CHAPTER XSETTLING THE NEST"Goods have come," called Mr. Ricketts from the mail box one morning. The pink freight card lay on top, and he seemed as pleased as anyone to find it there. "Letter from out West too, I noticed, so I presume you folks will be settled pretty soon.""I almost feel as if I ought to let him read what Mr. McRae says," Mrs. Robbins said amusedly. "He's so friendly and interested."As she opened the letter, the girls gathered around her chair, eager-eyed and curious to see what it contained. Jean declared that she liked the handwriting because it was firm and plain without any flourishes. Kit was sure he used a stub pen and was rather morose and dignified. Helen asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento, and Doris kept patting her mother's shoulder tenderly as if she would have protected her against any disappointment."You read it, dear. I'd much rather you did," the Motherbird said, handing it over to Mr. Robbins.Cousin Roxana was out in the buttery singing softly to herself about some day when the mists had rolled in splendor from the beauty of the hills, and the nurse was upstairs, packing to return to New York the following day. There was just their own little home group of robins and they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN,April 4th, 19--.Mr. Jerrold Robbins, Gilead Center, Conn.MY DEAR MR. ROBBINS: Your letter of March 28th, received. I should be very glad to rent the old house down at Stony Eddy on a lease, but do not want to let it go out of the family. Miss Robbins can tell you the conditions under which it came into my possession and why I am not at liberty to part with it. If you care to rent it at $100 a year, it is yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Robbins says about it will be satisfactory to me, as she was my Aunt Trowbridge's dearest friend.Hoping if you decide to take the place, you may be happy there, I am,Yours sincerely,RALPH McRAE."It's ours," Jean breathed thankfully."I always felt that it was, somehow," Mrs. Robbins smiled happily around at her brood. "And I know you'll like it, Jerry.""Oh, I know the place, I remember admiring it as a boy. Besides, I'd like anything up here. Why, I could live out yonder in Roxy's corncrib very comfortably this summer if she'd only let me," teased the invalid. "Better send a check out at once for the rent, Betty, and get into it as soon as possible."It was the third week in April when they drove down in relays from Maple Lawn and took possession of the new home. There had been considerable repairing to be done: painting and papering, mending the waterpipes and furnace, and cleaning out the chimneys.The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Hiram in the big hay wagon, he making four trips. Mrs. Robbins had wanted to hire an automobile truck from Norwich, but Roxana said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Hiram fussing around over frost still being in the ground so he couldn't do any deep ploughing. So the goods came up and were packed into the big front room downstairs while the girls and Mrs. Robbins went back and forth "settling."Hiram's younger brother came to do the papering and painting. He looked exactly like a young rooster, Kit declared, all neck and legs, and he was fearfully shy. She found immediate diversion in appearing before him suddenly in her most abrupt manner and asking his opinion anxiously on something, whereupon Shad would blush intensely to the roots of his taffy colored hair, and splash paste blindly.His name was Shadrach Farnum, but Shad suited him to perfection. As Cousin Roxana said, he did sort of run to bone. But he could paint and paper to the queen's taste and gradually the rooms began to look different. The big living-room was covered with a soft wood brown burlap that harmonized well with their ash furniture and bookcases, and the brown Spanish leather cushions. Window seats were built around the two bay windows, and the girls sewed diligently to cover the cushions for these with burlap, and to make inside curtains just to outline, as Jean said, the cream filet ones."It looks so warm and tender and friendly, doesn't it?" Doris exclaimed when the big brown suede cover was laid on the long library table and the copper lamp placed in the center. The copper lamp was really an institution in the Robbins' family. The girls had given it personal conduct from the Cove on Long Island to Nantic. Jean had found it in an old copper and brass shop in New York at a wonderful reduction, and had carted it home herself in triumph. The bowl was broad and low and squat, shaped a good deal like a summer squash. The shade was perforated by hand with exquisite artistry into strange Muscovite designs, through which the light shone softly. When it was lighted the first evening in the new home, Helen said she felt as if she were before a shrine."And it is a shrine too," Jean told them, "the shrine of home."Once in the long ago when they had all been quite young, Jean had been found industriously writing names on bits of paper, and fastening them with mucilage to pieces of the furniture."I thought they might feel queer not having any names," she said when discovery came, "so I was naming them."The lamp had a name too; it was always alluded to as Diogenes."It looks exactly like the kind of lamp he would have loved," Kit explained.The day after they really moved in, Cousin Roxana drove down with Ella Lou and some good advice, a large brown crock of freshly baked beans and a loaf of brown bread."You need a good safe horse that you all can drive," she said. "Sam Willetts has a brown mare that seems just about the ticket. I telephoned over to him this morning and he'll sell her for $75.00, which isn't bad at all. If you like, Betty, I'll call him up again as soon as I get back and Honey Hancock can bring her over. Honey's working for Mr. Willetts now, and the mare used to belong to the Hancocks. She was a regular pet, Piney said."Mrs. Robbins was sure it was a good plan and Cousin Roxana was instructed to close the bargain. So it was that Greenacres made the acquaintance of Honey Hancock, destined to be a close friend before summer was over, and always a family standby.It was a little past the supper hour when Honey drove up. Hitched to the back of the wagon was the brown mare, and they all went out to look at her. Honey was about fourteen and tall for his age. Rosy-cheeked he was, with blue eyes and curly brown hair and dimples so deep and ingratiating that Helen said it was a burning shame to waste them on a boy.He stood at the mare's head, patting her slender, glossy neck and combing her mane with his fingers, telling the girls her history, how she had belonged to Molly Bawn, their old mare, and how his father had broken her to harness himself."But she never had to be really broken in. Piney and I started riding her bareback when she was out in pasture and she was just as tame as a kitten. She understands anything you say to her. Mother hated to sell her to Mr. Willetts, but we had to, and as I was working for him, why, she didn't know any difference. She's used to a good deal of petting--""Oh, we'll all pet her here," Jean promised. "We must have something to drive her in. Haven't you a davenport that she'll drive nicely in?""A davenport!" exclaimed Kit. "Jean Robbins, a davenport's a sofa. She'd look nice hitched to a sofa. My sister isn't used to the country at all, Honey. She means a democrat, you know. The kind of a wagon you can put one seat or two on, and still have room to put things away in.""We haven't anything like that," said Honey, "but they might have down at Mr. Butterick's. He's the carriage maker. He can take a pair of old carriage wheels, and turn out a good buggy almost while you watch him.""You have wonderful people up here," Helen said fervently. "It seems as if whenever you want a certain kind of a person, there he is waiting for you. Where does Mr. Butterick live?""Down in Rocky Glen; second house past the basket weaver, Mr. Tompkins.""Suppose we go over there tomorrow, girls," Jean suggested. "Or do you have to take the mare over, Honey, and let Mr. Butterick sort of fit her with a carriage and a harness? I wish I could put her in the barn right now.""Better get somebody to take care of her first," Helen said practically. "We'd feed her fish cakes and doughnuts."Honey shifted his weight from one foot to the other somewhat uneasily."Don't suppose you folks think of taking anybody on regularly, do you? Mother said I was to ask, and say if you wanted me I might come up. It's nearer home than Mr. Willetts' and there's only Piney and Mother at home, and they need me to do the chores after I get home at night."Jean hastily signaled to Kit for fear she wouldn't remember all that Cousin Roxana had told them about Honey Hancock and his sister. But just then Mrs. Robbins stepped out on the side porch and smiled at Honey until he turned red and grinned delightedly."I could come for about ten a month, Mother thought," he vouchsafed with much embarrassment.The other Mother thought ten was about right too, and Honey drove away in the spring twilight, happy as one of the barn swallows that circled in the dusk in a wonderful vesper dance. All the way up the hill they heard him whistling "Beulah Land," and the hearts of the girls echoed the sweet old melody. Although the deal had been closed over the brown mare, and the check reposed in Honey's overalls' pocket, he took her back with him, and promised to ride her over in the morning so the girls should not have the care of her over night."I asked him what her name was," Doris said, "and he told me they just called her Mollie's Baby. We must think up some wonderful name for her. You know, Mother darling, she looked over at me so tenderly and wistfully when Honey said she would have to go back over night. I know she longed to stay with us."The next addition to the place was the lot of chickens. It had been agreed the first year that no large expenditures should be made for anything, because it was all more or less experimental."We want to take care of Dad, and make him well this first year," Jean told the other girls up in their room one night.One point about the Robbins family that was different from other families was their distinctive individualities; they simply demanded separate expression, as Jean put it. Nobody liked to double up with anyone else, and here at Greenacres there were plenty of rooms to choose from, so that each daughter might have her own. Two large bed-rooms with alcoves crossed the front of the house. These had been turned over to Mr. and Mrs. Robbins. Then came curious rooms, as Kit said. The hallway rambled through the second story, two steps up over here and two steps down over there. There were unexpected little corridors opening out from it like crooked arms. It really was a fascinating hallway, and the rooms along it were quite exceptional. There were two wings to the house, and an extension at the back over the summer kitchen "ell." This was a source of delight to the girls, for they found all kinds of interesting relics tucked back in this extension."Mother dear," Helen said seriously, appearing one day with cobwebs in her hair and dust smudges on her arms and face, "we've found perfectly wonderful things. Old newspapers before the war, and old magazines with hoopskirts in them and bonnets with flowers inside the poke!""And two old maps dated 1829, one of New York State and one of Connecticut," Kit added. "Both mounted on old yellow homespun linen and braced with hand carved ebony. Now what do you think of that, Dad? I'll bring them down to you. And a thing that looks like a little pilot wheel, but it isn't. Jean says it's part of a spinning outfit because she's seen them out in front of antique shops on Madison Avenue in New York. And we found a foot warmer, and an hour glass with one support broken, and a tailor's goose, and some old clothes-pins that had been whittled by hand."Jean selected the west room for her very own. It had a square bay window over the bower, as the girls had nicknamed the little conservatory off the dining-room. The upstairs window was smaller, but almost as pleasant, with small panes of glass and a beautiful outlook over the valley and the old dam.Doris had a smaller room next to Jean's, and then came a pleasant southeast room for a guest chamber."And for pity's sake, let's make it comfy and cheery," said Kit. "Most guest chambers give you the everlasting dumdums, don't they, Jeanie? Let's make ours look as if it were really to enjoy."Kit had taken for her special domicile the room over the summer kitchen, because it had so many shelves and cupboards in it. At first she had wanted the cupola room, but was talked out of it, much against her will and predilections. The upper staircase was circular, and you had to watch out going up to the cupola, or you'd get an unmerciful bump on the head as the door was very low. But once inside, it was a surprise, that held you spellbound for a minute. The room was square in shape, and had eight long narrow windows in it. From them you caught wonderful framed views of the far-reaching valley, the ruined stone mill, the great brown rock dam, covered now with the spring freshet, and beyond the placid lake with several islands dotting it and long rows of hills guarding its margins, one after the other like sentinels."Yes, I want this one," Kit had said. "I'm the only one in the family with genius and this should be mine. I want to walk around this crystal enclosure and play that I am one of Maeterlinck's sleeping princesses.""They didn't walk," Jean had protested, "and you needn't imagine that you're a genius, Kit Robbins, because you're not.""Well, I'm the only one in the family with much imagination anyway," Kit had answered pleasantly. "'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,' you know, Jeanie dear. And if I can't be a sleeping princess I will be the Lady of Shalott." Whereupon she had swept about the room with a couch cover draped around her in approved Camelot style, and a curtain cord bound about her brow for a circlet, declaiming:"'Four gray walls and four gray towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle embowers,The Lady of Shalott.'""It would be such a hard place from which to rescue you if the house caught fire," Helen had remarked thoughtfully, peering from one of the windows. "You couldn't very well skip down the lightning rod, Kit.""I should prefer to have all my girls nearer to me," Mrs. Robbins had remarked. "Suppose you should be taken ill in the night! How would any of the rest know of it or be able to help you? You had better select a room on the floor below, Childie.""Very well," Kit had said regretfully. "Of course I will not insist if the family are going to worry over me, but I shall come up here every day to comb out my golden tresses. I think we'll get Shad to build us window seats all the way around, stain the floor, and make a sort of sun parlor out of it.""Oh, Kit, remember the place in Egypt we always wanted to see, the Ramasseum, the thinking place of the king?" Jean's dark eyes had sparkled with mischief. "Let's call this the Thinking Place. Then we can retire here when we wish to meditate, and fairly soak in the sunlight until we feel radiant and revived. Do you all like that?"So it had been agreed upon and the cupola room became the thinking place of the four princesses.Another discovery they made soon after was the Peace Spot. This was over on the hillside across the bridge. Here was a rocky field with any number of evergreen trees. They were assorted sizes and all varieties. There were juniper trees and hemlocks, fat tubby little spruces and slender straggly cedars. It looked like a premeditated burial ground, Kit remarked, but Helen named it the Peace Spot. They often walked over there in the late afternoons. Kit had ideas of turning it into a wonderful Italian garden some day, but just now it was their place of rest.At first the housework had proved to be the great stumbling block in the way of perfect peace and daily comfort."I tell you, Motherbird, if you'll just say what you want done, we'll be your willing handmaidens," Jean had promised at the very beginning, but the willing handmaidens had found themselves tangled up in less than two days, treading on each other's heels and losing their tempers too.Mrs. Robbins laughed at them when she happened in and found them all "looking down their noses," as Doris expressed it."Girls, you'll have to learn team work," she explained. It appeared that Jean had put a chicken to roast in the top of the double baking pan and the gravy had all run out of the air draft at one end. "You must learn that when you put your bread to rise it doesn't shape itself into loaves and hop into the pans and walk over to the oven." Here Kit blushed hotly, remembering how her first batch had risen to the occasion beyond all expectations, and rambled during the night all over the edge of the pan and the arm of the chair she had set it on. "And, Dorrie, precious, if you catch mice in traps alive, and then decide to tame them, we'll have mice all over the place."Doris had discovered a nice little brown prisoner under the pantry shelf, had taken him out into the rose garden and there let him go, all in a spirit of lofty pity that left Kit and Jean speechless.Also, Doris had taken to rescuing flies caught on sticky paper, putting them into pill boxes until they recovered their usual blithe and debonnaire attitude towards life. Also, sundry noises having issued from her room at night, the other girls had started down the dark hall to investigate, and had stepped on turtles which Doris had found sunning themselves on logs in the pond, and had put into empty tomato cans and smuggled up to her room for future humanitarian reference."Go for us, Queen Mother," Jean cried valiantly. "Go for us. It's the only way we'll ever learn anything. I told Kit to fix the bread a dozen times. I was reading up tomato plants, and Helen was cutting out a stencil for her scrim curtains--conventionalized tulips--""Lotos buds," corrected Helen."Well, I'm not sure. They look like raised biscuits to me. I wish spring would hurry along and make up its mind to stay a while." She pressed her nose against the window pane and stared out at the land. Letters had come from some girl friends back at the Cove that day, and she felt a wave of loneliness and half panic at what they had undertaken.Just then Honey came to the kitchen door, bareheaded and smiling."Piney said for me to tell you folks that she heard Ma Parmelee had some good Plymouth Rocks for sale. They're about as reliable a hen as you can get. Ma's going to sell off everything and go to live with her son down in Nantic. It's near towards where I live, if you'd like to drive over that way."Mrs. Robbins thought it was a good idea, and that Jean could go with her. There had been a trip over to Rocky Glen after the purchase of Mollie's Baby, and Mr. Butterick had been persuaded to part with a buggy that just fit the mare. It was low and held three easily on its broad cushioned seat, and there was a fair space at the back where odds and ends could be packed away.It seemed rather foolish to call the mare Mollie's Baby every time they spoke to her, so a family council had given her a brand new cognomen and already she pricked up her ears when she heard it. They called her Princess, and the Jersey heifer that came up from the State farm was called Buttercup, after her famous predecessor. Buttercup was Mr. Robbins' special pride on the farm and great things were hoped from her.Jean gathered up the reins and Honey put some burlap sacks in the back of the wagon for the hens."Better tie them to something when you start off," he advised. "They always flop around a lot in sacks."It was a drive of about two and a half miles, up through the hills. Each new road seemed to lead them straight up to the edge of the world and then to dip again and leave cloudland behind. The woods held a haze of green now that hung over the distant hills like a mist. Once a row of young quail blinked dizzily from a pasture bar at the surprising apparition of the horse and buggy. And all at once there came the quick thud of hoofs behind them, and a young girl riding horseback drew rein beside their buggy. She was about as old as Kit, with thick brown hair brushed back boyishly from her face, and big friendly blue eyes."How do you do," she said, blushing in a way that seemed familiar to them, for it reminded them of Honey. "I'm Piney Hancock. Mollie wouldn't let me ride by unless I stopped to let her see Babe."CHAPTER XIMA PARMELEE'S CHICKS"Oh, we're ever so glad to know you, Piney," Jean said at once. "Honey's told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you."Piney blushed deeper than ever, just as Honey did, and brushed a fly off her pony's neck. She rode across saddle, in a home-made corduroy skirt, with a boy's cap set back on her head, and a boyish waist with knotted tie. Altogether both Mrs. Robbins and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Honey himself.Piney told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the burial ground."I'm going down the other way or I'd ride along and show you where it is.""You must come down to see us girls when you can, please. We're rather lonesome, not knowing anyone around here. Are there many girls?""Quite a few," said Piney. "There are the Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father's the carpenter, Mr. Chapelle. Etoile's the older one and the little one they call Tony. Her name's really Marie Antoinette. Mrs. Chapelle's awfully funny. She told me one day the reason they changed the little girl's name to Tony was because if she ever should get on a railroad track or anywhere in danger, and they had to call her in a hurry, they wanted something short and quick to say. She talks broken English, and it was so comical the way she said it." Piney's deep dimples were showing and her eyes were sparkling, as she imitated the voice of Mrs. Chapelle. "How I say to her ver' fast Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette! She can be dead four--five--time. I call her that way, I tink so. I yell Ton-ee! Right away she jump.""Isn't she a darling, Mother?" Jean exclaimed when they drove on. "I do hope she'll come down. Kit would love her.""Anybody would love her," agreed Mrs. Robbins, still smiling. "You know, Jean, I think that you girls are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these girls of our own neighborhood.""But, Mother dear, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles.""Even so. Cousin Roxana's old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years; he knows all of the families as if he were a census taker."Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and Princess took her time. Honey had fastened two bunches of ferns to her bridle to keep away flies, and she looked as if she wore a Dutch bonnet."There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother," Jean began slowly. "I thought we'd find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Lawn I rode around a good deal, and you'd be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Cousin Roxy told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply.""Well, dear?""But, Mother, you don't understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course--""Do you think of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeanie?"Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother's voice."I know what you're thinking, Mother, dear. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don't want to get intimate with everybody. You'll like some of the old families.""I think I'll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably, of first settlers?""Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out--walked, actually walked most of them--from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a break up, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in hamlets wherever they happened to stop. I found a burial ground in the woods near Cousin Roxy's, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717.""I'd like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can't you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land of flowers. There was Sienkiewicz the great novelist, and splendid Helena Modjeska, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend's name, and my Mother and aunts did not like me to chum with her because she was a foreigner. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are falling down, and leaving the world-brotherhood idea instead. Up here in our lonely old hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future.""Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before," Jean exclaimed. "You always seemed just dear and sweet, don't you know. I--why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things."Unconsciously, she moved a little nearer to this new kind of Mother, and Mrs. Robbins' hand closed over hers."If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?" she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. "Some one has called us the torch bearers, the light bringers, but I like to think of women best as the tenders of the ever-burning temple lamps.""You mean love and truth and--""I mean everything, dear, that tends for world betterment. And you girls are going to do your little share right here in Gilead Center, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these girls from different races. We'll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let's pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house."Princess turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weather-beaten and gray. "Ma" Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks."Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?" she said. "Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder. Thought I'd see you at meeting Sunday but I didn't."Mrs. Robbins explained that they were Episcopalians and the nearest parish was nine miles away."So it is, over at Riverview, but we're all bound for the same place, so you might as well come up and help fill the pews. Land knows they need it." She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. "Ma" scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it."I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to too," she said pleasantly. "Now, we'll take any that you like and put them into bags. I'm going to sell you my very best rooster. His name's Jim Dandy and he's all of that. He's pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don't have to worry about hawks when he's around."After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put in back of the wagon seat, "Ma" waved good-bye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house."I'm going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don't know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There's a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God's folks, you know.""Finns," murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. "There's a new blend to our Gilead sisterhood, Motherie."Mrs. Robbins laughed at the puzzled expression on her eldest daughter's face."We'll let Kit drive over and see them," she promised.Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit a while, Cousin Roxy said. One day the earth still looked wind-swept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons' pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods, and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. Keenest and sweetest it sounded over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps."It's the peep frogs," called Honey, coming up from the barn with Buttercup's creamy contribution to the family commonwealth. "They're just waking up. That means it's spring for sure.""Isn't it dear of them to try and tell us all about it," Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Helen come straight out-of-doors and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the veranda, two by two. Once Helen stopped below their father's window to call up to him in the long "Coo-ee!" their mother had taught them from her own girlhood days out in California on her grandfather's ranch.Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Doris herself, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging. The little nurse had left Greenacres the fifteenth of April both because of his gain in health and also to decrease expenses."And you needn't worry about anything at all, Mother darling," Kit had assured her. "Just keep right upstairs with Dad and let us girls run the kitchen, and we'll feed you on beautiful surprises."Mr. Robbins smiled over at them, and quoted teasingly:"The Chameleon's food I eat;Look you, the air, promise crammed."Piney paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls received their first real information about the other girl neighbors around Gilead Center.Honey was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Piney at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, studying a seed catalogue diligently."I'd love some elephant ears and castor beans and scarlet lichens in big beds along the terraces," she said. "Think of the splashes of red up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies' place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month.""You'll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better," Piney declared merrily. "We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what is left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you've got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don't need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl."The girls were silent, remembering what Cousin Roxana had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Doris's curiosity got the better of her caution, and she coaxed Piney away to hunt for the delicate pale green spear points with their white lilybells hidden away under the hazel bushes.It was Piney, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Piney who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries."She's perfectly wonderful," Kit declared that day at the noon dinner. "She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trilium and blood root, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn't let us pick many either, only a few. She says it's just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds' nests."Here Helen chimed in."And she's going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Motherie. We're going to take some of that dull castor-brown burlap that was left from the library and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin.""Piney seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities," said Mrs. Robbins amusedly."She is, just exactly that," Kit answered earnestly. "I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they're as poor as Job's turkey, too. Piney told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Gilead Center without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it.""I wonder what her real name is," Helen pondered. "Maybe it's Peony. Cousin Roxy calls peonies 'pinies.""It's much nicer than that," Jean said. "I can't think of any other name that would suit her. It's Proserpine. The minute she told me I saw her wandering along the seashore with the winds of the isles of Greece blowing back her funny short curls, and her hands up to her lips calling to the sea maids to come and play with her while her mother was away.""That's all very pretty and poetical, Sister Mine, but Piney's going to peddle our rhubarb for us," Kit remarked. "I think that rhubarb is one of the most grateful plants we have. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Piney told me it was rhubarb, and we're going to market it. She says there's a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we're going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mother dear, from the eyrie outlook, and heaven help any miscreant who takes our cranberries!""I wouldn't start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won't be along until frost," laughed Mrs. Robbins.Doris, with Honey's help, was devoting herself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Doris had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the "coming offs," as Honey put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Cousin Roxana's incubator, and over these Doris crooned and fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved."But they're motherless. Think of being born motherless and helpless--""Don't be ridiculous, Dorrie," Kit said crossly. "You can't be born motherless. You're hatched.""And if they don't know any better, what's the difference?" added Jean."I don't see that at all," Doris insisted plaintively. "Every time I go there and they call to me, I just want to take them in my lap, and cry and cry over them."One of "Ma" Parmelee's pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.Jean named her "Hamlet" in fun, because she said she was always looking for "rats in the arras." But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn't have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn't even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at meal time and eat her share."There'll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays," Kit prophesied darkly, but Doris begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Doris always begged off any of her flock from execution, and Honey had to go to one of the neighboring farms and purchase a fowl."It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you're well acquainted with," Doris explained. "And another thing, Motherie, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it's in the fall. I had Honey paint me some signs on shingles and I'm going to put them all over the place.""What do they say, dear?""They say just this," Doris's tone was full of firmness and decision."Any traps set on this-property will be sprung by ME.""Do they state who 'Me' is?""I signed it with Dad's name, and put underneath 'Per D.'"Jean wrapped loving arms around the youngest robin."Dorrie, you're a sweety," she said. "We don't appreciate you. You adopt everything in sight, but we have to look out for most of your orphans and semi-orphans. Never mind, Dorrie. I'm for you anyway.""We're such a devoted and loyal family tree, I think," sighed Doris. "Don't you, Motherie? I'm so glad I'm a branch.""You're not, dear, yet. You're just a twig," Kit teased. "And Mother is the beautiful dryad who lives in her very own family tree. Isn't that interesting, though? One thing about us, girls, is this, and it is very consoling. Scrap as we may, we turn right around and become a mutual admiration society at the slightest excuse. Good-night, everybody. The night is yet young, but I've promised Honey,--or rather, Honey and I have a bet that I couldn't get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my three foot rule against Honey's two pet turtles--""Are they trained?" asked Doris eagerly."They will be if they're not already. Don't anyone call me, because it's got to be fair running. Good-night."Helen and Doris decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living-room. Presently Mrs. Robbins glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean's lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old rock fireplace."What is it, dear?" she asked. "Tired?"Jean shook her head, and smiled half-heartedly."I'm awfully ashamed of it, Mother, but I do get so lonesome now and then, for everything, don't you know? All the people that we knew and the things that we used to do. Nothing happens up here.""Well, cheer up," said the Motherbird happily. "I am lonely too sometimes, but there is so much to compensate for what we have lost that I feel we must not dare be unhappy. And Father grows better every day."Jean dropped on her knees beside her mother's chair, arms folded close around her."You dear, precious, most wonderful person that ever was," she cried. "Don't eventhinkof what I said! I'm not a bit lonely, and tomorrow I'm going to see Piney and make calls."
CHAPTER X
SETTLING THE NEST
"Goods have come," called Mr. Ricketts from the mail box one morning. The pink freight card lay on top, and he seemed as pleased as anyone to find it there. "Letter from out West too, I noticed, so I presume you folks will be settled pretty soon."
"I almost feel as if I ought to let him read what Mr. McRae says," Mrs. Robbins said amusedly. "He's so friendly and interested."
As she opened the letter, the girls gathered around her chair, eager-eyed and curious to see what it contained. Jean declared that she liked the handwriting because it was firm and plain without any flourishes. Kit was sure he used a stub pen and was rather morose and dignified. Helen asked if she might keep the postage stamp for a memento, and Doris kept patting her mother's shoulder tenderly as if she would have protected her against any disappointment.
"You read it, dear. I'd much rather you did," the Motherbird said, handing it over to Mr. Robbins.
Cousin Roxana was out in the buttery singing softly to herself about some day when the mists had rolled in splendor from the beauty of the hills, and the nurse was upstairs, packing to return to New York the following day. There was just their own little home group of robins and they listened anxiously for the verdict. The letter ran:
April 4th, 19--.
Mr. Jerrold Robbins, Gilead Center, Conn.
MY DEAR MR. ROBBINS: Your letter of March 28th, received. I should be very glad to rent the old house down at Stony Eddy on a lease, but do not want to let it go out of the family. Miss Robbins can tell you the conditions under which it came into my possession and why I am not at liberty to part with it. If you care to rent it at $100 a year, it is yours. Any necessary repairs it may need I am willing to make. I have never seen the property myself, but whatever Miss Robbins says about it will be satisfactory to me, as she was my Aunt Trowbridge's dearest friend.
Hoping if you decide to take the place, you may be happy there, I am,
RALPH McRAE.
"It's ours," Jean breathed thankfully.
"I always felt that it was, somehow," Mrs. Robbins smiled happily around at her brood. "And I know you'll like it, Jerry."
"Oh, I know the place, I remember admiring it as a boy. Besides, I'd like anything up here. Why, I could live out yonder in Roxy's corncrib very comfortably this summer if she'd only let me," teased the invalid. "Better send a check out at once for the rent, Betty, and get into it as soon as possible."
It was the third week in April when they drove down in relays from Maple Lawn and took possession of the new home. There had been considerable repairing to be done: painting and papering, mending the waterpipes and furnace, and cleaning out the chimneys.
The goods had been brought up from Nantic by Hiram in the big hay wagon, he making four trips. Mrs. Robbins had wanted to hire an automobile truck from Norwich, but Roxana said it was all nonsense with two big horses standing idle in the barn just aching for work, and Hiram fussing around over frost still being in the ground so he couldn't do any deep ploughing. So the goods came up and were packed into the big front room downstairs while the girls and Mrs. Robbins went back and forth "settling."
Hiram's younger brother came to do the papering and painting. He looked exactly like a young rooster, Kit declared, all neck and legs, and he was fearfully shy. She found immediate diversion in appearing before him suddenly in her most abrupt manner and asking his opinion anxiously on something, whereupon Shad would blush intensely to the roots of his taffy colored hair, and splash paste blindly.
His name was Shadrach Farnum, but Shad suited him to perfection. As Cousin Roxana said, he did sort of run to bone. But he could paint and paper to the queen's taste and gradually the rooms began to look different. The big living-room was covered with a soft wood brown burlap that harmonized well with their ash furniture and bookcases, and the brown Spanish leather cushions. Window seats were built around the two bay windows, and the girls sewed diligently to cover the cushions for these with burlap, and to make inside curtains just to outline, as Jean said, the cream filet ones.
"It looks so warm and tender and friendly, doesn't it?" Doris exclaimed when the big brown suede cover was laid on the long library table and the copper lamp placed in the center. The copper lamp was really an institution in the Robbins' family. The girls had given it personal conduct from the Cove on Long Island to Nantic. Jean had found it in an old copper and brass shop in New York at a wonderful reduction, and had carted it home herself in triumph. The bowl was broad and low and squat, shaped a good deal like a summer squash. The shade was perforated by hand with exquisite artistry into strange Muscovite designs, through which the light shone softly. When it was lighted the first evening in the new home, Helen said she felt as if she were before a shrine.
"And it is a shrine too," Jean told them, "the shrine of home."
Once in the long ago when they had all been quite young, Jean had been found industriously writing names on bits of paper, and fastening them with mucilage to pieces of the furniture.
"I thought they might feel queer not having any names," she said when discovery came, "so I was naming them."
The lamp had a name too; it was always alluded to as Diogenes.
"It looks exactly like the kind of lamp he would have loved," Kit explained.
The day after they really moved in, Cousin Roxana drove down with Ella Lou and some good advice, a large brown crock of freshly baked beans and a loaf of brown bread.
"You need a good safe horse that you all can drive," she said. "Sam Willetts has a brown mare that seems just about the ticket. I telephoned over to him this morning and he'll sell her for $75.00, which isn't bad at all. If you like, Betty, I'll call him up again as soon as I get back and Honey Hancock can bring her over. Honey's working for Mr. Willetts now, and the mare used to belong to the Hancocks. She was a regular pet, Piney said."
Mrs. Robbins was sure it was a good plan and Cousin Roxana was instructed to close the bargain. So it was that Greenacres made the acquaintance of Honey Hancock, destined to be a close friend before summer was over, and always a family standby.
It was a little past the supper hour when Honey drove up. Hitched to the back of the wagon was the brown mare, and they all went out to look at her. Honey was about fourteen and tall for his age. Rosy-cheeked he was, with blue eyes and curly brown hair and dimples so deep and ingratiating that Helen said it was a burning shame to waste them on a boy.
He stood at the mare's head, patting her slender, glossy neck and combing her mane with his fingers, telling the girls her history, how she had belonged to Molly Bawn, their old mare, and how his father had broken her to harness himself.
"But she never had to be really broken in. Piney and I started riding her bareback when she was out in pasture and she was just as tame as a kitten. She understands anything you say to her. Mother hated to sell her to Mr. Willetts, but we had to, and as I was working for him, why, she didn't know any difference. She's used to a good deal of petting--"
"Oh, we'll all pet her here," Jean promised. "We must have something to drive her in. Haven't you a davenport that she'll drive nicely in?"
"A davenport!" exclaimed Kit. "Jean Robbins, a davenport's a sofa. She'd look nice hitched to a sofa. My sister isn't used to the country at all, Honey. She means a democrat, you know. The kind of a wagon you can put one seat or two on, and still have room to put things away in."
"We haven't anything like that," said Honey, "but they might have down at Mr. Butterick's. He's the carriage maker. He can take a pair of old carriage wheels, and turn out a good buggy almost while you watch him."
"You have wonderful people up here," Helen said fervently. "It seems as if whenever you want a certain kind of a person, there he is waiting for you. Where does Mr. Butterick live?"
"Down in Rocky Glen; second house past the basket weaver, Mr. Tompkins."
"Suppose we go over there tomorrow, girls," Jean suggested. "Or do you have to take the mare over, Honey, and let Mr. Butterick sort of fit her with a carriage and a harness? I wish I could put her in the barn right now."
"Better get somebody to take care of her first," Helen said practically. "We'd feed her fish cakes and doughnuts."
Honey shifted his weight from one foot to the other somewhat uneasily.
"Don't suppose you folks think of taking anybody on regularly, do you? Mother said I was to ask, and say if you wanted me I might come up. It's nearer home than Mr. Willetts' and there's only Piney and Mother at home, and they need me to do the chores after I get home at night."
Jean hastily signaled to Kit for fear she wouldn't remember all that Cousin Roxana had told them about Honey Hancock and his sister. But just then Mrs. Robbins stepped out on the side porch and smiled at Honey until he turned red and grinned delightedly.
"I could come for about ten a month, Mother thought," he vouchsafed with much embarrassment.
The other Mother thought ten was about right too, and Honey drove away in the spring twilight, happy as one of the barn swallows that circled in the dusk in a wonderful vesper dance. All the way up the hill they heard him whistling "Beulah Land," and the hearts of the girls echoed the sweet old melody. Although the deal had been closed over the brown mare, and the check reposed in Honey's overalls' pocket, he took her back with him, and promised to ride her over in the morning so the girls should not have the care of her over night.
"I asked him what her name was," Doris said, "and he told me they just called her Mollie's Baby. We must think up some wonderful name for her. You know, Mother darling, she looked over at me so tenderly and wistfully when Honey said she would have to go back over night. I know she longed to stay with us."
The next addition to the place was the lot of chickens. It had been agreed the first year that no large expenditures should be made for anything, because it was all more or less experimental.
"We want to take care of Dad, and make him well this first year," Jean told the other girls up in their room one night.
One point about the Robbins family that was different from other families was their distinctive individualities; they simply demanded separate expression, as Jean put it. Nobody liked to double up with anyone else, and here at Greenacres there were plenty of rooms to choose from, so that each daughter might have her own. Two large bed-rooms with alcoves crossed the front of the house. These had been turned over to Mr. and Mrs. Robbins. Then came curious rooms, as Kit said. The hallway rambled through the second story, two steps up over here and two steps down over there. There were unexpected little corridors opening out from it like crooked arms. It really was a fascinating hallway, and the rooms along it were quite exceptional. There were two wings to the house, and an extension at the back over the summer kitchen "ell." This was a source of delight to the girls, for they found all kinds of interesting relics tucked back in this extension.
"Mother dear," Helen said seriously, appearing one day with cobwebs in her hair and dust smudges on her arms and face, "we've found perfectly wonderful things. Old newspapers before the war, and old magazines with hoopskirts in them and bonnets with flowers inside the poke!"
"And two old maps dated 1829, one of New York State and one of Connecticut," Kit added. "Both mounted on old yellow homespun linen and braced with hand carved ebony. Now what do you think of that, Dad? I'll bring them down to you. And a thing that looks like a little pilot wheel, but it isn't. Jean says it's part of a spinning outfit because she's seen them out in front of antique shops on Madison Avenue in New York. And we found a foot warmer, and an hour glass with one support broken, and a tailor's goose, and some old clothes-pins that had been whittled by hand."
Jean selected the west room for her very own. It had a square bay window over the bower, as the girls had nicknamed the little conservatory off the dining-room. The upstairs window was smaller, but almost as pleasant, with small panes of glass and a beautiful outlook over the valley and the old dam.
Doris had a smaller room next to Jean's, and then came a pleasant southeast room for a guest chamber.
"And for pity's sake, let's make it comfy and cheery," said Kit. "Most guest chambers give you the everlasting dumdums, don't they, Jeanie? Let's make ours look as if it were really to enjoy."
Kit had taken for her special domicile the room over the summer kitchen, because it had so many shelves and cupboards in it. At first she had wanted the cupola room, but was talked out of it, much against her will and predilections. The upper staircase was circular, and you had to watch out going up to the cupola, or you'd get an unmerciful bump on the head as the door was very low. But once inside, it was a surprise, that held you spellbound for a minute. The room was square in shape, and had eight long narrow windows in it. From them you caught wonderful framed views of the far-reaching valley, the ruined stone mill, the great brown rock dam, covered now with the spring freshet, and beyond the placid lake with several islands dotting it and long rows of hills guarding its margins, one after the other like sentinels.
"Yes, I want this one," Kit had said. "I'm the only one in the family with genius and this should be mine. I want to walk around this crystal enclosure and play that I am one of Maeterlinck's sleeping princesses."
"They didn't walk," Jean had protested, "and you needn't imagine that you're a genius, Kit Robbins, because you're not."
"Well, I'm the only one in the family with much imagination anyway," Kit had answered pleasantly. "'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,' you know, Jeanie dear. And if I can't be a sleeping princess I will be the Lady of Shalott." Whereupon she had swept about the room with a couch cover draped around her in approved Camelot style, and a curtain cord bound about her brow for a circlet, declaiming:
"'Four gray walls and four gray towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle embowers,The Lady of Shalott.'"
"'Four gray walls and four gray towers,Overlook a space of flowers,And the silent isle embowers,The Lady of Shalott.'"
"'Four gray walls and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle embowers,
The Lady of Shalott.'"
The Lady of Shalott.'"
"It would be such a hard place from which to rescue you if the house caught fire," Helen had remarked thoughtfully, peering from one of the windows. "You couldn't very well skip down the lightning rod, Kit."
"I should prefer to have all my girls nearer to me," Mrs. Robbins had remarked. "Suppose you should be taken ill in the night! How would any of the rest know of it or be able to help you? You had better select a room on the floor below, Childie."
"Very well," Kit had said regretfully. "Of course I will not insist if the family are going to worry over me, but I shall come up here every day to comb out my golden tresses. I think we'll get Shad to build us window seats all the way around, stain the floor, and make a sort of sun parlor out of it."
"Oh, Kit, remember the place in Egypt we always wanted to see, the Ramasseum, the thinking place of the king?" Jean's dark eyes had sparkled with mischief. "Let's call this the Thinking Place. Then we can retire here when we wish to meditate, and fairly soak in the sunlight until we feel radiant and revived. Do you all like that?"
So it had been agreed upon and the cupola room became the thinking place of the four princesses.
Another discovery they made soon after was the Peace Spot. This was over on the hillside across the bridge. Here was a rocky field with any number of evergreen trees. They were assorted sizes and all varieties. There were juniper trees and hemlocks, fat tubby little spruces and slender straggly cedars. It looked like a premeditated burial ground, Kit remarked, but Helen named it the Peace Spot. They often walked over there in the late afternoons. Kit had ideas of turning it into a wonderful Italian garden some day, but just now it was their place of rest.
At first the housework had proved to be the great stumbling block in the way of perfect peace and daily comfort.
"I tell you, Motherbird, if you'll just say what you want done, we'll be your willing handmaidens," Jean had promised at the very beginning, but the willing handmaidens had found themselves tangled up in less than two days, treading on each other's heels and losing their tempers too.
Mrs. Robbins laughed at them when she happened in and found them all "looking down their noses," as Doris expressed it.
"Girls, you'll have to learn team work," she explained. It appeared that Jean had put a chicken to roast in the top of the double baking pan and the gravy had all run out of the air draft at one end. "You must learn that when you put your bread to rise it doesn't shape itself into loaves and hop into the pans and walk over to the oven." Here Kit blushed hotly, remembering how her first batch had risen to the occasion beyond all expectations, and rambled during the night all over the edge of the pan and the arm of the chair she had set it on. "And, Dorrie, precious, if you catch mice in traps alive, and then decide to tame them, we'll have mice all over the place."
Doris had discovered a nice little brown prisoner under the pantry shelf, had taken him out into the rose garden and there let him go, all in a spirit of lofty pity that left Kit and Jean speechless.
Also, Doris had taken to rescuing flies caught on sticky paper, putting them into pill boxes until they recovered their usual blithe and debonnaire attitude towards life. Also, sundry noises having issued from her room at night, the other girls had started down the dark hall to investigate, and had stepped on turtles which Doris had found sunning themselves on logs in the pond, and had put into empty tomato cans and smuggled up to her room for future humanitarian reference.
"Go for us, Queen Mother," Jean cried valiantly. "Go for us. It's the only way we'll ever learn anything. I told Kit to fix the bread a dozen times. I was reading up tomato plants, and Helen was cutting out a stencil for her scrim curtains--conventionalized tulips--"
"Lotos buds," corrected Helen.
"Well, I'm not sure. They look like raised biscuits to me. I wish spring would hurry along and make up its mind to stay a while." She pressed her nose against the window pane and stared out at the land. Letters had come from some girl friends back at the Cove that day, and she felt a wave of loneliness and half panic at what they had undertaken.
Just then Honey came to the kitchen door, bareheaded and smiling.
"Piney said for me to tell you folks that she heard Ma Parmelee had some good Plymouth Rocks for sale. They're about as reliable a hen as you can get. Ma's going to sell off everything and go to live with her son down in Nantic. It's near towards where I live, if you'd like to drive over that way."
Mrs. Robbins thought it was a good idea, and that Jean could go with her. There had been a trip over to Rocky Glen after the purchase of Mollie's Baby, and Mr. Butterick had been persuaded to part with a buggy that just fit the mare. It was low and held three easily on its broad cushioned seat, and there was a fair space at the back where odds and ends could be packed away.
It seemed rather foolish to call the mare Mollie's Baby every time they spoke to her, so a family council had given her a brand new cognomen and already she pricked up her ears when she heard it. They called her Princess, and the Jersey heifer that came up from the State farm was called Buttercup, after her famous predecessor. Buttercup was Mr. Robbins' special pride on the farm and great things were hoped from her.
Jean gathered up the reins and Honey put some burlap sacks in the back of the wagon for the hens.
"Better tie them to something when you start off," he advised. "They always flop around a lot in sacks."
It was a drive of about two and a half miles, up through the hills. Each new road seemed to lead them straight up to the edge of the world and then to dip again and leave cloudland behind. The woods held a haze of green now that hung over the distant hills like a mist. Once a row of young quail blinked dizzily from a pasture bar at the surprising apparition of the horse and buggy. And all at once there came the quick thud of hoofs behind them, and a young girl riding horseback drew rein beside their buggy. She was about as old as Kit, with thick brown hair brushed back boyishly from her face, and big friendly blue eyes.
"How do you do," she said, blushing in a way that seemed familiar to them, for it reminded them of Honey. "I'm Piney Hancock. Mollie wouldn't let me ride by unless I stopped to let her see Babe."
CHAPTER XI
MA PARMELEE'S CHICKS
"Oh, we're ever so glad to know you, Piney," Jean said at once. "Honey's told us all about you until we felt that we really did know you."
Piney blushed deeper than ever, just as Honey did, and brushed a fly off her pony's neck. She rode across saddle, in a home-made corduroy skirt, with a boy's cap set back on her head, and a boyish waist with knotted tie. Altogether both Mrs. Robbins and Jean approved of her at sight, for she seemed like a girl edition of Honey himself.
Piney told them they were on the right road, and to keep to the left after they passed the burial ground.
"I'm going down the other way or I'd ride along and show you where it is."
"You must come down to see us girls when you can, please. We're rather lonesome, not knowing anyone around here. Are there many girls?"
"Quite a few," said Piney. "There are the Swedish girls over on the old Ames place, and there are two French girls near us. Their father's the carpenter, Mr. Chapelle. Etoile's the older one and the little one they call Tony. Her name's really Marie Antoinette. Mrs. Chapelle's awfully funny. She told me one day the reason they changed the little girl's name to Tony was because if she ever should get on a railroad track or anywhere in danger, and they had to call her in a hurry, they wanted something short and quick to say. She talks broken English, and it was so comical the way she said it." Piney's deep dimples were showing and her eyes were sparkling, as she imitated the voice of Mrs. Chapelle. "How I say to her ver' fast Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette! She can be dead four--five--time. I call her that way, I tink so. I yell Ton-ee! Right away she jump."
"Isn't she a darling, Mother?" Jean exclaimed when they drove on. "I do hope she'll come down. Kit would love her."
"Anybody would love her," agreed Mrs. Robbins, still smiling. "You know, Jean, I think that you girls are going to find a special work up here that only you can do. A work among these girls of our own neighborhood."
"But, Mother dear, our own neighborhood up here means a radius of about ten miles."
"Even so. Cousin Roxana's old doctor covers twenty miles and has been doing it for forty years; he knows all of the families as if he were a census taker."
Jean thought for a minute. They were going up a long hill and Princess took her time. Honey had fastened two bunches of ferns to her bridle to keep away flies, and she looked as if she wore a Dutch bonnet.
"There seem to be so few real American girls up here, Mother," Jean began slowly. "I thought we'd find ever so many, but while I lived up at Maple Lawn I rode around a good deal, and you'd be surprised how many foreigners are up here. Cousin Roxy told me the reason. The old families die out, or the younger generation moves away to the towns, and the foreigners buy up the old homesteads cheaply."
"Well, dear?"
"But, Mother, you don't understand. There are all sorts. French Canadians, and a Swedish family, and a Polish family, and the old miller up the valley from us used to be a Prussian sailor. Then there are the real old families, of course--"
"Do you think of confining your circle of acquaintances to the old families, Jeanie?"
Jean laughed at the amusement in her mother's voice.
"I know what you're thinking, Mother, dear. Still I suppose we must be careful just moving into a new place like this. We don't want to get intimate with everybody. You'll like some of the old families."
"I think I'll like some of the new ones too. Have you noticed, Jean, in driving around, that the houses which are mostly unpainted and rather run-down looking belong to the old timers, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, probably, of first settlers?"
"Oh, Mother, there are some of the most interesting stories about them too, how they came out--walked, actually walked most of them--from the Massachusetts Bay Colony when there was some sort of a break up, and a few dropped off here, and a few there, and they settled in hamlets wherever they happened to stop. I found a burial ground in the woods near Cousin Roxy's, with old slate gravestones, and dates away back to 1717."
"I'd like to see them, dear, but at the same time they were foreigners too, or children of foreigners, immigrants from a far land. Can't you understand what I mean? These newer families are like new blood to the country. It takes only a couple of generations to blend them in, Jean, and they bring new strength to us. Think what we get from the different nations. I remember out in California I had a wonderful girl friend whose people had been Polish exiles. That was a strange group of exiles who sought a haven in our land of flowers. There was Sienkiewicz the great novelist, and splendid Helena Modjeska, and many whose names I forget. Wanda was my girl friend's name, and my Mother and aunts did not like me to chum with her because she was a foreigner. I think that you children are very fortunate to be born in an age when these queer old earth lines, these race barriers, are falling down, and leaving the world-brotherhood idea instead. Up here in our lonely old hills, we are going to face this same problem that all nations are coping with, and we in our small way can help open the gates of the future."
"Why, Mother, I never heard you talk this way before," Jean exclaimed. "You always seemed just dear and sweet, don't you know. I--why, somehow I never felt you were interested in such things."
Unconsciously, she moved a little nearer to this new kind of Mother, and Mrs. Robbins' hand closed over hers.
"If we mothers are not interested in them, who should be?" she asked, her eyes full of a beautiful tenderness and compassion. "Some one has called us the torch bearers, the light bringers, but I like to think of women best as the tenders of the ever-burning temple lamps."
"You mean love and truth and--"
"I mean everything, dear, that tends for world betterment. And you girls are going to do your little share right here in Gilead Center, making a circle that shall join together the hands of all these girls from different races. We'll give a party soon and get acquainted with them all. Now let's pay attention to chickens, for I think this must be the house."
Princess turned into a side drive leading around to a house that stood well back from the road. As Jean said afterwards, the house looked as if it had been outdoors all its life, it was so weather-beaten and gray. "Ma" Parmelee bustled out to meet them, plump and busy as one of her own Plymouth Rocks.
"Twelve pullets and one rooster you want?" she said. "Well, I guess I can fix you up. I heard you folks had moved in down yonder. Thought I'd see you at meeting Sunday but I didn't."
Mrs. Robbins explained that they were Episcopalians and the nearest parish was nine miles away.
"So it is, over at Riverview, but we're all bound for the same place, so you might as well come up and help fill the pews. Land knows they need it." She led the way out to the big barn, followed by the chickens. The great doors were wide open, and the barn floor was covered lightly with wisps of hay. "Ma" scattered a measure of grain over this, and let the hens scratch for it.
"I have to work hard for what I get, and they ought to too," she said pleasantly. "Now, we'll take any that you like and put them into bags. I'm going to sell you my very best rooster. His name's Jim Dandy and he's all of that. He's pure Rhode Island Red, and two years old. You don't have to worry about hawks when he's around."
After the chickens were all safely in the bags and put in back of the wagon seat, "Ma" waved good-bye and told them not to forget the Finnish family that was moving into her house.
"I'm going to live with my married daughter, and these poor things don't know a living soul up here. Do drive over and speak to them as neighbors. There's a man and his widowed sister and her children. All God's folks, you know."
"Finns," murmured Jean speculatively, as they drove away. "There's a new blend to our Gilead sisterhood, Motherie."
Mrs. Robbins laughed at the puzzled expression on her eldest daughter's face.
"We'll let Kit drive over and see them," she promised.
Spring seemed to descend on the land all at once in the next few days, as if she had quite made up her mind to come and sit a while, Cousin Roxy said. One day the earth still looked wind-swept and bare, and the next there seemed to be a green sheen over the land and the woods looked hazy and lacy with the delicate budding leaves.
One night as Doris was out shutting up the hen houses and filling the pigeons' pan with water, she stopped short, her head upraised eagerly like a fawn, listening to a new sound away off along the edges of the woods, and deep down in the lower meadow where the brook flowed. Keenest and sweetest it sounded over where the waters of the lake above the old dam moved with soft low lapping among the reeds and water grasses. Here it became a curiously shrill trilling noise, subdued and yet insistent like the strumming of muffled strings on a million tiny harps.
"It's the peep frogs," called Honey, coming up from the barn with Buttercup's creamy contribution to the family commonwealth. "They're just waking up. That means it's spring for sure."
"Isn't it dear of them to try and tell us all about it," Doris cried delightedly, and away she ran to the house to insist that Kit and Jean and Helen come straight out-of-doors and listen too. In the twilight they walked around the terraces below the veranda, two by two. Once Helen stopped below their father's window to call up to him in the long "Coo-ee!" their mother had taught them from her own girlhood days out in California on her grandfather's ranch.
Day by day they would assure each other of his returning strength and health. The country air and utter restfulness of life as it ran here in channels of peace were surely giving him back at least the power to relax and rest. He slept as soundly as Doris herself, all night long, something he had not been able to do in months, and his appetite was really getting to be quite encouraging. The little nurse had left Greenacres the fifteenth of April both because of his gain in health and also to decrease expenses.
"And you needn't worry about anything at all, Mother darling," Kit had assured her. "Just keep right upstairs with Dad and let us girls run the kitchen, and we'll feed you on beautiful surprises."
Mr. Robbins smiled over at them, and quoted teasingly:
"The Chameleon's food I eat;Look you, the air, promise crammed."
"The Chameleon's food I eat;Look you, the air, promise crammed."
"The Chameleon's food I eat;
Look you, the air, promise crammed."
Look you, the air, promise crammed."
Piney paid her promised visit within a few days, and from her the girls received their first real information about the other girl neighbors around Gilead Center.
Honey was ploughing up the kitchen garden behind the house and Jean, with Piney at her side, sat on the low stone wall that separated it from the orchard, studying a seed catalogue diligently.
"I'd love some elephant ears and castor beans and scarlet lichens in big beds along the terraces," she said. "Think of the splashes of red up against those pines, girls. Remember the Jefferies' place back at the Cove. Mrs. Jefferies paid her gardener a hundred dollars a month."
"You'll like the rare, rich red of radishes and beets and scarlet runner beans better," Piney declared merrily. "We always lay out money on the food seeds first and then what is left can go for flowers. Anyhow, when you've got heaps of roses and snowballs and syringas and lilacs and things that keep coming up by themselves every year, you don't need to buy very much. Did you find the lilies of the valley down along the north wall? Mother says they used to be beautiful when she was a girl."
The girls were silent, remembering what Cousin Roxana had told them of the romance of Luella Trowbridge. But Doris's curiosity got the better of her caution, and she coaxed Piney away to hunt for the delicate pale green spear points with their white lilybells hidden away under the hazel bushes.
It was Piney, too, who took them up the hill to the rocky sheep pasture and showed them where arbutus bloomed around the edges of the gray, mossy rocks. And it was Piney who pointed out to them the wintergreen, or checkerberry, as she called it, with its tiny pungent berries.
"She's perfectly wonderful," Kit declared that day at the noon dinner. "She knows the exact spot in this entire township where every single flower bobs up in its season. We found saxifrage at the base of an old oak, and white trilium and blood root, and perfect fields of bluets. And she wouldn't let us pick many either, only a few. She says it's just as cruel to rob a patch of wild flowers of all chance of blooming again next year as it is to rob birds' nests."
Here Helen chimed in.
"And she's going to teach me how to start a flower calendar. Not in a book, Motherie. We're going to take some of that dull castor-brown burlap that was left from the library and mount specimens on it, then make a folio with leather covers of dyed sheepskin."
"Piney seems to be a regular dynamo for starting activities," said Mrs. Robbins amusedly.
"She is, just exactly that," Kit answered earnestly. "I never met a girl with so many ideas up her sleeve. And they're as poor as Job's turkey, too. Piney told us so herself. And here she is, cooped up in Gilead Center without any outlet at all. She knows what she wants to do, but we girls can tell her how to do it."
"I wonder what her real name is," Helen pondered. "Maybe it's Peony. Cousin Roxy calls peonies 'pinies."
"It's much nicer than that," Jean said. "I can't think of any other name that would suit her. It's Proserpine. The minute she told me I saw her wandering along the seashore with the winds of the isles of Greece blowing back her funny short curls, and her hands up to her lips calling to the sea maids to come and play with her while her mother was away."
"That's all very pretty and poetical, Sister Mine, but Piney's going to peddle our rhubarb for us," Kit remarked. "I think that rhubarb is one of the most grateful plants we have. It seems to spring up everywhere and pay compound interest on itself every year. I found a lot of it growing and thought it was peonies or dahlias, but Piney told me it was rhubarb, and we're going to market it. She says there's a big cranberry bog on this place too, away off in some sunken meadows above the dam, and we must look out because somebody comes and picks them without asking anything at all about it. So we're going to watch the old wood road that turns into the sunken meadows. We can see it, Mother dear, from the eyrie outlook, and heaven help any miscreant who takes our cranberries!"
"I wouldn't start looking for him yet awhile, dear. Cranberries won't be along until frost," laughed Mrs. Robbins.
Doris, with Honey's help, was devoting herself to the hens. Although they had come rather late, still quite a few were setting, and Doris had several almanacs and calendars marked with the dates of the "coming offs," as Honey put it. Then there were about twenty tiny balls of fluff in the brooder from Cousin Roxana's incubator, and over these Doris crooned and fussed and wasted more sentiment than any chickens deserved.
"But they're motherless. Think of being born motherless and helpless--"
"Don't be ridiculous, Dorrie," Kit said crossly. "You can't be born motherless. You're hatched."
"And if they don't know any better, what's the difference?" added Jean.
"I don't see that at all," Doris insisted plaintively. "Every time I go there and they call to me, I just want to take them in my lap, and cry and cry over them."
One of "Ma" Parmelee's pullets had turned out to be a vagrant. Never would she stay with the rest of the chickens in the hen house or yard, or even around the barnyard. She was jet black and very peculiar. At feeding time she would show up, but hover around the outskirts of the flock and nibble at kernels of corn anxiously.
Jean named her "Hamlet" in fun, because she said she was always looking for "rats in the arras." But her real name was Gypsy. It was agreed that Gypsy had no idea of her natural obligation to society at all, that she didn't have the slightest intention of setting on any eggs, in fact that she didn't even have the gratitude to lay any eggs. All she did was appear promptly at meal time and eat her share.
"There'll be Gypsy a la Reine one of these fine Sundays," Kit prophesied darkly, but Doris begged for her life. In fact, whenever chicken was on the bill-of-fare Doris always begged off any of her flock from execution, and Honey had to go to one of the neighboring farms and purchase a fowl.
"It seems so awful to eat a chicken that you're well acquainted with," Doris explained. "And another thing, Motherie, did you know that the boys set traps around? Not now, but in the fall. At least, I think it's in the fall. I had Honey paint me some signs on shingles and I'm going to put them all over the place."
"What do they say, dear?"
"They say just this," Doris's tone was full of firmness and decision.
"Any traps set on this-property will be sprung by ME."
"Do they state who 'Me' is?"
"I signed it with Dad's name, and put underneath 'Per D.'"
Jean wrapped loving arms around the youngest robin.
"Dorrie, you're a sweety," she said. "We don't appreciate you. You adopt everything in sight, but we have to look out for most of your orphans and semi-orphans. Never mind, Dorrie. I'm for you anyway."
"We're such a devoted and loyal family tree, I think," sighed Doris. "Don't you, Motherie? I'm so glad I'm a branch."
"You're not, dear, yet. You're just a twig," Kit teased. "And Mother is the beautiful dryad who lives in her very own family tree. Isn't that interesting, though? One thing about us, girls, is this, and it is very consoling. Scrap as we may, we turn right around and become a mutual admiration society at the slightest excuse. Good-night, everybody. The night is yet young, but I've promised Honey,--or rather, Honey and I have a bet that I couldn't get up at five and help weed the garden. And we bet my three foot rule against Honey's two pet turtles--"
"Are they trained?" asked Doris eagerly.
"They will be if they're not already. Don't anyone call me, because it's got to be fair running. Good-night."
Helen and Doris decided that they were sleepy too, and the three went upstairs together, leaving Jean and her mother to read in the big living-room. Presently Mrs. Robbins glanced up and saw that the book lay idle on Jean's lap, and she was looking down at the wood fire that burned on the old rock fireplace.
"What is it, dear?" she asked. "Tired?"
Jean shook her head, and smiled half-heartedly.
"I'm awfully ashamed of it, Mother, but I do get so lonesome now and then, for everything, don't you know? All the people that we knew and the things that we used to do. Nothing happens up here."
"Well, cheer up," said the Motherbird happily. "I am lonely too sometimes, but there is so much to compensate for what we have lost that I feel we must not dare be unhappy. And Father grows better every day."
Jean dropped on her knees beside her mother's chair, arms folded close around her.
"You dear, precious, most wonderful person that ever was," she cried. "Don't eventhinkof what I said! I'm not a bit lonely, and tomorrow I'm going to see Piney and make calls."