that Peggy was a baby's name, and that she wished he would call her Marjorie.
That day Peggy's mamma saw her walking sedately down the stairs, without so much as touching the banister, and wondered if the poor child was ill again.
The next time Ali Baba came, Peggy sat waiting with her hands in her lap. She had stolen twelve of Susette's brass hairpins, and had done her frowsy little curls up in a ridiculous bob on the top of her head. Her heart was heavy, nevertheless, for she had found out for the first time that she had freckles—hundreds of them.
When Ali Baba came in he was in unusual good spirits, for he picked up Miss Peggy and impertinently kissed her on her little freckled nose and asked where her Aunt Frankie was.
Peggy resented that familiarity of address, whereupon Ali Baba kissed her again, and told her not to get priggish.
Peggy stamped her foot with rage. She would let Ali Baba know she was not a baby.
Ali Baba laughed and took her struggling in his arms, as he would hold an infant.
"I hate you, I hate you!" she cried hotly, as Ali Baba laughingly made his escape.
That night some one came down to dinner wearing a ring with one big shiny diamond in it, and an unusual pinkiness in her cheeks. Peggy did not understand its exact meaning, but she knew it must have come from Ali Baba. The thought filled her with a vague unrest, for Ali Baba scarcely spoke to her all dinner-time. She was silent and miserable as the meal went on. Her mother and father exchanged glances as they noted the change. Miss Peggy was at last learning to act more like a little lady at the table! But there was a mystery and constraint about that dinner that the child did not understand. She felt very lonesome. Ali Baba had forgotten the woman he had promised to marry if she would wait for him!
"When are you going to make your peace with Peggy?" she heard her Aunt Frankie laughingly ask Ali Baba.
"Oh, I'll have to do that when I'm her cross old uncle, shan't I, Peggy?" laughed back Ali Baba. "But Peggy is n't the same little girl I used to know. The Boogie man must have carried off my little Peggy!"
With one sickening flash the truth dawned on Peggy. Her uncle! Her uncle! Her heart jumped up into her throat, and in her agony she tore the lace Susette had sewn so carefully on her dress—sewn on for him! The first petal had fallen from the rose of her childhood.
"Why, Peggy, dear, what is it?" asked her mother in alarm.
Peggy did not and could not answer. A new and terrible sense of desertion and loneliness was eating at her heart. A blinding mist came before her eyes, and, to her unutterable shame, she wept—broke down and cried like a baby before Ali Baba and all the others.
She shook off the arm her mother had slipped about her, pushed over the cream pitcher, flung her own pink plate on the floor, turned from the table and fled from the room. She did not care where, so long as it was out of the house and out of his sight.
"How—how extraordinary!" gasped Ali Baba.
The butler was smiling behind his hand. Peggy saw it, and as she went past she kicked him vigorously and viciously on the shins.
"Poor Peggy," said the woman with the diamond ring, as she held Ali Baba's hand under the table. She understood.
Up in the hay-mow, to the consternation of the listening Hawkins, Peggy was crying as if her heart was broken for all time.
"Yes," the child's mother was saying over the coffee, "Peggy is just at the awkward age, is n't she?"