Chapter XIX: Dispossession and Possession

"WELL!" said Rosie when she heard the great news. "Well, if that hain't just like all I ever heard 'em tell of old Bittenbender! To go and hide the will, and then let it in a place where 'twould be sure to be found by whoever come here after him, so they'd have to stand the loss, or else be a big rascal like he was! I always heard 'em say old Bittenbender was the greatest scamp around here, but to hide the will, and then give the place he didn't own to pay his debt, and then let the will behind him, yet, where you'd be sure to find it, beats everything I ever heard."

"It looks as if the late unlamented Isaac Bittenbender enjoyed a joke of his own kind, though it isn't the sort to please all tastes in jokes," remarked Bob. "It is lucky for him that the will wasn't found while he still lived--it might have given him another sort of residence than the Ark."

"Well, it's a lucky thing for Gretta the farm come into honest hands, or the folks that found the will might have kept still about it and she'd never have been no wiser," remarked Rosie. "As 'tis, what you goin' to do about it?"

"Not that," said Laura, unnecessarily. "Don't you know, Rosie, how hard Aunt Keren tried to find the will, so she could give the place over to Gretta?"

"Why, you don't suppose I thought your Aunt Keren was a-goin' to keep it?" Rosie expostulated.

"We are going to have the will proved, admitted to probate, and we shall install Gretta as mistress of the Ark just as soon as we can possibly do so," said Miss Bradbury, smiling into Gretta's perturbed face. "Then we shall see what arrangement we can make with the owner by which we can stay on here for a time, instead of her living with us, but otherwise with no change of conditions. Did you ever see a girl so cast down by good fortune? Gretta, girl, pray look cheerful! Gaze out of the window at your own broad, snow-clad fields. Look around you at your own walls, and consider what a happy change this makes in the fortunes of a girl who has had nothing in all her life to call her own, not even a father's house! And now she is an independent farmer who, with a little help, can subsist off of her own good acres!"

"I wish it could stay yours, and you would let me live with you; it is dreadful to take anything from you when you have given me so much," repeated Gretta, unable yet to take any view of the morning's events except as they affected her friends.

It was impossible, however, not to feel some little thrills of pleasure as the idea of ownership became more familiar.

The snow of that Saturday went off like the mists of a July morning. On Monday the Scollards rejoiced in a premature sleigh-ride, though the drifts made some of the exposed points of the roads nearly impassable. On Tuesday the same roads were running with rivulets of water, and either sleighing or wheeling was nearly impossible.

Gretta's distress at being an heiress went through nearly the same process as the snow. Under the sunshine of Miss Bradbury and the Scollards' unselfish pleasure in her good, she began to brighten. Then she began to take pleasure in the thought that she could actually benefit them and shelter them under her roof, giving as well as receiving. It never occurred to any of them that they should separate, and in that case what did it matter, after all, in whose name the farm stood? It was and still should be, Gretta's home and that of its new inmates. It was a beautiful thing--provided no one else were the worse for it--that by her grandmother's will the old house had fallen to her grandchild, and that now Gretta Engel had a place, a holding in the county, and could take her position among her neighbors, no longer an object of charity. For even Miss Bradbury's, and the Scollards' charity--though it was of the sort meant by the strict meaning of the word--was a burden, lighten it as they would.

Mrs. Scollard was so much better that it was hard not to be quite as well as before she broke down, and to know that she was not equal to assuming the duties of her former clerkship. She talked a great deal with her older children as to their next move. The Ark had been a rest; it had saved her, but obviously they could not live on in dependence forever; there must be some way found to resume their independent existence. Bob could go back at any moment to Mr. Felton, but the five dollars a week at which he must begin would not support six people--even youngsters' sanguine views of practical questions had to admit that fact.

Margery, Happie and Gretta had a plan; they spent hours discussing it, but nobody yet knew what it was. In the meantime Mrs. Scollard cudgeled her brains by day--and by night too, to her own harm--trying to think of some way out of her troubles.

So when Bob drove up from the post-office on a day a little past the middle of November with a letter among her mail from the firm for which she had so long been confidential correspondent, Mrs. Scollard tore it open eagerly, and gave a queer little sob of joy as she laid it down after reading it.

"Oh, dear Miss Keren, do listen to this!" she said. "They ask me to come back if I am at all able, to take charge again of their foreign correspondence. And they say if I am not equal to resuming fully my old duties, at least to come to assume general supervision of that department at a smaller salary, if the work must be divided. They beg me to take my old position at fifty dollars a week, as before, or to take half the work at twenty-five dollars a week, until I am able to do more. Thirteen hundred a year--we can't live on it, but perhaps we could manage? I don't believe I am equal to resuming everything--manage to add to it, I mean?" Mrs. Scollard looked vaguely at her hearers, thinking aloud.

"Now here is where we come in!" cried Happie, starting up in rapture. "We have the best plan, Margery, Gretta and I, but it never seemed to us enough to rely on. But it would help lots; you can't tell how much, till it gets under way. We want to open a tea room, and a circulating library, and we want to make it lovely, somewhere near the drive, or the speedway, or somewhere where people get tired and thirsty, and blown to pieces. We may have to dress up as geishas, because that's the way it's usually done, but we don't want to; it's so silly! The girls never look Japanese."

"Really, Keren-happuch, what are you talking about?" demanded Miss Bradbury.

"Happie is trying to tell you about something we have talked over of late--it was her idea in the first place," said Margery. "We thought that we might--No; that isn't the beginning either! We thought that we must earn money somehow. And we never were able to think of anything that we could do; we are all so very young. And mother would be miserable if we so much as suggested anything that was--well, public, or which threw us in with people or things that weren't very nice indeed. And Happie said: A tea room! And it really does seem to be the very thing, only we couldn't see, much as we wanted to, how it would bring in a great deal of money after we had paid rent and all the other expenses. Even though we meant to add a circulating library to it."

"What does the tea room mean, precisely?" asked Miss Bradbury.

"It means some dark, rich paper--probably red--on the walls, and lots of little tables all around, and the sweetest little Japanese teapots--the kind you get at Mardine's for fifteen or twenty cents on the bargain tables--and dainty teacups, and sugar and cream jugs, and little plates of thin wafers and crackers and sweet cakes, and maybe sardines, because you have to have lemons anyway, for people that take it in their tea; and I say lettuce for sandwiches in the season when it's not too expensive, and, well, 'most anything dainty and good, such as you would get at a tea. And lanterns all around, and the windows darkened with pretty warm, dark Japanesey curtains, so you could have the lanterns lighted all the time. And Laura wants incense sticks, but I don't, because if any one burned those things where I was eating, I shouldn't be eating long. And then book shelves, and new novels in them, and let people help themselves, and charge ten cents a week, three books at a time twenty-five cents--oh, a regular duck of a place!" said Happie in a breath, forestalling Margery.

"A regular poll parrot of a place, I should say, if you are going in for ornithological comparisons, Happie," protested Miss Bradbury. "How you do run on! I don't think I understand. Are you intending to rent a room, and furnish and carry it on in the way you describe--or rather in the way you sketchily outline?"

"We wanted to do it, Aunt Keren," Margery answered for her sister. "But we didn't see any chance of getting enough out of it to warrant trying it. Now, if mother were going to be sure of thirteen hundred a year--if she is strong enough to take half her old work--and Bob went to Mr. Felton at five dollars a week, then I think we girls could make up the rest that we need for expenses. Gretta, we thought, would come down with us for the winter, anyway, and help us in the tea room."

"I am better able to go to the office every day than I am to feel troubled," said Mrs. Scollard truly. "And really I am almost perfectly well again; the Ark and this mountain air have saved me. I certainly shall accept this offer."

"And I will back the girls in this plan to be useful which they have concocted," said Miss Bradbury. "It is really not a bad plan, and perfectly feasible. And being their own plot it would be far better to help them to carry it out, than to offer them a substitute for it. I'll tell you what I will do, Margery and Happie! I will make myself responsible for the rent of your tea room, and you may repay me if I have to meet it, and that will leave the success wholly yours, if success it is to be. After the two first months it will have been tested sufficiently for us to judge."

"Aunt Keren, you are the very best namesake--named-after-sake--a girl could possibly have!" cried Happie in a rapture. "You don't know how we longed and burned to try this scheme, but we didn't see how we could do it without capital enough to pay the rent until we were on our feet. And now you say this! Bless you, bless you!" And Happie seized her financial sponsor, and name donor, around the neck in a hug that set the dignified Miss Bradbury awry in collar, tie, and hair combs.

Miss Bradbury adjusted these accessories with a protesting exclamation that her face belied. She was not only getting used to Happie's irruptiveness, but liking it. "Now I'll tell you something further," she said. "In going about among various degrees and kinds of poor people in New York, I often come upon some one who has a room to rent or a lease to get rid of--sometimes a whole house. In the spring, in the late winter, more correctly, I knew of a dear little, quiet widow who had undertaken more than she could carry on in the matter of rent. She had found a pretty shop, with two rooms above it which she had taken for her dancing school. When I last heard of her she wanted to keep only the two rooms above stairs for the school, and to rent the shop. If she should happen to be offering her place still--she wouldn't rent it except to the right tenants--it would be the very thing for you, a pretty room, precisely the right size, with large windows, and directly on the way to everywhere. More than that Mrs. Stewart would be there to look after you, and make your undertaking safe from any doubtful or unpleasant features--she would chaperon you children. Charlotte, we could not let them open their tea-library combination without an older person to take care of them, could we?"

"No, indeed; but you are all talking and planning so fast that I can't follow you. It is perfectly safe to say I agree with that last statement, but I'm not sure I agree to anything else," said Mrs. Scollard, looking as excited as her children, and far more bewildered.

"That's all that is necessary just now, my dear," said Miss Bradbury. "I think I will go to New York in the morning, see Mrs. Stewart, and get her prices for her shop, if she has it still."

"Oh, Aunt Keren, no!" Margery protested. "You must not go to town just for us. And how we are rushing on with our plan when we never really dreamed that we could carry it out, either!"

"I should not be going down just for that, Margaret," returned Miss Bradbury. "I intended going down in any case. I want to drum up guests for Thanksgiving Day--I thought I would bring Ralph and Snigs back with me."

"Aunt Keren! And you say it so quietly!" cried Happie with her voice full of admiration points. "We're having a Thanksgiving Day this moment. It will be perfectly beyond-tellingly-glorious to have those two boys up here now--especially that it looks like more snow!"

"It will be delightful, dear Aunt Keren," said Margery, with her gentle smile.

"Delightful! Do hear how calmly she speaks, with that temperate, adult adjective!" cried Happie. "Don't leave off extravagant words, and speak like a perfect lady yet, Peggy! There's so much time to be calm and grown-up! Though I suppose you would rather Aunt Keren asked some one else than our Patty-Pan boys!" And Happie glanced significantly at a letter in Margery's hand; the fine, eccentric writing, and the Baltimore postmark had become familiar to the Ark. Through his letters Robert Gaston, Margery's Bar Harbor friend, was winning her mother's respect and liking.

Margery smiled unperturbed, though with heightened color. "I shall be very glad to see the boys, if they come," she said heartily.

"Well, I must go find Gretta and tell her the news of the last hour," said Happie rising with a sigh, for no other joy could assuage the pang this friendship of Margery's cost her whenever she remembered it "Robert Gaston is a telescope turned the wrong way," she declared, "He makes me see Peggy 'way off."

"Just think," Happie added from the doorway. "An hour ago we were without prospects, and since then mother has had her letter, Aunt Keren has given us her blessing, and has promised to help us, and she is going down to-morrow to look up our room, and to bring up Ralph and Snigs! I never heard of such an eventful hour outside the theatre, and there of course you watch years pass at a matinée. Won't Gretta and Bob be dumbfounded? Don't you want to come with me, Margery, and hear the crash when I break the news?"

"Put that way I believe I must come," laughed Margery, as she followed her sister.

There was no "crash" audible in the library where Miss Bradbury and Mrs. Scollard lingered, but they heard a wild whoop from Bob, and then a clamor of voices as he and Gretta and Laura poured out questions, and Margery and Happie answered them as excitedly.

"Dear Miss Keren, you are so good to me and my children!" said Mrs. Scollard, as she saw that Miss Keren was listening to the babel in the room beyond in the highest satisfaction. "Think of all that we owe you already! And now you offer to be responsible for the girls financially, and to let them try this scheme of theirs! I can't bring myself to the point of feeling less than guilty to allow you to do so much."

"You may feel perfectly innocent, Charlotte, for I should do it in one form or another whether you would or no," affirmed Miss Bradbury. And when she said a thing she left little room for doubt that she meant every word that she said. "I have certain plans tucked away in the back of my head in regard to your children," she continued, "and I shall certainly carry them out. Don't forget, Charlotte, that in all the world there is no one who has the claim of kindred upon me; no one with closer ties between us than bind me to you, my beloved friend's daughter, and to her grandchildren, your children. So I shall look after them as far as I can. So much for that part of it, and never let me hear you allude to obligations again! As to the rest, I am not, privately, especially sanguine about the success of the plan these girls have made, and yet it really is a good one, if their inexperience and youth do not defeat it. I thoroughly approve of helping people to carry out their own ideas, however, and not in trying to force one's own upon them. So--unless you had objected--I should like to be responsible for the beginnings of the attempt, and let the girls consider what I expend as a debt to be repaid. I shall back them, Charlotte; that's all."

"And enough," supplemented Mrs. Scollard. "A financial backer is styled an 'angel,' isn't he--in theatrical parlance? I begin to see why."

Miss Bradbury departed in the early frosty morning of the next day. She was gone a week before she wrote announcing her return on the day before Thanksgiving. Not a word did she say of her errand, nor allude to the coming of the Gordon boys. But just when Happie and Bob--and the others of a lesser degree--were beginning to make up their minds that they were defrauded of all that would make the festival festal, and that their disappointment was too sharp to be borne, there came a telegram of but two words. "Boys coming. Keren-happuch," was the burden of the dispatch. There was but one conclusion possible: Miss Keren-happuch was indulging in teasing.

"Youth must be catching," remarked Happie, flying about the room with a feather duster, for it was too late to use a cloth--there were a dozen things to be done, and train time drawing on apace. "Aunt Keren would never have played us a trick like this before she had had the benefit of living with five young Scollards."

"You are Ralph's hostess this time, Gretta," said Laura. "Since he was here you have got the Ark."

"That's so!" cried Bob. "Let's dress up Gretta and put her on a sort of throne in the corner, and bring Aunt Keren and both boys to pay homage to her as their hostess."

"Well, I guess you won't!" cried Gretta, flushing at the bare idea of such a thing.

"Let's all dress up," cried Polly. "Let's look just as funny as we can, and stand in a row all across the steps when Bob drives up."

"Why, that's a great idea, pretty Poll!" Happie approved her. "There isn't time--yes, we'll make time! Hurry up, Gretta; don't stop to polish that glass another minute! Come on up-stairs, and let's whisk through our work there in a jiffy. Then we'll make sights of ourselves with all the old things we can find, and we'll put a big cambric collar on Dundee, and a white ribbon on Dorée, and we'll all sing--what on earth is the best thing to sing when they arrive?"

"Hail to the Chief," suggested Margery.

"Who knows the tune?" demanded Happie. "No, that won't do. What's the best tune? I'll make up words for it; there's no reason why Laura should have a family monopoly of Odes on Great Occasions."

"John Brown's Body--The Battle Hymn of the Republic--is the best tune I know when you want an awful noise, yet one that has a ring in it," said Bob.

"Right you are, my Bobby!" cried Happie. "There's nothing else has the swing and rush of that air. Let's see!" She began to hum the air rapidly as she switched the cover off the dresser in Bob's room, which both the Gordons were to share with him. "This will do!" she announced. "Give me something to write on; lend me your pencil, Bob!" She snatched up a box cover, scribbled hastily for a few moments, scratching out at intervals, but not much, and when she had finished read her effusion to the others.

"You're all right, Happie!" said Bob with as much heartiness in his commendation as the Academie Française could have shown in crowning a poem, if with less elegance. "You sing that when we drive up, the whole crowd of you in a row, and you'll make a hit. Now I've got to hurry off and harness, or I'll keep them waiting."

An hour later the hit was made. Margery and Gretta were almost of equal height; they headed the line, Margery in a sheet and pillow case costume, like a ghost; Gretta attired in a bright blue wrapper, with a patchwork quilt worn as a shawl, and her pink sunbonnet on her head, hastily trimmed with all sorts of artificial flowers in various stages of nearly falling off. Happie was a bride, pinned into window curtains, and with an old lace curtain for an impressive veil that trailed two feet, at the least, behind her. Laura wore a long velvet skirt of her mother's, over which she had draped a diaphanous blue scarf, and this festive costume ended in a full evening dress waist, which bore a suspicious resemblance to an old shirt waist, with the neck and sleeves cut out. But Laura flattered herself that her costume, at least, was impressive; she was reluctant to appear grotesque, even for fun.

Polly's round and serious face was the only thing visible above a great coat of fur which had been discovered in Miss Bradbury's closet, and which enveloped plump Polly from head to heels. Penny wore one of Margery's discarded dancing gowns which had not survived the summer at Bar Harbor. Over it Margery had pinned a Martha Washington kerchief, and without plan or seeking the result hoped for by Laura had been attained for Penelope--she was as picturesque as possible.

Don Dolor came up the driveway with a flourish. It proved him of a settled and sane mind that he did not rear or plunge as he faced this graduated line of funny figures, with beautiful Dundee in the front rank, waving his plume-like tail, and smiling with distended jaws as he barked wildly over a wide collar of white cambric, which he wore around his neck like a harlequin.

Miss Bradbury beamed at the group, evidently very glad to see her family again, from her collie up--or down, for Dundee had taken himself and his collar to the top step, whence he was barking more madly than before as Don Dolor stopped. Ralph and Snigs threw up their hats noiselessly; they would undoubtedly have cheered had not Bob warned them to be quiet, and to listen to their pæan of welcome. At the tops of their voices, but in harmony, for Gretta sang alto, and Laura was equal to sustaining a true tenor, the girls sang Happie's words to the air of The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

"Behold the glad Archaics in their Ararat array;
They have stolen Mrs. Japhet's clothes (and Shem's and Ham's) away;
They're glad to see their animals come back for holiday:
Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!

"The solid ground beneath our feet is good--we've floated long.
But Ararat is high and dry, and we have anchored strong;
We're grateful this Thanksgiving tide, and so we sing this song:
Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!"