reached Bruce on the dining-room couch. "We have Bruce here, being
nursed by Basil, and bothering the Greys,--tended by everybody.
Cousin Peace is here, of course. And we have adopted a child, more
or less--more or less adopted, I mean; not more or less a child.
Altogether this has been an eventful week for us."
"It certainly sounds so!" cried Hester, looking at Rob hard, not
knowing whether to take her seriously.
"You go into the dining-room; Basil and Wythie and Prue and France
are there, burning incense around our martyred Bruce--as though he
hadn't had enough of burning! I'll open the door for the doctor, who is
tying his horse, and follow you," said Rob. She came in, bringing Dr.
Fairbairn, whose six feet two of height, and proportionate bulk always
seemed to fill up the little grey house in every crevice.
"Is this a bee?" demanded the doctor as he entered, pulling off his
driving-gloves with a light chafing of each hand as he stripped it, and
glancing around at the five girls.
"Two B's, doctor; two thirds of Battalion B, but there's no chance
for anything but the busiest sort of idleness in this house, since
Bruce took possession of it, with his wounded hands,--to drop into a
poetical strain," said Rob.
"Dr. Fairbairn is going to let me decamp on Monday, aren't you,
doctor?" hinted Bruce.
"If you will promise to take proper care of yourself. One would suppose
he might be reasonably contented here, now wouldn't he?" added the
doctor, looking around the pleasant room.
"Oh, well, I may be a B, but I don't want to be a drone," said Bruce.
"I can take lectures with my bandages on. A little too long of this
halcyon weather and I'd be good for nothing, smothered in honey, like
an unworthy B." And Bruce's eyes rested lovingly on the Grey mother
that moment entering.
Hester had been looking so preoccupied all this time that Wythie
noticed it.
"Hester has something to tell us," she said.
"I'll take Bruce up-stairs and bandage him afresh, and Miss Hester can
disburden her mind while we are gone," said Dr. Fairbairn.
"If you wouldn't mind listening, you are the very ones whom I most want
to hear what I have to say--if I have courage," added Hester, with a
sudden unusual shyness.
Dr. Fairbairn settled back into his chair with a surprised look at the
girl.
"I can sit here exactly fifteen minutes," he said, consulting his
candid looking watch.
"I told you, Rob, about that crippled child that I saw in the
tenement," Hester began. Rob nodded. "And I told the others Greys and
Bruce," Rob said.
"I have been thinking hard ever since, and wondering how to help him,"
said Hester. "It seemed to be impossible till I suddenly remembered to
find out how much it cost to support a child, and then I found it a
simple matter, after all. I hate society, I--oh, Rob knows; I didn't
mean to talk about that. But I got mother and father to say that I
might drop certain things which I never wanted to do in the first
place, and use the money they would cost for that boy. I couldn't get
him into a hospital, because he was incurable, so I put him somewhere
to board--in the country--till I could do better. Then it struck me
that it wouldn't cost very much to support a house for such children,
and I talked to father. He was respectful to my plans at last. He had
always laughed me aside, because he thought I was full of notions, just
a dissatisfied young girl. But he told me in this talk I had with him
that if I would go slowly and sanely he would help me every step of
the way; that he couldn't possibly object if I wanted to lead a useful
life, instead of a merely pleasant one--not that this life wouldn't
be pleasanter than playing all the time! I have a little money that
is all my own, and father will help me. I should like to hire a house
and a housekeeper, and put into that house as many incurably crippled
children as we could afford. And I'd like them to have a good doctor's
care, so that, though they were incurable, they might be helped as
much as they could be. And I should like this home to be in Fayre,
where the Greys could help me, and watch over it. Besides, this is
where I learned so much that I should like to have the Home where the
atmosphere of the little grey house could flow over and around it."
Hester paused, quivering with excited eagerness, embarrassed that she
had revealed her innermost self to such a circle of listeners. But it
was a circle of the right sort. Dr. Fairbairn arose, with a mist on his
spectacles. He walked over to Hester and took both her hands. "My dear,
good, earnest child," he said, "I admire you and respect you. You have
thought of a beautiful thing, beautifully conceived and it seems to me
simple and practical. Everything can not be done in a day; let me turn
over in my mind what you have said, and we shall see, we shall see."
"We will do all we can to help you, Hessie," said Mrs. Grey, her eyes
beaming with longing to begin that instant to mother all the maimed
waifs whom Hester could offer her.
"Father will help; I know he will," cried Frances, eagerly.
"Our father, too," said Basil quietly. "Some day he is coming to Fayre,
not too long hence, I hope."
"It is lovely!" cried Prue, her imagination picturing vividly the
attractive rôle of Lady Bountiful to forlorn and grateful childish
hearts.
"I'll begin telling stories again, at once, to earn money for the
support of one little incurable. I could earn enough to support one, if
it were a small one, with not too big a hump, or whatever ailed her,"
said Rob, talking nonsense as usual to hide her deeper feeling. "And,
Hessie, I am proud to call you my friend!"
"I will be a specialist on little children's incurable diseases, and
I will give my services to the Home!" cried Bruce, sitting erect with
tumbled hair and his face glowing with genuine enthusiasm. "I have
always been afraid that I might be a failure in my profession because I
had income enough to live on without practising, but this will save me."
He followed Dr. Fairbairn up-stairs to have his wounds dressed, and
Hester looked from one to the other left behind.
"They were in earnest? They really did approve?" she implored.
"In entire earnest, and they approved profoundly," affirmed Rob. "This
may be the birthday of good that shall outlast our day."
Hester caught her breath. "If only I can do something!" she murmured.
CHAPTER SIX
ITS LEAN-TO ROOM
Bruce went away on Monday, with Basil and Bartlemy to support him, and
with his arms and hands still bound up. He resolutely turned his back
on the temptation to let his wounds serve as an excuse for prolonging
days which had been among the pleasantest of his life, in spite of
physical suffering.
Miss Charlotte had been persuaded by the council of all her friends
to abandon indefinitely her intention of rebuilding her house. It was
irreplaceable; nothing could restore to her the walls permeated with
the love and associations of a lifetime, and there was room for her and
need of her, as Mrs. Grey urged her to remember, in the little grey
house. So, for that winter at least, the little house was the richer
by another inmate, and the Greys set about fitting for her use the
room in the lean-to, to which Rob had been wont to repair through her
childhood and big-girlhood for solitude and inspiration. It really
was a dear room, although one could not stand erect in all parts of it
to view its charms. On either side of the door by which it was entered
sat a low rush-bottomed chair, with yellow stripes running around its
grooved back much dimmed and worn by years of service. At each end of
the room was a window; between the corner and one of these windows
stood a mahogany bedstead, with rolling head and footboard of equal
height. Beside the other window stood a high mahogany bureau, with
carved columns unnecessarily upholding its swelled front upper drawer,
and with two small drawers raising its top into a second story. Above
this bureau hung an old gilt mirror, divided across its top by a strip
of gilt framing a pleasing representation of two white houses facing
a common, through which a walk, bordered by the stiffest of trees,
mounted to the village church. The lean-to roof slanted rapidly down
from these windows on each side of the room towards the south, but the
few feet between the ceiling and the floor on that side were broken by
two half windows, their tiny panes contriving to let in a little of the
southern sunshine and breeze, and a glimpse of the apple-trees beyond.
It really was a most lovable and harmonious room, and its quaintness
seemed the proper setting for Cousin Peace's sweet aloofness from the
world of to-day.
Rob came alone to begin dismantling the room of its mementos of
the time when she had been the Scheherazade of Fayre, and had told
stories to the children for money which the Grey family had then so
sorely needed. These mementos were the absurdities which Battalion
B had showered upon her. The mottoes which Bartlemy had illuminated
still adorned the walls; Rob smiled and then sighed as she took them
down, one after the other--"Young Robin Grey came a-Courtin' We,"
"Plain Tales for the Bills," and other ridiculous sentiments which
the boys had contributed for her to hang in her auditorium, so they
declared, but which had hung here all this time, here where Rob used
to come to prepare her stories. Battalion B's other contributions to
her enterprise were also piled on the chairs and in the corners of
this room--rattan rods, slates, primers, a pedagogue's cap, and an
impossible false front of yellow flax, with its wide cotton parting;
this Bruce had sent her.
Rob laid her treasures in the clothes-basket, amusement and regret
written on her face. She was still young--just over the line, childhood
not out of sight behind her, but its very nearness made it worse to
know that it was inaccessible. Those had been hard days, but they had
been pleasant ones, and sixteen was a delightful age! Eighteen's two
additional years made great differences.
Rob folded the false front down its parting and smoothed its flaxen
locks meditatively. No shadow had come over the jolly comradeship that
had been established between her and Bruce at their first meeting;
he was still her boy friend, treating her with that fine mixture of
consideration, perfect understanding and equality which is the ideal of
American boy and girl friendship. But Rob felt quite sure that Bruce's
chummy manner hid quite as much of another sort of affection for her as
Basil quietly, but frankly showed for Wythie, and which Wythie accepted
with her sweet, honest single-mindedness. Rob had no desire to exchange
her most precious comradeship for love, and Bruce was too keen-eyed
not to know that, and not to retain the good he had by the utmost
vigilance, biding his time in the hope of making himself indispensable
to Rob. Bruce was nineteen; Rob felt sometimes, and for a brief moment
as if she were drifting towards a trap, for she was a little girl at
heart still, and shrank like a wild bird from a retaining hand.
"It is a great pity to be eighteen, and it's a greater pity that your
friends have to grow up," Rob said aloud, depositing the false front
on the top of her collection in the clothes-basket, and recalling
Bruce's expression when he left the little grey house on Sunday night
to be ready for an early start to college Monday morning. He had
bidden her good-bye with his old chummy pat on the shoulder, given
with the finger-tips which protruded from the bandages of his right
hand. All that he had said was: "Good-bye, Bobs Bahadur; you've been
to me the trump you always are. I'll pour oil on the troubled waters
for you if ever you get into trouble--hot water, I suppose I could
more appropriately have said. I don't suppose I'll ever have a chance
to tend you wounded, as you did me, because Bobs Bahadur is a general
that doesn't know defeat, but I'll read to you if you are laid up, and
return my obligations in any other way, if I have the chance. A wounded
hero might have worse nurses than you and Wythie, and Prue, too,
between her pursuit of knowledge."
He had gone off laughing, speaking like a schoolboy, but though Bruce
could control his tongue, and include Rob with the other two girls, he
could not keep his eyes from regarding her with a look that told her
there was only one girl in all the world for Bruce Rutherford.
"Bother such nonsense!" ejaculated Rob impatiently, shaking her
shoulders as she saw her clouded face in the gilt mirror, below the
village green and the white cottages.
"What nonsense, Robin?" asked Miss Charlotte's soft voice, and Rob
turned towards her, glad for the moment that her cousin could not see
her face.
"Only growing up, being a young woman, Cousin Peaceful," she said. "I
was taking down these trophies of my story-telling days, the absurd
things Battalion B used to send me, and I was thinking what good times
we used to have, and what a pity it was that we couldn't be boys and
girls forever instead of sober men and women."
"I haven't noticed any very great sobriety so far, Robin dear,"
remarked Miss Charlotte quietly. "Do you feel sorry to see the story
unfolding for Wythie and Basil?"
"Oh, I hate it! No, I don't!" cried Rob. "I'm glad about it, of
course--Wythie goes on as quietly as if she were a little rosebud
opening--sunflower, would be a better simile, because she looks up
to Basil in the most sunflowerish way imaginable. But it is rather
horrid, though it is nice, now don't you think so, Cousin Peace?"
"I think Robin is not fully fledged yet," said Cousin Peace wisely,
and Rob was silenced by the portentous little word at the end of her
sentence.
Cousin Peace had firmly refused to consider becoming one of the
family in the little grey house unless she were allowed to use the
lean-to room which was never occupied; no one, she declared, should be
disturbed by her coming, though Rob promptly reminded her that they
were sure to be disturbed by her wherever she might be, for she was
such a disturbing element. Rob was constantly caressing Cousin Peace by
loving pretence of her being a great trial.
The Greys had all objected to giving Miss Charlotte the lean-to room,
but when it was ready for her Wythie cried out in surprised delight:
"Why, it's the very nicest room in the whole house!"
It was a dear little room. The old-fashioned, fine furniture remained
in its place. Soft green and white short curtains framed the small
paned windows, plain green carpet covered the floor, long boxes of
flowers stood before the half windows on the south side of the room,
under the lean-to, and a few good pictures hung on the straight sides
of the walls. Though Cousin Peace could never see her surroundings, her
senses were so delicate that one felt impelled to surround her with
the finest beauty, beauty which she, more than most people, would have
revelled in had she not been debarred from seeing it. But Rob said
truly that "Cousin Peace's insight was much keener than most people's
outsight"; it was hard to believe that she did not get all the colour
and outline of every picture, flower, and sunset that came before her.
Over Miss Charlotte's bed Wythie had hung a fine photograph of St.
Lucy, with her lamp and the palm of a martyr's victory. It was like
Oswyth to remember the significance of St. Lucy's legend, her sacrifice
of her beautiful eyes and her reward of others more beautiful than
those which she had lost, and her name's meaning--light. To remember
how peculiarly appropriate to blind Cousin Charlotte, whose inward
vision revealed to her more than mere eyes could have shown, was the
legend of Santa Lucia.
"It seems kind of quiet, like a place to be good in," said little Polly
Flinders, surveying the result of the girls' work in the lean-to room
with serious gaze, as she nursed Prue's old doll, Hortense.
It grew to be just that to all the Grey family. When annoyances came,
when those days dawned which dawn for every one, in which nothing seems
right and many things seem wrong; when nerves quivered and other people
seemed suddenly aggressive and unkind, then Wythie, Rob, and Prue fell
into the habit of creeping up to Cousin Peace's little lean-to room to
be set straight.
"It is like having a domestic chapel," said Rob, who most of the three
was subject to perturbed spirits and the variability, which, she said
herself, was due to the reddish shade of her bright brown hair.
Little Polly Flinders loved dearly to crawl off into the corner, as far
under the lean-to as the low rocking-chair, which had served all the
Greys in turn, would go, and quietly to sit rocking Hortense, watching
Miss Charlotte with awe-struck eyes that never got to the end of the
charm and the lessons of that gentle face.
It became Polly's task to water the flowers in the boxes under the
windows in the lowest dip of the lean-to, because she most easily
of any of the inmates of the little grey house could crawl up to
them as they thirstily awaited her. Perhaps it was because Polly was
so faithful to them, perhaps because Charlotte Grey loved them so
dearly, but for some reason the flowers in the lean-to room blossomed
as no others in Fayre seemed to blossom, and filled the air with the
sweetness of mignonette, heliotrope, and roses, brightening the quiet
room with their glad colours.
Prue came home one afternoon with a face that would have betrayed her
perturbed state of mind to her family had there been any one about to
have seen it. But her mother had gone to Aunt Azraella's, Wythie and
Rob were out, Lydia sat in the kitchen darning long black hose to a
wailing accompaniment, and Kiku-san was too sleepy at that hour to be
observant of Prue's expression.
But the instant she crossed the threshold of the lean-to room, Miss
Charlotte dropped her knitting--as usual she was making soft wrappings
for little babies--and said: "Why, Prudy, dear girl, what has happened?"
"No one ever sees things as quickly as you do, Cousin Peace!" exclaimed
Prue, taking off her hat before the landscape mirror, and lightly
"fluffing" her golden hair before she took the low stool opposite
Cousin Peace. "There hasn't anything really happened, Cousin Charlotte,
but there is a chance for something to happen."
"There usually is," remarked Cousin Peace, resuming her knitting.
"Fourteen chances of sixty minutes each, at the very least, in each
day, and I think we may as well count them as twenty-four, because the
greatest event of my life was that dreadful fire, and that happened in
the night."
"Yes, but I mean that I have a chance, right here in my hand, for
something nice to happen to me, and I'm afraid mama won't let it
happen," said Prue dubiously.
Miss Charlotte reached over and touched the letter that Prue held.
"What is it all about, Prue?" she asked, leaning back again.
"First of all, Cousin Peace, do you think it is so very dreadful to be
ambitious?" asked Prue.
"I think it is very dreadful to lack ambition, Prudy. I think it all
depends on the direction one's ambitions take," returned Miss Charlotte.
"Mama warns me all the time not to be ambitious, to be content--I think
she means humdrum," said Prue. "Of course there is no one half as good
as mama, but just think a minute, Cousin Peace. She married early,
and she has been swallowed up in her home, living for us and for poor
papa. Now, couldn't a woman be good and happy if she was called to a
different life? Is this the only way to be good?"
"Prue, that is a foolish question, because you know quite well that a
great many people are being good, in a great many different ways and
places," said Cousin Peace. "Just what have you in mind? Don't you
think you had better tell me exactly what you have to decide? What is
the text of your address?"
"Yes, it is this that has set me off, but I think of these things a
good deal," said Prue slowly. "This is a letter from Hester Baldwin.
She knows I want dreadfully to go to New York for music, and drawing,
and languages, and such special studies. She has told me that her
father can get me into a perfectly fine school--I think I mean a
fashionable school," Prue interrupted herself to say, with the honesty
that was a Grey characteristic. "She says that they would be delighted
to have me spend the winter with them, with the Baldwins, Cousin
Charlotte, who entertain and go out a lot, and where I should have a
chance to meet the people I want to know, and to see the life I want to
see--Oh, I know mama will say no!" Prue broke off with almost a sob.
"Prue, you are but sixteen," began Miss Charlotte.
"Just at the age when impressions are keenest!" cried Prue. "It would
do me heaps of good! Don't disapprove, Cousin Charlotte! Please don't!
I want you to make mama see it my way."
"My dear little Prudy, come nearer; put your head on my lap. There!"
said Cousin Charlotte, running her long fingers through the hair that
glistened like spun gold between them. "Now, dear, listen to me. You
are getting a good education in Fayre; better, very possibly, than
you would have in that fashionable school--certainly as good as one
could ask. Look at the question honestly, Prudence, and as a truthful
girl tell me if I am not right when I say that I think you are far
better off to be denied this doubtful opportunity that has come to you.
You have good society in Fayre; the companionship of gentlemen and
gentlewomen, and it is society within the scope of your income to go
into and to receive in your turn. In New York you would meet well-bred
people too, dear, because the Baldwins would not admit other into their
home, but fashionable people are not necessarily well-bred; as soon
as you went beyond the Baldwin's immediate circle you would probably
find many things less satisfactory than they are here. This is an age
in which notoriety is mistaken for fame, and success is measured by a
standard very like the circus posters which adorn the barns around
Fayre in June. You have been taught by example and precept that success
is not always measured by results, but is always measured by the end
for which one works and lives. Dear Prue, keep your ideals; never for
one moment lose your hold on the vision of perfection in character
and the ends for which you labour. It is a dream which brings its own
fulfilment, if not in outward surroundings, at least in the character
of the dreamer. Your mother fears, dear Prue, your tendency to be
attracted by glitter and by the noise of plaudits which are not the
echo of truth. Neither of the other girls will be drawn away from their
poise of mind, which enables them to distinguish relative values very
exactly. But you, my Prudy, are less content, and your mother wants you
to find happiness within yourself, since outward belongings never give
it."
"But, Cousin Peace, I only want to see and be seen; I can't help
knowing what I look like, and I want to use my gifts in a larger
field," said Prue, very low, and rather glad that her cousin could
not see her handsome face as she claimed its possession. "Now, do you
despise me?"