CHAPTER IV.A GENEROUS CONSPIRACY.
“DON’T, Robert! Remember, it is best to be quiet!” said Isabelle, with an admirable self-control which not only gave Mr. Brook a new idea of her character, but the knowledge that this could not be the first time such a trouble had befallen the household.
And, a moment later, Beatrice had taken time to whisper in the little fellow’s ear: “It is no worse than usual, darling. Mother is reviving.”
Then the child heard a trembling question, eager and low: “Has she ever been like this before? Is it my visit that has caused it?” and looking up through his fingers he saw the disturbed face of their guest bent close above him.
“Yes. No. ’Tain’t your visit. She’s this way often. But she always looks like dead, an’ the doctor-man says she will die if she don’t stop sewin’ an’ live outdoors. But she can’t let the sewin’ go, ’cause we have to eat an’ wear clothes. We don’t eat any more’n we can help, but we’realways hungry. We try not to be, but we are. So she has to ’broider the things an’ sell ’em, you see.”
The two were quite alone then in the little parlor, for Roland had, at the first instant, lifted his mother in his arms and carried her into the small bedroom which was her own, and had stationed himself beside her to chafe her face and hands and administer the medicine which Isabelle had promptly prepared. They were evidently accustomed to such emergencies; but Bonny had disappeared in pursuit of a doctor, though she knew this action to be against her mother’s wish, expressed in view of such an event as this.
“But how can I help it!” argued the girl, dashing down the long flights of stairs two steps at a time. “How can I see her suffer so and not try to get somebody who knows more than we do to relieve her! Even though it will take her many hours of hard labor to pay for the physician’s visit.”
Meanwhile Robert led Mr. Brook into the corner, dignified by the name of “withdrawing room,” and the old gentleman laid his hand affectionately upon the boy’s shoulder. “My dear, I would like to help you all, if I can. I do not wish toask you anything which your mother would not be willing you should answer; but anything that you can tell me about your affairs, anything which your conscience does not warn you had best be kept to yourself, I wish you would tell me. Remember I was the friend of your grandfather, and try to feel as if you were talking to him.”
This speech was better suited to the ears of the elder son than to those of “Humpty-Dumpty,” and in the first case would have been answered judiciously; but judgment and reticence were qualities unknown to this small boy, and he now made as clean a breast of family matters as he was capable of doing. If there was anything he did not tell, it was something he had forgotten.
Mr. Brook listened with sympathy and some compunction; and as soon as the physician whom Beatrice had summoned pronounced Mrs. Beckwith “out of danger for the present,” took his leave, hunted up the long-suffering cab-driver who had brought him thither, and returned to his hotel.
There he burst rather excitedly into his own apartments, with the exclamation “I’ve found them, Dolloway! The Beckwiths, at last!”
“You don’t say so!” returned the other old fellow, who had left his bed for a cushioned chairclose to a grate fire, and who had the name of being Mr. Brook’s servant, but was, at times, his master—through rheumatism, which mastered both.
“But I have. That must be what my anxiety to see the horse-show meant. Else why, after all these years, should I have been suddenly rendered too uneasy to abide at home, and must needs not only put myself out but you as well? How goes it, Dolloway?”
“Bad, sir; about as bad as it can be. But a body must expect that who goes a trapesing off after will-o’-wisps, at our time of life, leaving good, respectable feather beds to sleep on boards in a barn of a place like this.”
“Not boards, Dolloway. The best mattresses the city affords, the manager assures me; and comfortable enough to those who like them. Yes, yes, yes. In some ways it is a pity. Yet—it is the most fortunate thing. Had any supper, Dolloway?”
“Don’t want any, sir. Thank you.”
“Pooh! I do. They had what they called supper, I suppose, poor things! And I’m ashamed to mention it; only I feel hungrier than if I hadn’t eaten anything; so, since you have not, take a cup of coffee with me, man, andlay aside formality for once. What will we have besides the coffee, Dolloway?”
“I couldn’t eat a bite, sir.”
“But you’d not refuse to please your old master, would you, lad? When we have taken all this trouble we want to make our holiday seem a bit like old times. Eh? In the old days, Dolloway, you could out-eat and out-drink me. Yes, yes, you could, indeed! What shall it be?”
“Well, if I must I must, and I’m obliged to you, sir, though I only do it to please you. I heard one of the waiters saying there was a lot of nice venison come in from the West, sir. If it were not spoiled in the cooking a venison steak—done to a turn, sir, done to a turn, as you like it yourself, Mr. Brook—might relish a little. Eh?”
“The very thing, lad, the very thing! I will ring and order it immediately.” Without waiting to be served by his servant, who remained composedly in his arm-chair, Mr. Brook pulled the rope, which he preferred to any modern “button” for bell-ringing purposes, and gave an order for a meal that would have made the Beckwith family’s eyes open in astonishment.
“A fine thing to have such an appetite as ours,Dolloway, at our age! A very fine thing, indeed. Eighty I shall be on my next birthday, and you but two years younger. And I warrant me there are no two other old chaps in this town who will sit down to this kind of a dinner with the relish we will. Eh? That’s the best of using gifts and not abusing them. And my waist measures no more than it did in my youth, lad; which shows I have not been a gourmand, though the truth is I like good living. I like good living immensely. I would like to tell you what a pretty family of five had prepared. Potatoes! nothing but potatoes, except, of course, the inevitable bread and butter and the detestable tea. I don’t wonder the woman had heart-failure, poor thing! And the air of that ‘flat’—it was enough to stifle a body. After our air at home, man.”
“Humph! Then I suppose I am not to know anything about Mr. Conrad’s folks, save what you choose to tell me in driblets, sir,” remarked Dolloway, in the injured tone of one suffering ungratified curiosity.
“You shall know all that I do myself, old fellow; but let us take it over our dinner. I want your advice, too. I am sorry to say that Conrad left his people poorly off.”
“Mr. Beckwith is dead, then, sir?”
“Dead this forty years, lad. Dead for forty years—that boy!” And Mr. Brook sank into a chair opposite his companion, and at the same time into a reverie so deep that even the highly privileged Dolloway dared not interrupt the current of his master’s thought.
Small Robert was in bed and should have been asleep; but Beatrice, listening, heard a forlorn little yawn and knew that the excitement of the evening or the tea-and-chrysanthemum dinner had been too much for his nerves. This suited her exactly; and watching her chance she stole into the room, or bed closet, known as “the boys’,” and perched herself on the pillow where Roland’s head would repose somewhat later.
“Hello, Bob! Asleep?”
“You know I ain’t. What’s up?”
“I am. I’ve something to say to you.”
“I hain’t done nothin’. What have I done?”
“Nothing but goodness, small sir. Bonny doesn’t scold, does she?”
“Sometimes,” answered the truthful child.
“Well, she isn’t going to now. She wants your assistance.”
“I’m goin’ ter sleep.”
“Pooh! I don’t want you to do anything to-night.I want to consult with you. Bob, are you awake?”
“If it ain’t nothin’ ter bother a feller at night, I be.”
“Sit up in bed. Here, put my jacket around you. I’ve a scheme—a splendid scheme!”
“Don’t like your schemes. Last one didn’t turn out worth a snap.”
“This one will. I see how you and I can make some money. Sit up.”
“I am sitting up. How can we make it?” asked the cash-greedy child, interested at last.
“You know those chrysanthemums?”
“Yep.”
“Well; here, let me whisper. We—can—sell—them! And make a lot of dollars—maybe. Make something, anyway. Enough to pay for the doctor’s visit.”
“Beatrice Beckwith! They was give to you!”
“Don’t speak so loud. Mother is asleep, Roland is writing, Belle studying. Only you and I are to know about this. Yes, I know they were given to me. Tome, understand. That is why I dare do this thing. And don’t reproach me for parting with them. It breaks my heart to do it; only it don’t break it into such little bits as it gets broken into every time I think ofMotherkin and how hard she works. To come to the point. I want you to get up with me early to-morrow and go on the street and try to sell the flowers. Will you?”
“Gracious! Would you—youyourself?”
“I would—I myself. I would do anything rather than be so idle. The flowers are mine. We have all enjoyed them. They did us good that way; now I want to make them do us good some other way.”
“Humph! How much will you give me fer my share?”
“Mercenary little wretch! not a cent! I want every single cent for Motherkin. You wouldn’t take anything away from Motherkin, would you, Bob?”
“Not that way. I wouldn’t no quicker’n you would. But if I had a little ‘capital’ I could sell papers like the other kids do on Fourteenth Street an’ round.”
“Robert, you are not a ‘kid.’ You are a well-born boy. I thought you did sell papers, anyway, almost every day.”
“Fer the other fellers, that’s all. I don’t make my livin’. If I had enough I could make a pile.”
“Well, we’ll see. But those chrysanthemums.Think of the value. Forty times seventy-five cents! Forty times porterhouse steaks all round the family. About one hundred and twenty tip-top oyster stews. Potatoes, galore. Bread—bread enough to pave the street from here to Union Square. And six weeks’ rent. Think of it, ‘Humpty-Dumpty,’ and cease to wonder that I can hardly wait till daylight to set about the business. Will you help me?”
“Yep, if Mother’ll let me.”
“You blessed little stupid! Mother is not to know a word about it, till it is past forbidding. Else she has such peculiar ideas about politeness that she might stop us. If you do as I want, as well as you can, I’ll give you all you can make out of the best flower in the lot.”
“It’s a bargain. What time ’ill I start?”
“Not till after breakfast. Not till you go to school. Then, instead of going to school, go with me up on Twenty-third Street, and there we’ll seek our fortune. Stay! I’ve a splendid thought now! We’ll go to the very store where they were bought and sell them back. They, the store folks at least, would know the value. Then we wouldn’t either of us have to stay away from school, and we could meet somewhere on the way home and come in together, with flying colors.So, if Mother wasn’t especially pleased at first, we could brace each other up in coaxing her round to look at the matter as we do and eating one of her chrysanthemums turned into oysters for her dinner that very day.”
“H’m-m. But— Wull.”
“Wull me no wulls, my son!”
“Motherkin don’t coax worth a snap. An’ what if she should be ‘grieved’? I wouldn’t mind her talking, so much; but when she sits round an’ don’t say anything, only look solemn, it—it—breaks me all up.”
“That isn’t a nice expression for a nice little boy. Say ‘it disturbs me’; that is more elegant.”
“Who cares for el’gunce! I hate them times when lumps come in throats. I’ve had ’em. I’d ruther be whipped, like other kids is; I would, so!”
“Look here, Robert Beckwith. Icando this thing all by myself. I don’t need to ask you or anybody to help me, but I thought you’d like to do something nice for Motherkin. If you don’t like to it’s all right;” and Bonny rose to go, with that independent air which experience had taught her would invariably bring her small brother to terms.
“Hello! Who’s a not wantin’ ter? But—if—”
“If trouble comes I’ll take all the blame, as I should, for it belongs to me. And I’m glad Mother is in bed now, so I can take the basket out of the room without anybody asking questions. Good-night. Not a word, now, to Roland when he comes in!”
“H’m-m. You might know I ain’t a blabber, anyway!”
“Of course you’re not. I depend on you. Good-night.”
Beatrice passed into the parlor and lifted her treasure from the table, then turned to leave as quietly as she had entered.
“Where are you going with those, Bonny?” asked Isabelle, drowsily; and her sister started as if she had been guilty of wrong-doing.
“I think they will keep better if I take them out of the basket and put them in a pail of water,” replied Bonny, hastily.
“I suppose they would. But it seems a pity to disturb such a perfect arrangement, and I do not think they would wither even that way very soon. They last well.”
“I am glad of that. I would not have them wither for anything!” replied the innocent conspirator,feeling as if she wanted to bury her face in the flowers and cry; only she reflected that salt water was supposed to be injurious to delicate petals and refrained. But when she went to bed that night she had taken each chrysanthemum carefully from its mossy nest and, after clipping its stem slightly, plunged it into a pail of fresh water and placed it in the coolest place the house afforded.