The Daughters of the Little Grey House
by Marion Ames Taggart · English · Gutenberg #48604 · 396,364 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Daughters of the Little Grey House
Author: Marion Ames Taggart
Release date: March 29, 2015 [eBook #48604]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DAUGHTERS OF THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE ***
THE DAUGHTERS OF
THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE
BY
MARION AMES TAGGART
AUTHOR OF THE LITTLE GREY HOUSE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE McCLURE COMPANY
MCMVII
* * * * *
_Copyright, 1907, by The McClure Company_
Published, October, 1907
* * * * *
_To
My Cousin
Ella T. Johnson, with love_
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. ITS INMATES 3
II. ITS GUESTS 21
III. ITS OLD FRIENDS 39
IV. ITS DREADFUL NIGHT 57
V. ITS HERO 74
VI. ITS LEAN-TO ROOM 94
VII. ITS AMBITIONS 113
VIII. ITS BLENDED ROMANCE 130
IX. ITS TRIUMPH 148
X. ITS AFTERMATH 168
XI. ITS DEADLY INSULT 186
XII. ITS SEPARATE ELL 204
XIII. ITS GAINS AND LOSSES 225
XIV. ITS RENUNCIATIONS 244
XV. ITS FIRST WEDDING 264
XVI. ITS DENIAL AND ITS GIFT 277
XVII. ITS ADAMANTINE DAUGHTER 296
XVIII. ITS GLAD SURRENDER 315
* * * * *
DAUGHTERS OF LITTLE GREY HOUSE
* * * * *
CHAPTER ONE
ITS INMATES
"How do you know when you're a young lady?" asked Roberta Grey.
She was sitting before the ancient mahogany dressing-table in her--and
Wythie's--room, unblushingly regarding herself in the mirror, while
the fingers of both hands, supporting her brilliant face, experimented
with changes in it by pushing up the delicate eyebrows into quite a
celestial angle.
Frances Silsby, from the rocking-chair by the window, and Wythie on the
foot of the bed, laughed.
"I know I'm young by the record in the Bible--and by the way I feel,"
said Frances. "And I know I'm a lady by the company I keep, since
'birds of a feather,' and so forth." Frances made a deep salaam almost
to the floor, taking advantage of the forward tilt of the rocking-chair
to deepen it.
"That's the retort courteous, Francie. You will be an ornament to the
diplomatic circle when you are Lady Ambassadress to the court of St.
James'. But I should like to know how to be sure one's reluctant feet
have crossed the meeting point of the brook and the river," insisted
Rob.
"_Lady_ Ambassadress, Rob?" hinted Oswyth. "You don't think that is
tautological, do you? You know in 'Rudder Grange' they never noticed
that Pomona had grown up until a young man walked home with her one
night, and loitered at the gate; perhaps that's the test," added
Wythie slyly. Bruce Rutherford had come down with Rob from Frances'
the previous night alone, and not with Basil and Bartlemy to bear them
company, as usual, hence Wythie's suggestion had a personal application.
"If one had to put on shoes and stockings, for instance, after she
ceased to stand where the brook and river meet, she would know that she
had waded in and had come out on the other side, a young lady," Rob
went on with slightly heightened colour, ignoring her sister. "That's
it; I have it!" she cried, wheeling around to look at her audience
outside the glass. "It is something of the sort--it's the hair! I am
just eighteen, but I wear my hair in a braid, with a big bow where it
is turned up on the top of my head. If I discarded that bow, and made a
great soft knot of hair 'on the top of my head, in the place where the
wool ought to grow'"--Rob chanted this direct quotation--"I should be a
young lady! I think I'll do it!"
She jumped up, snatched a kimono from a hook in the closet, threw
it over her shoulders, dropped back into her chair before the
dressing-table and in a twinkling had the pins out of her braid; the
bow, badge of young girlhood, thrown on the table, and her rebellious,
red-brown hair tumbling about her slender shoulders in a mass of
beautiful colour.
"Wythie is already done up, and Frances, too. I have been wondering
why they seemed so much more the real thing than I did, and I never
discovered till now," said Rob, speaking with difficulty as she sat,
head almost touching her lap, gathering her wealth of locks into her
hand. "Now, I am going to take my place among my peers," she added,
righting herself, displaying crimson cheeks as she faced the glass,
and twisting and coaxing her hair to the crown of her head. "You shall
see me in my true dignity henceforth. Won't it be pathetic, when the
fashion-books come and Mardy has no longer any interest in those
charming pages headed: Styles for Young Girls? Thank goodness, there
is Prue still, but even she is sixteen, and that means her hours are
numbered. I didn't want to grow up, and I mean to italicize the _young_
in my title of young lady just as long as I can, but I think I'm grown
up. There, will that do?"
Rob arose as she spoke and faced her sister and her friend. She was
tall, slender, radiant with nervous energy and quick wit; pretty, yet
charming more than pretty. The sort of girl that she had promised to
be; one who would carry everything before her with her high courage,
high standards, and her flashing charm of variety in colouring and
expression. Wythie was the same Wythie that she had been always;
pretty, womanly, gentle, sweet, with goodness, pure, simple,
unadulterated goodness, shining from her steady eyes and smiling
lips. Frances Silsby had not changed much. She, too, was pretty in
an unobtrusive way, and had grown more so in growing older. "She was
a girl," Bruce Rutherford said, "whom one would endorse or cash at
sight," and she deserved the trust that she inspired. But Rob swept
everything before her; no one ever stopped to criticise nor analyse
Rob. She flashed on the scene, and instantly every eye was filled
with the variable charm of her face, which defied regular laws of
beauty. Every heart went out to the warmth of her magnetic presence and
kindliness of nature; while no one could be sceptic enough to doubt her
crystal purity of purpose and truth.
Oswyth loved her with adoring love, and Frances regarded her as the
embodiment of all her ideals, just as she had regarded her from her
first meeting with Rob at the great age of three.
In the fifteen months that had passed since Rob's resolution had
prevented the sacrifice of her beloved "Patergrey's" legacy to his
family, and had secured for the Greys the full value of the patent into
which he had poured the best effort of years of his pathetic life,
both Oswyth and Rob had blossomed into girls of nineteen, and eighteen
respectively, and into a fulness of life and happiness such as they
could never have attained but that the stress and strain of anxiety
and even want, had thus been removed. They were not wealthy people, by
any means, these blithe and busy Greys, but they possessed, now, what
seemed contrastingly like wealth to them, and which was quite enough
to satisfy the true standards and tastes which their noble mother had
given them. And the little grey house, which had always seemed rather
like one of themselves than a mere house, had blossomed with its
daughters into fuller adornment and cheerfulness during this year and
a quarter. Many pretty modern things had crept in to take their places
among the riches of inherited mahogany, pewter and china which were the
little grey house's glory and pride.
"Well, you don't say anything! Don't you like me in my new rôle of full
blown young lady, sans braid, sans bow, sans everything that fettered
me in the bud?" demanded Rob, as Frances and Wythie gazed at her
without speaking.
"You are lovely, Robin dear," said Wythie, "but somehow it makes me
feel a little sorry to see the familiar bow discarded, and your hair
done up with a full grown _do_! I am so used to my young girl sister!"
"You have preceded me a-down the knotty way, Wythie," said Rob. "See
what dreadful puns you force me to in order to cheer you when you
become pensive! Your hair has been knotted and twisted up for a year.
You preceded me into the world by a twelvemonth, and dutifully I follow
you, one year in retard, in the matter of full-grown hair-dressing.
Isn't it all right, Francie?"
"The rightest kind of right, Rob," said Frances emphatically. "You are
eighteen, and it is time you came into your kingdom--besides, it is
most becoming! I only wish I could make my hair puff and lie up loose
like that."
For Frances' hair was of that fine, yet determined kind which is no
more capable of trifling with life than were the Puritan ancestors from
whom it was derived.
"There is no power on earth could make mine lie down smooth and
decorous like yours," retorted Rob, surveying with half approval, half
disfavour her hair which, like her face, was as full of ripples and
curves as ever. "Then, on the whole, the sentiment of the meeting is in
favour of the new departure. Girls, you have been singularly fortunate!
You have seen the larva turn into the butterfly--and you didn't have
to stand a glass over me either! I am now, Roberta Grey, spinster, and
I will fold up my hair-bow and present it to Prudence to have and to
hold, and to use until her hour of eighteen sounds."
"Here she comes now, with your mother," announced Frances from her seat
by the window.
"They went up to Aunt Azraella's, and then Mardy was going to Cousin
Charlotte's, while Prue went to the post-office. They were to meet at
Cousin Charlotte's, and come home together. I hope Mardy isn't tired,"
said Wythie, untwining herself from her Turkish position on the foot
of the bed, and running to look over Frances' shoulder and to wave her
hand at the beloved mother and Prudence.
Prue ran up-stairs; the girls heard Mrs. Grey going through the house
to find Lydia in the kitchen. Accustomed as she was to seeing Prue,
Frances felt anew, as she always did each time that she saw her, the
startling quality of the youngest Grey girl's great beauty. During the
past year Prue had grown amazingly, and had shot up into a slender
creature that topped by nearly a head Rob, who had seemed fairly tall
until Prue accomplished this feat. Her complexion was white with not a
hint of colour, unless it was brought there by her emotions, or whipped
into her cheeks by the breeze. Her features were faultlessly regular;
her hair bright gold, silky and abundant, flying like floss around her
low white brow. Her lips relieved the pallor of her face by their warm
crimson, and from under the golden crown of hair, which the tall young
creature wore proudly, there looked out a pair of large dark brown eyes
that startled one by their contrast with their surroundings. There was
no question that Prue was not only the beauty of the family, but that
she had grown into a beauty of a rare type and of a very high rank.
Unfortunately, she was conscious of her effect, although she was hardly
to blame for this, since every one, except her wise mother and sisters,
flattered her. It was a lucky thing for Prue that Wythie's sweetness
and Rob's charm surpassed in the long run the attraction of Prue's
dazzling beauty; for, otherwise, she might have forgotten altogether
that beauty is by no means the only gift that the good fairies can
bestow at a christening.
"I thought I should find you here, Frances. Here is a letter for you,
Rob, but there was no other. I saw Battalion B down by the post-office;
I thought they went back this morning," said Prue, dropping a letter in
Rob's lap, and laying her hat on her knee as she seated herself beside
Wythie and picked out the edges of its bows.
"No; Basil said he had to meet Mr. Dinsmore--they are having some
trouble with their landlord, and Basil said if they couldn't get it
straightened up they would buy the Caldwell place. It isn't really
their landlord, but his agent that bothers them," said Wythie, trying
to mention Basil Rutherford's name in the same old, easy, unconscious
way she had used it when Battalion B and the Grey girls had first
become friends. "And Bruce wanted to see Dr. Fairbairn, so they all
waited to go back to New Haven this afternoon--of course Bartlemy
waited to go with Basil and Bruce."
"Basil and Bruce both said that they would buy the Caldwell place
rather than leave Fayre," smiled Frances, and Wythie blushed; but Rob
was deep in her letter and did not heed. "Do you know, Wythie, I don't
believe we realize what a lot of money those boys must have?" Frances
continued. "You know they never say anything directly, but here they
are, all three of them in Yale, keeping this place here, and having
every wish gratified--all this means wealth, Oswyth, my dear. You
know papa is called the richest man in Fayre, but he says Commodore
Rutherford must have a great deal more than he has, for his boys to do
all this. They are so nice and simple that somehow they seem to have
the effect of being quite poor, but they are far from that."
"It doesn't make people simple to be poor, Francie; it makes them
self-conscious and generally horrid. I have so recently escaped the
throes of dire poverty, you know, that I speak by the book. The reason
Battalion B are such nice, straightforward boys is that they don't have
to think of money at all, and that--"
"That they are upright, straightforward, honest boys, well-bred, and
all 'round fine," said Mrs. Grey, entering and interrupting Rob. "What
nonsense you do talk, Robin, you chatterbox! I think Wren would be a
better name for you than Robin! As though money made people or unmade
them, by its possession or lack! Qualities are intrinsic, as you know
quite well, my dear. The boys are gentlemen, in the true sense of that
abused old word, and would be such were they kings or beggars. Whom is
your letter from; isn't it Hester Baldwin?"
"Yes, Mardy," said Rob meekly. "Please don't call me Wren; it doesn't
sound lofty and dignified, somehow. Don't you see that I've done my
hair up in what Wythie called 'a grown-up do'? I'd hate to be called
Wren with my hair done up--it's such an abbreviated bird!"
"Rob, you are so very silly!" smiled Mrs. Grey reproachfully. "Your
hair looks well, dear, but must I lose the last vestige of my little
Rob?"
"Yes, Mardy; she is gone but not forgotten. Prue, here before these
witnesses, I give you my last-worn hair-bow, and these, and these,"
said Rob, hastily rummaging in her drawer and producing several big,
soft ribbon bows which she tossed into Prue's lap.
"Much obliged," said Prue, beginning to fold her acquisitions. "I
think that I shall give up hair ribbons before I am eighteen; whom will
mine descend to?"
"There are always little girls, Prudy, though they may not be little
Grey ones," said Rob wisely. "Your ribbons will probably go to little
Polly Flinders. How did you find our relatives, Mardy? Is Aunt Azraella
still herself, and is dear Cousin Peace well?"
"Aunt Azraella has a cold, Rob; it isn't serious, but she is nursing
it. I think it would be as well if you and Wythie would go up there
after tea. And Charlotte looked tired. I fear it is too much for her to
go on keeping house there, now that she is alone. The dear soul clings
to her life-long home, but without some one besides Annie to look after
her it seems to me unsafe for her to live there," said Mrs. Grey,
looking anxious. "Why, what did Hester say, Rob? I forgot to ask you?"
"And you may well ask!" cried Rob, springing to her feet. "How could
I forget to tell you? She says that she wants to bring her favourite
cousin here to-morrow, and that if she doesn't hear from us to the
contrary she will assume that it is all right to do so, and come."
"Her cousin? What cousin is it? Does she mean to stay with us, or
merely to call? asked Mrs. Grey with a quick mental outlook over the
domestic conditions for guests.
"To lunch only," said Rob, looking over her letter. "The cousin is that
Lester Baldwin of whom she has talked so much. He is named after her
father, with the John dropped. He is young--twenty something--and has
been in Japan for three years. Hester thinks there never was such a
boy. When we wave our Battalion B in her face and she praises them, you
can see her reserving her opinion of Lester. We shall let them come,
Mardy?"
"Oh, yes, of course," said that motherly woman. "It is curious, but
with all her advantages I feel as though I must do everything I can to
make Hester happy."
"She just escaped being morbid," said Wythie rising. "Frances, you will
excuse me if I leave you to Rob and baby Prue, and go to look over the
pantry? There is time for one of us to go down again with orders if
there is anything that we must have for the lunch to-morrow. Suppose I
go down with orders, and stop at Aunt Azraella's, Mardy? Then Rob won't
have to go."
"You forget that I am now the favourite niece, Wythie dear," said Rob.
"But go if you will, and try to usurp that proud position; I will
never upbraid you."
Wythie smiled her quiet smile and left the room. Just beyond the
door she met with Kiku-san, grown into a mountain of a cat, but more
clingingly kittenfied and dependent than ever. Wythie swung him to her
shoulder just as she had always done since he had come to them, a white
down-ball with pink trimmings, and continued her way to the kitchen to
interview Lydia.
Lydia was the young woman who had come to preside over that department
when the sale of the bricquette machine patent had made it possible
for the Greys to have some one to help them in the tiresome routine of
housework.
"Help" was what Lydia was, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, used
as a particularly proper--and personal--noun. She was a most staid and
respectable young woman of native stock antedating Revolutionary days.
She could not have been more than half-way through her second decade
of years, but she seemed removed by eons from anything approaching to
youthful pleasures, not to say follies.
She had scorned domestic service, having preferred attending Fayre's
bake-shop, until she learned that the Greys were seeking "help"; then
she offered herself for the position, which she had filled from that
day to the present one. The Greys were immensely flattered by her
preference for them over all their townsfolk until they discovered
that Lydia had been willing to come to them because, as they had
heretofore been doing their own housework unaided, "they wouldn't feel
themselves better than she was." This humbled the Greys, but delighted
their sense of humour, and from the date of this discovery they had,
Rob said, "been vainly trying to feel themselves as good as Lydia."
Thus Lydia was a character, in the possession of whom the merry Greys
revelled, not less for her competent service than for her unconscious
contributions to their mirth. She welcomed Wythie, and Kiku-san on
Wythie's shoulder, with a solemn face raised from a small sheet which
she was attentively reading.
"Don't you think you had ought to take the pledge, Wythie?" she
demanded so unexpectedly that Wythie involuntarily glanced in the small
mirror which hung convenient to Lydia's back door to see what there was
in her appearance to warrant such a question.
"Why, no, Lyddie," she said rallying and with difficulty keeping her
lips straight. "I can't say I have felt any special need of it. What
made you ask that?"
"This paper," said Lydia, tapping the sheet she held as if Doom were
wrapped in it. "I get it sent me from Maine; it's a warning. I think
you had ought to take the pledge, you and Roberta and Prue, the whole
of you. There's the Rutherford boys."
"Where?" cried Wythie, looking hastily out of the window, for the
Rutherford boys were, she supposed, safely back at college by this
time. "Oh, you mean we ought to take the pledge on the boys' account?
Well, but you see, Lydia, we never give the boys wine, and they are
perfectly safe, as far as I can see----"
"It's the example," said this serious young woman severely, "I'm
a-going to sign. This paper has made me see I owe it to my conscience
to Protest--" she spoke the word with a capital--"and Protect the weak
from themselves. Was you going to get something?" she added, for Wythie
beat a retreat to the pantry, hiding her face in Kiku-san's fur. Lydia
frequently propounded moral questions to Wythie and Rob when they came
upon her, or were working with her, but thus far they had not grown
accustomed to these questions to the extent of meeting them with the
gravity which their handmaid felt they deserved.
"No," came Wythie's voice huskily from the depths of the pantry. "No,
Lyddie, I don't want anything, except to see what we have in the house
toward a luncheon-party to-morrow. Hester Baldwin is coming out from
New York, bringing a young man cousin of hers whom we have never seen,
so I want them to have something particularly nice. I thought we would
take account of stock and plan our lunch, and that I would go down
to-night to order what we needed before tea. Then I shall be here all
the morning to help you with some of the fancy things that take time."
"You might have lobster _à la_ Newburg," said Lydia, folding her paper
and abandoning the principles which it had just taught her with a speed
that finished Wythie's hopes of gravity.
Her laugh rang out so infectiously that her mother, hearing it
up-stairs, smiled in sympathy.
"Isn't that appropriate?" said Lydia, standing rigid in displeasure.
"We couldn't have anything better," cried Wythie emphatically. "That
wasn't what I laughed at, Lyddie. And you make it so well that we are
proud of your skill, aren't we?"
"That's what made me mention it," said Lydia innocently. And Wythie
just succeeded in checking a second laugh.
But Lydia would never have guessed that Wythie laughed because the
solemn girl beside her had lost sight of her principles and the wine
in the lobster _à la_ Newburg at one and the same moment, oblivious to
all but her newly acquired skill in making the delectable dish. Lydia
had long ago abandoned all hope of understanding at what Wythie and
Rob Grey laughed so often. She had decided that it was usually mere
light-mindedness.
CHAPTER TWO
ITS GUESTS
Rob walked up and down the platform of Fayre's small station waiting
the train which was to bring her guests from New York to spend the
day. It was a day that it seemed a pity to spend; it should have been
laid by for the winter need of such weather, much as one would lay
by a golden guinea against a dark day. And no guinea could have been
more golden than this October day. The sunshine seemed to be filtered
through its atmosphere till the very air was golden, and the trees sent
their showers of yellow leaves down the shafts of sunshine in the brisk
breeze, retaining more than they gave of their cloth-of-gold garments
to brighten the quiet streets and illumine the hillsides.
Hester Baldwin had been a frequent visitor to Fayre since Rob's
expedition to New York to save her father's patent had brought her into
Hester's orbit.
An only child, with an inheritance of wealth on both sides, Hester
lacked nothing in the way of opportunities, and had been introduced to
society the previous winter, in which she had thus far found little
to interest or attract her. She was a girl of considerable strength
of character, with vaguely great aspirations; it was true that she
had barely escaped being morbid. Thus far her vocation had not been
revealed, and she moved dissatisfiedly through a life from which all
outward reasons for dissatisfaction had been removed. Rob laughed at
Hester, and told her that she was only a degree less serious than
Lydia, but she sympathized with her none the less. Rob said in private
that Hester had been misplaced; that she should have been the oldest
daughter of a struggling family of sixteen members, for whom she would
have been forced to exert herself into forgetfulness of her own soul,
and her hair-splitting self-analysis. Rob herself had never had time
to question, being early called upon to do without choice of action,
and she did not underrate the advantages of her early disadvantages in
forming her character and keeping her cheerful--though nature had more
to do with the latter than Rob knew.
The more Hester came to Fayre the more she wanted not to leave it.
Her father and mother--whom Rob had found perfect in those difficult
rôles--were naturally wrapt up in this dear only daughter, but Hester
revelled in the family life of the little grey house, and envied Rob
her chum-sisters, thinking Rob richer in her simple home than was
Hester Baldwin in her big house, with servants, society, and all the
advantages of wealth which were hers alone, and which, being alone, she
could not half enjoy.
Rob smiled to herself as she paced the platform, thinking how Hester's
pale face was that moment lighting up with joy, for the train whistled
around the bend, and in an instant would be in sight.
Hester, her cousin, an old woman, and the mail-bag were the only
passengers for Fayre. The tall girl leaving the car would have been
conspicuous, however, among many, and the young man, browned by Eastern
suns, who followed her, not less so. Hester was as tall as Prue Grey.
She had a keen, restless face, with hungry, eager grey eyes, and rather
a melancholy droop to her well-cut lips. She was not a pretty girl, but
she was distinguished looking, and would be fine looking at forty when
many of her pretty contemporaries had become entirely commonplace. She
was clad in that quiet elegance of material and style which is the
perfection of taste, utterly unattainable except one has a purse long
enough to pay for its expensive simplicity.
Rob realized that their modest competence would never let her look
as Hester did that moment; she realized it anew every time she saw
her friend again, but it troubled her no more than it troubles her
namesake, the redbreast, that he is not clad like the oriole. For while
Rob was too sensible to ignore the lesser things of life she was too
light-heartedly happy to care for them greatly.
Hester sprang off the last step of the car, beyond the conductor's
extended hand, and had Rob in her arms before her cousin could
disentangle himself from the leisurely elderly passenger and her bag
which had got between him and Hester when they were in the aisle, and
now, by dismounting from the car sidewise, one step at a time, delayed
him from following his cousin. At last he circumnavigated the old
person's bulk and came forward, laughing, to be presented to Rob.
He looked so much like a younger edition of his uncle, John Lester
Baldwin, two thirds of whose name he bore, that Rob gave him her
friendship on the spot, and the three young people walked up the hill
of Fayre's main street, talking gaily all the way to the little grey
house.
"I asked Frances to luncheon, Lester," said Rob, as they turned in at
the low gate.
"And this is the little grey house, is it?" asked Lester Baldwin at the
same moment. "I have heard of it and dreamed of it in distant Japan."
"Just an every day, little colonial house; not worth dreaming of at the
foot of Fusiyama, among the cherry blossoms and the chrysanthemums,"
smiled Rob. "But we love it dearly; it has been a little Grey house for
five generations, including us, the present girls."
"_Present_ girls?" laughed Lester Baldwin. "Or _pleasant_ girls? And
does that hint a future possibility; does it mean: Girls, at present?"
"It means: Present girls," said Rob accenting the last syllable as
Wythie and Prue appeared in the doorway, thus turning her adjective
into a verb. "Let me present you, Mr. Baldwin, to my sisters, Oswyth
and Prudence. And our friend, Miss Frances Silsby," added Rob, as she
espied Frances in the hall.
Now Kiku-san, hearing Rob's voice, had come towards the door to welcome
her. Being abnormally timid, especially fearing men, he swiftly turned
and started to flee back to the kitchen for safety as he unexpectedly
caught a glimpse of Lester Baldwin, where he had counted on finding
only Rob. At the same instant that the white cat flew back from the
door, Frances advanced towards it. There was a fearful shriek of
terror and pain from Kiku, who thought that the worst he had feared
had happened as Frances came down upon his paw; a scream of terror
from Frances, who had not time to realize what was wrong, and she was
launched headlong at the stranger, Hester's travelled cousin, before
whom she, naturally, wanted to appear at her best.
The stranger received the sudden charge with a gravity that at once
established him high in the fun-loving Greys' good opinion. Steadying
himself against the casement he caught Frances in time to save her from
being dashed headforemost down the low steps, and helped her to regain
her feet.
"Customs have changed in the States since I left home," Lester said
quietly. "We exceed the hospitality of the East--there the arriving
guests are never offered more than tea, water for their hands and,
possibly, flowers."
All five girls burst into such a peal of laughter that old Mrs.
Dinsmore, the lawyer's mother, passing on the opposite side of the
street, laughed to herself till she had long passed the little grey
house.
"That reception was caused by the one Japanese member of our family,"
said Wythie. "Our white cat, Kiku-san, being timid, retreated from your
presence and upset Frances."
"Kiku--chrysanthemum?" suggested Lester Baldwin. "Nice name for a white
cat, but I was not prepared to find you speaking Japanese here."
"We have spoken all we know of it in naming Kiku. Won't you walk into
our parlour? We are not spiders," said Rob. "Prudy, please tell Mardy
we are come."
Prue disappeared, and the others entered the beautiful parlour of
the little grey house. For it was a beautiful room with its extreme
simplicity of green walls and high white wainscoting, its splendid
old mahogany, fine pictures, books, and with the logs burning on the
hearth, which the October wind made it just cool enough indoors to
warrant.
Lester Baldwin threw himself into a hospitable chair with a long breath
of appreciation. "I see why Uncle John said they had hard work to keep
you at home, Hessie, and why you never dream of living in marble halls,
but rather in a little grey house."
"Don't you?" said Hester, pulling out the fingers of her gloves, as she
stood with one foot extended towards the warmth of the fire for the
mere luxury of it, and not because she was in the least cold. "And you
don't know it all yet."
"My cousin doesn't mean that for slang, Miss Roberta," said Lester
Baldwin.
"Thanks," remarked Rob. "We love to have people like our house. There
is something in the dear little old thing that I can't get anywhere
else--Maybe it's my own love for it," she added.
"No, it's quality," said young Baldwin. "It has an atmosphere that is
quite indescribable that is partly the result of your love for it, no
doubt, but it is also the very delightful architecture of the house,
its simplicity and harmony, and its venerableness. An artist would envy
you it, Miss Roberta."
"Oh, I forgot for the moment that you were an architect," cried Rob,
beaming gratefully upon him.
Lydia might be solemn, but she made everybody else light-hearted on
such occasions as this. Mrs. Grey emerged from the kitchen to greet
her young guests, looking flushed, but peaceful. She and Wythie had
been helping Lydia all the morning, and the result was a luncheon that
satisfied her housewifely soul.
It was a merry luncheon, too, and Lydia served it with a face so
saddened by the constant laughter ringing around the table that Wythie
and Rob telegraphed to each other their appreciation of its contrasting
expression.
After luncheon Wythie, Frances, and Prue took Lester Baldwin to see
the beauties of Fayre, which were well worth seeing; its lovely, quiet
river; its great elms, and dignified mansions. Hester begged them to
let her stay at home and keep Rob with her, and she bore Rob off at
once, when she had obtained her way, for a long, confidential talk in
the room which her friend shared with Wythie.
"Well, Hester, what is it this time?" asked Rob, when they had
established themselves opposite to each other, one in a small, the
other in a large rocking-chair, and were rocking for dear life at that
cosey pace which seems at once to pursue and keep up with confidences.
Rob's eyes wandered a trifle longingly out of the window at the perfect
weather; though she was fond of Hester and interested in all that she
could have to tell her, she, too, would have found the walk which the
rest were enjoying pleasant had Hester been thus minded.
"Is it Chinese-missionarying, adopting a baby, teaching new Italian
citizens, or what, Hester?" she continued. Hester had been full of each
of these projects at various times.
Hester sat up straight in the energy of her reply. "Everything is
beginning, Rob," she cried, "and I can't stand it!"
"It does sound rather awful, though vague," retorted Rob, settling
herself back in her chair as Hester grew rigid, and moving her head
about until her hair got comfortably loose, and fitted over the chair
top.
"Ah, you know what I mean!" said Hester reproachfully in her alto
voice, which was her greatest charm. "Invitations, and teas, and all
those things! If I let myself drift into it all it takes every bit of
my time--strength too--and I shall never amount to one thing."
"Well, I suppose it's true that it will take all your time, but
I don't see that the rest of your proposition follows," said Rob
sensibly. "Your mother keeps up her social duties, and, except--loyally
excepting, you know--Mardy-mine, I don't know any woman who amounts to
much more. Amounting to something doesn't depend on circumstances, but
conquers them. We've gone over this ground a good many times already,
Hessie, and, really, what's the use?"
"My mother married, and her duty is to do exactly what she does," said
Hester. "She is a great help to father, entertaining his business
acquaintances, and furthering all his interests. But I am not helping
any one when I go butterflying about, and it is for me to choose now
what sort of a woman I will be."
"I suppose I can't enter into this tremendous earnestness of yours
as I ought," sighed Rob. "It seems to me that we both have only to
lead good, kind, sweet tempered lives, and be ready for our work when
it comes. I think a vocation ought to mean being called, and not
calling--with a megaphone, too--to all sorts of distant duties to come
and switch us off our track. We are young, Hester."
"Eighteen; quite old enough to find ourselves, Rob," said Hester.
"Yes, and I'm wearing my hair in full blown young-lady fashion; my
bow is gone--did you notice, Hester?" said Rob, refusing to rise to
Hester's heights. "But for mercy's sake, Hessie dear, don't adopt
soulful slang! I've heard seven separate women, one lecturer and six
private--geese?--talk about 'finding ourselves' lately! There's
something in set soulful phrases that affects my stout nerves."
"Yes," assented Hester with entire sympathy. "I didn't know I said it;
those things are so catching! You see, Rob, you wouldn't care for a
society life, any more than I do! It is full of catch phrases and catch
ways."
"Hessie, Hessie, what are you trying to get at?" cried Rob. "You know
I have as much desire for a society life as there is prospect of my
leading one! But I don't see why you can't 'just be happy'; wasn't
that the burden of one of James Whitcomb Riley's poems? Why can't
you dance and play, and be eighteen, only, with all your might, and
let the future take care of itself? I declare you are very like our
Lydia! She convulsed Wythie last night by suddenly demanding, when
poor Wythiekins came into the kitchen, if she didn't think she ought
to take the pledge! Wythie felt satisfied with her naturally temperate
tendencies, but Lydia thought she should sign as an example, chiefly to
the Rutherfords, who are sobriety itself! Don't you think you magnify
your office more as Lyddie does than as St. Paul did?"
Hester laughed. "I think one ought to make up one's mind definitely to
something," she insisted. "Rob, truthfully, do you think you would
like to marry?"
Rob laughed long and merrily. "Not this afternoon," she cried. "I'll
let you know if I feel differently to-morrow."
"No, but don't you think if a girl knows positively that she will
never marry, and nothing can change her mind, that she ought to act
differently from a girl who is willing to entertain the thought?"
Rob laughed again. "I notice the thought entertains most girls," she
said. "We have spoken on this tremendous subject also, Hessie. It never
occurs to me to make up my mind for good and for all about anything.
I have lived only eighteen years, but I have changed my tastes lots
of times, for food, for people, for amusements--for lots of things. I
don't know how I shall feel at twenty, much more at five and twenty.
I'm perfectly happy, and I'm not over the border of little girlhood--I
wish I could romp and play dolls without shocking people. And I've had
a hard fight, and tasted care and even sorrow, so it seems to be almost
wrong to go on twisting and distorting these lovely young days the way
you do, Hessie dear. You haven't told me what it is that has set you
out this time, however?"
"It is something I saw the other day," said Hester sadly. "I wish I
could be sunny and light-hearted like you."
"The reason of the difference is partly in our temperaments, but it is
a good deal because I had to be happy in self-defence from the trials
that began early for me," said Rob, with the keen wisdom that underlay
her merry ways. "You had your path made smooth; I had to be jolly to
keep up myself and the others. If you had worked as I did with a frail,
sensitive, beloved father, and had seen your brave mother trying to win
a fight where the odds against her were too heavy to count, you'd have
learned what virtue lay in a laugh. I don't mean to preach, Hester, but
you ought to be satisfied to love and to be loved, and wait your life's
meaning cheerfully. But what did you see?"
"Father had to go to a tenement district to look over some property
there which a client talked of buying," said Hester. "I begged to be
taken with him, and, though he objected, saying I was sober enough
without seeing misery, he let me have my way--as he usually does, the
dear, kind father! I saw, Robin, a cripple boy that was heartrending. I
never, never shall forget him, nor get over the feeling that I have no
right to my comforts while there is such as he. No; don't interrupt.
I know all that reason can tell me on that head, because father talked
to me, and he is not merely just--though that's the highest sort of
kindness--but he is tenderly kind as well, we both know that. But the
feeling remains after I have reasoned and reasoned. Then, after that
poor, poor child, I saw others, crippled, maimed, and all incurable.
What can be done with them, except leave them in the slums, to be
maimed in mind as well as in body?"
Hester stopped, her eyes overflowing. Rob put out her hand with a
responsive moisture in her own bright eyes.
"Dear Hessie, I beg your pardon. I suppose our point of view is
different, and very likely I am wrong, and you are right in taking life
so hard," she said.
"No, Rob; but you have your work in your family, which needs you,
while I am free, and I can't help thinking I ought to find mine. Such
sights make me sure that having money, I have no right to use it for
teas, receptions, dancing gowns--all that sort of thing," said Hester
earnestly.
"While we Greys, though we are freed from all our old worries, have
only enough income to live plainly, and help one another," added Rob,
finishing the thought Hester felt afraid to voice. "Then, here in Fayre
there is no such misery as you see in town, and when I go in to visit
you I see only New York's splendour. Go on, Hester; what have you in
mind?"
Hester flushed, and rose. "I don't know precisely, and I see the
others, coming back, so I can't talk my thoughts into shape with you
as I meant to. It will have to wait. But I know one thing: I can not
possibly rest till I find out exactly what it is that is in my mind.
Isn't Lester fine; don't you like him?"
"How can I help it, when he is so like his uncle?" retorted Rob. "There
is no other man in the world equal to your father, Hester, or whom I
love so much."
"Not Battalion B?" suggested Hester, fearing to narrow her question to
one member of that battalion.
"Battalion B are boys," retorted Rob. "Your cousin seems to find our
Prudy beautiful."
"Lester is an artist," said Hester. "Prue is the handsomest girl I ever
saw, but she isn't Roberta." And Hester twined an admiring and loving
embrace of both eyes and arms around the friend in whose mobile face
she found a beauty more entrancing than Prue's.
"We must go down, Hester dear," said Rob, patting the arm under her
right hand. She had grown quiet since Hester had told her of the sad
children, and the deep womanliness which lay hidden in her merry
girl-heart, and which had grown deeper and more apparent since her
father's death, softened the sparkling face into a most becoming
gravity. "Perhaps something can be done, Hester. Perhaps something good
may come, and through you, to the poor mite whom you saw! And perhaps,
after all, your discontent is that 'divine discontent,' which makes the
world better."
Hester smiled gladly; it was a comfort to feel that Rob did not think
her ridiculous.
The Greys' guests departed after an early tea to which they were easily
persuaded to remain. All three Grey girls saw them off on the edge of
the October twilight, and came home under Fayre's elms and the young
moon, discussing Hester's newly presented cousin, with unanimous praise.
"He may be an artist, but he liked the little grey house," said Prue,
as they stood in a sisterly row, warming their feet, first the right
ones and then the left, like a kind of drill, before the wood fire on
the hearth.
"He likes it _because_ he is an artist; not in spite of being one, as
you imply, Prudy," said Wythie.
"I am glad that he has come home to Hester, instead of becoming the
Mikado's prime minister," said Rob, as if Lester Baldwin had narrowly
missed that as an alternative.
"Tired, Mardy?" asked Wythie, turning to her mother as she entered, and
Rob and Prue made room for her between them on the hearth.
"What lovely, lovely times we do have in the little grey house!" she
added. It was the refrain that the Greys had sung to all their pleasant
times ever since the old anxieties had been laid to rest.
CHAPTER THREE
ITS OLD FRIENDS
Friday was a gala-day in the little grey house. "Battalion B," the
three tall Rutherford boys, were at Yale, pursuing their way towards
their chosen vocations with commendable industry, and with no apparent
detriment to their health. Every Friday the three B's came back to
Fayre to spend "the week end," bringing with them the cheer which they
had shed upon the Greys' pathway since their first meeting.
"It is like having six children," Mrs. Grey said happily, as she shook
her duster out the dining-room window. "The boys' coming sheds joy upon
the weekly task of sweeping and setting straight."
"It is a perpetual Thanksgiving Home-coming, isn't it, Mardy?" said
Oswyth joyously. For though the Rutherfords were supposed to come
to their own home, the Caldwell house, which they had occupied for
nearly three years, with a competent housekeeper to preside over its
destinies, their return was really to the little grey house, where they
made their absence of five days a plea for spending the other two of
each seven.
"Your sister-in-law's coming," called Lydia from her watch-tower, the
window beside the kitchen sink.
Wythie hastily glanced around the room which her mother was dusting,
while she herself was polishing silver, with newspapers carefully
spread over the fine old mahogany dining-table. Aunt Azraella had
been another Aunt Azraella since his family had been established in
comfort by the success of the machine over which poor Sylvester Grey
had spent the apparently fruitless hours which she had then so fiercely
denounced. But she never could conquer her habit of criticism, and the
girls still felt vague apprehension of what was coming at her heels
when they saw their aunt crossing the grass. Rob was out; since the
day when she alone had held her ground against Mrs. Winslow's opinion,
and had thus been the means of winning for the family all that they
now enjoyed, Wythie had been deposed from the first place in Aunt
Azraella's respect, and Rob was now, as she had herself said, the
favourite niece.
"Good-morning, Mary. Good-morning, Wythie. Is Rob about? She asked
me to let her know if Tobias got sick again, so I came down. Elvira
says she thinks he might as well be chloroformed, but Rob insisted on
being told if the cat ailed; I think his leg is broken." Aunt Azraella
delivered herself of her errand without giving any one time to reply to
her opening salutation. She seated herself in the low rocking-chair,
Mrs. Grey's favourite seat by the window, and began divesting herself
of overshoes, and a cape which she wore over her coat. Seeing Wythie
glance out at the grass she immediately said: "The grass isn't damp, I
suppose you think, Wythie, and it doesn't seem to be, but in October,
when the leaves are falling, you can't be certain. I think most people
sow the seeds of their death in the fall of the year and the spring."
"Are you feeling better, Azraella?" asked Mrs. Grey. Wythie glanced up
again and noticed that Mrs. Winslow looked pale, and less equal than
usual to the demands of living.
"My cold's better, Mary, but I feel weak," said Aunt Azraella, settling
back in her chair, having discarded her outer shell. "I think it must
have been grippish, though I didn't know it at the time. If I should
pass away, Mary, would the girls go back into all black?"
"Dear me!" ejaculated Wythie involuntarily.
"Oh, Azraella, I am sure I don't know! Why do you think of such
discordant things on this bright morning?" expostulated Mrs. Grey. "I
am sure that you are going to live a long, long time."
"It is impossible to be sure of anything of the sort," retorted Mrs.
Winslow, as though such obdurate cheerfulness annoyed her. "Human life
is most uncertain. I wish you would go out of black for Sylvester
Mary,--I mean solid black--this fall. White with it would be pretty,
and by another year you could wear sober greys."
"We are always trying to avoid anything like sober Greys, Azraella,"
said Mrs. Grey with her sunny smile, while in her heart she knew that
all her life she should wear the widow's garb for a loss irreparable to
her, though borne cheerfully, and courageously.
"You are too young--only a little past forty--to wear black long," said
Aunt Azraella, as if grief and mourning were a matter of astronomical
calculation, like eclipses of the sun. "What would you do if you had my
wealth, Wythie? You know you are not nearly as well off as I am."
"Quite as well off as I want to be," said Wythie contentedly. "Four
thousand a year is an ideal sum for four people. Enough to make life
secure, too little to give us much bother, and not enough to allow us
to be idle. Really, it is just the right sum. I never have thought what
I should do if I were as rich as you are, Aunt Azraella."
"Your mind seems to be travelling rapidly from one thing to another,
this morning, Azraella," smiled Mrs. Grey. "Tobias' leg, mourning,
money--though these latter subjects are closely connected only too
often."
"And the only thing I came for was Tobias' leg," added Mrs. Winslow.
"I'm getting too warm here; I'll be overheated and catch more cold.
You tell Rob when she comes that my cat's limping again and won't eat,
and if she wants to see him, she can. If she don't we'll chloroform
him--and I guess that's best."
Mrs. Winslow arose as she spoke, but Wythie pushed her gently back into
her chair and knelt to put on her aunt's overshoes. "Rob will be up,
Aunt," she said. "She has a surgeon's tastes and talents."
"I wonder if that's why she and that second Rutherford boy are
specially good friends?" suggested Aunt Azraella, stooping her
shoulders to receive her cape. "He's going to be a doctor, isn't he?"
"Yes, Bruce is studying hard for that end; he will make a good doctor.
Dr. Fairbairn says he has a marked vocation for his profession," said
Mrs. Grey.
"He's a good boy," said Aunt Azraella unexpectedly, "though they
are all three fine specimens. Well, send Rob, if she wants to come.
Good-bye."
"No fear of her not wanting to try to relieve Tobias and give him a
chance to live his exemplary life longer," said Wythie as she let her
aunt out of the side door by which she had entered.
"Is this your morning at home, Mardy?" called Prue from up-stairs where
she was setting the chambers straight. "Rob is coming up the hill with
Cousin Peace, and Mrs. Flinders is coming in the opposite direction
with Polly."
"And the boys to-night!" sighed Wythie. "I don't believe I shall get
done half I meant to do."
"That sigh must have been for Mrs. Flinders; it couldn't have been for
Charlotte," said her mother.
"I've brought a trophy," announced Rob, coming into the room like a
western breeze, eyes dancing and cheeks reddened by the October wind.
"Dear Charlotte, you are always the most welcome!" exclaimed Mrs. Grey,
her voice tenderly caressing, while Wythie wound her arm around their
beloved "Cousin Peace," as her other hand unfastened her coat.
"Robin insisted that I should not be in the way, and I did want so much
to come that I am afraid it didn't take strong arguments to convince
me that she was right," said the blind woman. "It is always good and
better to come here."
"Why there's little Polly Flinders and her mother!" exclaimed Rob. "Now
I wonder what has happened!"
She went to admit these last arrivals as she spoke, and Mrs. Flinders
came gauntly into the room, followed by Polly, clinging silently to her
adored Rob's hand, as if she were frightened.
Mrs. Flinders seated herself on the edge of a chair and began nervously
fingering the fold of the shawl in which she defied passing fashions
of coats and capes. "Did you hear?" she asked. And the Greys knew that
something serious had brought her to them.
"You didn't hear?" Mrs. Flinders substituted, as the Greys all shook
their heads. "It happened day before yesterday. He's had a stroke and
the doctor says he won't never be able to use his hands again. He can
talk's good's ever, and it ain't affected his mind, but he's done with
life till he dies."
"How dreadful!" murmured Mrs. Grey, struck by the dramatic form of
this closing statement, and greatly shocked at the hard fate which had
overtaken the farmer who for a long time had taken care of the Grey
place, sharing its product with the owners.
"What--You haven't made any plans yet, I suppose, Mrs. Flinders?"
"Yes, I have. I telegraphed his brother, and he telegraphed back I
could bring him on to his house in Boston and see if anything could
do any good, though I don't believe there's a doctor anywheres better
than Dr. Fairbairn," said the woman, disdaining to wipe away the tears
that had gathered in her eyes, and thus seeming to deny their presence.
"You ain't heard the worst. Here I am, been slaving and scrimping all
my days--you know just how near he's always been--and getting more
tired every year, and losing all my children except Maimie there, who
ain't any too rugged, and the only thing that kep' me up was thinking
that we was saving and putting by each year, so's if anything should
happen we'd have a tidy sum to pull through on. And as soon's he was
struck, and Dr. Fairbairn told him the truth about himself, according
to the doctor's principles of fair dealing with his patients, and had
left, he called me to him, and he up and told me what I hadn't so much
as an idea of. He's been drawing that money out of the bank and buying
stocks through some kind of a firm that advertised in the papers just
to catch country folks, and they kep' writing he was losing, with just
enough gain once in a while to egg him on, till he used up every penny
we had saved, and there ain't one red cent to show for all these years!
It was worrying about it that brought on the stroke, I guess--land
knows it's enough to give any one one! He never dared tell me, but when
he was took he didn't dare not to. Now, I ask you, Mis' Grey, if that
ain't just like a near man, to save and scrape and go without act'al
necessaries of life, and then be caught by a glittering humbug that
promises things even Maimie had ought to know it wouldn't fulfil?"
"I am afraid it is," assented Mrs. Grey, as the flood of Mrs. Flinders'
passionate eloquence paused for her reply. "It's not an unusual story,
but it is none the less a tragic one. I can't tell you how sorry I am
for you--and for Mr. Flinders, too; poor, deluded, stricken man!"
Mrs. Flinders swallowed what barely escaped being a great sob, and
Miss Charlotte asked: "But what does it all stand for, what degree of
misfortune, I mean? What are you going to do, Mrs. Flinders?"
"How am I going to live, do you mean?" asked the poor woman, turning
to the compassionate face that could not see her own. "The land knows;
I don't. There's no use trying to plan ahead. That's what I've been
doing, and now look at what's come of it! I know I'm going to his
brother's in Boston with him, and that's as far's I know."
"But Polly?" suggested Rob, clasping closer the little girl on her knee.
"Yes, that's what I was coming to, Roberta," said Mrs. Flinders,
turning to Rob with an embarrassment that was at the same time relief.
"I've been studying all the way here how I'd say it to you. First I
thought I'd tell you the story, and ask your advice about Polly. Then I
thought you'd see plain enough what I was hoping, and I ain't any hand
to beat around the bush, anyway; I like straight cuts best. Polly--'s
you call her--sets more by you than by any one on this earth, not
excepting me and her father. You took her here that time when she was
pindling away out of the world, and I guess there ain't much doubt you
saved her life. Would you see your way to taking her now for a spell? I
hate to ask a favour, but I don't know which way to turn."
"We should have offered to take the child if you hadn't asked, Mrs.
Flinders," said Mrs. Grey quickly. "Polly isn't any more trouble than
the little mouse in the wall that Kiku can never catch, because it
keeps in its hole there. Of course we will take little Polly, and keep
her safe as long as you want to leave her with us. We are only too glad
to get her back. Polly heard the last word my dear husband spoke, and
Polly sang him into his long sleep while she was singing to her dolly."
Mrs. Grey spoke very softly, and Rob's face dropped on Polly's smooth
head.
Polly's care-worn mother, worn into hardness and unloveliness, broke
down at this. "Oh, Lord," she said, not as an exclamation, but
prayerfully, "this life is queer. Sylvester Grey took just when he
was ready to live, and that poor, mean-souled, grasping man of mine
throwing away the work of his whole hard life, and then struck down
helpless on top of it! Well, I'm more obliged to you for your taking
Maimie, and for the way you do it than I can say. I won't let her stay
any longer'n I can help, but I've told you the whole story, and you can
see just what my prospects are. We've got to sell our farm--'tain't
valuble, but it'll bring something, if only some one wants it, and
after that I've got to support him and me and Maimie, till she's old
enough to do for herself."
Mrs. Flinders had risen as she spoke and the Greys arose too.
"I have told you truly that Polly is welcome for just as long a time
as you care to trust her to us--weeks, months, or years. She is a
dear, quiet, gentle child, and we have plenty of room to shelter her
and plenty of bread and butter to nourish her till life has something
better to offer her than we can give her. And you know, Mrs. Flinders,
that my girls and I will give the child the same care, in body, mind,
and soul that Wythie, Rob, and Prue received. You need not fear that
she will not be lovingly cared for, nor feel any anxiety about her. I
will do my best."
The two mothers looked into each others' eyes; one was seamed, thin,
work-hardened, work-worn, the other was beautiful, calm, clear-eyed,
wearing in the brave smile that illumined her face the look of one that
has conquered.
Mrs. Flinders put out her hard hand without a word. Then she shook
hands with Miss Charlotte, Wythie, and Rob, and took Polly's little
hand to lead her away.
"I'll send her up this afternoon," she said as she walked rigidly
out of the door, speaking without turning her head. "As to the rest,
whatever this blow is to us, Maimie's in luck."
"Isn't that tragic?" exclaimed Rob as soon as the outside door was
safely shut.
"Have you taken Polly Flinders, mama?" cried Prue, coming swiftly down
the stairs. "Good-morning, Cousin Peace. Oh, dear; don't you dread
having Polly?"
"Not any more than I dread the sparrows around the door, hopping about
for my crumbs, nor the dozen or so of cats who come daily for our
larger crumbs," replied her mother stoutly. "I love to feel that the
little grey house diffuses brighter colours on darkened lives. Polly
really is as quiet as the little mouse I compared her to, and it isn't
a great risk to take a child who lacks so much in her own home, is it
Charlotte? Polly can't lose in coming to us, having very little to
lose."
"That is not overstated, Mary," said Cousin Peace quietly, and even
Prue reluctantly laughed.
"Well," sighed Wythie, who had not spoken for a long time, rising as
she spoke. "Well, I feel dazed. That is such a sad story that we have
just heard, made sadder by the barrenness of its manner of telling! And
then we have acquired a child, indefinitely, and lost a farmer most
definitely. And I meant to have made a pudding for dinner, and it is
altogether too late. I feel dazed. I wonder if this is to be an era of
happenings? I have noticed events move in schools, like mackerel."
"I really hope, Wythie, that children aren't going to move upon us in
schools, like mackerel," cried Rob, recovering her brightness of face
and manner. "For our income is distinctly limited. I should have to
resume my story-telling."
This was a mild family joke; Rob's story-telling always loomed in the
near distance as a possibility when the warm Grey hearts led them to
generosities of which their purse was not capable.
The puddingless dinner was despatched with some haste, because Wythie
and Rob had cake to make to be ready for Battalion B's keen appetite,
made keener by abstinence from the little grey house's cake, and
Rob had to go to the rescue of Aunt Azraella's Tobias. There were
preparations to be made for the coming of Polly, which had to be
compromised for the immediate present by a bed in the corner of Prue's
room, for the afternoon was speeding away; it was almost time for the
arrival of the boys, while Polly must be quite due.
Mrs. Flinders, herself, did not bring the child. A neighbour drove her
up in the dilapidated buggy in which she had arrived to make her first
visit to the Greys. It did not look much more purplish and worn, nor
Polly much older for the time that had passed since then, though the
buggy had been in constant use, and the child had attained the great
age of nine.
Miss Charlotte lingered to welcome the boys, between whom and the sweet
blind woman there was the strongest affection. Polly had hardly been
established before three long shadows came wavering up the eastward
mounting hill of the main street, and Basil, Bruce, and Bartlemy strode
over the little front gate without stopping for the ceremony of opening
it, in quite their old way, and burst into the little grey house,
filling it from roof to cellar with their hearty voices shouting:
"Little Grey Mother, little Grey girls, where in the little grey house
are you?" this was their liturgical chant every week upon arriving.
"Here is the mother, and here are the girls. Welcome Battalion B!"
chanted the girls, and the ceremony of reception was ended.
Wythie, Rob, and Prue rushed to the door each trying to be the first to
open it. Three strong brown hands clasped the three held out to meet
them, and the girls, laughing and chattering, the boys chattering quite
as loudly, came into the quiet green and white room, filling it with
youth and joy.
Mrs. Grey sprang to meet her boys, holding out both hands, her face
radiating pleasure as brightly as the girls' faces did. Cousin
Charlotte pressed close behind her--it was not strange that the
Rutherford boys counted the hours from Monday to Friday that lay
between them and their glad home-coming.
"My but it's good to get here!" ejaculated Bruce, stretching his
long legs to the fire, but looking at Rob whose warm red-brown hair,
flashing eyes and crimson cheeks were every whit as heartening to look
upon as were the flames licking up through the great logs.
"There's no place like it--John Howard Paine was perfectly right," said
Basil with quiet conviction, watching Wythie's soft hands as they cut
generous slices from the afternoon's cake baking and added the cookies
the tall boys had "loved from their first meeting," as Bartlemy said.
"There is no news, except that we have Polly Flinders here for a visit
with no end in sight; her father is paralysed and has squandered all
his money in worthless stocks," Prue was saying, in reply to Bartlemy's
demand for news.
"Whew! As though that weren't news enough!" Bruce cried, sitting erect.
"Fancy Flinders squandering! And paralysed, is he? The poor old fellow!
He has been rather decent since your father died."
"Very decent," assented Rob. "And Hester was up, and brought her cousin
Lester Baldwin, fresh from Japan. He is just like her father. And
Hessie has some new longing, which I did not quite get at; something
to do with helping incurable cripple children in the tenements," she
continued.
"That sounds like the most interesting and sensible scheme she has had
yet," said Bruce heartily. "But this cousin--You like Mr. Baldwin;
did you say the Japaned cousin was like him?" And Bruce scowled
melodramatically.
"Precisely," said Rob. "Only nicer."
"Come up to our other house, Basil," said Bruce. "I won't linger here!"
"We'll be back after supper," he added, relenting as the battalion
filed out of the little grey house. "We must go up to look at the
Caldwell house, but we'll come home here as soon as our duty is done."
"It's good to get home, Wythie," said Basil turning back on the steps,
just as he spoke and just as he turned back each week at the same hour.
CHAPTER FOUR
ITS DREADFUL NIGHT
"I saved a life to-day, Bruce," said Rob. The Rutherford boys had got
back to the little grey house, the evening had shut in around it,
shutting out all the world except that small fragment of it which
centred around the old hearth.
Over in the corner, under her green-shaded sewing lamp, sat the mother
without whom the happiness of the six young people would have been
incomplete, and this was true although the six were drifting more and
more into the habit of being three pairs. Bartlemy was never tired
of vainly trying to satisfy himself in painting Prue's wonderful
colouring, and, if the truth were told, Prue never tired of having
him try. Bartlemy's talent was developing into something to be taken
seriously; already his brothers were making up their minds to the first
parting when they should be graduated together. Basil and Bruce had
delayed college till Bartlemy could enter with them, but evidently
their ways would lie together no further. Bartlemy must go away to
study in Italy and France, for his boyish nickname of Fra Bartolomeo
was proving prophetic--Bartlemy would be a painter.
Wythie and Basil never seemed to have very much to talk about, but they
drifted beside each other invariably, and their many moments of silence
seemed to be quite as full of utterance as their moments of speech, as
the observant Grey mother noted with a satisfaction that could not be
wholly free from regret.
As to Rob and Bruce they chattered ceaselessly, never far apart, always
absorbed in identical interests, and with the same kind of a sense of
humour--which it is said is the strongest cement of friendship. It was
hard to tell much about Rob and Bruce. It was plain to be seen that
Bruce was of the same opinion that he had been from the first, which
was that Rob easily surpassed all other girls, including sweet Wythie
and handsome Prue, just as Rob considered Battalion B collectively
the best and cleverest boys in the world, and Bruce the head of
the battalion. But their comradeship was so entirely free from the
suggestion of sentiment that there was no predicting how it would end.
As to Prue, she was but sixteen, and Mrs. Grey was too sensible to
build up romances, or to encourage them for such a youthful heroine.
She knew that Prue had plenty of that ambition which the other girls
lacked, the ambition to shine, to see and to be seen in a larger world
than the little grey house and Fayre offered her. She had never been
the simple and contented little girl that both of her sisters had
been, and the modest fortune that had come to the Greys had rather
contributed to her restlessness than made her contented, for it had
given Prue a taste of small luxuries which whetted her appetite for
greater ones.
Mrs. Grey watched this tendency in her baby with uneasiness. This
home-loving and essentially womanly woman believed that ambitions of
Prue's sort never brought happiness to the woman whom they drew after
their _ignis fatuus_ attractions, but rather substituted heartburnings
and envy for peace, holding out an unattainable gaol of triumph, which
would prove empty and unsatisfying even should it be reached. Mrs. Grey
was an old-fashioned woman, believing that love, not applause, good
deeds, not brilliant ones rounded and filled a woman's life.
"Cricket on the hearth?" suggested Bruce, replying to Rob's statement
that she had saved a life that day.
"No; Tobias, I set his leg and bandaged it. Aunt Azraella thought that
he must die," said Rob. "You're not the only surgeon of this sextette."
"Tobias?" repeated Bruce in the dark. "Don't know the gentleman. Where
was Dr. Fairbairn, and why should he die from a broken leg?"
"Don't you remember Aunt Azraella's cat, Tobias?" cried Rob. Adding,
as Bruce uttered an enlightened: "Oh!" "Aunt Azraella says that she
doesn't want Tobias chloroformed because Elvira would grieve for him,
but I believe she has a sneaking liking for the old cat herself;
she drew a long breath of relief when I repaired him and uttered my
professional opinion that he would pull through. Aunt Azraella doesn't
seem quite strong, and it makes her gentler. Do you suppose that it
would be your duty as a physician to impair the health of positive and
vigorous ladies, like Aunt Azraella?"
"'Health chiefly keeps an atheist in the dark,'" quoted Bruce promptly.
"I don't remember seeing that question of medical ethics raised, but
it opens up a wide field for argument. I think a great many people
would be softer and sweeter for having less cast-iron nerves, and less
self-sufficiency of health."
"Well, I think there are not a great many, but very few in America
who suffer from cast-iron nerves," said Rob with a sigh. "I'm only
beginning to realize what a horrible lot of misery there is in the
world. I can understand your choice of a profession, Bruce."
"You always had medicinal qualities--" Bruce began.
"You mean medical," corrected Prue from her pose before Bartlemy near
by.
"Do I?" asked Bruce. "I can perfectly understand my choice in every
way, Rob. As to the misery, there is more than you will ever realize, I
hope. But on the other hand as human beings grow better it will lessen.
The higher the civilization the greater the capacity to suffer, but the
stronger the sense of the rights of the weak and of our kinship and
obligations even to 'our brother, the wolf,' as St. Francis used to
say. His sanctity was great enough to reveal to him how endless was the
chain of love--they hadn't found it out in his day."
"There doesn't seem to be much that girls, Grey girls in Fayre, for
instance--can do," said Rob looking wistful.
"We know now, Robin, that everything is a system of units. We are all
merely molecules, by comparison, but working together for a result,"
said Bruce. "You can make life sweet and wholesome all around you. You
can help three big fellows, for instance, to march straight in a world
full of pitfalls; you can cheer everybody and set the best of examples,
which preaches wordlessly, to all who come near you. I think, as a
unit, Rob, you might be considered a success. If all units did their
cheerful best, as it is done in this little grey house, the collective
result would be the millennium."
"Goodness, no!" cried Rob. Then she shook off her gravity and her
face rippled into its usual merriment. "Did we ever talk so seriously
before, Bruce, in all the days of our partnership? It must be the
effect of Hester's visit and Mr. Flinders' sad state! Or is it the
influence of Lydia? I have long wondered how we kept up our habit of
laughter with Lydia about. She is like a perpetual Ash Wednesday--seems
to be going about putting a pinch of ashes on every Grey forehead all
the time, and saying: 'Remember, man, that dust thou art, and unto
dust thou shalt return!' And she conveys the impression of having such
a very poor opinion of the quality of our dust! I wonder if Lyddie
really can be but twenty-four years old! I can't believe it! Isn't
it odd how many things one knows to be true, yet can't believe? Like
India, for instance, and that the world is round, and all those things."
"All what things?" laughed Bruce. "Don't you believe in India--after
Kipling?"
"Kim is so vivid that I can't believe it--don't pretend you don't
understand, Bruce, because you always do," said Rob.
"I know," assented Bruce. "The wonderful detail that is vivid and
unreal at once, as dreams are vivid and unreal. Rob, you are in a queer
mood to-night; you have somewhat the effect on me this moment which you
are trying to describe--you are most vivid, yet you seem unreal, at
least unlike yourself."
"I feel so," agreed Rob promptly. "I feel excited, stirred, restless,
happy, unhappy--all ways, but my normal way. What is making Basil so
much more talkative than usual to-night?"
"His plans, I fancy; he is probably telling Wythie what he is
considering," Bruce answered regarding his elder with a twinkle.
What Basil was saying was nothing, apparently to call forth the
twinkle.
"Then you approve the idea?" Rob heard him say.
"Yes," said Wythie quietly. "I like the Caldwell place very much; it
is dignified and beautiful. If you really mean to make literature your
career, and to study, Basil, and became a specialist in bird study,
besides writing a novel or so--you said a novel or so? Well, then,"
Wythie continued as Basil nodded a smiling assent, "I do not see how
you could have a better place in which to live and work than in Fayre,
so quiet, yet so near town, and in the old Caldwell place, among its
elms and Norwegian pines."
"And you like it, Wythie? You think it could be made a home to be happy
in?" persisted Basil.
Wythie looked up without embarrassment, her face shining with
confidence.
"Anywhere may be that, Basil," she said. "And the Caldwell place
more than most. If I were you I would buy it. And it is certainly an
irresistible bargain at that price."
"Basil is talking of buying the Caldwell place, you see," said Bruce.
"He has fully made up his mind, since father's latest letter came, to
give up all thought of a business career after we are graduated and
'commence author,' as our English cousins say. I honestly think he is
warranted in the choice; I suppose he will do something the sort of
thing John Burroughs does, as well as write novels--everybody writes
novels."
"Except you and me," smiled Rob. "Must you go? How short these
intercollegiate evenings are!"
"Intercollegiate, Rob?" echoed her mother, putting down her work and
coming forward as the three tall guests rose to take their leave.
"Aren't they between college?" asked Rob unabashed. "Just two little
full days sandwiched in between the five of hard labour at Yale."
The little grey house settled down to slumber soon after it was left
to itself. The brisk autumnal winds are conducive to deep sleep, and
Wythie and Rob in their room, and Prue in hers, opening from it, in
which little Polly Flinders was tucked away in the corner, slept
dreamlessly far into the night.
Then the sound of voices penetrated their sleep, far-off calls,
men shouting, and, at last, a hand was shaking Wythie and Rob into
wakefulness.
They sat erect, trembling and startled, to see their mother bending
over them, a hand on the shoulder of each, as she cried: "Wythie, Rob,
wake up, wake up!"
"What has happened?" cried the frightened girls on their feet in an
instant.
"Charlotte's house is burning; they have called us. We must go," gasped
Mrs. Grey. "Put on warm clothing; make haste! Prue, stay here with
Lydia and that child," she added as Prue, wide eyed and pale, joined
the group.
Somehow Wythie and Rob found themselves dressing; everything
went wrong, yet they managed, after a fashion, to get themselves
sufficiently protected from the chill of the night air, and found
themselves with their mother, escorted by some of their men neighbours
down the street. The elms stood out against a background of red, from
which tongues of flame occasionally shot up, dulling the red glow on
the sky, and revealing the smallest twigs. It was Cousin Peace's house
which was burning! The girls repeated the words as they ran, trying to
make them real, convey a meaning. Poor blind Cousin Peace! With this
thought Wythie stopped short.
"Where is she? Where is Miss Grey?" she demanded.
It was Lawyer Dinsmore who held her arm; she felt his hand tremble on
it as he answered: "We do not know; we could not find her--" Wythie
groaned, and he hastily added: "It must be that she is safe, Wythie.
There was time to get out, but no one has seen her. Her senses are so
abnormally acute that she must have known of the fire before the alarm
was given, and escaped."
"Unless she slept, and the smoke--" Wythie could not go on. "Hurry!"
she murmured.
Mr. Dinsmore did not attempt to reassure her further; indeed, the
suggestion that Miss Charlotte, alone in the house, might have been
asleep and overcome by smoke had occurred to him before Wythie voiced
it. It was not pleasant to wonder why it was that the alarm had been
given from outside, not from within the doomed building.
Mrs. Grey and her daughters were stationed beyond the reach of danger
where the Rutherford boys soon found and joined them.
There was no question of saving the house; from the first it was
doomed, and it would have been most painful to have stood helplessly
by while the peaceful house that had absorbed so much of its blind
mistress' calm repose was destroyed, had not all other thought been
swallowed up in the absorbing anxiety which left Miss Charlotte's fate
doubtful. For the feeling was growing among the knot of bystanders
around the Greys that, if she were safe, they should have had some
assurance of it, that, by this time, some one should have come forward
who could tell them definitely where Miss Grey had taken refuge.
"It is unbearable," groaned Rob at last, through her set teeth.
"I will go around to the other side and see if I can't find out
something, Rob," said Bruce with a glance at the girl's agonized face.
"Look after them, Basil, Bart, if I can't get back very soon."
His tall form moved through the crowd, elbowing its way until it was
lost to sight, before the Greys fully realized that he was going.
Moments passed, a quarter of an hour, and Mrs. Grey, held fast on
either hand by her girls, watched with them the mounting flames, tense,
silent with the misery that made each second seem an hour. Bruce did
not return, the fire licked and burst its awful way around the eaves,
around Cousin Peace's chamber window! Wythie hid her face, shuddering;
she could not look.
Suddenly a great roar went up from the crowd, and many voices together
shouted words which the onlookers could not catch. They cheered
mightily, and then a deadly stillness settled upon the mass of human
beings.
"What is it?" Rob asked of a man who pushed his way towards them.
"Shut up!" Wythie heard another man mutter to this new-comer, and on
this hint the latter snarled: "I don't know. Nothin', I guess." But Rob
felt sure that the snarl was to conceal something, and that it did not
spring from bad temper.
Suddenly the crowd seemed to go stark mad. Swaying, surging, pushing,
it began to yell, hoarse, loud, frightful, like some sort of a monster.
"Come out, come back! The roof's caving! It's going! Come out!" the
crowd roared, plainly articulate to the group on its edge, which was
most vitally interested.
"Some one's in there, in that horrible fire!" gasped Rob. With one
instinctive movement Basil and Bartlemy turned and looked at each
other, reading each in the other's eyes the same thought. It was so
exactly like Bruce!
Rob caught the look, saw the boys' hands meet in a tight clasp, saw
their faces turn paler than before. Instantly she guessed, and shared
their fear.
"Not he! Not Bruce!" she groaned.
Before the boys could answer a great shout rent the air, a shout that
was triumphant. For an instant Rob forgot Cousin Peace.
"He's out!" she cried, and Basil and Bartlemy dropped each others'
hands to steady her as she swayed.
"I shan't faint," she cried. "I never faint. They're cheering. He's
out, he's out!"
"You must let me go," said Basil, and Bartlemy made no demur, though it
must have been hard to stand at his post on guard with the mother and
girls while Basil pushed his way to the front.
The roof fell in with a great plunge and a fierce up-leaping of flames
which burned rapidly for a brief time. Then the fire began to fade out
as it consumed the last remnants of the pretty old home.
"If we do not hear something soon I think I shall die or go mad!" cried
Wythie. The waiting was getting unbearable.
"Don't you think you all ought to go home and wait there?" suggested
Bartlemy. "You are shivering, and we shall hear about Miss Charlotte
there as soon as here."
"I couldn't go, dear Bartlemy," Mrs. Grey said, and Bartlemy did not
insist.
It was taking all the force the boy possessed to keep himself to his
present duty when every muscle twitched to follow his brothers, and
anxiety for Bruce was added to his previous fear for Miss Charlotte.
At last the strained watchers saw a movement in the crowd; it seemed
to be falling away, and a path was opening towards them. Through this
path they soon saw Basil's head towering above his surroundings, and
behind him another even taller than he--Bruce? Ah, thank God, thank
God! The relief of seeing him was so great that both Rob and Bartlemy
groaned with the pain of it. Mrs. Grey and Wythie looked at them in new
terror; they had not known the fear for Bruce shared by the other three.
Bruce was being helped along by Basil; he was hurt. Behind them
came--yes, Dr. Fairbairn, and he was carrying something in his arms.
A woman? It certainly was. The Greys clasped each other close, their
throats tightening.
It was Miss Charlotte.
"You mustn't look like that," called Dr. Fairbairn in his booming voice
as soon as he could make it reach the group that he was approaching. "I
forbid it! Charlotte is safe; not a hair harmed. Mary, don't you dare
to faint away! Wythie, pull yourself together! Rob, be sensible."
Scolding them as he came the big doctor set his burden on her feet, and
Miss Charlotte smiled feebly, as Mrs. Grey gathered her in her arms.
"Not a word; not a word here, you womankind!" said the big doctor.
"I've sent for a carriage. When you get home you may cry and faint,
or do whatever you will, but not here. Charlotte was in no danger; she
walked off--most sensibly." The old man nodded significantly, scowling
over his shoulder at Mrs. Grey who was totally in the dark as to how to
interpret his meaning.
"Here is my patient," Dr. Fairbairn continued turning to Bruce who had
been trying to answer Bartlemy's questions and reassure Rob, though his
lips twisted with pain.
"Bruce is burned. Wanted to get his name in the papers, so rushed into
the burning house to rescue Charlotte. It served him quite right; she
was quietly out walking all the time. She defeated his purpose of
having his picture in the papers, bearing a limp woman out through
curling flames! No one in the house, you understand, yet in he went,
risking his life, and getting badly burned for nothing in this world!
And he to be my partner as soon as he has finished his medical course!
A pretty partner he will be, a sensational scamp like him! Here is the
carriage. Let me put you in, Bruce, dear boy. Look out there, Bart;
don't touch him--he isn't in a state to be handled." And the old doctor
helped Bruce tenderly into the carriage, for he loved the boy as a son.
"Now, Charlotte, you next. Come, Mary; come children. Basil and
Bartlemy, you and I are going to crowd up outside. It has been a
horrible night; I don't believe any of us are up to walking," he said,
as he closed the carriage door. "I've got to attend Bruce's wounds, and
I'm going to take him to the little grey house where there will be some
one besides a housekeeper to nurse him, Mary."
"Yes, of course," said Mrs. Grey, not fully understanding what was
happening, and still clinging thankfully to Miss Charlotte.
Rob sat opposite to Bruce staring at him with big, frightened eyes. He
had been in that horrible danger, and he was hurt!
Bruce looked at her, then at his two brothers, whose faces were
ghastly, and at Wythie crying quietly in the corner.
He smiled, in spite of his pain. "I'm all right, boys and girls--and
Rob," he said. "I thought we had Rutherfords to burn, while there was
only one Miss Charlotte."
CHAPTER FIVE
ITS HERO
The crowded carriage bringing its exhausted occupants the short
distance which lay between what had been Miss Charlotte's home and the
little grey house, revealed the latter bright with lights as it drew
near. The sight cheered every one; it seemed as though nothing could be
seriously wrong as long as the lights of home gleamed forth unchanged.
Prue had the front door open before the carriage stopped, and ran down
the flagged walk to meet it. She caught Cousin Peace in her arms with
a depth of feeling that delighted her mother--a girl could not be in
great danger from worldliness who thus appreciated one who was the
embodiment of unworldliness.
Basil and the doctor, with Bartlemy tenderly aiding, led Bruce into the
house, and got him on the ample couch in the dining-room which the Grey
girls still called "their nurse," in remembrance of babyhood days when
it faithfully tended them.
It was on occasions like this--no, there had never been an occasion
in the least like this, but in emergencies, that Lydia's gravely
responsible mind scored heavily. That venerable young woman had a brisk
fire burning in the kitchen when the family and its guests came back,
and the tea-kettle was steaming to the boiling point. Lydia had early
been trained in all emergencies to have hot water in the tea-kettle,
and she now faithfully lived up to the traditions of her forebears.
Dr. Fairbairn rubbed his hands with satisfaction as he glanced into the
kitchen to see what were the prospects there.
"Lydia," he said, "your common sense would do credit to seven older
women, if it were subdivided among them. Will you make coffee in
abundance and rather strong and as quick as you can? Your tea-kettle is
ready, I see."
"My grandmother always said that to have your kettle always full of
hot water, and your Bible thumbed was a sign that you were the woman
of Proverbs, and a comfort to your family," said Lydia with a sort of
solemn self-satisfaction. "I'd ought to be commonsensed; _she_ was."
It did not take long to make the coffee, and its fumes put courage into
the chilled and tired group waiting it even before the invigorating
beverage had been tasted.
Dr. Fairbairn set down his empty cup with a satisfied smack of the
lips. "Now, Bruce," he said, "we are both fortified to bind up your
wounds, pouring in oil like true Samaritans."
The other boys helped remove Bruce's coat, a painful process, and the
doctor's scissors bared his arms to the shoulders. They were badly
burned, and Dr. Fairbairn's big, deft hands moved over them with
extreme gentleness, anointing them and covering them with absorbent
cotton which he bound into place with the linen bandages produced from
the capacious depths of his inexhaustible pockets.
Bruce's hands had fared worse than his arms; they were ministered to
in turn, and the poor lad found some respite from his pain when the
ointment was bound on and the air excluded.
Wythie and Rob in the meantime had been helping Miss Charlotte to bed
in their mother's room. She scarcely spoke; there was no need of Dr.
Fairbairn's injunction to the girls to make her keep silence. She
seemed utterly dazed, and there was a look in her face that made her
cousins fear that the fright of the night had affected her mind. They
gave her the sedative which Dr. Fairbairn had prepared, and Rob ran
down-stairs, leaving Wythie on guard at Miss Charlotte's side.
"Do you think she can be injured--mentally I mean?" Rob asked, ending
her account of Miss Charlotte's docile, silent and lost manner of
behaving.
"Not a bit, I am certain," said Dr. Fairbairn cheerfully, though he
could not help realizing that cases where a shock had permanently
affected the mind were by no means rare.
"Charlotte is too well-balanced to be unhinged. We must expect her to
suffer from a shock like this, and from the grief of losing a home
to which she was deeply attached. You must keep her perfectly quiet,
and we must make her sleep and sleep, until her quivering nerves are
restored. She must not be allowed to talk of to-night more than just
enough to prevent her dwelling on it in secret and magnifying its
events. Bruce, do you feel able to tell us in a few words just what did
happen to you--What made you go into that house when Charlotte and her
maid were both out, and where did you find her at last?"
"It doesn't take long to tell how I happened to go in," said Bruce.
"There seemed to be a growing conviction in the crowd that Miss
Charlotte must be in the house, or some one would be able to account
for her. So I went in to see."
"Perfectly simple, and a natural thing to do," observed Dr. Fairbairn
dryly. "Well?"
"There were rooms which I couldn't get into--indeed they were no
longer rooms; the fire had started there. But they were in the rear of
the house, and I felt sure Miss Charlotte would not have been there.
Indeed, the only possible explanation of her being in the house at all
was that she had been smothered by the smoke, and had not wakened. This
could only have happened in her bedroom, or on the way to the door, so
I managed to get up-stairs----"
"Were they burning?" demanded Rob, leaning forward, her face pale, her
hands tensely clasped.
"A little," said Bruce, smiling at her reassuringly. "Don't have a
Looking-Glass Land scare, Rob; it's all over, and you see I did not
perish on that burning stairway." Rob shuddered, and Prue dropped the
cup she held; it fell in fragments to the floor.
"Hold on, Prudy! This story seems to be hard on the china," cried
Bruce. "There isn't any use in dwelling on details, aside from the
effect on tea-cups. 'Suffice it to say,' as I suppose Basil will say
when he writes novels, I got into Miss Charlotte's room, and she wasn't
there. Then the crowd began to shout at me to come out, and I took its
advice. Not much too soon; the roof fell--" Bruce stopped short. He
could not carry off his story with the lightness of touch with which he
had begun it. The recollection of that crashing roof, falling just as
his feet crossed the threshold, sickened him. Life seemed very precious
as he recalled it, and the death he had so narrowly escaped unspeakably
dreadful.
Bruce felt his audience tighten, as it were, under the strain of his
own feeling and a sudden, full realization of their close reprieve from
an unbearable tragedy.
He turned to smile into Basil's blanched face. "I lost my overcoat," he
said quickly. "I had wrapped it around my head to keep off the heat and
smoke. It was an unusually satisfactory coat."
"Where did you find Charlotte?" asked Dr. Fairbairn.
Bruce turned to him, grateful for being helped over and away from the
remembrance of that frightful exit with the crash of the infalling
roof in his ears.
"Some one said that Annie had been taken over to St. Chad's rectory,"
said Bruce. "But I heard people around me saying when I came out
without Miss Charlotte and without having found any trace of her that
she must have perished, or she would have gone with her maid. There
was a moment as I heard them talking that my heart sank within me,
remembering those rooms in the rear, burned out before I got there.
And then, like an inspiration, there flashed upon me a picture of Miss
Charlotte's favourite spot down by the river, and I started for it on
the run. There she was, walking up and down, back and forth, her hands
clasped straight in front of her, her head hanging, and a strange,
bewildered look on her gentle face. Not a hair was harmed, but it was
most pathetic."
Bruce paused for an instant, and Dr. Fairbairn frowned dreadfully, as
Mrs. Grey caught her breath in a half sob.
"Very fortunate she was there, and nothing whatever pathetic in her
being sensible enough to get out of the way of the rabble, when she
could do no good," the doctor said gruffly. The Rutherford boys smiled
at one another, well used to Dr. Fairbairn's ways, and Bruce resumed:
"Miss Charlotte knew me at once, and came with me willingly when I told
her that the Greys were waiting for her anxiously. The doctor and Basil
met me coming back with her, and brought us to you. After that you know
what happened--no one better, since you brought me here to the little
grey house, and comforted me with coffee and affection, as the Greys
best know how."
"And I intend that they shall continue their ministrations," said Dr.
Fairbairn promptly. "Mary Grey, you can keep this boy here until he is
able to be about, can't you?"
"Of course I can," said Mrs. Grey quickly, though she hadn't the least
idea how she was to manage it.
"Oh, wait a minute, Doctor," expostulated Bruce. "I shall do very well
at home, and I can't add to the burdens in this house; the Greys are
rather heavily weighted just now."
"You wouldn't do in the least well up at that big Caldwell place,
Bruce boy," said the doctor, like the autocrat that he was. "You are
going to have a hard time for a few days, harder than you realize now
when you are freshly made comfortable. You will be feverish and in
pain, and there isn't any one up there to nurse you--not even these
amiable young giraffe brothers of yours, who would know as much about
nursing as a cat, if they were there! You didn't accomplish much by
your folly--rushing into a burning house when it was empty on the
chance of saving a life, but it wasn't the meanest form of folly, after
all, and I'm not sure that you don't deserve some reward, if only in
consolation for missing the medal for life-saving which you hoped to
earn. Certainly the Greys will keep you--I order it!"
"There's the lean-to room in which I used to plan my stories when I was
a public entertainer," said Rob. "Wythie and I will turn in there--it's
perfectly comfortable, so don't remonstrate, Bruce! Cousin Peace will
share Mardy's room, Polly is already established in Prue's, so there
you are! This is the most blessedly elastic little house! I've no doubt
we could tuck away Basil and Bartlemy if they insisted."
"Nobody need desire a better bed than is this old nurse," said
Bruce stretching one hand into the curves of the ancient couch, and
immediately bringing it back with an involuntary moan.
"Now, Mary," said the doctor, viewing with experienced eye the mounting
colour in Bruce's cheek and the dilating brightness of his eyes, "if
you and your girls can get ready these various nests which Rob has just
planned, I think our foolhardy young hero here had better be put to bed
with a quieting draught, and allowed to sleep. He is more overwrought
than he realizes."
"Certainly, doctor," said Mrs. Grey rising immediately, restored to
herself by the necessity of action. "Come, Rob and Prue. We will
improvise a bed for Wythie and Rob that will answer for to-night,
and settle Bruce in the girls' room, then by the morning we can make
everybody more comfortable."
"Oh, please--Mrs. Grey--Rob, I can't turn you and Wythie out of your
room, you know!" remonstrated Bruce distressed at the thought.
"That's all right, Bruce," cried Rob. "I'd do more than give my room to
one who tried to save Cousin Peaceful, even if he were not my chum."
She laughed as she spoke, but the laugh was tremulous, and Bruce and
Dr. Fairbairn looked after her and then looked at each other with eyes
so full of meaning that in that glance they exchanged confidences.
"You will go back to college on Monday, boys, and tell the heads what
has happened, and get permission to take notes of the lectures for me,
won't you?" said Bruce after a moment's silence.
"Aren't you together in lectures?" asked the doctor.
"I'm taking the scientific, but Bas and Bart take the _belles lettres_
course," said Bruce. "I shall be able to go back in a few days?"
"If you don't catch cold, and can go back with one of the boys to
attend to you. You can't use those arms under ten days," answered the
doctor. "It seems to me at your age I should not have been so impatient
of coddling in the little grey house, by the three nicest and prettiest
girls between Maine and California."
"It would be a hero, doctor, that could turn from it, if it did not
postpone greater happiness," said Bruce. "I want to graduate."
"Oh, you want to graduate! And you are in a tremendous hurry to read
medicine with me--I see!" said the doctor. "I have always been a meek
and humble man, my boy, but you will make me conceited of my charms."
The kind old doctor, whose sixty years made his rest at night important
after a busy day, helped Basil and Bartlemy get Bruce to bed, and drove
away only when morning's nearness made going to bed an absurdity.
Basil stayed with Bruce, and Bartlemy decided to nap on the broad old
"nurse" for the few remaining hours of darkness.
For several days Bruce suffered more keenly than he had expected to,
just as Dr. Fairbairn prophesied. Bartlemy went back to Yale on Monday,
as usual, but Basil stayed behind to help nurse and serve his brother,
who was helpless for nearly a week.
Miss Charlotte slept for three days, only waking to take nourishment,
and then she drifted back to oblivion of her loss. She had loved her
home, the home of her birth and entire life, so dearly that Mrs. Grey
was grateful for every hour that spared her consciousness of that loss.
That courageous woman found even her competent hands overfull for
those seven days of nursing and a crowded house. But Wythie and Rob
pervaded every corner with their helpfulness, and between school hours
Prue uncomplainingly shouldered the hardest tasks that she could find
undone. The thought that the little grey house had so nearly lost big,
noble Bruce, and that he had risked his life only on the chance of
saving Cousin Peace, who was dearer than any one outside its immediate
circle, awoke in Prue such a depth of gratitude that nothing was too
hard for her to do to prove that gratitude.
When Miss Charlotte came back from her voyaging in unknown waters the
Grey family rejoiced anew, for she came back her old, calm, sweet self;
sorrowful in the loss of her house, but not harmed by the shock of
the fire, and far too deeply good to brood over the holocaust of all
the memorials and associations of her life. Nothing was said by Miss
Charlotte of Bruce's daring plunge, at that last moment of special
danger, into the burning house in search of her. But once Rob, coming
into the dining-room, saw Cousin Peace bending over the boy's couch
with both her delicate hands lightly enfolding his bandaged ones, and
she knew that Bruce was receiving his thanks.
Bruce's back was towards the door, which was fortunate, for he would
have been greatly embarrassed to meet Rob's eyes, and Cousin Peace,
of course, could not see her. Rob slipped away quietly, and when she
came singing along the hall a little later Bruce was relating college
tales to Miss Charlotte, smiling over by the window, in Mrs. Grey's low
sewing chair.
"Fayre is ringing with your heroism, Bruce," cried a voice from the
other direction, and Rob turned to see Frances coming in the front
door. "And what is more, Rob," Frances added as she and Rob met in the
doorway of the dining-room, "I see Hester Baldwin coming up the street
as fast as she can come."
"Hester!" cried Rob, setting down her bowl of blancmange. Bruce
ungratefully called all the food prepared for him during these days of
feverish tendencies by one generic name--"softness."
"It is Hester, actually," she cried. "And Dr. Fairbairn is driving down
the street; I wonder he didn't overtake you."
"Not while he continues to drive Reliable," laughed Frances. "Reliable
makes his daily visits in time, but he doesn't overtake many people."
"Well, Hester, it's very nice to see you coming up the hill
unexpectedly, as if you were a Fayre maiden, and not a daughter of
Gotham!" said Rob welcoming her friend.
"I had to come out--I'm going back early, so don't be frightened," said
Hester. "I saw in the paper an account of Bruce Rutherford's splendid
act, and that your cousin was burned out, and I couldn't rest one more
day without finding out for myself how bad everything was."
"Pretty bad," said Rob, raising her voice slightly to be sure it
reached Bruce on the dining-room couch. "We have Bruce here, being
nursed by Basil, and bothering the Greys,--tended by everybody.
Cousin Peace is here, of course. And we have adopted a child, more
or less--more or less adopted, I mean; not more or less a child.
Altogether this has been an eventful week for us."
"It certainly sounds so!" cried Hester, looking at Rob hard, not
knowing whether to take her seriously.
"You go into the dining-room; Basil and Wythie and Prue and France
are there, burning incense around our martyred Bruce--as though he
hadn't had enough of burning! I'll open the door for the doctor, who is
tying his horse, and follow you," said Rob. She came in, bringing Dr.
Fairbairn, whose six feet two of height, and proportionate bulk always
seemed to fill up the little grey house in every crevice.
"Is this a bee?" demanded the doctor as he entered, pulling off his
driving-gloves with a light chafing of each hand as he stripped it, and
glancing around at the five girls.
"Two B's, doctor; two thirds of Battalion B, but there's no chance
for anything but the busiest sort of idleness in this house, since
Bruce took possession of it, with his wounded hands,--to drop into a
poetical strain," said Rob.
"Dr. Fairbairn is going to let me decamp on Monday, aren't you,
doctor?" hinted Bruce.
"If you will promise to take proper care of yourself. One would suppose
he might be reasonably contented here, now wouldn't he?" added the
doctor, looking around the pleasant room.
"Oh, well, I may be a B, but I don't want to be a drone," said Bruce.
"I can take lectures with my bandages on. A little too long of this
halcyon weather and I'd be good for nothing, smothered in honey, like
an unworthy B." And Bruce's eyes rested lovingly on the Grey mother
that moment entering.
Hester had been looking so preoccupied all this time that Wythie
noticed it.
"Hester has something to tell us," she said.
"I'll take Bruce up-stairs and bandage him afresh, and Miss Hester can
disburden her mind while we are gone," said Dr. Fairbairn.
"If you wouldn't mind listening, you are the very ones whom I most want
to hear what I have to say--if I have courage," added Hester, with a
sudden unusual shyness.
Dr. Fairbairn settled back into his chair with a surprised look at the
girl.
"I can sit here exactly fifteen minutes," he said, consulting his
candid looking watch.
"I told you, Rob, about that crippled child that I saw in the
tenement," Hester began. Rob nodded. "And I told the others Greys and
Bruce," Rob said.
"I have been thinking hard ever since, and wondering how to help him,"
said Hester. "It seemed to be impossible till I suddenly remembered to
find out how much it cost to support a child, and then I found it a
simple matter, after all. I hate society, I--oh, Rob knows; I didn't
mean to talk about that. But I got mother and father to say that I
might drop certain things which I never wanted to do in the first
place, and use the money they would cost for that boy. I couldn't get
him into a hospital, because he was incurable, so I put him somewhere
to board--in the country--till I could do better. Then it struck me
that it wouldn't cost very much to support a house for such children,
and I talked to father. He was respectful to my plans at last. He had
always laughed me aside, because he thought I was full of notions, just
a dissatisfied young girl. But he told me in this talk I had with him
that if I would go slowly and sanely he would help me every step of
the way; that he couldn't possibly object if I wanted to lead a useful
life, instead of a merely pleasant one--not that this life wouldn't
be pleasanter than playing all the time! I have a little money that
is all my own, and father will help me. I should like to hire a house
and a housekeeper, and put into that house as many incurably crippled
children as we could afford. And I'd like them to have a good doctor's
care, so that, though they were incurable, they might be helped as
much as they could be. And I should like this home to be in Fayre,
where the Greys could help me, and watch over it. Besides, this is
where I learned so much that I should like to have the Home where the
atmosphere of the little grey house could flow over and around it."
Hester paused, quivering with excited eagerness, embarrassed that she
had revealed her innermost self to such a circle of listeners. But it
was a circle of the right sort. Dr. Fairbairn arose, with a mist on his
spectacles. He walked over to Hester and took both her hands. "My dear,
good, earnest child," he said, "I admire you and respect you. You have
thought of a beautiful thing, beautifully conceived and it seems to me
simple and practical. Everything can not be done in a day; let me turn
over in my mind what you have said, and we shall see, we shall see."
"We will do all we can to help you, Hessie," said Mrs. Grey, her eyes
beaming with longing to begin that instant to mother all the maimed
waifs whom Hester could offer her.
"Father will help; I know he will," cried Frances, eagerly.
"Our father, too," said Basil quietly. "Some day he is coming to Fayre,
not too long hence, I hope."
"It is lovely!" cried Prue, her imagination picturing vividly the
attractive rôle of Lady Bountiful to forlorn and grateful childish
hearts.
"I'll begin telling stories again, at once, to earn money for the
support of one little incurable. I could earn enough to support one, if
it were a small one, with not too big a hump, or whatever ailed her,"
said Rob, talking nonsense as usual to hide her deeper feeling. "And,
Hessie, I am proud to call you my friend!"
"I will be a specialist on little children's incurable diseases, and
I will give my services to the Home!" cried Bruce, sitting erect with
tumbled hair and his face glowing with genuine enthusiasm. "I have
always been afraid that I might be a failure in my profession because I
had income enough to live on without practising, but this will save me."
He followed Dr. Fairbairn up-stairs to have his wounds dressed, and
Hester looked from one to the other left behind.
"They were in earnest? They really did approve?" she implored.
"In entire earnest, and they approved profoundly," affirmed Rob. "This
may be the birthday of good that shall outlast our day."
Hester caught her breath. "If only I can do something!" she murmured.
CHAPTER SIX
ITS LEAN-TO ROOM
Bruce went away on Monday, with Basil and Bartlemy to support him, and
with his arms and hands still bound up. He resolutely turned his back
on the temptation to let his wounds serve as an excuse for prolonging
days which had been among the pleasantest of his life, in spite of
physical suffering.
Miss Charlotte had been persuaded by the council of all her friends
to abandon indefinitely her intention of rebuilding her house. It was
irreplaceable; nothing could restore to her the walls permeated with
the love and associations of a lifetime, and there was room for her and
need of her, as Mrs. Grey urged her to remember, in the little grey
house. So, for that winter at least, the little house was the richer
by another inmate, and the Greys set about fitting for her use the
room in the lean-to, to which Rob had been wont to repair through her
childhood and big-girlhood for solitude and inspiration. It really
was a dear room, although one could not stand erect in all parts of it
to view its charms. On either side of the door by which it was entered
sat a low rush-bottomed chair, with yellow stripes running around its
grooved back much dimmed and worn by years of service. At each end of
the room was a window; between the corner and one of these windows
stood a mahogany bedstead, with rolling head and footboard of equal
height. Beside the other window stood a high mahogany bureau, with
carved columns unnecessarily upholding its swelled front upper drawer,
and with two small drawers raising its top into a second story. Above
this bureau hung an old gilt mirror, divided across its top by a strip
of gilt framing a pleasing representation of two white houses facing
a common, through which a walk, bordered by the stiffest of trees,
mounted to the village church. The lean-to roof slanted rapidly down
from these windows on each side of the room towards the south, but the
few feet between the ceiling and the floor on that side were broken by
two half windows, their tiny panes contriving to let in a little of the
southern sunshine and breeze, and a glimpse of the apple-trees beyond.
It really was a most lovable and harmonious room, and its quaintness
seemed the proper setting for Cousin Peace's sweet aloofness from the
world of to-day.
Rob came alone to begin dismantling the room of its mementos of
the time when she had been the Scheherazade of Fayre, and had told
stories to the children for money which the Grey family had then so
sorely needed. These mementos were the absurdities which Battalion
B had showered upon her. The mottoes which Bartlemy had illuminated
still adorned the walls; Rob smiled and then sighed as she took them
down, one after the other--"Young Robin Grey came a-Courtin' We,"
"Plain Tales for the Bills," and other ridiculous sentiments which
the boys had contributed for her to hang in her auditorium, so they
declared, but which had hung here all this time, here where Rob used
to come to prepare her stories. Battalion B's other contributions to
her enterprise were also piled on the chairs and in the corners of
this room--rattan rods, slates, primers, a pedagogue's cap, and an
impossible false front of yellow flax, with its wide cotton parting;
this Bruce had sent her.
Rob laid her treasures in the clothes-basket, amusement and regret
written on her face. She was still young--just over the line, childhood
not out of sight behind her, but its very nearness made it worse to
know that it was inaccessible. Those had been hard days, but they had
been pleasant ones, and sixteen was a delightful age! Eighteen's two
additional years made great differences.
Rob folded the false front down its parting and smoothed its flaxen
locks meditatively. No shadow had come over the jolly comradeship that
had been established between her and Bruce at their first meeting;
he was still her boy friend, treating her with that fine mixture of
consideration, perfect understanding and equality which is the ideal of
American boy and girl friendship. But Rob felt quite sure that Bruce's
chummy manner hid quite as much of another sort of affection for her as
Basil quietly, but frankly showed for Wythie, and which Wythie accepted
with her sweet, honest single-mindedness. Rob had no desire to exchange
her most precious comradeship for love, and Bruce was too keen-eyed
not to know that, and not to retain the good he had by the utmost
vigilance, biding his time in the hope of making himself indispensable
to Rob. Bruce was nineteen; Rob felt sometimes, and for a brief moment
as if she were drifting towards a trap, for she was a little girl at
heart still, and shrank like a wild bird from a retaining hand.
"It is a great pity to be eighteen, and it's a greater pity that your
friends have to grow up," Rob said aloud, depositing the false front
on the top of her collection in the clothes-basket, and recalling
Bruce's expression when he left the little grey house on Sunday night
to be ready for an early start to college Monday morning. He had
bidden her good-bye with his old chummy pat on the shoulder, given
with the finger-tips which protruded from the bandages of his right
hand. All that he had said was: "Good-bye, Bobs Bahadur; you've been
to me the trump you always are. I'll pour oil on the troubled waters
for you if ever you get into trouble--hot water, I suppose I could
more appropriately have said. I don't suppose I'll ever have a chance
to tend you wounded, as you did me, because Bobs Bahadur is a general
that doesn't know defeat, but I'll read to you if you are laid up, and
return my obligations in any other way, if I have the chance. A wounded
hero might have worse nurses than you and Wythie, and Prue, too,
between her pursuit of knowledge."
He had gone off laughing, speaking like a schoolboy, but though Bruce
could control his tongue, and include Rob with the other two girls, he
could not keep his eyes from regarding her with a look that told her
there was only one girl in all the world for Bruce Rutherford.
"Bother such nonsense!" ejaculated Rob impatiently, shaking her
shoulders as she saw her clouded face in the gilt mirror, below the
village green and the white cottages.
"What nonsense, Robin?" asked Miss Charlotte's soft voice, and Rob
turned towards her, glad for the moment that her cousin could not see
her face.
"Only growing up, being a young woman, Cousin Peaceful," she said. "I
was taking down these trophies of my story-telling days, the absurd
things Battalion B used to send me, and I was thinking what good times
we used to have, and what a pity it was that we couldn't be boys and
girls forever instead of sober men and women."
"I haven't noticed any very great sobriety so far, Robin dear,"
remarked Miss Charlotte quietly. "Do you feel sorry to see the story
unfolding for Wythie and Basil?"
"Oh, I hate it! No, I don't!" cried Rob. "I'm glad about it, of
course--Wythie goes on as quietly as if she were a little rosebud
opening--sunflower, would be a better simile, because she looks up
to Basil in the most sunflowerish way imaginable. But it is rather
horrid, though it is nice, now don't you think so, Cousin Peace?"
"I think Robin is not fully fledged yet," said Cousin Peace wisely,
and Rob was silenced by the portentous little word at the end of her
sentence.
Cousin Peace had firmly refused to consider becoming one of the
family in the little grey house unless she were allowed to use the
lean-to room which was never occupied; no one, she declared, should be
disturbed by her coming, though Rob promptly reminded her that they
were sure to be disturbed by her wherever she might be, for she was
such a disturbing element. Rob was constantly caressing Cousin Peace by
loving pretence of her being a great trial.
The Greys had all objected to giving Miss Charlotte the lean-to room,
but when it was ready for her Wythie cried out in surprised delight:
"Why, it's the very nicest room in the whole house!"
It was a dear little room. The old-fashioned, fine furniture remained
in its place. Soft green and white short curtains framed the small
paned windows, plain green carpet covered the floor, long boxes of
flowers stood before the half windows on the south side of the room,
under the lean-to, and a few good pictures hung on the straight sides
of the walls. Though Cousin Peace could never see her surroundings, her
senses were so delicate that one felt impelled to surround her with
the finest beauty, beauty which she, more than most people, would have
revelled in had she not been debarred from seeing it. But Rob said
truly that "Cousin Peace's insight was much keener than most people's
outsight"; it was hard to believe that she did not get all the colour
and outline of every picture, flower, and sunset that came before her.
Over Miss Charlotte's bed Wythie had hung a fine photograph of St.
Lucy, with her lamp and the palm of a martyr's victory. It was like
Oswyth to remember the significance of St. Lucy's legend, her sacrifice
of her beautiful eyes and her reward of others more beautiful than
those which she had lost, and her name's meaning--light. To remember
how peculiarly appropriate to blind Cousin Charlotte, whose inward
vision revealed to her more than mere eyes could have shown, was the
legend of Santa Lucia.
"It seems kind of quiet, like a place to be good in," said little Polly
Flinders, surveying the result of the girls' work in the lean-to room
with serious gaze, as she nursed Prue's old doll, Hortense.
It grew to be just that to all the Grey family. When annoyances came,
when those days dawned which dawn for every one, in which nothing seems
right and many things seem wrong; when nerves quivered and other people
seemed suddenly aggressive and unkind, then Wythie, Rob, and Prue fell
into the habit of creeping up to Cousin Peace's little lean-to room to
be set straight.
"It is like having a domestic chapel," said Rob, who most of the three
was subject to perturbed spirits and the variability, which, she said
herself, was due to the reddish shade of her bright brown hair.
Little Polly Flinders loved dearly to crawl off into the corner, as far
under the lean-to as the low rocking-chair, which had served all the
Greys in turn, would go, and quietly to sit rocking Hortense, watching
Miss Charlotte with awe-struck eyes that never got to the end of the
charm and the lessons of that gentle face.
It became Polly's task to water the flowers in the boxes under the
windows in the lowest dip of the lean-to, because she most easily
of any of the inmates of the little grey house could crawl up to
them as they thirstily awaited her. Perhaps it was because Polly was
so faithful to them, perhaps because Charlotte Grey loved them so
dearly, but for some reason the flowers in the lean-to room blossomed
as no others in Fayre seemed to blossom, and filled the air with the
sweetness of mignonette, heliotrope, and roses, brightening the quiet
room with their glad colours.
Prue came home one afternoon with a face that would have betrayed her
perturbed state of mind to her family had there been any one about to
have seen it. But her mother had gone to Aunt Azraella's, Wythie and
Rob were out, Lydia sat in the kitchen darning long black hose to a
wailing accompaniment, and Kiku-san was too sleepy at that hour to be
observant of Prue's expression.
But the instant she crossed the threshold of the lean-to room, Miss
Charlotte dropped her knitting--as usual she was making soft wrappings
for little babies--and said: "Why, Prudy, dear girl, what has happened?"
"No one ever sees things as quickly as you do, Cousin Peace!" exclaimed
Prue, taking off her hat before the landscape mirror, and lightly
"fluffing" her golden hair before she took the low stool opposite
Cousin Peace. "There hasn't anything really happened, Cousin Charlotte,
but there is a chance for something to happen."
"There usually is," remarked Cousin Peace, resuming her knitting.
"Fourteen chances of sixty minutes each, at the very least, in each
day, and I think we may as well count them as twenty-four, because the
greatest event of my life was that dreadful fire, and that happened in
the night."
"Yes, but I mean that I have a chance, right here in my hand, for
something nice to happen to me, and I'm afraid mama won't let it
happen," said Prue dubiously.
Miss Charlotte reached over and touched the letter that Prue held.
"What is it all about, Prue?" she asked, leaning back again.
"First of all, Cousin Peace, do you think it is so very dreadful to be
ambitious?" asked Prue.
"I think it is very dreadful to lack ambition, Prudy. I think it all
depends on the direction one's ambitions take," returned Miss Charlotte.
"Mama warns me all the time not to be ambitious, to be content--I think
she means humdrum," said Prue. "Of course there is no one half as good
as mama, but just think a minute, Cousin Peace. She married early,
and she has been swallowed up in her home, living for us and for poor
papa. Now, couldn't a woman be good and happy if she was called to a
different life? Is this the only way to be good?"
"Prue, that is a foolish question, because you know quite well that a
great many people are being good, in a great many different ways and
places," said Cousin Peace. "Just what have you in mind? Don't you
think you had better tell me exactly what you have to decide? What is
the text of your address?"
"Yes, it is this that has set me off, but I think of these things a
good deal," said Prue slowly. "This is a letter from Hester Baldwin.
She knows I want dreadfully to go to New York for music, and drawing,
and languages, and such special studies. She has told me that her
father can get me into a perfectly fine school--I think I mean a
fashionable school," Prue interrupted herself to say, with the honesty
that was a Grey characteristic. "She says that they would be delighted
to have me spend the winter with them, with the Baldwins, Cousin
Charlotte, who entertain and go out a lot, and where I should have a
chance to meet the people I want to know, and to see the life I want to
see--Oh, I know mama will say no!" Prue broke off with almost a sob.
"Prue, you are but sixteen," began Miss Charlotte.
"Just at the age when impressions are keenest!" cried Prue. "It would
do me heaps of good! Don't disapprove, Cousin Charlotte! Please don't!
I want you to make mama see it my way."
"My dear little Prudy, come nearer; put your head on my lap. There!"
said Cousin Charlotte, running her long fingers through the hair that
glistened like spun gold between them. "Now, dear, listen to me. You
are getting a good education in Fayre; better, very possibly, than
you would have in that fashionable school--certainly as good as one
could ask. Look at the question honestly, Prudence, and as a truthful
girl tell me if I am not right when I say that I think you are far
better off to be denied this doubtful opportunity that has come to you.
You have good society in Fayre; the companionship of gentlemen and
gentlewomen, and it is society within the scope of your income to go
into and to receive in your turn. In New York you would meet well-bred
people too, dear, because the Baldwins would not admit other into their
home, but fashionable people are not necessarily well-bred; as soon
as you went beyond the Baldwin's immediate circle you would probably
find many things less satisfactory than they are here. This is an age
in which notoriety is mistaken for fame, and success is measured by a
standard very like the circus posters which adorn the barns around
Fayre in June. You have been taught by example and precept that success
is not always measured by results, but is always measured by the end
for which one works and lives. Dear Prue, keep your ideals; never for
one moment lose your hold on the vision of perfection in character
and the ends for which you labour. It is a dream which brings its own
fulfilment, if not in outward surroundings, at least in the character
of the dreamer. Your mother fears, dear Prue, your tendency to be
attracted by glitter and by the noise of plaudits which are not the
echo of truth. Neither of the other girls will be drawn away from their
poise of mind, which enables them to distinguish relative values very
exactly. But you, my Prudy, are less content, and your mother wants you
to find happiness within yourself, since outward belongings never give
it."
"But, Cousin Peace, I only want to see and be seen; I can't help
knowing what I look like, and I want to use my gifts in a larger
field," said Prue, very low, and rather glad that her cousin could
not see her handsome face as she claimed its possession. "Now, do you
despise me?"
Miss Charlotte laughed. "My dear, my dear, my dear!" she cried. "It is
very natural to want to see and to be seen, though it does sound a
little odd to hear you claiming beauty so frankly. But, Prudy, don't
you expect to use your eyes to good purpose, wherever you are, and
is it a little thing that your bonny face will give pleasure to your
loved ones? I am afraid you want an audience, my little cousin, but
remember that anything outside doesn't matter seriously; it is the
close heart things that count, especially to women. I don't mean to
underrate your gift of beauty, Prue, nor to have you underrate it, but
don't overrate it. Wythie is very sweet and pretty, and Rob's charm
exceeds her good looks, which are not insignificant. You have fallen
into the Grey heritage--that's all. The Greys are usually more or less
handsome. But that does not necessitate foolish ambitions. There is
another side to this plan of going to New York for the winter which
does not seem to have occurred to you. You would be cultivating tastes
which you have not the means to gratify. You have a comfortable, dear
little old home, Prudy, as much of this world's goods as you need, but
you could not maintain the habits of the girls whom you would meet in
that fashionable school, not for one month. Can you afford a great
many expensive dresses, carriages, flowers, theatre tickets unlimited,
all the costly nothings that make up tremendous sums in a season?
And if you can not, why should you want to make yourself miserable by
acquiring tastes which you have no reason to suppose that you can ever
gratify? If you are vaguely restless now what would you be after a
winter in that atmosphere, to which, at first, you would take only too
kindly?"
"I could manage," said Prue. "They would not know what I could afford."
"Don't you think, Prue, that is not quite honest?" suggested Cousin
Peace gently. "Don't you think upright, self-respecting honesty demands
that one should take that place in the world which belongs to him? And
common sense will tell you it is the only way to be happy. I don't
mean to preach, my dear, but when you look around you and see how many
people are false to their ideals, and sink to incredible baseness for
the love of display, it seems to me that when one is but slenderly
equipped with money it is an obvious duty to safeguard one's self by
cultivating simple tastes, and by living with perfect integrity on that
basis which is his rightfully, striving of all things for contentment.
I do not approve of your feeding your love of luxury, your desire for
a wider field, even though I can easily forgive you for knowing that
you are a remarkably pretty girl. You should not accept Hester's
invitation, Prue; you should stay in your own place until you are old
enough to carve your way through to what you want, and by that time
I hope very much that you will see how lovely it is to live in the
simple, noble, unworldly atmosphere in which you have been born and
bred. If I were you I wouldn't ask my mother to let me go to Hester
this winter."
"There wouldn't be any use in my asking her if you disapprove," said
Prue, half tempted to resentment, though she liked to be preached to by
Cousin Peace.
"There wouldn't be if I did approve, you rebellious child," smiled her
cousin. "Mary would never expose her baby to the danger of having her
golden head filled with the sort of ambition which leads to bitterness
of soul." Cousin Peace stroked the golden head very kindly as she
spoke, and Prue lifted it with a sigh.
"Worldiness is beautiful to think about," she said, "but I wonder if
worldliness isn't rather splendid to live? I can't help thinking it
would be fine to enter a vast room, magnificently attired, and hear
people catch their breath and whisper: 'There's the beautiful Miss
Grey!'"
Miss Charlotte laughed long and merrily. "Prue, you are just a little
girl after all, and in spite of your great height! You haven't changed
at all since the time that you used to get on that ragged old silk
from the attic and trail about playing you were Mary of Scotland. Do
you remember how you used to add: 'Before she was beheaded,' when we
asked who you were, and you used to say: 'Mary Queen Scots'? I think I
needn't have preached such a long sermon to you, if you have only such
a childish ambition as that!"
"Who's talking of ambitions?" cried Rob in the doorway. "Here is Polly
going to have a birthday next week and be nine years old, and I have
found out that her ambition is to have a lovely doll, all her own, so
that she can feel that her child is not an adopted one, like Hortense."
Rob came in, all fresh and glowing from the out-of-doors. Miss
Charlotte put out her hand and Rob dropped Polly's little hand to clasp
it.
"What are your ambitions, Robin Redbreast?" asked Cousin Peace, using
Rob's childish nickname.
"I believe I haven't one; isn't it disgraceful?" cried Rob. "Only to
be happy, happy, with Mardy and the girls--and you, dearest Cousin
Peaceful--in the little grey house, forever and ever without change or
decay."
"Dear Robin!" murmured her cousin. "If only that might be! But your
ambition may be, it _will_ be realized, for love is eternal."
"Oh, yes! I believe I am ambitious to resume my story-telling
successfully, to help Hessie's little cripples," added Rob with a light
pressure of her cheek on Miss Charlotte's hand as her only answer.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ITS AMBITIONS
Prue laid before her mother the proposition from Hester Baldwin which
it seemed to the girl herself one that no one could possibly refuse.
Mrs. Grey did not entertain it for a moment. "The Baldwins are charming
people, dear," she said quietly, as she folded Hester's letter and
returned it to its envelope. "If you had no home I should be thankful
to have you received into theirs. As it is, and considering that the
home to which you would return is such a simple one, I think you would
get more harm than good from the school of which Hester speaks. Your
place is in the little grey house, my Prudy, and in the little Grey
family; it would be too small a family by one if you left us."
Prue did not urge the point; there never was the slightest use in
urging Mrs. Grey to do something upon which she decidedly made up her
mind in the beginning, but the girl's beauty was clouded for some days
by the shadow of her dissatisfaction.
When Hester came out to spend a few days before Christmas Prue hoped
that she might convert her mother to other views, but Hester was so
engrossed with her project of founding a home for crippled little
children that she had forgotten her plan for Prue.
"They tell me that, though he is incurable, the poor little fellow I
have sent out to Jersey really is better!" cried Hester almost the
moment that she arrived. "Only suppose there were twenty of them!"
"Five dollars a week--two hundred and fifty a year, five thousand a
year--Oh, Hester, I'm afraid you will have to get on with less than
twenty little cripples. You can't afford so many!" cried Rob.
"Nonsense, Rob! It wouldn't cost nearly five dollars a week apiece if
we had them all in one house, and weren't paying board for them, but
had a housekeeper, and made a fund for them all together," retorted
Hester.
"I'm afraid it would be a sinking fund," remarked Wythie quietly.
"It can be done; only give me the chance!" cried Hester.
"We will give you a chance!" cried Rob. "I'll announce immediately that
I will resume story-telling to the Fayre children. It won't be much,
but it will enable you to afford one more cripple, anyway."
"I think we might have a costume entertainment; our attic is full of
the loveliest things," said Prue.
"Why, Prue, how did we all happen to forget those venerable costumes
up-stairs!" exclaimed Wythie. "We can give something really worth
while."
"It would be no end of fun," said Frances slowly; she had dropped in at
the little grey house and had been kept for luncheon. She was wondering
if the Grey girls did not remember the frolic they had had in those
antiquated garments on the last night of their father's life. She saw
Rob's lips draw a little at the corners as she smiled, and she knew
that her "Patergrey's" "son Rob" was thinking of that night.
"It would be a frolic for us, but what form could the affair take that
people would come to it? You mean to sell tickets to it?" Rob asked.
"Why, of course; we mean it to earn money to give Hester another
cripple," laughed Prue.
"Make it a dance to which everybody must come in costume, and for
which they must buy tickets for the privilege of coming," said Frances,
whose practical mind always was quick to plan details. "We will lead
the dancing, and do a costume gavotte, or something--Let's see--three
Greys, Hessie and I are five girls, and Battalion B and Hessie's cousin
are four boys. We'll get three more girls and four more boys, and we'll
practise an old-time dance; we can make it lovely. And--why not?--let's
have the dance preceded by a short concert of old-time songs. Mama will
lend our house, I'm sure of that, and we could have the nicest kind of
an affair."
Hester fairly beamed with joyous excitement. "Why, what has made you
girls so perfectly angelic this morning?" she cried. "You have always
been interested, but not so ready charged to go right off at a touch
as you are now. If Rob would tell stories for the Home this winter,
and you would have this entertainment--why, we could take two more
children at once! It seems as though I could not wait to carry out this
beautiful plan, and I can hardly believe it when I see that it really
begins to look like a possibility."
"It's getting to be a probability, Hester," said Rob. "One thing
that has fired our zeal is Dr. Fairbairn's report on it. He has
been talking about it here, and he has found several people deeply
interested, while the dear old man himself is enthusiastic. Then Aunt
Azraella, of all people under the sun, has inspired us with courage.
She said the other day that if we proved to be in earnest, and she
could be shown that this home for incurable little waifs stood a chance
of being an accomplished fact, she might help it. I could hardly gasp
out my answer, but if she can be interested in the scheme it could be
put through, for Aunt Azraella has a good deal of money, we think--we
never knew how much she really had."
"Come here, my beloved Feather-bed!" cried Wythie as Kiku-san swung
into the room, so big, and white, and fluffy that Hester laughed aloud
at the appropriate name.
Before the golden eyed cat had risen from the toilet which he
immediately sat down to prepare when Wythie called him, a clear,
delicate sound of singing floated in through the door, a high, sweet,
childish treble, fine as a gossamer thread of sound, but beautifully
true. It sang "Annie Laurie," by no means an easy task for a childish
singer, without a false note or a break, and when the song was ended
the same voice took up "Oft in the Stilly Night," which it sang with
the same charm.
The five girls listened, breathless, Rob with uplifted finger of
warning.
"That's little Polly Flinders," she said when the lovely little voice
died away into silence. "She is in the lean-to room, singing to
Cousin Peace. It is the prettiest companionship imaginable. Little,
old-fashioned, quiet Polly, and lovely, blind Cousin Peace. Polly
steals away to her at every opportunity. I wish I could paint the
picture: that sober, pale faced child on her stool, with her new,
birthday dolly, at the feet of the blind woman, with the saintly face,
and the lean-to room, with its old furniture for the setting of the
picture! Polly worships at her feet, figuratively and literally. The
child sings exquisitely. Mardy, Wythie and I--and Prue, I suppose, only
she hasn't discussed it with us--want her educated in music. She has
decided talent, and she sings quaint, unchildlike old songs which she
has learned from her mother, so she says, but I'm sure Mrs. Flinders'
tired, hard voice never sung them as Polly does. We love to hear
her----"
"Rob," interrupted Wythie, "fancy Polly in an old-time gown, singing
her songs at our entertainment!"
"The very thing!" cried Rob and Frances together, while Hester choked
Wythie in a rapture of gratitude.
"Well, you have had an idea worth having, Oswyth!" cried Rob. "And it
might be of use, later, to Polly. There are so many things to be done,
I begin to wish we were rich. I want to help Polly--to tell the truth,
'way down in the bottom of my heart, I care more for giving talented
girls a chance than I do for cripples--forgive me, Hessie! And I wish
I could found a home in Fayre for the homeless animals in the New York
streets, and I'd like to brighten up the lives of girls who have no
fun, with an occasional concert or theatre ticket. Oh, dear; I believe
a million would not go far!"
Prue looked disconsolate. "And I want fine things and a million just
for myself!" she said. "What shall I do if you are all going to turn
saints or philanthropists?"
Wythie laughed. "Poor Prudy, it would be trying to live with a family
given over to good works exclusively," she said. "But we are not quite
saints, nor even philanthropists. What's the difference?"
"The philanthropist does good from purely humanitarian motives, natural
pity, while the saint works from supernatural motives," said Prue
promptly and triumphantly. "You can't catch me, Miss Oswyth; didn't we
have all that in a lecture lately?"
Saints or philanthropists--or a little of both, which these girls
were--the five young creatures worked with a will for the object in
view, and the plan that they had hit upon that morning. Hester even
cut short her visit to go back to New York to work for it at that
end, and wrote what she described as "a chortle and not a letter," to
tell the Fayre girls that she had sold a hundred and eight tickets in
four days, tickets that brought two dollars each--"So there's another
cripple for us already!" wrote Hester at the end of her letter; wrote
in such a hasty, tremulous way that a big blot, representing her joyous
excitement, crowned the H of her signature, like a black king in
checkers.
Rob's audience for her story-telling was secured without any
difficulty, for most of the children who had heard her first series
wanted to hear these new tales, and their little brothers and sisters
had grown up in the meantime to a size that added them to her hearers.
She sold forty-five course tickets, at five dollars apiece, and was
to begin the story-telling after New Year's. So that while the
preparations for the concert and dance were going on, Rob's mind was
additionally burdened by the preparations for the storytelling.
Her first set of twenty stories was to be from Grecian history and
Grecian mythology; she tried to concoct them in her mind while she
made ready the room in which they were to be told. When she had first
told stories to the children of Fayre, Mrs. Silsby had lent her big
parlour for the enterprise, but now that the master of the little grey
house had gone away from it forever it had a room to offer its bravest
daughter, a room upon which she had a special claim.
On what Mrs. Grey called "the morning side of the house," opposite
the dining-room, was the quaint old room, originally intended for the
kitchen of the little grey house in the days when a kitchen was also
the dining and living-room.
It was a large room, consequently; the only one on that side of the
house, and it had been Sylvester Grey's special sanctum. In it he had
laboured long on the invention which, with the house, had been his sole
but sufficient legacy to his family, the invention upon which Roberta,
his "son Rob" had helped him for many long hours between her thirteenth
and her seventeenth year.
The dear old room, with its high wainscotting, narrow cupboards, and
immense fireplace, had been left as its master had quitted it, except
that the models of the machine and his books had been set in order and
no longer lay piled over the rush-bottomed chairs as they had been when
they were daily used by the thin, nervous hands which for a year and a
half had been folded in rest.
Now Rob was to take this room for her auditorium, and she had assumed
the task of preparing it. After all there was not much to be done;
when it came to the point neither Rob nor her mother could bear to
make more than absolutely necessary changes. The tall book-cases still
stood there with their contents, the books which Sylvester Grey had
most used; dignified scientific books in one, the well-worn Thackeray
and a few other novels and a few shabby looking poets in its mate. They
would not be in the way of seats for forty-five children; Rob was sure
that her little hearers could easily squeeze into the chairs in which,
judging by her first experience, they would not stay. She knew that
they would crowd around her knees, and hang upon her arms, drinking in
the story as if it were a syrup which might flow past them if they were
not close enough to catch it at its source.
"There isn't much to be done, Mardy," said Rob looking up to her mother
from her knees as she straightened a file of magazines in the bottom
part of one of the cases.
Mrs. Grey aroused herself by an effort from the thoughts into which she
had fallen.
"I was thinking how much had been done, Rob, and how much was done with
forever," said her mother.
"It is all right, Mardy," said Rob quickly. "I feel more and more
sure that it is all right. Much as we miss him it was so beautiful to
slip away in the moment of assured triumph that we would not have it
otherwise, would we?"
"No, dear; very likely we wouldn't if we had time to remember to be
unselfish if the chance came to get him back--but, oh Rob 'son Rob,'
the first impulse would not be unselfish!" Mrs. Grey's voice quavered
over her words, though she bravely smiled.
Rob scrambled to her feet, and went over to put her arm around her
mother.
"I can't help remembering how the first money I earned story-telling
went to introduce the bricquette machine to the world, and now,
thanks to the machine, I am going to be able to tell stories for a
charity," said Rob "let us call this room yours and mine, Mardy, as
it used to be Patergrey's and mine, and let us creep away from the
others sometimes, and come here for little cosey talks. I feel more
like little Rob here than anywhere else. This room makes me forget my
eighteen years and five feet six."
"Do you want to forget them, Rob? Your life seems to me so ideally
simple, so lightheartedly happy, that I thought you were glad you were
no longer that little Robin that used to perch on my knee." Mrs. Grey
looked at Rob sharply as she spoke, and Rob looked her squarely in the
eyes, with her changeable face flashing into smiles. "She was a nice,
dreaming, sunny little Robin, Mardy, but I am as blithe as a blackbird
now, so don't imagine the hand of time lies heavy on me yet. Only you
know I never did want to be a woman," said Rob. "I think it is so very
lovely to be vastly young. Coming events cast their _shadows_ before,
you know; they don't cast rays of light. The present is nice." Rob
laughed as she spoke, but her eyes were wistful.
"Your future will be 'nice' too, Rob dearest," said her mother.
"Somehow, I don't fear for you."
"There doesn't seem to be much plot in our lives, Mardy. Just a little
income, just a little house, just a little work, considerable play--
and so the Grey days drift along, only they're not grey days in any but
a cognominal sense. Now, Mardy, wasn't that a lovely word to have made
up just as it was needed, with no malice, nor aforethought?"
"Very lovely, Rob--Listen! Why here are the boys already!" cried Mrs.
Grey interrupting herself.
"Goodness! Can it be late enough for them?" cried Rob darting out to
give the Rutherfords welcome though the front of her waist was all
dust from the books which she had been hugging, and her hair was more
rebellious than usual from the stooping and climbing which she had been
doing, loosening hairpins that were only too ready at all times to
escape.
"How's the fancy-dress ball progressing?" cried Bartlemy the instant
the door was opened. He had unexpectedly developed more interest in the
plan than either of the other boys, a fact which he himself explained
by saying that it appealed to his artistic sense.
"It's going to be the loveliest thing!" cried Prue enthusiastically.
"And the date is fixed for Twelfth Night," added Wythie. "There is
something in the ring of that name that seems to set off the costumes."
"The very night!" cried Basil.
"How are the burns, Bruce?" asked Rob.
"Nearly burned out. How many listeners to the stories have you secured?
Did they pay in advance?" asked Bruce, kissing Mrs. Grey's cheek, as
all three boys always did when they came home, and stroking the hand
which Miss Charlotte had given him.
"Forty-five, actually!" announced Rob, with exclamation marks in her
voice. "Two hundred and twenty-five dollars down! And Hester must have
nearly as much more, by this time, for the tickets she has sold to the
entertainment. We are going to sell lots here in Fayre when we begin,
and we have hardly any expenses. I gasp at the thought of the wealth
we are amassing for the crippled children with very little effort and
hardly any planning."
"It's a good beginning; enough to make some one ready to help you with
an endowment fund, or the like, for, of course, you will have to have
such help," said Basil, the careful one.
"'Little drops of water, little grains of sand,'" chanted Prue.
"Just so. You must let me look at your costume, Prue, and see if it is
all right," said Bartlemy. "When can you have a rehearsal?"
"We shall rehearse to-morrow night, but not in costume," said Wythie.
"We waited for you, Battalion B, to be here. Hester is coming out, and
her cousin."
"To stay over Sunday?" asked Bruce.
"Hester will; Lester Baldwin goes back on the last train--unless he
misses it, then we shall have to send him up to you boys," said Rob.
"You don't look hospitable."
"Yes, we are," remonstrated Basil. "Send him to us in any case, girls;
it is ridiculous to let him go back on that crawling train when he
might as well have a pleasant Sunday with the crowd. You approve of
him, don't you?"
"Oh, he's very nice, Basil; you will like him," said Wythie in her
kindly way that explained Basil's confidence in her indifference to the
new friend. While Rob, on the contrary, smiled provokingly and said: "I
haven't met so nice a youth in many a day."
"Not since we met our nicest of all boys," said Wythie quietly, for she
had no liking for that sort of teasing.
"What a blessing you are, Wythie!" ejaculated Bruce fervently.
"Hester told me that Lester Baldwin admired Frances very much," said
Prue. Her attempts at casual remarks were usually transparent and not
very successful.
"Shows his sense!" commented Bruce.
"Frances deserves admiration," said Rob.
"She is very nice, of course," said Prue with her most grown-up air,
which always made her seem decidedly less than sixteen. "But I don't
think Frances is striking at all; she is only just a little pretty."
Basil and Bruce laughed and tweaked tall Prue's ear in the elder
brotherly way of theirs which always tried her; it really was trying to
have a B at each ear simultaneously. "Pretty Prudy!" they said together.
The two older Rutherfords made it their business to check Prue's
vanity, which they considered the only defect in any Grey girl.
But Bartlemy stoutly defended her. "Don't you mind those two moles,"
he said, seeing Prue's cheeks reddening and her eyes dangerously near
tears. "They don't know how artists feel about beauty. I can't imagine
giving Frances more than a kindly thought when there's a tearing beauty
in sight."
"Bart, have some caramels; I made them to-day," interposed Rob,
offering the boys the result of her labours. "Taffy's bad for the
digestion, so I never have any."
For in her turn Rob believed in checking Bartlemy's manifest desire to
offer incense to Prue's handsome face; at least till she was long past
sixteen, and somewhat less appreciative of that face herself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ITS BLENDED ROMANCE
The rehearsal for the Twelfth Night entertainment went off so well that
the double quartette most interested in it were greatly elated.
Eleanor Dinsmore, Edith Hooper, Helen Lacey three pretty girls--as well
as Fayre girls--had been asked to complete the number for the gavotte,
and their brothers and cousins and friends, four in all, had gladly
added themselves to the Rutherfords and Lester Baldwin to make up eight
men. Rob had had an inspiration, and had written words to be sung
by the dancers to a beautiful old French gavotte air, as they moved
through the stately figures of the charming dance. Even in ordinary
modern dress the effect was so exquisite that the few privileged
people who looked on were enthusiastic. The young people began to
plume themselves on accomplishing something really artistic, while
the fear that the ticket purchasers would feel that their purchase
was equivalent to an outright donation, with no return to themselves,
vanished like mists in the sunshine of the dancers' perception of
unhoped-for success.
The songs were not going to fail either. The Greys and Battalion
B, with Frances, had sung together since their first meeting. Now
Bartlemy's uncertain bass had deepened into the real thing, Basil's
tenor had grown sweeter, and Bruce's barytone richer. Oswyth had a
sympathetic, true little home voice, exactly like herself; Rob sang
alto very well, and Prue's high soprano had grown stronger than when
they first sang together rowing and working through that summer of
the beginning of Greys' acquaintance with the Rutherfords. Frances
had always sung well, and now Hester's rich, splendid alto was a real
acquisition, while Lester Baldwin's tenor was stronger and higher than
Basil's. It really was an unusual combination of voices, and long
practise together, of most of the singers, made them know exactly how
to bring out one another's best points, and made the voices blend quite
beautifully.
It had not taken much persuasion to get Lester Baldwin to give up
his intention of going back after the rehearsal, but to accept the
Rutherfords' hospitality that night and take Hester back Sunday
evening.
Bruce glowered at Lester for an hour after he met him, then yielded
to his personal charm, but still more to the charm of his marked
preference for talking to Frances, and became cordial with a heartiness
that surprised Lester. He did not know that it was not for what he had
done, nor for what he was, but for what he had not done and for what he
was not that Bruce Rutherford suddenly became his friend.
Sunday morning the three Greys and Battalion B carried off Hester and
her cousin to the quiet church where the Grey girls had been carried in
white draperies to be made little Christians in baptism--Very little
and very reluctant ones.
They came out of church into a fine, cold winter rain which had
threatened them on setting forth. It had kept Miss Charlotte and little
Polly at home for a peaceful morning in the little grey house; it
had served, with her cold, to retain Mrs. Grey at Lydia's side, for
appetites attend on church-going, as a rule, and there was much to be
done by those mother-hands which always smoothed out possible rough
places, and made all kinds of comfort certain.
Aunt Azraella was not out either, which was a relief to the girls, who
dreaded her probable addition to them at dinner, for however gentler
Aunt Azraella's diminution of health might make her, she still was not
adapted to great increase of joy.
"Do you think," Rob asked as they gathered around the hearth after
dinner, "do you really think, Mardy, that it would be unsuited to the
day for 'we (twice) four, and no more' to go up into the attic and look
over the chests and trunks of old clothing?"
"It would be Shintoism--ancestor-worship," said Bruce.
"Bruce, we have sufficient knowledge of the Eastern question to
understand what Shintoism is without your foot-note," remarked Rob
sternly.
"I think it would be perfectly proper to the day, dear, to go into the
attic and see those old costumes, that is to the Sunday side of the
day, but how about the weather side of the day? Wouldn't it be too
cold for you?" Mrs. Grey stretched her fingers towards the fire as she
spoke; she dearly loved warmth--of all sorts.
"We're not afraid of the cold, are we girls? Of course the boys are
afraid of nothing," said Rob.
_"Won't you walk into my attic?" said a robin to her mates._
_"I have venerable garments that would fit up many crates._
_"The way into my attic is up a winding stair,_
_"But, 'spite of cold, these garments old repay a journey there."_
Rob chanted this effusion, and Battalion B arose as one body and
echoed, as a refrain:
"But, 'spite of cold, these garments old repay a journey there."
Then the entire eight departed atticward with Polly and her doll,
Roberta Charlotte, bringing up the rear.
"Go on, Wythie; I must put Polly's jacket on," said Rob, pausing at her
chamber door. "Queer, that little bodies take cold more easily than
larger ones, which have more surface to catch cold on."
"What an absurd girl she is!" sighed grave Hester with supreme content
in the qualities which she lacked and which Rob possessed in excess.
"She talks nonsense all the day long, and acts sense more than any
one," said Wythie, with her loving smile.
Rob and Polly came quickly, the bunch of keys dangling from Rob's hand.
"We forgot these," she cried breathlessly. "We may get too cold if we
try to look over all the clothes. Shall we omit the fantastic ones,
Wythie, and get out only the serious ones, which we can use for the
gavotte?"
"Let us open the cedar chest first," said Oswyth, taking the key Rob
offered her.
She laid back the lid and displayed its contents. In five minutes they
were being shaken out of their folds and held up for inspection, big
cloaks, fur-trimmed hoods, shirred with rattans, long veils, shawls,
for this was the chest given over to materials which might attract
moths.
"The beautiful things are in the trunks," said Prue. "We shall want the
silks and embroidered muslins. Open this trunk, Wythie, please."
Oswyth opened it, and the girls drew a deep breath of joy over what
even their first glimpse displayed.
"Oh, Frances, do you remember these?" whispered Rob, taking out a gown
of 1776, and one of the Madison Era. "Do you remember the night we wore
these?"
"Indeed I do, Rob," whispered Frances. "We must only remember now what
a happy night that was, and be thankful that it was so--that special
night."
"I think I'll wear this gown in the gavotte," said Rob, turning to the
others. "That is if no one else wants it."
"Ah, yes!" said Bruce involuntarily, and Rob knew that he too
remembered her wearing it in their impromptu frolic nearly two years
ago.
"Would this do, Bartlemy?" asked Prue, holding up a pale blue brocade
over a quilted satin petticoat.
"It's beautiful, but better for Wythie or Frances. You ought to wear
this." And Bartlemy drew out a yellow satin, overshot with white, and
sweeping open down the front to display a paler yellow petticoat. "Here
is a cloth-of-gold effect for a golden-haired maiden."
"We will make our audience play a game after the entertainment called
'The Search for the Golden Girl,'" suggested Lester Baldwin.
"And introduce Prue to them afterward as Miss Midas," added Hester. "My
mother has a great-grandmother dress for me--crimson and silver."
"I'd like to have Oswyth wear this," said Prue looking well-pleased
with her own allotment, and displaying a brocade of rosebuds on a blush
ground.
"No," said Wythie. "That is lovely, Prudy, but I have a sentimental
desire to wear something else. Eleanor Dinsmore and that gown have an
affinity for each other."
"We must try to select gowns that not only suit each wearer, but which
contrast and compose well in the general picture," said Bartlemy.
"I know what Wythie wants to do! She wants to wear one of Oswyth Grey's
gowns!" cried Rob.
"Her own?" asked Hester wondering.
"No, indeed; Oswyth Grey long dead and gone; our thrice repeated
great-aunt. That is her trunk standing there." And Rob pointed to an
ancient chest with a heavy, old-time lock. "She died when she was not
much past twenty; there was a love-story, of course, about her, and we
children have always felt the fascination of our vague knowledge of
her history, especially Wythie. When she was a little girl she seemed
greatly impressed by this kinswoman whose name she bore--I think, in a
childish way, she must have had some cloudy notion of reincarnation."
"Might we see her chest?" asked Frances. "It sounds as if opening it
would be like opening a volume of poems."
Hester shivered in spite of her effort to convince herself that she was
warm. Prue noticed it, and was rather glad of an excuse for getting
down to warmer quarters.
"Hester is freezing," she cried. "Oswyth Grey's chest hasn't such
splendid gowns in it as those we have seen; they're all simple
muslins, delicately embroidered, except one heavy violet and white
brocade--white, with violets strewn over it--which is the one Wythie
will wear at the dance, if she wears any of them. Let's go down and get
warm, all of us."
"Shall we? Are you cold, Hessie, Frances, little Rutherford B's,
and Lester?" Rob asked, hesitating a little over the use of Lester
Baldwin's name, though both he and Hester had protested against
formality.
"Well, I'm more nearly goose-flesh than one could possibly expect me to
be," said Bruce.
"I confess that the wood-fire down-stairs might be spelled wooed, for
it woos me strongly, though I should dearly love to see Oswyth Grey's
chest opened," said Hester.
"Why, she's shivering as she speaks!" cried Rob. "Come, then my
brethren. We might carry down these gowns we have selected. I'll lay
them in Mardy's room to be tried on by the girls tomorrow. Hester must
slip on hers to-night--oh, I forgot! Hester has her gown at home. We
haven't provided for the other two girls, but we didn't come up here
intending to select gowns; merely to see them."
Rob was talking as she went on down the stairs, following her guests
and Prue, Polly following her, as she always did. Her voice floated
back to Wythie who had remained behind closing the trunks. She arose
from her knees when the last key was withdrawn and looked longingly
over to Oswyth Grey's chest, where it stood in a corner by one of the
gable windows. She loved that chest and its vanished owner, whose
kinship to herself she felt so strongly, the young maiden, about whom
she knew really nothing but that she had loved and died--which, after
all, is an epitome of all lives.
"Ah, well; I shall have plenty of chances to see you again, dear
Oswyth," she said aloud.
She turned around and there was Basil, waiting for her.
"Why, you startled me, Basil," said Wythie, her colour rising. But she
did not look in the least startled; it always seemed possible to Wythie
that she might raise her eyes and see Basil, even when he was away.
"I thought perhaps you and I might stay behind long enough for just one
peep into that other Oswyth Grey's chest," said Basil. "Let me know
her, too, Wythie."
Wythie crossed over to the chest without a word, and knelt to unfasten
it. Then she threw back its lid, and looked up at Basil.
"There isn't much to see, but it has always seemed to me that there was
much to feel in this chest," she said.
An odour of attar of roses, of lavender, of tonka beans, blended into
an indefinable, sweet mustiness by more than a hundred years, arose
into the young faces bent to inhale it. Soft muslins, fine with the
fineness of the importations from India when broad-sailed merchantmen
went out from New England ports, yellow with age, and daintily wrought
with broidery, lay neatly folded before their eyes.
Beneath them, as Oswyth the second tenderly raised them, lay
high-heeled, narrow slippers, a fan that had been brought from China
long ago to the happy young girl whose cheeks' tint matched its
mandarin's crimson robe, a white silk shawl that might have come with
the fan, its knotted silken fringe and heavily embroidered flowers
several shades more yellow than the delicate fabric. Neckerchiefs of
soft mull, white and in colours lay there, ribbons, stained and faded
by the years, a sampler, a bead bag, clocked stockings, and a great
leghorn hat with its plumes and gauze ribbons flattened by long lying.
It was a young girl's chest, and its pathos spoke to Basil, the pathos
of a light heart that early had ceased to beat, of brief life and long
death.
Wythie lifted, one after the other, that other Oswyth's treasures, and
at last raised from its box near the bottom of the chest the beautiful
brocade which she wished to wear in the gavotte. Beneath it lay
bed-linen, hemmed with the tiniest stitches, and table-linen with its
"O. G." carefully wrought in its corners. And underneath all, in the
very bottom, lay a few thin books, and a bundle of letters tied with a
yellowed ribbon that might once have been either white or pale blue,
and marked in the finest of old-fashioned writing: "From B. R. to O. G.
Her all of life."
"B. R.?" exclaimed Basil. "Am I in this story, too, Wythie?"
"I never thought of those initials before," said Wythie, flushing to
the uppermost line of her brow, "I have not opened this chest, not for
ever so long--three years, it may be."
"You couldn't have thought of the initials then, Wythie, dear; I wasn't
in your story as long ago as that," said Basil.
"I remember that Oswyth Grey's lover's name was Benjamin Raymond," said
Wythie. "Poor little greatest aunt--they are sad letters!"
She gently untied the discoloured ribbon and the letters fell apart in
her lap as she sat back on her heels to look at them. From among them
fell a bunch of flowers and lock of hair; the usual trivial mementos of
greater values lost.
"The first ones are formal, but they were written happily; one can see
that," said Wythie, as she unfolded a yellow sheet, handling its brown
folds carefully, for age had made it very frail. "It's curious how the
mood of the writer shows through the set phrases of that time."
"Nature and strong feeling break through stronger barriers than
phrases, Oswyth, the second," said Basil, as he picked up the flowers.
"Look," he added, "these flowers were waxed for their preservation."
"Yes. I imagine Oswyth Grey did that, for her lover could never have
sent her waxed flowers," said Wythie, lifting the sheet which had held
them for so long that Basil might replace them. "The letters grew more
frank and assured as they went on--some day we will read them. Then
there was one reproaching my little greatest aunt for her hardness of
heart, her cruelty after so long, and then a last one bidding her
farewell. It is quite pitiable. But this is the saddest thing of all."
And Oswyth unfolded the sheet which bore on its outer fold the initials
and the inscription that had lain on top of the packet of letters, like
their epitaph as well as Oswyth Grey's. "See, she wrote this letter to
him in reply to the reproach he had made her, knowing that he would
never see it; it was never sent. Read it."
Basil read it. It threw no light on the cause of the lovers' parting,
but it was a passionate protest against the distrust of her which her
lover had expressed to that Oswyth, and a revelation of devotion and
beauty of character that, after all the years, still palpitated with
life. Oswyth Grey, the little Puritan, would not have poured out her
soul thus had she not felt sure that no other eyes than her own would
ever rest upon that paper.
"What a pity!" murmured Basil, gently folding the unsent letter in its
brown creases again. His eyes were moist.
"She died not long after that the records show; he never knew. Isn't
it a pity?" Wythie's lashes hid her downcast eyes as she fingered the
papers absently. "I always felt that I ought to make it right to her,
because I bore her name. I can't explain just what I have felt about
her, though the feeling is strong. Yet the dear girl has been quite
happy for more than a century; I suppose we need not feel sad about her
now. Here is a stanza written to her, signed B. R. It isn't remarkable,
but it is enough to prove that her B. R. cared for poetry when many
were indifferent to it."
Wythie looked up, smiling to show that the moisture on those lashes
meant nothing, and offered Basil one more yellow page. He took it and
read:
_If there were other like to thee, my loved one,_
_Then might I love that other perfect she;_
_But since the world holds naught like thee, my loved one,_
_How can I choose but at thy feet to be?_
_For, save in this, thou hast no fault, my loved one,_
_That to my love thou prov'st thy obduracy._
Basil returned the verse without comment, and Wythie tied up again the
packet just as that other Wythie had tied it so long before. But with
the great difference that for this Wythie happiness just within reach
seemed to fill the shadowy attic.
"You didn't care for B. R's poetry?" she said, bending over to replace
the letters at the bottom of the chest.
"On the contrary, and I like him for writing it," said Basil. "Wythie,
there will never come anything between us? We shall not be parted as
were this other B. R., and Oswyth Grey? I am still in college, but when
I begin life you are coming to begin it with me in the Caldwell house,
aren't you? We know you are, both of us, but I have been feeling lately
that I wanted to hear you say it."
Oswyth trembled. She had known that Basil's first preference for her
had grown into a devoted love, and she knew that she would have had no
courage to face the years if they did not include Basil. Gentle Wythie
had gone on to this moment without a fear, quietly unfolding without
doubt or dread. But, after all, it meant so much, and for a moment the
girl paused. Then she looked up into Basil's face. "It couldn't be
otherwise, Basil, because it is just as Oswyth Grey wrote here: All of
life," she said.
Basil bowed his head for a speechless moment. "God helping me this
Oswyth shall never be unhappy," he said. Then a great joy seized him,
and he was silent, holding back the expression of it, for Wythie's dove
eyes looked up, half frightened, at the new, manly Basil beside her.
And before either could speak Rob's voice rang out, and Rob's step came
up the lower flight of stairs.
"Where are you two? Basil, Wythie, what has happened to you?" she
called. "Have you fallen into a trunk, and are we going to have a case
of the Mistletoe Bough right here in the little grey house and our own
attic?"
She appeared at the foot of the attic stairs, peering up through the
gathering darkness.
"We opened Oswyth Grey's chest--Basil wanted to see its contents--and
it took longer than we realized," said Wythie coming to the head of the
stairs. "Here is her white brocade with the violets; I shall wear this
in the gavotte."
Wythie's voice sounded unnatural; Rob pounced on her the moment she
descended, and glanced at Basil, following her with his eyes alight as
they had never been before.
"What have you been doing?" she demanded. "Reading Oswyth Grey's
letters? Wythie, what has kept you? Weren't you cold?"
"Oh, no; it is as warm--" began Wythie.
"'As springtime, the only pretty ring time,'" supplemented Basil.
"Wythie, tell me!" insisted Rob.
"Not now; wait until to-night," said Wythie, and escaped with Oswyth
Grey's white brocade all bestrewn with violets.
"If I have to wait until to-night there's nothing to wait for; I know
this minute," muttered Rob. Then she turned fiercely upon Basil.
"Basil, I thought we could trust you," she said.
"Nonsense, Rob, you knew quite well what was coming," retorted Basil
with a quiet laugh of triumph.
"Does that make me like it?" she demanded. "My blessed Wythie! How do
you expect me to go down again to the rest?"
"Shall I send Bruce up?" inquired Basil blandly.
Rob bolted for the back-stairs, to the calm atmosphere of Lydia till
she should have regained sufficient composure to face her guests and
the first romance of this generation in the little grey house.
CHAPTER NINE
ITS TRIUMPH
When her young guests had gone, and the little grey house was quiet for
the night, Mrs. Grey stood before the charred embers on the hearth,
thoughtfully regarding the blackened scales, with their under edges
still glowing, which lay all along the sides of the bits of logs
remaining.
Kiku-san stirred, stretched his paws, lifted his head and remarked:
"M-m-m-mmm?" in a cooing voice, at once welcoming and inquiring. Mrs.
Grey looked up to see Wythie in her violet kimono. She held out her
arms without speaking, for she knew what Oswyth had come to say.
Wythie sprang into the loving arms and nestled her head on her mother's
shoulder.
"Basil wants--" she began.
"You, when the time comes, darling," whispered Mrs. Grey. "I suppose we
have known that for a long time."
"Yes, but he said so," Wythie whispered back.
"And that alters it? Yes, a little. But I want it to be just as little
as possible, my Wythie," returned her mother. "We won't talk about it
to any one outside the little grey house, and you and Basil will be
just the same friendly, simple comrades you have always been. You are
so young, dear, and Basil is still in college. But we understand, as we
have understood all along, that by and by your friendship is to broaden
and deepen into much more."
"It can't, Mardy," said Wythie.
"Ah, Oswyth, everything broadens and deepens with time. Youth feels
tempestuously, but years bring profounder depths. You are too much a
child to know the truth of what I say to you. Be a young girl still, my
Wythie, and be happy. Basil is all we could wish him to be," said Mrs.
Grey, speaking out of the knowledge of her years of sacrificial love
and her widowhood.
"Then you are willing, you don't mind, Mardy?" murmured Wythie.
"I am very glad, dearest, and I believe my gentle girl is going to be a
happy woman. I mind nothing now but that she should miss sleep and take
cold. Go to bed, little daughter, and go to sleep. Waking or sleeping
my very breathing prays for you and Robin and little Prudy."
Mrs. Grey kissed Wythie hastily and half pushed her from her. Wythie
clung to her as she returned the kiss, but went instantly away with
her tear-wet face smiling. It was the mother, left standing beside
the hearth, whose tears fell without the smiles. At last she stirred,
sighed, stooped to pick up the fallen hearth brush, and stroked
Kiku-san with the other hand.
"Of course I am glad, glad and thankful," she said, with only the white
cat to hear. "But joy seems brief when one is a widow at forty-three,
and mothers are selfish creatures." And this most unselfish mother
brushed the ashes over the dying embers of the fire, looked at each
window fastening, slowly put out her reading-lamp, and crept up-stairs
like one that craved for rest.
Twelfth Night was not long in coming; it was to bring such a great
event that it even successfully hurried the holidays out of the way.
Rob, watching Wythie jealously, saw no change in her except a greater
sweetness and gentleness, and a deeper look of contentment in her
brooding eyes.
"You see I am not very old, Rob, and Mardy says that I'm not to be
formally engaged; only to go happily on till the time comes to go
happier further," explained Wythie.
"H'm!" ejaculated Rob, inconsistently exasperated by the fulfilment
of her own wishes. "I don't know about the formality--we're not
particularly formal as a family--but you're as much engaged as you can
be, and I long to put you back into short dresses and braid your hair
down your back."
"And whip me soundly and put me to bed, like the old woman that lived
in the shoe?" laughed Wythie. "Your voice sounds threatening. You silly
Robin! You're much taller than I am. I doubt my having a monopoly of
growing up, or----"
Wythie stopped suggestively, and Rob said hastily:
"Here comes Aunt Azraella, critically examining the boundaries of
the path I dug around the clothes whirligig, out through the back
yard towards her place. Her Aaron and I met at the fence. Poor Aunt
Azraella; she looks older! She has her little black bag; I believe she
is coming to render her account of the tickets that she has sold for
to-morrow night."
"I went over to Mrs. Silsby's on my way home from market this morning,"
Mrs. Winslow said without preliminary on entering. "She is having her
great parlours decorated beautifully, and her arrangement of the
spectators' seats is perfect. I think it is safe to say that this will
be the finest affair ever held in this place. I have seventy-four
dollars here for thirty-seven tickets, and several people sent to me
for tickets while I was out. Elvira could not find them; I had them all
with me."
Prue could not repress a tiny giggle at this excellent reason for
Elvira's failure. But Wythie covered it by saying: "I can deliver them
when I go out. Everybody is coming up on the same train this afternoon,
Battalion B and the Baldwins; I am going to meet them after I have done
a few errands. We have a dress rehearsal to-night up at Mrs. Silsby's.
I can take the tickets to the people who sent for them, Aunt Azraella."
"Very well. I will send Aaron around with the carriage; you'll be too
tired if you walk everywhere, and rehearse dancing to-night. I'll send
the victoria, and you can bring the Baldwins and two of the Rutherfords
home with you," said Aunt Azraella with her new consideration of the
Grey's comfort.
"Thank you, Aunt," said Wythie. "Hester writes that there will be more
than a car full of people from New York to-morrow--Oh, I do so hope the
good weather will hold out!"
"My almanac says that we shall have fair weather for six days; this is
the third day," said Aunt Azraella confidently; she pinned her faith
to a certain venerable publication, withstanding frequent failures on
the part of her prophet. "The good weather began with the change of the
moon, which occurred at the right hour--shortly after midnight; this
weather will hold."
"If your almanac won't play us false this time I will ask no more of
it," said Rob.
"It never fails," said Aunt Azraella with generous oblivion to facts.
"If it makes what seem like mistakes sometimes it is owing to local
currents, which cannot be foretold. Is your mother up-stairs? I want to
see her and Charlotte."
"They are together, in Cousin Charlotte's room. You look serious, Aunt
Azraella," said Rob.
"I feel serious, and I want to consult them about something serious,"
returned her aunt. "After this excitement is over you will know what it
is about; I shall be guided by their advice."
"The best advice we ever got was from those two ladies, Aunt Azraella,"
said Rob. "I am sure you will not look serious after you get it."
"You don't know what you are talking about," returned Mrs. Winslow
moving majestically away.
Aunt Azraella's victoria brought up Hester, her cousin and Basil; Bruce
and Bartlemy arrived on foot, and all the performers, except little
Polly Flinders, went up to the Silsbys for their final dress rehearsal
that night. They came back to the little grey house so excited by its
result that there was no checking the flood of chatter till past one
o'clock.
"This was Eleventh Night," as Prue suggested, and Twelfth Night, _the_
night, followed as quickly as it could, coming into weather that fully
justified Aunt Azraella's almanac-maker. Crisp, cold, clear, January
sunshine--there could not be better weather for a revel.
The day sped in a whirl of excitement, a delightful day to all but
Lydia's orderly soul. She could hardly be expected to approve it,
since it included no meal at a normal time, and this disturbance was,
besides, the prelude to a dance, which Lydia regarded with horror.
After a supper at half past five which none of the gavotteers, as Rob
called them, wanted in the least, Aunt Azraella's carriage came to take
them up to Mrs. Silsby's.
Frances flew out to meet them, and the flushed faces of the other three
girl performers beamed on them as they descended.
Mrs. Grey superintended the dressing-room with four maids to assist
her. It was a trying office, with eight girls chattering like
magpies, and eighty things to be done at once, admitting of no delay.
The concert that was to precede the gavotte was to be costumed
fantastically, and when the girls were ready one could hardly have said
whether the picture they presented, huddled, laughing together, was
prettier or funnier.
Wythie was a dear little Puritan maiden, in her grey dress and folded
kerchief; Rob a brilliant fantasy in her ante-bellum gown with its
hoops and sloping shoulders, and her lovely, rebellious hair ringletted
from a tremendous back comb. Prue would not consent to being fantastic,
so she looked beautiful in a pale green muslin of the empire style,
with her golden hair filetted with gold and a great feather fan waving
from her long-gloved hand. But the cream of them all was solemn little
Polly.
The child was not pretty, but something gathered through her few sad
years in the lonely home whence all the other children had departed,
her frail health and active imagination, had written itself on her
sensitive, pale little face. Now her dilated eyes shone like stars;
grey eyes they were, under black lashes, the sort that have a trick of
looking black, but whose colour is hard to determine.
They had dressed her in a long gown, belonging to some Puritan child in
the days when costumes not merely denied, but annihilated childhood.
Polly's gown had a stiff long stomacher, its front was cut square,
like a court lady's, and the heavy silk stood out around her figure,
disdaining a hint of a droop. A round cap surmounted the pale brown
hair which had been brushed smoothly back from the blue-veined brow,
and yellow lace fell around the childish throat and tiny thin hands.
There was something in the child herself, poor as her home had been,
that exactly suited her quaint fineness of habiliment, and she stood,
a quick breathing little poem, a picture of perfect harmony and of a
quality that made every artist-eye that rested upon her flash with the
perception of its values.
When the door of the dressing-room opened and its occupants came forth
it was to encounter in the hall a long line of queer and pretty figures
of other Fayre girls who were to compose the chorus, and big lads in
the collars and coats of their ancestors, delightful foils to the
girls' brilliant colours. First and last Fayre, an old colonial town,
possessed a goodly store of relics of the past, and there was no lack
of material for costuming the concert.
While they were dressing the singers had been hearing carriage after
carriage roll up the Silsby driveway, and depart, and when they peeped
through a life-saving hole in the curtain, but for which they would
have perished of curiosity, they saw the ample accommodations which
Mrs. Silsby had provided for an audience already filled, and people
beginning to station themselves standing at the sides of the long
rooms, in the best positions now obtainable.
A small orchestra of harps and violins, 'cellos and bass viols, had
been Mrs. Silsby's welcome contribution to the affair, and the concert
began with an overture by it while the curtain slowly parted and
rolled away, disclosing the thirty-five singers seated on the stage,
the double quartette which, later was to dance the gavotte, in the
front row, and little Polly, the soloist of the occasion, seated alone
before them all. She did not seem at all frightened; the hand that Rob
contrived to slip between the rounds of her chair for a little pressure
on her shoulder, was not necessary.
Polly sat quite still, very pale, but not frightened, with an uplifted
look on the pathetic little face, with the big eyes staring upward,
unseeing of the considerable audience. Miss Charlotte and Rob had told
Polly that she was to sing for suffering children, without homes,
friends, or childhood, and Polly's whole soul was bent on singing for
them so well that all these blessings should be theirs at the close of
the concert.
Choruses, quartettes, trios, double quartettes, followed each other
on the programme, old-time songs and classics, bright, lively,
sad, and patriotic. The audience applauded wildly, which was to be
expected at an amateur entertainment. In this case the applause took
on enthusiastic fervour from the real enjoyment which the music
was giving; it was good in itself, and not "considering." It was a
delightful surprise to hear the quality, the precision, the expression
of these choruses and quartettes, for, when it comes to amateur music,
given for charities, few of us can echo the sentiments of the gentleman
in Punch, who replied to his hostess' inquiry as to whether he was fond
of music: "Madam, I am not afraid of it."
At last came Polly's turn, and she arose at a signal from Rob and
walked quietly down to the front of the stage. No one applauded
for fear of frightening the child, but the effect the little figure
produced could be felt in the sudden stillness, together with a tension
of interest.
A single violin played "Annie Laurie" and Polly began to sing. Not a
tremble in the clear voice, not a false note in the sweet tones, as
they soared up, thrilled with feeling and died away in pathos that the
singer was far too young to feel. For an instant the room was still and
then the applause rang out. Polly stood very quiet, looking up at the
ceiling, forgetful of the bow in which she had been carefully drilled.
It did not matter. The violin began again, and the child sang on and
on, as the audience clamoured for more at the end of each song. She did
not seem to tire, but a red spot glowed in each cheek, and the tiny
figure trembled.
"Sit down, Polly," said Rob at last, fearing the effect on Polly of
such repressed excitement.
Polly obediently turned and seated herself amid the plaudits of her
audience. Then she remembered her duty, arose, went forward, took her
stiff skirt in her hands on each side, and dropped the ceremonious
courtesy of the period which she represented. The applause broke out
anew, but Polly was to sing no more. A rousing chorus covered the
clapping, and the audience settled down to listen to the remainder of
the programme.
A young artist from the city who had been trolled to Fayre by Mr.
Baldwin, generously offered to amuse the audience while the gavotte was
being costumed, and gave a Chinese three part play, in which he was the
maiden, her lover, and the stern parent by turns, with a Chinese song
chanted wonderfully as a last touch. It was really very funny, and Mrs.
Silsby gratefully heard the audience laughing as she hastily surveyed
the supper room which was to be her surprise to the performers, after
the gavotte.
In the meantime, Mrs. Grey and the maids were getting eight excited
girls into their beautiful gowns for the dance. It really did not take
long but it was a time into which so much disturbance of mind, so many
thrills were compressed that it seemed a little eternity.
When they were ready the eight filed forth, and met their eight
cavaliers in the hall.
Wythie in her white silk, brocaded with violets, and with the romance
of Oswyth Grey in her heart, under the gown that she had once worn,
joined Basil in his purple velvet court costume, and led the way down
the stairs.
Eleanor Dinsmore in the blush pink, brocaded with rosebuds, came next.
Her partner was a youth in black velvet.
Then came Frances in her pale blue; with her was to dance Lester
Baldwin, in dark blue velvet.
Hester in glorious crimson, with silver headdress, petticoat and
trimmings, joined her partner in white satin, with gold lace.
Edith Hooper in overshot white and silver danced with Jack Dinsmore in
red velvet.
Helen Lacey, a clear, dark brunette, wore a bronze brocade that
revealed its blue lining with every motion; her partner in golden brown
velvet made them into an autumn harmony.
Rob's brocade was dark green, overstrewn with a pale green conventional
design. A silver petticoat revealed her silver slippers with the big
paste buckles, and splendid silver lace fell over her pointed bodice
and bare arms. Bruce, her partner, wore black velvet with green satin
waistcoat, and flashing knee-buckles on the green ribbons that bound
his knees.
Prue came last, regal in her golden raiment, so beautiful that Mrs.
Grey's heart leaped and then contracted with fear as she fell back to
look at her, for beauty is a difficult crown to carry steadily, thought
this simple, loving woman.
Bartlemy wore hunting green--it did not matter what he wore, he said,
while he danced beside the golden girl.
The curtain went up on the empty stage, and the orchestra played the
air of the gavotte. The dancers entered, hands joined and held high,
and marched in minuet step around and up and down the stage, crossing
and recrossing, bowing, forming brief figures, instantly dissolved into
the march. Then they took their places for the gavotte, and in the
pause between the end of the march and its beginning the audience went
quite wild with delight over the really beautiful picture.
The orchestra sounded a few bars, and suddenly the sixteen dancers
began to sing to the old French gavotte the words which Rob had
written, beginning the dance at the same time. In breathless silence
the audience watched and listened. The colours blended and contrasted,
the girls flushed and dimpled, carrying their heads regally under their
powdered hair, while the young men, not less gorgeous in their degree,
led them forth with courtly bendings of their powdered heads, managing
their swords and the laced hats which they carried with creditable
grace and dignity.
There could not have been a more beautiful picture. Faint,
irrepressible applause broke out at intervals, quickly silenced that
the audience might not lose one note, one lovely, gracious motion.
But when it was ended the room was stormed with plaudits, unescapable
demands for a repetition, which the dancers were not in the least
reluctant to accord, when they were satisfied that the demand was
sincere.
There were many in the audience who were strangers to all the
performers; several from New York whom only Hester knew slightly, but
the majority were friends or familiar acquaintances of the dancers, and
after the curtain had gone down they came forth in all their ancient
splendour to mingle with the audience and to be congratulated.
Rob went to Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin as straight as circumstances allowed
her to go.
Mr. Baldwin took her hands with the fatherly affection that he always
showed her, almost equal to that which he gave to his own girl.
"It was fine, Rob; really fine, a gavotte in colouring and execution
worthy the old days of Daly's Theatre, and the dances he used to give
us in 'Much Ado' and 'Twelfth Night.' You look like a dryad in your
green, my Robin. And how really magnificent Prue is going to be! Hers
is wonderful beauty for a girl of sixteen. I have a ward of mine here
who says he never dreamed of such a girl. He wants to speak to Prue.
Shall I take him over there?"
"He is a nice boy, Mr. Baldwin?" asked Rob.
"What a dragon of an elder sister--and only two years the elder!"
laughed Mr. Baldwin. "Trust me, Rob, not to introduce any but nice
boys to my Grey girls! This is not precisely a boy, though. He is
twenty-four, and that is a great age compared to sixteen. He is still
my ward, because I was to take charge of his property, by his father's
will, until he was thirty. I'll go take him to Prue. Mr. Armstrong is
here, and wants to see you."
"Mr. Armstrong who bought Patergrey's patent?" cried Rob.
"The very same. He has never forgotten your describing it to him in his
office, so frightened, yet so brave," said Mr. Baldwin. "He heard of
this entertainment, and came out for your sake."
"What a lovely world this is!" laughed Rob. "I'll go find him." And
she moved off in search of her elderly acquaintance, looking back to
see Mr. Baldwin taking up to radiant Prue a young man whose face was
turned from her, but whose "back looked well-bred" Rob thought.
Her progress towards Mr. Armstrong was impeded by congratulations, but
at last Rob reached him.
"I am glad to see that you have not forgotten me," said the old
gentleman, grasping the hand she extended.
"I am not likely ever to forget you," returned Rob simply.
"No, it is not likely; our acquaintance was brief, but impressive to
us both," said Mr. Armstrong. "You will be glad to learn that your
father's invention has proved valuable to us, Miss Grey. Are you Miss
Grey?"
"Not yet," said Rob with her whimsical twist of the lips as she smiled
up into the kindly face. "It is delightful to know that my dear
father's work was all he believed it to be."
"Fully," assented the old gentleman. "But Miss Roberta, what about the
child that sang here to-night? They tell me she is a protégé of yours.
She is a prodigy. I want to know about her. I am not going back to town
to-night; I have no fancy for these late, crawling trains back from
suburban pleasures. I am staying over night at your Fayre hotel--why
do you have a town with a name so provocative of puns? May I call on
you to-morrow? Not only to tell you what real pleasure you young people
gave me to-night, but to hear about this child?"
"We should all be glad, indeed, to see you, Mr. Armstrong, with no
errand whatever," said Rob. "I'll tell you all there is to learn of
Polly. I suppose I shouldn't stop now; there are so many people to whom
I ought to speak."
"Run along, run along, lovely little green great-grandmother," said
Mr. Armstrong, with an appreciative downward glance at Rob's beautiful
costume.
The rooms were rapidly thinning out as she turned away from the old
gentleman; Frances was beckoning her.
Rob crossed over to her. "Mother has a spread for us, the thirty-five
performers, in the dining-room--she is the dearest thing! We are going
to have a glorious time, so hurry up and do the pretty-behaved to those
who bought your tickets, and then come to the banquet."
Rob needed no further hint. The eight heroines of the gavotte sipped
the sweets of adulation for a short time, completely overshadowing
their less brilliant but equally meritorious partners, till the last of
their audience had departed.
"Come ghosts of departed years; come ancestral descendants; come and
see if modern viands have a pleasant flavour," cried Mrs. Silsby from
the doorway, and the picture-figures, seizing their proper partners'
arms, burst into the song of the gavotte and to it marched to supper.
CHAPTER TEN
ITS AFTERMATH
The day after great festivities is a trying time. Everybody feels
mentally out-at-elbows; it is a day like those fifteen minutes between
the ebb and flow of the tide when the waters seem to lie motionless.
No one feels like ordinary duties, and there is a general impression
that they may be neglected, though it is not avowed. It takes a day for
energies to wake up and get into harness.
The boys had set out early in their workaday tweeds for college and
business. Velvets, queues, laced hats and swords discarded for the
commonplace, the girls' partners in the gavotte had been forced back
to the actual world with the wintry dawn, but the girls revelled in
reminiscent laziness and the joys of "talking it over."
Hester had stayed till an afternoon train, and she lay across the foot
of Wythie and Rob's bed, her mind vibrating like a pendulum between the
events of the preceding night and their results, between recalling
some little point which had not been mentioned, and wondering how many
cripple children they would now be able to afford. Wythie lolled in the
rocking-chair in a relaxed attitude unlike her usual compact little
self. Rob reclined on her elbow beside Hester, with her unruly hair
tumbled into the many ringed disorder in which it was always prettiest,
and most comfortable. Prue, who was staying home from school that day
in charitable allowance of time in which to descend from her pedestal
and readjust her mind to study, sat on the edge of the bed at its head
with the pillow whose place she occupied "laid as tenderly across her
knees as if it were one of the cripples," Rob said.
"One might think there wasn't a chair in the room," remarked Wythie
languidly, as she glanced at the unused ones standing about. "I wonder
why all girls love to pile on a bed together?"
"They like to be on a bed because it suits 'a rosebud garden of
girls,'" suggested Rob. "That seems to lack the suggestion of a garden
bed that I was aiming for--as a pun it is a failure. Confidences and
caramels are best enjoyed on a bed, among pillows. Please pass me
another caramel, Hester, and let me see your Christmas ring again. I
like emeralds!"
"Speaking of rings," said Hester as she complied, "I wonder if I am
betraying confidence in telling you what Lester said?"
"You might try it and see," said Rob. "We'll tell you frankly after you
have repeated it whether or not it is a betrayal of confidence."
Hester laughed. "I'll risk it," she said. "Lester has taken a great
fancy to Frances Silsby, and he says he is seriously going to try to
make her care for him. He is in business with his father, representing
the Japanese end of the firm, as his older brother represents it in
London, so he would be able to think of marrying as far as being
established in the world goes."
"Marrying!" cried Prue, dropping both hands into the pillow with a
thump as she sat erect in her surprise. "Do you mean to say he is going
to marry Francie right off?"
"I don't know that he can ever marry her; I don't know that she will
ever see the charm in him that I see--he's the dearest boy and the best
cousin in the world! But I think it's safe to say that he won't marry
her right off, Prudy; certainly not before Easter," laughed Hester.
"There are other reasons for not doing so besides canonical ones."
"Yes; comical ones," amended Rob. "But only think of France, my
playmate, with a wooer in serious earnest! I think it is fearful the
way we are getting on in life."
"Mrs. Silsby wouldn't think of letting Frances marry for ever so long,"
said Wythie, her colour mounting. "She is such a good, sensible mother!
But I wish when the time does come Lester would have his way. He is
right to choose Frances; she is as true and trusty and good as a girl
can be. Wouldn't you like it, Hester?"
"Yes; I like Frances, but I could find it in my heart to wish it were
a Grey girl," said Hester. "Only there aren't enough to go around, and
Lester stayed too long in Japan."
"Fiddle-dedee!" remarked Rob. "Grey girls aren't going around--do you
take us for tops, Hester?"
"Yes; tip-tops," said Hester, scoring that time.
Rob gave her a withering look of pretended reproach, and Prue said:
"Who was that interesting young man whom your father introduced to me?
That Mr. Stanhope?"
"Is he interesting, Prudy? He has lots of interest, if that's what you
mean," said Hester. "You have just said nearly all I know about him.
He is Mr. Arthur Stanhope. I know a little more. He had a cautious
and conservative father, who had a million to leave this boy, so he
appointed my father his guardian, and left the money so that the son
could use only the interest until he was thirty. Then he comes into his
million, and in the meantime is not starving on its interest. Father
says he is a good youth, not spoiled by his prospects, and I know that
if he is it is largely owing to my father, who has been a faithful
guardian, and has influenced this boy's tastes and aims. I don't know
him particularly well myself, though he has been to the house a great
deal; we never seemed to get on together.'"
"I thought he was as nice as he could be," remarked Prue with her
grown-up air, which made it trying to have Rob suggest quickly that
none of us could be more than that, and to have the older girls laugh.
"Oh, Rob, here comes Mr. Armstrong!" cried Wythie from her post at the
window.
"So early!" exclaimed Rob. "Yet we might have known that he wouldn't
linger in Fayre for luncheon. And we were having such a heavenly,
halcyon time! Prue, do get out my brown dress while I smooth this
demented hair of mine!"
Rob pulled out her pins and brushed her unruly locks into her hand,
head downward, and with the brush, like the Red Queen's, in "Alice,"
in danger of getting lost, in the bright and beautiful rings of which
Hester telegraphed to Wythie an admiration which Rob would have
resented had it been audible.
Wythie always seemed to be ready for any one's arrival, from the king
to the ashman. She placidly smoothed her soft hair, of which not a lock
was misplaced, pulled down her shirt-waist, made sure her belt covered
the line of her skirt--which it invariably did--and was ready to go
down to help her mother receive their caller, leaving Rob to Hester and
Prue's mercies to be helped into her street gown.
"Because I've got to go up to Aunt Azraella's when I take you to the
station, and I can't go through the agony of dressing three times a
day," she explained frantically struggling with a hook that refused to
find its affinity in a loop half buried in the shoulder seam.
"Not faded by late hours, Miss Roberta?" said Mr. Armstrong, rising to
greet Rob as she entered looking radiant from her hurried toilette.
"Only my glories of last night are faded, sir," said Rob, giving her
hand to the old gentleman whose kindly voice and manner she found even
more likable than her memory of them.
"Now, my dear Grey young ladies, all of you, for my daughter must be
older than these lassies' mother, I have not many minutes to spare if
I want to lunch in town, as I mean to do," began Mr. Armstrong. "I
want to hear the history of the child whose singing last night was so
remarkable."
"It is easily told, Mr. Armstrong," said Mrs. Grey. And she briefly
related Polly's story, and that of the Flinders family.
Mr. Armstrong listened attentively. "Now, for my reasons for asking,"
he said. "I have a sum of money entrusted to me, the principal well
invested, and the interest left for the education of young girls whose
talents and industry make them worth helping. Your little Polly is
certainly wonderfully gifted, and there is a gap now in the application
of the money; we can take another girl at once. I propose to make your
Polly Flinders--what an extraordinary name!--our next experiment. What
do you say to it?"
"How could it be done?" asked Mrs. Grey considering, while Wythie and
Rob flushed with pleasure over the proposition. "She is so little,
so sensitive and frail that I do not feel like giving her over to
strangers, even though her mother should consent to it."
"If you are willing to keep her here it would add the much-needed
touch to our methods," said Mr. Armstrong. "There are five of us joined
in administering this fund, of whom I am chairman, or president, or
whatever you choose to call an informal board officer. Our trouble
always is to find a place where our girls can get home training while
they are educating, until they are old enough to be placed in a good
boarding-school. If you will keep this child, I will see that the
funds are provided for the musical education which she deserves. She
should begin to be taught piano at once, and every year as she grows
older suitable instruction shall keep step with her development. If she
proves as talented as we now think her, and you will contribute her
maintenance, as your part of her provision, the sum which her support
would have cost shall be laid aside to send her to Germany to study,
if, when she is grown, it seems better for her to go there."
"It is the most delightful thing I have heard in years, Mr. Armstrong,"
cried Mrs. Grey. "I have wondered and wondered whom we could interest
in little Polly, and how we might get for her the training she should
have. I have taught her the beginnings of the piano, and she recites
her lessons daily to my daughter Oswyth, but we are not rich people, as
you know, and I have never been able to see what I wanted to see in
Polly's future. You have solved it, and I can't tell you how thankful
I am. I must write her poor mother to-night; poor creature, she needs
good tidings, I fear."
"I don't know what you call rich, my dear madam," said the old
gentleman decidedly. "This little house has always seemed to me, and
remained in my memory, as the most richly endowed spot I know. The
money which is at my disposition can give the girl her opportunity
in life, but you will give her far more than that; an education far
surpassing mere sc
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