We Girls, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

nice and hazardous work was all done. Even the press that held the table-napery was emptied to the last napkin, and all was safe.

Now the hall doors were thrown open; wagons were driven up to the entrances, and loaded with everything that came first, as things are ordinarily "saved" at a fire. These were taken over to Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's. Books and pictures, furniture, bedding, carpets; quantities were carried away, and quantities were piled up on the lawn. The men-servants came and looked after these; they had done all they could elsewhere; they left the work to the firemen now, and there was little hope of saving the house. The window-frames were smoking, and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire was running along the piazza roofs before we left the building. The water was giving out.

After that we had to stand and see it burn. The wells and cisterns were dry, and the engines stood helpless.

The stable roofs fell in with a crash, and the flames reared up as from a great red crater and whirlpool of fire. They lashed forth and seized upon charred walls and timbers that were ready, without their touch, to spring into live combustion. The whole southwest front of the mansion was overswept with almost instant sheets of fire. Fire poured in at the casements; through the wide, airy halls; up and into the rooms where we had stood a little while before; where, a little before that, the children had been safe asleep in their nursery beds.

Mrs. Marchbanks, like any other burnt-out woman, had gone to the home that offered to her,--her sister-in-law's; Olivia and Adelaide were going to the Haddens; the children were at Mrs. Hobart's; the things that, in their rich and beautiful arrangement, had made _home_, as well as enshrined the Marchbanks family in their sacredness of elegance, were only miscellaneous "loads" now, transported and discharged in haste, or heaped up confusedly to await removal. And the sleek servants, to whom, doubtless, it had seemed that their Rome could never fall, were suddenly, as much as any common Bridgets and Patricks, "out of a place."

Not that there would be any permanent difference; it was only the story and attitude of a night. The power was still behind; the "Tailor" would sew things over again directly. Mrs. Roger Marchbanks would be comparatively composed and in order, at Mrs. Lewis's, in a few days,--receiving her friends, who would hurry to make "fire-calls," as they would to make party or engagement or other special occasion visits; the cordons would be stretched again; not one of the crowd of people who went freely in and out of her burning rooms that night, and worked hardest, saving her library and her pictures and her carpets, would come up in cool blood and ring her door-bell now; the sanctity and the dignity would be as unprofanable as ever.

It was about four in the morning--the fire still burning--when Mrs. Holabird went round upon the out-skirts of the groups of lookers-on, to find and gather together her own flock. Rosamond and Ruth stood in a safe corner with the Haddens. Where was Barbara?

Down against the close trunks of a cluster of linden-trees had been thrown cushions and carpets and some bundles of heavy curtains, and the like. Coming up behind, Mrs. Holabird saw, sitting upon this heap, two persons. She knew Barbara's hat, with its white gull's breast; but somebody had wrapped her up in a great crimson table-cover, with a bullion fringe. Somebody was Harry Goldthwaite, sitting there beside her; Barbara, with only her head visible, was behaving, out here in this unconventional place and time, with a tranquillity and composure which of late had been apparently impossible to her in parlors.

"What will Mrs. Marchbanks do with Mrs. Hobart after this, I wonder?" Mrs. Holabird heard Harry say.

"She'll give her a sort of brevet," replied Barbara. "For gallant and meritorious services. It will be, 'Our friend Mrs. Hobart; a near neighbor of ours; she was with us all that terrible night of the fire, you know.' It will be a great honor; but it won't be a full commission."

Harry laughed.

"Queer things happen when you are with us," said Barbara. "First, there was the whirlwind, last year,--and now the fire."

"After the whirlwind and the fire--" said Harry.

"I wasn't thinking of the Old Testament," interrupted Barbara.

"Came a still, small voice," persisted Harry. "If I'm wicked, Barbara, I can't help it. You put it into my head."

"I don't see any wickedness," answered Barbara, quickly. "That was the voice of the Lord. I suppose it is always coming."

"Then, Barbara--"

Then Mrs. Holabird walked away again.

The next day--_that_ day, after our eleven o'clock breakfast--Harry came back, and was at Westover all day long.

Barbara got up into mother's room at evening, alone with her. She brought a cricket, and came and sat down beside her, and put her cheek upon her knee.

"Mother," she said, softly, "I don't see but you'll have to get me ready, and let me go."

"My dear child! When? What do you mean?"

"Right off. Harry is under orders, you know. And they may hardly ever be so nice again. And--if we _are_ going through the world together--mightn't we as well begin to go?"

"Why, Barbara, you take my breath away! But then you always do! What is it?"

"It's the Katahdin, fitting out at New York to join the European squadron. Commander Shapleigh is a great friend of Harry's; his wife and daughter are in New York, going out, by Southampton steamer, when the frigate leaves, to meet him there. They would take me, he says; and--that's what Harry wants, mother. There'll be a little while first,--as much, perhaps, as we should ever have."

"Barbara, my darling! But you've nothing ready!"

"No, I suppose not. I never do have. Everything is an emergency with me; but I always emerge! I can get things in London," she added. "Everybody does."

The end of it was that Mrs. Holabird had to catch her breath again, as mothers do; and that Barbara is getting ready to be married just as she does everything else.

Rose has some nice things--laid away, new; she always has; and mother has unsuspected treasures; and we all had new silk dresses for Leslie's wedding, and Ruth had a bright idea about that.

"I'm as tall as either of you, now," she said; "and we girls are all of a size, as near as can be, mother and all; and we'll just wear the dresses once more, you see, and then put them right into Barbara's trunk. They'll be all the bonnier and luckier for her, I know. We can get others any time."

We laughed at her at first; but we came round afterward to think that it was a good plan. Rosamond's silk was a lovely violet, and Ruth's was blue; Barbara's own was pearly gray; we were glad, now, that no two of us had dressed alike. The violet and the gray had been chosen because of our having worn quiet black-and-white all summer for grandfather. We had never worn crape; or what is called "deep" mourning. "You shall never do that," said mother, "till the deep mourning comes. Then you will choose for yourselves."

We have had more time than we expected. There has been some beautiful delay or other about machinery,--the Katahdin's, that is; and Commander Shapleigh has been ever so kind. Harry has been back and forth to New York two or three times. Once he took Stephen with him; Steve stayed at Uncle John's; but he was down at the yard, and on board ships, and got acquainted with some midshipmen; and he has quite made up his mind to try to get in at the Naval Academy as soon as he is old enough, and to be a navy officer himself.

We are comfortable at home; not hurried after all. We are determined not to be; last days are too precious,

"Don't let's be all taken up with 'things,'" says Barbara. "I can _buy_ 'things' any time. But now,--I want you!"

Aunt Roderick's present helped wonderfully. It was magnanimous of her; it was coals of fire. We should have believed she was inspired,--or possessed,--but that Ruth went down to Boston with her.

There came home, in a box, two days after, from Jordan and Marsh's, the loveliest "suit," all made and finished, of brown poplin. To think of Aunt Roderick's getting anything _made_, at an "establishment"! But Ruth says she put her principles into her unpickable pocket, and just took her porte-monnaie in her hand.

Bracelets and pocket-handkerchiefs have come from New York; all the "girls" here in Westover have given presents of ornaments, or little things to wear; they know there is no housekeeping to provide for. Barbara says her trousseau "flies together"; she just has to sit and look at it.

She has begged that old garnet and white silk, though, at last, from mother. Ruth saw her fold it up and put it, the very first thing, into the bottom of her new trunk. She patted it down gently, and gave it a little stroke, just as she pats and strokes mother herself sometimes.

"_All_ new things are only dreary," she says. "I must have some of the old."

"I should just like to know one thing,--if I might," said Rosamond, deferentially, after we had begun to go to bed one evening. She was sitting in her white night-dress, on the box-sofa, with her shoe in her hand. "I should just like to know what made you behave so beforehand, Barbara?"

"I was in a buzz," said Barbara. "And it _was_ beforehand. I suppose I knew it was coming,--like a thunderstorm."

"You came pretty near securing that it _shouldn't_ come," said Rosamond, "after all."

"I couldn't help that; it wasn't my part of the affair."

"You might have just kept quiet, as you were before," said Rose.

"Wait and see," said Barbara, concisely. "People shouldn't come bringing things in their hands. It's just like going down stairs to get these presents. The very minute I see a corner of one of those white paper parcels, don't I begin to look every way, and say all sorts of things in a hurry? Wouldn't I like to turn my back and run off if I could? Why don't they put them under the sofa, or behind the door, I wonder?"

"After all--" began Rosamond, still with the questioning inflection.

"After all--" said Barbara, "there was the fire. That, luckily, was something else!"

"Does there always have to be a fire?" asked Ruth, laughing.

"Wait and see," repeated Barbara. "Perhaps you'll have an earthquake."

We have time for talks. We take up every little chink of time to have each other in. We want each other in all sorts of ways; we never wanted each other so, or _had_ each other so, before.

Delia Waite is here, and there is some needful stitching going on; but the minutes are alongside the stitches, they are not eaten up; there are minutes everywhere. We have got a great deal of life into a little while; and--we have finished up our Home Story, to the very present instant.

* * * * *

Who finishes it? Who tells it?

Well,--"the kettle began it." Mrs. Peerybingle--pretty much--finished it.