CHAPTER SEVEN

ITS AMBITIONS

Prue laid before her mother the proposition from Hester Baldwin which it seemed to the girl herself one that no one could possibly refuse. Mrs. Grey did not entertain it for a moment. "The Baldwins are charming people, dear," she said quietly, as she folded Hester's letter and returned it to its envelope. "If you had no home I should be thankful to have you received into theirs. As it is, and considering that the home to which you would return is such a simple one, I think you would get more harm than good from the school of which Hester speaks. Your place is in the little grey house, my Prudy, and in the little Grey family; it would be too small a family by one if you left us."

Prue did not urge the point; there never was the slightest use in urging Mrs. Grey to do something upon which she decidedly made up her mind in the beginning, but the girl's beauty was clouded for some days by the shadow of her dissatisfaction.

When Hester came out to spend a few days before Christmas Prue hoped that she might convert her mother to other views, but Hester was so engrossed with her project of founding a home for crippled little children that she had forgotten her plan for Prue.

"They tell me that, though he is incurable, the poor little fellow I have sent out to Jersey really is better!" cried Hester almost the moment that she arrived. "Only suppose there were twenty of them!"

"Five dollars a week--two hundred and fifty a year, five thousand a year--Oh, Hester, I'm afraid you will have to get on with less than twenty little cripples. You can't afford so many!" cried Rob.

"Nonsense, Rob! It wouldn't cost nearly five dollars a week apiece if we had them all in one house, and weren't paying board for them, but had a housekeeper, and made a fund for them all together," retorted Hester.

"I'm afraid it would be a sinking fund," remarked Wythie quietly.

"It can be done; only give me the chance!" cried Hester.

"We will give you a chance!" cried Rob. "I'll announce immediately that I will resume story-telling to the Fayre children. It won't be much, but it will enable you to afford one more cripple, anyway."

"I think we might have a costume entertainment; our attic is full of the loveliest things," said Prue.

"Why, Prue, how did we all happen to forget those venerable costumes up-stairs!" exclaimed Wythie. "We can give something really worth while."

"It would be no end of fun," said Frances slowly; she had dropped in at the little grey house and had been kept for luncheon. She was wondering if the Grey girls did not remember the frolic they had had in those antiquated garments on the last night of their father's life. She saw Rob's lips draw a little at the corners as she smiled, and she knew that her "Patergrey's" "son Rob" was thinking of that night.

"It would be a frolic for us, but what form could the affair take that people would come to it? You mean to sell tickets to it?" Rob asked.

"Why, of course; we mean it to earn money to give Hester another cripple," laughed Prue.

"Make it a dance to which everybody must come in costume, and for which they must buy tickets for the privilege of coming," said Frances, whose practical mind always was quick to plan details. "We will lead the dancing, and do a costume gavotte, or something--Let's see--three Greys, Hessie and I are five girls, and Battalion B and Hessie's cousin are four boys. We'll get three more girls and four more boys, and we'll practise an old-time dance; we can make it lovely. And--why not?--let's have the dance preceded by a short concert of old-time songs. Mama will lend our house, I'm sure of that, and we could have the nicest kind of an affair."

Hester fairly beamed with joyous excitement. "Why, what has made you girls so perfectly angelic this morning?" she cried. "You have always been interested, but not so ready charged to go right off at a touch as you are now. If Rob would tell stories for the Home this winter, and you would have this entertainment--why, we could take two more children at once! It seems as though I could not wait to carry out this beautiful plan, and I can hardly believe it when I see that it really begins to look like a possibility."

"It's getting to be a probability, Hester," said Rob. "One thing that has fired our zeal is Dr. Fairbairn's report on it. He has been talking about it here, and he has found several people deeply interested, while the dear old man himself is enthusiastic. Then Aunt Azraella, of all people under the sun, has inspired us with courage. She said the other day that if we proved to be in earnest, and she could be shown that this home for incurable little waifs stood a chance of being an accomplished fact, she might help it. I could hardly gasp out my answer, but if she can be interested in the scheme it could be put through, for Aunt Azraella has a good deal of money, we think--we never knew how much she really had."

"Come here, my beloved Feather-bed!" cried Wythie as Kiku-san swung into the room, so big, and white, and fluffy that Hester laughed aloud at the appropriate name.

Before the golden eyed cat had risen from the toilet which he immediately sat down to prepare when Wythie called him, a clear, delicate sound of singing floated in through the door, a high, sweet, childish treble, fine as a gossamer thread of sound, but beautifully true. It sang "Annie Laurie," by no means an easy task for a childish singer, without a false note or a break, and when the song was ended the same voice took up "Oft in the Stilly Night," which it sang with the same charm.

The five girls listened, breathless, Rob with uplifted finger of warning.

"That's little Polly Flinders," she said when the lovely little voice died away into silence. "She is in the lean-to room, singing to Cousin Peace. It is the prettiest companionship imaginable. Little, old-fashioned, quiet Polly, and lovely, blind Cousin Peace. Polly steals away to her at every opportunity. I wish I could paint the picture: that sober, pale faced child on her stool, with her new, birthday dolly, at the feet of the blind woman, with the saintly face, and the lean-to room, with its old furniture for the setting of the picture! Polly worships at her feet, figuratively and literally. The child sings exquisitely. Mardy, Wythie and I--and Prue, I suppose, only she hasn't discussed it with us--want her educated in music. She has decided talent, and she sings quaint, unchildlike old songs which she has learned from her mother, so she says, but I'm sure Mrs. Flinders' tired, hard voice never sung them as Polly does. We love to hear her----"

"Rob," interrupted Wythie, "fancy Polly in an old-time gown, singing her songs at our entertainment!"

"The very thing!" cried Rob and Frances together, while Hester choked Wythie in a rapture of gratitude.

"Well, you have had an idea worth having, Oswyth!" cried Rob. "And it might be of use, later, to Polly. There are so many things to be done, I begin to wish we were rich. I want to help Polly--to tell the truth, 'way down in the bottom of my heart, I care more for giving talented girls a chance than I do for cripples--forgive me, Hessie! And I wish I could found a home in Fayre for the homeless animals in the New York streets, and I'd like to brighten up the lives of girls who have no fun, with an occasional concert or theatre ticket. Oh, dear; I believe a million would not go far!"

Prue looked disconsolate. "And I want fine things and a million just for myself!" she said. "What shall I do if you are all going to turn saints or philanthropists?"

Wythie laughed. "Poor Prudy, it would be trying to live with a family given over to good works exclusively," she said. "But we are not quite saints, nor even philanthropists. What's the difference?"

"The philanthropist does good from purely humanitarian motives, natural pity, while the saint works from supernatural motives," said Prue promptly and triumphantly. "You can't catch me, Miss Oswyth; didn't we have all that in a lecture lately?"

Saints or philanthropists--or a little of both, which these girls were--the five young creatures worked with a will for the object in view, and the plan that they had hit upon that morning. Hester even cut short her visit to go back to New York to work for it at that end, and wrote what she described as "a chortle and not a letter," to tell the Fayre girls that she had sold a hundred and eight tickets in four days, tickets that brought two dollars each--"So there's another cripple for us already!" wrote Hester at the end of her letter; wrote in such a hasty, tremulous way that a big blot, representing her joyous excitement, crowned the H of her signature, like a black king in checkers.

Rob's audience for her story-telling was secured without any difficulty, for most of the children who had heard her first series wanted to hear these new tales, and their little brothers and sisters had grown up in the meantime to a size that added them to her hearers. She sold forty-five course tickets, at five dollars apiece, and was to begin the story-telling after New Year's. So that while the preparations for the concert and dance were going on, Rob's mind was additionally burdened by the preparations for the storytelling.

Her first set of twenty stories was to be from Grecian history and Grecian mythology; she tried to concoct them in her mind while she made ready the room in which they were to be told. When she had first told stories to the children of Fayre, Mrs. Silsby had lent her big parlour for the enterprise, but now that the master of the little grey house had gone away from it forever it had a room to offer its bravest daughter, a room upon which she had a special claim.

On what Mrs. Grey called "the morning side of the house," opposite the dining-room, was the quaint old room, originally intended for the kitchen of the little grey house in the days when a kitchen was also the dining and living-room.

It was a large room, consequently; the only one on that side of the house, and it had been Sylvester Grey's special sanctum. In it he had laboured long on the invention which, with the house, had been his sole but sufficient legacy to his family, the invention upon which Roberta, his "son Rob" had helped him for many long hours between her thirteenth and her seventeenth year.

The dear old room, with its high wainscotting, narrow cupboards, and immense fireplace, had been left as its master had quitted it, except that the models of the machine and his books had been set in order and no longer lay piled over the rush-bottomed chairs as they had been when they were daily used by the thin, nervous hands which for a year and a half had been folded in rest.

Now Rob was to take this room for her auditorium, and she had assumed the task of preparing it. After all there was not much to be done; when it came to the point neither Rob nor her mother could bear to make more than absolutely necessary changes. The tall book-cases still stood there with their contents, the books which Sylvester Grey had most used; dignified scientific books in one, the well-worn Thackeray and a few other novels and a few shabby looking poets in its mate. They would not be in the way of seats for forty-five children; Rob was sure that her little hearers could easily squeeze into the chairs in which, judging by her first experience, they would not stay. She knew that they would crowd around her knees, and hang upon her arms, drinking in the story as if it were a syrup which might flow past them if they were not close enough to catch it at its source.

"There isn't much to be done, Mardy," said Rob looking up to her mother from her knees as she straightened a file of magazines in the bottom part of one of the cases.

Mrs. Grey aroused herself by an effort from the thoughts into which she had fallen.

"I was thinking how much had been done, Rob, and how much was done with forever," said her mother.

"It is all right, Mardy," said Rob quickly. "I feel more and more sure that it is all right. Much as we miss him it was so beautiful to slip away in the moment of assured triumph that we would not have it otherwise, would we?"

"No, dear; very likely we wouldn't if we had time to remember to be unselfish if the chance came to get him back--but, oh Rob 'son Rob,' the first impulse would not be unselfish!" Mrs. Grey's voice quavered over her words, though she bravely smiled.

Rob scrambled to her feet, and went over to put her arm around her mother.

"I can't help remembering how the first money I earned story-telling went to introduce the bricquette machine to the world, and now, thanks to the machine, I am going to be able to tell stories for a charity," said Rob "let us call this room yours and mine, Mardy, as it used to be Patergrey's and mine, and let us creep away from the others sometimes, and come here for little cosey talks. I feel more like little Rob here than anywhere else. This room makes me forget my eighteen years and five feet six."

"Do you want to forget them, Rob? Your life seems to me so ideally simple, so lightheartedly happy, that I thought you were glad you were no longer that little Robin that used to perch on my knee." Mrs. Grey looked at Rob sharply as she spoke, and Rob looked her squarely in the eyes, with her changeable face flashing into smiles. "She was a nice, dreaming, sunny little Robin, Mardy, but I am as blithe as a blackbird now, so don't imagine the hand of time lies heavy on me yet. Only you know I never did want to be a woman," said Rob. "I think it is so very lovely to be vastly young. Coming events cast their _shadows_ before, you know; they don't cast rays of light. The present is nice." Rob laughed as she spoke, but her eyes were wistful.

"Your future will be 'nice' too, Rob dearest," said her mother. "Somehow, I don't fear for you."

"There doesn't seem to be much plot in our lives, Mardy. Just a little income, just a little house, just a little work, considerable play-- and so the Grey days drift along, only they're not grey days in any but a cognominal sense. Now, Mardy, wasn't that a lovely word to have made up just as it was needed, with no malice, nor aforethought?"

"Very lovely, Rob--Listen! Why here are the boys already!" cried Mrs. Grey interrupting herself.

"Goodness! Can it be late enough for them?" cried Rob darting out to give the Rutherfords welcome though the front of her waist was all dust from the books which she had been hugging, and her hair was more rebellious than usual from the stooping and climbing which she had been doing, loosening hairpins that were only too ready at all times to escape.

"How's the fancy-dress ball progressing?" cried Bartlemy the instant the door was opened. He had unexpectedly developed more interest in the plan than either of the other boys, a fact which he himself explained by saying that it appealed to his artistic sense.

"It's going to be the loveliest thing!" cried Prue enthusiastically.

"And the date is fixed for Twelfth Night," added Wythie. "There is something in the ring of that name that seems to set off the costumes."

"The very night!" cried Basil.

"How are the burns, Bruce?" asked Rob.

"Nearly burned out. How many listeners to the stories have you secured? Did they pay in advance?" asked Bruce, kissing Mrs. Grey's cheek, as all three boys always did when they came home, and stroking the hand which Miss Charlotte had given him.

"Forty-five, actually!" announced Rob, with exclamation marks in her voice. "Two hundred and twenty-five dollars down! And Hester must have nearly as much more, by this time, for the tickets she has sold to the entertainment. We are going to sell lots here in Fayre when we begin, and we have hardly any expenses. I gasp at the thought of the wealth we are amassing for the crippled children with very little effort and hardly any planning."

"It's a good beginning; enough to make some one ready to help you with an endowment fund, or the like, for, of course, you will have to have such help," said Basil, the careful one.

"'Little drops of water, little grains of sand,'" chanted Prue.

"Just so. You must let me look at your costume, Prue, and see if it is all right," said Bartlemy. "When can you have a rehearsal?"

"We shall rehearse to-morrow night, but not in costume," said Wythie. "We waited for you, Battalion B, to be here. Hester is coming out, and her cousin."

"To stay over Sunday?" asked Bruce.

"Hester will; Lester Baldwin goes back on the last train--unless he misses it, then we shall have to send him up to you boys," said Rob. "You don't look hospitable."

"Yes, we are," remonstrated Basil. "Send him to us in any case, girls; it is ridiculous to let him go back on that crawling train when he might as well have a pleasant Sunday with the crowd. You approve of him, don't you?"

"Oh, he's very nice, Basil; you will like him," said Wythie in her kindly way that explained Basil's confidence in her indifference to the new friend. While Rob, on the contrary, smiled provokingly and said: "I haven't met so nice a youth in many a day."

"Not since we met our nicest of all boys," said Wythie quietly, for she had no liking for that sort of teasing.

"What a blessing you are, Wythie!" ejaculated Bruce fervently.

"Hester told me that Lester Baldwin admired Frances very much," said Prue. Her attempts at casual remarks were usually transparent and not very successful.

"Shows his sense!" commented Bruce.

"Frances deserves admiration," said Rob.

"She is very nice, of course," said Prue with her most grown-up air, which always made her seem decidedly less than sixteen. "But I don't think Frances is striking at all; she is only just a little pretty."

Basil and Bruce laughed and tweaked tall Prue's ear in the elder brotherly way of theirs which always tried her; it really was trying to have a B at each ear simultaneously. "Pretty Prudy!" they said together.

The two older Rutherfords made it their business to check Prue's vanity, which they considered the only defect in any Grey girl.

But Bartlemy stoutly defended her. "Don't you mind those two moles," he said, seeing Prue's cheeks reddening and her eyes dangerously near tears. "They don't know how artists feel about beauty. I can't imagine giving Frances more than a kindly thought when there's a tearing beauty in sight."

"Bart, have some caramels; I made them to-day," interposed Rob, offering the boys the result of her labours. "Taffy's bad for the digestion, so I never have any."

For in her turn Rob believed in checking Bartlemy's manifest desire to offer incense to Prue's handsome face; at least till she was long past sixteen, and somewhat less appreciative of that face herself.