Maida's little house

CHAPTER XXII SILVA’S MESSAGE

“After the dishes are washed and wiped, let’s set the table for supper,” Laura suggested. “Floribel will be so tired when she gets home, and thinks of all the work she’ll have to do alone.”

So the girls added this to the work they had already done.

“Shall we go in bathing this afternoon?” Rosie asked when the last knife and fork was in place.

“You all go if you want,” Maida answered, “I don’t think I want to swim. Somehow I feel as though I’d like to stay about the house. So many things have happened that I’m worried about going away.”

“So do I, Maida,” Laura agreed emphatically.

So although the boys went in swimming as usual, the girls stayed at home.

“I feel tired, too,” Maida remarked. They took books from the library and settled quietly in the Tree Room where they read and talked all the afternoon. They were interrupted twice—once by the boys who, as though they had a responsibility too, cut their swimming short—and by the baby.

When the baby awoke, late in the afternoon, Rosie brought her downstairs into the air for a while. They all declared that she looked quite a different child. A tinge of pink had come into her soft brown cheeks and the warmth and moisture of her nap had curled the brown hair in her neck.

“Oh you sweet sweet darling!” Maida kissed the little girl ecstatically. “Oh how I wish your parents would give you to me! That’s all we need in the Little House—a baby. Delia’s not quite little enough.” She caught Delia and kissed her.

“Delia bid dirl,” Delia protested.

Even the boys were amused and entertained by their little visitor. Arthur deigned to make faces for her. They amused her enormously, and when Harold unloosed an ear-splitting whistle, she turned round, delighted eyes in his direction. But that she was still tired was evident; she kept falling into little naps.

“I don’t think I’ll bathe her again so soon,” Rosie meditated with knitted brows when they had taken her upstairs for the night. “To-morrow I’ll give her a bath in the morning and another at night. But now I’ll just wash her face and hands and let her have her bottle. You do it this time, Maida and to-morrow,” added Rosie, generous always, “we’ll take turns bathing and feeding her.”

As they came downstairs Laura said, “I wonder what time it is. Oh half past five!”

“Five!” Maida exclaimed. “Why Floribel ought to have been home at five! What train can she get now?”

Nobody knew, but Arthur remembered there was a time-table in the library. They clustered about him. To most of them it was as difficult as Greek; but to Arthur, who had had some experience in traveling and to Maida who had had a great deal, it did not seem insolvable.

They puzzled over it together.

“There’s a train at six from Boston and another at seven,” they finally decided. “And that’s all.”

“She must have lost the three from Boston,” Maida declared. “But the six from Boston isn’t due here until eight. And in the meantime we’ll have to get supper.”

“Say let us boys help,” Arthur suggested. “It must be a big job cooking for twelve. I know how to cook,” he added unexpectedly.

“Where did you learn, Arthur?” Maida asked with interest.

“Tramping with my father,” Arthur answered briefly. “We often camped in the woods for days.”

“Supper isn’t so hard as dinner,” Rosie said hopefully. “Now I propose that we have a combination salad with hard-boiled eggs cut up in it. You see there’s a lot of cold vegetables in the ice chest and we can make a custard and orange pudding.”

The whole group, three girls and three boys, bustled into the kitchen. From a drawer full of aprons, Rosie took out enough for all of them. The little girls wore the aprons as they should be worn, but in the boys’ case, Rosie tied them around their necks. “I’ve seen boys cook before,” she announced scornfully, “and when they get through, they generally look as though they had fallen into a barrel of something.”

The boys protested loudly. But to some extent Rosie’s pungent comment seemed to be justified. Arthur for instance squeezed the orange juice into his own eye. He yelled so loudly at this unexpected deluge that Harold dropped an egg on his coat.

“There I told you!” Rosie declared scathingly. “What did you pick out an egg to drop for, Harold, why didn’t you drop a potato?”

However pride goeth before destruction and the contemptuous Rosie was soon caught up with; for clandestinely stealing a long sliver of ice from the high ice box, she seized it in such a way that it slipped out of her hand and dropped down her neck.

“Serves you right,” Arthur declared with delight. With heartless interest they all watched her wriggles before she was able to secure and extricate the slippery, rapidly melting sliver.

“You look as though you had had the hose squirted on you,” said Dicky.

But their supper was good. The salad—lettuce with cold peas, string beans, tomatoes and sliced eggs—was so pretty that Maida said she thought it ought to be used as an ornament for the center of the table. As for the custard and orange pudding—to which the gifted Laura had added a delicious meringue—they ate and ate.

“I never tasted anything so good in all my life,” Rosie sighed. “I wish we’d made a bathtubful. Once I had a dream,” she went on pensively, “where it looked as though I was going to have all the sweet things to eat I wanted. I dreamed that when I came out in the morning to go to school, the whole neighborhood was made of pink and white candy—everything, houses, streets, lamp-posts. I took a big bite right out of my fence.”

“And what happened then?” Maida asked breathlessly.

“I woke up, goose. Wouldn’t you know that that was what would happen with a whole worldful of candy to be eaten?”

After talking a while longer, they all filed into the living room; began to look about for their books. Suddenly the telephone bell rang. Maida was nearest. “I hope nothing else has happened,” she said as she took off the receiver.

“I want to talk with Maida Westabrook,” came a girl’s voice over the wire to her. Strange it was and yet it had a familiar ring; the strangeness was its weakness and its breathlessness.

“I am Maida Westabrook.”

“Listen! I must talk quick. They will be back and stop me. I am Silva Burle. They think I am asleep. I have tried to tell them. They won’t listen. They think I am raving. I’m not. I’ve got my senses. My baby sister, Nesta, is in a cave on the other side of the lake. Tyma is away. There’s nobody to feed her. She’ll starve—”

“I found her this afternoon, Silva,” Maida interrupted. “She’s upstairs in the Little House now—fast asleep.”

“Oh!” Silva’s voice dropped almost as though she were faint. Then suspiciously, “Are you saying this to me because you think I’m raving? Oh tell me the truth. I ask God to be my witness that I am telling you the truth.”

“Yes, Silva,” Maida said steadily, “I am telling you the truth. I give you my word of honor. I went across the lake this morning. I heard the baby crying. I followed the sound and found her. Don’t worry any more about her. We’ll keep her here just as long as you’re ill.” She started to add the news of Mrs. Dore’s accident, of Granny’s and Floribel’s absence, but a sudden discreet impulse bade her not to go on. Instead she said, “How did you happen to have the baby in that cave?”

“It’s a long story,” answered Silva weakly. “I can’t tell you now. Will you come to see me to-morrow?”

“Yes,” Maida agreed, “in the morning.”

“You promise?” Silva’s weak voice entreated; it almost threatened.

“I cross my throat and my heart!” Unseen by Silva, Maida solemnly performed these rituals of the pledged word.

“And you’re sure she’s all right?”

“Sure,” Maida answered. “You ought to hear her laugh and coo.”

“Ask her how often they feed her,” came from Rosie’s clear voice from behind. Maida repeated the question.

“Four times a day—at nine; at twelve; at three and at six, and then at night.”

“That’s what Rosie said,” Maida explained, “four in the day and one at night.”

“I can never thank you enough.” Silva’s voice had something in it that Maida had never heard there before. “But some day— Here they are coming up the stairs. I must get back to bed.” Silva’s voice cut off quickly. Maida listened for a while, but there was no sound.

A babble of questions assailed her when she dropped the receiver. She told them all she knew.

“Who would have thought that baby would have turned out to be Silva Burle’s sister!” Rosie remarked thoughtfully.

“Well now,” Laura prophesied with a faint lilt of triumph, “I guess she won’t be so pig-headed.”

“Nesta,” Maida said. “What a sweet name! I’ll go to-morrow morning at—” And then the telephone rang again. Maida took the message. “It’s Floribel,” she announced in a serious voice. “They’ve lost the last train. We’ve got to get breakfast.”

“If we’re going to get up as early as that,” Laura declared, “I’m going to bed now. I’m so tired that I’m cross.”

“I told you things always go by three’s,” Rosie triumphantly reminded them.

CHAPTER XXIII SILVA’S STORY

When Maida woke up the next morning, it was to the sound of a baby’s crying. It was not however a sick cry; it was a sleepy cry. She glanced swiftly at the clock; then jumped out of bed. Rosie was standing in the doorway, Nesta, wearing one of Delia’s nightgowns, in her arms.

“You never woke me up, Rosie Brine,” Maida accused her friend.

“I tried to,” Rosie replied. “Honest I did. But you couldn’t seem to wake up. And when I realized what a day you had yesterday and what a day might be before you, I thought it would be better to let you sleep. Laura and I got breakfast. We’ve given the baby her bath and I am now taking her to bed.”

Maida kissed the little curly, dusky head. “She looks fine,” she said approvingly. “I’m so glad I can give Silva such good news.”

“What time did you say you had to call there?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“It’s now half past eight,” Rosie said. “And here comes Laura with your breakfast.”

As Rosie disappeared with her sleeping burden, Laura appeared at the stairs carrying a tray.

“Hop back into bed, Maida Westabrook,” she said serenely. “You’re going to have your breakfast in bed this morning—like a princess.”

Maida meekly hopped back as ordered and Laura placed the tray on the bed in front of her. On it, the peel so divided that it looked like a great golden-petaled flower, was an orange; a dish of oatmeal; an egg in an egg cup; two pieces of toast; a small pitcher of milk; sugar. Around the plate was wreathed nasturtiums, flowers and leaves.

“Oh how good it looks!” Maida said; and then after a few moments of enthusiastic eating, “Oh, how good it tastes! How dainty you’ve made this tray, Laura! I’m sure you’re going to be the best housekeeper among us. You like housekeeping, don’t you?”

“I just love it,” Laura replied.

“I hate it.” Rosie who now reappeared in the doorway, declared emphatically. “I wish you could buy blocks of dishes the way you buy blocks of paper; so’s you could tear off a clean set for every meal; then burn them up. I wish you could buy blocks of clothes just the same way.”

“What a queer thing you are, Rosie!” Laura exclaimed. “I just love to have pretty things, crocheted and knit and embroidered—dainty china and glass—and keep everything neat and shining.”

Maida reflectively tapped the top of her egg; meditatively removed the little bit of broken shell; absently salted and buttered it; thoughtfully tasted it. “I don’t know what I like,” she declared after a while, “I like to do anything—if I’m doing it with people I love. But I just despise to do anything with people I don’t like.”

An hour later, Maida, one foot on the pedal of her bicycle was accepting last orders in regard to marketing from Rosie and Laura; giving equally hurried advice to them.

“Don’t forget to buy all the different kinds of berries you can find,” Rosie said. “Berries make such an easy dessert.”

“And oh, if there are any tomatoes yet, order all you can find, Maida,” Laura chimed in. “I can make so many things with tomatoes: tomato and macaroni; tomato and crackers; stewed tomatoes and boiled tomatoes.”

“And don’t let the fire go out,” Maida replied, “and always have some one near the telephone if anybody calls up. And remember, if the baby doesn’t seem all right, telephone for the doctor at once. Get the hospital on the telephone at nine o’clock and ask how Mrs. Dore is this morning.” Then mounting her machine in a flash, Maida was off like a bird.

“Who would ever have thought,” Rosie said looking after her, “that the Maida Westabrook who first came to Primrose Court—so pale and thin and lame—would ever grow into such a strong girl? Do you remember, Laura?”

“Of course I do. My mother didn’t think she was going to live.”

In the meantime, Maida was proceeding down the dewy trail, the prey to some worry but with a gradually-growing, comfortable feeling that her troubles were all over and that now things would go smoothly. She did all the marketing that had been intrusted to her and was even able, being the first on the spot, to secure a basket of early tomatoes for Laura. As for berries—they were everywhere. Maida ordered, a little recklessly, blueberries, blackberries, currants. It was ten o’clock as she had agreed—Maida was a very prompt little girl, having been brought up to promptness by a business-like father—ten o’clock to the dot, when she walked up the Fosdick path and knocked on the door by means of a big brass knocker.

A maid servant opened the door; but just behind appeared a white-haired lady in a black silk and black silk mitts; a three-cornered bit of black lace on her soft hair.

“You are Maida Westabrook,” she said smiling, “and you have come to see our little invalid. She’s awake and waiting for you. If you will follow me, I will take you to her.”

Maida followed Mrs. Fosdick up broad carpeted stairs and down a long sunny hallway. At the very end, the old lady pushed open a door. Silva was lying on a day couch, placed near a back window which overlooked the garden. A light gayly-flowered down puff covered her. Silva looked white but her strange amber-colored eyes seemed to hold a drop of fire.

“Good morning, Silva,” Maida said.

“Good morning,” Silva answered, but she used the words awkwardly, like one who has not been accustomed to this morning greeting.

“I’m glad you are better,” Maida went on and then paused in a little embarrassment. After an instant in which Silva said nothing she added, “How did it happen?”

Mrs. Fosdick interrupted. “I am going to leave you little girls alone to talk. I know you’ll have things to tell each other,” her kind old eyes smiled understandingly, “that you don’t want grown-ups to hear.”

“Oh no,” Maida said involuntarily but this was only instinctive politeness on her part. She very much desired to be alone with Silva. Silva was apparently too honest to say anything. She waited until Mrs. Fosdick’s footsteps were lost to hearing. Then she pulled herself upright with a sudden jerk. “How’s Nesta?” she asked breathlessly.

“She’s all right. She slept all night long without waking once—except when Rosie fed her at ten—and this morning she looks as sweet and dainty as a rose-bud. Don’t worry about Nesta, Silva. She’s all right. It’s you we’re worrying about.”

But this did not appear to interest Silva. “How did you find her?” she demanded.

Maida told the story of her visit to the Moraine Land, not leaving out a detail. Silva listened intently, her strange eyes unwinkingly fixed on Maida’s face. “What time was this?” Silva asked.

Maida told her.

“Oh she only missed one feeding then,” Silva said in a tone of acute relief. “You can just imagine,” she went on, “when I came out of the faint enough to remember about the baby, how I felt. I tried to tell them here about Nesta, but nobody would listen to me. They thought I was raving and I can’t blame them for that of course. I begged them, I screamed at them; then suddenly I thought of you—why I don’t know. But somehow I knew I could trust you. I asked them to call you up or let me call you up. But they wouldn’t. ‘There! There!’ they would say, ‘Lie down and sleep! You’ll be all right in the morning.’ Oh what I went through! I thought I was going crazy! And then I heard somebody using the telephone in the hall. And when they left me to go down to dinner, I crept out and called you up. Nobody heard me. They don’t know yet that I telephoned. I told them last night that I knew you’d come this morning.”

“It must have made you dizzy to stand up,” Maida said sympathetically.

“It did. At first I thought I couldn’t stand it. But I had to do it and so I did. You are sure Nesta is all right?”

“Sure!” Maida reiterated, smiling. “But why didn’t you call up Aunt Save?”

“She was at the Warneford Fair. They all went. Tyma went too. Aunt Save’s telling fortunes. Tyma and I have been making baskets for a month. He thought he could probably sell them all in three days. We talked it all over. One of us had to go and the other to stay with the baby and of course I was the one to stay with Nesta. Tyma won’t be back until to-morrow.”

“But I don’t understand why Nesta was in the cave,” Maida declared in a puzzled tone.

Silva closed her eyes for a moment and she sighed. It was a long sigh and a weary one to come from a little girl’s lips.

“We’ve kept her there a month,” she said. “We stole her—Tyma and I.”

“Stole her!” Maida echoed in a shocked tone. “Stole her! From whom?”

“From my father,” Silva answered and two big tears formed slowly in her eyes. They hung on the end of her long lashes but they did not drop. Maida handed Silva her handkerchief. Silva wiped the tears away. No more came, and she went on with her story in a perfectly composed way.

“It’s a queer story to tell and—and I’m so ashamed. You see my mother died last February when Nesta was about three months old. After mother’s death, we had all the care of her—Tyma and I. It was very hard because my father—” She stopped for an instant and seemed to choke on what she was going to say. Then she went on steadily. “My father began to get drunk—more and more— But that wasn’t the worst. He began to treat us badly—and I was always worried about Nesta—sometimes I was afraid he’d hurt her— Sometimes—” She stopped and looked at Maida imploringly.

Maida nodded as though she understood.

“He was worse to Tyma though, and so Tyma ran away. He joined Aunt Save and she told him to stay with them. One day he was exploring the woods and he discovered that cave. Well things got worse and worse at home— And— And— And then father told me he was going to be married again. I didn’t like the—the one he was going to marry. I knew she didn’t mind his drinking. She—used to drink too. She didn’t like me—nor Tyma—nor Nesta. I could see that she didn’t want the care of Nesta. Tyma and I could take care of ourselves, but I knew she would be cruel to Nesta.”

Silva paused; for this time it was Maida’s eyes that filled. Silva held out Maida’s handkerchief and Maida took it; and wiped her tears away.

“Go on,” Maida said.

“Tyma came back one night very late. Father never knew he was there. He threw pebbles against my window and I came out and talked to him. He told me a plan. It was for us to run away and take Nesta with us and keep her hidden in the cave. He said he’d take the baby first. Then after a few days, I was to go to live with Aunt Save. You see if I was to run away with the baby, father would know. But if the baby was stolen while I was with him and when he thought Tyma was with Aunt Save, he could not blame it onto either of us.”

“Oh Silva!” Maida gasped. “What a terrible thing to do— I mean—” She thought an instant. “What a terrible thing to have to do! How could you do it? I couldn’t.”

“You can do anything,” Silva said in a voice strangely stern in one so young, “if you have to do it. So we planned it all very carefully. Tyma went back to Aunt Save and then he returned a few nights later. While I was in the field with father, he took the baby and went back with her to Satuit; put her in the cave. He went by night and almost always through the woods. Nobody saw him. When Aunt Save woke up the next morning, Tyma was in his tent.”

“What did your father say?”

“He was wild. He thought at once it was Tyma and he went over to see Aunt Save. Tyma was there, but of course there was no baby about. Aunt Save said that Tyma had no baby with him and father knew that Aunt Save wouldn’t lie to him. She asked father if he didn’t want me to come and live with her as long as he was going to get married. Father said yes and when he came back, he told me to go to Aunt Save. He gave me my car fare and I went.”

“Didn’t he do anything more to find the baby?” Maida asked in a horrified tone.

“Oh yes—he hunted everywhere—he talked about her all the time. And then after ten days or so he told the police and there were articles in the newspapers with his picture and Nesta’s—it didn’t look anything like her. Reporters came to see him. But after a while nobody cared. People don’t care what happens to gypsies.” Silva’s voice was bitter. “Then he got married and as his wife didn’t want Nesta, he stopped bothering about her.”

“And do you mean to tell me,” Maida said in an awed voice, “that you kept the baby in the cave nearly two months?”

“Ever since just after you children came to the Little House. We were planning to steal Nesta when we saw you first. That’s why we had to be so hateful to you— We had to do everything we could to keep you away from the cave. That’s why we acted so terribly that first day when you were swimming in the lake and that’s why we broke your canoes and that’s why we stole all your lunch the day of the picnic. That day, Tyma was in the cave with the baby and I was bringing a bottle of milk and a little doll for her. She was too little to play with a doll, but I wanted her to have one. Rosie Brine caught sight of me. I dodged around the bushes and got into the cave. I think she would have thought she imagined me if I hadn’t dropped the doll. Tyma and I sat there trembling.... And then we realized that you were going to eat your lunches right near.... The baby was asleep; but we were frightened to death for fear she would wake up and cry ... and then the idea came to us to steal your lunches ... and ruin everything so you would think tramps had been there.... And then the baby did cry.... Oh how frightened we were! Tyma and I clung to each other and the same idea came to us both at once. I began to moan very loud. And so did Tyma. And then you couldn’t trace the sound and it frightened you and you all ran away. Tyma said you would never come back and you didn’t. That is, except one night, when I saw Arthur Duncan.”

“I never heard or read anything like this,” Maida declared solemnly. “How did you manage to take care of the baby—and bathe her and feed her?”

“It was very hard,” Silva said simply. “Tyma and I took turns in spending the night in the cave. Aunt Save never knew; for we waited until everybody was asleep before we left the camp. I used to go once in the morning to heat water and bathe her and once in the afternoon to take her out in the sunlight. We made baskets all the time so that we could buy milk. Getting the milk to her though without being seen—Oh how we had to plan! I bought a little lamp and heated her milk over it. And then I was so worried! I knew it was going to be very troublesome in a little while because it was only a question of time before Nesta would creep. Fortunately she was backward about everything—especially walking. We planned to barricade the front of the cave. But what we should do when winter came, we could not guess. And then we were so bothered about clothes—” Silva stopped and cast her eyes downward. “This is so hard to tell you!”

“Go on!” Maida urged.

“I broke into your house night before last, and stole some doll clothes. That first day you came to visit Aunt Save, I heard you talking with her about a doll you had as big as a baby, and how you kept her clothes in a little hair-cloth trunk under your window in your room. I watched the house until I found out which room was yours. There was a great tree in front of it. And that night, when everybody had gone to sleep, I climbed in your window and took all the doll clothes. You see some nights were rainy and I was afraid she wouldn’t be warm enough. Please excuse me if you can. I will give them all back.”

Maida was silent for an instant struggling with the situation too complicated for her young mind.

“Of course,” she said at last in a tremulous voice, “stealing is always wrong. I would have given you Lucy’s clothes if you had asked me for them.”

“I didn’t know that you would,” Silva faltered. “And I didn’t dare tell you about Nesta.”

“Of course I saw Lucy’s clothes in the cave,” Maida went on. Her eyes were downcast. “Let’s not speak of it again. Very likely, I would have done the same thing if I had been in your place— Only I suppose I wouldn’t have stolen the baby in the beginning.” She paused and then added honestly, “But perhaps that’s only because I wouldn’t have had the courage. What are you going to do now— I mean when you get well?”

“I don’t know—” Silva answered drearily. “I’ll have to wait until Tyma comes back. Everybody’ll know then. Aunt Save will make me write to father that I have Nesta. He’ll take Nesta away from me and that dreadful woman will have the care of her—”

And now Silva put her head in the hollow of her elbow and sobbed. But they were not the sobs of a child. They were hard and tearless. They shook Silva’s whole body. Maida rushed to her side. She put her arms about Silva; kissed her again and again. “Don’t think of it any more, Silva dear,” she begged. “I know it isn’t as bad as you fancy. Will you let me tell my father about it? My father is a wonderful man. It is almost as though he had magic power—like a genie. He’ll find some way out for you, I’m sure. Will you let me tell him?”

It was some moments before Silva’s whispered “Yes” came from between her racking sobs. But very soon thereafter she sat up. “Here comes somebody,” she whispered. “Please don’t say anything about Nesta.”

CHAPTER XXIV GUESTS

When Maida turned the bend in the path just before it came out on the Little House, she found Rosie, Laura, Arthur, Harold and Dicky drawn up in a straight soldier-like line.

“We have to report that—” they all chanted in a solemn voice.

“Mother is very comfortable and will return to us in a week,” announced the radiant Dicky.

“Granny Flynn has come back,” announced the beaming Laura.

“Floribel is in the kitchen,” announced the smiling Harold.

“Zeke is in the garden,” announced the triumphant Arthur.

“Your father is in the living room waiting for you,” announced the sparkling Rosie.

“My father!” Maida exclaimed in a happy voice. “My father! Oh what a blessing that is!” She dropped her bicycle. “Oh Rosie, will you put my wheel away for me? I want to see my father so much.” She didn’t wait for Rosie’s hearty, “Yes, of course, goose!” but raced across the grass.

In a few minutes an unprecedented activity broke out in the Little House. Down stairs in the living room, Mr. Westabrook, who had been most of the time glued to the telephone, was still telephoning. Up-stairs in the Little House, Floribel was getting the spare room ready for one guest. Up-stairs in the barn, Zeke was putting up a cot for another. In the kitchen, Rosie was frantically making popovers. Between the flower garden and the spare room, Laura and Maida were swinging like a pair of active pendulums, decorating with flowers. Outside on lawn and in vegetable garden, the boys were working frantically putting everything in what Rosie called “apple pie order.” Everywhere the smaller children, to whom for the moment nobody was paying any attention, were getting in everybody’s way.

About noon the big gray limousine appeared at the end of the trail. Zeke hurried down to it. He and Botkins lifted out the slight figure lying in the back, bore it up the path to the house and over the stairs to the guest chamber. An excited queue of children—all the young inhabitants of the Little House in fact—followed.

“All right, Silva?” Maida was enquiring and to Silva’s faint “Yes,” Rosie was saying, “We’re all awfully glad you’re going to be here with us,” and “Just as soon as you are well enough, you’ve got to teach us how to make those beautiful baskets,” Laura was contributing. The boys didn’t seem to be able to do anything but they were making attempts—highly unsuccessful ones to be sure—to assist the two men.

Up-stairs, they left Silva alone with the girls. Maida immediately took off the long rusty coat that Silva was wearing, her worn and stained middy blouse; her ragged skirt; undressed her; put on first one of her own simple white nightgowns and over it her favorite dressing gown of organdie muslin with pink ribbon. Laura brought a pair of pink bed shoes; slipped them on Silva’s slender feet. Rosie contributed a boudoir cap of white lace with pink ribbons which she had managed to fashion in the hour they had waited for Silva. And then in answer to the beseeching look in Silva’s eyes, Rosie brought the cooing little Nesta and put her in her sister’s arms.

“My father is going to send for your father, Silva,” Maida explained. “He is going to ask him to let you and Tyma and the baby stay with us. Your father will say yes, Silva—people always say yes to my father—and then if you like us, we want you to live with us as long as we stay here.”

“Only a few weeks longer,” Rosie added in a wailing voice, “then school begins.”

Silva, only half hearing, was kissing her little sister with violent flurries of kisses. And her eyes were filling with tears. She made no effort to check them because that would have been impossible. Finally she put her head down on the arm of her chair and cried. The others kept a frightened silence. Rosie, recovering first, noiselessly removed Nesta. Silva made no attempt to keep her. Maida slipped into the bathroom and came back with a wet face cloth and a towel; proceeded to bathe Silva’s face. Silva submitted meekly. Laura disappeared and returned with a bottle of toilet water with which she sprinkled Silva.

“Oh you are so good to me,” Silva said when she could control her voice. “And when I think of how I treated you— I didn’t want to though. I—I had to. But when I’m well, I’ll gladly show you how to make baskets. And I know where the berries grow thickest and biggest ... I’ll take you to all my secret places ... I do thank you! I do! I do! With all my heart!”

CHAPTER XXV THE END OF SUMMER

Outside all was wind, rain, confusion and destruction. Occasionally a bough came crashing down to earth and always the branches of the great tree beside Maida’s window, rubbed against the house. The wind veered and whirled. One moment the rain was coming, like a shower of bullets, against the window of one side; the next it was lashing, like a bundle of twigs, against the glass of another.

Inside was warmth, light, laughter and conversation. The older children sat about the big fireplace in the living room. Rosie was on her knees there, busily wielding a corn popper. Beside her sat Laura toasting macaroons on the end of a long fork. Silva and Maida were bringing in great pans of molasses candy which simply refused to cool. The boys were fanning it in an effort to bring it to the tasting point. The little children were running about, looking at books, or playing games, according to their tastes, perfectly confident, as ever, that the relentless hour of eight o’clock could be put off this one evening. Mrs. Dore, quite herself again, was rocking Delia who had given way to premature fatigue. In the midst of all this excitement Granny Flynn read tranquilly from her Lives of the Saints.

“I can’t believe the summer is over,” Rosie exclaimed suddenly. “I won’t believe it! Oh why can’t things like this go on for ever?”

“I couldn’t believe it either,” Laura declared, “until this storm came. The weather has been so warm up to now that I wouldn’t believe autumn had come. But to-day and yesterday have been fallish.”

“Autumn’s here,” Silva said, “when the goldenrod and asters come.”

“I know it,” Maida agreed mournfully. “How glad I am when flowers come and how sorry I am when they go! It makes you know that summer is flying just to watch them disappear. If the flowers only stayed after they came, you wouldn’t notice it so much. But they don’t. They go—first the dandelions and then the violets; and then the daisies and buttercups and wild roses and iris; then the elderberry and sumach; and then the goldenrod and asters. But as soon as each one of these stops blooming, you realize that that part of the summer is gone. And as soon as you see the red rose hips—” she twisted her hand through the long necklace of crimson berries that she was wearing, “—then you know that the fall has begun.”

“I never thought of that before,” Laura exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it be perfectly beautiful if they stayed until the end of the summer, even the dandelions? Perhaps there wouldn’t be room for them all though.”

“This storm makes me think of fall all right,” Arthur said.

“Yes, and this fire,” Dicky chimed in.

“It makes me think of school,” Harold declared.

Everybody groaned.

“Perhaps it’s the popcorn,” Rosie said, “and the apples. But somehow I feel to-night just as though it were Halloween night. Oh, do you remember the beautiful party we had at Laura’s last Halloween?”

“Do I?” Maida answered. “I should say I did. It was the first Halloween party I ever went to. I shall remember it as long as I live. I remember sitting in the window of the Little Shop and watching all the pumpkin lanterns come bobbing along Primrose Court. Oh how lovely it was!”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Rosie reiterated dreamily, although she was vigorously shaking the popper, “that next Sunday night means Charlestown again, and Monday morning, horrid school once more. How shall we ever get used to being kept indoors? I shall stifle. I shall miss everything—oh dreadfully. But the thing I shall miss most is my lovely little room, out-of-doors. Oh no, it isn’t that,” she contradicted herself, “the thing I shall miss most is the cave. Everything that happens to us is like a story book; but the cave is most like a story book of all. Oh how sorry I was when we came to the end of it! I did so hope it would be a Mammoth Cave with a great big river in it and fish without eyes and chambers with stalactites and stalagmites.”

“If it had been,” Tyma Burle said shrewdly, “people would have been coming all the time to look at it and it wouldn’t be our cave any longer. I have enjoyed tennis most of anything,” Tyma went on. “I think it is the greatest game in the world.”

“I don’t wonder you like tennis,” Laura exclaimed, “when you can beat everybody at it. Oh, how mad it still makes me to think that when I’ve been playing tennis for two years that Tyma has to give himself a handicap when he plays with me.”

Everybody laughed. They were always amused by the spectacle on the tennis court of Laura’s rages when Tyma beat her so easily.

“I have enjoyed the deer most,” Arthur declared.

This specification of enjoyment had developed to a game now. Arthur went on. “Having those deer about is the most like Robin Hood of anything I’ve ever known. It’s like stories you read in Kipling and Stevenson. When I come across a group of them in the woods, I feel—well I give it up—I don’t know how I feel.”

“I know what Dicky enjoys most,” Maida said.

“What?” Dicky demanded.

“The white peacocks.”

Dicky admitted it. “But the swimming and the canoeing and the tennis, too,” he added as though a little jealous for these new sports of his. “But of course the white peacocks most— Well, if Arthur thinks the deer are like adventure stories I think the peacocks are like all the fairy stories in the world come true. What do you enjoy most, Maida?”

Maida thought carefully. “Everything! Having all of you here.”

“Oh but what special thing, Maida?” Rosie pleaded. “There’s always one thing you like better than others.”

“Betsy’s badness, then,” Maida admitted. “I’ve never laughed so much in all my life as at the things Betsy does. You see when I was a little girl, I was so sick that I never did anything really naughty but Betsy—Oh she’s such fun!”

“I’ve enjoyed the keeping house part most,” Laura stated with enthusiasm. “I never had the chance before to cook all the things I wanted in a real kitchen—and dust rooms—and arrange things—and put the flowers about. I just love setting the table for Sunday night supper.”

“I hate it,” burst out Rosie. “I hate every single thing you like, Laura. But I’m glad you like it because then I don’t have to do it.” Rosie poured the popper-full of white corn into a big brown bowl. “Now don’t all grab at once!” She commanded, as a half-a-dozen eager hands reached towards the table. “Wait until I pour melted butter on it. That makes it perfectly scrumptious! There you are! Now each one of you take a plate, and spoon the corn out on it.”

The bowl passed rapidly from hand to hand. Rosie embedded her sharp little teeth into the shining coral of a Baldwin apple. “Oh what a good apple!” she said.

“What did you enjoy most, Silva?” Maida asked curiously, her mouth full of popcorn.

“Oh, living in a house!” Silva answered instantly. “You don’t know what fun that is to me. All my life I have lived either in a tent or a wagon. All my life I have longed to live in a house with lace curtains in the windows. How I love that little room of mine I can’t tell you! And yet at first—Do you know—I was afraid I couldn’t stand it? It seemed as though the walls were pressing in on me and I couldn’t get enough air. Many and many a night, I got up and went downstairs in the middle of the night and slept in the hammock. Sometimes I felt like a bird in a cage—as if I was beating my wings the way I’ve seen birds do.”

“I’ve never got quite used to it,” Tyma confessed. “Sometimes, even now I have to get up in the middle of the night and go out and sleep on the grass.”

“My!” Rosie exclaimed. “I should think that would be a hard bed. What have you enjoyed most, Harold?”

“Oh going all over the country on my bicycle,” Harold explained. “You see always before we have gone to Marblehead Neck and you always have to go so far before you come to any new country. But here you start out in any direction and you are somewhere else before you know it.”

The little children who, as the popcorn approached the eating point, had been lured out of the room, now came in to say good night. As usual they were rebellious about going to bed; but were comforted by the promise of a long train-ride next Sunday. As Arthur tactfully concealed the popcorn under his chair and Tyma mimicking him, shoved the apples under the couch, the good nights were effected without tragedy.

“How well they all look!” Maida said proudly. “They are as freckled and sun-burned as they can be and fat as little butterballs!”

CHAPTER XXVI PROMISE

“What are you going to do in the winter, Maida?” Rosie asked.

“I don’t know,” Maida answered. “Father hasn’t made up his mind yet and it all depends of course upon what he is going to do.”

“Then if he went to Europe, you’d go too?”

“Yes,” Maida admitted. “But I don’t think we’ll go to Europe. At least,” she added conscientiously, “he hasn’t said we would. I don’t know what we’ll do.”

“But if you don’t go to Europe, will you go to school?” Silva asked.

“I don’t know,” Maida responded. “Perhaps I’ll have a governess.”

“What would you rather do, Maida?” persisted Rosie.

“I think I’d rather go to school,” Maida answered honestly.

“And what kind of a school?” Rosie kept it up.

“Oh the school you all go to—in Charlestown. I’d love that.”

“Oh how I wish your father would let you,” Rosie declared fervently. “Wouldn’t it be fun? But then you know all they could teach you there. You know geography and history and literature.”

“Oh but my arithmetic is dreadful,” Maida declared, “and my spelling, and father says he is perfectly ashamed of my writing.”

“But you speak French,” Laura said enviously, “and Italian!”

“A very little Italian,” Maida confessed.

“But you can read fairy tales in French,” Dicky said. “Oh what a lucky girl!”

“Yes, I do think I’m lucky in that,” Maida agreed with him.

“And if you aren’t very good in arithmetic, you know all about English and French and Italian money,” Harold asserted. “I think that’s great!”

“It’s very easy to learn that,” Maida said deprecatingly. “How I wish I knew fractions and percentage and square root—like you, Rosie.”

“Rosie was the smartest girl in the room in arithmetic,” Dicky declared. “She could beat any one of us, and as for mental arithmetic—whew! And she always won in the spelling matches.”

“I never was in a spelling match in my life,” Maida said in a grieved tone. “How I should enjoy it—except of course that I’d fail in the first word they gave me.”

“Yes,” Dicky informed her, “they always give you something like receive and believe or Mississippi or separate! I shall never learn how to spell separate as long as I live.”

“I’ll tell you how to remember it,” Harold offered. “You know there’s a city in South America called Para. Well, I always remember that there’s a Para right in the middle of separate.”

“Gee that makes it easy!” Dicky’s voice was grateful. “I won’t forget that.” After an instant he added, “I hate school!”

“So do I,” said Rosie.

“So do I,” said Laura.

“So do I,” said Arthur.

“So do I,” said Harold.

“I never went to school,” Maida said sadly.

“Nor I,” admitted Silva.

“Nor I,” admitted Tyma.

“You’d want to go to school if you’d never had the chance,” Maida announced to the quartette of discontented ones. “Isn’t that true?” She appealed to Silva and Tyma.

They both nodded.

“Everybody wants what he doesn’t have,” Rosie said eagerly. “Now I should like to travel like Maida.”

“Who wouldn’t!” exclaimed Laura and Arthur together.

“And I’d like to have a tutor,” Dicky declared. “Somebody to read to you and answer all your questions. I should think that would be great.”

“I don’t believe you would like school long, Maida,” Rosie went on. “At least if you went to the same kind of school we go to. Isn’t that so, Arthur?”

Arthur nodded. “They’re no fun.”

“When the teacher puts the arithmetic problems on the blackboard,” Rosie said, “I always get them done in five minutes. I’m good in arithmetic and they’re almost always correct. Then there’s nothing for me to do until the rest of the children have finished but read in my Reader that I’ve read through a million times; or my Geography that I have read just as often; or in the Supplementary Reading that I know just as well.”

“That’s stupid,” Maida decided reflectively.

“And then, when we have to write compositions, I nearly die,” Rosie went on in the same discontented vein. “I hate compositions. I never can think of anything to say. I always have to stay after school—”

“Why Rosie, you write the most wonderful letters,” Maida protested. “Oh how I enjoyed getting them abroad! You told me all the things I wanted to know and how I used to laugh at them too.”

“Oh well, letters aren’t writing!” Rosie said scornfully. “Anybody can write letters.”

“I can’t,” Arthur declared, “I hate writing letters.”

“I don’t think it’s easy to write letters,” Laura interrupted, “although Maida and Rosie do it so easily. I think they’re just as hard as a composition. If you can write a letter, you ought to be able to write a composition, and if you can write a composition, you ought to be able to write a letter.”

“And then,” Arthur went on with the argument, “geography is so dull in school. You never learn about the places you’d like to know about—like Gibraltar and the Desert of Sahara and the North Pole and the jungles of Africa and the Great Wall of China, and the Mammoth Cave and the Grand Cañon. Or history. Now I’d like to study about Richard Cœur de Lion and Robert Bruce and William Tell and Thermopylæ and the Alamo and the Battle of Hastings and Waterloo and Gettysburg. But you never get anything about them.”

“Gracious!” Rosie commented, “I don’t even know what those are.”

“Sometimes I like school,” Dicky said hesitatingly.

“That’s because you have only gone to school one year,” Laura declared scornfully.

“Well I’d rather be with you in a school that wasn’t very interesting,” Maida persisted, “than not be with you at all. Now next summer in the Little House—”

“Next summer!” Rosie interrupted. “Oh Maida, is there going to be a next summer?”

“Is there going to be a next summer?” Maida repeated. She stared about the circle of faces; all very intent; all waiting almost with hushed breath, for her reply. “Of course there’s going to be a next summer. What made you think there wasn’t?”

“You never said once there was going to be a next summer,” Dicky accused her out of the hubbub which succeeded this statement. “Oh I could jump up and down!”

“I shall jump up and down,” Rosie announced—and did until the glass pendants to the candelabra tinkled.

Maida could only repeat feebly, “But of course there’s going to be a next summer. It never occurred to me to tell you so. I thought you understood.”

“Not only a next summer, but next summers,” a voice said back of them.

They all started and then jumped to their feet. Mr. Westabrook, coming in very quietly, had apparently caught much of their discussion.

“A whole line of summers, all in a row,” he added as he took the easy chair which Arthur pushed into the middle of the circle for him. He helped himself to popcorn from the plate which Rosie filled and placed in his lap; took one of the apples which Laura offered him; a piece of the molasses candy which Tyma pressed upon him. “You’ve got a permanent engagement with us every summer.”

Again Rosie did what Dicky had threatened to do—she jumped up and down. Laura danced the whole length of the room, turning out one after another a series of the most beautiful pirouettes. Silva did not move except to lean forward and stare intently at Mr. Westabrook. The boys drew their chairs in a circle closer about him.

“So you don’t think schools are very interesting?” Buffalo Westabrook went on, bending his eagle glance on Arthur.

“Not any I have ever been to,” Arthur answered promptly.

“Do you think they could be made interesting?” Mr. Westabrook went on.

“I’m not sure they could,” Arthur answered.

But Rosie broke in with an impulsive, “Of course they could.”

“How?” Mr. Westabrook asked with his disturbing brevity.

“By letting you study the things you want, in the way you want to study them,” Rosie answered immediately.

“I guess that’s as good an answer as I could get,” Mr. Westabrook admitted. “What would you say,” he went on very slowly after a pause, “if we tried to have such a school as that here?” He continued apparently unconscious of the excitement which was developing in his hearers. “A school where, as Rosie says, you could study the things you want to study, in the way you want to study them. A school with plenty of books to read and dictionaries and encyclopedias and books of reference to consult. A book with all the newest maps and globes. A school with plenty of travel and discovery and exploration. A school with gardens to grow. A school with a magic lantern, an aquarium, and—”

Maida could contain herself no longer. “Father,” she burst out, “you’re going to have such a school for us!”

“I’ve got it,” Buffalo announced. “And you’re all going to that school this winter.”

“Oh my goodness,” Rosie said in a quiet awed voice, “if anything else happens I shall die of happiness.”

“Do our fathers and mothers know?” Laura asked.

“Know,” Mr. Westabrook repeated, though very tranquilly, “they helped to decide what you should study there.”

“And we won’t be separated after all,” Dicky declared in a voice shaken with happiness.

“No.”

“What’s the name of the school?” Harold asked.

“It hasn’t any name yet,” Mr. Westabrook answered.

“I know what to call it,” Arthur said, his face lighting up. “We’ve had Maida’s Little Shop and Maida’s Little House. Why not call it Maida’s Little School?”

THE END