CHAPTER VPRIMROSE COURTReturn to Table of Contents
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But during that first two weeks a continual rush of business made long days for Maida. All the children in the neighborhood were curious to see the place. It had been dark and dingy as long as they could remember. Now it was always bright and pretty—always sweet with the perfume of flowers, always gay with the music of birds. But more, the children wanted to see the lame little girl who “tended store,” who seemed to try so hard to please her customers and who was so affectionate and respectful with the old, old lady whom she called “Granny.”
At noon and night the bell sounded a continuous tinkle.
For a week Maida kept rather close to the shop. She wanted to get acquainted with all her customers. Moreover, she wanted to find out which of the things she had bought sold quickly and which were unpopular.
After a day or two her life fell into a regular programme.
Early in the morning she would put the shop to rights for the day’s sale, dusting, replacing the things she had sold, rearranging them often according to some pretty new scheme.
About eight o’clock the bell would call her into the shop and it would be brisk work until nine. Then would come a rest of three hours, broken only by an occasional customer. In this interval she often worked in the yard, raking up the leaves that fell from vine and bush, picking the bravely-blooming dahlias, gathering sprays of woodbine for the vases, scattering crumbs to the birds.
At twelve the children would begin to flood the shop again and Maida would be on her feet constantly until two. Between two and four came another long rest. After school trade started up again. Often it lasted until six, when she locked the door for the night.
In her leisure moments she used to watch the people coming and going in Primrose Court. With Rosie’s and Dicky’s help, she soon knew everybody by name. She discoveredby degrees that on the right side of the court lived the Hales, the Clarks, the Doyles and the Dores; on the left side, the Duncans, the Brines and the Allisons. In the big house at the back lived the Lathrops.
Betsy was a great delight to Maida, for the neighborhood brimmed with stories of her mischief. She had buried her best doll in the ash-barrel, thrown her mother’s pocketbook down the cesspool, put all the clean laundry into a tub of water and painted the parlor fireplace with tomato catsup. In a single afternoon, having become secretly possessed of a pair of scissors, she cut all the fringe off the parlor furniture, cut great scallops in the parlor curtains, cut great patches of fur off the cat’s back. When her mother found her, she was busy cutting her own hair.
Often Granny would hear the door slam on Maida’s hurried rush from the shop. Hobbling to the window, she would see the child leading Betsy by the hand. “Running away again,” was all Maida would say. Occasionally Maida would call in a vexed tone, “Nowhowdid she creep past the window without my seeing her?” And outside would be rosy-cheeked, brass-buttoned Mr.Flanagan, carrying Betsy home. Once Billy arrived at the shop, bearing Betsy in his arms. “She was almost to the bridge,” he said, “when I caught sight of her from the car window. The little tramp!”
Betsy never seemed to mind being caught. For an instant the little rosebud that was her mouth would part over the tiny pearls that were her teeth. This roguish smile seemed to say: “You wait until the next time. You won’t catch me then.”
Sometimes Betsy would come into the shop for an hour’s play. Maida loved to have her there but it was like entertaining a whirlwind. Betsy had a strong curiosity to see what the drawers and boxes contained. Everything had to be put back in its place when she left.
Next to the Hales lived the Clarks. By the end of the first week Maida was the chief adoration of the Clark twins. Dorothy and Mabel were just as good as Betsy was naughty. When they came over to see Maida, they played quietly with whatever she chose to give them. It was an hour, ordinarily, before they could be made to talk above a whisper. If they saw Maida coming into the court, they would run to herside, slipping a hot little hand into each of hers. Attended always by this roly-poly bodyguard, Maida would limp from group to group of the playing children. Nobody in Primrose Court could tell the Clark twins apart. Maida soon learned the difference although she could never explain it to anybody else. “It’s something you have to feel,” she said.
Billy Potter enjoyed the twins as much as Maida did. “Good morning, Dorothy-Mabel,” he always said when he met one of them; “is this you or your sister?” And he always answered their whispered remarks with whispers so much softer than theirs that he finally succeeded in forcing them to raise their shy little voices.
The Doyles and the Dores lived in one house next to the Clarks, Molly and Tim on the first floor, Dicky and Delia above. Maida became very fond of the Doyle children. Like Betsy, they were too young to go to school and she saw a good deal of them in the lonely school hours. The puddle was an endless source of amusement to them. As long as it remained, they entertained themselves playing along its shores.
“There’s that choild in the water again,”Granny would cry from the living-room.
Looking out, Maida would see Tim spread out on all fours. Like an obstinate little pig, he would lie still until Molly picked him up. She would take him home and in a few moments he would reappear in fresh, clean clothes again.
“Hello, Tim,” Billy Potter would say whenever they met. “Fallen into a pud-muddle lately?”
The wordpud-muddlealways sent Tim off into peals of laughter. It was the only thing Maida had discovered that could make him laugh, for he was as serious as Molly was merry. Molly certainly was the jolliest little girl in the court—Maida had never seen her with anything but a smiling face.
Dicky’s mother went to work so early and came back so late that Maida had never seen her. But Dicky soon became an intimate. Maida had begun the reading lessons and Dicky was so eager to get on that they were progressing famously.
The Lathrops lived in the big house at the back of the court. Granny learned from the Misses Allison that, formerly, the whole neighborhood had belonged to the Lathrop family. But they had sold all their land,piece by piece, except the one big lot on which the house stood. Perhaps it was because they had once been so important that Mrs. Lathrop seemed to feel herself a little better than the rest of the people in Primrose Court. At any rate, although she spoke with all, the Misses Allison were the only ones on whom she condescended to call. Maida caught a glimpse of her occasionally on the piazza—a tall, thin woman, white-haired and sharp-featured, who always wore a worsted shawl.
The house was a big, bulky building, a mass of piazzas and bay-windows, with a hexagonal cupola on the top. It was painted white with green blinds and trimmed with a great deal of wooden lace. The wide lawn was well-kept and plots of flowers, here and there, gave it a gay air.
Laura had a brother named Harold, who was short and fat. Harold seemed to do nothing all day long but ride a wheel at a tearing pace over the asphalt paths, and regularly, for two hours every morning, to draw a shrieking bow across a tortured violin.
The more Maida watched Laura the less she liked her. She could see that what Rosiesaid was perfectly true—Laura put on airs. Every afternoon Laura played on the lawn. Her appearance was the signal for all the small fry of the neighborhood to gather about the gate. First would come the Doyles, then Betsy, then, one by one, the strange children who wandered into the court, until there would be a row of wistful little faces stuck between the bars of the fence. They would follow every move that Laura made as she played with the toys spread in profusion upon the grass.
Laura often pretended not to see them. She would lift her large family of dolls, one after another, from cradle to bed and from bed to tiny chair and sofa. She would parade up and down the walk, using first one doll-carriage, then the other. She would even play a game of croquet against herself. Occasionally she would call in a condescending tone, “You may come in for awhile if you wish, little children.” And when the delighted little throng had scampered to her side, she would show them all her toy treasures on condition that they did not touch them.
When the proceedings reached this stage, Maida would be so angry that she couldlook no longer. Very often, after Laura had sent the children away, Maida would call them into the shop. She would let them play all the rest of the afternoon with anything her stock afforded.
On the right side of the court lived Arthur Duncan, the Misses Allison and Rosie Brine. The more Maida saw of Arthur, the more she disliked him. In fact, she hated to have him come into the shop. It seemed to her that he went out of his way to be impolite to her, that he looked at her with a decided expression of contempt in his big dark eyes. But Rosie and Dicky seemed very fond of him. Billy Potter had once told her that one good way of judging people was by the friends they made. If that were true, she had to acknowledge that there must be something fine about Arthur that she had not discovered.
Maida guessed that the W.M.N.T.’s met three or four times a week. Certainly there were very busy doings at Dicky’s or at Arthur’s house every other day. What it was all about, Maida did not know. But she fancied that it had much to do with Dicky’s frequent purchases of colored tissue paper.
The Misses Allison had become great friends with Granny. Matilda, the blind sister, was very slender and sweet-faced. She sat all day in the window, crocheting the beautiful, fleecy shawls by which she helped support the household.
Jemima, the older, short, fat and with snapping black eyes, did the housework, attended to the parrot and waited by inches on her afflicted sister. Occasionally in the evening they would come to call on Granny. Billy Potter was very nice to them both. He was always telling the sisters the long amusing stories of his adventures. Miss Matilda’s gentle face used positively to beam at these times, and Miss Jemima laughed so hard that, according to her own story, his talk put her “in stitches.”
Maida did not see Rosie’s mother often. To tell the truth, she was a little afraid of her. She was a tall, handsome, black-browed woman—a grown-up Rosie—with an appearance of great strength and of even greater temper. “Ah, that choild’s the limb,” Granny would say, when Maida brought her some new tale of Rosie’s disobedience. And yet, in the curious way in which Maida divined things that were nottold her, she knew that, next to Dicky, Rosie was Granny’s favorite of all the children in the neighborhood.
With all these little people to act upon its stage, it is not surprising that Primrose Court seemed to Maida to be a little theater of fun—a stage to which her window was the royal box. Something was going on there from morning to night. Here would be a little group of little girls playing “house” with numerous families of dolls. There, it would be boys, gathered in an excited ring, playing marbles or top. Just before school, games like leap-frog, or tag or prisoners’ base would prevail. But, later, when there was more time, hoist-the-sail would fill the air with its strange cries, or hide-and-seek would make the place boil with excitement. Maida used to watch these games wistfully, for Granny had decided that they were all too rough for her. She would not even let Maida play “London-Bridge-is-falling-down” or “drop the handkerchief”—anything, in fact, in which she would have to run or pull.
But Granny had no objections to the gentler fun of “Miss Jennie-I-Jones,”“ring-a-ring-a-rounder,” “water, water wildflower,” “the farmer in the dell,” “go in and out the windows.” Maida used to try to pick out the airs of these games on the spinet—she never could decide which was the sweetest.
Maida soon learned how to play jackstones and, at the end of the second week, she was almost as proficient as Rosie with the top. The thing she most wanted to learn, however, was jump-rope. Every little girl in Primrose Court could jump-rope—even the twins, who were especially nimble at “pepper.” Maida tried it one night—all alone in the shop. But suddenly her weak leg gave way under her and she fell to the floor. Granny, rushing in from the other room, scolded her violently. She ended by forbidding her to jump again without special permission. But Maida made up her mind that she was going to learn sometime, even, as she said with a roguish smile, “if it took a leg.” She talked it over with Rosie.
“You let her jump just one jump every morning and night, Granny,” Rosie advised, “and I’m sure it will be all right.That won’t hurt her any and, after awhile, she’ll find she can jump two, then three and so on. That’s the way I learned.”
Granny agreed to this. Maida practiced constantly, one jump in her nightgown, just before going to bed, and another, all dressed, just after she got up.
“I jumped three jumps this morning without failing, Granny,” she said one morning at breakfast. Within a few days the record climbed to five, then to seven, then, at a leap, to ten.
Dr. Pierce called early one morning. His eyes opened wide when they fell upon her. “Well, well, Pinkwink,” he said. “What do you mean by bringing me way over here! I thought you were supposed to be a sick young person. Where’d you get that color?”
A flush like that of a pink sweet-pea blossom had begun to show in Maida’s cheek. It was faint but it was permanent.
“Why, you’re the worst fraud on my list. If you keep on like this, young woman, I shan’t have any excuse for calling. You’ve done fine, Granny.”
Granny looked, as Dr. Pierce afterwards said, “as tickled as Punch.”
“How do you like shop-keeping?” Dr. Pierce went on.
“Like it!” Maida plunged into praise so swift and enthusiastic that Dr. Pierce told her to go more slowly or he would put a bit in her mouth. But he listened attentively. “Well, I see you’re not tired of it,” he commented.
“Tired!” Maida’s indignation was so intense that Dr. Pierce shook until every curl bobbed.
“And I get so hungry,” she went on. “You see I have to wait until two o’clock sometimes before I can get my lunch, because from twelve to two are my busy hours. Those days it seems as if the school bell would never ring.”
“Sure, tis a foine little pig OI’m growing now,” Granny said.
“And as for sleeping—” Maida stopped as if there were no words anywhere to describe her condition.
Granny finished it for her. “The choild sleeps like a top.”
Billy Potter came at least every day and sometimes oftener. Every child in Primrose Court knew him by the end of the first week and every child loved him by the endof the second. And they all called him Billy. He would not let them call him Mr. Potter or even Uncle Billy because, he said, he was a child when he was with them and he wanted to be treated like a child. He played all their games with a skill that they thought no mere grown-up could possess. Like Rosie, he seemed to be bubbling over with life and spirits. He was always running, leaping, jumping, climbing, turning cartwheels and somersaults, vaulting fences and “chinning” himself unexpectedly whenever he came to a doorway.
“Oh, Masther Billy, ’tis the choild that you are!” Granny would say, twinkling.
“Yes, ma’am,” Billy would answer.
At the end of the first fortnight, the neighborhood had accepted Granny and Maida as the mother-in-law and daughter of a “traveling man.” From the beginning Granny had seemed one of them, but Maida was a puzzle. The children could not understand how a little girl could be grown-up and babyish at the same time. And if you stop to think it over, perhaps you can understand how they felt.
Here was a child who had never played, “London-Bridge-is-falling-down” or jackstonesor jump-rope or hop-scotch. Yet she talked familiarly of automobiles, yachts and horses. She knew nothing about geography and yet, her conversation was full of such phrases as “The spring we were in Paris” or “The winter we spent in Rome.” She knew nothing about nouns and verbs but she talked Italian fluently with the hand-organ man who came every week and many of her books were in French. She knew nothing about fractions or decimals, yet she referred familiarly to “drawing checks,” to gold eagles and to Wall Street. Her writing was so bad that the children made fun of it, yet she could spin off a letter of eight pages in a flash. And she told the most wonderful fairy-tales that had ever been heard in Primrose Court.
Because of all these things the children had a kind of contempt for her mingled with a curious awe.
She was so polite with grown people that it was fairly embarrassing. She always arose from her chair when they entered the room, always picked up the things they dropped and never interrupted. And yet she could carry on a long conversation with them. She never said, “Yes, ma’am,” or“No, ma’am.” Instead, she said, “Yes, Mrs. Brine,” or “No, Miss Allison,” and she looked whomever she was talking with straight in the eye.
She would play with the little children as willingly as with the bigger ones. Often when the older girls and boys were in school, she would bring out a lapful of toys and spend the whole morning with the little ones. When Granny called her, she would give all the toys away, dividing them with a careful justice. And, yet, whenever children bought things of her in the shop, she always expected them to pay the whole price. You can see how the neighborhood would fairly buzz with talk about her.
As for Maida—with all this newness of friend-making and out-of-doors games, it is not to be wondered that her head was a jumble at the end of each day. In that delicious, dozy interval before she fell asleep at night, all kinds of pretty pictures seemed to paint themselves on her eyelids.
Now it was Rose-Red swaying like a great overgrown scarlet flower from the bars of a lamp-post. Now it was Dicky hoisting himself along on his crutches, hisface alight with his radiant smile. Now it was a line of laughing, rosy-cheeked children, as long as the tail of a kite, pelting to goal at the magic cry “Liberty poles are bending!” Or it was a group of little girls, setting out rows and rows of bright-colored paper-dolls among the shadows of one of the deep old doorways. But always in a few moments came the sweetest kind of sleep. And always through her dreams flowed the plaintive music of “Go in and out the windows.” Often she seemed to wake in the morning to the Clarion cry, “Hoist the sail!”
It did not seem to Maida that the days were long enough to do all the things she wanted to do.
CHAPTER VITWO CALLSReturn to Table of Contents
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One morning, Laura Lathrop came bustling importantly into the shop. “Good morning, Maida,” she said; “you may come over to my house this afternoon and play with me if you’d like.”
“Thank you, Laura,” Maida answered. To anybody else, she would have added, “I shall be delighted to come.” But to Laura, she only said, “It is kind of you to ask me.”
“From about two until four,” Laura went on in her most superior tone. “I suppose you can’t get off for much longer than that.”
“Granny is always willing to wait on customers if I want to play,” Maida explained, “but I think she would not want me to stay longer than that, anyway.”
“Very well, then. Shall we say at two?” Laura said this with a very grown-up air. Maida knew that she was imitating her mother.
Laura had scarcely left when Dicky appeared, swinging between his crutches. “Maida,” he said, “I want you to come over to-morrow afternoon and see my place. You’ve not seen Delia yet and there’s a whole lot of things I want to show you. I’m going to clean house to-day so’s I’ll be all ready for you to-morrow.”
“Oh, thank you,” Maida said. The sparkle that always meant delight came into her face. “I shall be delighted. I’ve always wanted to go over and see you ever since I first knew you. But Granny said to wait until you invited me. And I really have never seen Delia except when Rosie’s had her in the carriage. And then she’s always been asleep.”
“You have to see Delia in the house to know what a naughty baby she is,” Dicky said. He spoke as if that were the finest tribute that he could pay his little sister.
“Granny,” Maida said that noon at lunch, “Laura Lathrop came here and invited me to come to see her this afternoon and I just hate the thought of going—I don’t know why. Then Dicky came and invited me to come and see him to-morrowafternoon and I just love the thought of going. Isn’t it strange?”
“Very,” Granny said, smiling. “But you be sure to be a noice choild this afternoon, no matter what that wan says to you.”
Granny always referred to Laura as “that wan.”
“Oh, yes, I’ll be good, Granny. Isn’t it funny,” Maida went on. The tone of her voice showed that she was thinking hard. “Laura makes me mad—oh, just hopping mad,”—“hopping mad” was one of Rosie’s expressions—“and yet it seems to me I’d die before I’d let her know it.”
Laura was waiting for her on the piazza when Maida presented herself at the Lathrop door. “Won’t you come in and take your things off, first?” she said. “I thought we’d play in the house for awhile.”
She took Maida immediately upstairs to her bedroom—a large room all furnished in blue—blue paper, blue bureau scarf covered with lace, blue bed-spread covered with lace, a big, round, blue roller where the pillows should be.
“How do you like my room, Maida?”
“It’s very pretty.”
“This is my toilet-set.” Laura pointedto the glittering articles on the bureau. “Papa’s given them to me, one piece at a time. It’s all of silver and every thing has my initials on it. What is your set of?”
Laura paused before she asked this last question and darted one of her sideways looks at Maida. “She thinks I haven’t any toilet-set and she wants to make me say so,” Maida thought. “Ivory,” she said aloud.
“Ivory! I shouldn’t think that would be very pretty.”
Laura opened her bureau drawers, one at a time, and showed Maida the pretty clothes packed in neat piles there. She opened the large closet and displayed elaborately-made frocks, suspended on hangers. And all the time, with little sharp, sideways glances, she was studying the effect on Maida. But Maida’s face betrayed none of the wonder and envy that Laura evidently expected. Maida was very polite but it was evident that she was not much interested.
Next they went upstairs to a big playroom which covered the whole top of the house. Shelves covered with books and toys lined the walls. A fire, burning in the big fireplace, made it very cheerful.
“Oh, what a darling doll-house,” Maidaexclaimed, pausing before the miniature mansion, very elegantly furnished.
“Oh, do you like it?” Laura beamed with pride.
“I just love it! Particularly because it’s so little.”
“Little!” Laura bristled. “I don’t think it’s so very little. It’s the biggest doll-house I ever saw. Did you ever see a bigger one?”
Maida looked embarrassed. “Only one.”
“Whose was it?”
“It was the one my father had built for me at Pride’s. It was too big to be a doll’s house. It was really a small cottage. There were four rooms—two upstairs and two downstairs and a staircase that you could really walk up. But I don’t like it half so well as this one,” Maida went on truthfully. “I think it’s very queer but, somehow, the smaller things are the better I like them. I guess it’s because I’ve seen so many big things.”
Laura looked impressed and puzzled at the same time. “And you really could walk up the stairs? Let’s go up in the cupola,” she suggested, after an uncertain intervalin which she seemed to think of nothing else to show.
The stairs at the end of the playroom led into the cupola. Maida exclaimed with delight over the view which she saw from the windows. On one side was the river with the draw-bridge, the Navy Yard and the monument on Bunker Hill. On the other stretched the smoky expanse of Boston with the golden dome of the state house gleaming in the midst of a huge, red-brick huddle.
“Did you have a cupola at Pride’s Crossing?” Laura asked triumphantly.
“Oh, no—how I wish I had!”
Laura beamed again.
“Laura likes to have things other people haven’t,” Maida thought.
Her hostess now conducted her back over the two flights of stairs to the lower floor. They went into the dining-room, which was all shining oak and glittering cut-glass; into the parlor, which was filled with gold furniture, puffily upholstered in blue brocade; into the libraries, which Maida liked best of all, because there were so many books and—
“Oh, oh, oh!” she exclaimed, stopping beforeone of the pictures; “that’s Santa Maria in Cosmedin. I haven’t seen that since I left Rome.”
“How long did you stay in Rome, little girl?” a voice asked back of her. Maida turned. Mrs. Lathrop had come into the room.
Maida arose immediately from her chair. “We stayed in Rome two months,” she said.
“Indeed. And where else did you go?”
“London, Paris, Florence and Venice.”
“Do you know these other pictures?” Mrs. Lathrop asked. “I’ve been collecting photographs of Italian churches.”
Maida went about identifying the places with little cries of joy. “Ara Coeli—I saw in there the little wooden bambino who cures sick people. It’s so covered with bracelets and rings and lockets and pins and chains that grateful people have given it that it looks as if it were dressed in jewels. The bambino’s such a darling little thing with such a sweet look in its face. That’s St. Agnes outside the wall—I saw two dear little baby lambs blessed on the altar there on St. Agnes’s day. One was all covered with red garlands and the otherwith green. Oh, they were such sweethearts! They were going to use the fleece to make some garment for the pope. That’s Santa Maria della Salute—they call it Santa Maria dellaVoluteinstead ofSalutebecause it’s all covered with volutes.” Maida smiled sunnily into Mrs. Lathrop’s face as if expecting sympathy with this architectural joke.
But Mrs. Lathrop did not smile. She looked a little staggered. She studied Maida for a long time out of her shrewd, light eyes.
“Whose family did you travel with?” she asked at last.
Maida felt a little embarrassed. If Mrs. Lathrop asked her certain questions, it would place her in a very uncomfortable position. On the one hand, Maida could not tell a lie. On the other, her father had told her to tell nobody that she was his daughter.
“The family of Mr. Jerome Westabrook,” she said at last.
“Oh!” It was the “oh” of a person who is much impressed. “‘Buffalo’ Westabrook?” Mrs. Lathrop asked.
“Yes.”
“Did your grandmother, Mrs. Flynn, go with you?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Lathrop continued to look very hard at Maida. Her eyes wandered over the little blue frock—simple but of the best materials—over the white “tire” of a delicate plaided nainsook, trimmed with Valenciennes lace, the string of blue Venetian beads, the soft, carefully-fitted shoes.
“Mr. Westabrook has a little girl, hasn’t he?” Mrs. Lathrop said.
Maida felt extremely uncomfortable now. But she looked Mrs. Lathrop straight in the eye. “Yes,” she answered.
“About your age?”
“Yes.”
“She is an invalid, isn’t she?”
“Shewas,” Maida said with emphasis.
Mrs. Lathrop did not ask any more questions. She went presently into the back library. An old gentleman sat there, reading.
“That little girl who keeps the store at the corner is in there, playing with Laura, father,” she said. “I guess her grandmother was a servant in‘Buffalo’Westabrook’sfamily, for they traveled abroad a year with the Westabrook family. Evidently, they give her all the little Westabrook girl’s clothes—she’s dressed quite out of keeping with her station in life. Curious how refinement rubs off—the child has really a good deal of manner. I don’t know that I quite like to have Laura playing with her, though.”
The two little girls returned after awhile to the playroom.
“How would you like to have me dance for you?” Laura asked abruptly. “You know I take fancy dancing.”
“Oh, Laura,” Maida said delightedly “will you?”
“Of course I will,” Laura said with her most beaming expression. “You wait here while I go downstairs and get into my costume. Watch that door, for I shall make my entrance there.”
Maida waited what seemed a long time to her. Then suddenly Laura came whirling into the room. She had put on a little frock of pale-blue liberty silk that lay, skirt, bodice and tiny sleeves, in many little pleats—“accordion-pleated,” Laura afterwards described it. Laura’s neck and armswere bare. She wore blue silk stockings and little blue-kid slippers, heelless and tied across the ankles with ribbons. Her hair hung in a crimpy torrent to below her waist.
“Oh, Laura, how lovely you do look!” Maida said, “I think you’re perfectly beautiful!”
Laura smiled. Lifting both arms above her head, she floated about the room, dancing on the very tips of her toes. Turning and smiling over her shoulder, she bent and swayed and attitudinized. Maida could have watched her forever.
In a few moments she disappeared again. This time she came back in a red-silk frock with a little bolero jacket of black velvet, hung with many tinkling coins. Whenever her fingers moved, a little pretty clapping sound came from them—Maida discovered that she carried tiny wooden clappers. Whenever her heels came together, a pretty musical clink came from them—Maida discovered that on her shoes were tiny metal plates.
Once again Laura went out. This time, she returned dressed like a little sailor boy. She danced a gay little hornpipe.
“I never saw anything so marvelous inmy life,” Maida said, her eyes shining with enjoyment. “Oh, Laura how I wish I could dance like that. How did you ever learn? Do you practice all the time?”
“Oh, it’s not so very hard—for me,” Laura returned. “Of course, everybody couldn’t learn. And I suppose you, being lame, could never do anything at all.”
This was the first allusion that had been made in Primrose Court to Maida’s lameness. Her face shadowed a little. “No, I’m afraid I couldn’t,” she said regretfully. “But—oh—think what a lovely dancer Rosie would make.”
“I’m afraid Rosie’s too rough,” Laura said. She unfolded a little fan and began fanning herself languidly. “It’s a great bother sometimes,” she went on in a bored tone of voice. “Everybody is always asking me to dance at their parties. I danced at a beautiful May party last year. Did you ever see a May-pole?”
“Oh, yes,” Maida said. “My birthday comes on May Day and last year father gave me a party. He had a May-pole set up on the lawn and all the children danced about it.”
“My birthday comes in the summer, too.I always have a party on our place in Marblehead,” Laura said. “I had fifty children at my party last year. How many did you have?”
“We sent out over five hundred invitations, I believe. But not quite four hundred accepted.”
“Four hundred,” Laura repeated. “Goodness, what could so many children do?”
“Oh, there were all sorts of things for them to do,” Maida answered. “There was archery and diabolo and croquet and fishing-ponds and a merry-go-round and Punch and Judy on the lawn and a play in my little theater—I can’t remember everything.”
Laura’s eyes had grown very big. “Didn’t you have a perfectly splendiferous time?” she asked.
“No, not particularly,” Maida said. “Not half such a good time as I’ve had playing in Primrose Court. I wasn’t very well and then, somehow, I didn’t care for those children the way I care for Dicky and Rosie and the court children.”
“Goodness!” was all Laura could say fora moment. But finally she added, “I don’t believe that, Maida!”
Maida stared at her and started to speak. “Oh, there’s the clock striking four?” was all she said though. “I must go. Thank you for dancing for me.”
She flew into her coat and hat. She could not seem to get away quick enough. Nobody had ever doubted her word before. She could not exactly explain it to herself but she felt if she talked with Laura another moment, she would fly out of her skin.
“Mother,” Laura said, after Maida had gone, “Maida Flynn told me that her father gave her a birthday party last year and invited five hundred children to it and they had a theater and a Punch and Judy show and all sorts of things. Do you think it’s true?”
Mrs. Lathrop set her lips firmly. “No, I think it is probably not true. I think you’d better not play with the little Flynn girl any more.”
The next afternoon, Maida went, as she had promised, to see Dicky.
She could see at a glance that Mrs. Dore was having a hard struggle to support her little family. In the size and comfort of its furnishings, the place was the exact opposite of the Lathrop home. But, somehow, there was a wonderful feeling of home there.
“Dicky, how do you manage to keep so clean here?” Maida asked in genuine wonder.
And indeed, hard work showed everywhere. The oilcloth shone like glass. The stove was as clean as a newly-polished shoe. The rows of pans on the wall fairly twinkled. Delicious smells were filling the air. Maida guessed that Dicky was making one of the Irish stews that were his specialty.
“See that little truck over there?” Dicky said. “That helps a lot. Arthur Duncan made that for me. You see we have to keep our coal in that closet, way across the room. I used to get awful tired filling the coal-hod and lugging it over to the stove. But now you see I fill that truck at the closet, wheel it over to the stove and I don’t have to think of coal for three days.”
“Arthur must be a very clever boy,” Maida said thoughtfully.
“You bet he is. See that tin can in the sink? Well, I wanted a soap-shaker but couldn’t afford to get one. Arthur took that can and punched the bottom full of holes. I keep it filled up with all the odds and ends of soap. When I wash the dishes, I just let the boiling water from the kettle flow through it. It makes water grand and soapy. Arthur made me that iron dish-rag and that dish-mop.”
A sleepy cry came from the corner. Dicky swung across the room. Balancing himself against the cradle there, he lifted the baby to the floor. “She can’t walk yet but you watch her go,” he said proudly.
Go! The baby crept across the room so fast that Maida had to run to keep up with her. “Oh, the love!” she said, taking Delia into her arms. “Think of having a whole baby to yourself.”
“Can’t leave a thing round where she is,” Dicky said proudly, as if this were the best thing he could say about her. “Have to putmywork away the moment she wakes up. Isn’t she a buster, though?”
“I should say she was!” And indeed, the baby was as fat as a little partridge. Maida wondered how Dicky could lift her.Also Delia was as healthy-looking as Dicky was sickly. Her cheeks showed a pink that was almost purple and her head looked like a mop, so thickly was it overgrown with tangled, red-gold curls.
“Is she named after your mother?” Maida asked.
“No—after my grandmother in Ireland. But of course we don’t call her anything but ‘baby’ yet. My, but she’s a case! If I didn’t watch her all the time, every pan in this room would be on the floor in a jiffy. And she tears everything she puts her hands on.”
“Granny must see her sometime—Granny’s name is Delia.”
“Hi, stop that!” Dicky called. For Delia had discovered the little bundle that Maida had placed on a chair, and was busy trying to tear it open.
“Let her open it,” Maida said, “I brought it for her.”
They watched.
It took a long time, but Delia sat down, giving her whole attention to it. Finally her busy fingers pulled off so much paper that a pair of tiny rubber dolls dropped into her lap.
“Say ‘Thank you, Maida,’” Dicky prompted.
Delia said something and Dicky assured her that the baby had obeyed him. It sounded like, “Sank-oo-Maysa.”
While Delia occupied herself with the dolls, Maida listened to Dicky’s reading lesson. He was getting on beautifully now. At least he could puzzle out by himself some of the stories that Maida lent him. When they had finished that day’s fairy-tale, Dicky said:
“Did you ever see a peacock, Maida?”
“Oh, yes—a great many.”
“Where?”
“I saw ever so many in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and then my father has some in his camp in the Adirondacks.”
“Has he many?”
“A dozen.”
“I’m just wild to see one. Are they as beautiful as that picture in the fairy-tale?”
“They’re as beautiful as—as—” Maida groped about in her mind to find something to compare them to “—as angels,” she said at last.
“And do they really open their tails like a fan?”
“That is the most wonderful sight, Dicky, that you ever saw.” Maida’s manner was almost solemn. “When they unfurl the whole fan and the sun shines on all the green and blue eyes and on all the little gold feathers, it’s so beautiful. Well, it makes you ache. Icriedthe first time I saw one. And when their fans are down, they carry them so daintily, straight out, not a single feather trailing on the ground. There are two white peacocks on the Adirondacks place.”
“Whitepeacocks! I never heard of white ones.”
“They’re not common.”
“Think of seeing a dozen peacocks every day!” Dicky exclaimed. “Jiminy crickets! Why, Maida, your life must have been just like a fairy-tale when you lived there.”
“It seems more like a fairy-tale here.”
They laughed at this difference of opinion.
“Dicky,” Maida asked suddenly, “do you know that Rosie steals out of her window at night sometimes when her mother doesn’t know it?”
“Sure—I know that. You see,” he wenton to explain, “it’s like this. Rosie is an awful bad girl in some ways—there’s no doubt about that. But my mother says Rosie isn’t as bad as she seems. My mother says Rosie’s mother has never learned how to manage her. She whips Rosie an awful lot. And the more she whips Rosie, the naughtier she gets. Rosie says she’s going to run away some day, and by George, I bet she’ll do it. She always does what she says she’ll do.”
“Isn’t it dreadful?” Maida said in a frightened tone. “Run away! I never heard of such a thing. Think of having a mother and then not getting along with her. Suppose she died sometime, as my mother did.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without my mother,” Dicky said thoughtfully. “But then I’ve got the best mother that ever was. I wish she didn’t have to work so hard. But you wait until I get on my feet. Then you’ll see how I’m going to earn money for her.”
When Maida got home that night, Billy Potter sat with Granny in the living-room. Maida came in so quietly that they took nonotice of her. Granny was talking. Maida could see that the tears were coursing down the wrinkles in her cheeks.
“And after that, the poor choild ran away to America and I niver have seen her since. Her father died repenting av his anger aginst her. But ut was too late. At last, in me old age, Oi came over to America, hoping Oi cud foind her. But, glory be, Oi had no idea ’twas such a big place! And Oi’ve hunted and Oi’ve hunted and Oi’ve hunted. But niver a track of her cud Oi foind—me little Annie!”
Billy’s face was all screwed up, but it was not with laughter. “Did you ever speak to Mr. Westabrook about it?”
“Oh, Misther Westabruk done iv’ry t’ing he cud—the foine man that he is. Advertisements anddetayktives, but wid all his money, he cudn’t foind out a t’ing. If ut wasn’t for my blissed lamb, I’d pray to the saints to let me die.”
Maida knew what they were talking about—Granny had often told her the sad story of her lost daughter.
“What town in Ireland did you live in, Granny?” Billy asked.
“Aldigarey, County Sligo.”“Now don’t you get discouraged, Granny,” Billy said, “I’m going to find your daughter for you.”
He jumped to his feet and walked about the room. “I’m something of a detective myself, and you’ll see I’ll make good on this job if it takes twenty years.”
“Oh, Billy, do—please do,” Maida burst in. “It will make Granny so happy.”
Granny seemed happier already. She dried her tears.
“’Tis the good b’y ye are, Misther Billy,” she said gratefully.
“Yes, m’m,” said Billy.