Chapter FIVE: Its Blithe Days

Mr. Grey fulfilled his promise to Roberta. He wrote the article which had been requested of him by the magazine, and read it to its prime instigator before sending it off. She found it one of the most remarkable productions of the human pen, nor was shaken, but rather strengthened in her opinion by the fact that she understood very little of what it was all about.

Then followed a ten days of waiting for the result, which seemed--to one of the conspirators, at least--the longest ten days she had ever passed. It was so hard not to drop a hint of the great expectations to Wythie and Prue, still harder not to suggest to Mardy that the anxious line between her eyes had no especial reason for being there, since deliverance and the equivalent of the winter supply of coal was at hand. At last Prue brought up the longed-for letter from her early morning expedition to the post-office, and gave it, quite unsuspectingly, to her father.

"Rob, Roberta, come here," called Mr. Grey, in a few moments, and, feeling quite sure of the reason for her summons, Rob flew to him, nearly upsetting little white Kiku-san on the way.

Her father looked boyishly delighted as she entered his quarters--Mr. Grey would not allow the word "den" to be applied to his room. "See, Rob, my son," he cried, triumphantly brandishing aloft the magic slip of paper. "Your worthless father is not quite useless, is he? They shall find out some day that Sylvester Grey is not the drone they think him."

Rob had seized the check, and was gloating over it ecstatically.

"Take that to your mother, child, and tell her to cease worrying; that there is the money she needed, and that when the machine is finished she shall never again know what anxiety is," continued the dreamer, magnificently. "And it will be done soon--in a few months, Rob--and while it is getting placed I will turn my attention to this sort of thing, and we shall be very comfortable while waiting to be rich. Why, when my mind is free, Roberta, it is a low estimate to reckon that I can make a hundred dollars a month by my pen."

"Of course you can, Patergrey," echoed inexperienced Rob, confidently. "Will it take long to place the bricquette machine when it is done?"

"Oh, as to that, no one can tell--probably not, but there are delays always liable to occur in the disposing of a patent. But this one is in such demand--no, I think there will hardly be much delay. Not that it matters seriously--the important thing is to get it off my mind; that will leave me free, as I said. But run along and take this check to your mother, Rob; she must be gladdened as soon as possible. Just wait till I make it payable to her order," added Mr. Grey, seating himself at the table.

"Indeed, I am not going to take it to her, Patergrey," declared Rob. "You must give it to her yourself; what have I to do with it?"

"Oh, I can't," said Mr. Grey, flushing and hanging back like a school-boy. "You have a great deal to do with it. Take it, and tell her you got me to write the article, there's a good fellow!"

"Isn't it queer how almost all American little boys are ashamed to do nice things? But this little boy must do as he's bid," laughed Rob, feeling, as she often did, as though this tall, unpractical, lovable dreamer were actually a little child. "I'll tell you what we'll do: You go out and sit on the steps, Patergrey, and I'll go tell Mardy there are several tons of coal and some other things outside, and send her out to see. And she'll find you there. And when she comes, you'll hand her the check, and after she gets her breath we'll have a jubilation. Run along, little Patergrey; we don't get hundred-dollar checks often enough to take this one in a commonplace, every-day way--we must make a celebration of it."

Without giving her father time for further demur, Roberta bundled him out of the door, putting her hands on his shoulders and pushing him before her like a particularly active motor-engine. Laughing and breathless, she got him into the ancient wooden arm-chair which stood on the tiny stoop, and ran away in triumph to fetch her mother.

"Mardy, Mardy," she cried, rapturously, "coal and other vitals are here--just come out! Go look, and 'drive that shadow from thy brow!'"

"Rob, my dear, are you quite crazy?" cried Mrs. Grey.

"Only go see! This time it is not the patient you must examine for her sanity, but the front stoop. Drop your duster and obey, Lady Grey!" cried Rob, seizing her mother around the waist and waltzing her irresistibly toward the door.

"Rob, you're a scamp," gasped Mrs. Grey--all that she had breath to say--as she kissed Rob's glowing cheek, and yielded.

"Wait a minute, Wythie; don't go out there, Prue. Let Mardy see the luck first alone, and then we'll all go, and make a time of it," cried Rob, getting between the other girls and the door.

"What is it all about, Rob?" cried Wythie. "Is there really coal there?" added Prue.

"The equivalent of much coal. Patergrey wrote an article--by request, mind you--for a magazine, and they have sent him a check for a hundred dollars," cried Rob. "I guess there are people outside of Fayre with brains enough to appreciate our father!"

"Oh, how beautiful!" cried Oswyth, while Prue caught her breath in delight. Then, as Mrs. Grey's voice reached them in a happy laugh, the three made a stampede to join her outside.

"Did you ever know anything so splendumphant?" cried Rob, once more catching her mother around the waist in one of her mad onslaughts.

"I'm so glad, Mardy! You've looked so troubled," said Oswyth, kissing her mother with a tenderness so maternal that it almost seemed as though their relation was reversed.

Prue beamed on them all impartially. "I think it is quite awful that money can make people so happy and unhappy," she remarked.

"That is an opinion held by all philosophers--all _other_ philosophers, Prudence," observed her father.

"Let's make a tucked-in for dinner," said Rob. "It's the only way I can express my joy."

A "tucked-in" was Rob's name for a fruit-pudding, into which one tucked whatever fruit might chance to be in season at its making.

"Blueberry!" cried Prue, enthusiastically. "I'll go back to the store and get them--they had beauties this morning when I went for the mail."

"What a lovely day!" said Wythie, but, though she gazed afar over the tree-tops as she spoke, they knew that she did not refer to the weather, nor the fleckless sky above them.

"I feel as though an inexpressible weight had been lifted from my shoulders; I'm very happy, dear," said Mrs. Grey. But though she laid her hand on her husband's arm as she spoke, and looked at him, only Rob, who loved him so protectingly, understood that over and above the relief of having the means to provide necessities for her family, her mother rejoiced that her husband, for whose sake her sensitive pride was always up in arms, had aroused himself to give them to her.

Dinner was scarcely over when Prue, looking out of the window, called to her sisters: "Here comes Battalion B." This was Rob's final christening of the three Rutherfords, who rarely appeared separately. The friendship between them and the girls had progressed sufficiently for the Greys not to mind being caught by "Battalion B" in their uniforms, and Rob leaned out of the window now to hail them with wild wavings of a dish-towel.

"How are you, Grey ladies?" cried Basil, as they entered. "We have come to demand of you an afternoon in the orchard, beneath whose spreading appletrees the village chestnut wishes to paint Prue's portrait."

"My portrait?" cried Prue, starting up in a rapture.

"Who, may I ask, is the village chestnut?" inquired Wythie.

"Bartlemy Rutherford, whose talents as an artist are great, though unrecognized," said Bruce.

"Does Bartlemy paint?" cried Wythie, surprised.

"And powders and tints his eyebrows," whispered Bruce behind his hand, in a stage aside. "But he doesn't want it known."

"Can you really paint, Bart? And will you do my portrait?" asked Prue, much impressed, for she had caught a sufficient glimpse of an easel and paint-box outside to convince her there was something behind Basil's opening statement besides a jest.

"Oh, well, I can paint some--I always liked to. I'd like to try to do you, if you wouldn't mind, down in the orchard, under the trees, you know," stammered Bartlemy, getting embarrassed.

"He doesn't do so badly," added Basil. "You'd be surprised. We've got canvases at home representing our tutor's brow, Bruce's mouth, my nose, quite marvellously. Of course, there are other features in each of these portraits, but those are the ones faithfully limned, so we always politely allude to the portraits by their successful points. In private we call Bartlemy Fra Bartolomeo. You observe its suitability; he is already Bartlemy; he is a brother--twice a brother--so the _fra_ part is o. k., and he is a painter. We think it kind and complimentary to call him Fra Bartolomeo."

"Oh, let up on your nonsense, Bas," growled Bartlemy, even his long-suffering patience beginning to give way. "Will you let me try a portrait of you, or won't you, Prue?"

"I'd be perfectly delighted," cried Prue. "Only you must wait for me to put on a white dress and let my hair down."

"And wash your face, little Goldilocks," added Rob. "However beautiful blueberry juice may be as a temporary decoration, I shouldn't like it perpetuated in a portrait."

Prue ran away, not deigning to notice this piece of advice, and came back as quickly as was consistent with the attainment of perfect beauty, looking really lovely in her snowy muslin gown, and her big brown eyes alight under her masses of sunny hair.

"I'm going to take my darning," announced Wythie.

"Oh, dear," sighed Rob. "If only you good people didn't shame others into being good, too! I suppose I ought to take some work--I'll shell the peas!" This was a heroic resolve, for Aunt Azraella, in an unwonted fit of generosity, had sent the Greys half a bushel of peas from her abundance, to be canned for winter use, and the shelling them was a formidable undertaking.

Rob pulled out the big basket of peas, and Basil and Bruce, each seizing a handle, bore it forth. Rob followed with her big pan; Prue, in the glory of her spotless raiment and the importance of sitting for her portrait, could not be expected to carry more than her own weight, so Rob had to hang the basket intended for pods across her shoulders, and walked immediately behind Basil and Bruce, beating wildly on her pan.

Prue, holding up her skirts daintily, walked beside Bartlemy, with his artist's paraphernalia, as Oswyth, with her pretty sweet-grass work-basket, brought up the rear, as calm and fair as always.

Down to the orchard they went, and to Bartlemy, as the one it concerned, was left the selection of place. Finally he placed Prue to his satisfaction--and greatly to her own--in the fork of a picturesquely shaped old appletree, and fell back to regard her in approved artist fashion, head on one side, and with one eye closed.

Then he set up his easel, and the rest disposed of themselves on the grass, regardless of creatures that crawled.

Basil and Bruce--as perhaps she had expected--volunteered to help Rob in her task, and sitting opposite each other, placed the empty basket between their knees, while Rob sat beside them, where she could reach supplies, with the bright pan in her lap, into which the peas were soon hailing under the swift work of thirty fingers.

Oswyth began to darn, sitting a little apart, but almost forgetting her work in the interest of watching Bartlemy sketch in the outline of the appletree and Prue's slender figure, with swift, sure strokes. Whatever Bartlemy might prove as a colorist, he unmistakably could draw.

"_When the little busy B's
Turn their minds to shelling peas,_"

began Rob in a cheerful sing-song, but got no further, for Bruce interrupted her, carrying on her stanza,

"_'Neath the leadership of Rob,
What's a half-bushel job?_"

he sang.

"You are such nice boys," cried Rob, approvingly. "Just as big geese as we are ourselves."

"Bigger, physically, but mentally we yield to you," said Basil, with a bow.

"Do you expect to be a painter, Bart?" asked Wythie. The sketch he was making was really full of talent.

"I'd like to be; they say I can't tell what I want till I finish college, but I think I know," said Bartlemy. "I want to go off to Europe and live in galleries for a few years, and then try my own hand."

"I mean to teach school," said pretty Prue, looking as picturesquely unlike such a career as was possible. "I'm the only one that is getting a regular school training; Wythie and Rob did lessons at home, but I'm to be properly educated. So I shall teach. Unless I sing," she added, as an after-thought.

"Bruce has been a doctor, according to his own verdict, ever since he could speak," said Basil.

"And Basil doesn't care what he does, provided it puts a pen between his fingers, and encloses him in four walls lined with books," added Bruce.

"I think I shall be a motorman," said Rob, gravely. "I get so deadly tired sometimes of hearing no clang or rattle! There is a monotony about my youth that will drive me to trolleys, or a Ferris wheel when I grow up. I'd like to see things hum."

Now a seventh member of the party had been adding himself to it, unseen of the others, and in easy approaches. This was a grey goat belonging to the Greys for some years, whose intimacy with the family was fully established, and whose manners were of the pleasantest. But whether he regarded Bartlemy's easel as a personal affront, or whether he resented his daring to paint the pretty youngest girl, to whom the goat belonged in a particular manner, no one was ever sufficiently in his confidence to say, but just as Rob announced her desire to see things hum, they hummed, for the grey goat, kicking up his heels, charged head down, full at artist and easel.

Neither was prepared. Bartlemy was stooping, brush in teeth, to look for a palette-knife, and two of the easel's three legs rested on tufts of grass. As the goat charged Bartlemy went head over heels down a slope below him; the canvas flew up and lighted full on Oswyth's smooth head; the easel fell with a clatter, and paints danced broadcast over the grass. Prue screamed, and so did Oswyth, not recognizing the assailant in the first confusion. Basil and Bruce fell prone on their backs, one in each direction, like Max and Maurice in the old pictures, perfectly convulsed with laughter, while Rob, after the pause of a startled instant, fell on her face and nearly went into hysterics.

The goat, seeing that he was, after all, in the midst of friends, and seeming to fear that he might have estranged them, looked around on the company with a vacuous and conciliatory expression, while Bartlemy, sitting erect, and pulling his collar up and his belt down, returned the goat's gaze with a horrible scowl that sent his brothers and the girls off into fresh spasms of laughter.

"What is he?" demanded Bartlemy, and added, shaking his fist at the goat: "You old sign of the zodiac, I wasn't interfering with you, was I?"

"That's our--our nice--gentle--oh, dear me!--our nice, gentle, old Ben Bolt," gasped Rob, sitting up and wiping her eyes.

"Gentle!" ejaculated Bartlemy.

"He's our little pet," said Rob. "Come here, Ben, dear. Why did you go for to do it? Bowling over a harmless boy who was painting of your missus!"

Ben Bolt meekly obeyed, and took the chance to seize a mouthful of peas, as he gazed with his light-barred eyes at the wreck he had made.

"Can you hold him, Rob? Is he likely to go off again?" asked Bartlemy.

"Never," said Rob, confidently. "I think he may not like art."

"Probably suspects camel-hair brushes of being made of goat-hair," suggested Basil, pulling Bruce into shape, who was quite weak from laughing. "Where did you get the little angel, Rob?"

"Why, when Prue was only eight years old she found some boys abusing a little grey kid--probably she felt for him because she was a little Grey kid herself. At any rate, she purchased him for all her wealth--a quarter--and brought him home. He's been a good goat, and used to drag Prue in her wagon until she outgrew it. We named him Ben Bolt because he bolted everything in sight, but though I used to sing to him, inquiring if he didn't 'remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt,' it never affected him visibly."

"Painting is over for to-day," announced Bartlemy. "My easel has a fractured limb, and my palette is broken."

"Oh, can't you go on?" cried Prue, so mournfully that they all laughed.

"Not to-day. We'll try again--sans Ben Bolt--soon," said Bartlemy.

"It's such a pity; my dress is so clean," sighed Prue.

"She finds it a world of stains and pains," observed Rob. "Never mind, Prue; you aren't losing your hair yet."

"Come on, kid; help with these peas, since you can't paint," said Basil.

"Meaning me, or the goat?" asked Bartlemy, accepting the invitation.

"Give Ben Bolt the pods, and let's sing to him; then he'll be ashamed of himself," said Rob, who dearly loved the sextettes the Greys and Battalion B carolled.

"Or ashamed of us," suggested Bruce, but obediently lifted up his voice in song.

The peas were done much too soon, with so many shelling. Long before the young people were tired the last pod had yielded its five plump fellows to the green-filled pan, under the pressure of Wythie's thumb. Shouldering their burdens the six returned to the house.

"It has been a dear day," said Wythie, as she and Rob stood for a moment on the steps before closing the little grey house for the night.

"Beautiful!" assented Rob, promptly. "In spite of our trials and drawbacks we do have some blithe days in the grey house."