CHAPTER VIIEXQUISITE THINGS
Mrs. Gracia Theddon, writing in her upstairs library the Saturday morning after her visit to the Orphanage, was disturbed by one Murfins, her butler. Murfins merely thrust in his head, being florid and coatless from directing the cleaning of near-by rooms.
“The small girl you spoke of Tuesday is here, ma’am,” was his simple way of announcing news to transcend all future events in Gracia Theddon’s life.
The woman arose, gripping her chair-back with one hand, the other quieting her heart.
“Bring her up, Murfins,” she directed huskily.
It was a new rôle for Mrs. Theddon, that of mother. Capable of directing as brilliant a social galaxy as the annual Charity Ball, she waited unnerved for the advent of a tiny, dark-eyed stranger.
Three minutes later the foster-mother beheld her new child come down the room.
The Fairy Foundling had removed her twenty-cent hat of brown straw and shaken free her dusky, ribbonless tresses. She wore a drab Orphanage frock which only reached her knees, her stockings were thick and shapeless and her shoes had emphatically been selected for service and not for style. Yet the child in either sackcloth or satin would have divulged equal quality. There was no cheap sniggering bashfulness, no clodhopper shyness in her demeanor. But there was reserve and painful anxiety not unmixed with a little dread. Her cameo features were pale. Her delicate rosebud lips disclosed teeth like chips of porcelain. Her deep brown eyes—almost black—held that same queer calmness, but those eyes could easily turn starry, as Mrs. Theddon discovered in the next few moments.
“Makes me think she’s always on the point of wanting to weep with happiness, yet smilin’ through tears that don’t quite come,” was old Murfins’ way of describing those eyes to Stebbins, the second man. To which sentiments Stebbins subscribed avidly,—though with picturesque variations.
Six feet from Mrs. Theddon the little girl halted.
“So you’ve come,” was all that perturbed woman could call up at the moment. She meant it kindly yet she realized it was the wrong thing—not at all cordial and maternal. And she greatly longed to be cordial and maternal and set riotously free the tenderness aching in her soul for expression.
“Yes’m,” returned the Fairy Foundling, with a tight swallow,”—I’ve come.”
“And you’d like to be my little girl?”
“I’d like to be anybody’s little girl that” (swallow) “wanted me.”
Mrs. Theddon sank sideways upon her chair. She could feel every throb of her heart, count its ragged beatings.
Suddenly, as the wistful figure stood there, never so parentless, her frailness and smallness accentuated by the great room above her, the rich woman held out her arms.
“Baby!” she cried brokenly. “Come!”
Murfins went back to his cleaning.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he cried. “Didn’t know the old girl had it in her. Just goes to prove that folks don’t always match their outsides! Yes, I’ll be damned! I’ll be damned a couple of times—maybe three!”
“Do you know how long I’ve wanted a little girl and never knew what it was I wanted?” Mrs. Theddon asked when her emotions permitted.
“No, ma’am,” the princess answered.
“It’s been a long, long time! God never sent me a little girl of my own—excepting my Dream Girl, dear.”
“Your Dream Girl?”
“Sometimes in dark nights I dreamed a little girl—somebody very like yourself, came to me—and——”
“Please don’t cry, Mrs. Theddon!”
“We’re going to be so happy, you and I! You must forget the Orphanage or that you ever knew it. You must try to believe you’ve lived with me always. You’re going tohave pretty dresses and a beautiful room. You’re going to have all sorts of nice people to teach you and help you. And good times!—we’re going to have all sorts of parties and walks and travels together, you and I—and then some day—all I own will be yours—because you’re all I’ll have, all—I—have—now!”
“That will be awfully fine,” the little girl replied joyously.
Most children would have been abashed or thoughtlessly ecstatic. The Fairy Foundling was not unappreciative, yet a fine reserve seemed bred in her blood and fiber. This environment of culture and refinement, instead of distressing her, placed her vaguely at ease.
“And please, dear—please don’t call me ‘Mrs. Theddon.’ I’m Mrs. Theddon to every one but you. You are to be different from the rest. Call me—if you can—call me mother! Would you call me mother, little girl?”
“I’d love to call you mother!”
The child smiled up sweetly into the woman’s aching eyes. And something caught in Mrs. Theddon’s throat. Only for an instant. Then another great wave of maternity swept through her tightened breast and long-repressed motherhood welled up gloriously,—fine and overwhelming and golden and true.
Mrs. Theddon led the child down the outer hallway into a small room which opened from her own. White and blue was the color scheme in an atmosphere of silken daintiness. Two windows opened upon a wide panorama of the Connecticut Valley and the river, far-flung from north to south below.
Little frocks were laid upon the counterpane. The dressing table was as complete as the boudoir appointments of feminine royalty. Beyond the chamber opened a diminutive, white-tiled bath.
“The workmen finished it yesterday afternoon, dear. I made them rush to complete it in time for you to-day. Now I’m going to bathe and dress you—myself. I want to do it! Marie, your maid, will not arrive until Monday. But that was arranged on purpose. For the first two days—I wanted—to accustom you to it, myself. I want us to get acquainted.You don’t mind, do you, dear?” She asked it anxiously, as though the child were a guest as old as herself.
“Oh, mother—dear—I’m—so happy! It’s a dream come true.”
“A dream come true?” Mrs. Theddon repeated the words dazedly. “And have you ever dreamed of things like these, little girl?”
“Lots and lots of times. Somehow the Orphanage seemed a place where I was staying for just a little while—until somebody I belonged to came after me.”
“I’m so glad you’re not—like—the other Orphanage children, dear. I thought in some ways you might be. But—you don’t know—how pleased—I am!”
“I’m just me,” the princess affirmed. “And it seems like—coming home!”
The mother bathed and dressed the child, calling a servant to carry away the Orphanage clothes. But if Mrs. Theddon had been pleasantly surprised thus far, it was nothing to her overpowering satisfaction when she beheld her little ward clothed in the habilaments better befitting her character.
“You’re wonderful, girlie mine!” the woman whispered, as she surveyed the transformation.
“And I think you’re wonderful, too,” the child answered.
And yet, twenty-four hours later, a gray Sunday twilight, Mrs. Theddon entered her chamber to discover the child huddled in a window-chair, sobbing convulsively.
“What’s the matter, darling?” cried the shocked woman. “Aren’t you happy?”
The princess sought frantically to hide her tears.
“Yes’m—I’m happy—so happy it hurts. Yet—well, I guess I miss the orphans already!”
“Miss them! You mean you’d rather be at the Orphanage than here with me?”
“It isn’t the nice things—it isn’t you—it’s—it’s——”
“Yes, yes! What is it?”
“I guess it’s just the orphans—’specially the babies. I miss havin’ to do things for ’em. For they needed an awful lot done for ’em, and—I was happy because it was me that could do it.”
“But they have some one else to look after them now. They’re no worse off because you’ve gone.”
“No’m. Perhaps not. I wasn’t ‘specially thinking of their side of it. I was thinking of mine. They liked to have things done for ’em. They told me so. Miss Howland got awful cross sometimes. And I felt happy because I was ’preciated. That’s an awful nice word, ’preciated, isn’t it? I so want folks to ’preciate me, Mrs. Thed—mother dear. I guess everybody does, don’t they?—want to be ’preciated?”
Every one wants to be appreciated? Dear God in heaven!
“Child, what does put such mature thoughts into your little head?”
“If you’d wondered and wondered who you were, and never found out, maybe you’d know how sad you could feel, thinking it was because nobody wanted you and you wasn’t ’preciated.”
“You poor, maternal, romantic little lamb! You talk like a woman grown, already.”
“Do grown-up ladies feel like that, Mrs. Thed—mother dear?”
Mrs. Theddon did not answer at once. Her voice was handicapped when she responded:
“Real women do, I fancy, my darling. But maybe there are a lot who have a cruel time showing it. Come, baby! Tell me—did any one ever pick you up and rock you to sleep in their arms? Did any one ever try to sing you a lullaby, child?”
“Not much, Mrs. Thed—mother. I always tried to do it to those littler than me. But I loved to do it!” the princess cried suddenly.
“Let’s sit down in the rocker, child. And don’t weep any more. Because you’ll never know how much you are appreciated here.”
The woman took the distraught, moist-eyed little girl in her arms. She tried to soothe her by singing a lullaby. She had a rich contralto voice, “trained” by a great Parisian master—for this!—to sing a little, parentless girl to sleep. Yet she had to stop half way. She found that her training had gone for naught. Her voice was cracked and jagged and uneven and broken.
In that mellow pause, the child snuggled closer. She whispered in the dusk:
“You’re just like a real mother, Mrs. Theddon. I guessI know now why some of the babies at the Home stopped crying when I began to rock them to sleep.”
The future opened radiantly for Mrs. Gracia Theddon then. And the past dropped away, colorless and shallow and tinseled and wasted.
“Listen, dear,” she said finally. “I’m going to ask if you’ll do something for me.”
“I’ll do anything in the world for you—that I can.”
“When Miss Howland took you into the Home, she called you Allegra. When she partly adopted you, she gave you her own name—Howland. So while you were at the Orphanage your name was Allegra Howland. But now that you’ve left that life behind you, your last name is Theddon, like my own.”
“Yes’m.”
“I don’t like the name Allegra. I want you to let me change that too. I’ve picked out a name I’d planned to call a little girl of my own, if one ever came.”
“What is it, mother dear? I’m sure I’ll like it if you picked it out.”
“It’s—Madelaine!”
“It’s an awful pretty name,” said the child, after a moment’s silence. “It’s so soft-sounding and pleasant, like all the rooms here in your house—and your eyes and your voice—since I’ve been here and you started to love me.”
“God help me!” whispered the rich woman. “Maybe You knew best, dear God. It’s worth the dreary wait, after all!”
And so Madelaine Theddon came into existence. So she too started her journey—a daintier, softer journey—toward Life’s Hilltop and the lambent stars and the Amethyst Moment.
In the butler’s pantry old Murfins was straightening out the tradesmen’s orders for a dinner party. Stebbins, near-by, was polishing liqueur glasses with a flannel cloth.
“But I’m thinking there’s going to be family fireworks, Steb, when the Ruggleses come home and hear what she’s done. They got an awful good opinion of themselves—those Ruggleses. Amos’s wife threw an awful fit, I heard, whenher brother married the Missus which up to that time had been practically a Nobody. Now there’s a child from an orphanage come to get a look-see at the moneybags. Can you see ’em standing for it, Steb?”
“The Missus is too smart to have any will drawed that them Ruggleses can break.”
“You never can tell, Steb. There’s lawyers and lawyers. Some of ’em could drive a coach unscorched through hell.”
“Well, I hope young Gordon don’t get any of it—his aunt’s money, I mean. He’s a bad one, Gordon is! Remember how he almost killed the roan colt last time he was here? Murphy wasn’t goin’ to stand by and have no horse abused like that. I seen it all. When he interfered, Gord went for him with his quirt. If the Missus hadn’t showed up when she did, Mike’d busted the young roughneck wide open.” Murphy was the Theddon coachman.
“She’s provin’ she’s a bit of an angel,” observed Murfins. “I’d hate to see her get the short end of it.” He meant Madelaine.
They worked in silence for a few minutes. Then Stebbins remarked:
“Wonder how Gord’ll behave next time he comes to visit here and finds the princess his aunt’s got out of an asylum.”
“Not an asylum, Steb. An asylum’s a crazy house where they store insane lunatics that ain’t quite right in their heads!”