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Theodora, Gift Of God
by
At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the gift of God. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the perambulator’s handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources, and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.
Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and disprized gift of God.
“Stop it, I tell you,” she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. “Stop it, or mamma will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch.” But Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of promise. “If you’ll stop yellin’ now I’ll see that my prince husband lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice being a goose-girl,” she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to charm. “If I didn’t have to marry that prince an’ be a queen I guess I’d been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it’s lovely work on the hills behind a palace with all the knights ridin’ by an’ sayin’, ‘Fair maid, did’st see a boar pass by this way?’ You don’t have to be afraid–you’d never have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn’t never see no boars, and the knights gave ’em a piece of gold an’ smiled on ’em, and the sunshine shined on ’em, an’ they had a lovely time.”
Having stumbled into the road to peace of conscience, Mary trod it bravely and joyously. Theodora’s future rank increased with the decrease of her present comfort, but her posts, though lofty and remunerative, were never such as would bring her into intimate contact with the person of the queen.
She was betrothed to the son of a noble, and very distant, house after an afternoon when the perambulator, ill-trained to cross-country work, balked at the first stone wall on the way to the old ladies’ house. It was then dragged backward for a judicious distance and faced at the obstacle at a mad gallop. Umbrella down, handle up, wheels madly whirring, it was forced to the jump.
Again it refused, reared high into the air, stood for an instant upon its hind wheels and then fell supinely on its side, shedding its blankets, its pillows, and Theodora upon the cold, hard stones.
After that her rise was rapid, and the distance separating her from her sister’s elaborate court more perilous and more beset with seas and boars and mountains and robbers. She was allowed to wed her high-born betrothed when she had been forgotten for three hours while Mary learned a heart-rending poem commencing, “Oh, hath she then failed in her troth, the beautiful maid I adore?” until even Miss Susan could only weep in intense enjoyment and could suggest; no improvement in the recitation.
On another occasion Mary was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal; and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready for its customary occupant that young person was in a position to claim heavy damages.