THE RECONSTRUCTION.
"Helen, I actually slept all night."
"So did I. If any one had told me I could sleep a wink, I would have
been furious. I wish we could hear from Father. You saw Cousin Lizzie
felt just exactly as I did about that Dr. Wright. He may be all right
and he may be all wrong. If he is all wrong, couldn't he make us dance,
though? He could sell us out, lock, stock and barrel, pocket the
proceeds and skidoo."
"Oh, Helen, how can you even give such a horrid idea a moment's
lodgement in your mind? Dr. Wright is as good as he looks, I am sure. He
certainly looks kind and honest."
"Well, he ought to be honest he is so ugly."
The girls were still in bed, which they had shared ever since they had
been promoted from cradles. It was Saturday morning and the day before
had been the one of trial.
"Father likes him a lot and trusts him."
"Ye--s, I know--but then, you see----"
"Yes, I see he is a very fine young man who thought, and quite rightly,
that we had been blindly selfish and heartless to let Father work so
hard; and he let us know what he thought of us and it got your goat."
"Is that the way you are going to express yourself in your B. M. exams?
Because if it is, you will win a scholarship surely."
"If I only could!... Come in!" in answer to a knock at the door.
"Telegraph fer you, Miss Douglas. I hope an' trus' 'tain't no bad news
'bout yo' maw and paw," said the housemaid, bringing in a dreaded yellow
envelope. "Uncle Oscar, he dreamed 'bout aigs las' night an' they was
whole an' entire, an' all de dream books say dat it is a sho' sign an'
symbol er trouble. De trouble is in de shell an' time alone will hatch
it out."
"Well, this is good news, Susan," laughed Douglas as she quickly scanned
the message: "'Your father and mother slept well and are now enjoying
breakfast at Pennsylvania Station. Will see you this evening. George
Wright.'"
"Well, Glory be! It can't be Mr. Carter what the bad luck is layin' fer.
I 'low it is dat lo' down nigger Jim, Uncle Oscar's sister's step-son,
what got stuck in de lonesome ribs by a frien' at meetin' las' Sunday
with one er these here unsafety razors," and Susan took herself off to
give out in the kitchen that no doubt Jim was going to die, since Mr.
Carter was improving.
"Now, Helen, don't you think Dr. Wright is very thoughtful? You just
said you wished we could hear from Father."
"He does seem to think of lots of things. I couldn't help admiring him
for the way he got the drawing room for them and put them on the train
at the downtown station to keep them from having to see so many people.
That night train is always full of people we know and they all of them
get on at Elba. I bet you he got his telegram in ten words, though. I
know he is economical and would die rather than spill over. Let me see
it. Humph! Nineteen words. I wonder he didn't send it collect."
"Oh, Helen! How can you be so hard on the poor young man? I believe you
are just pretending to hate him so. I am glad it is Saturday and no
school. I think we had better go see real estate agents the first thing
this morning and try to rent our house furnished for the summer. I am
pretty sure Dr. Wright would approve of that. And also see about selling
the car."
"Selling the car! Why, Douglas, how on earth will we do without it?"
"Of course we must sell it. Helen Carter, I actually believe you think
that if you give up wearing silk stockings for a year we can live on
your resolution. Do you realize that the cash we have in bank would just
about pay the chauffeur and keep us in gasoline for a month?"
"Oh, I am such a dunce! I am afraid my being poor has a kind of musical
comedy effect in my mind so far. What are you going to do with me,
Douglas?"
"Nothing, honey, but you must not get angry with me when I call you
down about money. I feel so responsible somehow."
"Angry with you! Why, I think you are just splendid, and I am going to
be so careful I just know you will never have to call me down."
Douglas smiled, knowing very well that Helen and economy were not meant
to dwell together.
"There is only one thing I am going to make all of you promise, that is
NOT TO CHARGE," with great emphasis.
"Oh, of course not after we get started, but how are we to get our
outfits for the mountains? Our khaki skirts and leggins and things that
are appropriate? And then the cotton stockings that I have sworn to wear
until Father is well! I have to have a new set of them. Ugh! how I hate
'em!"
"But, Helen, we have our Camp-Fire outfits that are thoroughly suitable
for what we are going to do. There are loads of middy blouses in the
house, so I am sure we need buy no more of them. As for stockings--it
seems to me you had better wear out what stockings you have, even if
they are silk, before you buy any more."
"Never! You don't seem to understand the significance of my oath. When
a pilgrim of old swore to put on sackcloth and travel to some distant
shrine, he didn't say he would not go to the expense of sackcloth since
he had plenty of velvet suits on hand, did he now? No! He went and
bought some sackcloth if he didn't happen to have any in the house and
gave his velvet suits to the poor or had his hand-maidens pack them up
in frankincense and myrrh or something until he got back----"
"All right! All right! But please don't give away anything to the poor.
If Cousin Lizzie should hear of your doing such a thing she would
certainly say: 'Charity begins at home.'"
"I won't give them away if you think I shouldn't, but I'd like to put
temptation out of my reach. I hope we can get off to the mountains real
soon as I am sure I have no desire to flaunt my penance in the face of
the Richmond public. Don't you think, Douglas, that I might have the
fifty-nine cents that is in the bank so things will balance better, and
with fifty-nine cents I can get three pair of sixteen-and-two-third-cent
stockings? I'll bring back the nine cents change." Helen was quite
solemn in her request, but Douglas was forced to laugh at her lugubrious
countenance.
"Yes, dear, if you really feel so strongly about the cotton stockings.
Haven't you any money at all in your purse? I have a little, I believe."
"Well, I never thought of that! Sure I have!" and Helen sprang out of
bed, where they were still lolling while the above conversation was
going on, and hunted wildly in a very much mussed drawer for her silver
mesh bag. "Hurrah! Three paper dollars and a pile of chicken feed
silver! I can get cotton stockings for a centipede with that much
money."
It was a very pretty room that Douglas and Helen Carter shared. Robert
Carter had brought to bear all the experience he had gained in building
other persons' houses to make his own house perfect. It was not a very
large house but every detail had been thought out so not one brick was
amiss. Convenience and Beauty were not sacrificed to one another but
went hand in hand. The girls loved their room with its dainty pink paper
and egg-shell paint. They had not been in the house long enough for the
novelty to wear off, as it was only about a year old. As Douglas lay in
her luxurious bed while Helen, being up in search of money, took first
bath, she thought of the bitterness of having strangers occupy their
room. How often she had lain in that soft, comfortable nest and fancied
that it must be like the heart of a pink rose. And the charming private
bath-room must be given up, too.
She could hear Helen splashing away, evidently enjoying her morning
shower as she was singing with many trills and folderols, trying
seemingly to hear herself above the noise of the running water.
"Poor Helen!" thought Douglas. "It is harder, somehow, for her than any
of us. Lucy is young enough to learn the new trick of being poor very
easily, and Nan is such a philosopher; and dear little Bobby won't see
the difference just so he can have plenty of mud to play in; and I--oh,
well--I have got so much to do I can't think about myself--I must get up
and do it, too. Here I am selfishly lying in bed when I know Nan and
Lucy want to hear the news from Father just as much as I did." So,
slipping on a kimono, she ran into the room across the hall, shared by
the two younger girls.
They were up and almost dressed. "Lucy and I thought maybe we could
help, so we hurried. I know you've lots to do," said Nan.
"That was dear of you both. Of course we won't have so much to do right
now, as we have to wait for Dr. Wright to come home; and then if we can
rent the house furnished, we must get everything in order. But first
listen to the good news!" and she read the telegram.
"Isn't that splendid and wasn't it kind of Dr. Wright to send it to
you?"
"I think so. If only Helen would not feel so unkindly to him! She
utterly refuses to like him," and Douglas sighed.
"I don't intend to like him either, then!" exclaimed Lucy. "He shan't
boss me if he isn't going to boss Helen."
"How absurd you are," laughed Nan. "You are so afraid that Helen will
get something you don't have that you won't even let her have a private
little dislike without wanting to have some, too. I bet if Helen got the
smallpox you would think yourself abused if you didn't get it, too."
"And in your heart of hearts you know you do like him," said Douglas
with a severity that she felt such silliness warranted.
"Well, if I do--and--and--maybe I do, I'm not going to take anything off
of him that Helen won't."
"Well, I reckon Dr. Wright will be glad to wash his hands of us,
anyhow," said Nan. "I can't see that it would be any sweet boon to look
after you and Helen or any of us, for that matter."
"I should think not," laughed Douglas; "but you see his having power of
attorney from Father makes it necessary for us to consult with him
about some things, selling the automobile, for instance, and renting the
house."
"Selling the car!" wailed Lucy. "I think it is foolishness to do that.
I'd like to know how you are to occupy Dan, the chauffeur, if we haven't
a car to keep him busy."
"Oh, you incorrigible girls! Of course we will have to let the chauffeur
go immediately; and I've got to tell the servants to-day that we can't
keep them. I'll give them all a week's warning, of course."
"I understand all that," said Nan, "so please don't bunch me in with the
incorrigibles."
"But, Douglas, Oscar has been with us since long before we were born. I
don't see how you can have the heart to dismiss him," and Lucy looked
resentfully at her older sister.
"Heart! I haven't the heart to let any of them go, but it would be a
great deal more heartless to have them work for us with no money to pay
them with."
"Now, Lucy Carter, you've pretty near made Douglas cry. You sound like
a half-wit to me. Heartless, indeed! If you had half of Douglas's heart
and one-fourth of her sense, you wouldn't make such remarks," and Nan
put her arms around Douglas.
"No, she didn't make me cry, but what does make me feel bad is that Lucy
and Helen can't even now realize the state of affairs. I hated to have
to tell Helen she mustn't charge anything more, no matter what it is she
wants."
"Charge! I should say not! I think I would walk on my uppers all the
rest of my life before I'd put any more burden like that on Father,"
declared Nan.
"But don't people always charge when they haven't got any money? What
will we do when we need things?" asked Lucy.
"Do without," said Douglas wearily. She saw it was going to take more
than a few hours or a few days to make two of her sisters realize the
necessity for reconstruction of their lives. "Helen and I are going
right after breakfast to see real estate agents about getting us a
tenant, and Helen is going to purchase some cotton stockings. She still
persists in sticking to the letter of her oath not to wear silk
stockings until Daddy is home and well."
"I'm going to wear cotton stockings, too, if Helen is."
"So you are, so are all of us, but we are going to keep on with the ones
we have until we go to the country. Helen is spending her own money,
some she had, on these stockings and no one is buying them for her," and
Douglas went back to her room to dress and take up the burden of the day
that was beginning to seem very heavy to her young shoulders. "If only
Helen and Lucy could see without being knocked down and made to see,"
she thought. "Poor Father, if he had only not been so unselfish how much
better it would have been for all of us now that we have got to face
life!"
True to their determination, Douglas and Helen went to several real
estate agents. None of them were very encouraging about renting during
the summer months to reliable tenants, but all of them promised to keep
an eye open for the young ladies.
"Your father gone off sick?" asked one fatherly old agent. "Well, I saw
him going to pieces. Why, Robert Carter did the work of three men. Just
look at the small office force he kept and the work he turned out! That
meant somebody did the drudgery, and that somebody was the boss. What do
the fellows in his office think of this?"
"I--I--don't know," stammered Douglas. She couldn't let the kind old man
know that she had not even thought of informing the office of her
father's departure. How could she think of everything?
Before seeing any more agents, she and Helen betook themselves to their
father's office, a breezy apartment at the top of a great bank building.
Two young men were busily engaged on some architectural drawings. They
stopped work and came eagerly forward to inquire for Mr. Carter. Their
consternation was great on hearing of his sudden departure and their
grief and concern very evident.
"We will do all we can to keep things going," said the elder of the two.
"You bet we will!" from the other, who had but recently been advanced
from office boy.
"There is a big thing Mr. Carter has been working on for some time, a
competitive design for a country club in North Carolina. It is about
done and I will do my best to finish it as I think he would want it, and
get it off. Did he leave power of attorney with any one? You see, Mr.
Carter has two accounts, in different banks, one, his personal account,
and one, his business one."
"Yes, Dr. Wright, his physician, was given power of attorney. There was
no time to let any of you know as it was important to have Father kept
very quiet, with no excitement. Dr. Wright will come in to see you on
Monday, I feel sure. He does not get back from New York until
to-night."
"More work and responsibility for the doctor," thought Douglas.
"More power over us than we dreamed even," was in Helen's mind.
"We want to rent our house, furnished, for the summer, giving possession
immediately, or almost immediately," continued Douglas; "perhaps you may
hear of some one who will be interested."
"I know of some one right now," eagerly put in Dick, the promoted office
boy. "It is a family who have been driven from Paris by the war. They
have been living there for years--got oodlums of money and no place to
spend it now, poor things! They want a furnished house for six months
with privilege of renewing the lease for a year."
"Oh, please, could you send them to me or me to them right off?"
"Yes, Miss Carter, that's easy! If you go home, I'll have the folks up
there in an hour."
"How kind you are!"
"Not a bit of it! I'm so glad I happened to know about them--and now
you will be saved an agent's fee."
"How much do you think we should ask for our house?" said Douglas,
appealing to both young men.
"Well, that house is as good a one as there is in Richmond for its
size," said Mr. Lane, the elder. "I know, because I helped on it. There
is not one piece of defective material in the whole building. Even the
nails were inspected. If it had been on Franklin Street, I'd say one
hundred a month, unfurnished, with all the baths it has in it; but since
it is not on Franklin, I believe one hundred, furnished, would be a fair
price."
"Oh, wouldn't that be fine, Douglas?" spoke Helen for the first time.
She had been very quiet while these business conferences had been going
on. "That will be a whole lot of money. Now we need not feel so poverty
stricken."
"Certainly families do live on less," and the young man smiled. "I think
Mr. Carter usually takes out about six hundred a month for his household
expenses--of course, that's not counting when he buys a car. I know it
is none of my business, but I am very much interested to know what you
young ladies are going to do with yourselves. If I can be of any
assistance, you must call on me."
"Oh, we've got the grandest scheme! I thought of it myself, so I am
vastly proud of it. We are going up to Albemarle County, where Father
owns a tract of land right on the side of a mountain, and there we are
going to spend the summer and take boarders and expect to make a whole
lot of money."
"Take boarders? Is there a house there? I understood from Mr. Carter
that it was unimproved property."
"So it is. That is the beauty of it. We intend to camp and all the
boarders will camp, too."
The young men could not contain themselves but burst out laughing. They
had not seen much of their employer's family but they well knew the
luxurious lives they lived and their helplessness. It was funny to hear
this pretty butterfly of a girl talking about taking boarders and
making money at it.
"It does sound funny," said Douglas when the laugh in which she and
Helen had joined subsided, "but we are really going to do it--that is, I
think we are," remembering that the Power of Attorney had not yet been
consulted and nothing could really be determined on until then. "I don't
know about our making lots of money, but we can certainly live much more
cheaply camping than any other way."
"That's so!" agreed Mr. Lane. "Now maybe this is where Dick and I can
help. Camps have to be built and we can get up some plans for you. There
is a book of them just issued and we can get a working plan for you in
short order."
"That is splendid. We have a cousin, Lewis Somerville, who is home now
and has nothing to do, and he is going up to Albemarle ahead of us and
build the camp. I'll tell him to come down and see you and you can tell
him all about it."
Then the girls, with many expressions of gratitude, hastened home to
prepare for the poor rich people who had been driven from Paris and now
had no place to spend their money.
They stopped on Broad Street long enough for Helen to spend one of her
precious dollars for six sixteen-and-two-third-cent stockings.
"Do you think it would be very extravagant if I spent a dime in market
for flowers?" asked Helen. "It would make the house look more cheerful
and might make the poor rich people like it better."
"Why, no, I don't think that would be very extravagant," laughed
Douglas.
So they went over to the Sixth Street market, where the old colored
women sit along the side-walk, and purchased a gay bunch of wild phlox
for a dime. And then Helen could not resist squandering another nickel
for a branch of dogwood. They jitneyed home, another extravagance. There
was no tangible reason why they should not have ordered out their own
car for this business trip they had been forced to take, but it had
seemed to both of them a little incongruous to ride in a seven-seated
touring car on the mission they had undertaken.
"It doesn't gee with cotton stockings, somehow," declared Helen, "to
step out of a good car like ours. Jitneys are much more in keeping."
The exiles from Paris came with the faithful Dick; liked the house; did
not mind the price, although furnished houses during the summer months
are somewhat a drug in the real estate market; and were ready to close
the bargain just as soon as Dr. Wright should return.
The son, an æsthetic looking youth of seventeen, who was Dick's
acquaintance, was carried away with the wild phlox and went into
ecstasies over the branch of dogwood which Helen had placed near a
Japanese print in the library.
"Let's take it, Mamma! It is perfect!" he exclaimed as he stood
enraptured by the effect.
Helen always declared that the market flowers rented the house, and so
they may have.