AN OPEN DOOR
THE Scollard girls of all sizes, and Gretta too, closed up around Ralph
under the light of a street light to gaze at him after his amazing
announcement.
"Mrs. Jones-Dexter your great-aunt!" cried Happie.
"That fault-finding, snappish person!" gasped Laura.
"That lovely little child your cousin!" exclaimed Margery.
"There's nothing flattering in your remark, Margery. What kind of a
cousin would I be likely to have except a lovely little child? You'd
expect a family resemblance, wouldn't you?" demanded Ralph. "If you
girls get wonder-struck and stand bunched up on this corner long, we'll
all be run in by a policeman, under the law that forbids push-carts and
things blocking the sidewalks."
Happie laughed and set an example to the others by moving on at once.
"You can't expect us to hear such a surprising piece of news as this
unmoved," she said.
"No, but you were hearing it unmoved; that's what I was talking
about," retorted Ralph. "There's no use in getting stirred up. Mrs.
Jones-Dexter was my mother's aunt before I was born--there's nothing
new about it."
"Well, but Ralph, we should like to hear how it happened," said Laura
eagerly.
"By her being my grandmother's sister, Laura," Ralph kindly explained.
"Oh, no!" cried Laura impatiently. "I mean how she came to be so cross,
and you not know her--you don't know her, do you?"
"Never saw the lady, never knew she had a granddaughter until this very
night as now is," affirmed Ralph. "There isn't an interesting story;
I'm sorry, for your sake, Laura, because you might write music for
it. My great-aunt Lucinda seems to be a person troubled with chronic,
all-round incompatibility. She quarreled with everybody belonging to
her if they dared to have a mind of their own. Mother always said she
had a grievance against the world because it revolved on its own axis.
She never had a fuss with mother directly, but she fell out with her
sister, mother's mother, when my mother was a little girl, and she
wouldn't make up, not if the skies fell--or grandmother fell on her
knees. Grandmother wasn't a bit like her--dear soul, grandmother was,
and it worried her to be on the outs with her sister, but she could
never coax her on the ins. And the gentle Lucinda included mother in
her scrap, because mother was grandmother's daughter, and that's why
we never knew her. Aunt Lucinda married this immensely wealthy Mr.
Jones-Dexter, and after that, when grandmother was dead and mother a
widow without much money, why she didn't like to try to patch up the
row for fear Mrs. Jones-Dexter would misunderstand her motives. We
knew Mr. Jones-Dexter died--he was too rich to die privately, so to
speak--and we heard that Aunt Lucinda quarreled bitterly with her only
son--couldn't make him marry the girl she had picked out--and he died
'way off somewhere. This little Serena must be his child. I wonder
where the mother is? Aunt Lucinda must have taken her grandchild into
favor."
"Into favor doesn't express it," said Margery. The girls had listened
to this outline sketch of family history so intently as to endanger
their feet and passers-by, in their oblivion to all else. "She is
perfectly wrapped up in her, and her love for her is evidently her
absorbing passion. She is so proud of her, so tender of her, looks so
adoringly at her that you never saw anything like it! Really, I wish
you could see your little cousin, Ralph, I can't do her justice."
"I'm not likely to see her," said Ralph. "Very likely Aunt Lucinda was
sorry for driving her son off, especially as people say the girl he
cared for was nice in every way, only she wasn't the one his mother
had picked out. Probably she is conscience-stricken, as unjust,
bad-tempered people are at the end, in story books, and she is making
up to this little Serena for all her life-long injustice. Old age ought
to count for a good deal, too; that seems to be something that makes
the strongest will knuckle under."
"Mrs. Jones-Dexter must be dreadful," said Polly with conviction.
"She must have led a dreadful life," said Ralph kindly. "It must be
pretty bad to have your shoulder bruised your whole life long from
keeping chips on it all the time! I'd hate to spend seventy years on
the home plate with my bat up, ready to hit any old ball, foul or fair.
Look out, Happie! These are the elevated road stairs. You want to pick
up your feet, my child!"
Happie laughed. Ralph had just saved her from falling, face downward,
up the stairs. She was so interested in what he was saying that she had
tripped on her own skirt and Laura's trailing umbrella.
"You needn't fumble for your pocket book, Margery. Bob gave me a strip
of L tickets to bring you home. He's a terror on insisting on strict
justice," said Ralph, producing a dark-pink jointed strip of pasteboard
and dropping it whole into the ticket chopper's box. "I had precisely
the right number for the crowd."
"And we always settle with Bob. Our car fares are part of the expenses
of the tea room," said Margery. "We all believe in not being slovenly
about such little items."
"I never thought the people in the next flat were lacking in
squareness," observed Ralph, steadying Penny who lurched wildly as
the train started. "Hold me around the knee, Pfennig; there's no use
tumbling about until you've grown tall enough to reach the strap!"
"You know you might see little Serena Jones-Dexter," said Happie
suddenly. She had evidently been following her own line of thought from
a remark of Ralph's which had long been left behind in the course of
the talk.
"Easy to see through you, Happie!" said Ralph. "You've been carrying on
the story through several chapters, and you haven't decided whether you
will let me--the hero--dash into the burning Jones-Dexter mansion and
bear out the flower-like darling through the flames, or whether you'll
inveigle me on the steam-boat from which Serena is to tumble overboard
for me to rescue, or whether you will just get me down to the tea
room when the old lady is expected, take me by my lily white hand and
lead me up to that great aunt of mine--say, she is a great old aunt,
isn't she?--and say: 'Mrs. Jones-Dexter, look on your long-lost, your
beautiful boy!' That's the best way, Happie. None know me but to love
me, you know, so it's all that's necessary, and it will save the wear
and tear on little Serena."
"Ralph, you perfect goose!" exclaimed Happie, half laughing, half
teased. For though she had not been entertaining such melodramatic
schemes as Ralph attributed to her, she had been plotting how to work
good to all concerned by bringing together Mrs. Jones-Dexter and her
niece's family.
"I think the tea room is wonderful," said Gretta suddenly. "It is so
interesting, as well as bringing in so much money. We had such music
to-day, Ralph! You haven't told Ralph about that queer man and how he
played."
"Hans Lieder," said Happie. "No, but we never could tell any one how he
played! Ralph, it was wonderful. He is a man in a cloak and sombrero
and he comes so much that we wish--or we did wish--he wouldn't. We
were half afraid of him; we called him the Mystery, and we thought he
looked like Mephistopheles. But to-day I talked to him a little while,
and I thought he looked sad. He has always seemed interested in Laura's
playing, and to-day he played for us. Ralph, you don't know how he
plays! He's a great musician. I wish you could hear him."
Laura looked at Ralph very seriously. "I am going to write a song for
him, words and all. It is going to be very beautiful,--sad, maybe,
but beautiful," she said. "I am going to show how he came cloaked and
shadowy, like the dawn, and how he burst forth, like the morning, with
all the beauty, the music of the world. It will probably be my best
song, for I would do anything to pay him for the way he played. I'm not
afraid of him, like the girls, because I'm a musician too. Musicians
and poets are never understood."
Laura looked at Ralph with a seriously uplifted expression on her pale
little face, and Ralph looked down on her perplexed. She was such a
funny contrast to the crowded aisle, the jarring car, even to her own
thirteen years. Ralph never could manage to like Laura, nor be patient
with her. He rightly thought that she shirked her share of the family
burdens, yet, like Happie, who understood her better, he was sometimes
impressed with the queer child's cleverness shining out through her
conceit.
"Well, I think I'd go slow on writing songs to mysterious musicians in
dramatic cloaks," Ralph advised Laura now. "What did you say the man's
name was?"
"He said when I asked him that we might call him Hans Lieder, but I'm
certain that's not a real name," said Happie.
"Do you know what I believe?" asked Laura standing on tiptoe to whisper
so that Happie and Ralph, but not the crowd around them might hear her.
"I believe he is the spirit of Chopin come back in another body."
She fell back triumphantly to observe the effect of her words, but it
was not what she had intended it to be. Happie and Ralph shouted out in
girl and boy fashion. Laura lost her balance as she dropped back and
down from her toe tips, the car stopping, lurched forward, and she took
an unsentimental header straight into a big man who was reading stock
market reports, and whose face turned as angry as the maddest of the
Wall Street bulls, while his coat felt to Laura as shaggy and rough as
the coat of the grizzliest bear.
"Don't stop to apologize; this is our station," said Ralph, taking the
bewildered and mortified Laura by the arm and pushing her towards the
door through the crowd that blocked their way.
It was the rule in the Patty-Pans that after dinner there were to be
lessons every night except Sunday and on festivals. It was an undecided
question as to whether family birthdays were to be reckoned festivals
or not. The trouble was there were so many that celebrating all of them
cut off a good many nights from study for children who were limited to
night for their lessons. Mrs. Scollard was her children's teacher. The
eldest three had been to school very little, Laura less, and Polly and
Penny not at all. Mrs. Scollard hoped by another year to send Laura
for the beginning of a musical education, that should include general
study, and to launch Polly on the sea of school life.
There had never been a choice as to methods of education in Margery and
Happie's case; the loss of fortune that had made the mother the support
of the family, had forced the two elder girls early to take up the
office of housekeepers who could not be at school.
Mrs. Scollard felt safer to have the younger ones at home with their
sisters while she was away than to let them go to school. So the
Scollards were homeeducated by the teaching of a mother qualified
beyond most women for her task.
When a birthday came around it was always a question whether it
warranted the omission of lessons or not. Happie looked imploringly
at her mother after dinner and said insinuatingly: "Polly was never
ten years old until to-night, motherums! Don't you think we might mark
the occasion by dropping all other lessons and taking up chemistry,
demonstrating how heat changes butter, chocolate, milk and sugar into
fudge?"
Mrs. Scollard hesitated and was lost. Penny leaped on her lap to
hug her for a consent which she read in her mother's eyes, and
Polly cried in a staid sort of rapture: "This will make my birthday
perfect--dancing school and fudge!"
Flats are an invention for which to be grateful. Without them how
would homes be possible to people with little strength, less income
and no space? But they have their drawbacks, like everything else in
an imperfect world, and not least of these is the way sounds and odors
wander from one end of them to the other, owing to the arrangement
which Happie had called "the Patty-Pan style of architecture." No one
can safely talk secrets in a flat, and no one can brew secret potions,
for good intent or ill, in the most distant end of their elongated
connections.
Happie had her specialty well under way in the little kitchen, and
Laura, who was still under the spell of the wizard playing of the
afternoon, found it impossible to keep to her seat at the piano, or the
composition of her song, in the fudge-burdened atmosphere of the little
parlor. She gave it up, and was coming out to join the less gifted
young folk in the kitchen when the bell rang through the little flat;
the upper bell, so that whoever had come was already at the threshold,
having entered the outer door without ringing below. Laura opened the
door, and there stood Mrs. Barker and Elsie beautifully attired.
"Oh!" ejaculated Laura, and it was perfectly evident that her first
feeling was dismay, not welcome, her consciousness of the odor of fudge
overwhelming hospitality. "Yes, mamma is in. And Happie and Gretta,
yes, Elsie," Laura said, rallying. "If you will please wait a moment, I
will call them."
"I wish I could go out where Happie is. She's making fudge, I smell it,
and we all know Happie's fudge of old," said Elsie.
"Just one minute, Elsie, and Happie will come. I've no doubt you can go
out to see her make the fudge then." Laura's dignity was impressive.
She carried it with her around the corner of the parlor, into the
little hall, but she ran down the latter to the kitchen, shedding the
dignity on the way.
"The Barkers, of all people!" she announced in a stage whisper. But
Mrs. Scollard did not seem dismayed, and Happie said without looking up
from the pan which claimed all her attention, "Send Elsie out here;
this is at the point when it can't be left."
Mrs. Scollard went in at once with Laura, who came back to say that
Mrs. Barker would like to see Margery, Happie and Gretta Engel, if she
might.
"Oh, dear, Laura, I truly can't leave this fudge now without spoiling
it! Tell Elsie to come out here, and ask Mrs. Barker if she will be
kind enough to give me a quarter of an hour? Then we'll all come in.
What can the mystery be?" Happie asked the question of Margery; Laura
had already departed.
"I think it has something to do with Gretta's saving Elsie the day of
the sleigh ride," whispered Margery. "I've been wondering that she
didn't hear from the Barkers."
"My goodness! They've probably brought her the Victoria cross, or
the Legion of honor, or a Carnegie medal, or whatever they give for
saving fair maidens! Oh, Margery, will you go and see that Gretta makes
herself look her prettiest? If I beat this fudge like mad I'll be ready
to go in there by the time you are--she is--ready."
Margery willingly departed to see that Gretta was a credit to herself
and to Happie, whose care for the big girl, no younger than she was,
amused the Patty-Pan family. Happie was as good as her word, and came
into the room where Margery was superintending Gretta's toilette two
minutes before she had finished.
"I do not see why I must go," Gretta was protesting for the fifth time.
She had not recovered from her shyness, and dreaded strangers nearly as
much as she dreaded a dentist.
"Because they have asked for us, all three of us," said Happie. "Did
you ever see such a red face as mine is? Please button the middle
button of my waist, Margery; it's undone. Now, courage, Gretta! You
have already met Elsie, to put it mildly, and you needn't mind Mrs.
Barker. You weren't afraid of Auntie Cam."
It always seemed to Margery and Happie that Gretta looked far better
out of doors. There was something dwarfing to her beauty in the
Patty-Pans. Still, it was a handsome creature that followed the two
Scollards into the parlor and rather stiffly laid her hand in Mrs.
Barker's as that lady arose to greet her. Elsie kissed her with genuine
cordiality. Mrs. Barker eyed her keenly, and then said:
"They have not exaggerated your good looks, my dear; they positively
could not do so. I have never seen you, and now that I do see you how
can I thank you for what you did for my little girl?"
Happie expected to see Gretta sink under the embarrassment of this
speech, beginning with the most unlimited flattery and ending in an
allusion to her courage. But keen-witted Gretta perceived the bad taste
of the opening, and her sense of humor put her at her ease.
"I should not like to have you thank me," she said pleasantly.
"Ah, but I came here expressly to do so!" returned Mrs. Barker. "This
is the first opportunity I have had, but you may imagine how I have
burned to see the brave girl to whom Elsie owes, if not her life,
undoubtedly the fact that she is not a cripple." Mrs. Barker prided
herself on her eloquence; she addressed meetings of all sorts on every
occasion, but this sentence had not turned out as well as she had
expected it to. She began again: "For one thing, Mr. Barker and I have
consulted each other, and thought long on what form our thanks should
take. I have come here to beg a favor of you, my dear Gretta--you will
let me call you Gretta?"
"Oh, please," said Gretta.
"Yes. Mrs. Scollard, Margery and Happie, I beg that you will plead with
your friend for me that I may have my way. I understand, Gretta, that
you have a little property somewhere in the country, but not enough to
enable you to seize the advantages of a desirable education. I desire
to give you six years at an excellent school, a boarding school. I
desire you to be placed where you will have every advantage, not only
of education of the mind, but of refined association, so that at the
end of the six years, when you are twenty-one years old, you will be
prepared to take your place among young women of your own age, their
equal in cultivation, manners, accomplishments, as you will be their
superior in beauty. Mrs. Scollard, please add your voice to mine.
Gretta probably does not realize what this would do for her."
"Gretta, dear, you do realize it, I know," said Mrs. Scollard softly.
She laid her hand on Gretta's. "You will not refuse, will you? It will
change all your life."
Gretta shook her head. "Thank you, thank you very much, but I couldn't
go, Mrs. Barker," she said.
"Not because you want to stay with me, Gretta!" cried Happie, rising to
throw her arms around Gretta. "You would come to us in every vacation,
and it wouldn't separate us, not really. You will take this chance,
Gretta?"
"No," said Gretta quietly, "I can't."
"You will ruin your life, child!" protested Mrs. Barker.
Again Gretta shook her head. "I study at night, and I read a great deal
with Happie. And I learn how to be part of what you said--I think I
couldn't have a better teacher of manners." She put her other hand over
Mrs. Scollard's resting on her left one. "It's very good of you, but I
think I can't accept your offer."
"I hope it isn't pride," said Mrs. Barker.
"I hope not," said Gretta with a smile. "It would be very silly,
sillier than it would be wrong, for why should I be proud? It's just
that I can't, thank you."
"Won't you leave the offer open a few days? Let us talk to Gretta.
I think she ought to accept the chance to get all that she always
desired, Mrs. Barker," said Mrs. Scollard.
"Certainly," said Mrs. Barker rising. "Consider it for a week, two
weeks, and let me know your decision. No, I really must not stay
another moment. The carriage is waiting, and it is cold for the
horses. Gretta, whatever you decide I am very grateful to you. Come
and see Elsie. Margery and Happie, your tea room makes it harder than
ever to catch a glimpse of you! Do come to see us! Good-night, dear
Mrs. Scollard; it is a pleasure to find you so much stronger than
last winter. Change your mind, Gretta, I beg of you! Good-night, dear
people."
Mrs. Scollard summoned Bob to attend their guests to their carriage,
and as soon as the door was well closed behind them Happie flew at
Gretta.
"I couldn't imagine why you were so sure right away that you wouldn't
let her send you to school," she cried. "But the minute she said 'tea
room' it flashed upon me! Gretta, we can get on without you! Do you
think it would be right to refuse an education for that tea room?"
Gretta looked as guilty as if she had been caught dynamiting a safe.
"We all have as much as we can do," she said. "I think this winter
I'd better help you. Besides, I'm getting all the education I need--a
better one than in school, in lots of ways. If you want to get rid of
me, Happie----" She paused, laughing out of her dark eyes, and Happie
promptly choked her. "You goose!" she said.
Bob came up two steps at a time. He had heard of the offer from Mrs.
Barker. "Good for you, Gretta; we can't spare you!" he cried. "Besides,
you're educated now! No one can drive, make butter, do heaps of things
like you. Bother education!"
"Yes, it is a bother," assented Gretta.