"Children!" said Mrs. Carey, folding the letter and slipping the check
into the envelope for safety, "your Cousin Ann is really a very
good woman."
"I wish her bed hadn't come down with her," said Gilbert. "We could
never have afforded to get that water into the house, or had the little
furnace, and I suppose, though no one of us ever thought of it, that you
would have had a hard time doing the work in the winter in a cold house,
and it would have been dreadful going to the pump."
"Dreadful for you too, Gilly," replied Kathleen pointedly.
"I shall be at school, where I can't help," said Gilbert.
Mrs. Carey made no remark, as she intended the fact that there was no
money for Gilbert's tuition at Eastover to sink gradually into his mind,
so that he might make the painful discovery himself. His fees had
fortunately been paid in advance up to the end of the summer term, so
the strain on their resources had not been felt up to now.
Nancy had disappeared from the room and now stood in the doorway.
"I wish to remark that, having said a good many disagreeable things
about Cousin Ann, and regretting them very much, I have placed the four
black and white marble ornaments on my bedroom mantelpiece, there to be
a perpetual reminder of my sins. You Dirty Boy is in a hundred pieces in
the barn chamber, but if Cousin Ann ever comes to visit us again, I'll
be the one to confess that Gilly and I were the cause of the accident."
"Now take your pencil, Nancy, and see where we are in point of income,
at the present moment," her mother suggested, with an approving smile.
"Put down the pension of thirty dollars a month."
"Down.--Three hundred and sixty dollars."
"Now the hundred dollars over and above the rent of the Charlestown
house."
"Down; but it lasts only four years."
"We may all be dead by that time." (This cheerfully from Gilbert.)
"Then the interest on our insurance money. Four per cent on five
thousand dollars is two hundred; I have multiplied it twenty times."
"Down.--Two hundred."
"Of course if anything serious happens, or any great need comes, we have
the five thousand to draw upon," interpolated Gilbert.
"I will draw upon that to save one of us in illness or to bury one of
us," said Mrs. Carey with determination, "but I will never live out of
it myself, nor permit you to. We are five,--six, while Julia is with
us," she added hastily,--"and six persons will surely have rainy days
coming to them. What if I should die and leave you?"
"Don't, mother!" they cried in chorus, so passionately that Mrs. Carey
changed the subject quickly. "How much a year does it make, Nancy?"
"Three hundred and sixty plus one hundred plus two hundred equals six
hundred and sixty," read Nancy. "And I call it a splendid big lump
of money!"
"Oh, my dear," sighed her mother with a shake of the head, "if you knew
the difficulty your father and I have had to take care of ourselves and
of you on five and six times that sum! We may have been a little
extravagant sometimes following him about,--he was always so anxious to
have us with him,--but that has been our only luxury."
"We saved enough out of exchanging the grand piano to pay all the
expenses down here, and all our railway fares, and everything so far, in
the way of boards and nails and Osh Popham's labor," recalled Gilbert.
"Yes, and we are still eating the grand piano at the end of two months,
but it's about gone, isn't it, Muddy?" Nancy asked.
"About gone, but it has been a great help, and our dear little
old-fashioned square is just as much of a comfort.--Of course there's
the tapestry and the Van Twiller landscape Uncle gave me; they may
yet be sold."
"Somebody'll buy the tapestry, but the Van Twiller'll go hard," and
Gilbert winked at Nancy.
"A picture that looks just the same upside down as the right way about
won't find many buyers," was Nancy's idea.
"Still it is a Van Twiller, and has a certain authentic value for all
time!"
"The landscapes Van Twiller painted in the dark, or when he had his
blinders on, can't be worth very much," insisted Gilbert. "You remember
the Admiral thought it was partridges nesting in the underbrush at
twilight, and then we found Joanna had cleaned the dining room and hung
the thing upside down. When it was hung the other end up neither father
nor the Admiral could tell what it was; they'd lost the partridges and
couldn't find anything else!"
"We shall get something for it because it is a Van Twiller," said Mrs.
Carey hopefully; "and the tapestry is lovely.--Now we have been doing
all our own work to save money enough to make the house beautiful; yet,
as Cousin Ann says, it does not belong to us and may be taken away at
any moment after the year is up. We have never even seen our landlord,
though Mr. Harmon has written to him. Are we foolish? What do you
think, Julia?"