Chapter IV: An Angel in Disguise

"IT'S rather worse to be ill with nothing the matter than to be sensibly ill of a disease," said poor Mrs. Scollard speaking feebly, but with an attempt at her own cheerfulness.

She had been ill for three weeks, and had not improved perceptibly over her condition in the beginning. "Only a nervous collapse," the doctor repeated. It had been so long coming on that the recovery must be proportionately long. And how could she get better with the thought that when her strength had given out, the family income had ceased sitting like a vulture at her bedside? Small as was the rent of the "Patty-Pans," still it must be paid. A month was as long as she could be idle, yet that month was nearly past, and she was no better.

Margery, Bob and Happie for the first time realized what a vitally real thing money is, and vainly strove to find a way to take their mother's place as the bread-winners. They understood only too clearly that there was no chance for that dear mother to get well while she lay in the second Patty-Pan room with anxiety tearing at her heart-strings.

Ralph and Snigs and their fine mother were comforts in those black days, but it was on Miss Bradbury that the Scollards found themselves relying with hourly increasing appreciation of her strength. That remarkable woman had not suggested returning to her home, but nightly occupied the parlor couch in the Patty-Pans, and daily took charge of its sorrowful tenants. Delicacies such as Margery would not have dared to buy found their way to Mrs. Scollard, and Margery discovered when she went to market that there were no out-standing accounts such as she had been dreading with the neighboring tradesmen; Miss Keren-happuch paid as she went out of her own purse, which the Scollard girls had always believed to be not over-abounding.

"Over-doing in work is not likely to lead to under-doing a breakdown," Miss Bradbury replied to Mrs. Scollard's remark. "Nature is an excellent accountant, and knows how to collect her dues. I think I should be satisfied with what ails you, if I were you, Charlotte."

She altered the position of Mrs. Scollard's pillows and smoothed them with a touch singularly gentle in such an energetic person, and beckoned Margery to follow her into the dining-room. Laura sat here in an attitude of despair, her feet stuck straight out before her indifferently to the size of the room, her arms hanging over the back of her chair. Bob and Happie were trying to occupy themselves with the lessons which their mother would have required had she been well, and serene little Polly sat rocking her doll, she the more sleepy of the two, though the doll's eyes did droop with the motion of the rocking-chair.

Miss Bradbury took the chair which Polly had occupied when the little girl yielded it up on her entrance, and gathered Polly into her lap, who in turn still held Phyllis Lovelocks tight.

"Now, my dears," began Miss Keren-happuch in her businesslike way that covered so much tenderness, "you all look dreadfully worried. You must not; your mother will get well after she gets to the country."

"Why, Aunt Keren!" exclaimed Happie reproachfully. "When you know she can't even afford to stay in the city!"

"Which is the reason that she is going to my farm, that, and the fact that she must have fresh air and quiet," said Miss Keren-happuch.

"Your farm!" exclaimed all the children together.

"Yes; in Pennsylvania," said Miss Bradbury calmly. "I have never seen it, and I doubt strongly that I shall be particularly pleased with the sight. But a farm it is, of some seventy acres, up in the mountains, and there is where we are going in two weeks."

"We don't understand," cried Bob, after he had exchanged excited and bewildered glances with the others.

"There is nothing more to understand," declared Miss Bradbury. "Polly, your doll's arm will break off if you don't turn it around. Your mother must rest, there is no money to provide that rest, I must go to the country somewhere, so instead of boarding this summer, I am going to open that house of mine, which I have never seen, and you children are going to keep house for your mother and me indefinitely. It's not in the least difficult nor mysterious."

"You trump!" cried Bob with an enthusiasm that prevented any suspicion of disrespect.

"I heard a boy say lately that he would not live in the country for anything," observed Miss Bradbury with her twinkle.

"But to save his mother, and when he didn't know how he could live anywhere!" cried Bob.

"You dear, dear, blessed Aunt Keren!" cried Happie, throwing herself upon her adopted relative with an abandon which, under ordinary circumstances that lady would have disapproved.

"There, there! I suppose it is a relief," she said patting Happie's back. "But I warn you that it will not be at all attractive, probably. I took it for a debt, and my debtor said afterwards, so I am told, that it was cheaper to give it to me than to keep it. I suspect that he pretended not to be able to pay me in money in order to get rid of this farm. So you may be prepared for going into the wilderness. However, it will be a wilderness of pure air and great altitude, and we can exist somehow. It will undoubtedly build up poor Charlotte."

"I am going to like it," Happie declared. "I learned to like tomatoes, and I thought that in all this world I could never taste them a second time. And I love olives now, but when I first tried one, I really had to rush away from the table. So I am going to love that farm no matter what it is. How could we help loving a place that cured motherkins?"

"Aunt Keren, you are an angel in disguise," announced Laura solemnly.

"I must admit the disguise," retorted Miss Bradbury. "Now, children, I want you to get ready to go out of town in two weeks from now. Can you do it?"

"Yes, but we have a lease of the Patty-Pans; we shall have to sub-let it," said Margery, with the tiny anxious line appearing in her forehead.

"Furnished," supplemented Miss Bradbury. "I shall send up all the furniture necessary. There is some furniture there; I don't know how much, nor how good."

"Nobody has told you what we think of your giving up your comfortable summer in the White Mountains and down in Maine, without a care, and going up to this farm in order to cure dear mother, and to help us," said Margery, with a quiver in her voice.

"Nonsense!" cried Miss Keren-happuch briskly. "Every landed proprietor should look after his estate. It is high time that I saw mine. I shall enjoy the novelty of the situation. For the rest, Margaret, I have a very real affection for your mother, and a profound respect for the way that she has fought her good fight for you orphaned children. There is more than you know in my feeling for Charlotte; your grandmother and I were not ordinary friends. I should not do less than my best for her daughter, even if I were not as fond of her as I am. So there is nothing more to be said on that head."

"We will call the farm 'the Ark,'" said Happie. "It will be our refuge in this flood of affliction."

"It's not a particularly original name, Hapsie," remarked Bob. "I think lots of houses have been called the Ark, but it fits this case to a T. I don't suppose there's any doubt that we should not have had a place in which to lay our heads if it had not been for Aunt Keren and her farm."

A knocking at the dumb waiter door warned the Scollards that Ralph and Snigs wanted to be admitted; they had adopted this substitute for the bell not to disturb Mrs. Scollard. Polly slipped down from Miss Bradbury's lap and ran to open the door to them.

"Boys, what do you think?" cried Happie the moment they entered. "We are going away!"

The Gordons had known all the troubles, the anxieties that threatened to engulf their neighbors, and had shared their despondency over a prospect that held no hope. They stopped short, looking hardly less excited than the family group.

"What do you mean?" Ralph cried.

"Going away with blessed Aunt Keren to a farm she owns in Pennsylvania," Happie said. "It will save mother's life--and you know what else it will do, Ralph. We are going to try to sub-let the Patty-Pans furnished, so it won't be good-bye forever to you."

"And my mother wants to find another flat!" cried Snigs, getting very red in the effort to speak fast enough. "There are some college boys from the South want to stay in New York all summer. She wants to rent another flat and take them with her. She was saying to-night she might move if she could not get one in this house. Mayn't we have yours?"

"Now, did you ever in all your life?" demanded Happie of the world at large. And the world at large, in the person of Margery, Bob and Laura, replied that it never did! Even Miss Bradbury seemed elated over this remarkable coincidence of need and supply on both sides.

"Come on over and tell mother about it!" said Snigs, seizing Bob's arm, and gesticulating wildly to Margery and Happie, while plunging towards the door as if he feared the escape of the Patty-Pans or of his mother, unless they were at once permanently secured to each other.

"Go, if you like," Miss Bradbury supplemented. "I think I will unfold my plan to your mother this moment. The rule is not to talk to a nervous invalid at night, but I suspect that she is more sleepless now from worry than she will be from excitement over a prospect which, though not brilliant, at least holds a solution of her troubles."

The oldest Scollards having departed with and to their neighbors, Miss Keren-happuch went into their mother's room, and seated herself on the edge of the bed with an air of such resolution that the sick woman humorously wondered whether she had come to amputate or to execute.

"You are to be deported, Charlotte," she announced decidedly.

"Deported? Why and whence?" asked Mrs. Scollard.

"For precisely the same reason that the authorities always deport--because you are not fit to stay," replied Miss Bradbury. "We are going to spend the summer on my Pennsylvania farm, your family and myself."

"I didn't know you had a farm," gasped Mrs. Scollard, catching at the first thing that occurred to her to say, overwhelmed with the magnitude of the announcement.

"Neither did I, fully, until to-day," said Miss Bradbury. "I have never seen it, but I believe it will shelter us. As soon as you are able to move we are going, and our return is most indefinite. You are going to sub-let the Patty-Pans, furnished, and the girls are to keep house for us while we enjoy ourselves without a care upon our minds."

"Dear, dear Miss Keren!" sobbed Mrs. Scollard with the ready tears of nervous prostration. "How good you are! But do you think I could let you take my place, and support all my family for several months?"

"Nonsense, Charlotte! I shall save money. My summers cost me not less than three hundred dollars always, junketing around from hotel to hotel, from the seashore to the mountains. We won't spend three hundred dollars up there, not all of us put together, if I know anything about an isolated farm. And I really ought to look after my property. What do I get out of the sort of summers I usually spend? Weariness and vexation of spirit! Dress three times a day, not a solitary spot that isn't humming with summer voices! When I want to sit down and hear the waves, or to read, I have to hear a lot of empty-headed women telling one another about their servants' misdeeds, or how the tailor spoiled a coat, or--worst of all--how seriously they doubt the wisdom of speaking to some of the other women, one of whom is too quiet to be a desirable acquaintance, and the other too gay to know! And all the long golden summer days they sit on the piazza and make hideous, useless things out of pretty materials! It is nothing to regret that I may spend one summer on my own probably worthless estate, in dignified seclusion. Whether or not, we are going. I did not come to consult you, but to announce it. So go to sleep. For half a year you are to have a vacation where, at the worst, you will be two thousand feet above tide water, and must get strong, knowing the children are safe, and you are secure, breathing good air, even if there is little else to live on. Go to sleep, Charlotte, and stop worrying, because I want you to get strong enough to go at once. Since I have remembered my farm, I am all youthful impatience to see it."

Good Miss Keren-happuch arose with a jerk, intending to stalk out of the room, but Mrs. Scollard sprang up and caught her around the neck. "You dear, you dear! I can't thank you!" she sobbed.

"I don't remember suggesting that you should," said Miss Keren gruffly. But the kiss with which she laid her old friend's daughter back upon the pillow was very tender.

* * * * *

Mrs. Gordon was delighted with the opportunity to take the Patty-Pans and its furniture; it fitted her plans to obtain it quite as well as it worked for the Scollards to have her assume it. Before any one had time to realize what had happened, energetic Miss Bradbury had set Margery and Happie at their preparations for departure, and going away had become a definite fact.

It seemed a little formidable to the three eldest children, now that the plan had taken on definiteness. Mrs. Scollard was about again, proving that if one can find the way to minister to a mind diseased, strength attends on such ministration, but she was still so weak and pale that Margery could hardly look at her without tears. She tried hard to be brave, but she dreaded leaving behind her the only life that she had known, to go away into an untried life among new surroundings.

More than any of the other children, Happie had a cat-like love of place, and to her it was very hard to go away from New York with uncertainty in her mind as to how or when she could return to it.

"I suppose I shall go around wailing and gnashing my teeth, Bob," she confided to her brother. But Bob knew her, and her ability to make the best of something that was not merely a bad bargain, but no bargain at all.

"Not you, Hapsie!" he said. "You will find a dozen good reasons for preferring that farm to any other spot on earth, no matter if it turns out as bad as Martin Chuzzlewit's Eden."

"That's not a bad testimony to the fitness of your nickname, Happie," smiled Margery.

Laura openly gave way to grief, which she carefully fostered in herself, for Laura loved the rôle of martyr as well as Happie loved to be sunny.

It troubled Mrs. Scollard sorely to see Laura's sorrow until she took to singing Schubert's "Adieu," as a suitable expression of her woe, then her mother smiled at the sentimental little girl, justly concluding that sentimental grief was not dangerously deep.

Jeunesse Dorée was to accompany his family as a matter of course, though the old colored woman who came to clean for them held up her hands in horror at the suggestion.

"You sholy won't have luck if you takes him," she groaned. "'Twan't never reckoned right where I come fum to move a cat, and I just begs an' prays you let him run. It's bad nuff ter see you goin', let 'lone wif a cat."

"We think it would be very bad luck to be deprived of Dorée," smiled Mrs. Scollard. "And surely, Amanda, some sort of punishment ought to fall on those who would turn a petted creature into the street to starvation and ill-treatment! I think I'd rather risk the effect of taking him."

"Bob has bought a beautiful strong basket for him," said Happie applauding her mother's sentiments with a bright smile as she went through the Patty-Pans parlor.

She found Laura with Polly in the chamber which they shared, Polly watching her elder with a face expressive of puzzled awe, tempered by amusement. Penny was lost in the labor of packing the animals into a large Noah's ark, and losing her patience with the bulk of elephants and flies--which really did not differ materially--and with unruly legs and horns which got continually entangled.

"Bob says," the mite was remarking, "we's all going to live in a nark, an' for me to get you nanimals all back 'gain 'fore ve flood. If you don't swallow you' horns, you foolsish mooly cow, you, I'll make you sail on ve roof, and vhen you'll see!"

"Leave the ducks and geese out to swim, Penny mine, and you'll have more room," suggested Happie. "Let Happie coax the cow to draw in her horns. There, you see what good it does to pat her and to speak to her gently? She's in. What are you doing, Laura?"

Laura looked up, raised her eyebrows, and sighed with her grown-up air, but she did not answer.

"She says she's going to put all her pretty things in a box and mark it for me when I'm twelve, going on thirteen," said Polly answering for her. "She says she's sure she'll never live to use 'em. Now, isn't that silly? Because farms are healthy, I thought!"

Happie laughed. "Oh, Laura," she cried, "how can you be such a goose? I wouldn't count on getting those treasures if I were you, Polly. I think Laura may live to use them."

Laura regarded Happie with serene superiority. "Grief often kills," she said with the brevity of a tragic poet. "I'm sure I shall pine away. Do you know what nostalgia means?"

Again Happie laughed out merrily. "No; do you?" she said.

"It means homesickness," replied Laura with crushing dignity. "I found the word in a book of poetry and I looked it up, because I knew it must mean something lovely and sad. I made a song without words about it; it goes this way." And Laura hummed a line of music that was more minor than any known key seemed able to represent.

"Isn't that perfectly be-au-ti-ful?" she demanded. "Doesn't that sound just like nostalgia? That may be my last composition; it will be if this move kills me, as I 'most know it will. Wouldn't you feel sure that meant some one dying of homesickness if you heard it, and no one told you?"

"What a queer thing you are, Laura!" exclaimed Happie, half impressed, though she could never keep a respectfully straight face over Laura's performances. "I can't tell whether it sounds like nos--what-you-call-it or not, because I never heard the word before, so I haven't had time to know it set to music, but I don't think I should know that tune meant homesickness. It sounds to me like the wail of the washerwoman who got too much blueing in the clothes--it's the bluest thing I ever heard."

"You haven't one bit of--of anything in you, Happie," said Laura turning away pettishly.

Bob came in, his arms full of half-discarded boyish treasures. "Say, what do you think, Hap; will there be room for this stuff?" he demanded. "I could give it up, but I'd just as lief keep it. You see it won't be our house."

"Still there must be room for everything, since it's a farm, and we have a freight car to ourselves. I'd keep it," said Happie with the understanding she could not give Laura.

"I guess I asked you instead of Margery because I wanted that advice, and I knew you'd give it--she thinks I clutter," said Bob. "Are you going to take all your own Lares and Penates?"

"What it is to have a classical education!" exclaimed Happie in mock admiration. "No; we are only going to take our Laura and Penelope." And she swooped down to snatch a refreshing kiss from the pink and white baby, and to rescue a particularly spotted dog from having his exceedingly curled-up tail shut in the cover of the Noah's ark.

* * * * *

At last all the preparations were completed, the Patty-Pans flat was shining and fleckless, everything in apple-pie order to be relinquished to Mrs. Gordon's care. Ralph and Snigs were inconsolable over the approaching parting until Miss Bradbury hinted her intention of asking them to follow the exiles sometime during the summer, when they plucked up heart and began to plan for meeting on the farm.

It was a cold, raw day in April, a day left over from March getting used up in April, a most dreary and uncomfortable day on which to set forth upon a journey with an invalid to migrate from the city to the country, and to a house the comfort of which there was good reason to doubt.

The Gordon boys went to the station and pressed upon their friends, in parting, bulky packages of almost any possibilities. They shook hands with emotion, and the Scollard party sank into its seats silently with a suspicious redness about other lashes than Laura's, though everybody made heroic efforts to appear cheerful, and not ungrateful for Miss Bradbury's kindness. The only way to succeed in this effort was to keep constantly in view the good that was to be done the dear mother.

The warmth of the train was welcome. Poor Mrs. Scollard sank into the corner of her chair hardly able to endure the neuralgia which had added itself to her weakness, glad of the friendly steam pipes.

The train pulled slowly out of the station, and steamed, with increasing speed across the plains of Jersey towards the distant hills.

No one spoke for some time. Then Happie aroused herself. "I wonder if the farm has good cherry-trees," she said.

Bob laughed. "Already, Happie?" he said. "I thought it would take longer than this for even your barometer to indicate clearing."

Happie smiled a feeble smile. "I'm afraid I don't much care whether it has or not," she said. "I just happened to think of it."

"Don't apologize," returned Bob. "It's a comfort to have you beginning to sit up and take notice."

Jeunesse Dorée purred when one of the children peeped into his basket, according to his cheerful habit of responding with a song to any notice.

After a time the landscape arose from the dull level of its beginnings and began to put on beauty. The hills were showing their heads in the distance, with blue vaporous lights playing over them in the pale sunshine of the chill afternoon.

On they steamed, the grade perceptibly higher, until all the young folk were looking out of the windows, enjoying the barren beauty of the mountains in the early spring. Mrs. Scollard felt the benediction of space and quiet, her throbbing nerves grew more still as her eyes sought the horizon with the delight this beauty-loving woman always found in nature.

Miss Bradbury sat preternaturally stiff and straight looking at the scene, which was as new to her as to any of the others, with the approval of a proprietor.

"It's pretty here!" cried Polly, as the train rounded a curve. As she spoke the travelers felt its motion retard. It stopped, and the guard called out: "Crestville!" They had arrived.