“WHO LOVES A GARDEN LOVES A GREENHOUSE, TOO”
“We call our house a greenhouse, though it is made of red brick,
because it grew all the Gardens,” explained Mary, when Win brought
their unexpected guest down to supper.
The boy was less pale for a vigorous towelling, but he looked
uncomfortable, like one who could neither account for his being there
nor feel that he ought to be there. Mary saw at a glance that Win had
adopted him without reservation during their absence. Win was a most
definite person toward his acquaintances; one was never in doubt as to
his attitude toward them. He loved, or he loved them not, and one never
had to have recourse to a daisy to find out which it was. He kept his
hand on the lame lad’s shoulder, as he entered the dining-room, and
smiled at him with peculiar kindness.
“Yes, we consider that a subtle bit of cleverness!” Win supplemented
Mary. “The house is a greenhouse for growing the Garden roses--see?”
He waved his hand toward Mary and Jane. “It has grown other Garden
plants, for that matter. My grandfather, the girls’ great-grandfather,
built it, and it was owned by my father, and then by my elder brother,
their father. I was born in it; so were they. It went to two oldest
sons; then that last one had nothing but three worthless girls to leave
it to!” Win scowled fearfully at them.
“It’s a dandy house,” said the stranger, looking around him.
It really was! The hall ran through the middle of it, with big rooms
on either hand and windows catching the sun’s rays in turn, as the
solid house was swung around him. The dining-room got the last of the
daylight, facing westward as it did. A glowing sunset lighted up the
round mahogany table, in the centre of the room, and its snowy damask,
brilliant glass, and silver. Fine old steel engravings of Landseer’s
pictures hung around the wall; the chairs were solid, high of back. The
room gave an effect of cheer, and space, and plenty.
“I feel horribly uncomfortable, intruding,” said the guest, looking
with convincing appeal and a flushed face at the girls.
“I don’t think you could call it intruding to stay when you are urged
to--and wanted--do you?” asked Mary.
“My only fear is there mayn’t be enough to eat!” said Win.
“There is, then!” declared a new voice, and they all turned to see
Abbie Abbott, bringing in a tray with creamed chicken garnished with
parsley, and a steaming plate piled with flaky biscuits. Abbie might
have been almost any age between twenty-five and sixty-five; in reality
she was halfway between those two ages, and a character.
“You’ve enough to feed six delegates to a convention--and they’re the
hungriest things I ever come across, Mr. Win! Mr. Moulton and Mis’
Moulton called on the phome and said they’d be over to-night,” added
Abbie.
“We always say Mr. and Mrs. Moulton called,” remarked Jane, as Abbie
disappeared. “You don’t speak of every one together as you do them. I
wonder why!”
“And you don’t hear people calling over the ‘phome’ unless you happen
to be Abbie Abbott,” added Win. “Sounds like a sea song.
“I heard a voice across the foam:
To-night I’ll tread the Garden loam;
Helm hard a-lee, I’m sailing home!”
“Win, you ridiculous fellow!” cried Mary, with her merry laugh.
Jane ran to him and shook him approvingly; Jane could never approve
heartily without violence. “You lovely idiot!” she cried.
Florimel dashed into the room and collided with Abbie bringing Saratoga
chips and tomatoes. “Oh, gracious!” cried Florimel, dropping into a
chair.
“You may well say so!” said Abbie sternly, as she skilfully saved her
burden from wreck. “Good thing it wasn’t next trip, with the coffee-pot
steaming hot and the diddly cream jug!”
“Now we are all here; we don’t have to wait any longer,” announced
Mary, with evident relief. “Grubbing in the garden makes me hungry.”
“Let me wait on Mr. Walpole, because I found him; Chum was starving,”
said Florimel, and they all laughed.
“So am I,” said the guest, accepting the skipping Saratoga potatoes
which Florimel aimed at his plate, or as many of them as arrived there.
“But my name is Mark.”
“Nice, handy one, too; can’t be shortened,” said Win. “We’ll all be
first-name friends from now on. I’m the oldest of the lot and I’m only
six years older than Mark. What’s your specialty, Mark? Any special
work you’re after?”
“Paying work,” said Mark, with a laugh. “I did intend to study a good
while longer. I’m not prepared for any special work; not ready for it,
I’m afraid, but it has to be found, if it’s wrapping grocery parcels.
I’d like to work with a botanist; I know more about botany than
anything else.”
“And Mr. Moulton is botany crazy, in an amateurish way!” cried Mary.
“I wonder how a person is an amateur lunatic,” murmured Jane.
“Now, who’d expect you, of all people, to ask that, Jane?” said Win
suggestively. “Mr. Moulton is at work on a tremendous book, more
tremendous than it will ever be book, I’m afraid. He’ll never finish
it! ‘A Study of the Flora of New York,’ he calls it, and he’s making a
herbarium as big as the book. Maybe he’d take you to help on it.”
“If I could do it,” said Mark doubtfully.
“If nobody can possibly eat another bite, nor drink another drop,
suppose we go out and watch the stars come out, and wait for Mr. and
Mrs. Moulton to come over,” suggested Mary.
“If it was anybody else, or we were anybody else,” said Florimel, “and
Mr. and Mrs. Moulton was their guardian--Mr. Moulton, really, but Mrs.
Moulton does more guarding than he does--we’d call them Uncle Austin
and Aunt Althea, but we never do. Mr. and Mrs. to them means just as
much as uncle and aunt do when other girls say it to people who aren’t
any relation. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton like us to call them what they
really are; not relations, when they’re not.”
Mark laughed, and Win said: “Strain that, kiddums, to clear your
remarks. They’re badly mixed.”
Mary explained to Mark: “Florimel means that we never fell into the
way of calling people who weren’t related to us uncle and aunt, but
Mr. Moulton and Mrs. Moulton are two of our cornerstones. I do wish
Mr. Moulton would let you help him. Very likely his book will never be
published, but I’m sure it’s fine, and as interesting as it can be to
work on. Mr. Moulton would be so happy if a young person were working
with him. All we can do is listen when he tells us about it, or reads
us bits, but he knows quite well that we don’t understand any more about
the scientific part of it than a telephone receiver would, and that
must be discouraging.”
“I don’t know what your Mr. Moulton would want of me, but I’d be
glad enough if he could use me. You see I meant to go on studying,
go to college and specialize and maybe teach, and do something worth
doing in botany. But that’s knocked on the head.” Mark tried to speak
carelessly, but the tang of disappointment was in his voice.
“No telling which is the short cut to your destination when you’re
young and all roads stretch out before you, my son,” said Win,
answering this note in the younger lad’s voice and laying a hand on his
shoulder with a mock paternal air. “Come on outside, and take a course
in botany and astronomy, sitting in our garden watching the stars come
out.”
“Just a moment, Win,” murmured Mary. She laid a detaining hand on Win’s
arm, and Mark followed Jane and Florimel through the door that led
directly into the garden from the dining-room.
“Aren’t we to keep him overnight?” Mary asked. “It may be he hasn’t
much money for lodgings, and morning seems the right time to set out.”
“Why, of course, Lady Bountiful,” Win concurred heartily. “Sure thing
we’re going to keep him to-night! He’s a mighty nice little chap, if
he is out seeking his fortune, and Florimel did pick him up--like the
dog!”
“He’s very nice,” Mary agreed. “He has lived among nice people. But he
isn’t a little chap, Win; he’s taller than you are.”
“What are inches?” demanded Win. “When you are twenty-four, my child,
you will understand that eighteen is mere infancy.”
“In fancy! Yes, it is!” cried Mary saucily. “In reality twenty-four is
nothingness.”
“Disrespectful to your uncle! Bringing his dark hairs in sorrow to the
gray!” growled Win, stalking after the others to the garden.
Mary ran out to look for Anne, whom she knew she should find at that
hour helping Abbie get the supper dishes out of the way.
“Anne, Anne dear, Anne Kennington!” she called as she came.
“Mary, lass, what is it?” Anne answered, coming to meet her.
She was a tall Englishwoman of about thirty-five, with the brightness
of her youthful brilliant colouring beginning to fade. The red in
her cheeks was hardening as the whiteness around it browned, but her
eyes still flashed fires out of their depth of blue, and her hair was
almost black. She moved with a free, indifferent swing as if she had
been born under the Declaration of Independence instead of the English
queen. But her devotion to the Garden girls partook of the loyalty of a
subject, while it was, at the same time, all maternal.
“We have a guest for the night, a nice boy a year older than I am, who
came to Vineclad looking for work. Florimel met him and brought him
home with her to see Mr. Moulton. Is the little room in order?” asked
Mary.
“Little room, and big room, and middle-sized room, all the guest-rooms
are in order,” said Anne, resenting the question. “But staying the
night here, Mary? A tramp!”
“Mercy, no! A gentleman and very really!” Mary set her right. “His home
was burned, his father was killed in the fire, and, instead of being
left well-off, he had nothing. He is from Massachusetts, he didn’t say
where; his name is Mark Walpole. Win thinks he is fine--it isn’t merely
girls’ judgment.”
“And Winchester Garden is only a big boy; what does he know of reading
character? Though he would be a good judge of breeding,” Anne conceded.
“I suppose a night of him won’t ruin the place, though what with
Florimel bringing home that dog and now a boy, there’s no telling what
the end will be! Of course I knew he was at supper; he looks a nice
sort; I’ll grant him that. Go on, Mary; Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are this
minute crossing over. I’ll see that the ewer is filled in the boy’s
room, and more than that it doesn’t need done to it; that, and a pair
of towels.”
“There’s no housekeeper like our Anne! You can’t catch her napping,”
laughed Mary, hastening out to help receive her guardian and his wife.
The Garden girls and their absurdly un-uncle-fied young uncle had a
habit of sitting out in their garden in the evening from such an early
date in the spring that everybody croaked “malaria,” till so late a
date in the autumn that, figuratively speaking, the neighbourhood
clothed them in shrouds and got out its own funeral garments.
But Vineclad, sitting some fifteen miles back from the Hudson River,
never administered malaria to its trusting children, and the old Garden
garden could never have been persuaded to harm its three girls, between
whom and it was a love profoundly sympathetic.
Mary found Jane, Florimel, Win, and Mark, with Chum nearby, in the
comfortable wicker chairs which stood about on the grass with which
the garden emphasized its paths, permitting it to grow as a small lawn
on the west side of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Moulton were just coming
toward them through the broad path which led directly from the side
gate.
Mr. Moulton was not above medium height. His hair was grizzled, as was
his short-cropped moustache; he stooped and peered at the world through
large-lensed glasses, as if he regarded everything, collectively and
separately, as specimens. Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, carried
herself so erect that she might have been protesting that the specimens
were not worth while. No one had ever seen her dishevelled, nor dressed
with less than elegant appropriateness to the time and occasion. The
result was that she conveyed an effect of elderliness though she
was not quite fifty years old, which is young in this period of the
world’s progress. Her light-brown hair showed no thread of gray, her
aristocratic face was still but lightly lined, and her complexion was
fair, yet one thought of her as of a person growing old, though doing
so with great nicety.
The three Garden girls sprang up to meet these arrivals with the
alacrity and deference which was the combination of manner that Mrs.
Moulton liked. Florimel damaged the effect this time by overturning her
chair and stepping on Chum’s tail. Both chair and dog bounded as this
happened and Chum howled, too newly adopted to be sure the injury was
not intended.
“A dog, my dear?” asked Mrs. Moulton of Jane, at that moment kissing
her cheek. But she looked beyond Chum at Mark, as being, in every
sense, the larger object.
“Yes, Mrs. Moulton,” said Jane, curbing her desire to laugh. “Florimel
found it lost, and brought it home. We have adopted it as a friend; it
seems to be obedient and good tempered.” She flashed a look at Mark,
calling upon him to appreciate this doubly accurate description. Her
hair, rumpled by the breeze, seemed to flash with her eyes; it looked
like a part of the afterglow in the west now illumining the garden.
“Dog!” said Mr. Moulton, who had not discovered Chum. “Looks like a boy
to me, a boy I don’t know.” He peered at Mark through his large glasses.
Win presented Mark, instinctively feeling that it would incline Mr. and
Mrs. Moulton more favourably toward Mark if Win, and not the young
girls, assumed the responsibility for him.
“Walpole, did you say?” Mrs. Moulton repeated after Win. “Mark Walpole?
What was your father’s name? I knew of Walpoles in Massachusetts--what
was your town?”
“Worcester, and my father’s name was Cathay. My grandfather was in
India, and was pretty tired of it. He named my father Cathay because
he felt as though he had been there a hundred years, had ‘a cycle of
Cathay,’ you know. Hard on my father to get such a name, wasn’t it?”
replied Mark.
“That’s the Walpole I meant!” Mrs. Moulton triumphed. “The very one! I
didn’t know him, but a friend of my girlhood did; one couldn’t forget
that name. Suppose you sit here and talk to me.” She led the way to a
bench and motioned Mark to a place beside her.
“And suppose you sit _here_ and talk to _me_!” echoed her
husband, drawing a chair close to the one he took and inviting Mary to
it. Mr. Moulton availed himself of most opportunities to appropriate
Mary, his favourite of the three girls whom his friend had left to his
guardianship, dear as they all were to him.
But the conversation did not divide itself off into duets. Mr.
Moulton ceased to draw from Mary her story of the doings of the Garden
household since his last report, and Jane and Florimel, neither of whom
was often silent, joined in listening to Mrs. Moulton’s catechism of
Mark and his answers.
“It isn’t as if I were all right, you know,” Mark said quietly, when he
had told her of his aim to make his way in the world, though his hope
of preparing to follow the course he would have chosen had been wiped
out. “I’m lame. It doesn’t bother me much, but it will probably get in
the way of lots of things a sound boy might do. I got my foot smashed
when I was a little chap and it couldn’t be mended to be as good as
new. But I’m sure I’ll limp into something--something that will keep me
out of the bread line!”
“Mark was telling me, Mr. Moulton,” interposed Win, seeing his chance,
“that he had gone quite far in botany, already he was planning to
specialize in it, when he was thrown out of his own place in the world.
I thought that would interest you.”
“Why not?” said Mr. Moulton, turning from Mary to scrutinize Mark anew,
scowling at him nearsightedly. “As to being thrown out of your place
in the world, my lad, there’s no power on earth can play you that
trick; it’s every man’s work to make the place he’s in his own place.
It’s a consoling truth--and most absolutely a truth--that a man often
grows bigger himself for having to fit himself to a smaller place than
he had expected to fill. As to this ambition of yours interesting me,
touch a man on his hobby and there is not much question of interesting
him! I’m a botanist by choice and profession, though luckily for me
I could afford to be! I live in spite of it, not by means of it. I’m
working on a vast herbarium and a big book: ‘A Study of the Flora of
New York.’ Now if you knew enough to help me--I’m not sure it would be
just to your future, but--I could use a clever youngster who had what
I’d call botanical common sense as well as sympathy. Come and see me
to-morrow morning! I can measure you if I have you in my study, but
not here. From the beginning a garden, a garden with even one girl in
it, proved fatal to planning for a happy future!” Mr. Moulton twinkled
behind his owl-like lenses. His wife arose to go.
“When Mr. Moulton becomes facetious I say good-night,” she remarked.
“I have a few chapters of my library book to finish before I sleep.
We came only to be assured the Garden children still blossomed.
Fancy finding Cathay Walpole’s boy here!” She arose with a rustling,
impressive dignity, and her husband meekly arose also.
“Another reminiscence of that first garden--I do what the woman bids
me,” he said.
The three girls kissed both their guardian and his wife, and offered
their own cool cheeks to receive their good-night kiss. Then they
escorted them to the gate, while Win strolled beyond it with them,
accompanying them home. Jane and Florimel joined hands and danced like
nymphs up the walk. It was always a strain upon them to keep up to Mrs.
Moulton’s standards of propriety during one of their visits. Mary ran
after the two, having lingered a little to say a last word to their
old friends. Jane switched her skirts, held out in both hands, as she
danced alone around the lawn. Florimel took Chum’s forepaws and tried
to get her to dance, but the big puppy growled a protest and Florimel
gave it up.
“Chum knows the hesitation, all right,” observed Mark.
Florimel caught Mary as she came and swayed her in a mad dance of her
own devising.
“Mrs. Moulton knew your father! Mr. Moulton is going to love you for
old botany’s sake. I’ve been lucky fishing to-day!” Florimel chanted.
“And to-morrow you’ll go to see Mr. Moulton, and I’m going to give Chum
a bath.”
Mark laughed, and looked admiringly at her brilliant beauty.
“What is it about helping lame dogs over stiles? That’s been your job
to-day, Miss Gypsy Florimel!”
“We always have nice times,” said Mary, as if good luck for Mark and
rescue of Chum had been her personal gain. “Come into the house.”
“Such a kindly, motherly house; I love it,” said Mark.
“It’s the greenhouse, you know, for us Garden slips, so it has to be
warm and sort of hospitable,” Jane reminded him.
They all passed in through the wide door, into the broad hall, and the
light from the bend of the wide staircase fell on four happy young
faces, and, Mark rightly thought, on three of the prettiest girls he
had ever seen together.
“It’s a lucky greenhouse with its specimens,” he said shyly, but with a
smile at Mary.