Real Folks, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [the reader ebook txt] 📗

much visiting, and spare rooms kept always in everybody's house, why should not somebody who needed to, just come in and stay? What were the spare places made for?

"We might have Sulie for this winter," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, at last. "They would let her come to us for that time; and it would be a change for her, and leave a place for others. Then if anything made it impossible for us to do more, we should not have raised an expectation to be disappointed. And if we can and ought to do more, it will be shown us by that time more certainly."

She asked Miss Craydocke about it, when she came home from Z---- that fall. She had been away a good deal lately; she had been up to Z---- to two weddings,--Leslie Goldthwaite's and Barbara Holabird's. Now she was back again, and settled down.

Miss Craydocke thought it a good thing wisely limited.

"Sulie needs to be with older girls; there is no one in the Home to be companion to her; the children are almost all little. A winter here would be a blessing to her!"

"But the change again, if she should have to make it?" suggested Mrs. Ripwinkley.

"Good things don't turn to bad ones because you can't have them any more. A thing you're not fit for, and never ought to have had, may; but a real good stays by; it overflows all the rest. Sulie Praile's life could never be so poor again, after a winter here with you, as it might be if she had never had it. If you'd like her, let her come, and don't be a bit afraid. We're only working by inches, any of us; like the camel's-hair embroiderers in China. But it gets put together; and it is beautiful, and large, and whole, somewhere."

"Miss Craydocke always knows," said Hazel.

Nobody said anything again, about Uncle Titus. A winter's plan need not be referred to him. But Hazel, in her own mind, had resolved to find out what was Uncle Titus's, generally and theoretically; how free they were to be, beyond winter plans and visits of weeks; how much scope they might have with this money and this house, that seemed so ample to their simple wants, and what they might do with it and turn it into, if it came into their heads or hearts or consciences.

So one day she went in and sat down by him in the study, after she had accomplished some household errand with Rachel Froke.

Other people approached him with more or less of strategy, afraid of the tiger in him; Desire Ledwith faced him courageously; only Hazel came and nestled up beside him, in his very cage, as if he were no wild beast, after all.

Yet he pretended to growl, even at her, sometimes; it was so funny to see her look up and chirp on after it, like some little bird to whom the language of beasts was no language at all, and passed by on the air as a very big sound, but one that in no wise concerned it.

"We've got Sulie Praile to spend the winter, Uncle Titus," she said.

"Who's Sulie Praile?"

"The lame girl, from the Home. We wanted somebody for Vash to wait on, you know. She sits in a round chair, that twists, like yours; and she's--just like a lily in a vase!" Hazel finished her sentence with a simile quite unexpected to herself.

There was something in Sulie's fair, pale, delicate face, and her upper figure, rising with its own peculiar lithe, easily swayed grace from among the gathered folds of the dress of her favorite dark green color, that reminded--if one thought of it, and Hazel turned the feeling of it into a thought at just this moment--of a beautiful white flower, tenderly and commodiously planted.

"Well, I suppose it's worth while to have a lame girl to sit up in a round chair, and look like a lily in a vase, is it?"

"Uncle Titus, I want to know what you think about some things."

"That is just what I want to know myself, sometimes. To find out what one thinks about things, is pretty much the whole finding, isn't it?"

"Don't be very metaphysical, please, Uncle Titus. Don't turn your eyes round into the back of your head. That isn't what I mean."

"What do you mean?"

"Just plain looking."

"O!"

"Don't you think, when there are places, all nice and ready,--and people that would like the places and haven't got 'em,--that the people ought to be put into the places?"

"'The shirtless backs put into the shirts?'"

"Why, yes, of course. What are shirts made for?"

"For some people to have thirty-six, and some not to have any," said Mr. Oldways.

"No," said Hazel. "Nobody wants thirty-six, all at once. But what I mean is, rooms, and corners, and pleasant windows, and seats at the table; places where people come in visiting, and that are kept saved up. I can't bear an empty box; that is, only for just one pleasant minute, while I'm thinking what I can put into it."

"Where's your empty box, now?"

"Our house _was_ rather empty-boxy. Uncle Titus, do you mind how we fill it up,--because you gave it to us, you know?"

"No. So long as you don't crowd yourselves out."

"Or you, Uncle Titus. We don't want to crowd you out. Does it crowd you any to have Sulie and Vash there, and to have us 'took up' with them, as Luclarion says?"

How straight Witch Hazel went to her point!

"Your catechism crowds me just a little, child," said Uncle Titus. "I want to see you go your own way. That is what I gave you the house for. Your mother knows that. Did she send you here to ask me?"

"No. I wanted to know. It was I that wanted to begin a kind of a Beehive--like Miss Craydocke's. Would you care if it was turned quite into a Beehive, finally?"

Hazel evidently meant to settle the furthest peradventure, now she had begun.

"Ask your mother to show you the deed. 'To Frances Ripwinkley, her heirs and assigns,'--that's you and Diana,--'for their use and behoof, forever.' I've no more to do with it."

"'Use, and behoof,'" said Hazel, slowly. And then she turned the leaves of the great Worcester that lay upon the study table, and found "Behoof."

"'Profit,--gain,--benefit;' then that's what you meant; that we should make as much more of it as we could. That's what I think, Uncle Titus. I'm glad you put 'behoof in."

"They always put it in, child!"

"Do they? Well, then, they don't always work it out!" and Hazel laughed.

At that, Mr. Oldways pulled off his spectacles, looked sharp at Hazel with two sharp, brown eyes,--set near together, Hazel noticed for the first time, like Desire's,--let the keenness turn gradually into a twinkle, suffered the muscles that had held his lips so grim to relax, and laughed too; his peculiar, up-and-down shake of a laugh, in which head and shoulders made the motions, as if he were a bottle, and there were a joke inside of him which was to be well mixed up to be thoroughly enjoyed.

"Go home to your mother, jade-hopper!" he said, when he had done; "and tell her I'm coming round to-night, to tea, amongst your bumble-bees and your lilies!"


XV.

WITH ALL ONE'S MIGHT.

Let the grapes be ever so sweet, and hang in plenty ever so low, there is always a fair bunch out of reach.

Mrs. Ledwith longed, now, to go to Europe.

At any rate, she was eager to have her daughters go. But, after just one year, to take what her Uncle Oldways had given her, in return for her settling herself near him, and _un_settle herself, and go off to the other side of the world! Besides, what he had given her would not do it. That was the rub, after all. What was two thousand a year, now-a-days? Nothing is anything, now-a-days. And it takes everything to do almost nothing.

The Ledwiths were just as much pinched now as they were before they ever heard from Uncle Oldways. People with unlimited powers of expansion always are pinched; it is good for them; one of the saving laws of nature that keeps things decently together.

Yet, in the pink room of a morning, and in the mellow-tinted drawing-room of an evening, it was getting to be the subject oftenest discussed. It was that to which they directed the combined magnetism of the family will; everything was brought to bear upon it; Bridget's going away on Monday morning, leaving the clothes in the tubs, the strike-price of coal, and the overcharge of the grocer; Florence's music, Helena's hopeless distress over French and German; even Desire's listlessness and fidgets; most of all Mrs. Megilp's plans, which were ripening towards this long coveted end. She and Glossy really thought they should go this winter.

"It is a matter of economy now; everybody's going. The Fargo's and the Fayerwerses, and the Hitherinyons have broken all up, and are going out to stay indefinitely. The Fayerwerses have been saving up these four years to get away, there are so many of them, you know; the passage money counts, and the first travelling; but after you _are_ over, and have found a place to settle down in,"--then followed all the usual assertions as to cheap delights and inestimable advantages, and emancipation from all American household ills and miseries.

Uncle Oldways came up once in a while to the house in Shubarton Place, and made an evening call. He seemed to take apricot-color for granted, when he got there, as much as he did the plain, old, unrelieved brown at Mrs. Ripwinkley's; he sat quite unconcernedly in the grand easy chair that Laura wheeled out for him; indeed, it seemed as if he really, after a manner, indorsed everything by his acceptance without demur of what he found. But then one must sit down on something; and if one is offered a cup of coffee, or anything on a plate, one cannot easily protest against sea-green china. We do, and we have, and we wear, and we say, a great many things, and feel ourselves countenanced and confirmed, somehow,--perhaps excused,--because nobody appears surprised or says anything. But what should they say; and would it be at all proper that they should be surprised? If we only thought of it, and once tried it, we might perhaps find it quite as easy and encouraging, on the same principle, _not_ to have apricot rep and sea-green china.

One night Mr. Oldways was with them when the talk turned eastwardly over the water. There were new names in the paper, of people who had gone out in the _Aleppo_, and a list of Americans registered at Bowles Brothers,' among whom were old acquaintance.

"I declare, how they all keep turning up there" said Mrs. Ledwith.

"The war doesn't seem to make much difference," said her husband.

"To think how lucky the Vonderbargens were, to be in Paris just at the edge of the siege!" said Glossy Megilp. "They came back from Como just in time; and poor Mr. Washburne had to fairly hustle them off at last. They were buying silks, and ribbons, and gloves, up to the last minute, for absolutely nothing. Mrs. Vonderbargen said it seemed a sin to come away and leave anything. I'm sure I don't know how they got them all home;