The Carey children had only found it by accident. All their errands took
them down the main street to the village; to the Popham's cottage at the
foot of a little lane turning towards the river, or on to the
post-office and Bill Harmon's store, or to Colonel Wheeler's house and
then to the railway station. One afternoon Nancy and Kathleen had walked
up the road in search of pastures new, and had spied down in a distant
hollow a gloomy grey house almost surrounded by cedars. A grove of
poplars to the left of it only made the prospect more depressing, and if
it had not been for a great sheet of water near by, floating with cow
lilies and pond lilies, the whole aspect of the place would have been
unspeakably dreary.
Nancy asked Mr. Popham who lived in the grey house behind the cedars,
and when he told them a certain Mr. Henry Lord, his two children and
housekeeper, they fell into the habit of speaking of the place as the
House of Lords.
"You won't never see nothin' of 'em," said Mr. Popham. "Henry Lord ain't
never darkened the village for years, I guess, and the young ones ain't
never been to school so far; they have a teacher out from Portland
Tuesdays and Fridays, and the rest o' the week they study up for him.
Henry's 'bout as much of a hermit's if he lived in a hut on a mounting,
an' he's bringing up the children so they'll be jest as odd's he is."
"Is the mother dead?" Mrs. Carey asked.
"Yes, dead these four years, an' a good job for her, too. It's an awful
queer world! Not that I could make a better one! I allers say, when
folks grumble, 'Now if you was given the materials, could you turn out a
better world than this is? And when it come to that, what if you hed to
furnish your _own_ materials, same as the Lord did! I guess you'd be put
to it!'--Well, as I say, it's an awful queer world; they clap all the
burglars into jail, and the murderers and the wife-beaters (I've allers
thought a gentle reproof would be enough punishment for a wife-beater,
'cause he probably has a lot o' provocation that nobody knows), and the
firebugs (can't think o' the right name--something like cendenaries),
an' the breakers o' the peace, an' what not; an' yet the law has nothin'
to say to a man like Hen Lord! He's been a college professor, but I went
to school with him, darn his picter, an' I'll call him Hen whenever I
git a chance, though he does declare he's a doctor."
"Doctor of what?" asked Mrs. Carey.
"Blamed if I know! I wouldn't trust him to doctor a sick cat."
"People don't have to be doctors of medicine," interrupted Gilbert.
"Grandfather was Alexander Carey, LL.D.,--Doctor of Laws, that is."
Mr. Popham laid down his brush. "I swan to man!" he ejaculated. "If you
don't work hard you can't keep up with the times! Doctor of Laws! Well,
all I can say is they _need_ doctorin', an' I'm glad they've got round
to 'em; only Hen Lord ain't the man to do 'em any good."
"What has he done to make him so unpopular?" queried Mrs. Carey.
"Done? He ain't done a thing he'd oughter sence he was born. He keeps
the thou shalt not commandments first rate, Hen Lord does! He neglected
his wife and froze her blood and frightened her to death, poor little
shadder! He give up his position and shut the family up in that tomb of
a house so 't he could study his books. My boy knows his boy, an' I tell
you the life he leads them children is enough to make your flesh creep.
When I git roun' to it I cal'late to set the house on fire some night.
Mebbe I'd be lucky enough to ketch Hen too, an' if so, nobody in the
village'd wear mournin'! So fur, I can't get Maria's consent to be a
cendenary. She says she can't spare me long enough to go to jail; she
needs me to work durin' the summer, an' in the winter time she'd hev
nobody to jaw, if I was in the lockup." This information was delivered
in the intervals of covering the guest chamber walls with a delightful
white moire paper which Osh always alluded to as the "white maria,"
whether in memory of his wife's Christian name or because his French
accent was not up to the mark, no one could say.
Mr. Popham exaggerated nothing, but on the contrary left much unsaid in
his narrative of the family at the House of Lords. Henry Lord, with the
degree of Ph.D. to his credit, had been Professor of Zoology at a New
England college, but had resigned his post in order to write a series of
scientific text books. Always irritable, cold, indifferent, he had grown
rapidly more so as years went on. Had his pale, timid wife been a rosy,
plucky tyrant, things might have gone otherwise, but the only memories
the two children possessed were of bitter words and reproaches on their
father's side, and of tears and sad looks on their mother's part. Then
the poor little shadow of a woman dropped wearily into her grave, and a
certain elderly Mrs. Bangs, with grey hair and firm chin, came to keep
house and do the work.
A lonelier creature than Olive Lord at sixteen could hardly be imagined.
She was a tiny thing for her years, with a little white oval face and
peaked chin, pronounced eyebrows, beautifully arched, and a mass of
tangled, untidy dark hair. Her only interests in life were her younger
brother Cyril, delicate and timid, and in continual terror of his
father,--and a passion for drawing and sketching that was fairly
devouring in its intensity. When she was ten she "drew" the cat and the
dog, the hens and chickens, and colored the sketches with the paints her
mother provided. Whatever appealed to her sense of beauty was
straightway transferred to paper or canvas. Then for the three years
before her mother's death there had been surreptitious lessons from a
Portland teacher, paid for out of Mr. Lord's house allowance; for one of
his chief faults was an incredible parsimony, amounting almost to
miserliness.
"Something terrible will happen to Olive if she isn't taught to use her
talent," Mrs. Lord pleaded to her husband. "She is wild to know how to
do things. She makes effort after effort, trembling with eagerness, and
when she fails to reproduce what she sees, she works herself into a
frenzy of grief and disappointment."
"You'd better give her lessons in self-control," Mr. Lord answered.
"They are cheaper than instruction in drawing, and much more practical."
So Olive lived and struggled and grew; and luckily her talent was such a
passion that no circumstances could crush or extinguish it. She worked,
discovering laws and making rules for herself, since she had no helpers.
When she could not make a rabbit or a bird look "real" on paper, she
searched in her father's books for pictures of its bones. "If I could
only know what it is like _inside_, Cyril," she said, "perhaps its
_outside_ wouldn't look so flat! O! Cyril, there must be some better way
of doing; I just draw the outline of an animal and then I put hairs or
feathers on it. They have no bodies. They couldn't run nor move; they're
just pasteboard."
"Why don't you do flowers and houses, Olive?" inquired Cyril
solicitously. "And people paint fruit, and dead fish on platters, and
pitchers of lemonade with ice in,--why don't you try things like those?"
"I suppose they're easier," Olive returned with a sigh, "but who could
bear to do them when there are living, breathing, moving things; things
that puzzle you by looking different every minute? No, I'll keep on
trying, and when you get a little older we'll run away together and live
and learn things by ourselves, in some place where father can never
find us!"
"He wouldn't search, so don't worry," replied Cyril quietly, and the two
looked at each other and knew that it was so.
There, in the cedar hollow, then, lived Olive Lord, an angry, resentful,
little creature weighed down by a fierce sense of injury. Her gloomy
young heart was visited by frequent storms and she looked as unlovable
as she was unloved. But Nancy Carey, never shy, and as eager to give
herself as people always are who are born and bred in joy and love,
Nancy hopped out of Mother Carey's warm nest one day, and fixing her
bright eyes and sunny, hopeful glance on the lonely, frowning little
neighbor, stretched out her hand in friendship. Olive's mournful black
eyes met Nancy's sparkling brown ones. Her hand, so marvellously full of
skill, had never held another's, and she was desperately self-conscious;
but magnetism flowed from Nancy as electric currents from a battery. She
drew Olive to her by some unknown force and held her fast, not realizing
at the moment that she was getting as much as she gave.
The first interview, purely a casual one, took place on the edge of the
lily pond where Olive was sketching frogs, and where Nancy went for
cat-o'-nine-tails. It proved to be a long and intimate talk, and when
Mrs. Carey looked out of her bedroom window just before supper she saw,
at the pasture bars, the two girls with their arms round each other and
their cheeks close together. Nancy's curly chestnut crop shone in the
sun, and Olive's thick black plaits looked blacker by contrast. Suddenly
she flung her arms round Nancy's neck, and with a sob darted under the
bars and across the fields without a backward glance.
A few moments later Nancy entered her mother's room, her arms filled
with treasures from the woods and fields. "Oh, Motherdy!" she cried,
laying down her flowers and taking off her hat. "I've found such a
friend; a real understanding friend; and it's the girl from the House of
Lords. She's wonderful! More wonderful than anybody we've ever seen
anywhere, and she draws better than the teacher in Charlestown! She's
older than I am, but so tiny and sad and shy that she seems like a
child. Oh, mother, there's always so much spare room in your heart,--for
you took in Julia and yet we never felt the difference,--won't you make
a place for Olive? There never was anybody needed you so much as she
does,--never."
Have you ever lifted a stone and seen the pale, yellow, stunted shoots
of grass under it? And have you gone next day and next, and watched the
little blades shoot upward, spread themselves with delight, grow green
and wax strong; and finally, warm with the sun, cool with the dew,
vigorous with the flow of sap in their veins, seen them wave their green
tips in the breeze? That was what happened to Olive Lord when she and
Cyril were drawn into a different family circle, and ran in and out of
the Yellow House with the busy, eager group of Mother Carey's chickens.