CHAPTER SEVEN
“’TIS JUST LIKE A SUMMER BIRD CAGE IN A
GARDEN”
“Are you girls always as good as this?” asked Mrs. Garden on the third day after her arrival. Her tone expressed something akin to despair.
“Don’t you ever frolic, do anything young, perhaps something you ought not to do? You’re like my grandmothers.”
Mary and Jane laughed, glancing at each other.
“We’re being good purposely, you know,” said Jane. “It isn’t an accident.”
“Very likely Florimel is in mischief this minute,” Mary added consolingly. “She’s always likely to be, and it’s a good while since she has travelled off a walk.”
“How did you happen to name Mel that, madrina?” asked Jane. “Nobody else has that name.”
“I thought it pretty. The Gardens named you two; it was my turn to name a baby. Flori has something to do with flowers, and mel is Latin for honey, isn’t it? I thought it combined prettily with Garden. It’s in Spenser’s ‘Fairy Queen,’” Mrs. Garden replied.
“Spenser’s ‘Fairy Queen!’” Jane’s repetition expressed surprise.
“Oh, I never read it,” her mother cried hastily. “It’s far too long and old-time English to read, but I found out Florimel was in that poem. I always liked to feel that nice books were around me, and to hear them alluded to, but nobody but a teacher of English literature, I should fancy, would read Spenser.”
Mary tipped her head back and laughed with great enjoyment. “You’re such a funny little personage, Mrs. Garden! You often say what other people think, but don’t dare to say,” she cried.
“Oh, well, that’s one advantage in having a career all your own; one doesn’t have to bother about what other people do. I was a singer and entertainer; I never had to read books to talk about them, you see. Lots of people read what they think they ought to read; I always read exactly what I wanted to read, and let the rest go,” explained Mrs. Garden frankly. “Don’t you know any young people? No girls come here, no boys, except that nice young secretary of Mr. Moulton’s, whom you say Florimel found along the wayside—like a flower! Are your friends keeping away from me? Because I wish they wouldn’t! Of course I’ve been having just the rest I needed since I came, but it might be—don’t you think?—the least bit dull to go on forever this way. I remember I found Vineclad overwhelmingly dull when I lived here. Aren’t there any pleasant people who will call on me, older than you are, but not so elderly, so sedately elderly as Mr. and Mrs. Moulton?” Mrs. Garden gave her daughters a glance like a naughty child venturing on mild disrespect to her elders. More than ever the relation between this mother and her children seemed to be reversed, as Mary received the glance and its suggestion with precisely that anxious air of helplessness so many mothers wear when their children threaten to prove difficult.
“Why, yes, mother dear, there are a good many young people in Vineclad who come to see us,” she replied. “They are letting us have you all to ourselves at first, you know. We don’t know them as we should have known them if Mr. Moulton had not been obliged to carry out father’s ideas of education. Girls who are taught at home are a little separated from the young people in school. But we see a good deal of the Vineclad girls and boys. And you will have lots of callers, of course, after people think you are ready for them. I don’t know whether or not Vineclad is dull. I suppose it is, when you think about it and have lived somewhere else. But there are lovely people here. Didn’t you know some you liked twelve years ago? They’d be here now, I’m sure.”
“So am I sure of it! I fancy Vineclad people are rooted!” laughed her mother.
“They used to call on me; perfectly nice creatures, but—Mary, they used to want to teach me stitches and recipes because I was so young! And that was precisely why stitches and recipes did not interest me!”
“I think I like them.” Mary looked apologetic.
“Because you are a little old lady! And I wasn’t—and am not!” cried Mrs. Garden.
“I don’t like them, either!” cried Jane. “But Mary loves fun, madrina. You see she hasn’t been thinking of anything but getting you well.”
“Surely I see,” returned Mrs. Garden, with the smile that always made new applause burst forth when she acknowledged applause from her audiences. “If you three little grandmothers of mine hadn’t so far succeeded in getting me well, I suppose I should be quite content to sun myself in the garden, like a lizard. But Yet it’s really very charming here in this garden and house! When my boxes get here I shall have no end of things to show you. You’ve no notion of the scrapbooks I’m bringing, with my programmes and press notices in them, and I’m afraid there’ll be so many photographs of me you’ll be impatient of them. But one’s press agent demands constant sittings.”
“It must seem dreadfully dull, madrina,” said Mary, rising with a line between her clouded eyes. “Only wait! I should think you could wake Vineclad when you feel stronger. Perhaps it won’t be so hard on you by and by. Poor little singing linnet! Much as I love to have you for my own, I think I’m able to wish it had not happened. I can faintly guess how hard it is to drop out of all that glory and come home to three little crude daughters, whom you don’t know and who can’t entertain you. Let me shake up that pillow!”
“You ought rather to shake me, sweet Mary!” cried her mother sincerely, not deaf, in spite of her regret for what she had lost, to the pathos in this dear girl’s voice, nor blind to the patient, self-forgetful depth of her pitying love. “I’ll get on. It’s a great thing to find you—each what you are.”
“Well, I know I’d feel like an uprooted plant from the king’s garden, dying on a country stone wall, if I were in your place!” cried Jane, with an explosion that amazed her mother.
“You are the most like me of the three, Janie,” she said. “But I was never the little stick of dynamite that you are. I was merely a girl that loved her own way of being happy and found it. I never cared with the force you do; I liked and disliked quietly, and quietly slipped through what I disliked and chose what I liked. I still like pleasantness; it isn’t particularly pleasant to feel too strongly, I fancy; I really never tried it. So I mean to enjoy rusting out here in Vineclad with you—somehow! I haven’t found the way yet. Don’t look so anxious, Mary sweetheart. How did they happen to call you Mary? You are Martha, now, ‘troubled about many things.’ No, you’re not! You are precisely what we mean when we say Mary!” Mrs. Garden lightly swayed herself backward and tipped up her face to invite Mary to kiss her, which she did, with heart as well as lips, feeling that this exotic must blossom and brighten in their garden at any cost.
Later, in the pantry, Jane came upon Mary shaking the lettuce for lunch out of its cold-water submersion. She looked up, as Jane came in, with such a sober face that Jane shook her, lightly, much as she was shaking the lettuce.
“You look like a frost-bitten Garden,” Jane declared, “and there’s no sense!”
“Suppose we can’t keep her, Janie? If she’s unhappy we shall not want to keep her,” Mary sighed, dropping a spoonful of mayonnaise on to the lettuce as if she said: “Ashes to ashes.”
“I don’t think she’s so heartless, Mary,” said Jane, intending to banish Mary’s anxiety by a shock, and certainly succeeding in shocking her.
“Heartless! Oh, Jane!” Mary cried.
“What else would it be, if she didn’t care enough about her own children to stay with them, when they were doing their best, too?” maintained Jane.
“If we had been her own children all along it would be different,” Mary suggested. “I’m afraid such young girls as we can’t make her happy. There’s so much we have to replace.”
“I think we’re pretty nice,” said Jane honestly. “Lots of people like girls young; the younger the better. Some people prefer babies, even. Of course we are not companionable, like the people she’s been with, nor entertaining that way, but I’d suppose we were interesting in another way. Besides, we’re hers! There isn’t any sense in trying to feel as if we were just little sugar gingerbread figures! We think Florimel is so pretty we can’t do a thing, sometimes, but watch her. And you like me, and laugh at my nonsense. And I know you’re—Mary! Often I want to fly off and do things and see things myself, but I know all the time I’d fly back to you fast enough! I always know that and say that, even when I’m craziest. I guess nobody could have you around, Mary Garden, and feel they had a right to you, and give you up, my darling! So what’s the use of worrying too much about our cute little toy mother? She’ll root in the garden!”
“You’re a queer mixture, my Janie,” said Mary, looking at Jane with laughter and gratitude in her eyes. “Nobody would be expected to love us as we love each other, you and I! Not that I mean that is part of the queer mixture. But you’re as full of impossible schemes, and as flighty as the wind, yet you’re really so sensible! More so than I am and I seem”
“The church steeple and I the weathercock!” cried Jane. “So you are, so I am. But you’re afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings, if you go to bed and think the truth in the dark, where nobody can see you, and when everybody thinks you’re asleep! I’m not! I think it’s right to see straight—then you’re pretty sure to stand by people, because you haven’t anything to change your mind about. That cute little mother ought to be crazy over such a girl as you are, Mary, and such a pretty, clever thing as Mel”
“And such a flame-warm, and flame-clever, and flame-beautiful daughter as”
“Get the fire extinguisher, Molly!” Jane interrupted. “You see, after all, you do know that our cunning linnet ought to enjoy her young birds in this garden! Though I’m sorrier than you can be for her to have lost her voice. Somehow, I believe I know better than you do what that is to her. Molly, did you ever think of it? You’re the reliable, house-motherly little soul, and I’m the flighty Garden, yet I’m older than you are, though I’m not sixteen, and you’re trotting right up to your eighteenth bend in the road?”
Mary looked at her a moment, turning this statement over in her mind. “You really are, in lots of ways. It’s that trick you have of knowing what you don’t know at all,” said Mary, after that moment.
“Hurrah for Mistress Mary and her definitions! That’s called intuition, Molly!” cried Jane.
To the amazement of both girls their mother came hurrying into the dining-room. Her step was quick, her face flushed, her whole expression and air alert as they had not yet seen it.
“Oh, girls,” she cried breathlessly, “where can Anne be? Do you think you can do anything? There’s a boy in the garden in a frightful way! He dashed in at the side gate and quite crumpled up before me! He’s wet and besmeared with mud; I fancy he’s been rescued from drowning, or some one has tried to drown him, and he barely made the garden, running away! I can’t leave him there! Come, for pity’s sake! Oh, where are Anne and Abbie? Why don’t we keep a man about all day?” She wrung her hands frantically as she spoke.
Mary had dashed into the cold closet, back of the pantry, and brought out a glass of brandy. She snatched up the bottle of household ammonia that stood on the shelf beside the pantry sink, not to take time to go after proper restorative ammonia. Jane had flown to the kitchen and had wrenched Abbie from her steak at its critical moment, then had shrieked Anne’s name until she had heard and had almost fallen downstairs, recognizing the cry as announcing danger.
Mrs. Garden led the way, as light of foot and fleet as her children. Mary and Jane followed and Anne behind them, not able to move as quickly as the rest. A little in arrear of the other four lumbered Abbie, whose joints were refractory, carrying a pail of water and a glass, also a large palm leaf fan.
A short distance from the chair in which the girls had left their mother lay a boy of childish build. A gray felt sombrero hat covered his head; he was as wet and muddy as Mrs. Garden had described him, but he was able to move for, as the rescue party came up, he rolled over on his face, having been turned as if to get more air, and Jane’s keen eyes saw him pull his hat tighter down over his head by the hand farthest from them, slipped up to catch its broad brim. The lad wore grayish knickerbockers and a loose flannel shirt that had been white, but the mud with which he was generously decorated concealed its original colour and barely revealed that his stockings were black and his shoes old tan ones.
“Wait a minute,” said Jane, thinking that there was something familiar in the boy’s drooping shoulders and build. She put out her hands to check Mary, who, overflowing with sympathy, was hastening to lift the lad and pour between his cold lips a little of the brandy which she carried. “Wait a minute, Anne; let mother turn him over.”
Mary stopped, but looked at Jane, astonished. Anne gave her a sharp glance.
“All right, Jane; I think maybe it would be better,” Anne said.
“Oh, I don’t want to touch him! I never could bear to do anything of this sort!” shuddered Mrs. Garden.
She went up to the boy, nevertheless, and shrinkingly took him by the two dryest spots that she could select on his shoulders and turned him. He resisted her and made the turning unexpectedly hard, considering that he had fallen as he lay when he had entered, as if his last drop of strength had been drained. Pulling him over, Mrs. Garden fell back with a cry.
“Florimel! Florimel, you little wretch! Whatever is wrong with you? Why are you in such clothes?” she gasped.
Florimel lay on her back, the hot sunshine of noon streaming down on her mischievous face. Her black hair, shaken loose by her movement, tumbled about her from the sombrero covering it. Her eyes danced, her red cheeks dimpled, and her teeth gleamed as she lay, laughing till she could not speak, ripples and chuckles shaking her, the picture of supreme enjoyment.
“You handsome imp!” cried her mother, as if she could not help it. “You frightened me almost out of my life. I never dreamed it was you. Whatever did you do it for?”
“That’s why: to scare you,” said Florimel, lying still, in no hurry to get up, nor having much breath with which to do so. “I was watching you this morning and I thought you looked dull; I thought, maybe, you’d like to have something happen. Whenever we get to feeling that way it’s up to Jane or me to start something. I knew Jane wouldn’t dare, not for you, yet, so I did. Got these things down at Allie Ives’, her brother Phil’s, you know.” Florimel turned her brilliant eyes on her sisters, expecting them to recognize Phil Ives. “Allie and I muddied them up—Mrs. Ives didn’t care, Phil’s outgrown them—and we turned the hose on me; I never take cold, Anne knows it! Then I ran home, by the back way, and tumbled in here! I thought it would scare you! It did, didn’t it?” Florimel pleadingly asked her mother, desiring to hear again of her complete success.
“Certainly it did, dreadfully.” Mrs. Garden’s tone was satisfactory to Florimel.
“Didn’t any one see you coming home, Florimel? What would they think!”
“That’s all right, little motherkins,” cried Florimel, jumping up and displaying her costume, with its muddy wetness, to such a ridiculous effect that there was no scolding her, for it was funny. “I didn’t meet any one but the Episcopalian minister, and he loves nonsense, and the grocer’s boy, and he grinned; he loved it! And an old funny woman down the street who is too nearsighted to see I wasn’t some boy—unless Chum gave me away, but I guess she doesn’t know Chum! Anyhow, people all know we’re the Garden girls, and Vineclad always looks up to Gardens, so it doesn’t matter. Besides, they expect me to cut up; I always do—and Mary never! It’s all right, mothery. Do you like me better as a boy? I do. Why didn’t you let the baby be a boy, little mother? When you had two girls, and she’d have loved so to have been one?”
“Did you actually do this because you wanted to entertain me?” asked Mrs. Garden, looking as helpless as she felt, laughing, yet puzzled by this prank.
“You and me,” said Florimel honestly. “I’d got tired of being so steady ever since you came. I’m always getting into scrapes; I thought it was time you got acquainted with the real me—not that this is a scrape! But honest and true, I did think you looked as if it was time something shook you up, little lady-mother.”
“I felt that,” Mrs. Garden acknowledged. “But, really, Florimel, I hope you won’t feel obliged to go to extremes to enliven me! Oughtn’t she get off those wet clothes, Mary; oughtn’t she, Anne? Do you really think it won’t make her ill?”
“She’s proof against illness, or she’d have been buried ten years ago,” said Anne. “She’s as healthy as a ragamuffin—which she looks like! Of course you must go and dress, Florimel! Did you leave your frock at Allie’s? Lunch is almost ready, too.”
“Oh, Jerusalem Halifax Goshen! My steak, my steak! You abominable, desolating Florimel, if it’s burnt!” screamed Abbie, dropping her pail, with the glass now floating on its surface, and ambling toward the house, her big palm leaf fan making her look like a large insect with one disabled wing.
“If Florimel sees that you need entertaining, I think we’d better give a tea for you, and invite Vineclad to make your acquaintance, madrina,” said Mary, offering her mother her arm for support from the garden to the house after the shock of Florimel’s invasion.
Mrs. Garden slipped her hand into Mary’s arm and shook it delightedly. “If only you would!” she cried. “I’ve been wishing you would, but I didn’t like to suggest it. Why not a garden party? I have the loveliest gown for it you ever saw in all your life, and a hat that shades my face just enough! They told me it made me look less than twenty-five! I wore it at home in England. But only once, girls; think of it! Do give me a party! I never wore that delicious costume except to the fête champêtre which dear Lady Hermione gave when Balindale came of age. You know Lord Balindale is not yet twenty-two, and this was his twenty-first birthday, last September. The gown isn’t in the least out of style. How lovely you are, Mary, to have thought of this!”
Mary stopped short in their slow progress houseward. She looked at her mother, and then at Jane aghast. “Oh, little mother,” she cried, “what are we to do! Here you’ve been playing with countesses and having coming-of-age parties, precisely like an English story, and we’ve nothing in the least splendid to give you here! The greatest personages in all Vineclad and its neighbourhood are Mrs. Dean, the widow of the founder of the college; the various ministers’ wives, and the doctors’ and lawyers’ families, and the bank families; and a retired author, who is really very nice, but doesn’t care to go out a great deal; and Mr. and Mrs. Moulton! And is Lord Balindale an earl?”
“Certainly he is, but one doesn’t expect earls in a republic. Americans are quite as nice in manners and as clever as titled people—provided they are nice Americans—though, as a rule, their voices are not as good! Of course one doesn’t expect much in a small country place! But pray give the party, Mary! At least I can wear my gown, and it will be something to think about!” begged Mrs. Garden.
“Of course, if you want it,” Mary hesitated, but Jane cried:
“That’s the idea; it will be an excuse for dressing up, and being nice yourself! I always imagined parties were things to dress up for more than they were to enjoy. All I ever went to were, anyway! We’ll have a lovely garden party, little madrina, if only because you’ll be lovely at it!”