  JEAN OF GREENACRES BY IZOLA L. FORRESTER THE WORLD SYNDICATE PUBLISHING CO.
Copyright, 1917, by George W. Jacobs & Company All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
JEAN OF GREENACRES It was Monday, just five days before Christmas. The little pink express card arrived in the noon mail. The girls knew there must be some deviation from the usual daily mail routine, when the mailman lingered at the white post. Jean ran down the drive and he greeted her cheerily. “Something for you folks at the express office, I reckon. If it’s anything hefty you’d better go down and get it today. Looks like we’d have a flurry of snow before nightfall.” He waited while Jean glanced at the card. “Know what it is?” “Why, I don’t believe I do,” she answered, regretfully. “Maybe they’re books for Father.” “Like enough,” responded Mr. Ricketts, musingly. “I didn’t know. I always feel a little mite interested, you know.” “Yes, I know,” laughed Jean, as he gathered up his reins and jogged off down the bridge road. She hurried back to the house, her head sideways to the wind. The hall door banged as Kit let her in, her hands floury from baking. “Why on earth do you stand talking all day to that old gossip? Is there any mail from the west?” “He only wanted to know about an express bundle; whether it was hefty or light, and where it came from and if we expected it,” Jean replied, piling the mail on the dining-room table. “There is no mail from Saskatoon, sister fair.” “Well, I only wanted to hear from Honey. He promised me a silver fox skin for Christmas if he could find one.” Kit’s face was perfectly serious. Honey had asked her before he left Gilead Center just what she would like best, and, truthful as always, Kit had told him a silver fox skin. The other girls had nicknamed it “The Quest of the Silver Fox,” and called Honey a new Jason, but Kit still held firmly to the idea that if there was any such animal floating around, Honey would get it for her. Jean was engrossed in a five-page letter from one of the girl students at the Academy back in New York where she had studied the previous winter. The sunlight poured through the big semicircular bay window at the south end of the dining-room. Here Doris and Helen maintained the plant stand, a sort of half-moon pyramid, home-made, with rows of potted ferns, geraniums, and begonias on its steps. Helen had fashioned some window boxes too, covered with birchbark and lined with moss, trying to coax some adder’s tongue and trailing ground myrtle, with even some wild miniature pines, like Japanese dwarfs, to stay green. “It has turned bleak and barren out of doors so suddenly,” said Helen. “One day it was all beautiful yellow and russet and even old rose, but the next, after that heavy frost, it was all dead. I’m glad pines don’t mind frost and cold.” “Pines are the most optimistic, dearest trees of all,” Kit agreed, opening up an early spring catalogue. “If it wasn’t for the pines and these catalogues to encourage one, I’d want to hunt a woodchuck hole and hiberate.” “Hibernate,” Jean corrected absently. Now, one active principle in the Robbins family was interest in each other’s affairs. It was called by various names. Doris said it was “nosing.” Helen called it “petty curiosity.” But Kit came out flatly and said it was based primarily on inherent family affection; that necessarily every twig of a family tree must be intensely and vitally interested in every single thing that affected any sister twig. Accordingly, she deserted her catalogues with their enticing pictures of flowering bulbs, and, leaning over Jean’s chair, demanded to know the cause of her absorption. “Bab Crane is taking up expression.” Jean turned back to the first page of the letter she had been reading. “She says she never fully realized before that art is only the highest form of expressing your ideals to the world at large.” “Tell her she’s all wrong.” Kit shook her mop of boyish curls decidedly. “Cousin Roxy told me the other day she believes schools were first invented for the relief of distressed parents just to give them a breathing spell, and not for children at all.” “Still, if Bab’s hit a new trail of interest, it will make her think she’s really working. Things have come to her so easily, she doesn’t appreciate them. Perhaps she can express herself now.” “Express herself? For pity’s sake, Jeanie. Tell her to come up here, and we’ll let her express herself all over the place. Oh! Just smell my mince pies this minute. Isn’t cooking an expression of individual art too?” said Kit teasingly as she made a bee line for the oven in time to rescue four mince pies. “Who’s going to drive down after the Christmas box?” Mrs. Robbins glanced in at the group in the sunlight. “I wish to send an order for groceries too and you’ll want to be back before dark.” “I’m terribly sorry, Mother dear,” called Kit from the kitchen, “but Sally and some of the girls are coming over and I promised them I’d go after evergreen and Princess pine. We’re gathering it for wreaths and stars to decorate the church.” “And I promised Father if his magazines came, I’d read to him,” Helen added. “And here they are, so I can’t go.” “Dorrie and I’ll go. I love the drive.” Jean handed Bab’s letter over to Kit to read, and gave just a bit of a sigh. Not a real one, only a bit of a one. Nobody could possibly have sustained any inward melancholy at Greenacres. There was too much to be done every minute of the day. Kit often said she felt exactly like “Twinkles,” Billie’s gray squirrel, whirling around in its cage. Still, Bab’s letter did bring back strongly the dear old times last winter at the Art Academy. Perhaps the girl students did take themselves and their aims too seriously, and had been like that prince in Tennyson’s “Princess,” who mistook the shadow for the substance. Yet it had all been wonderfully happy and interesting. Even in the hills of rest, she missed the companionship of girls her own age with the same tastes and interests as herself. Shad harnessed up Princess and drove around to the side porch steps. It seemed as if he grew taller all the time. When the minister from the little white church had come to call, he had found Shad wrapping up the rose bushes in their winter coats of sacking. Shad stood up, six feet of lanky, overgrown, shy Yankee boy, and shook hands. “Well, well, Shadrach, son, you’re getting nearer heaven sooner than most of us, aren’t you?” laughed Mr. Peck. And he was. Grew like a weed, Shad himself said, but Doris told him pines grew fast too, and she thought that some day he’d be a Norway spruce which is used for ship-masts. Mrs. Robbins came out carrying her own warm fur cloak to wrap Doris in, and an extra lap robe. “Better take the lantern along,” advised Shad, in his slow drawling way. “Looks like snow and it’ll fall dark kind of early.” He went back to the barn and brought a lantern to tuck in under the seat. Princess, dancing and side stepping in her anxiety to be off, took the road with almost a scamper. Her winter coat was fairly long now, and Doris said she looked like a Shetland pony. It was seven miles to Nantic, but the girls never tired of the ride. It was so still and dream-like with the early winter silence on the land. They passed only Jim Barlow, driving his yoke of silver gray oxen up from the lumber mill with a load of logs to be turned into railroad ties, and Sally’s father with a load of grain, waving his whipstock in salute to them. Sally herself was at the “ell” door of the big mill house, scraping out warm cornmeal for her white turkeys. She saluted them too with the wooden spoon. “I’m going after evergreen as soon as I get my dishes washed up,” she called happily. “Goodbye.” Along the riverside meadows they saw the two little Peckham boys driving sheep with Shep, their black and white dog, barking madly at the foot of a tall hickory tree. “Got a red squirrel up there,” called Benny, proudly. “Sally says they’re making all their Christmas presents themselves,” said Doris, thinking of the large family the mill house nested. “They always do, every year. She says she thinks presents like that are ever so much more loving than those you just go into a store and buy. She’s got them all hidden away in her bureau drawer, and the key’s on a ribbon around her neck.” “Didn’t we make a lot of things too, pigeon? Birchbark, hand-painted cards, and pine pillows, and sweet fern boxes. Mother says she never enjoyed getting ready for Christmas so much as this year. Wait a minute.” Jean spied some red berries in the thicket overhanging the rail fence. She handed Doris the reins, and jumping from the carriage, climbed the fence to reach the berries. Down the road came the hum of an automobile, a most unusual sound on Gilead highways. Princess never minded them and Doris turned out easily for the machine to pass. The driver was Hardy Philips, the store keeper’s son at Nantic. He swung off his cap at sight of Jean. She surely made an attractive picture with the background of white birches against red oak and deep green pine, and over one shoulder the branches of red berries. The two people on the back seat looked back at her, slim and dark as some wood sprite, with her home crocheted red cap and scarf to match, with one end tossed over her shoulder. “Somebody coming home for Christmas, I guess,” she said, getting back into the carriage with her spoils. “Princess, you are the dearest horse about not minding automobiles. Some stand right up and paw the air when one goes by. You’ve got the real Robbins’ poise and disposition.” Doris was snuggling down into the fur robe. “My nose is cold. I wish I had a mitten for it. It’s funny, Jeanie. I don’t mind the cold a bit when I walk through the woods to school, but I do when we’re driving.” “Snuggle under the rug. We’ll be there pretty soon.” Jean drove with her chin up, eyes alert, cheeks rosy. There was a snap in the air that “perked you right up,” as Cousin Roxy would say, and Princess covered the miles lightly, the click of her hoofs on the frozen road almost playing a dance tempo. When they stopped at the hitching post above the railroad tracks, Doris didn’t want to wait in the carriage, so she followed Jean down the long flight of wooden steps that led to the station platform from the hill road above. And just as they opened the door of the little stuffy express office, they caught the voice of Mr. Briggs, the agent, not pleasant and sociable as when he spoke to them, but sharp and high pitched. “Well, you can’t loaf around here, son, I tell you that right now. The minute I spied you hiding behind that stack of ties down the track, I knew you’d run away from some place, and I’m going to find out all about you and let your folks know you’re caught.” “I ain’t got any folks,” came back a boy’s voice hopefully. “I’m my own boss and can go where I please.” “Did you hear that, Miss Robbins?” exclaimed Mr. Briggs, turning around at the opening of the door. “Just size him up, will you. He says he’s his own boss, and he ain’t any bigger than a pint of cider. Where did you come from?” “Off a freight train.” Mr. Briggs leaned his hands on his knees and bent down to get his face on a level with the boy’s. “Ain’t he slick, though? Can’t get a bit of real information out of him except that he liked the looks of Nantic and dropped off the slow freight when she was shunting back and forth up yonder. What’s your name?” “Joe. Joe Blake.” He didn’t look at Mr. Briggs, but off at the hills, wind swept and bare except for their patches of living green pines. There was a curious expression in his eyes, Jean thought, not loneliness, but a dumb fatalism. As Cousin Roxy might have put it, it was as if all the waves and billows of trouble had passed over him, and he didn’t expect anything better. “How old are you?” “ ’Bout nine or ten.” “What made you drop off that freight here?” Joe was silent and seemed embarrassed. Doris caught a gleam of appeal in his glance and responded instantly. “Because you liked it best, isn’t that why?” she suggested eagerly. Joe’s face brightened up at that. “I liked the looks of the hills, but when I saw all them mills I—I thought I’d get some work maybe.” “You’re too little.” Mr. Briggs cut short that hope in its upspringing. “I’m going to hand you right over to the proper authorities, and you’ll land up in the State Home for Boys if you haven’t got any folks of your own.” Joe met the shrewd, twinkly grey eyes doubtfully. His own filled with tears reluctantly, big tears that rose slowly and dropped on his worn short coat. He put his hand up to his shirt collar and held on to it tightly as if he would have kept back the ache there, and Jean’s heart could stand it no longer. “I think he belongs up at Greenacres, please, Mr. Briggs,” she said quickly. “I know Father and Mother will take him up there if he hasn’t any place to go, and we’ll look after him. I’m sure of it. He can drive back with us.” “But you don’t know where he came from nor anything about him, Miss Robbins. I tell you he’s just a little tramp. You can see that, or he wouldn’t be hitching on to freight trains. That ain’t no way to do if you’re decent God-fearing folks, riding the bumpers and dodging train-men.” “Let me take him home with me now, anyway,” pleaded Jean. “We can find out about him later. It’s Christmas Friday, you know, Mr. Briggs.” There was no resisting the appeal that underlay her words and Mr. Briggs capitulated gracefully, albeit he opined the county school was the proper receptacle for all such human rubbish. Jean laughed at him happily, as he stood warming himself by the big drum stove, his feet wide apart, his hands thrust into his blue coat pockets. “It’s your own doings, Miss Robbins,” he returned dubiously. “I wouldn’t stand in your way so long as you see fit to take him along. But he’s just human rubbish. Want to go, Joe?” And Joe, knight of the bumpers, rose, wiping his eyes with his coat sleeve, and glared resentfully back at Mr. Briggs. At Jean’s word, he shouldered the smaller package and carted it up to the waiting carriage while Mr. Briggs leisurely came behind with the wooden box. “Guess you’ll have to sit on that box in the back, Joe,” Jean said. “We’re going down to the store, and then home. Sit tight.” She gathered up the reins. “Thank you ever and ever so much, Mr. Briggs.” It was queer, Mr. Briggs said afterwards, but nobody could be expected to resist the smile of a Robbins. He swung off his cap in salute, watching the carriage spin down the hill, over the long mill bridge and into the village with the figure of Joe perched behind on the Christmas box. Helen caught the sound of returning wheels on the drive about four o’clock. It was nearly dark. She stood on the front staircase, leaning over the balustrade to reach the big wrought iron hall lamp. When she opened the door widely, its rays shining through the leaded red glass, cast a path of welcome outside. “Hello, there,” Jean called. “We’re all here.” Doris jumped to the ground and took Joe by the hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze. He was shivering, but she hurried him around to the kitchen door and they burst in where Kit was getting supper. Over in a corner lay burlap sacks fairly oozing green woodsy things for the Christmas decoration at the church, and Kit had fastened up one long trailing length of ground evergreen over an old steel engraving of Daniel Webster that Cousin Roxy had given them. “He ain’t as pretty as he might be,” she had said, pleasantly, “but I guess if George Washington was the father of his country, we’ll have to call Daniel one of its uncles.” “Look, Kit,” Doris cried, quite as if Joe had been some wonderful gift from the fairies instead of a dusty, tired, limp little derelict of fate and circumstance. “This is Joe, and he’s come to stay with us. Where’s Mother?” One quick look at Joe’s face checked all mirthfulness in Kit. There were times when silence was really golden. She was always intuitive, quick to catch moods in others and understand them. This case needed the Motherbird. Joe was fairly blue from the cold, and there was a pinched, hungry look around his mouth and nose that made Kit leave her currant biscuits. “Upstairs with Father. Run along quick and call her, Dorrie.” She knelt beside Joe and smiled that radiant, comradely smile that was Kit’s special present from her fairy godmother. “We’re so glad you’ve come home,” she said, drawing him near the crackling wood fire. “You sit on the woodbox and just toast.” She slipped back into the pantry and dipped out a mug of rich, creamy milk, then cut a wide slice of warm gingerbread. “There now. See how that tastes. You know, it’s the funniest thing how wishes come true. I was just longing for somebody to sample my cake and tell me if it was good. Is it?” Joe drank nearly the whole glass of milk before he spoke, looking over the rim at her with very sleepy eyes. “It’s awful good,” he said. “I ain’t had anything to eat since yesterday morning.” “Oh, dear,” cried Kit. This was beyond her. She turned with relief at Mrs. Robbins’ quick light step in the hall. “Yes, dear, I know. Jeanie told me.” She put Kit to one side, and went straight over to the wood box. And she did just the one right thing. That was the marvel of the Motherbird. She seemed always to know naturally what a person needed most and gave it to them. Down she stooped and took Joe in her arms, his head on her shoulder, patting him while he began to cry chokingly. “Never mind, laddie, now,” she told him. “You’re home.” She lifted him to her lap and started to untie his worn sodden shoes. “Doris, get your slippers, dear, and a pair of stockings too, the heavy ones. Warm the milk, Kit, it’s better that way. And you cuddle down on the old lounge by the sitting room fire, Joe, and rest. That’s our very best name for the world up here, did you know it? We call it our hills of rest.” Shad came in breezily, bringing the Christmas boxes and a shower of light snow. He stared at the stranger with a broad grin of welcome. “Those folks that went up in the automobile stopped off at Judge Ellis’s. Folks from Boston, I understood Hardy to say. He just stopped a minute to ask what was in the boxes, so I thought I’d inquire too.” Nothing of interest ever got by the Greenacre gate posts if Shad could waylay it. Helen asked him to open the boxes right away, but no, Shad would not. And he showed her where it was written, plain as could be, in black lettering along one edge: “Not to be opened till Christmas.” Mrs. Robbins had gone into the sitting room and found a gray woolen blanket in the wall closet off the little side hall. From the chest of drawers she took some of Doris’s outgrown winter underwear. Supper was nearly ready, but Joe was to have a warm bath and be clad in clean fresh clothing. Tucking him under one wing, as Kit said, she left the kitchen and Jean told the rest how she had rescued him from Mr. Briggs’s righteous indignation and charitable intentions. “Got a good face and looks you square in the eye,” said Shad. “I’d take a chance on him any day, and he can help around the place a lot, splitting kindlings, and shifting stall bedding and what not.” The telephone bell rang and Jean answered. Rambling up through the hills from Norwich was the party line, two lone wires stretching from home-hewn chestnut poles. Its tingling call was mighty welcome in a land where so little of interest or variation ever happened. This time it was Cousin Roxy at the other end. After her marriage to the Judge, they had taken the long deferred wedding trip up to Boston, visiting relatives there, and returning in time for a splendid old-fashioned Thanksgiving celebration at the Ellis homestead. Maple Lawn was closed for the winter but Hiram, the hired man, “elected” as he said, to stay on there indefinitely and work the farm on shares for Miss Roxy as he still called her. “And like enough,” Cousin Roxy said comfortably, when she heard of his intentions, “he’s going to marry somebody himself. I wouldn’t put it past him a mite. I wish he’d choose Cindy Anson. There she is living alone down in that little bit of a house, running a home bakery when she’s born to fuss over a man. I told Hiram when I left, if I was him I’d buy all my pies and cake from Cindy, and then when I drove by Cindy’s I just dropped a passing word about how badly I felt at leaving such a fine man as Hiram to shift for himself up at the house, so she said she’d keep an eye on him.” “But, Cousin Roxy,” Jean had objected, “that’s match-making.” “Maybe ’tis so,” smiled Roxy placidly. “But I always did hold to it that Cupid and Providence both needed a sight of jogging along to keep them stirring.” Over the telephone now came her voice, vibrant and cheery, and Jean answered the call. “Hello, yes, this is Jean. Mother’s right in the sitting room. Who? Oh, wait till I tell the girls.” She turned her head; her brown eyes sparkling. “Boston cousins over at the Judge’s. Who did you say they are, Cousin Roxy? Yes? Cousin Beth and Elliott Newell. I’ll tell Father right away. Tomorrow morning early? That’s splendid. Goodbye.” Before the girls could stop her, she was on her way upstairs. The largest sunniest chamber had been turned into the special retiring place of the king, as Helen called her father. “All kings and emperors had some place where they could escape from formality and rest up,” she had declared. “And Plato loved to hide away in his olive grove, so that is Dad’s. Somebody else, I think it’s Emerson, says we ought to keep an upper chamber in our souls, well swept and garnished, with windows wide.” “Not too wide this kind of weather, Helenita,” Jean interrupted, for Helen’s wings of poetry were apt to flutter while she forgot to shake her duster. Still, it was true, and one of the charms of the old Mansion House was its spaciousness. There were many rooms, but the pleasantest of all was the “king’s thinking place.” The months of relaxation and rest up in the hills had worked wonders in Mr. Robbins’ health. As old Dr. Gallup was apt to say when Kit rebelled at the slowness of recovery, “Can’t expect to do everything in a minute. Even the Lord took six days to fix things the way he liked them.” Instead of spending two-thirds of his time in bed or on the couch now, he would sit up for hours and walk around the wide porch, or even along the garden paths before the cold weather set in. But there still swept over him without warning the great fatigue and weakness, the dizziness and exhaustion which had followed as one of the lesser ills in his nervous breakdown. He sat before the open fire now, reading from one of his favorite weeklies, with Gladness purring on his knees. Doris had found Gladness one day late in October, dancing along the barren stretch of road going over to Gayhead school, for all the world like a yellow leaf. She was a yellow kitten with white nose and paws. Also, she undoubtedly had the gladsome carefree disposition of the natural born vagabond, but Doris had tucked her up close in her arms and taken her home to shelter. Some day, the family agreed, when all hopes and dreams had come true, Doris would erect all manner and kind of little houses all over the hundred and thirty odd acres around the Mansion House and call them Inns of Rest, so she would feel free to shelter any living creature that was fortunate enough to fall by the wayside near Greenacres’ gate posts. Cousin Roxy had looked at the yellow kitten with instant recognition. “That’s a Scarborough kitten. Sally Scarborough’s raised yellow kittens with white paws ever since I can remember.” “Had I better take it back?” asked Doris anxiously. “Land, no, child. It’s a barn cat. You can tell that, it’s so frisky. Ain’t got a bit of repose or common sense. Like enough Mis’ Scarborough’d be real glad if it had a good home. Give it a happy name, and feed it well, and it’ll slick right up.” So Gladness had remained, but not out in the barn. Somehow she had found her way up to the rest room and its peace must have appealed to her, for she would stay there hours, dozing with half closed jade green eyes and incurved paws. Kit said she had taken Miss Patterson’s place as nurse, and was ever so much more dependable and sociable to have around. “Father, dear,” Jean exclaimed, entering the quiet room like an autumn flurry of wind. “What do you think? Cousin Roxy has just ’phoned, and she wants me to tell you two Boston cousins are there. Did you hear the machine go up this afternoon? Beth and Elliott Newell. Do you remember them?” “Rather,” smiled Mr. Robbins. “It must be little Cousin Beth and her boy. I used to visit at her old home in Weston when I was a little boy. She wanted to be an artist, I know.” Jean had knelt before the old gray rock fireplace, slipping some light sticks under the big back log. At his last words she turned with sudden interest and sat down cross legged on the rug just as if she had been a little girl. “Oh, father, an artist? And did she study and succeed?” “I think so. I remember she lived abroad for some time and married there. Her maiden name was Lowell, Beth Lowell.” “Did she marry an artist too?” Jean leaned forward, her eyes bright with romance, but Mr. Robbins laughed. “No, indeed. She married Elliott’s father, a schoolmate from Boston. He went after her, for I suppose he tired of waiting for Beth’s career to come true. Listen a minute.” Up from the lower part of the house floated strains of music. Surely there had never issued such music from a mouth organ. It quickened one into action like a violin’s call. It proclaimed all that a happy heart might say if it had a mouth organ to express itself with. And the tune was the old-fashioned favorite of the fife and drum corps, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” “It must be Joe,” Jean said, smiling mischievously up at her father, for Joe was still unknown to the master of the house. She ran out to the head of the stairs. “Can Joe come up, Motherie?” Up he came, fresh from a tubbing, wearing Doris’s underwear, and an old shirt of Mr. Robbins’, very much too large for him, tucked into his worn corduroy knee pants. His straight blonde hair fairly glistened from its recent brushing and his face shone, but it was Joe’s eyes that won him friends at the start. Mixed in color they were like a moss agate, with long dark lashes, and just now they were filled with contentment. “They wanted me to play for them downstairs,” he said gravely, stopping beside Mr. Robbins’ chair. “I can play lots of tunes. My mother gave me this last Christmas.” This was the first time he had mentioned his mother and Jean followed up the clue gently. “Where, Joe?” He looked down at the burning logs, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Over in Providence. She got sick and they took her to the hospital and she never came back.” “Not at all?” He shook his head. “Then, afterwards,—” much was comprised in that one word and Joe’s tone, “afterwards we started off together, my Dad and me. He said he’d try and get a job on some farm with me, but nobody wanted him this time of year, and with me too. And he said one morning he wished he didn’t have me bothering around. When I woke up on the freight yesterday morning, he wasn’t there. Guess he must have dropped off. Maybe he can get a job now.” So it slipped out, Joe’s personal history, and the girls wondered at his soldierly acceptance of life’s discipline. Only nine, but already he faced the world as his own master, fearless and optimistic. All through that first evening he sat in the kitchen on the cushioned wood box, playing tunes he had learned from his father. When Shad brought in his big armfuls of logs for the night, he executed a few dance figures on the kitchen floor and “allowed” before he got through Joe would be chief musician at the country dances roundabout. After supper the girls drew up their chairs around the sitting room table as usual. Here every night the three younger ones prepared their lessons for the next day. Jean generally read or sat with her father awhile, but tonight she answered Bab Crane’s letter. It was read over twice, the letter that blended in so curiously with the coming of the cousins from Boston. Ever since Jean could remember she had drawn pictures. In her first primer, treasured with other relics of that far off time when she was six instead of seventeen, she had put dancey legs on the alphabet and drawn very fat young pigs with curly tails chasing each other around the margins of spellers. No one guessed how she loved certain paintings back at the old home in New York. They had seemed so real to her, the face of a Millet peasant lad crossing a stubble field at dawn; a Breton girl knitting as she walked homeward behind some straying sheep; one of Franz Hals’ Flemish lads, his chin pressed close to his violin, his deep eyes looking at you from under the brim of his hat, and Touchstone and Audrey wandering through the Forest of Arden. She had loved to read, as she grew older, of Giotto, the little Italian boy trying to mix colors from brick dust, or drawing with charcoal on the stones of the field where Cimabue the monk walked in meditation; of the world that was just full of romance, full of stories ages old and still full of vivid life. Once she had read of Albrecht Durer, painting his masterpieces while he starved. How the people told in whispers after his death that he had used his heart’s blood to mix with his wonderful pigments. Of course it was all only a story, but Jean remembered it. When she saw a picture that seemed to hold one and speak its message of beauty, she would say to herself, “There is Durer’s secret.” And some day, if she ever could put on canvas the dreams that came to her, she meant to use the same secret. “I think,” said Kit, yawning and stretching her arms out in a perfect ecstasy of relaxation after a bout with her Latin, “I do think Socrates was an old bore. Always mixing in and contradicting everybody and starting something. No wonder his wife was cranky.” “He died beautifully,” Helen mused. “Something about a sunset and all his friends around him, and didn’t he owe somebody a chicken and tell his friends to pay for it?” “You’re sleepy. Go to bed, both of you,” Jean told them laughingly. “I’ll put out the light and fasten the doors.” She finished her letter alone. It was not easy to write it. Bab wanted her to come down for the spring term. She could board with her if she liked. Expenses were very light. Any expenses would be heavy if piled on the monthly budget of Greenacres. Jean knew that. So she wrote back with a heartache behind the plucky refusal, and stepped out on the moonlit veranda for a minute. It was clear and cold after the light snowfall. The stars were very faint. From the river came the sound of the waterfall, and up in the big white barn, Princess giving her stall a goodnight kick or two before settling down. “You stand steady, Jean Robbins,” she said, between her teeth. “Don’t you dare be a quitter. You stand steady and see this winter straight through.” After her marriage to Judge Ellis, Cousin Roxy had taken Ella Lou from Maple Lawn over to the big white house behind its towering elms. “I’ve been driving her ten years and never saw a horse like her for knowingness and perspicacity,” she would say, her head held a little bit high, her spectacles half way down her nose. “I told the Judge if he wanted me he’d have to take Ella Lou too.” So it was Ella Lou’s familiar white nose that showed at the hitching post the following morning when the Boston cousins came over to get acquainted. Jean never forgot her introduction to Beth Newell. She was about forty-seven then, with her son Elliott fully five inches taller than herself, but she looked about twenty-seven. Her fluffy brown hair, her wide gray eyes, and quick sweet laughter, endeared her to the girls right away. “And she’s so slim and dear,” Doris added. “Her dress makes me think of an oak leaf in winter, and she’s a lady of the meads.” Elliott was about fifteen, not one single bit like his mother, but broad-shouldered and blonde and sturdy. It was so much fun, Kit said, to watch him take care of his mother. “Where’s your High School out here?” he asked. “I’m at Prep. specializing in mathematics.” “And how any son of mine can adore mathematics is beyond me,” Cousin Beth laughed. “I suppose it’s reaction. Do you like them, Jean?” She put her arm around the slender figure nearest her. “Indeed, I don’t,” Jean answered fervently, and then all at once, out popped her heart’s desire before she could check the words. Anybody’s heart’s desire would pop out with Beth’s eyes coaxing it. “I—I want to be an artist.” “Keep on wishing and working then, dear, and as Roxy says, if it is to be it will be.” While the others talked of turning New England farms into haunts of ancient peace and beauty, these two sat together on the davenport, Jean listening eagerly and wistfully while her cousin told of her own girlhood aims and how she carried them out. “We didn’t have much money, so I knew I had to win out for myself. There were two little brothers to help bring up, and Mother was not strong, but I used to sketch every spare moment I could, and I read everything on art I could find, even articles from old magazines in the garret. But most of all I sketched anything and everything, studying form and composition. When I was eighteen, I taught school for two terms in the country. Father had said if I earned the money myself, I could go abroad, and how I worked to get that first nest egg.” “How much did you get a week?” “Twelve dollars, but my board was only three and a half in the country, and I saved all I could. During the summers I took lessons at Ellen Brainerd’s art classes in Boston and worked as a vacation substitute at the libraries. You know, Jean, if you really do want work and kind of hunt a groove you’re fitted for, you will always find something to do.” Jean was leaning forward, her chin propped on her hands. “Yes, I know,” she said. “Do go on, please.” “Ellen Brainerd was one of New England’s glorious old maids with the far vision and cash enough to make a few of her dreams come true. Every year she used to lead a group of girl art students over Europe’s beauty spots, and with her encouragement I went the third year, helping her with a few of the younger ones, and paying part of my tuition that way. And, my dear,” Cousin Beth clasped both hands around her knees and rocked back and forth happily, “we set up our easels in the fountain square in Barcelona and hunted Dante types in Florence. We trailed through Flanders and Holland and lived delightfully on the outskirts of Paris in a little gray house with a high stone wall and many flowers.” “And you painted all those places?” exclaimed Jean. “I’ve longed and longed to go there.” “Well, I tried to,” Cousin Beth looked ruefully at the fire. “Yes, I tried to paint like all the old masters and new masters. One month we took up this school and the next we delved into something else, studying everything in the world but individual expression.” “That’s just what a girl friend of mine in New York wrote and said she was doing,” cried Jean, much interested. “Then she’s struck the keynote. After your second cousin David came over and stopped my career by marrying me I came back home. We lived out near Weston and I began painting things of everyday life just as I saw them, the things I loved. It was our old apple tree out by the well steeped in full May bloom that brought me my first medal.” “Oh, after Paris and all the rest!” “Yes, dear. And the next year they accepted our red barn in a snowstorm. I painted it from the kitchen window. Another was a water color of our Jersey calves standing knee deep in the brook in June, and another was Brenda, the hired girl, feeding turkeys out in the mulberry lane. That is the kind of picture I have succeeded with. I think because, as I say, they are part of the home life and scenes I love best and so I have put a part of myself into them.” “Durer’s heart’s blood,” Jean said softly. “You’ve helped me so much, Cousin Beth. I was just hungry to go back to the art school right now, and throw up everything here that I ought to do.” “Keep on sketching every spare moment you can. Learn form and color and composition. Things are only beautiful according to the measure of our own minds. And the first of March I want you to visit me. I’ve got a studio right out in my apple orchard I’ll tuck you away in.” “I’d love to come if Mother can spare me.” Jean’s eyes sparkled. “Well, do so, child,” Cousin Roxy’s hands were laid on her shoulders from behind. “I’m going up too along that time, and I’ll take you. It’s a poor family that can’t support one genius.” She laughed in her full hearted, joyous way. “Now, listen, all of you. I’ve come to invite you to have Christmas dinner with us.” “But, Cousin Roxy,” began Mrs. Robbins, “there are so many of us—” “Not half enough to fill the big old house. Some day after all the girls and Billie are married and there are plenty of grandchildren, then we can talk about there being too many, though I doubt it. There’s always as much house room as there is heart room, you know, if you only think so. They’re going to have a little service for the children at the Center Church, Wednesday night, and Shad had better drive the girls over. Bring along the little lad too.” She smiled over her shoulder at Joe, seated in his favorite corner on the woodbox reading one of Doris’s books, and he gave a funny little onesided grin back in shy return. “Billie’s going away to school after New Year’s, did I tell you?” “Oh, dear me,” cried Kit, so spontaneously that everyone laughed at her. “Doesn’t it seem as if boys get all of the adventures of life just naturally.” “He’s had adventures enough, but he does need the companionship of boys his own size. Emerson says that the growing boy is the natural autocrat of creation, and I don’t want him to be tied down with a couple of old folks like the Judge and myself. You’re never young but once. Besides, I always did want to go to these football games at colleges and have a boy of mine in the mixup, bless his heart.” “My goodness!” Kit exclaimed after the front door had closed on the last glimpse of Ella Lou’s white feet going down the drive. “Doesn’t it seem as if Cousin Roxy leaves behind her a big sort of glow? She can say more nice things in a few minutes than anybody I ever heard. Except about Billie’s going away. I wonder why he didn’t come down and tell me himself.” “Well, you know, Kit,” Helen remarked, “you haven’t a mortgage on Billie.” “Oh, I don’t care if he goes away. It isn’t that,” Kit answered comfortably. “I wouldn’t give a snap of my finger for a boy that couldn’t race with other fellows and win. Jean, fair sister, did you realize the full significance of Cousin Roxy’s invitation? No baking or brewing, no hustling our fingers and toes off for dinner on Christmas Day. I think she’s a gorgeous old darling.” Jean laughed and slipped up the back stairs to her own room. It was too cold to stay there. A furnace was one of the luxuries planned for the following year, but during this first winter of campaigning, they had started out pluckily with the big steel range in the kitchen, the genial square wood heater in the sitting room and open fire places in the four large bedrooms and the parlor. “We’ll freeze before the winter’s over,” Kit had prophesied. “Now I know why Cotton Mather and all the other precious old first settlers of the New England Commonwealth looked as if their noses had been frost bitten. Sally Peckham leaves her window wide open every night, and says she often finds snow on her pillow.” But already the girls were adapting themselves to the many ways of keeping warm up in the hills. On the back of the range at night were soapstones heating through, waiting to be wrapped in strips of flannel and trotted up to bed as foot warmers. Cousin Roxy had sent over several from her own store and told the girls if they ran short a flat iron or a good stick of hickory did almost as well. It was comical to watch their faces. If ever remembrance was written on a face it was on Helen’s the first time she took her soapstone to bed with her. Where were the hot water coils of yester year? Heat had seemed to come as if by magic at the big house at Shady Cove, but here it became a lazy giant you petted and cajoled and watched eternally to keep him from falling asleep. Kit had nicknamed the kitchen stove Matilda because it reminded her of a shiny black cook from Aiken, Georgia, whom the family had harbored once upon a time. “And feeding Matilda has become one of the things that is turning my auburn tinted locks a soft, delicate gray,” she told Helen. “I know if any catastrophe were to happen all at once, my passing words would be, ‘Put a stick of wood in the stove.’ ” Jean felt around in her desk until she found her folio of sketches. The sitting room was deserted excepting for Helen watering the rows of blooming geraniums on the little narrow shelves above the sash curtains. Cherilee, the canary, sang challengingly to the sunlight, and out in the dining-room Doris was outmatching him with “Nancy Lee.” Helen went upstairs to her father, and Kit appeared with a frown on her face, puzzling over a pattern for filet lace. “I think the last days before Christmas are terrible,” she exclaimed savagely. “What on earth can we concoct at this last minute for Cousin Beth? I think I’ll crochet her a filet breakfast cap. It’s always a race at the last minute to cover everybody, and you bite off more than you can chew and always forget someone you wouldn’t have neglected for anything. What on earth can I give to Judge Ellis?” “Something useful,” Jean answered. “I can’t bear useful things for Christmas presents. Abby Tucker says she never gets any winter clothes till Christmas and then all the family unload useful things on her. I’m going to send her a bottle of violet extract in a green leather case. I’ve had it for months and never touched it and she’ll adore it. I wish I could think of something for Billie too, something he’s never had and always wanted.” “He’s going away,” Jean mused. “Why don’t you fix up a book of snapshots taken all around here. We took some beauties this summer.” “A boy wouldn’t like that.” “He will when he’s homesick.” Jean opened her folio and began turning over her art school studies. Mostly conventionalized designs they were. After her talk with Cousin Beth they only dissatisfied her. Suddenly she glanced up at the figure across the table, Kit with rumpled short curls and an utterly relaxed posture, elbows on table, knees on a chair. There was a time for all things, Kit held, even formality, but, as she loved to remark sententiously when Helen or Jean called her up for her lax ways, “A little laxity is permissible in the privacy of one’s own home.” Jean’s pencil began to move over the back of her drawing pad. Yes, she could catch it. It wasn’t so hard, the ruffled hair, the half averted face. Kit’s face was such an odd mixture of whimsicality and determination. The rough sketch grew and all at once Kit glanced up and caught what was going on. “Oh, it’s me, isn’t it, Jean? I wish you’d conventionalized me and embellished me. I’d like to look like Mucha’s head of Bernhardt as Princess Lointaine. What shall we call this? ‘Beauty Unadorned.’ No. Call it ‘Christmas Fantasies.’ That’s lovely, specially with the nose screwed up that way and my noble brow wrinkled. I like that. It’s so subtle. Anyone getting one good look at the helpless frenzy in that downcast gaze, those anguished, rumpled locks—” “Oh, Kit, be good,” laughed Jean. She held the sketch away from her critically. “Looks just like you.” “All right. Hang it up as ‘Exhibit A’ of your new school of expression. I don’t mind. There’s a look of genius to it at that.” “One must idealize some,” Jean replied teasingly. She hung it on the door of the wall closet with a pin, just as Mrs. Robbins came into the room. “Mother dear, look what my elder sister has done to me,” Kit cried tragically. Jean said nothing, only the color rose slowly in her cheeks as her mother stood before the little sketch in silence, and slipped her hand into hers. “It’s the first since I left school,” she said, half ashamed of the effort and all it implied. “Kit looked too appealing. I had to catch her.” “Finish it up, girlie, and let me have it on the tree, may I?” There was a very tender note in the Motherbird’s voice, such an understanding note. “Oh, would you like it, really, Mother?” “Love it,” answered Mother promptly. “And don’t give up the ship, remember. Perhaps we may be able to squeeze in the spring term after all.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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