The two children did not know exactly whether they were frightened or
not. If it had not seemed impossible that anything should go entirely
wrong while John Holt was near them, they would have felt rather queer.
But John Holt was evidently not the least alarmed.
“Look here,” he said, “I’m glad of it. I want to see that woman.”
“Do you?” exclaimed Robin and Meg together.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Come along, and let’s go and find her.” And he
strode out towards the Agricultural Building as if he were going towards
something interesting.
It is true that the Agricultural Building had been too nearly connected
with Aunt Matilda’s world to hold the greatest attractions for the
little Pilgrims. It had, indeed, gone rather hard with them to find a
name for it with a beautiful sound.
“But it _is_ something,” Meg had said, “and it’s a great, huge thing,
whether we care for it or not. That it isn’t the thing we care for
doesn’t make it any less. We should be fools if we thought that, of
course. And you know we’re not fools, Rob.”
“No,” Rob had said, standing gazing at rakes and harrows with his brows
knit and his legs pretty wide apart. “And if there’s one thing that
shows human beings _can_ do what they set their minds to, it’s this
place. Why, they used to thresh wheat with flails—two pieces of wood
hooked together. They banged the wheat on the barn floor with things
like that! I’ll tell you what, as soon as a man gets any sense, he
begins to make machines. He bangs at things with his brain, instead of
with his arms and legs.”
And in the end they had called it the Palace of the Genius of the Earth,
and the Seasons, and the Sun. They walked manfully by John Holt through
the place, Robin leading the way, until they came to the particular
exhibit where he had caught sight of Aunt Matilda. Being a business-like
and thorough person, she was still there, though she had left the steam
plough and directed her attention to a side-delivery hay rake, which she
seemed to find very well worth study.
If the children and John Holt had not walked up and planted themselves
immediately in her path, she would not have seen them. It gave Meg a
little shudder to see how like her world she looked, with her hard,
strong-featured face, her straight skirt, and her square shoulders. They
waited until she moved, and then she looked up and saw them. She did not
start or look nervous in the least. She stared at them.
“Well,” she said. “So this was the place you came to.”
“Yes, Aunt Matilda,” said Robin. “We couldn’t let it go by us—and we
took our own money.”
“And we knew you wouldn’t be anxious about us,” said Meg, looking up at
her with a shade of curiosity.
Aunt Matilda gave a dry laugh.
“No,” she said, “I’ve no time to be anxious about children. I took care
of myself when I was your age; and I had a sort of notion you’d come
here. Who are you with?”
John Holt lifted his hat, but without too much ceremony. He knew Mrs.
Matilda Jennings’s principles were opposed to the ceremonious.
“I’m a sort of neighbor of yours, Mrs. Jennings,” he explained. “I have
some land near your farm, though I don’t live on the place. My name is
John Holt.”
Aunt Matilda glanced from him to Robin.
She knew all about John Holt, and was quite sufficiently business-like
to realize that it would be considered good luck to have him for a
friend.
“Well,” she said to them, “you’ve got into good hands.”
John Holt laughed.
“By this time we all three think we’ve got into good hands,” he said;
“and we’re going to see this thing through.”
“They haven’t money enough to see much of it,” said Mrs. Jennings.
“No,” said John Holt, “but I have, and it’s to be my treat.”
“Well,” said Aunt Matilda, “I suppose you can afford it. I couldn’t.
I’ve come here on business.”
“You’d better let us help you to combine a little pleasure with it,”
said John Holt. “This won’t happen twice in your life or mine.”
“There’s been a lot of money wasted in decorations,” said Mrs. Jennings.
“I don’t believe it will pay them.”
“Oh, yes; it will pay them,” said John Holt. “It would pay them if they
didn’t make a cent out of it. It would have paid _me_, if I’d done it,
and lost money.”
“Now, see here,” said Mrs. Matilda Jennings, with a shrewd air, “the
people that built this didn’t do it for their health—they did it for
what they’d make out of it.”
“Perhaps they did,” said John Holt, “and perhaps all of them didn’t. And
even those that did have made a bigger thing than they knew, by
Jupiter!”
They were all sauntering along together, as they spoke. Meg and Robin
wondered what John Holt was going to do. It looked rather as if he
wanted to see more of Aunt Matilda. And it proved that he did. He had a
reason of his own, and, combined with this, a certain keen sense of
humor made her entertaining to him. He wanted to see how the place
affected her, as he had wanted to look on at its effect on Meg and
Robin. But he knew that Aunt Matilda had come to accumulate new ideas on
agriculture, and that she must be first allowed to satisfy herself on
that point; and he knew the children were not specially happy in the
society of ploughs and threshing-machines, and he did not think Aunt
Matilda’s presence would add to their pleasure in the Palace of the
Earth, the Seasons, and the Sun. Besides, he wanted to talk to Mrs.
Jennings a little alone.
“You know where Ben and his mother are?” he said to Robin, after a few
minutes.
“Yes,” Robin answered.
“Then take Meg and go to them for a while. Mrs. Jennings wants to stay
here about an hour more, and I want to walk round with her. In an hour
come back to the entrance here and I will meet you.”
Meg and Robin went away as he told them. It was in one sense rather a
relief.
“I wonder what she’ll say to him,” said Meg.
“There’s no knowing,” Robin answered. “But whatever it is, he will make
it all right. He’s one of those who have found out human beings can do
things if they try hard enough. He was as lonely and poor as we are when
he was twelve. He told me so.”
What Aunt Matilda said was very matter-of-fact.
“I must say,” she said, as the children walked off, “you seem to have
been pretty good to them.”
“They’ve been pretty good to me,” said John Holt. “They’ve been pretty
good _for_ me, though they’re not old enough to know it.”
“They’re older than their age,” said Aunt Matilda. “If they’d been like
other children the Lord knows what I should have done with them. They’ve
been no trouble in particular.”
“I should imagine not,” said John Holt.
“It was pretty business-like of them,” said Mrs. Jennings, with another
dry laugh, “to make up their minds without saying a word to any one, and
just hustle around and make their money to come here. They both worked
pretty steady, I can tell you, and it wasn’t easy work, either. Most
young ones would have given in. But they were bound to get here.”
“They’ll be bound to get pretty much where they make up their minds to,
as life goes on,” remarked John Holt. “That’s their build.”
“Thank goodness, they’re not like their father,” Mrs. Jennings
commented. “Robert hadn’t any particular fault, but he never made
anything.”
“He and his wife seem to have made a home that was a pretty good start
for these children,” was what John Holt said.
“Well,” said Mrs. Jennings, “they’ve got to do the rest themselves. He
left them nothing.”
“No other relations but you?” John Holt asked.
“Not a soul. I shall keep them and let them work on the farm, I
suppose.”
“It would pay to educate them well and let them see the world,” said
John Holt.
“I dare say it would pay _them_,” replied Aunt Matilda, “but I’ve got
all I can do, and my husband’s family have a sort of claim on me. Half
the farm belonged to him.”
They spent their remaining hours in the Agricultural Building very
profitably. Mrs. Jennings found John Holt an excellent companion. He
knew things very thoroughly, and had far-seeing ideas of how far things
would work, and how much they would pay. He did not expect Mrs. Jennings
to tell him fairy stories, and he told her none, but before they left
the place they had talked a good deal. John Holt had found out all he
wanted to know about the two children, and he had made a proposition
which certainly gave Aunt Matilda something new to think of.
She was giving some thought to it when they went out to meet the party
of four at the entrance. She looked as if she had been rather surprised
by some occurrence, but she did not look displeased, and the glances she
gave to Meg and Robin expressed a new sense of appreciation of their
practical value.
“I’ve promised Mr. Holt that I’ll let him take me through the Midway
Plaisance,” she said. “I’ve seen the things I came to see, and I may as
well get my ticket’s worth.”
Meg and Robin regarded her with interest. Aunt Matilda and the Midway
Plaisance, taken together, would be such a startling contrast that they
must be interesting. And as she looked at John Holt’s face, as they went
on their way, Meg knew he was thinking the same thing. And it was a
strange experience. Mrs. Jennings strode through the curious places
rather as if she were following a plough down a furrow. She looked at
Samoan beauties, Arab chiefs, and Persian Jersey Lilies with unmovedly
scrutinizing eyes. She did not waste time anywhere, but she took all in
as if it were a matter of business. Camel drivers and donkey boys seemed
to strike her merely as samples of slow travelling; she ascended, as it
were into mid-heaven, on the Ferris Wheel, with a grim air of
determination. Being so lifted from earth and poised above in the clear
air, Meg had thrilled with a strange, exultant feeling of being a bird,
and it had seemed to her that, with a moment’s flutter of wings, she
could soar higher and higher, and lose herself in the pure sea of blue
above. Aunt Matilda looked down with cool interest.
“Pretty big power this,” she said to John Holt. “I guess it’s made one
man’s fortune.”
John Holt was a generous host. He took her from place to place—to
Lapland villages, Cannibal huts, and Moorish palaces. She tramped about,
and inspected them all with a sharp, unenthusiastic eye. She looked at
the men and women, and their strange costumes, plainly thinking them
rather mad.
“It’s a queer sight,” she said to John Holt; “but I don’t see what good
all this is going to do any one.”
“It saves travelling expenses,” answered John Holt, laughing. His
shrewd, humorous face was very full of expression all the time they were
walking about together. She had only come for the day, and she was going
back by a night train. When she left them, she gave them both one of
those newly appreciative looks.
“Well,” she said, “Mr. Holt’s going to look after you, he says. He’s got
something to tell you when I’m gone. We’ve talked it over, and it’s all
right. There’s one thing sure, you’re two of the luckiest young ones
_I_’ve heard of.” And she marched away briskly.
Meg and Robin looked at each other and at John Holt. What was he going
to tell them? But he told them nothing until they had all dined, and Ben
and his mother had gone home, prepared to come again the next day.
By that time the City Beautiful was wreathed with its enchanted jewels
of light again, and in the lagoon’s depths they trembled and blazed.
John Holt called a gondola with a brilliant gondolier, and they got into
it and shot out into the radiant night.
The sight was so unearthly in its beauty that for a few moments they
were quite still. Meg sat in her Straw Parlor attitude, with her elbows
on her knees, and her chin on her hands. Her eyes looked very big, and
as lustrous as the jewels in the lagoon.
“I’m going to ask you something,” said John Holt, in a quiet sort of
voice, at last.
“Yes,” said Meg, dreamily.
“Would you two like to belong to _me_?”
Meg’s hands dropped, and she turned her shining eyes.
“I’ve been talking to your Aunt Matilda about that big house of mine,”
he went on. “It’s empty. There’s too much room in it. I want to take you
two, and see if you can fill it up. Will you come?”
[Illustration: “IT’S A QUEER SIGHT,” SHE SAID TO JOHN HOLT.]
Meg and Robin turned their eyes upon each other in a dazed way.
“Will we come?” they stammered.
“Mrs. Jennings is willing,” said John Holt. “You two have things to do
in the world. I’ll help you to learn to do them. You,” with the short
laugh—“you shall tell me fairy stories.”
Fairy stories! What was this? Their hearts beat in their breasts like
little hammers. The gondola moved smoothly over the scintillating water,
and the jewel-strung towers and domes rose white against the lovely
night. Meg looked around her, and uttered a little cry.
“Oh, Rob!” she said. “Oh, dear John Holt. We have got _into_ the City
Beautiful, and you are going to let us live there always.”
And John Holt knew that the big house would seem empty no more.