CHAPTER X.

MISS PIKE’S STORY.

“PAPA, we are starving. Do send us a watermelon!” wrote Mary one day, and sent home the note by little Kittyleen, whose visit was at last over.

Dr. Gray laughed again and again at this pathetic appeal, and chancing to see Mrs. Townsend picking strawberries in her garden, he paused as he went by to tell her how the children were suffering.

“They had plenty day before yesterday,” said she, laughing in her turn. “O doctor, have you ever been out to their camp? They are the most disorderly, wasteful creatures: and just think of the grocer’s bills they are running up.”

“It’s an extravagant piece of business,” assented the doctor; “but they are having a delightful time, something to remember all their lives. It won’t last more than two or three weeks at farthest, and I for one shan’t mind the bills if the little souls don’t starve and are happy.”

“You are just like the general,” returned Mrs. Townsend, with a disapproving smile; and then went into the house to make with her own hands a strawberry short-cake for Miss Pike and Julia Gray to take to Camp Comfort in the sunshade carriage with the other goodies.

It was quite the fashion for the parents, aunts, cousins, and other friends to make little donation visits to the quintette, who always hailed both visitors and viands with joy. But to-day the “favorite friend,” Miss Pike, sister Julia, and the watermelon, coming all together, were almost too much for Mary.

Miss Pike was the most entertaining of guests, and had brought a story with her, written expressly for the Quintette Club—so she informed them as they all gathered about her in a delighted group after dinner.

“Oh let’s have it now, this moment. Oh, Miss Pike, you are a darling.”

“Well, you may bring my hand-bag, Mary. And will Julia read aloud while I sew? For I’m rather hurried, you see.”

She had already been over to Old Bluff, measured Pecy Pancake with her eye, and found she was about Fanny’s size; and now the dear soul began to baste a calico frock for the machine, while Julia read.

A FAMILY MYSTERY,

_Revealed by a Chimney._

Here I am, at my last gasp. I’ve stood it thirty-five years without flinching, but now my time is come. Pleasant sky, you and I must part. Bright sun, good by. Remember I am but a “humble instrument,” and forgive me for smoking in your face. Look, iron-hearted men,—see how a hero dies! For I’m dying in a good cause, and it’s not I that will cry “Quarter.”

Well, what would you do? Here I am alone,—shovel, tongs, cooking-stove, all gone, that made life desirable! Yesterday, sir, you climbed atop of the house, tore off the tin roof, and rolled it up into parcels like so much jelly-cake. I looked on and saw you, but the bitterness was past. The time I could have wept was the day my family had notice to leave. Now they are gone, and what care I what happens? I saw you pull down the walls, till the air was so thick with plaster you could almost cut it with a knife. I saw you rip up the chamber-floor as if it had been a rag carpet. I saw you pull away the door-steps, where _she_ used to stand, looking up and down the street.

I saw women and children coming to carry away shingles and clapboards for kindlings. Little by little, crash by crash, down went the house, till there was nothing left standing but the other chimney and me—and this morning _he_ was taken. Now I’m sole survivor. I’m red as far down as the chamber fireplace; the rest of the way I’m white. Some of you laughed, seeing me standing up alone, with a white body and red head, and said I looked “like a monument smiling at grief.”

Well, yes, and my grief began to come (or rather I began to come to grief) last winter, when I first heard my family say the “city fathers” were going to “improve the street.” As we were a frame house, one story with basement kitchen, I feared, and my family feared, our room would be considered better than our company.

“And if they do pull the house down, where shall _we_ go?” asked poor Mr. Dean, as they all sat about the sitting-room fireplace. He was always asking his wife “what they should do,” and she a sick woman, coughing there in her chair! But Mr. Dean has been a broken-down man ever since that affair of Dick’s, which I am about to relate.

There are three Dean children, John, Dick, and Nell. _She_—I mean Nell—has a voice like a harp, and I’ve heard it remarked that her hair is a trap to catch a sunbeam. Bless her, I always did my best to draw when _she_ laid the coal on the grate! Her father never could understand why she had so much better luck than he had in making a fire!

John, the oldest, is married, and living in Boston. He has always paid his father’s rent, and the Deans have lived here ever since Dick was born. I _think_ they had a life-lease. They could afford to laugh at their neighbors on moving day. Who’ll laugh now? I’m getting wheezy—thank you, little boy—put on more shingles, it warms my heart.

Where was I? O, speaking of the trouble. It is the family mystery, twelve months old; and the odd part of it is, that I know more about it than anyone else in the family.

A year ago, when Dick was attending the academy, he came home one night with a diamond ring on his forefinger.

“How splendid! Whose is it?” said Nell, who was making buttered toast for supper.

“That’s telling,” says Dick. “What if it’s my own?”

“Then it’s paste.”

“Paste, ma’am? It’s a _solitaire_, worth seven hundred dollars.”

Nell let the toast burn. She put the ring on her finger and turned it round and round. Knowing it was worth seven hundred dollars, and its owner wouldn’t take a thousand, she saw at once it was an elegant affair. After Dick had teased her a while, he told her it belonged to James Van Duster, the wealthiest boy in school.

“And he doesn’t know I’ve got it. I slipped it off his finger while I was helping him out with his Greek. Won’t it be a good joke to see his long face to-morrow morning?”

“O Dick, how dared you?” said Nell.

And then I smelt the toast burning again, and heard her scraping it with a knife.

“The ring is too large for you, Dick. Let me take it for safe keeping.”

“You, Miss Nell! Why, you’d serve it up in the toast-dip, just as you did the saltspoon last week.”

“But think, Dick, if anything should happen to such a splendid jewel!”

“There isn’t anything going to happen! Don’t fret! If I was in the habit of losing things now——”

Dick checked himself, and I suspect he blushed. Nell, with all her kindness of heart, couldn’t help laughing, for Dick was as harum-scarum as a hurricane.

I felt low-spirited from that moment, and knew I shouldn’t breathe freely till the precious ring was fairly out of the house.

In the evening Dick came down into the basement kitchen again to crack some butternuts. He knelt by the brick hearth and began to pound. I could have told him better than that. There was a crack in a corner of the fireplace, and all of a sudden off slipped that ring and rolled into it. _Of course!_

You could have knocked me over with a feather. But, as true as I stand here, that boy went whistling upstairs, and never missed the ring till Nell asked what he had done with it.

You may depend there were a few remarks made then. Dick rushed upstairs and down, and the whole family went to hunting. Next morning a carpenter was sent for to take up the boards under the dining-room table. There was a hole in the carpet there, and Dick was almost sure he must have dropped the ring when he stooped to pick up his knife.

How I longed to be heard! I talked then as plainly as I do now, but they thought it was the wind “sighing down chimney.”

Nell suggested that the ring might be around the fireplace.

“You’re warm, my dear,” whispered I, as they say in games when you come near a right guess.

But, alas, they didn’t look deep enough; there was a crack in the mortar under the bricks, and there lies that ring now, at the north-east corner, eight inches from the surface; there it lies to this day!

Well, what’s a diamond ring? Nothing but the dust of the earth; no better than Lehigh coal anyway. But James Van Duster didn’t think so. And the worst is to tell. He wasn’t quite so absent-minded as our Dick took him to be; _he_ knew when the ring was drawn off his finger as well as either you or I would have known. And being a high-spirited young fellow, with a narrow mind, and envious of our Dick besides, what should he do that morning but send an officer after Dick. You could have heard Mr. Dean groan across the street. The officer was very polite, and listened respectfully to all the family had to say; but I’ve no means of knowing whether he believed it or not. All I can state with certainty is that old Mr. Van Duster interfered, and said if Dick could pay James the price of the ring, the matter should be hushed up, and he needn’t go to jail.

Seven hundred dollars! Why, old Mr. Dean just earned his salt by tending an oven at a bakery! There was nothing in the house of any value but Mrs. Dean’s piano, and that wouldn’t bring more than three hundred dollars. Of course it went, though—poor Nelly, how that took the life out of her!—and John made up the rest of the money in the shape of a loan. I did think John was hard-faced, wife or no wife. He might have _given_ Dick the money for their mother’s sake. It was too bad for such a young fellow as Dick to be saddled with a debt.

After this he couldn’t afford his time to go to school; so he got a clerkship. He tried to hold up his head with the best of them till he began to see his mates turning the cold shoulder. The Van Dusters hadn’t kept their word. You see, the story had been whispered around that Dick stole a solitaire and sold it to a Jew who had run off with it, and _that_ was why James Van Duster was obliged to stoop to wear a cluster diamond. This was more than Dick could bear. He ran away, and went to work on a farm in New Jersey. He kept writing home that his mother’s letters were his greatest comfort. She had perfect faith that the mystery would be cleared up some time, but I think hope deferred was the cause of her illness.

The old gentleman gave up at once, and everything fell upon Nell. She found some employment, embroidering and copying and the like of that, and had most of the housework to do besides. I never knew such a girl. All the amusement she seemed to have was going to the door, standing on the steps, and looking up and down the street.

(More shingles, boys, I’m about out of breath.)

Ah, well, we’ve been a suffering family; but we have our blessings after all; not the least of which is Nell. We have had some cosy times this winter, too, popping corn over the open fire; but it’s all past now. The family went to Thirty-fifth Street yesterday. I don’t know how I could have borne it, but I’m sustained by this reflection; I am dying; dying, too, for the good of the family.

Yes, when _I_ fall the ring will be revealed! To whom? Aye, there’s the rub! Not to you noisy, rollicking boys, I hope and trust! I keep looking out for Nell. I heard her tell her mother day before yesterday “she should watch that kitchen chimney when it went.”

Bravo! There she stands! That’s Nell! That modest girl in the blue dress, with the bird on her hat. Bravo, Nell! I’m reeling, dear. I’ve got my death-blow, I’ve only been waiting for you!

Hammer away, ye iron-hearted men! Make an end of me now. I’m dying in a good cause, sirs, in a good cause, _yes_!

Farewell, sweet Nell, _North-East corner; eight inches down_! Farewell, N-e-l-l!

* * * * *

Allow me to add that our friend, the late Chimney, did not die with a lie in his mouth. There _was_ a ring. Nell found it.

Imagine the delight of the Dean family! The newspapers made it appear that the Honorable Van Duster was very magnanimous, for he gave Dick the price of the ring—seven hundred dollars. Why not, indeed? Hadn’t Mr. Van Duster received payment in full? But he also gave back the boy’s good name, which was worth a thousand diamond rings.

“But he can’t make up to my Dick for the two dreadful years he has borne. That suffering can _never_ be made up,” said old Mr. Dean, shaking the ashes out of his pipe.

I can’t agree with him. Hasn’t the suffering been made up to Dick in patience and thoughtfulness and charity for others? If you knew him you would think so, I know. It was a hard experience; but Dick is wondrously improved. He is the staff of the family now, and his loving mother says:—

“The sorrows of his youthful days Have made him wise for coming years.”