CHAPTER VII

TAKING ARMS AGAINST A SEA OF TROUBLES

Christmas morning dawned clear and cold, with a few errant snowflakes drifting on the wind as if to show New York that the great Northwest had not forgotten her, but had only delayed its Christmas box of winter weather for a little while.

It is hard wholly to escape the universal joy in the Christmas air; and, in spite of anxiety, Jessamy and Barbara felt more hopeful than they had the night before. Then little crumbs of comfort floated their way in the morning, as the snowflakes were floating without. Beautiful flowers came to Mrs. Wyndham from Mr. Hurd and other friends, and the expressman had left some packages for the girls late the preceding night, which the chambermaid with the chronically dust-branded forehead brought up the first thing in the morning.

Relations had been strained between the three Wyndham girls and the less fortunate trio who sat opposite them at table; Jessamy, Phyllis, and Bab, finding their overtures of peace misunderstood and rejected, had given up making them. But this morning the Christmas spirit seemed reflected in the softer looks under the towering pompadours across from them, and, hearing May Daly say that she was "dreadful sorry they hadn't any flowers for the dance that evenin'," Jessamy ventured to suggest that her mother had received lovely roses, which she would be glad to share with her neighbors if they would accept them.

"You're real kind," said Daisy Heimberger, flushing with pleasure. "If you've got so many you'll have enough for your ma and we, they'd be about 's nice a Christmas card as you could give us."

"We'll accept them with pleasure, and be much obliged," added May Daly, who, the Wyndhams had learned, was more ambitious than either of her friends.

"We was sayin' this mornin' that it must be a sorrowful kind of Christmas to you, and we'd like to show we thought of you if we knew how, or you wouldn't be mad," added Fanny Harmon.

"That was lovely," said Jessamy, heartily, flushing in her turn, and wondering that she felt so glad of a kind word from one of these girls. "We have had a good many more merry Christmases, but we won't mind if only my mother and cousin get well--" She stopped abruptly.

"Don't you fret," said Daisy Heimberger, coming around to pat dignified Jessamy kindly on the shoulder. "I wish you was goin' to the dance to-night like us; but your turn'll come, sure, an' most likely your ma and sister'll be all right in a day or two."

"Thank you," said Jessamy, gratefully, while Bab added: "We're very glad you are going to have a nice time, if we can't; but we shall be happier if we can add to your pleasure with the flowers. We'll send them down, and if you wrap them in wet newspapers and lay them outside on your window-sill in the shade they won't open, but will be just right to wear to-night. We have lots, so don't be afraid to take what we send."

"All right; we'll do something for you if ever we can," said May Daly. "So long, and I hope you'll have something nice happen to you to-day."

This little incident made both Jessamy and Bab feel that the sun shone brighter; it is such a pleasant thing to feel one can add even a trifle to some one's happiness, and every one's good wishes and liking are worth having.

Then the postman came and brought Christmas greetings for the girls from several of their old friends, and a letter from Mrs. Van Alyn, with an ivy-leaf from Stratford-on-Avon for Phyllis, a photograph of Botticelli's beautiful little picture of the "Nativity" in the National Gallery for Jessamy, and for Bab an oak-leaf from the sleepy old English town whence the first ancestor of the Wyndhams had sailed away to America two hundred years before. But, best and most wonderful of all, he brought a note from Aunt Henrietta, which Jessamy read aloud to Bab after they got up-stairs.

"'My dear nieces,'" it ran, "'I am concerned to hear that your mother and Phyllis are ill, though it would be more becoming if you had acquainted me with the fact directly, rather than leave me to learn it circuitously through Mrs. Haines. I trust Phyllis is not going to have typhoid, like the Haines child. Also that your mother will try to overcome her natural weakness. It is a pity she has none of the Wyndham endurance.'"

"Yet dear papa died, not Madrina," interrupted Bab.

"'I should have been to see you,'" continued Jessamy, "'but that I myself have been suffering. I have had a severe attack of bronchitis, and the doctor thought I should not escape appendicitis--'"

"Mercy! They're not much alike, except in having that horrible long-i sound!" exclaimed Bab, who grew what Tom called "Babbish" the moment pressure on her spirits was relaxed.

"Do be still, Babbie," cried Jessamy, and read on: "'Escape appendicitis, but the symptoms were caused, as you may conjecture, by acute indigestion. When I am able to be out, I shall go to see you. In the meantime, I send you each a small Christmas remembrance, which may be useful to you in your present circumstances. Your affectionate aunt, Henrietta Hewlett.'"

The small Christmas remembrance was a check for twenty-five dollars for each member of the family. Jessamy snatched them up greedily. No one knew how she had dreaded applying to Aunt Henrietta for a loan, and now Aunt Henrietta herself had precluded the necessity. A hundred dollars! It would carry them more than two weeks beyond the New Year, when their interest came in; and perhaps before this windfall was used up they might be able to dispense with the nurse. It is difficult to be hopeful about anything with money anxieties to corrode one's heart, and for the first time Jessamy and Bab looked down on their two dear patients with courage, and pressed each other's waists with their encircling arms, feeling very grateful for the relief Christmas had brought them, and something very like love for Aunt Henrietta, who, in spite of ways all her own, had done a really beautiful thing.

Mrs. Black rose to the requirements of the festival, and gave "her guests" an unwonted feast. Mrs. Wyndham took little bits of the delicate meat around the turkey wishbone with more relish than she had shown for anything since her breaking down.

After dinner Ruth Wells came down, her basket on her arm, like a happy combination of Little Red Riding Hood and Little Mabel, whose "willing mind" could not have been as ready to serve others as kindly Ruth's. Out of her basket she produced a veil-case for Jessamy, a handkerchief-case for Bab, a glove-case for Phyllis, all embroidered in tiny Dresden flowers and wreaths on white linen, not in her spare moments--for Ruth had no spare moments--but in the moments she had pilfered from her work for her friends. And for the sick ones were clear jellies and a mold of blanc-mange, with bits of holly stuck blithely in the top.

"Oh, Ruth, how could you make all these, and how did you get them down here?" cried Jessamy.

"That comes of having one's flat, and not boarding," laughed Ruth. "At least, as far as the making goes. As to getting them down, a little more or less, once you have a basket, doesn't matter. Your mother looks ever so much brighter."

"Yes; she ate with a little appetite to-day. But Phyllis doesn't seem to change. And, oh, Ruth! They have cut off her hair!" said Bab.

"Well," said Ruth, stoutly, "what of it? You speak as though it were her head. I suppose it won't be like the raveled-yarn hair on the knit doll I had when I was a little tot; I cut that once when he was going to a party, and was dreadfully grieved that it never grew again. Phyllis's will, I suspect."

"Come and see her," said Jessamy. Ruth followed. She really was a wonderfully comforting girl. Not a shadow of regret could Jessamy and Bab, watching her closely, detect as she looked on poor shorn Phyllis, lying quietly just then, the delirium past. Instead, Ruth said cheerily: "It will probably grow out in little soft curls all over her head, and how pretty she will look!"

And, as if to reward Ruth for her goodness, Phyllis opened her eyes, smiled faintly, and said: "I'm lazy, Ruth."

It was the first sign of recognition she had given since she became unconscious, and Jessamy and Bab clutched each other with speechless joy. To be sure, Phyllis said no more, but dropped away again into that mysterious space wherein the sick seem to exist, and Tom was gone home to keep the holidays with his family, so they could not fly, as they longed to do, to ask some one just how good a symptom this might be. But the nurse told them that though it might mean little, it was encouraging; and Jessamy and Bab resolved to take it at its highest valuation--to get all the joy they could out of a Christmas which was not too bright at best.

Bab went out with Ruth for a breath of air, and they walked up town, passing one or two elevated-road stations which Ruth might have used, but that she preferred keeping Bab company. They came to a little church; its doors were ajar, and Bab proposed entering. "I think I feel like church," she said, and Ruth understood that tired Babbie craved support and help. So she did not suggest that she was due at home, but went in willingly. A strong odor of spruce and pine filled the air, together with a kind of close sweetness, the lingering reminder of incense used in the morning service.

"It must be a Catholic church," whispered Ruth. "What do you suppose that is on the side where everybody is kneeling?" The girls followed two women who had preceded them up the aisle, and came to a curious scene at the altar-rails. On the right side a small grotto of firs had been made, with rocks represented by unmistakable painted canvas. At the back of the grotto were little figures, dressed in bright colors, mounted on camels, coming in procession down the rocks toward the foreground. And in that foreground were far larger figures, some shepherds with lambs on their shoulders, an ox and an ass, a man leaning on a staff, a young woman dressed in blue, with a white veil floating backward, all adoring a tiny infant, lying, with little hands clasped, on straw in the middle of the group.

"It must represent Bethlehem, and the birth of Christ," whispered Barbara.

"Isn't it queer? And do see those funny little Wise Men on the camels, and the big tinsel star," returned Ruth.

"Don't, Ruth," said Bab. She saw that the representation was childish, far from artistic, and yet that it had another kind of beauty. For old women and men were kneeling around it at prayer, with rapt faces or wet cheeks, evidently carried back to the first Christmas; and little children came and went hand in hand, kneeling a brief time before this quaint reminder of Bethlehem, then going decorously away. Sometimes, as the girls watched, funny round tots, in faded hoods or with tattered caps in hand, would rise from kneeling on the altar-step, so high to them that their shabby shoes stuck straight out in the air, and make a bobbing curtsy of farewell with the best of intentions, but with their backs frequently turned toward the Bethlehem where their serious faces should have been. It was droll, but it was touching. Barbara was endowed by nature with the simplicity and love which enabled her to see beyond the ugly colors, the tinsel, the inartistic figures, and grasp the love and faith they were meant to awaken. It was a simple representation, for simple people, and Barbara saw for what it stood.

She knelt in a pew, watching the strange scene, and feeling as though some magic had transported her far from New York to a distant European village; but as she watched and wondered, wordlessly her heart prayed too among these imploring visitors to the manger. "Mama, Phyllis; mama, Phyllis," she thought, but the thought was a prayer, every pulse and heart-beat crying out for those she loved.

At last they left the dark church, lighted only by the reflector behind the star and a light above the altar. "Did you ever see anything like it?" said Ruth, who had been less touched by the scene than Barbara.

"No; it is so foreign and queer, but I think I see what it means," said Bab, slowly. "Only fancy there being such quaint things among us! If we went to Europe, and saw what we have seen on Christmas, we should write long letters home, and probably you would think it pretty in Italy, Ruth."

"Well, I don't see how it could be pretty, but I suppose it has a kind of beauty, too. I am glad we went in. I'll take the train here, Bab, for I'm late already. Keep up heart; everything is coming right for you, and Phyllis is better, or she wouldn't have known me."

"Thank you, Ruthy; you're so heartening. I wish mama could take you for a tonic. I'm sure I don't know any other equal to you," said Bab. And she went her way alone, quickening her steps, for it was growing dusk, and feeling comforted by the quiet quarter of an hour in the little dim church, where she had poured her heart out silently and it had come back to her refreshed.

The last seven days of the year slipped by with alternations of hope and fear for Phyllis filling Jessamy and Barbara's moments,--for Phyllis, because the question of whether she was to throw off the fever or settle down to long typhoid was determining, and Mrs. Wyndham's condition involved no present danger. On the whole, hope predominated; the times in which Phyllis had lucid moments grew more frequent and longer. Doctor Jerome looked more cheerful each day.

But finally, as if she knew that the time of good resolutions and amendment had come, on the closing night of the year Phyllis threw off the last trace of her fever and lay weak and white, but smiling and conscious, to greet the New Year's dawn.

Tom and Nixie came back just in time to hear the good news and rejoice with the grateful girls, bringing cheer with them; altogether, Jessamy felt that night, when she lay down to sleep, that her troubles were nearly over, and she saw light ahead.

She had yet to learn that the long days of convalescence held trials greater than those she had borne, though the haunting fear that had hung over her during Phyllis's danger was relieved.

In the first place, the January days fulfilled the old prophecy of increased cold, with longer hours of light; and the little stoves, to which she and Bab offered up holocausts of knuckles and finger-tips, tried them almost past endurance.

"It really isn't the stove which bothers us," said Bab, falling back on her heels as she knelt before it, and raising a discouraged and smutty face to Jessamy. "The stove is like the rest of us--it would work better if it could get something to consume."

That was true; it took constant battling to keep coal on hand to replenish the fire. Mrs. Black was not interested in fuel, or, more correctly, she was interested in it to keep the supply low, and the result was that the swift-drawing cylinder stoves were precariously near being fireless half the time.

The matter of getting food for their convalescents kept Jessamy and Barbara's nerves quivering. Even when they sacrificed their own dinners, and toiled upstairs again with clumsy trays, hoping to get a warm chop, bowl of soup, or slice of beef to their mother or Phyllis, who was pathetically hungry and begged for plenty to eat, they failed in their object, though they went hungry themselves to attain it.

They bought chops and gave them to Mrs. Black to be cooked, bribing the cook to do them nicely; but the meat that had looked so succulent and juicy when it was cut, reappeared dry and blackened, with congealing fat around the edges of the plate, or else was so rare that Phyllis's hungry eyes filled with tears at the sight of it.

They bought beef and glass jars, and tried extracting the juice in cold water and salt, as Mrs. Wells taught them to do; and they got a broiling-fork and cooked chops over the coals in their stoves till the irascible old man below them and Mrs. Hardy, who disapproved of the Wyndhams' friendship for Tom, complained to the landlady of the odor of broiling. Jessamy began to have a little line between her eyes, and her sweet voice grew almost sharp from nervous strain, while Bab, though she really struggled hard to "be good," as she said, found her naturally quick temper roused beyond her ability to curb it in the effort to obtain justice, if not kindness, for her dear patients, whose recovery depended on proper care.

For a month the two poor little heroines struggled on in a daily round of petty annoyances that were not petty when one considered what they involved.

"We're getting awful, Jessamy," said Bab, tearfully, one night. "We're getting sharp-tempered, nervous, hard, and where shall we end?"

"Come in here, girls," called Phyllis's voice, still tremulous, from the next room. "Bring Tom."

Tom and Nixie had resumed their old quarters since the nurse had gone, and they both came as readily as they always did when Jessamy and Barbara called them.

"I heard what you said, Babbie," said Phyllis, motioning Tom to the seat of honor, and making Nixie welcome by her side in the big chair. "I heard you say you were getting horrid, and I've been seeing what a hard time you were having, and I want to tell you what we're going to do."

"It sounds rather solemn, Phyl," said Jessamy, "summoning us to a conclave like this. If we're going to do anything bad, don't tell us to-night."

Phyllis laughed. "Hand me that book, Bab, please," she said, and Bab wonderingly gave her a volume she had been reading that afternoon. Phyllis produced from it a sheet of paper covered with figures. "What we're going to do," she said, "or what I am going to do, is go to housekeeping."

There was a shout of laughter from her auditors, after a moment of surprised silence.

"You look like housekeeping just now," said Bab.

"I look less like boarding," said Phyllis, stoutly. "Ruth Wells is perfectly right; we should be far better off in a little home of our own--'be it ever so humble.' It takes strong--no, I mean tough people to get on without home comforts. You and Jessamy are getting utterly worn out, as nervous and fretted as you can be, and if you put half the strength it takes to live this way into healthy housework you would have everything you need and not be tired, still less cross."

"Phyllis is right!" exclaimed Tom. "It's a miserable way to live."

"Of course I'm right," said Phyllis; "only this isn't living. Now, I've been figuring," and she held up her sheet of paper. "It costs us fourteen hundred and fifty-six dollars a year to board as we are boarding now. Our washing is about three dollars a week--that is a hundred and fifty-six dollars a year--and that makes sixteen hundred and twelve dollars. Then, I don't know what you are spending besides for all these nourishing things auntie and I are having."

"I do," said Jessamy, with a half-humorous, half-genuine sigh.

"I am sure you do, and that it is awful," said Phyllis. "Well, now, listen; we are going to take a flat, wherever we can find it, and the best for the money, at forty dollars a month. We are going to have a woman come in two days in the week, to wash, iron, and sweep, at a dollar and a quarter a day, and that is a hundred and thirty dollars a year. And we are going to cook on gas, and spend about six dollars a month for our gas--Ruth said so--and that is seventy-two dollars more. And we're going to live plainly, but have nice, wholesome things to eat, and all we want, for six hundred a year--Ruth told me that too, and she knows--and that makes a total of thirteen hundred dollars, allowing a little margin. That's three hundred dollars less than we spend now; and who wouldn't rather live in her own dear little home, with all scratchy, maddening things and people shut out?"

Phyllis stopped, breathless, and the others had listened in so much the same condition that it was a moment before any one spoke. Then Bab leaped to her feet and ran over to hug Phyllis in rapture. "You dear, quiet, splendid old Phyllistine!" she cried. "It's just blissfully lovely. To think of you being the one to do it, when you're still so weak and forlorn!"

"Ask me to tea, have me up to help, and let me catch the crumbs from your table," said Tom. "Phyllis, you're a trump, and you've saved the day!"

"Crumbs from the table!" cried Jessamy, catching her breath. "That's just it. It is a dream, Phyl; but how in the wide world can we do it? There won't be any crumbs from the table, nor anything to eat; we don't know anything, any of us; I'm not sure mama understands cooking."

"Auntie can direct a cook; I've heard her do it," said Phyllis. "And as to anything to eat, we'll learn a few necessary things, and do them every day if we have to. But I'm not afraid, with a good cook-book and Ruth to ask. It's better than this at the worst, and we shall save money, too. As to that, if we failed we could have one servant and still spend no more than we do now. You and Bab go out to look for flats to-morrow. You'll see I am right."

Phyllis's last remark settled the question; if they could afford to keep a servant in case they were forced to it, there could be no risk in the attempt. Indeed, Barbara would not admit that there was risk in any case.

Tom was unselfishly enthusiastic over the scheme, though he said he dared not think of his loneliness if they left the "Blackboard." But Bab hospitably gave him the freedom of the new apartment, and before they separated for the night the place was rented, furnished, and they had moved in. And, best of all, Tom had promised Phyllis a kitten.