CHAPTER IX

WILLING HELPERS

VERY soon after half-past four, the Maynard quartette walked sedately into the drawing-room and seated themselves. Miss Larkin, herself just about to start for the station, regarded them critically.

“You look lovely,” she declared, “all of you. And, beside being dressed prettily, you all look unusually good. In fact, I’m ’most afraid you look _too_ good to be true! But you will keep yourselves tidy till we return, won’t you? Don’t romp, or pull off hair-ribbons.”

“Touch those wonderful constructions!” exclaimed King, pointing to the unusually wide and elaborate bows that adorned the heads of his three sisters; “perish the thought! Nay! I will constitute myself chief protector of those marvels of headgear, and just as you see them now, so shall they stay to dazzle the eyes of the admiring Mortimers!”

When King declaimed in this highfalutin style, he was very funny, and even Miss Larkin smiled, though still a little anxious about their behavior.

“Well,” she said, with a sigh, “I must go. I leave you in charge, King; you’re the oldest. Can’t you read aloud or do something to amuse yourselves quietly? If you don’t, you’ll get to tumbling around before you know it.”

“Oh, we’ll be good, Miss Larkin,” declared Marjorie. “Skip along, now, or you’ll be late at the train.”

With a final glance round the pretty room, and at the pretty children, Miss Larkin went away.

“We’ll give her a surprise,” said Marjorie, as, from the window, she watched the carriage roll down the drive. “She really ’spects we’re going to tear around and get all tumbled up ’fore she comes back. Now, let’s be extra special careful to keep quiet and let her find us just as she left us.”

“It’s easy enough,” agreed Kitty, “if you only make up your mind to it. But don’t anybody read aloud—I hate it. If we want to read, let’s read to ourselves.”

“Don’t read,” said Midget, sociably; “let’s just talk.”

And so, perhaps unconsciously a little subdued by the atmosphere of the drawing-room, they sat quietly and conversed like model children.

Nurse Nannie looked in, and seeing all was well, left Rosy Posy with the others.

The baby, looking adorable in her dainty white frock, white socks and slippers, and white hair-ribbon, was perched demurely on a chair, holding one of her best dolls in her arms.

Midget, near the window, sometimes lifted the curtain a trifle to see if the returning carriage was yet in sight.

“They can’t get here till five, Mopsy,” said her brother; “and it’s only twenty minutes to five now.”

“I know it,” said Midge; “but it always seems to hurry people up, if you look out the window for them.”

“It doesn’t, though,” argued Kitty; “if they don’t know you’re looking.”

“No,” agreed Midget, amiably. Then she suddenly added, “Oh, King, look at all that smoke! It burst up all at once! Something is on fire!”

“I should say so!” cried King, going to the window. “Not very far away, either. Come out on the piazza.”

“Fires are always farther away than they seem,” said Kitty, as they went out at the front door and stood on the verandah, looking toward the smoke.

“Hullo, there’s flame, too,” said King. “Must be about as near as Bridge Street, anyhow. Let’s go down to the gate.”

Toward the gate they went, for what is so fascinating as a fire?

Kitty took Rosy Posy by the hand, and, mindful of their best clothes, the children didn’t run, but walked quickly to the entrance of their own grounds.

“Where’s the fire?” called King to a man who rushed by.

“Dunno,” was the answer. “Summers down on Bridge Street, I guess. You can see from the corner.”

So, of course, the Maynards went on to the corner of the block, from which point of vantage a much better view of the fire could be had.

It was a real conflagration, and no mistake. Smoke rose in volumes, and occasionally whirls of flame darted up through it. Never before had the children seen such a spectacle.

Thrilling with excitement, they went another block, and then some one passing them cried out, “Why, it’s Simpson’s old tumble-down house! Good thing for the town to have that go!”

“Oh, King!” cried Marjorie, her face white with horror, “it’s Mrs. Simpson’s house! How terrible! We must go and see if we can help them.”

“Sure!” exclaimed King. “Why, Mr. Simpson’s back in the hospital, you know. Whatever will she do, with all those children!”

The Simpsons were a poor family, who were special beneficiaries of the Maynards. Mr. Simpson, after an injury, had recovered sufficiently to leave the hospital, but a relapse had sent him back there again, and his wife, with seven children, had a hard time to get along at all. They lived in a large, but old and dilapidated, frame house in a poor quarter of the town.

Mr. and Mrs. Maynard had been very kind to them, and the Maynard children had often carried gifts of food or clothing to the needy family. Learning, then, that it was the Simpsons’ house that was burning, King and Marjorie started on a dead run, and Kitty followed, as fast as Rosy Posy’s toddling steps would allow.

“Oh,” cried Marjorie, as she ran; “the poor, dear people! I think only rich folks’ houses ought to burn down, not poor widows’, who haven’t any other shelter.”

“She isn’t a widow,” returned King, for he and Midget were running hand in hand.

“It’s all the same,” she responded. “Mr. Simpson is in the hospital, so she’s as poor as a widow, anyway. We must do all we can to help them, King.”

“’Course we must. If Father and Mother were only here, they’d do lots. We must do whatever they’d do.”

By this time, they were nearing the burning house. A rather inefficient fire department was doing its best, but it was easily to be seen the whole house was doomed.

A crowd of men and boys were excitedly rushing about, jostling each other as they tried to save some of the furniture from the flames. But the broken and battered chairs and tables seemed scarcely worth saving, and their efforts were mostly expended in shouting orders to each other, which were never, by any chance, carried out.

Kingdon was indignant at their actions, and, throwing off his coat, began at once to lend whatever aid a fourteen-year-old boy could compass, and inspired by his enthusiasm, others began to do better work, and many of Mrs. Simpson’s poor belongings were saved from destruction.

Marjorie went straight to the poor woman, herself, and found her sitting in a broken rocking-chair, with two children in her lap. She was watching the destruction of her forlorn home, and the tears ran down her pale cheeks, as she realized the magnitude of this, her latest disaster.

“There, there,” said Marjorie, patting her shoulder, “don’t cry so, Mrs. Simpson. Be thankful you and the children escaped with your lives. You might have all been burned to a black, you know!”

But this tragic suggestion was of no comfort.

“Better so, Miss,” she replied, with fresh wails of grief. “Ah, yes, ’twould have been far better. Me, with me good man in the hospital, and seven homeless children, what can I ever do now?”

The question was, indeed, unanswerable, and the neighbors, many of them also poverty-stricken stood about volubly but uselessly sympathetic.

“Here, take these boxes, Mops,” called King. “They’re tied up, and they may have valuables in.”

Marjorie took a pile of boxes from her brother, and Mrs. Simpson, looking at them with interest, said:

“Yes, I’m glad to save those; they’re bits of ribbons and silks for patchwork.”

As the poor woman had now no beds to put patchwork quilts on, the boxes did not seem so very valuable, but King hadn’t waited to learn; he had returned to the house for other things. The firemen handed them out, or threw them from the windows, and those that King received he handed over to Marjorie and Kitty, who stacked them up in nondescript-looking heaps.

Kitty had stood Rosy Posy up against Mrs. Simpson, and bade her stay there.

“Look after her, please,” she said to the half-distracted woman, “and then I can help save your things. Be good, won’t you, Baby, and stay right there till sister comes back.”

“Ess,” acquiesced little Rosamond, and, sinking down on the ground, began to dig in the dirt with an iron spoon she found near by. Blissfully happy with this occupation, and pausing now and then to watch the novel spectacle of the burning house, Rosy Posy staid just where Kitty had told her, and Mrs. Simpson found it as easy to look after three babies as two.

The other five Simpson children were scattered among the crowd, the older ones realizing their misfortune, the others enjoying it as a new and startling form of entertainment.

“Well,” said a fireman, as he rather perilously made his own escape from the falling walls, “there she goes! That’s the last of her!” And then all that was left of the building collapsed into the flames, and nothing more of house or furniture could be saved.

For a few moments, everyone was silent, thrilled by the grandeur and awfulness of the sight, for there is always something awesome about uncontrollable flames.

Then the firemen turned their attention to extinguishing smouldering embers. Some of the neighbors started to go home, and others lingered out of curiosity, to see what the Simpsons would do.

“They’ll have to go to the poorhouse,” said one man, unfeelingly; “here comes the overseer now.”

At sight of the overseer, and hearing the unsympathetic remark of the other, Mrs. Simpson’s woe broke out afresh.

“The poorhouse for me!” she cried. “Me, who was a Foster! Oh, don’t let me go there! I’ll work me finger-ends off to keep a home for my childhern, somehow! Oh, if my man could be here with me! Have pity on a poor lone woman. Don’t send me to the poorhouse.”

“But what else can you do?” said the overseer of the poor. He was not unkindly in speech or tone, but he could see no other future for the mother and her seven children. Not one of them was old enough to earn a living, and as Mrs. Simpson had been in sore straits before the fire, surely she was really destitute now.

But the look of agony on her ashen face was so tragic that Marjorie felt her own heart breaking.

“Mrs. Simpson,” she said, “you shall not go to the poorhouse! You shall come home with us!”

Everybody looked at the speaker in amazement. They all knew the Maynards, and had often had proofs of their kindness and generosity, but this declaration of Marjorie’s took them by storm.

And Midget, as she stood before them, her tearful eyes spilling drops that made little furrows on her smoke-begrimed cheeks; her dainty white serge frock, soiled and ruined by her work of assistance; her hair-ribbon awry, but still rampant; seemed like an angel of mercy to the stricken woman, and the other auditors.

“Yes,” she went on, “you shall go home with us, for a few days anyway, until we see what can be done. You and all the children shall at least have a roof to your head and a lamp to your feet.”

Marjorie’s enthusiasm was making her a little incoherent, and she looked appealingly at Kingdon. Loyalty to his sister stirred in the boy’s soul, and as he saw a look of incredulity on some faces, he determined to stand by her amazing offer, although filled, himself, with secret consternation at the idea.

“Sure,” he said, stepping to Marjorie’s side, and taking her hand. “My father and mother are away, but I know they would do a heap for the Simpsons if they were at home. And Mother told us to do whatever she would approve of, so I know it’s all right. We will take care of these stricken people”—this didn’t sound quite right, but King hurried on—“and give them a home beneath a roof which hasn’t yet burned down!”

It was characteristic of King to wax declamatory in exciting moments, and his loud tones, and the sight of the brother and sister standing nobly in their parents’ place, so moved the audience, that they at once gave three cheers for the Maynards.