CHAPTER III

WAYS AND MEANS

Events moved swiftly for the Wyndhams, impelled by the force of necessity. The trust company that had made the loan to Mr. Abbott which had been secured by Mrs. Wyndham's house, learning of the failure of the corporation and that it was unable to meet its indebtedness, fell back on its security, and seized the house so unfortunately pledged to it.

Although Mrs. Wyndham was prepared for this inevitable result of her fatal confidence in Mr. Abbott, it came upon her like a bewildering blow that her house was hers no longer. This, and the fact that the expense of running such an immense establishment would make ruinous inroads on her slender principal in a few weeks, determined her upon hastening her movements and quitting as soon as possible the home she loved, taking up an existence which seemed to her, as she tried to picture it, a horrible nightmare in which she must die if she did not waken.

It was no more difficult for her true friends to mislead Mrs. Wyndham kindly in business matters than it had been for her false friend to defraud her. Mr. Hurd and Mrs. Van Alyn combined to take advantage of her ignorance of affairs, to her profit. It was a bad time of year for a sale, as Mr. Hurd had said; but it was of paramount importance that the painful severing of old ties should be made quickly, not only because it was necessary to begin to receive an income immediately, but in order to avoid the torture of keeping the Wyndhams' troubles an open wound.

To all those whom she hoped the news might interest, Mrs. Van Alyn sent notices that the pictures were to be sold. Collectors and dealers came not only from the city, but from Boston and Philadelphia, for Mr. Wyndham had been well known for the value of his art treasures. Offers were made for the pictures as they hung on the walls, as well as for the marbles and bronzes; on the whole, the prices were fair, considering that it was a forced sale, with no time margin to allow the owners opportunity to do better. At least this method saved the commission on an auction sale, which had to be added to net profits in estimating them.

The horses brought an excellent price; they were young, perfectly matched, and spirited, yet gentle. Parting from them was perhaps the hardest pang Barbara had to endure. Castor and Pollux were really her friends--as, indeed, any animal she came in contact with was sure to be. But she derived a grain of comfort from the promise, which she went personally to obtain from their new owner, that even if they began to break down he would never allow them to be sold into hardship--a promise which, it is to be hoped, was kept for the sake of the girl who had tried to protect the creatures she loved.

Mrs. Van Alyn persuaded Mrs. Wyndham to come to her for the final two weeks of her nominal ownership of the house. It would be less painful, she thought, if the poor lady could pass its threshold for the last time, shutting the door on everything as she had loved it, rather than remain during the dismantling, to see profane hands ruthlessly dragging from their places the mementos of her happy marriage and the childhood of her daughters.

Accordingly, one warm, sunny morning, Mrs. Van Alyn's rotund horses drew up at the door, and Mrs. Wyndham, looking very frail and newly widowed under her long veil, came slowly down the stairs, leaning on Jessamy's arm. She had made a painful pilgrimage to each room, pausing at certain spots, laying her hand lingeringly on the furniture, and kneeling long before the great brown-leather chair which had been her husband's, her face hidden on its glossy seat, which was wet with her tears when she raised her head.

At each door she stopped, rested her cheek a moment against the casement, and kissed the dark wood as lovingly as a Jew would kiss the _mazuzah_ on the casement; for this had been her home, a sacred temple, and the law of love was written on its door-posts. It was a long and weary task to get the poor creature to the end of her stations of sorrow, and the three girls, as well as she, were white and faint when they reached the hall. But finally Mrs. Wyndham came forth on the door-step, and for the last time the heavy mahogany door swung close, shutting out its mistress forever.

Jessamy drove with her mother to the kind friend who waited her with loving welcome, but Phyllis and Bab sobbed long and tempestuously on the stairs after Mrs. Wyndham had gone, and black Violet and blacker Sally, with Irish Ellen, the laundress, on the basement stairs, sobbed with them.

That afternoon the work of stripping the house was begun. The pictures were boxed for their various owners, vans were coming and going, taking the furniture to auction-rooms, and all was melancholy confusion.

Mrs. Van Alyn and Phyllis took charge of the painful work. Mrs. Van Alyn quietly set aside some of the dearer mementos of past happiness not too valuable to be kept out of the sale, to be sent to a store-room she had taken for the purpose. Nothing splendid was retained; only the pictures in the girls' rooms, their own special pet chairs, desks, tables, Bab's piano, and Mr. Wyndham's library chair. Mrs. Van Alyn foresaw and tried to provide for the day when, in one way or another, some of the Wyndhams would again have a home in which this flotsam and jetsam from their early shipwreck would be welcome. Not even Phyllis knew that their kind friend was doing this, though she unconsciously furnished the information which guided Mrs. Van Alyn in making her selections.

It took but a week to undo the work of twenty years. Mr. Wyndham had bought this house on his marriage, and his family had known no other home; yet by the Saturday following the Monday on which Mrs. Wyndham had gone away from it, it was barren of everything except a bonnet and shawl hanging on a hook behind the kitchen door, the property of the woman who had come in to sweep out the empty rooms.

Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara roamed through the house as their mother had done, like her, bidding it farewell in every corner, listening, half frightened, to the echo of their footsteps on the bare floors. Their power to feel had been spent in the preceding days of their painful tasks; utterly weary in body and mind, they closed the door of their dismantled home behind them, and passed down the steps into their new existence.

It had been agreed at first among the Wyndhams that they would not accept Mrs. Van Alyn's invitation to Mount Desert for the summer; but Mrs. Wyndham was so ill with utter prostration of nerves and strength, and the girls themselves so unfit to encounter any further trials, that the question decided itself otherwise. They gladly availed themselves of another kindness from the devoted friend who was an antidote against heavy doses of the poisonous bitterness of finding there were many the warmth of whose affection was much tempered by change of fortune.

The summer at Mount Desert sent the Wyndhams back to New York fortified in mind and body to meet their fate. Phyllis especially was much cheered by the fact that she had made a friend in Maine in the person of an old lady from Boston, who had been quite charmed by her, of whom she always spoke as "the dear little girl," and to whom she promised a position as reader and companion to herself at any time that fortune failed Phyllis in New York or that her family could spare her.

The sale of the Wyndhams' effects--silver, glass, jewelry, as well as pictures, marbles, furniture, and horses--had brought but a trifle over twenty thousand dollars. Fortunately Mrs. Wyndham disapproved of bills, so there was but little outstanding indebtedness to discharge before investing the remnant of their fortune. But even at six per cent. it could not yield more than half of the sum they had calculated on having, and the once lightly valued legacy to the girls from their unknown great-aunt Amelia was required to bring their little capital up to the point of returning them two thousand a year.

The first step to be made by these novices in the ungentle art of living was to find a boarding-place. This undertaking was assumed by Jessamy and Phyllis, aided by Ruth Wells, who knew better than they did what to seek and what to avoid.

The limitations of their purse defined the boundaries of their search; only places where low prices obtained were open to the Wyndhams--a fact in itself difficult to master at first; and the poor little pilgrims up Poverty Hill shrank from the mere exterior of some of the houses, the advertisements of which they had cut out and pasted on a sheet of paper, making a "vertebrate" like Mrs. March's in Howells's story.

At last they summoned courage to ring the bell of an old-fashioned, high-stoop house in a quiet down-town street.

"What a queer smell, Ruth!" murmured Phyllis, sniffing the air critically and speaking low, because the sight and sound of some one moving about, opening and shutting drawers in the back parlor, were distinctly visible and audible through the plain places in the pattern of the ground-glass panels of the folding doors.

"Boarding-house!" said Ruth, laconically. "It's the regular odor; ghosts of Christmases--past Christmas dinners, I mean--Fourth of July, and no particular days besides."

At this moment the doors slid back, revealing a folding-bed, let down and unmade, and a gaunt figure in a worn black silk skirt and lavender waist stood confessed.

"We are looking for board for four ladies--a widow with two daughters and a niece," said Ruth, making herself spokeswoman. "You take boarders, I believe? We saw your advertisement in yesterday's 'Herald.'"

"We receive a few guests," replied the gaunt person, correctively. "We prefer gentlemen."

"Yes; we knew that on general principles," said Ruth, easily; "but these are ladies. What rooms have you?"

"A hall bedroom on the second and two square rooms on the third," returned the gaunt one. "Will you look at them?"

"If you please," said Jessamy, and they were conducted up the dingy stairs to the third floor. The floors were covered alike with red Brussels carpet; the wall-papers--gray with gilt figures in one, brown with red roses in the other--were alike tarnished and stained. A marble-topped bureau of black walnut, a bedstead, and three chairs, with one rocker, all of the same expressionless wood, furnished each room.

"We could never put up with this, Ruth; don't delay here," whispered Jessamy, but Ruth shook her head. "What do you ask for these rooms?" she inquired.

"Twenty dollars a week for each, two in a room," replied the gaunt person.

"Thank you; they would not answer," said Jessamy. "Why, I should die here, or go mad of odors and ugliness," she added for Phyllis's private ear.

"We might consider thirty-five a week, as it is one family," suggested the gaunt person at the door.

"No, thanks," said Phyllis. "Only fancy! Seven dollars more than we mean to pay, and for what? Are all boarding-houses like this, Ruth?"

"Not in detail; similar in genus. I tell you, you would be far better off in your own little flat, cooking your own little meals on your own little gas-range, in your own little spider. However, don't lose heart at the first one; there are degrees of badness," laughed Ruth.

The second attempt was made further up town, in a street among the Thirties. The parlor into which the girls were ushered was more cheerful here than in the first case, but was furnished in a style that jarred on the nerves through the eyes, just as grating slate-pencils jar them through the ears.

A portly person, with a much jetted front, sailed into the room, smiling affably.

"We take a few guests," she said in reply to the inquiry for board, precisely as the gaunt person down town had replied, adding, like her, that she "preferred gentlemen." "I have the back parlor on this floor and a hall bedroom on the third vacant just now, though we rarely have a vacancy," she said graciously. "You might manage with a folding-bed in the large room and the hall bedroom."

"And your prices?" asked Phyllis. "Still, it doesn't matter; we must have two square rooms near each other."

"I should charge eighteen dollars for two in the back parlor, and I would let the hall bedroom to two for fourteen--my table board is six dollars apiece without a room," said she of the jets.

"No; we shall pay only fourteen for each of the rooms we are looking for," said Jessamy, whose courage was rising.

"Oh, I couldn't consider it," said the landlady, sternly. "Still, there are two lovely rooms on the top floor you might have for that. The furnace does not go up there, so they would be heated by a stove. You wouldn't mind looking after your own fires?"

"I should mind my mother going up so many flights; still, we will look at the rooms," said Jessamy. The long climb to the top of the house brought them to two rooms together, though not connected; sunny, rather cheerful, and, though plainly furnished, not so ugly as the first ones.

"We are not willing to go up so high, but we will let you know if we consider them further," said Jessamy.

"I should require references as to respectability," said the landlady, firmly.

"I am glad to hear it; so should I," said Jessamy, and departed, cutting short a list of distinguished people who had once boarded there.

Three days of weary search brought forth no better results. The main difference in the places the discouraged girls visited was that in one house the stairs went up on the right side of the hall, in another on the left; that in one the furniture of the rooms was black walnut, in another oak--when it was maple or mahogany it was beyond the Wyndhams' limit of price.

These days taught the three girls--for Barbara had joined the others--more of life than their entire years so far had shown them, and the fruit of this tree of knowledge was bitter indeed.

They were unable to find anything within their means better than the upper rooms in the West Thirty ---- Street house, and decided to risk the four flights--five including the basement--and the dubious prospect of the care of their own fires.

Having decided, they proceeded to make the best of what each felt in her heart to be a very bad bargain, with the courage each possessed in different forms.

There were two days intervening between that on which the new boarding-place was engaged and the day on which it was to be "infested," as Bab called taking possession. That young person assumed the task of beautifying their unattractive quarters, nor would she permit any of the others to see her improvements, but hammered her thumbs and strained her unaccustomed arms putting up curtains, shelves, casts, and photographs unassisted, in order to "usher her family into a bower of bliss" when it moved in.

On the afternoon before this event, Barbara came along Thirty ---- Street from Sixth Avenue. Her arms were full of flower-pots--two filled them--and a boy came behind with a basket containing six more. Bab had not been able to resist the temptation to invest in plants to fill her mother's sunny window and make the room a little more cheerful. She hurried down the street, and paused at the foot of the steps long enough to let her listless attendant squire catch up with her. She had no hand to give her skirts, but she sprang up the steps, regardless of the danger of tripping. At the same instant the front door opened and a cocker spaniel rushed out, barking wildly and throwing himself downward with that apparent utter disregard of whether head or tail went first, and of anything which might be in his path, characteristic of a young and blissful little dog.

He flung himself down, and Barbara stepped aside; her balance was uncertain, and her skirts unmanageable by reason of her laden arms. She tripped, fell, and flower-pots, dog, and girl rolled crashing and scattering dirt in all directions into the boy and basket two steps lower, ending in a tangle on the sidewalk.

From the doorway a horrified voice cried: "Good heavens! Nixie!" and a young man dashed down the steps into the ruins.

"Are you hurt?" he cried anxiously, as he fished Barbara out of the wreck. Nixie had already slunk out from under, and was wagging his tail deprecatingly, with glances of mingled shame and amazement at his master.

"I think I am," said Barbara, raising her head and trying to speak cheerfully.

The young man replaced her hat--it had fallen over her eyes--and revealed a woebegone little face. Earth plastered the saucy chin, one cheek was cut, and blood trickled from the bridge of the poor little tilted nose, making a paste wherever the loam from the flower-pots had spattered, and this was nearly everywhere. Barbara's hair was coming down, her hat was shapeless, and her eyes tearful from the smarting wounds.

"By Jove, you're a wreck! It's a shame!" cried the young man. "I'll whip Nixie."

"You'll do nothing of the sort!" said Barbara, with spirit. "How did he know I was coming up--coming up like a flower--at that moment? You might as well whip me. Nobody is to blame, and I'll be all right when I've washed and sewed and plastered, and done a few other things."

"Well, you're plucky," said the youth, admiringly. "I'm a doctor in embryo--full fledged next June. I'll take you in and fix you up. Do you--you don't live here?"

"We shall to-morrow; I'm a new boarder," said Barbara. "Oh, I hope my plants aren't broken! Can they be re-potted? We've become poor, and I ought not to have bought them. Why on earth doesn't that boy get up? Is he killed?" she demanded, realizing that her companion in misery was still lying, with his head in the basket, under a debris of flower-pots.

"It's why _in_ earth, rather," laughed the medical student. "Here, you boy, are you alive? You're buried all right! Get up."

The listless boy gathered himself slowly together. "Well, I'll be darned!" he said.

"You'll have to be," cried the doctor, sitting down to laugh, and pointing to the rent across the shoulders of the inert one's jacket.

"What ailed that dog? Did he have a fit?" drawled the boy, scowling at Nixie, who slunk behind Barbara self-consciously.

"He wasn't a dog; he was a cat-apult," gasped the doctor.

"Oh, please help me into the house," cried Barbara, half laughing, half crying. Several people had paused to gaze, grinning sympathetically at the scene.

"I beg your pardon! What an idiot to keep you standing here!" cried the medical student, jumping up. "Here, hustle these plants into your basket," he added to the boy. "They're not broken; we can fix them up all right. Where's my key?--there you are! Walk in. Get into the house, Nixie, you crazy pup; you've lost your walk. Leave those plants in the hall, boy, and rush back to your employer and tell him you want as many pots as you had at first, and a bag of dirt, and hurry back with it. Now, Mrs. Black--Mrs. Black, where are you?"

"Here," said the landlady, emerging from the rear. "Why, Miss Wyndham, what has happened?"

"Introduce us, please; we met on the steps," said Barbara's new acquaintance.

"Miss Wyndham--Doctor Leighton," said the bewildered Mrs. Black, automatically.

"Happy to have the honor, Miss Wyndham. There was a mix-up on the steps, Mrs. Black; there's some of it there yet. Let me have some warm water and a sponge, please. Miss Wyndham, take off your hat and have your face washed," said the unabashed boy.

"Not by you," said Barbara.

"Precisely. I'm almost a doctor, and I'm going to see that no dirt is left in your wounds to scar you. Don't be foolish, Miss Wyndham; it's not exactly a ceremonious occasion."

Barbara submitted with no further demur, and soon her face was adorned with strips of court-plaster laid on in a plaid pattern.

"Shall I be scarred?" she asked, surveying the crisscross lines on the bridge of her nose.

"Not a bit," said Doctor Leighton, cheerfully. "Mrs. Black might give you a cup of tea to brace you up."

"Yes," said Mrs. Black, without enthusiasm.

"No, thanks; I hate tea, and I'll be all right. There's the boy back with the new pots," said Barbara.

"Let me help you get the plants in, and I'll settle with the boy, because it's all Nixie's fault," said the young doctor. "Not a word! Get to work, Miss Wyndham."

He placed papers on the floor in the rear hall, apparently oblivious to Mrs. Black's icy disapproval, which inexperienced Barbara found oppressive.

"My father and your father were friends," said the young fellow, packing the earth around a begonia. "I knew you were coming here to board, and I know about the hard blow you've had. It's a shame, and it's all the fault of that scoundrel Abbott."

"Oh, how nice that your father knew papa! That is almost like being friends ourselves," said Barbara, simply. "Yes, it's dreadful for mama to be poor, and for Jessamy. Phyl and I are not going to mind it so much."

"Is Phil your brother?"

"No; Phyllis it is; she's my cousin, only she's just as much my sister as Jessamy, for she has always lived with us. I'm a year younger than she and Jessamy. Jessamy's perfectly beautiful and princessfied, and Phyllis is the most unselfish blessing in the world. I'm only Barbara."

"And I'm only Tom; I'm not a doctor yet. It's awfully jolly you're coming here. Mrs. Black gone? Yes. There isn't any one in the house I care to know; the young people are not my sort. I hope you'll forgive Nixie and me enough to speak to us once in a while," said Tom, getting up and dusting his knees.

"Oh, we shall want to talk to you; Nixie is such a nice dog," laughed Barbara.

"Only Nixie? Well, love my dog, love--oh, it's the other way about! Never mind, though; we can improve old saws. Where are your rooms?"

"First floor from the Milky Way," laughed Bab. "We hate to have mama climb so far, but we couldn't afford better rooms."

Tom Leighton looked down on the swollen, patched little face with brotherly kindness; respect and pity were in his voice as he said gently: "You will make any room bright and homelike. I see why you took your tumble down the steps so well. You are brave in falling, Miss Barbara."

Barbara stooped suddenly to pat Nixie, hiding her wounded face in his glossy curls.

"I'm not always brave," she said huskily. "I am ashamed to think so much about my beautiful room and home. I feel so little and lost in this boarding-house."

"Poor little woman!" said Tom Leighton. "Try to feel you have one friend in it. I have two sisters, and it was lonely for me when I left home. Good-by; we shall meet to-morrow." They shook hands, feeling like old friends; and Nixie sat up to shake hands too, though the dignity of his farewell was much damaged by a surreptitious lick of his quick red tongue on Bab's chin.

Tom departed, whistling, to give Nixie the walk the accident had postponed; he found himself seeing, all down the street, a tilted little nose adorned with court-plaster, and brown eyes, wistful like Nixie's. "She's plucky and simple and frank; just the girl to be a fellow's good chum," he thought. "What luck they're coming to the Blackboard!"--Tom's name for his residence.

Bab finished her tasks, and went home with glowing accounts of the little dog who had undone her and the jolly boy who had patched her up.

"There are two nice things in our new home," she said; "and I believe we'll be happy, in spite of fate."