CHRISTMAS GUESTS
Helen caught the sound of returning wheels on the drive about four
o’clock. It was nearly dark. She stood on the front staircase, leaning
over the balustrade to reach the big wrought iron hall lamp. When she
opened the door widely, its rays shining through the leaded red glass,
cast a path of welcome outside.
“Hello, there,” Jean called. “We’re all here.”
Doris jumped to the ground and took Joe by the hand, giving it a
reassuring squeeze. He was shivering, but she hurried him around to the
kitchen door and they burst in where Kit was getting supper. Over in a
corner lay burlap sacks fairly oozing green woodsy things for the
Christmas decoration at the church, and Kit had fastened up one long
trailing length of ground evergreen over an old steel engraving of
Daniel Webster that Cousin Roxy had given them.
“He ain’t as pretty as he might be,” she had said, pleasantly, “but I
guess if George Washington was the father of his country, we’ll have to
call Daniel one of its uncles.”
“Look, Kit,” Doris cried, quite as if Joe had been some wonderful gift
from the fairies instead of a dusty, tired, limp little derelict of fate
and circumstance. “This is Joe, and he’s come to stay with us. Where’s
Mother?”
One quick look at Joe’s face checked all mirthfulness in Kit. There were
times when silence was really golden. She was always intuitive, quick to
catch moods in others and understand them. This case needed the
Motherbird. Joe was fairly blue from the cold, and there was a pinched,
hungry look around his mouth and nose that made Kit leave her currant
biscuits.
“Upstairs with Father. Run along quick and call her, Dorrie.” She knelt
beside Joe and smiled that radiant, comradely smile that was Kit’s
special present from her fairy godmother. “We’re so glad you’ve come
home,” she said, drawing him near the crackling wood fire. “You sit on
the woodbox and just toast.” She slipped back into the pantry and dipped
out a mug of rich, creamy milk, then cut a wide slice of warm
gingerbread. “There now. See how that tastes. You know, it’s the
funniest thing how wishes come true. I was just longing for somebody to
sample my cake and tell me if it was good. Is it?”
Joe drank nearly the whole glass of milk before he spoke, looking over
the rim at her with very sleepy eyes.
“It’s awful good,” he said. “I ain’t had anything to eat since yesterday
morning.”
“Oh, dear,” cried Kit. This was beyond her. She turned with relief at
Mrs. Robbins’ quick light step in the hall.
“Yes, dear, I know. Jeanie told me.” She put Kit to one side, and went
straight over to the wood box. And she did just the one right thing.
That was the marvel of the Motherbird. She seemed always to know
naturally what a person needed most and gave it to them. Down she
stooped and took Joe in her arms, his head on her shoulder, patting him
while he began to cry chokingly.
“Never mind, laddie, now,” she told him. “You’re home.” She lifted him
to her lap and started to untie his worn sodden shoes. “Doris, get your
slippers, dear, and a pair of stockings too, the heavy ones. Warm the
milk, Kit, it’s better that way. And you cuddle down on the old lounge
by the sitting room fire, Joe, and rest. That’s our very best name for
the world up here, did you know it? We call it our hills of rest.”
Shad came in breezily, bringing the Christmas boxes and a shower of
light snow. He stared at the stranger with a broad grin of welcome.
“Those folks that went up in the automobile stopped off at Judge
Ellis’s. Folks from Boston, I understood Hardy to say. He just stopped a
minute to ask what was in the boxes, so I thought I’d inquire too.”
Nothing of interest ever got by the Greenacre gate posts if Shad could
waylay it. Helen asked him to open the boxes right away, but no, Shad
would not. And he showed her where it was written, plain as could be, in
black lettering along one edge:
“Not to be opened till Christmas.”
Mrs. Robbins had gone into the sitting room and found a gray woolen
blanket in the wall closet off the little side hall. From the chest of
drawers she took some of Doris’s outgrown winter underwear. Supper was
nearly ready, but Joe was to have a warm bath and be clad in clean fresh
clothing. Tucking him under one wing, as Kit said, she left the kitchen
and Jean told the rest how she had rescued him from Mr. Briggs’s
righteous indignation and charitable intentions.
“Got a good face and looks you square in the eye,” said Shad. “I’d take
a chance on him any day, and he can help around the place a lot,
splitting kindlings, and shifting stall bedding and what not.”
The telephone bell rang and Jean answered. Rambling up through the hills
from Norwich was the party line, two lone wires stretching from
home-hewn chestnut poles. Its tingling call was mighty welcome in a land
where so little of interest or variation ever happened. This time it was
Cousin Roxy at the other end. After her marriage to the Judge, they had
taken the long deferred wedding trip up to Boston, visiting relatives
there, and returning in time for a splendid old-fashioned Thanksgiving
celebration at the Ellis homestead. Maple Lawn was closed for the winter
but Hiram, the hired man, “elected” as he said, to stay on there
indefinitely and work the farm on shares for Miss Roxy as he still
called her.
“And like enough,” Cousin Roxy said comfortably, when she heard of his
intentions, “he’s going to marry somebody himself. I wouldn’t put it
past him a mite. I wish he’d choose Cindy Anson. There she is living
alone down in that little bit of a house, running a home bakery when
she’s born to fuss over a man. I told Hiram when I left, if I was him
I’d buy all my pies and cake from Cindy, and then when I drove by
Cindy’s I just dropped a passing word about how badly I felt at leaving
such a fine man as Hiram to shift for himself up at the house, so she
said she’d keep an eye on him.”
“But, Cousin Roxy,” Jean had objected, “that’s match-making.”
“Maybe ’tis so,” smiled Roxy placidly. “But I always did hold to it that
Cupid and Providence both needed a sight of jogging along to keep them
stirring.”
Over the telephone now came her voice, vibrant and cheery, and Jean
answered the call.
“Hello, yes, this is Jean. Mother’s right in the sitting room. Who? Oh,
wait till I tell the girls.” She turned her head; her brown eyes
sparkling. “Boston cousins over at the Judge’s. Who did you say they
are, Cousin Roxy? Yes? Cousin Beth and Elliott Newell. I’ll tell Father
right away. Tomorrow morning early? That’s splendid. Goodbye.”
Before the girls could stop her, she was on her way upstairs. The
largest sunniest chamber had been turned into the special retiring place
of the king, as Helen called her father.
“All kings and emperors had some place where they could escape from
formality and rest up,” she had declared. “And Plato loved to hide away
in his olive grove, so that is Dad’s. Somebody else, I think it’s
Emerson, says we ought to keep an upper chamber in our souls, well swept
and garnished, with windows wide.”
“Not too wide this kind of weather, Helenita,” Jean interrupted, for
Helen’s wings of poetry were apt to flutter while she forgot to shake
her duster. Still, it was true, and one of the charms of the old Mansion
House was its spaciousness. There were many rooms, but the pleasantest
of all was the “king’s thinking place.”
The months of relaxation and rest up in the hills had worked wonders in
Mr. Robbins’ health. As old Dr. Gallup was apt to say when Kit rebelled
at the slowness of recovery,
“Can’t expect to do everything in a minute. Even the Lord took six days
to fix things the way he liked them.”
Instead of spending two-thirds of his time in bed or on the couch now,
he would sit up for hours and walk around the wide porch, or even along
the garden paths before the cold weather set in. But there still swept
over him without warning the great fatigue and weakness, the dizziness
and exhaustion which had followed as one of the lesser ills in his
nervous breakdown.
He sat before the open fire now, reading from one of his favorite
weeklies, with Gladness purring on his knees. Doris had found Gladness
one day late in October, dancing along the barren stretch of road going
over to Gayhead school, for all the world like a yellow leaf. She was a
yellow kitten with white nose and paws. Also, she undoubtedly had the
gladsome carefree disposition of the natural born vagabond, but Doris
had tucked her up close in her arms and taken her home to shelter.
Some day, the family agreed, when all hopes and dreams had come true,
Doris would erect all manner and kind of little houses all over the
hundred and thirty odd acres around the Mansion House and call them Inns
of Rest, so she would feel free to shelter any living creature that was
fortunate enough to fall by the wayside near Greenacres’ gate posts.
Cousin Roxy had looked at the yellow kitten with instant recognition.
“That’s a Scarborough kitten. Sally Scarborough’s raised yellow kittens
with white paws ever since I can remember.”
“Had I better take it back?” asked Doris anxiously.
“Land, no, child. It’s a barn cat. You can tell that, it’s so frisky.
Ain’t got a bit of repose or common sense. Like enough Mis’
Scarborough’d be real glad if it had a good home. Give it a happy name,
and feed it well, and it’ll slick right up.”
So Gladness had remained, but not out in the barn. Somehow she had found
her way up to the rest room and its peace must have appealed to her, for
she would stay there hours, dozing with half closed jade green eyes and
incurved paws. Kit said she had taken Miss Patterson’s place as nurse,
and was ever so much more dependable and sociable to have around.
“Father, dear,” Jean exclaimed, entering the quiet room like an autumn
flurry of wind. “What do you think? Cousin Roxy has just ’phoned, and
she wants me to tell you two Boston cousins are there. Did you hear the
machine go up this afternoon? Beth and Elliott Newell. Do you remember
them?”
“Rather,” smiled Mr. Robbins. “It must be little Cousin Beth and her
boy. I used to visit at her old home in Weston when I was a little boy.
She wanted to be an artist, I know.”
Jean had knelt before the old gray rock fireplace, slipping some light
sticks under the big back log. At his last words she turned with sudden
interest and sat down cross legged on the rug just as if she had been a
little girl.
“Oh, father, an artist? And did she study and succeed?”
“I think so. I remember she lived abroad for some time and married
there. Her maiden name was Lowell, Beth Lowell.”
“Did she marry an artist too?” Jean leaned forward, her eyes bright with
romance, but Mr. Robbins laughed.
“No, indeed. She married Elliott’s father, a schoolmate from Boston. He
went after her, for I suppose he tired of waiting for Beth’s career to
come true. Listen a minute.”
Up from the lower part of the house floated strains of music. Surely
there had never issued such music from a mouth organ. It quickened one
into action like a violin’s call. It proclaimed all that a happy heart
might say if it had a mouth organ to express itself with. And the tune
was the old-fashioned favorite of the fife and drum corps, “The Girl I
Left Behind Me.”
“It must be Joe,” Jean said, smiling mischievously up at her father, for
Joe was still unknown to the master of the house. She ran out to the
head of the stairs.
“Can Joe come up, Motherie?”
Up he came, fresh from a tubbing, wearing Doris’s underwear, and an old
shirt of Mr. Robbins’, very much too large for him, tucked into his worn
corduroy knee pants. His straight blonde hair fairly glistened from its
recent brushing and his face shone, but it was Joe’s eyes that won him
friends at the start. Mixed in color they were like a moss agate, with
long dark lashes, and just now they were filled with contentment.
“They wanted me to play for them downstairs,” he said gravely, stopping
beside Mr. Robbins’ chair. “I can play lots of tunes. My mother gave me
this last Christmas.”
This was the first time he had mentioned his mother and Jean followed up
the clue gently.
“Where, Joe?”
He looked down at the burning logs, shifting his weight from one foot to
the other.
“Over in Providence. She got sick and they took her to the hospital and
she never came back.”
“Not at all?”
He shook his head.
“Then, afterwards,—” much was comprised in that one word and Joe’s
tone, “afterwards we started off together, my Dad and me. He said he’d
try and get a job on some farm with me, but nobody wanted him this time
of year, and with me too. And he said one morning he wished he didn’t
have me bothering around. When I woke up on the freight yesterday
morning, he wasn’t there. Guess he must have dropped off. Maybe he can
get a job now.”
So it slipped out, Joe’s personal history, and the girls wondered at his
soldierly acceptance of life’s discipline. Only nine, but already he
faced the world as his own master, fearless and optimistic. All through
that first evening he sat in the kitchen on the cushioned wood box,
playing tunes he had learned from his father. When Shad brought in his
big armfuls of logs for the night, he executed a few dance figures on
the kitchen floor and “allowed” before he got through Joe would be chief
musician at the country dances roundabout.
After supper the girls drew up their chairs around the sitting room
table as usual. Here every night the three younger ones prepared their
lessons for the next day. Jean generally read or sat with her father
awhile, but tonight she answered Bab Crane’s letter. It was read over
twice, the letter that blended in so curiously with the coming of the
cousins from Boston.
Ever since Jean could remember she had drawn pictures. In her first
primer, treasured with other relics of that far off time when she was
six instead of seventeen, she had put dancey legs on the alphabet and
drawn very fat young pigs with curly tails chasing each other around the
margins of spellers.
No one guessed how she loved certain paintings back at the old home in
New York. They had seemed so real to her, the face of a Millet peasant
lad crossing a stubble field at dawn; a Breton girl knitting as she
walked homeward behind some straying sheep; one of Franz Hals’ Flemish
lads, his chin pressed close to his violin, his deep eyes looking at you
from under the brim of his hat, and Touchstone and Audrey wandering
through the Forest of Arden.
She had loved to read, as she grew older, of Giotto, the little Italian
boy trying to mix colors from brick dust, or drawing with charcoal on
the stones of the field where Cimabue the monk walked in meditation; of
the world that was just full of romance, full of stories ages old and
still full of vivid life.
Once she had read of Albrecht Durer, painting his masterpieces while he
starved. How the people told in whispers after his death that he had
used his heart’s blood to mix with his wonderful pigments. Of course it
was all only a story, but Jean remembered it. When she saw a picture
that seemed to hold one and speak its message of beauty, she would say
to herself,
“There is Durer’s secret.”
And some day, if she ever could put on canvas the dreams that came to
her, she meant to use the same secret.
“I think,” said Kit, yawning and stretching her arms out in a perfect
ecstasy of relaxation after a bout with her Latin, “I do think Socrates
was an old bore. Always mixing in and contradicting everybody and
starting something. No wonder his wife was cranky.”
“He died beautifully,” Helen mused. “Something about a sunset and all
his friends around him, and didn’t he owe somebody a chicken and tell
his friends to pay for it?”
“You’re sleepy. Go to bed, both of you,” Jean told them laughingly.
“I’ll put out the light and fasten the doors.”
She finished her letter alone. It was not easy to write it. Bab wanted
her to come down for the spring term. She could board with her if she
liked. Expenses were very light.
Any expenses would be heavy if piled on the monthly budget of
Greenacres. Jean knew that. So she wrote back with a heartache behind
the plucky refusal, and stepped out on the moonlit veranda for a minute.
It was clear and cold after the light snowfall. The stars were very
faint. From the river came the sound of the waterfall, and up in the big
white barn, Princess giving her stall a goodnight kick or two before
settling down.
“You stand steady, Jean Robbins,” she said, between her teeth. “Don’t
you dare be a quitter. You stand steady and see this winter straight
through.”