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Adjoining this closet was what had been the "girl's room," opening into the passage where the kitchen stairs came up, and the passage itself was fair-sized and square, corresponding to the depth of the other divisions. Here we had a great box placed for wood, and a barrel for coal, and another for kindlings; once a week these could be replenished as required, when the man came who "chored" for us. The "girl's room" would be a spare place that we should find twenty uses for; it was nice to think of it sweet and fresh, empty and available; very nice not to be afraid to remember it was there at all.
We had a Robinson-Crusoe-like pleasure in making all these arrangements; every clean thing that we put in a spotless place upon shelf or nail was a wealth and a comfort to us. Besides, we really did not need half the lumber of a common kitchen closet; a china bowl or plate would no longer be contraband of war, and Barbara said she could stir her blanc-mange with a silver spoon without demoralizing anybody to the extent of having the ashes taken up with it.
By Friday night we had got everything to the exact and perfect starting-point; and Mrs. Dunikin went home enriched with gifts that were to her like a tin-and-wooden wedding; we felt, on our part, that we had celebrated ours by clearing them out.
The bread-box was sweet and empty; the fragments had been all daintily crumbled by Ruth, as she sat, resting and talking, when she had come in from her music-lesson; they lay heaped up like lightly fallen snow, in a broad dish, ready to be browned for chicken dressing or boiled for brewis or a pudding. Mother never has anything between loaves and crumbs whenshemanages; then all is nice, and keeps nice.
"Clean beginnings are beautiful," said Rosamond, looking around. "It is the middle that's horrid."
"We won't have any middles," said Ruth. "We'll keep making clean beginnings, all the way along. That is the difference between work and muss."
"If you can," said Rose, doubtfully.
I suppose that is what some people will say, after this Holabird story is printed so far. Then we just wish they could have seen mother make a pudding or get a breakfast, that is all. A lady will no more make a jumble or litter in doing such things than she would at her dressing-table. It only needs an accustomed and delicate touch.
I will tell you something of how it was, I will take that Monday morning—and Monday morning is as good, for badness, as you can take—just after we had begun.
The room was nice enough for breakfast when we left it over night. There was nothing straying about; the tea-kettle and the tin boiler were filled,—father did that just before he locked up the house; we had only to draw up the window-shades, and let the sweet light in, in the morning.
Stephen had put a basket of wood and kindlings ready for Mrs. Dunikin in the kitchen below, and the key of the lower door had been left on a beam in the woodshed, by agreement. By the time we came down stairs Mrs. Dunikin had a steaming boiler full of clothes, and had done nearly two of her five hours' work. We should hand her her breakfast on a little tray, when the time came, at the stair-head; and she would bring up her cup and plate again while we were clearing away. We should pay her twelve and a half cents an hour; she would scrub up all below, go home to dinner, and come again to-morrow for five hours' ironing. That was all there would be about Mrs. Dunikin.
Meanwhile, with a pair of gloves on, and a little plain-hemmed three-cornered, dotted-muslin cap tied over her hair with a muslin bow behind, mother had let down the ashes,—it isn't a bad thing to do with a well-contrived stove,—and set the pan, to which we had a duplicate, into the out-room, for Stephen to carry away. Then into the clean grate went a handful of shavings and pitch-pine kindlings, one or two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle of small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with its volcanic margin of cinders and ashes.
Then—that Monday morning—we had brewis to make, a little buttered toast to do, and some eggs to scramble. The bright coffee-pot got its ration of fragrant, beaten paste,—the brown ground kernels mixed with an egg,—and stood waiting for its drink of boiling water. The two frying-pans came forth; one was set on with the milk for the brewis, into which, when it boiled up white and drifting, went the sweet fresh butter, and the salt, each in plentiful proportion;—"one can give one's selfcarte-blancher," Barbara said, "than it will do to give a girl";—and then the bread-crumbs; and the end of it was, in a white porcelain dish, a light, delicate, savory bread-porridge, to eat daintily with a fork, and be thankful for. The other pan held eggs, broken in upon bits of butter, and sprinkles of pepper and salt; this went on when the coffee-pot—which had got its drink when the milk boiled, and been puffing ever since—was ready to come off; over it stood Barbara with a tin spoon, to toss up and turn until the whole was just curdled with the heat into white and yellow flakes, not one of which was raw, nor one was dry. Then the two pans and the coffee-pot and the little bowl in which the coffee-paste had been beaten and the spoons went off into the pantry-closet, and the breakfast was ready; and only Barbara waited a moment to toast and butter the bread, while mother, in her place at table, was serving the cups. It was Ruth who had set the table, and carried off the cookery things, and folded and slid back the little pembroke, that had held them beside the stove, into its corner.
Rosamond had been busy in the brown room; that was all nice now for the day; and she came in with a little glass vase in her hand, in which was a tea-rose, that she put before mother at the edge of the white waiter-napkin; and it graced and freshened all the place; and the smell of it, and the bright September air that came in at the three cool west windows, overbore all remembrance of the cooking and reminder of the stove, from which we were seated well away, and before which stood now a square, dark green screen that Rosamond had recollected and brought down from the garret on Saturday. Barbara and her toast emerged from its shelter as innocent of behind-the-scenes as any bit of pretty play or pageant.
Barbara looked very nice this morning, in her brown-plaid Scotch gingham trimmed with white braids; she had brown slippers, also, with bows; she would not verify Rosamond's prophecy that she "would be all points," now that there was an apology for them. I think we were all more particular about our outer ladyhood than usual.
After breakfast the little pembroke was wheeled out again, and on it put a steaming pan of hot water. Ruth picked up the dishes; it was something really delicate to see her scrape them clean, with a pliant knife, as a painter might cleanse his palette,—we had, in fact, a palette-knife that we kept for this use when we washed our own dishes,—and then set them in piles and groups before mother, on the pembroke-table. Mother sat in her raised arm-chair, as she might sit making tea for company; she had her little mop, and three long, soft clean towels lay beside her; we had hemmed a new dozen, so as to have plenty from day to day, and a grand Dunikin wash at the end on the Mondays.
After the china and glass were done and put up, came forth the coffee-pot and the two pans, and had their scald, and their little scour,—a teaspoonful of sand must go to the daily cleansing of an iron utensil, in mother's hands; andthatwas clean work, and the iron thing never got to be "horrid," any more than a china bowl. It was only a little heavy, and it was black; but the black did not come off. It is slopping and burning and putting away with a rinse, that makes kettles and spiders untouchable. Besides, mother keeps a bottle of ammonia in the pantry, to qualify her soap and water with, when she comes to things like these. She calls it her kitchen-maid; it does wonders for any little roughness or greasiness; such soil comes off in that, and chemically disappears.
It was all dining-room work; and we were chatty over it, as if we had sat down to wind worsteds; and there was no kitchen in the house that morning.
We kept our butter and milk in the brick buttery at the foot of the kitchen stairs. These were all we had to go up and down for. Barbara set away the milk, and skimmed the cream, and brought up and scalded the yesterday's pans the first thing; and they were out in a row—flashing up saucily at the sun and giving as good as he sent—on the back platform.
She and Rosamond were up stairs, making beds and setting straight; and in an hour after breakfast the house was in its beautiful forenoon order, and there was a forenoon of three hours to come.
We had chickens for dinner that day, I remember; one always does remember what was for dinner the first day in a new house, or in new housekeeping. William, the chore-man, had killed and picked and drawn them, on Saturday; I do not mean to disguise that we avoided these last processes; we preferred a little foresight of arrangement. They were hanging in the buttery, with their hearts and livers inside them; mother does not believe in gizzards. They only wanted a little salt bath before cooking.
I should like to have had you see Mrs. Holabird tie up those chickens. They were as white and nice as her own hands; and their legs and wings were fastened down to their sides, so that they were as round and comfortable as dumplings before she had done with them; and she laid them out of her two little palms into the pan in a cunning and cosey way that gave them a relish beforehand, and sublimated the vulgar need.
We were tired of sewing and writing and reading in three hours; it was only restful change to come down and put the chickens into the oven, and set the dinner-table.
Then, in the broken hour while they were cooking, we drifted out upon the piazza, and among our plants in the shady east corner by the parlor windows, and Ruth played a little, and mother took up the Atlantic, and we felt we had a good right to the between-times when the fresh dredgings of flour were getting their brown, and after that, while the potatoes were boiling.
Barbara gave us currant-jelly; she was a stingy Barbara about that jelly, and counted her jars; and when father and Stephen came in, there was the little dinner of three covers, and a peach-pie of Saturday's making on the side-board, and the green screen up before the stove again, and the baking-pan safe in the pantry sink, with hot water and ammonia in it.
"Mother," said Barbara, "I feel as if we had got rid of a menagerie!"
"It is the girl that makes the kitchen," said Ruth.
"And then the kitchen that has to have the girl," said Mrs. Holabird.
Ruth got up and took away the dishes, and went round with the crumb-knife, and did not forget to fill the tumblers, nor to put on father's cheese.
Our talk went on, and we forgot there was any "tending."
"We didn't feel all that in the ends of our elbows," said mother in a low tone, smiling upon Ruth as she sat down beside her.
"Nor have to scrinch all up," said Stephen, quite out loud, "for fear she'd touch us!"
I'll tell you—in confidence—another of our ways at Westover; what, we did, mostly, after the last two meals, to save our afternoons and evenings and our nice dresses. We always did it with the tea-things. We just put them, neatly piled and ranged in that deep pantry sink; we poured some dipperfuls of hot water over them, and shut the cover down; and the next morning, in our gingham gowns, we did up all the dish-washing for the day.
"Who folded all those clothes?" Why, we girls, of course. But you can't be told everything in one chapter.
MMrs. Dunikin used to bring them in, almost all of them, and leave them heaped up in the large round basket. Then there was the second-sized basket, into which they would all go comfortably when they were folded up.
One Monday night we went down as usual; some of us came in,—for we had been playing croquet until into the twilight, and the Haddens had just gone away, so we were later than usual at our laundry work. Leslie and Harry went round with Rosamond to the front door; Ruth slipped in at the back, and mother came down when she found that Rosamond had not been released. Barbara finished setting the tea-table, which she had a way of doing in a whiff, put on the sweet loaf upon the white trencher, and the dish of raspberry jam and the little silver-wire basket of crisp sugar-cakes, and then there was nothing but the tea, which stood ready for drawing in the small Japanese pot. Tea was nothing to get, ever.
"Mother, go back again! You tired old darling, Ruth and I are going to do these!" and Barbara plunged in among the "blossoms."
That was what we called the fresh, sweet-smelling white things. There are a great many pretty pieces of life, if you only know about them. Hay-making is one; and rose-gathering is one; and sprinkling and folding a great basket full of white clothes right out of the grass and the air and the sunshine is one.
Mother went off,—chiefly to see that Leslie and Harry were kept to tea, I believe. She knew how to compensate, in her lovely little underhand way, with Barbara.
Barbara pinned up her muslin sleeves to the shoulder, shook out a little ruffled short-skirt and put it on for an apron, took one end of the long white ironing-table that stood across the window, pushed the water-basin into the middle, and began with the shirts and the starched things. Ruth, opposite, was making the soft underclothing into little white rolls.
Barbara dampened and smoothed and stretched; she almost ironed with her fingers, Mrs. Dunikin said. She patted and evened, laid collars and cuffs one above another with a sprinkle of drops, just from her finger-ends, between, and then gave a towel a nice equal shower with a corn-whisk that she used for the large things, and rolled them up in it, hard and fast, with a thump of her round pretty fist upon the middle before she laid it by. It was a clever little process to watch; and her arms were white in the twilight. Girls can't do all the possible pretty manoeuvres in the German or out at croquet, if they only once knew it. They do find it out in a one-sided sort of way: and then they run to private theatricals. But the real every-day scenes are just as nice, only they must have their audiences in ones and twos; perhaps not always any audience at all.
Of a sudden Ruth became aware of an audience of one.
Upon the balcony, leaning over the rail, looking right down into the nearest kitchen window and over Barbara's shoulder, stood Harry Goldthwaite. He shook his head at Ruth, and she held her peace.
Barbara began to sing. She never sang to the piano,—only about her work. She made up little snatches, piecemeal, of various things, and put them to any sort of words. This time it was to her own,—her poem.
"I wrote some little books;I said some little says;I preached a little pre-e-each;I lit a little blaze;I made—things—pleasant—in one—little—place."
She ran down a most contented little trip, with repeats and returns, in a G-octave, for the last line. Then she rolled up a bundle of shirts in a square pillow-case, gave it its accolade, and pressed it down into the basket.
"How do you suppose, Ruth, we shall manage the town-meetings? Do you believe they will be as nice as this? Where shall we get our little inspirations, after we have come out of all our corners?"
"We won't do it," said Ruth, quietly, shaking out one of mother's nightcaps, and speaking under the disadvantage of her private knowledge.
"I think they ought to let us vote just once," said Barbara; "to say whether we ever would again. I believe we're in danger of being put upon now, if we never were before."
"It isn't fair," said Ruth, with her eyes up out of the window at Harry, who made noiseless motion of clapping his hands. How could she tell what Barbara would say next, or how she would like it when she knew?
"Of course it isn't," said Barbara, intent upon the gathers of a white cambric waist of Rosamond's. "I wonder, Ruth, if we shall have to read all those Pub. Doc.s that father gets. You see women will make awful hard work of it, if they once do go at it; they are so used to doing every—little—thing"; and she picked out the neck-edging, and smoothed the hem between the buttons.
"We shall have to take vows, and devote ourselves to it," Barbara went on, as if she were possessed. "There will have to be 'Sisters of Polity.' Not that I ever will. I don't feel a vocation. I'd rather be a Polly-put-the-kettle-on all the days of my life."
"Mr. Goldthwaite!" said Ruth.
"May I?" asked Harry, as if he had just come, leaning down over the rail, and speaking to Barbara, who faced about with a jump.
She knew by his look; he could not keep in the fun.
"'Mayyou'? When you have, already!"
"O no, I haven't! I mean, come down? Into the one-pleasant-little-place, and help?"
"You don't know the way," Barbara said, stolidly, turning back again, and folding up the waist.
"Don't I? Which,—to come down, or to help?" and Harry flung himself over the rail, clasped one hand and wrist around a copper water-pipe that ran down there, reached the other to something-above the window,—the mere pediment, I believe,—and swung his feet lightly to the sill beneath. Then he dropped himself and sat down, close by Barbara's elbow.
"You'll get sprinkled," said she, flourishing the corn-whisk over a table-cloth.
"I dare say. Or patted, or punched, or something. I knew I took the risk of all that when I came down amongst it. But it looked nice. I couldn't help it, and I don't care!"
Barbara was thinking of two things,—how long he had been there, and what in the world she had said besides what she remembered; and—how she should get off her rough-dried apron.
"Which do you want,—napkins or pillow-cases?" and he came round to the basket, and began to pull out.
"Napkins," says Barbara.
The napkins were underneath, and mixed up; while he stooped and fumbled, she had the ruffled petticoat off over her head. She gave it a shower in such a hurry, that as Harry came up with the napkins, he did get a drift of it in his face.
"That won't do," said Barbara, quite shocked, and tossing the whisk aside. "There are too many of us."
She began on the napkins, sprinkling with her fingers. Harry spread up a pile on his part, dipping also into the bowl. "I used to do it when I was a little boy," he said.
Ruth took the pillow-cases, and so they came to the last. They stretched the sheets across the table, and all three had a hand in smoothing and showering.
"Why, I wish it weren't all done," says Harry, turning over three clothes-pins in the bottom of the basket, while Barbara buttoned her sleeves. "Where does this go? What a nice place this is!" looking round the clean kitchen, growing shadowy in the evening light. "I think your house is full of nice places."
"Are you nearly ready, girls?" came in mother's voice from above.
"Yes, ma'am," Harry answered back, in an excessively cheery way. "We're coming"; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to Mrs. Holabird's astonishment.
"You never know where help is coming from when you're trying to do your duty," said Barbara, in a high-moral way. "Prince Percinet, Mrs. Holabird."
"Miss Polly-put—" began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a half-diffident mischief. But Barbara walked round to her place at the table with a very great dignity.
People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar "chignons"; at least, commerce games and bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each other naturally, as it were,—dip into each other's little interests and doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of opportunities it opens up! You may happen upon a good time any minute, then. Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life used to be "co-operative."
Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.
"Only you can't get them into it again," objected Rosamond. "It's a case of Humpty Dumpty. The world will go on."
"Oneworld will," said Barbara. "But the world is manifold. You can set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself round it. You've just got to live your own way, and everything that belongs to it will be sure to join on. You'll have a world before you know it. I think myself that's what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat, and the Noachian—don't they call it?—new foundation. That's the way they got up New England, anyhow."
"Barbara, what flights you take!"
"Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up nineteen flights now, you know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones."
It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt Radford's illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham. Father went with her, but he came back the same night. Mother had made up her mind to stay a week. And so we had to keep house without her.
One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I don't know why, but if ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took the time to talk over special affairs with father. Yet he thought everything of "Mrs. Stephen," too, and he quite relied upon her judgment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as if they had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, when the Mrs. Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone for a little.
At any rate, Grandfather Holabird sat with father on the north piazza, out of the way of the strong south-wind; and he had out a big wallet, and a great many papers, and he stayed and stayed, from just after dinner-time till almost the middle of the afternoon, so that father did not go down to his office at all; and when old Mr. Holabird went home at last, he walked over with him. Just after they had gone Leslie Goldthwaite and Harry stopped, "for a minute only," they said; for the south-wind had brought up clouds, and there was rain threatening. That was how we all happened to be just as we were that night of the September gale; for it was the September gale of last year that was coming.
The wind had been queer, in gusts, all day; yet the weather had been soft and mild. We had opened windows for the pleasant air, and shut them again in a hurry when the papers blew about, and the pictures swung to and fro against the walls. Once that afternoon, somebody had left doors open through the brown room and the dining-room, where a window was thrown up, as we could have it there where the three were all on one side. Ruth was coming down stairs, and saw grandfather's papers give a whirl out of his lap and across the piazza floor upon the gravel. If she had not sprung so quickly and gathered them all up for him, some of them might have blown quite away, and led father a chase after them over the hill. After that, old Mr. Holabird put them up in his wallet again, and when they had talked a few minutes more they went off together to the old house.
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It was wonderful how that wind and rain did come up. The few minutes that Harry and Leslie stopped with us, and then the few more they took to consider whether it would do for Leslie to try to walk home, just settled it that nobody could stir until there should be some sort of lull or holding up.
Out of the far southerly hills came the blast, rending and crashing; the first swirls of rain that flung themselves against our windows seemed as if they might have rushed ten miles, horizontally, before they got a chance to drop; the trees bent down and sprang again, and lashed the air to and fro; chips and leaves and fragments of all strange sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring aloft and onward in a false, plebeian triumph.
The rain came harder, in great streams; but it all went by in white, wavy drifts; it seemed to rain from south to north across the country,—not to fall from heaven to earth; we wondered if itwouldfall anywhere. It beat against the house; that stood up in its way; it rained straight in at the window-sills and under the doors; we ran about the house with cloths and sponges to sop it up from cushions and carpets.
"I say, Mrs. Housekeeper!" called out Stephen from above, "look out for father's dressing-room! It's all afloat,—hair-brushes out on voyages of discovery, and a horrid little kelpie sculling round on a hat-box!"
Father's dressing-room was a windowed closet, in the corner space beside the deep, old-fashioned chimney. It had hooks and shelves in one end, and a round shaving-stand and a chair in the other. We had to pull down all his clothes and pile them upon chairs, and stop up the window with an old blanket. A pane was cracked, and the wind, although its force was slanted here, had blown it in, and the fine driven spray was dashed across, diagonally, into the very farthest corner.
In the room a gentle cascade descended beside the chimney, and a picture had to be taken down. Down stairs the dining-room sofa, standing across a window, got a little lake in the middle of it before we knew. The side door blew open with a bang, and hats, coats, and shawls went scurrying from their pegs, through sitting-room and hall, like a flight of scared, living things. We were like a little garrison in a great fort, besieged at all points at once. We had to bolt doors,—latches were nothing,—and bar shutters. And when we could pause indoors, what a froth and whirl we had to gaze out at!
The grass, all along the fields, was white, prostrate; swept fiercely one way; every blade stretched out helpless upon its green face. The little pear-trees, heavy with fruit, lay prone in literal "windrows." The great ashes and walnuts twisted and writhed, and had their branches stripped upward of their leaves, as a child might draw a head of blossoming grass between his thumb and finger. The beautiful elms were in a wild agony; their graceful little bough-tips were all snapped off and whirled away upon the blast, leaving them in a ragged blight. A great silver poplar went over by the fence, carrying the posts and palings with it, and upturned a huge mass of roots and earth, that had silently cemented itself for half a century beneath the sward. Up and down, between Grandfather Holabird's home-field and ours, fallen locusts and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and through all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters; the air was like a sea, tossing and foaming; we could only see through it by snatches, to cry out that this and that had happened. Down below us, the roof was lifted from a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a furlong off, against some rocks; and the hay was flying in great locks through the air.
It began to grow dark. We put a bright, steady light in the brown room, to shine through the south window, and show father that we were all right; directly after a lamp was set in Grandfather Holabird's north porch. This little telegraphy was all we could manage; we were as far apart as if the Atlantic were between us.
"Will they be frightened about you at home?" asked Ruth of Leslie.
"I think not. They will know we should go in somewhere, and that there would be no way of getting out again. People must be caught everywhere, just as it happens, to-night."
"It's just the jolliest turn-up!" cried Stephen, who had been in an ecstasy all the time. "Let's make molasses-candy, and sit up all night!"
Between eight and nine we had some tea. The wind had lulled a little from its hurricane force; the rain had stopped.
"It had all been blown to Canada, by this time," Harry Goldthwaite said. "That rain never stopped anywhere short, except at the walls and windows."
True enough, next morning, when we went out, the grass was actually dry.
It was nearly ten when Stephen went to the south window and put his hands up each side of his face against the glass, and cried out that there was a lantern coming over from grandfather's. Then we all went and looked.
It came slowly; once or twice it stopped; and once it moved down hill at right angles quite a long way. "That is where the trees are down," we said. But presently it took an unobstructed diagonal, and came steadily on to the long piazza steps, and up to the side door that opened upon the little passage to the dining-room.
We thought it was father, of course, and we all hurried to the door to let him in, and at the same time to make it nearly impossible that he should enter at all. But it was Grandfather Holabird's man, Robert.
"The old gentleman has been taken bad," he said. "Mr. Stephen wants to know if you're all comfortable, and he won't come till Mr. Holabird's better. I've got to go to the town for the doctor."
"On foot, Robert?"
"Sure. There's no other way. I take it there's many a good winter's firing of wood down across the road atwixt here and there. There ain't much knowing where youcanget along."
"But what is it?"
"We mustn't keep him," urged Barbara.
"No, I ain't goin' to be kep'. 'T won't do. I donno what it is. It's a kind of a turn. He's comin' partly out of it; but it's bad. He had a kind of a warnin' once before. It's his head. They're afraid it's appalectic, or paralettic, or sunthin'."
Robert looked very sober. He quite passed by the wonder of the gale, that another time would have stirred him to most lively speech. Robert "thought a good deal," as he expressed it, of Grandfather Holabird.
Harry Goldthwaite came through the brown room with his hat in his hand. How he ever found it we could not tell.
"I'll go with him," he said. "You won't be afraid now, will you, Barbara? I'mverysorry about Mr. Holabird."
He shook hands with Barbara,—it chanced that she stood nearest,—bade us all good night, and went away. We turned back silently into the brown room.
We were all quite hushed from our late excitement. What strange things were happening to-night!
All in a moment something so solemn and important was put into our minds. An event that,—never talked about, and thought of as little, I suppose, as such a one ever was in any family like ours,—had yet always loomed vaguely afar, as what should come some time, and would bring changes when it came, was suddenly impending.
Grandfather might be going to die.
And yet what was there for us to do but to go quietly back into the brown room and sit down?
There was nothing to say even. There never is anything to say about the greatest things. People can only name the bare, grand, awful fact, and say, "It was tremendous," or "startling," or "magnificent," or "terrible," or "sad." How little we could really say about the gale, even now that it was over! We could repeat that this and that tree were blown down, and such a barn or house unroofed; but we could not get the real wonder of it—the thing that moved us to try to talk it over—into any words.
"He seemed so well this afternoon," said Rosamond.
"I don't think hewasquite well," said Ruth. "His hands trembled so when he was folding up his papers; and he was very slow."
"O, men always are with their fingers. I don't think that was anything," said Barbara. "But I think he seemed rather nervous when he came over. And he would not sit in the house, though the wind was coming up then. He said he liked the air; and he and father got the shaker chairs up there by the front door; and he sat and pinched his knees together to make a lap to hold his papers; it was as much as he could manage; no wonder his hands trembled."
"I wonder what they were talking about," said Rosamond.
"I'm glad Uncle Stephen went home with him," said Ruth.
"I wonder if we shall have this house to live in if grandfather should die," said Stephen, suddenly. It could not have been hisfirstthought; he had sat soberly silent a good while.
"O Stevie!don'tlet's think anything about that!" said Ruth; and nobody else answered at all.
We sent Stephen off to bed, and we girls sat round the fire, which we had made up in the great open fireplace, till twelve o'clock; then we all went up stairs, leaving the side door unfastened. Ruth brought some pillows and comfortables into Rosamond and Barbara's room, made up a couch for herself on the box-sofa, and gave her little white one to Leslie. We kept the door open between. We could see the light in grandfather's northwest chamber; and the lamp was still burning in the porch below. We could not possibly know anything; whether Robert had got back, and the doctor had come,—whether he was better or worse,—whether father would come home to-night. We could only guess.
"O Leslie, it is so good you are here!" we said.
There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the possible awfulness and change that were so near,—over there in Grandfather Holabird's lighted room.
BBreakfast was late the next morning. It had been nearly two o'clock when father had come home. He told us that grandfather was better; that it was what the doctor called a premonitory attack; that he might have another and more serious one any day, or that he might live on for years without a repetition. For the present he was to be kept as easy and quiet as possible, and gradually allowed to resume his old habits as his strength permitted.
Mother came back in a few days more; Aunt Radford also was better. The family fell into the old ways again, and it was as if no change had threatened. Father told mother, however, something of importance that grandfather had said to him that afternoon, before he was taken ill. He had been on the point of showing him something which he looked for among his papers, just before the wind whirled them out of his hands. He had almost said he would complete and give it to him at once; and then, when they were interrupted, he had just put everything up again, and they had walked over home together. Then there had been the excitement of the gale, and grandfather had insisted upon going to the barns himself to see that all was made properly fast, and had come back all out of breath, and had been taken with that ill turn in the midst of the storm.
The paper he was going to show to father was an unwitnessed deed of gift. He had thought of securing to us this home, by giving it in trust to father for his wife and children.
"I helped John into his New York business," he said, "by investing money in it that he has had the use of, at moderate interest, ever since; and Roderick and his wife have had their home with me. None of my boys ever paid me anyboard. I sha'n't make a will; the law gives things where they belong; there's nothing but this that wants evening; and so I've been thinking about it. What you do with your share of my other property when you get it is no concern of mine as I know of; but I should like to give you something in such a shape that it couldn't go for old debts. I never undertook to shoulder any ofthem; what little I've done was done for you. I wrote out the paper myself; I never go to lawyers. I suppose it would stand clear enough for honest comprehension,—and Roderick and John are both honest,—if I left it as it is; but perhaps I'd as well take it some day to Squire Hadden, and swear to it, and then hand it over to you. I'll see about it."
That was what grandfather had said; mother told us all about it; there were no secret committees in our domestic congress; all was done in open house; we knew all the hopes and the perplexities, only they came round to us in due order of hearing. But father had not really seen the paper, after all; and after grandfather got well, he never mentioned it again all that winter. The wonder was that he had mentioned it at all.
"He forgets a good many things, since his sickness," father said, "unless something comes up to remind him. But there is the paper; he must come across that."
"He may change his mind," said mother, "even when he does recollect. We can be sure of nothing."
But we grew more fond than ever of the old, sunshiny house. In October Harry Goldthwaite went away again on a year's cruise.
Rosamond had a letter from Mrs. Van Alstyne, from New York. She folded it up after she had read it, and did not tell us anything about it. She answered it next day; and it was a month later when one night up stairs she began something she had to say about our winter shopping with,—
"If I had gone to New York—" and there she stopped, as if she had accidentally said what she did not intend.
"If you had gone to New York! Why! When?" cried Barbara. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing," Rosamond answered, in a vexed way. "Mrs. Van Alstyne asked me, that is all. Of course I couldn't."
"Of course you're just a glorious oldnoblesse oblige-d! Why didn't you say something? You might have gone perhaps. We could all have helped. I'd have lent you—that garnet and white silk!"
Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would scarcely be kissed.
After all, she had co-operated more than any of us. Rose was always the daughter who objected and then did. I have often thought that young man in Scripture ought to have been a woman. It is more a woman's way.
The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and the round masses of the ash were shining brown; we filled the vases with their leaves, and pressed away more in all the big books we could confiscate, and hunted frosted ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes morning and evening in the brown room, and began to think how pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was going to be, out here at Westover.
"How nicely we could keep Halloween," said Ruth, "round this great open chimney! What a row of nuts we could burn!"
"So we will," said Rosamond. "We'll ask the girls. Mayn't we, mother?"
"To tea?"
"No. Only to the fun,—and some supper. We can have that all ready in the other room."
"They'll see the cooking-stove."
"They won't know it, when they do," said Barbara.
"We might have the table in the front room," suggested Ruth.
"The drawing-room!" cried Rosamond. "Thatwouldbe a make-shift. Who ever heard of having supper there? No; we'll have both rooms open, and a bright fire in each, and one up in mother's room for them to take off their things. And there'll be the piano, and the stereoscope, and the games, in the parlor. We'll begin in there, and out here we'll have the fortune tricks and the nuts later; and then the supper, bravely and comfortably, in the dining-room, where it belongs. If they get frightened at anything, they can go home; I'm going to new cover that screen, though, mother; And I'll tell you what with,—that piece of goldy-brown damask up in the cedar-trunk. And I'll put an arabesque of crimson braid around it for a border, and the room will be all goldy-brown and crimson then, and nobody will stop to think which is brocade and which is waterproof. They'll be sitting on the waterproof, you know, and have the brocade to look at. It's just old enough to seem as if it had always been standing round somewhere."
"It will be just the kind of party for us to have," said Barbara.
"They couldn't have it up there, if they tried. It would be sure to be Marchbanksy."
Rosamond smiled contentedly. She was beginning to recognize her own special opportunities. She was quite conscious of her own tact in utilizing them.
But then came the intricate questions of who? and who not?
"Not everybody, of course," said Rose, "That would be a confusion. Just the neighbors,—right around here."
"That takes in the Hobarts, and leaves out Leslie Goldthwaite," said Ruth, quietly.
"O, Leslie will be at the Haddens', or here," replied Rosamond. "Grace Hobart is nice," she went on; "if only she wouldn't be 'real' nice!"
"That is just the word for her, though," said Ruth. "The Hobartsarereal."
Rosamond's face gathered over. It was not easy to reconcile things. She liked them all, each in their way. If they would only all come, and like each other.
"What is it, Rose?" said Barbara, teasing. "Your brows are knit,—your nose is crocheted,—and your mouth is—tatted! I shall have to come and ravel you out."
"I'm thinking; that is all."
"How to build the fence?"
"What fence?"
"That fence round the pond,—the old puzzle. There was once a pond, and four men came and built four little houses round it,—close to the water. Then four other men came and built four big houses, exactly behind the first ones. They wanted the pond all to themselves; but the little people were nearest to it; how could they build the fence, you know? They had to squirm it awfully! You see the plain, insignificant people are so apt to be nearest the good time!"
"I like to satisfy everybody."
"You won't,—with a squirm-fence!"
If it had not been for Ruth, we should have gone on just as innocently as possible, and invited them—Marchbankses and all—to our Halloween frolic. But Ruth was such a little news-picker, with her music lessons! She had five scholars now; beside Lily and Reba, there were Elsie Hobart and little Frank Hendee, and Pen Pennington, a girl of her own age, who had come all the way from Fort Vancouver, over the Pacific Railroad, to live here with her grandmother. Between the four houses, Ruth heard everything.
All Saints' Day fell on Monday; the Sunday made double hallowing, Barbara said; and Saturday was the "E'en." We did not mean to invite until Wednesday; on Tuesday Ruth came home and told us that Olivia and Adelaide Marchbanks were getting up a Halloween themselves, and that the Haddens were asked already; and that Lily and Reba were in transports because they were to be allowed to go.
"Did you say anything?" asked Rosamond.
"Yes. I suppose I ought not; but Elinor was in the room, and I spoke before I thought."
"What did you tell her?"
"I only said it was such a pity; that you meant to ask them all. And Elinor said it would be so nice here. If it were anybody else, we might try to arrange something."
But how could we meddle with the Marchbankses? With Olivia and Adelaide, of all the Marchbankses? We could not take it for granted that they meant to ask us. There was no such thing as suggesting a compromise. Rosamond looked high and splendid, and said not another word.
In the afternoon of Wednesday Adelaide and Maud Marchbanks rode by, homeward, on their beautiful little brown, long-tailed Morgans.
"They don't mean to," said Barbara. "If they did, they would have stopped."
"Perhaps they will send a note to-morrow," said Ruth.
"Do you think I am waiting, in hopes?" asked Rosamond, in her clearest, quietest tones.
Pretty soon she came in with her hat on. "I am going over to invite the Hobarts," she said.
"That will settle it, whatever happens," said Barbara.
"Yes," said Rosamond; and she walked out.
The Hobarts were "ever so much obliged to us; and they would certainly come." Mrs. Hobart lent Rosamond an old English book of "Holiday Sports and Observances," with ten pages of Halloween charms in it.
From the Hobarts' house she walked on into Z——, and asked Leslie Goldthwaite and Helen Josselyn, begging Mrs. Ingleside to come too, if she would; the doctor would call for them, of course, and should have his supper; but it was to be a girl-party in the early evening.
Leslie was not at home; Rosamond gave the message to her mother. Then she met Lucilla Waters in the street.
"I was just thinking of you," she said. She did not say, "coming to you," for truly, in her mind, she had not decided it. But seeing her gentle, refined face, pale always with the life that had little frolic in it, she spoke right out to that, without deciding.
"We want you at our Halloween party on Saturday. Will you come? You will have Helen and the Inglesides to come with, and perhaps Leslie."
Rosamond, even while delivering her message to Mrs. Goldthwaite for Leslie, had seen an unopened note lying upon the table, addressed to her in the sharp, tall hand of Olivia Marchbanks.
She stopped in at the Haddens, told them how sorry she had been to find they were promised; asked if it were any use to go to the Hendees'; and when Elinor said, "But you will be sure to be asked to the Marchbankses yourselves," replied, "It is a pity they should come together, but we had quite made up our minds to have this little frolic, and we have begun, too, you see."
Then she did go to the Hendees', although it was dark; and Maria Hendee, who seldom went out to parties, promised to come. "They would divide," she said. "Fanny might go to Olivia's. Holiday-keeping was different from other invites. One might take liberties."
Now the Hendees were people who could take liberties, if anybody. Last of all, Rosamond went in and asked Pen Pennington.
It was Thursday, just at dusk, when Adelaide Marchbanks walked over, at last, and proffered her invitation.
"You had better all come to us," she said, graciously. "It is a pity to divide. We want the same people, of course,—the Hendees, and the Haddens, and Leslie." She hardly attempted to disguise that we ourselves were an afterthought.
Rosamond told her, very sweetly, that we were obliged, but that she was afraid it was quite too late; we had asked others; the Hobarts, and the Inglesides; one or two whom Adelaide did not know,—Helen Josselyn, and Lucilla Waters; the parties would not interfere much, after all.
Rosamond took up, as it were, a little sceptre of her own, from that moment.
Leslie Goldthwaite had been away for three days, staying with her friend, Mrs. Frank Scherman, in Boston. She had found Olivia's note, of Monday evening, when she returned; also, she heard of Rosamond's verbal invitation. Leslie was very bright about these things. She saw in a moment how it had been. Her mother told her what Rosamond had said of who were coming,—the Hobarts and Helen; the rest were not then asked.
Olivia did not like it very well,—that reply of Leslie's. She showed it to Jeannie Hadden; that was how we came to know of it.
"Please forgive me," the note ran, "if I accept Rosamond's invitation for the very reason that might seem to oblige me to decline it. I see you have two days' advantage of her, and she will no doubt lose some of the girls by that. I reallyheardhers first. I wish very much it were possible to have both pleasures."
That was being terribly true and independent with West Z——. "But Leslie Goldthwaite," Barbara said, "always was as brave as a little bumble-bee!"
How it had come over Rosamond, though, we could not quite understand. It was not pique, or rivalry; there was no excitement about it; it seemed to be a pure, spirited dignity of her own, which she all at once, quietly and of course, asserted.
Mother said something about it to her Saturday morning, when she was beating up Italian cream, and Rosamond was cutting chicken for the salad. The cakes and the jellies had been made the day before.
"You have done this, Rosamond, in a very right and neighborly way, but it isn't exactly your old way. How came you not to mind?"
Rosamond did not discuss the matter; she only smiled and said, "I think, mother, I'm growing very proud and self-sufficient, since we've had real,through-and-throughways of our own."
It was the difference between "somewhere" and "betwixt and between."
Miss Elizabeth Pennington came in while we were putting candles in the bronze branches, and Ruth was laying an artistic fire in the wide chimney. Ruth could make a picture with her crossed and balanced sticks, sloping the firm-built pile backward to the two great, solid logs behind,—a picture which it only needed the touch of flame to finish and perfect. Then the dazzling fire-wreaths curled and clasped through and about it all, filling the spaces with a rushing splendor, and reaching up their vivid spires above its compact body to an outline of complete live beauty. Ruth's fires satisfied you to look at: and they never tumbled down.
She rose up with a little brown, crooked stick in one hand, to speak to Miss Pennington.
"Don't mind me," said the lady. "Go on, please, 'biggin' your castle.' That will be a pretty sight to see, when it lights up."
Ruth liked crooked sticks; they held fast by each other, and they made pretty curves and openings. So she went on, laying them deftly.
"I should like to be here to-night," said Miss Elizabeth, still looking at the fire-pile. "Would you let an old maid in?"
"Miss Pennington! Would you come?"
"I took it in my head to want to. That was why I came over. Are you going to play snap-dragon? I wondered if you had thought of that."
"We don't know about it," said Ruth. "Anything, that is, except the name."
"That is just what I thought possible. Nobody knows those old games nowadays. May I come and bring a great dragon-bowl with me, and superintend that part? Mother got her fate out of a snap-dragon, and we have the identical bowl. We always used to bring it out at Christmas, when we were all at home."
"O Miss Pennington! How perfectly lovely! How good you are!"
"Well, I'm glad you take it so. I was afraid it was terribly meddlesome. But the fancy—or the memory—seized me."
How wonderfully our Halloween party was turning out!
And the turning-out is almost the best part of anything; the time when things are getting together, in the beautiful prosperous way they will take, now and then, even in this vexed world.
There was our lovely little supper-table all ready. People who have servants enough, high-trained, to do these things while they are entertaining in the drawing-room, don't have half the pleasure, after all, that we do, in setting out hours beforehand, and putting the last touches and taking the final satisfaction before we go to dress.
The cake, with the ring in it, was in the middle; for we had put together all the fateful and pretty customs we could think of, from whatever holiday; there were mother's Italian creams, and amber and garnet wine jellies; there were sponge and lady-cake, and the little macaroons and cocoas that Barbara had the secret of; and the salad, of spring chickens and our own splendid celery, was ready in the cold room, with its bowl of delicious dressing to be poured over it at the last; and the scalloped oysters were in the pantry; Ruth was to put them into the oven again when the time came, and mother would pin the white napkins around the dishes, and set them on; and nobody was to worry or get tired with having the whole to think of; and yet the whole would be done, to the very lighting of the candles, which Stephen had spoken for, by this beautiful, organized co-operation of ours. Truly it is a charming thing,—all to itself, in a family!
To be sure, we had coffee and bread and butter and cold ham for dinner that day; and we took our tea "standed round," as Barbara said; and the dishes were put away in the covered sink; we knew where we could shirk righteously and in good order, when we could not accomplish everything; but there was neither huddle nor hurry; we were as quiet and comfortable as we could be. Even Rosamond was satisfied with the very manner; to be composed is always to be elegant. Anybody might have come in and lunched with us; anybody might have shared that easy, chatty cup of tea.
The front parlor did not amount to much, after all, pleasant and pretty as it was for the first receiving; we were all too eager for the real business of the evening. It was bright and warm with the wood-fire and the lights; and the white curtains, nearly filling up three of its walls, made it very festal-looking. There was the open piano, and Ruth played a little; there was the stereoscope, and some of the girls looked over the new views of Catskill and the Hudson that Dakie Thayne had given us; there was the table with cards, and we played one game of Old Maid, in which the Old Maid got lost mysteriously into the drawer, and everybody was married; and then Miss Pennington appeared at the door, with her man-servant behind her, and there was an end. She took the big bowl, pinned over with a great damask napkin, out of the man's hands, and went off privately with Barbara into the dining-room.
"This is the Snap," she said, unfastening the cover, and producing from within a paper parcel. "And that," holding up a little white bottle, "is the Dragon." And Barbara set all away in the dresser until after supper. Then we got together, without further ceremony, in the brown room.
We hung wedding-rings—we had mother's, and Miss Elizabeth had brought over Madam Pennington's—by hairs, and held them inside tumblers; and they vibrated with our quickening pulses, and swung and swung, until they rung out fairy chimes of destiny against the sides. We floated needles in a great basin of water, and gave them names, and watched them turn and swim and draw together,—some point to point, some heads and points, some joined cosily side to side, while some drifted to the margin and clung there all alone, and some got tears in their eyes, or an interfering jostle, and went down. We melted lead and poured it into water; and it took strange shapes; of spears and masts and stars; and some all went to money; and one was a queer little bottle and pills, and one was pencils and artists' tubes, and—really—a little palette with a hole in it.