the morning papers lately a notice of the entertainment you gave in
this town, in which it was stated that your costumes were veritable
antiques, heirlooms of the Grey family. My principal is a person of
remarkable astuteness; he said at once: 'Demetrius, where there is so
many antique garments there very likely may be antique furniture and
china. Take a train to Fayre on the first convenient morning, and buy
it up.'"
Mrs. Grey gasped at the assurance of this speech, but Rob laughed
outright. "Buy up the train or buy up the morning?" she asked. "And is
this a convenient morning? I have always found mornings more or less
convenient; they answer to begin the day with."
The visitor was impervious to ridicule, and he smiled kindly at Rob's
fun-crinkled face.
"It suited me, Miss Grey," he said. "It was perfectly convenient to me.
I could not come yesterday, because I went out to Jersey in pursuit of
a corner dresser which proved utterly valueless, utterly worthless,
I assure you. I am glad to see through the vista afforded me by that
door that here I have not come in vain. If I mistake not that room,
which I assume to be your dining-room, contains genuine pieces of old
mahogany." He stepped forward as he spoke, and before the indignant
Greys could interpose he had passed them and gone into the dining-room,
ushered forward by Lydia, whose face expressed the deepest admiration
for the language with which he was inundating her entranced ears.
"Ah!" observed this curious person with the Graeco-Hibernian name,
"Now there is a side-board for which I am prepared to make a liberal
offer, and for all the pewter which surmounts it. Also for that corner
cupboard, and the blue and white china which it contains. Also for that
cloverleaf side table. And here are chairs for which I will make a
lump offer sufficient to replace them with moderns quite as good from
the point of view of any but a collector. This is your sitting-room,
I perceive," continued the invader, pushing on. "Just as I expected!
For those high book-cases I am prepared to give as much as a hundred
dollars apiece. That card-table, that work-table, that claw legged
great sofa--all these things I will take, and give you more than any
other dealer in New York. Doubtless you have antique bureaux, chairs,
tables, all sorts of antique stuff in your bedrooms. I will just run
them over hastily and make a rough inventory, and we will write you,
we will write you, offering for everything, calculating each piece
individually, but offering in the lump. I assure you we shall give you
a good sum--it will mount above a thousand dollars, I fancy, judging
from my rapid survey, and I am considered as good a judge of antiques
as there is in the city. It is not impossible that you have a tester
bed? An old high poster? I will take that at two hundred, if it is
in good condition. It is remarkable to find a collection so complete
so near New York; I consider myself lucky that no other dealer has
superseded me. Now, if you please, the bedrooms."
He turned towards the hall with the same cheerful confidence and rapid
movement that he had evinced since, rescued from Ben Bolt, whose
intelligence the Greys were rating higher with every word, he had bent
his attention upon the errand which had brought him to the little grey
house.
But as he started in that direction Mrs. Grey recovered from the
stunned state of mind into which the suddenness and rapidity of Mr.
Dennis' invasion had thrown her. She uttered the one word: "Stop!"
with such force that it arrested the invader. He wheeled suddenly,
presenting to the Greys a face of such amazement that Rob burst out
laughing, although her cheeks were reddened with anger.
"Mr. Dennis," said Mrs. Grey, consulting the card for the name, "you
lose sight of a very important fact. I have not offered my furniture
for sale, nor have had the slightest intention of parting with it.
Is it your habit to push through houses in this impertinent manner,
assuming that your presence, and your appraisals, and offers to
purchase are welcome? You will remain, sir, precisely where you are;
my house is not open for your inspection, nor are its contents for
sale. The reason for the presence here of so many relics of the past,
which you seem to consider remarkable, is very simple. This house
has remained in one family for more than two hundred years, and its
treasures have not been on the market. They are not for sale now. You
will withdraw at once. This front door is the safer way; the goat is
still in the orchard."
Demetrius Dennis beamed on the indignant lady with an indulgent and
approving smile. "My dear madam," he said, "I see that you have an eye
for business, and there is nothing that I do so admire as business
sense. It is right for you to hold out for as large a price as you
can get, and of course the more you seem not to care to sell, the
more likely we are to persist and come down with something handsome.
Something handsome it will be, I assure you, Mrs. Grey, and that I
have told you frankly from the beginning. It has never come in my way
to notice that people wouldn't sell in the end if they got what they
wanted for their stuff. We shall not balk at a good price, because the
collection includes so much that it will be worth our while to take it
entire, and I don't mean that any other dealer shall get it."
There was a certainty of common understanding in the man's manner that
disarmed Mrs. Grey's indignation as it stirred her sense of humor. It
was perfectly evident that he considered himself her benefactor, and
felt sure that, after some necessary delays for finesse, the furniture
would be his. Whereat not only he would be entirely happy but he would
leave the Greys even more so in the possession of a check large enough
to furnish the little house over again in shining, highly varnished
newness.
Her eyes softened into a laugh of pure amusement, which she prevented
from reaching her lips, but Wythie and Rob were too young to be
tolerant of impertinence, and Rob's eyes emitted an indignant flash
as she said sternly: "You have heard my mother's order to leave the
house. She has told you that its contents are not for sale. You will
immediately obey her: there is the door."
"Now, why should you be huffy, my dear young lady?" began Mr. Dennis,
reasonably. "Can't you see it's for your advantage to sell, and don't
you suppose that I don't want to go back to town and report a failure?
I don't generally fail, you know, when my head sends me out to buy for
him."
"Nevertheless you have failed this time," said Rob. And gentle Oswyth
added as she set the front door back: "Leave the house at once, sir.
You are not to discuss the subject, nor be so impertinent as to assume
that my mother means less than every syllable that she has uttered."
Here Lydia stepped to the fore. "This gentleman has left his hat in the
kitchen. Come back the way you come in, sir, and I will hand it to you."
Demetrius Dennis, who looked much chagrined--even wounded--by the
girls' sternness, turned to Lydia with a grateful smile. "No offence
meant, I don't see why there should be any taken," he said. "If you
insist on keeping the stuff, and on me going, there isn't anything else
to be done but to let you keep it, and to go. But you don't know how
hard it is for me to believe you'd refuse the offer I'd have made. Say,
I'll leave that card with you, and if you change your mind when you
talk it over around the evening lamp to-night--as you may you know, as
you may--why a postal card dropped to me at that address will fetch me
out here right away. You hadn't ought to be angry, madam; it's all in
the way of business."
"I see that you consider it so. Another time you would be wiser to
hesitate before you intrude. At least find out if you may inventory
people's property. It doesn't matter. Lydia, take him safely out
beyond Ben Bolt who evidently shares our prejudices against too great
a disregard of private rights." And Mrs. Grey's lips twitched at the
memory of the picture Mr. Demetrius Dennis had presented on their first
glimpse of him.
"I wish you good-morning, ladies," said that individual with a bow
comprehensive of the irate younger ones, and the amused elder ladies.
Then he followed Lydia to the kitchen in pursuit of his hat, and after
an unaccountable delay they saw him crossing the orchard in Lydia's
wake, who preceded him as a bulwark against Ben Bolt.
At the rear gate their handmaid lingered long; the Greys saw her
engaged in earnest conversation with the Graeco-Hibernian. By this time
even Rob's indignation at his impertinence had given way to her sense
of the ridiculous, and Mrs. Grey, Miss Charlotte, and the two girls
were in the full tide of peals of laughter when Lydia reappeared to
rebuke them tacitly by her gravity of demeanour, beneath which gleamed
something like self-satisfaction.
"He told me to go straight in to you when I got into the house and say
that he wasn't one mite offended, and for you to preserve the card in
case you changed your mind," said Lydia. "He's a gentleman, that's what
he is," added Lydia, as she half turned in the doorway, as one who
would be willing to entertain a motion to linger.
"Is he, Lydia?" asked Rob demurely. "How did he prove it?"
"By not bearing ill-will when you all got angry," said Lydia with
spirit. "And by his conversation with me. He's serious-minded; says
he neither drinks, smokes, chews nor swears, and considers life too
short to be wasted on dangerous pastimes, like such. He's got a lot
of serious books that came in an old book-case his folks bought.
He's going to come out here some pleasant night and lend me those
books--bring 'em with him. I'd admire to read 'em! Some are biographies
of good men, and some are sermons; he says some are obituary sermons.
He's a perfect gentleman!"
Lydia departed to begin getting a dinner that would inevitably be late
at best.
"Obituary sermons! Coming to lend them to Lydia! The test of
gentlemanhood!" murmured Rob.
"Are we witnessing the dawn of a romance?" asked Wythie, whose
perceptions in that direction were keener of late.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ITS SEPARATE ELL
"Its no wonder they called it spring," said Prue, coming into the
house with her jacket on her arm and her golden hair lying damp on her
flushed forehead. "The way it is sprung on us is dreadful. It is a
perfect dream of a day, but I'm half dead in these winter clothes, and
the day before yesterday we had snow squalls!"
She dropped into a chair and threw open the window beside it.
"Sore throat weather, Prue!" warned her mother. "You must not sit in a
draught when you are so heated. Come over here, dear, you will be cool
enough after you have been in the house a little while. May has a trick
of masquerading as July without warning us that she is going to change
her rôle."
"But isn't it delicious?" cried Miss Charlotte, going to the window
which Prue had left open as she obeyed her mother, and breathing in
the damp, fresh odours of young grass, lilacs, blossoms, and all the
haunting, indefinable scents of the spring. Then she half sighed, and
stood leaning her head against the window-sash.
Rob came in from the kitchen with a voluminous gored apron embracing
her closely from collar to hem, and with her bright hair more
than usually ringed in moist tendrils, and with her right sleeve
flour-dusted from her cake making.
"Dear me, how warm it is out by the stove!" she exclaimed. "And Lydia
expects Demetrius this evening, so she brought me molasses instead of
sugar, and forgot to take the draughts off, after her fire was burning
up, so the oven is so scorching hot that my cake has to wait till it
can get a chance to rise in the oven before it is burned to a crisp."
"I wonder if it is true that Demetrius is going to settle in Fayre?"
laughed Prue.
"Perfectly true. Lydia says that he is going to be an auctioneer, and
it seemed to me that I had never heard of such a happy choice of a
profession," said Rob. "I think that affair is going to be serious."
"It couldn't be anything else with Lydia as one of the principals,"
commented Wythie on her way through the room with some branches of
apple blossoms for the vases, just catching Rob's last words and their
connection.
"We don't keep a servant--not even one; we have help," said Rob. "And
she is much less helpful help for being so engrossed by Demetrius." She
glanced at Cousin Peace as she spoke and instantly perceived the droop
of the gentle head, the unwonted melancholy of her attitude.
"Cousin Peaceful, dearest, what are you thinking about?" she asked
going over to put her arms around Miss Charlotte, oblivious to the
floury record she was making on her cousin's soft grey waist.
"I am half afraid to tell you, for fear you will think me ungrateful,
and----"
"Generally horrid," supplemented Rob. "So we shall, but never mind
that!"
"You know how happy I am here, in my dear little lean-to room," Miss
Charlotte went on, pressing the warm hands closer to her. "So you can't
suspect me of lack of appreciation when I say that I am afraid that I
want to take my insurance money and build a little home of my own on
the site of the dear old one."
"I felt sure you were thinking of that, Charlotte, and dreading to say
it," cried Mrs. Grey. "I couldn't anticipate you in speaking, but I
have been sorry to see that you were longing for your own home and not
daring to say so."
"Do you approve, Mary?" cried Miss Charlotte, wheeling about with
girlish eagerness.
"No; I think you are better here, among us all, without any care, and
knowing that you are blessing us every day, merely by living," said
Mrs. Grey, rising to join Rob at Miss Charlotte's other side. "But I
understand the love of place, and the love of home--the feeling that
you want your own little nook, and, since you do feel thus, I approve
of your building. Yes, I approve of the building; I do not approve of
your wanting--oh, I don't mean that! I mean I think you are entitled to
your own fireside, but I want to keep you."
"You are the best Mary of all the thousands in the world!" cried Miss
Charlotte. "You are so sweetly reasonable! Yes, I love every one of you
much more than you know, well as you know my love, and I love this dear
little grey house--but I want my home."
"You shall have your own home!" cried Mrs. Grey, while Rob and Prue
looked at each other aghast at the prospect of letting Cousin Peace
slip away out of their household. "The first thing to be done is to
consult on plans."
"I have made some plans myself," said Cousin Peace meekly.
"Oh, you sly, deceiving Cousin Peace!" cried Rob reproachfully, but not
surprised to hear that the blind woman had been turning architect, for
Miss Charlotte's blindness never seemed to be a deprivation of sight,
so sensitive were her fingers and nerves. She now produced from her
knitting-bag, which always hung on her left arm, two sheets of paper
and spread them out lovingly. "I have been amusing myself with these
at odd moments," she said. "I think this will make a charming and
inexpensive little house."
Prue came over to look at the plans with the others. They were wavering
as to line at times, but they were perfectly correct in dimensions, and
were a design for a house most tasteful and comfortable, with all sorts
of little nooks and contrivances to enhance the pleasure of living and
the beauty of each room.
"It couldn't be nicer!" cried Rob, and immediately added: "Oh, my cake,
my cake!" and fled. Her eyes were moist with tears when she came into
the kitchen, and Lydia looked up with her serious air to inquire if
anything had happened.
"Yes, Lyddie," said Rob. "It's all right, but it makes me heartsick.
We've got to give up Cousin Charlotte. She loves us as much as we love
her, but she wants to build a house for herself on her old place, and I
suppose we must let her, because it is natural that she should hunger
for her old surroundings."
"I think," said Lydia with that portentous manner of hers, that made
the opening announcement that _she_ thought seem little less than the
declaration of an ecumenical council, "I think that she ought to do it.
I think everybody that can get one had ought to have a home. I have
been wondering why Miss Grey didn't do just what she's going to do. As
for you, you can't really say you need her, with such a family as yours
is. I said to Demetrius the last time he was out that if she only would
build and go to housekeeping I should ask her to let us take care of
her place, him outside, me inside. For I might as well tell you now,
Roberta, and you can tell the rest, that Mr. Dennis and I are engaged
to be married."
"I hope you will be very happy, Lydia," said Rob, not quite knowing how
to reply.
"He's a man in a thousand, in a million," said Lydia impressively, "for
all you took a dislike to him when you first saw him."
"Oh, but I didn't, Lydia! I only disliked his methods of transacting
business," cried Rob. "He came too much as the winds come when navies
are stranded."
Lydia passed over her denial with the dignified virtue of one who
disdained casuistry. "You spoke up to him sharp, but he never laid
it up against you," she said. "He has a disposition for which he had
ought to be thankful to heaven, and I make no doubt he is. And he never
practises any of those small vices which people allow themselves, and
which pave the way to entire destruction--I allude to cigar smoking and
the like."
Rob remembered the ashes in a certain jar in the sitting-room, left
there by Basil and Bruce's cigars and Bartlemy's artist pipe, and was
silent, examining her cake in the oven to hide her quivering lips.
"I am glad that he is a good man, Lydia, for I'm sure I don't see what
you would do with an imperfect one," she said, and Lydia was gratified
to hear the quaver in Rob's voice which she attributed to emotion. "And
so you are going to be married, and want to live with Cousin Peace? Can
your Demetrius do gardening?"
"He thoroughly understands all kinds of gardening," returned
Lydia. "There are few auctions in Fayre, so between times he would
be gardening, and I should do the housework. It would be a lucky
arrangement for your cousin and--and us." And immovable Lydia faltered
over the latter touching pronoun.
"And what would become of us without you, Lydia?" asked Rob. "Have you
thought of us?"
"My mother would come to do for you," said Lydia, "and she knows how to
do everything better than I do."
"Is she--younger than you, Lyddie?" asked Rob.
Lydia gave Rob one of the glances by which she frequently reproved
frivolity. "A mother is never younger than her child," she said
sternly. "But my mother is livelier than I am, and she is only
middle-aged--forty-three."
"How can your mother be only forty-three?" cried Rob involuntarily.
"I am twenty-four, and she was nineteen years old when I was born,"
said Lydia. "It seems to me I smell that cake."
"So do I," said Rob, taking it out of the oven. "Well, we'll see about
your mother, and all the rest of the plan when the time comes. Cousin
Charlotte has not even begun to build. I must hurry off, or I shall not
be ready when the guests come."
Rob ran out of the room, Lydia's voice pursuing her into the hall.
"If she knows she can get Mr. Dennis and me she may hasten; her Annie
that she had has gone away, and she would likely build quicker if she
knew there was some one she could count on." Lydia called after her,
and Rob burst in upon Wythie at her toilette in their bedroom with the
surprising news of the past hour.
"Oh, dear," sighed Wythie while she laughed at Rob's account of Lydia's
announcement, "how can Cousin Peace want to leave us and how can we let
her go? Yet, of course, it is natural that she should cling to that
spot where she was born and has always lived, and natural to want her
own home. But that dear lean-to domestic chapel will be a sore loss to
us! It seems to me that this has been a winter of uneventful events
that count for a great deal."
"I suppose that is partly because we are at that age when everything
seems significant," said Rob with great astuteness. "It will make a lot
of difference to me just now if I can't get ready in time to be down at
the station when the train arrives." And she frantically tried to find
the button which was, naturally, on the other side of the band of the
skirt, which she had put on wrong side out.
"'Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe,'" quoted
Wythie mildly as she went to rescue Rob from her plight. "There is
time, Robin, if you only wouldn't try to take it all at once."
"Robins are always flustering birds," said Rob emerging, flushed, but
grateful, from the skirt which Oswyth had righted. "But you know it
would be hard not to be on hand to witness the arrival of the first
instalments."
This was "the spring opening," as Rob called it, of "the separate
ell" of the little grey house. In other words the Flinders' farm had
been made ready, after trying delays, to receive the four crippled
children with whom Hester's experiment was to begin, and they were to
be brought to Fayre by a delegation from New York on the mid-afternoon
train. Dr. Fairbairn had had an inspiration, so natural that every one
wondered why it had not been part of the plan from the first: this was
to install Mrs. Flinders as housekeeper in her own house. It involved
the presence of her paralysed husband, but Polly was to remain with
the Greys, an arrangement so much to the child's advantage that her
mother gladly agreed to it. So the Flinders were already installed on
the farm, which, after much discussion had received the name of Rob's
suggesting, and was called Green Pastures.
"There is something so peaceful about it," said Rob, "and when we teach
the children the child's own psalm they will take it as referring
directly to themselves when they say: 'He maketh me to lie down in
green pastures.' And if ever the attempt did grow into something
important I for one would rather have it spoken of as Green Pastures
than as the Hester Home for Incurables, or some such forbidding name--I
hate the institutional sound!"
So Green Pastures it was, and a busy time its friends had had making it
a real clover pasture for its little guests.
There was not to be a formal opening to which the public was invited;
it was too simple and modest an attempt to be inaugurated ceremonially,
and the youth of its founders made their elders desire to see its
first beneficiaries installed in a way harmonious with that youth and
inexperience. But on the other hand it was impossible to let the day
go by without some special notice; the plan had grown too important
for that. So the Baldwins and Mr. Armstrong were coming out from
town, bringing the children; the Rutherfords were coming home for the
occasion, and Mrs. Silsby, Aunt Azraella and Miss Charlotte with Mrs.
Grey were to have a tea in Mrs. Flinders' former best parlour after the
children had been fed and tucked away in the little white enamelled
beds provided for them.
A rosy-cheeked young woman with experience in a children's hospital,
had been engaged to look after these first arrivals, and stood ready
to receive them in her white cap and apron when Wythie and Rob and
Prue had left Green Pastures at noon, having satisfied themselves that
nothing was wanting, and having hovered over the spotless, little
waiting beds with something painfully sweet and tender stirring in
their womanly girl-hearts.
"I haven't done anything for this except sympathize," said Wythie
ruefully as she walked down the street to the station with Frances and
Prue, all three radiant in festive garments. Rob hastened to overtake
them, putting on a new pair of gloves as she came, for which, in spite
of propriety, there had been absolutely no time to delay in the house.
"What has any of us done more than that, except Hester and Rob?" asked
Frances. "Rob has earned money for it by her story-telling, and Hester
has sacrificed for it, and founded it, but we have only encouraged
it----"
"And danced and sang for it," added Prue.
"Your mother has done a great deal, and your father has given money
enough to supplement all deficiencies in this beginning," said Wythie.
"However, I am not envious; I only wish I were more useful."
"I think there isn't a bit of difference in the credit," said Frances,
not merely sensibly but rather profoundly. "We all were ready to do
what we could, and it is the will that counts, not opportunity. Hester
and Rob are not like us--we are not brilliant like Rob, nor intense and
tremendous like Hester; we are background figures, Oswyth."