Chapter III: Part 3

"At any rate," insisted Wilma, "I wish it had come before sister went to town, and if it should be from Mrs. Gorham's son, of all the unlucky days in creation, he couldn't have chosen a worse time to arrive. The situation is absolutely hopeless."

The two girls were in the attic, arrayed in their oldest wrappers. Claribel, with her curly hair carefully tied up in a towel, was ripping open an old feather bolster to convert it into sofa pillows. Wilma, dragging out dusty boxes from under the eaves, was looking through them for some remnants of linen for covers.

Their noses were blue with cold, for the wind whistled through the broken panes of the attic windows. Early that morning Agnes had started on her weekly trip to town to the _Sentinel's_ office. Her face was white and set, and she had passed a sleepless night. The day before, her manuscript, that was to have made the fortunes of her little world, was returned to her from the publishers. It was more than a disappointment to the three who had counted so confidently upon its success. It was almost a tragedy in the shattering of such high hopes. An intangible sense of loss had weighed on their spirits ever since, almost as if some one lay dead in the great empty parlours below.

It was a desire to rid themselves of the strange feeling of desolation that brooded over the familiar rooms that sent the girls to the attic as soon as Agnes left. Mam Daphne had brought the mail, as she often did in rainy weather, and gone again. The sight of the letter addressed to Agnes had given rise to Wilma's usual supposition, and then silence followed for nearly an hour. It was broken by a sudden thundering of the griffin's head against the great front door. The girls' hearts seemed to leap up in their throats. They had not heard that sound since the June day of Mrs. Gorham's visit.

"_Tom!_" ejaculated Wilma, in a terrified whisper, looking wildly into Claribel's startled eyes. "Oh, we can't let him in! Neither of us is fit to go down, and there isn't a spark of fire in this big barn of a house, even in the kitchen stove."

"I can't go," announced Claribel. "I am simply covered with feathers. It will take an hour at least to pick them off."

Wilma held up two grimy hands, and pointed to the front breadth of her wrapper, which had been torn to ribbons on a lurking nail.

"Do you think he would recognise in either of us one of the 'charming girls of Marchmont' that his mother painted?"

"Maybe it's only a book-agent after all," suggested Claribel, hopefully. But the knocking sounded again, and Wilma shook her head.

"No, there was that letter to sister, you know, and it sounds just as I've imagined Tom would knock, from what his mother told of him--so peremptory and lordly, somehow, as if he wouldn't take no for an answer."

"What shall we do?" groaned Claribel, desperately. "Even if we were fit to go down, there's nothing but bread and tea for lunch. Oh, if sister were only home!"

While they hesitated and exclaimed and debated, they heard a step crunch on the gravel far below, and looking down, saw a dripping umbrella, a broad back, and two long legs striding down the walk. Just above the attic window where they crouched, a grinning gargoyle spouted a stream of water past the tiny diamond panes. Through this miniature cataract they watched their departing guest. At the gate he turned for a long backward look, and they had a glimpse of a handsome boyish face, as he gazed up at the stately pillared old mansion. The roses were gone, and the rain beating against it made it look unspeakably old and cheerless. All the front shutters were closed, and no smoke wreathed from any of its chimneys. Evidently he thought the place deserted, seeing no signs of life anywhere about it.

As his gaze wandered upward to the grinning old gargoyle, the girls hastily drew back. When they peeped out again, he had gone.

"Do you realise what we have done?" asked Claribel, with tears of mortification springing to her eyes. "We have kept still and acted another lie for the sake of our ancestral latch-string. Oh, why haven't we servants and plenty to eat and wear as they had in the good old times Mam Daphne tells about, so that we could always be at home to everybody?"

"And he looked _so_ interesting," wailed Wilma. "I'd love to know a man like that--a real, wide-awake college fellow--and now he's walked right out of our lives as everything else worth while has done. Now that 'Carrington' has failed and sister lost hope--"

She did not finish the sentence, but sat there on the attic floor in a disconsolate little heap, staring out the tiny window while the rain beat a dirge on the leaky roof. Suddenly she was startled by Claribel scrambling to her feet.

"You hear me, Wilma Mason," she cried. "I'll never be mortified again in this way! I don't care what sister says, I am going to work for the honour of the family latch-string. I swear this shall never happen again." Her tragic manner was in such comical contrast to her befeathered appearance that Wilma laughed, for the first time since the return of the manuscript. Then they went down to rekindle the kitchen fire, and plan for the repairing of their family fortunes.

"I don't know what practical shape your fine resolutions will take," said Wilma, as they took their bread and tea at lunch, "but for my part, no one shall ever again look at that poor old broken-hinged gate with the quizzical glance Tom gave it. His very eyebrows seemed to say 'Lor', how shiftless!' I shall put on a new hinge myself as soon as it stops raining. There's a big box of screws and locks and things down in the granary, and the remains of a tool-chest."

Once started on her round of repairs, Wilma found herself viewing the entire premises from the standpoint of the sharp gray eyes that had looked so reprovingly at the broken-hinged gate.

"If Tom ever comes here again," she vowed to herself, "he shall not see this grand old place in such a pitiful state of dilapidation. I can at least see that the porch floor has paint, and the garden chairs more than three legs apiece. I feel that I have the making in me of a first-class carpenter." So here and there she went, hammering, and screwing, and puttying, and painting, finding an outlet for much latent energy, and a use for her long repressed, although long suspected mechanical ability.

Claribel's plans did not put themselves into practical shape so readily. For days she went about with a preoccupied air. There was some mysterious correspondence that Agnes wondered over, many hours spent in her room with locked doors. Then one day she stole down the stately stairway with a little valise in her hands.

"You needn't look at me in that way," she whispered, defiantly, as she met the disapproving gaze of the long line of family portraits. "It is to keep up your own old traditions that I am doing it."

Then something of the proud spirit of her ancestors seemed to take possession of her as she passed out of their patronising presence. It helped her to hold her head high, and carried her through a trying interview with the most fashionable dressmaker in the city, whither she had slipped away with some little models of children's dresses of her own designing and making.

At the end of an hour she came away triumphant. Madame, impressed by her references, quick to see the value of her original ideas, and shrewd enough to know how useful this artistic young girl could be to her, consented to her proposition to establish a department for the making of children's fancy costumes, of which Claribel was to be in charge. At first the woman named a salary so low that she would not have dared propose it, had she not thought that necessity had driven the girl to such a step. She was used to beating down her employees to absurdly low wages. Then it was that the pride of all her ancestors seemed to blaze out of Claribel's eyes, and she drew herself up haughtily.

"You know that the designing alone would be worth four times that sum, madame," she said, quietly. "If that is the best you can do, we will not discuss the subject farther."

Madame hastily retracted then. She knew it would never do to let this opportunity slip into the hands of a rival, and the names of Claribel's references were too prominent to overlook. So a little later, when the next train bore the excited young girl homeward, it was a triumphant voice that poured out the story of her success to Wilma, who met her at the gate.

"And at a salary that will put new shingles on old Marchmont," she cried, "and put Daphne in the kitchen, and picnic fare in the pantry every day."

"You needn't think you're going to do it all," exclaimed Wilma. "This very day I discovered all the old hothouse frames stored away in the carriage-house, as good as new; and Mam Daphne told me so many tales about the violets and the lettuce that used to be the boast of Marchmont every winter, that I went over to consult papa's old gardener. Sister has actually consented to let me try my hand at raising both. I haven't told her yet that it is my ambition to furnish the fashionable club houses this winter with extra fine lettuce at fancy prices. Poor sister! She'll be horrified, after all her precautions, to have one of us turn out a market-gardener and the other a dressmaker."

"Say designer, if you please, when you break my news to her, and tell her that my creative ability simply had to have an outlet of some kind, and that this will be a stepping-stone to my career as artist. Maybe that will help to soften the blow."

"Really, it was Tom who began it. He ought to have all the credit, or otherwise," said Wilma, as they passed on into the wide front hall. "I hadn't realised the condition of our family latch-string until I saw it through his eyes. Then I began to trace it back and found that it began in the door of a pioneer log cabin; and oh, what do you think, Claribel, the two ancestors we are proudest of, the ones we all quote the oftenest, and plume ourselves the most on being their descendants, had to dig and delve for everything they got. Old Mrs. Carter told me so this morning." She pointed to the two portraits that headed the long line. "_Now_ if sister makes any objections to our plans, I'll just refer her to the first of the grandmammas who made our hospitality proverbial, and, hardening her hands with the work of the wilderness, was yet the truest gentlewoman of them all."

THE END.

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End of Project Gutenberg's Cicely and Other Stories, by Annie Fellows Johnston