CHAPTER II

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.”