Little Miss By-The-Day Part 22

Freddie had tried to give her just as they were stepping into the car.

"It's worth ony money to Mr. Freddie to have Mr. Peter s.n.a.t.c.h a bit of contentment from life--and Mr. Freddie is that prodigal with money that if you don't take it of him he'll hand it to the next one--"

"But I can't take money for playing--chess is only playing, its only for work we should take money."

Janet snorted. She talked volubly in her rich broad Scotch. Agitated as she was, Felicia's own lips were mouthing these strange new sounds, she was sure she could get the gutteral A, she wasn't sure of the burry R. She couldn't heed at all what Janet was saying, indeed she couldn't listen intelligently, because her tired ears were still filled with the glorious harmonies of Dudley Hamilt's unfinished song.

When she shut her eyes she could see his tall figure swinging up the stairs--she was trying to convince herself that she was really glad that he hadn't recognized her, when the car stopped before her darkened house. Janet got out first, haughtily dismissing the chauffeur with the a.s.surance that she could walk the four blocks over to her own house and she'd not leave a clean car in such a dirty street as Montrose Place.

Dulcie was waiting on the old balcony. Bab.i.+.c.he trotted ahead of her when she opened the door, in ecstacy at Felicia's home coming. Dulcie set her flaring candle carefully on the newel post and eyed Janet.

"It's Janet MacGregor with me, Dulcie. She's a widow woman. This is Dulcie Dierckx, Janet, you'll like Dulcie--" She had Bab.i.+.c.he in her arms now, and was leaning wearily against the bal.u.s.trade, "Janet was good to bring me home--I was a silly fool--I cried, Dulcie--"

Janet was peering curiously into the empty house.

"Is onybody livin' here?" she demanded. "I thought I saw them all movin' out--I heard the building was comin' down to make room for lofts."

Dulcie answered that it wasn't, holding the door open as a tactful hint that she'd better go. But Janet had no intention of leaving. She had a woman's curiosity about a vacant house, and she was frankly looking things over, craning her neck to glance down the murky hallway.

"Would you think the bas.e.m.e.nt might be to let to a decent body? It's no worth much, so old and all but I know a body as might conseeder it." Impractical as the "beastly step-aunt" had proclaimed her to be Dulcie grasped Janet's thin arm.

"How much would you pay?"

"Is it your hous'?"

"It's Miss Day's--" Dulcie nodded toward Felicia. "She's just been thinking she might rent part of it. Of course its altogether too large for her."

"If she's livin' here where's her furnis.h.i.+ngs?" demanded Janet cannily.

Felicia sat down on a stair. She motioned but the others remained standing, their lean figures casting grotesque shadows in the flickering light of the candle.

"This is the pattern of it," the little seamstress explained. "It's my house, Janet MacGregor, only it's dirty because while I was gone building my garden, some dirty filthy heathen came to live here. But now I'm home His Honor made them all go away. And as soon as I have earned enough money to pay the taxes and other things I shall make the house lovely again. The furniture is in a place called storage. I think I have to pay them something before I get my things, don't I, Dulcie?"

"What's the matter o' the storage bills?" demanded Janet her eyes gleaming.

Dulcie answered her, her sharp slangy syllables falling incisively after Felicia's low drawl.

"I don't know that it's any of your business but they amount to about two hundred dollars. I know what you're thinking, that with the furniture we could open a rooming house. I've been thinking that myself while Miss Day was gone. I've experience you know, my beastly step-aunt does make a good thing of it. So if you wanted to rent the bas.e.m.e.nt and had some furniture of your own Miss Day might consider it."

Janet's thin arms rested akimbo. She nodded.

"If you've lodgings to let you've got to have some one to keep 'em tidy. There's a good bit o' money there for an able body. If the furnis.h.i.+ngs is what she ree-presents and you'd conseeder takin' me in on shares--I might conseeder--"

"Consider what?" gasped Dulcie.

"Conseeder advancing for the storage of the furnis.h.i.+ngs--with the furnis.h.i.+ngs as security o' course. And doin' some cleanin' toward the matter o' what ma rent would be. Mind I'm no sayin' I would until I see the furnis.h.i.+ngs. I'm on'y conseederin'--I'll have the matter o'

some ladders--" she peered again down the dark hallway, "and I'd want a neat ticket in the window--"

At midnight, by the embers of their dying fire, Felicia lay with Dulcie's rug about her, plaintively pretending from the feel of the chair, that she was the young Felice of those long years ago, journeying toward the beloved House in the Woods. It was an easy pretense for she could glimpse the dark waters of the bay and the silent s.h.i.+ps drifting on the tide. A spring fog seeped through the open windows and she was quite as miserable as she had been on that memorable trip. Beside her in her own chair, Dulcie talked and talked, a thousand details that Felicia's tired wits could not follow. It did not seem at all a miracle to her that she had found Janet. She accepted her with the simplicity with which she accepted any one who came into her life.

"The garden is a little old pippin," Dulcie boasted. "We can make that all O. K. in a day or so, but the house did stump me! Janet MacGregor is an angel sent straight from heaven. If I ever get a commish' to sculpt an angel I shall use Janet MacGregor for my model, little Miss By-the-Day," she sighed drowsily, "your middle name must be Luck."

"My middle name is Trenton," answered Felicia literally. "Dulcie, I am going to tell you something. Something you must remember. When our little garden is lovely again, if any one--ever--kisses--you out there and you love him--don't let any one take you away from him. Because it might be too long afterward that you come back--you might be old like Grandy and Piqueur--so that he wouldn't know you when he saw you. He wouldn't know that you were the--Girl,--"

Something in the level flatness of her tones almost broke the Sculptor Girl's heart. She reached out her hand and caught Felicia's and gripped it hard. She did not say much but what she said Felicia found strangely comforting.

"Why--" her reply was the breathless reply of discovery, "I hadn't noticed till now--_how young your hands are!"_

They awoke to the dazzling wonder of the new day, a bit stiff from their unaccustomed couches but exuberant over the adventure. Almost before they had finished their simple breakfast the excited Janet MacGregor appeared.

It was Dulcie Dierckx, impractical Dulcie Dierckx, who took charge.

She was a very different person from the hysterical girl that Felicia had brought home with her two days before.

"You'd better go to your by-the-day." Dulcie was almost saucy.

"Bab.i.+.c.he and I will stay and guard the fort. I'll show Janet all the dirt, I think there's enough to satisfy even her unholy craving--and then if she still wants to go into the deal I can go to the storage place. I know I could arrange it because I did it once for Aunt Jen; it's a bore, it takes all kinds of time, you'd hate it and--" tears threatened, "unless I'm doing something for my keep I can't stay."

Little Miss Day agreed gratefully. She departed with tactful discretion before Janet and Dulcie began their argument. Which was some argument! But in the end they came to something like a feasible plan and when they did--! Ah! if you could have seen what those two accomplished that day! Each put the other on her mettle. They did wonderful team work. Janet agreed readily enough when she saw the ma.s.sive furniture that she had ample security. Dulcie fairly browbeat the storage manager, and between the two of them they actually arranged for a small van load of furniture to be delivered at Montrose Place before dark. As for the rest of it, Dulcie had a wrist-watch, that for all we know is still reposing in the dusty p.a.w.nbroker's at which she cheerfully hocked it. She'd always wondered why she had it and I don't believe she ever remembered to go back for it. And Janet had a nephew, a cross-eyed nephew, who was an odd-job man. Can't you see Dulcie buying the bags of creamy kalsomine and the brushes and Janet packing up her pails and scrubbing things?

There never was such a polis.h.i.+ng, such a mopping, such a scrubbing such a--whisper!--fumigating--since the old house had been built!

They'd sense enough not to try too much. They confined their efforts to the nursery, Janet's bas.e.m.e.nt room and Mademoiselle's old quarters.

Dulcie knew she mustn't touch the shepherdesses there. Felice had told her about the battle royal with the sponge, but in the nursery--well, the crossy-eyed nephew couldn't work fast enough to suit Dulcie. She feverishly grabbed a brush herself and slashed about delightedly in kalsomine. Janet bossed the nephew and Dulcie, Dulcie bossed Janet and the nephew, the nephew nearly uncrossed his eyes from trying to follow all the instructions the two shouted at him.

At quarter after six when Miss By-the-Day climbed slowly up the stairs, reaching out delightedly for Bab.i.+.c.he, who had been sleeping in the top-most niche of the stair, two tired and aching women flung open the door of the nursery. They were smiling. Neither of them could think of a thing to say, but a curious mingling of odors told their story for them. The freshness of the clean, scarcely-dried, kalsomine, the faint tinge of smoke from the bit of fire, the delicious soapy cleanliness and a wholesome whiff of barley broth floated out into the dusty hallway to the little person on the stairs. She looked through the doorway and saw clean walls, creamy yellow; windows that glistened, a glowing fire, a tiny table spread for two--Janet knew her place!--Grandy's fat sofa under the dormer windows, the stately hall table flat against the side wall, Maman's chaise-longue, the slender chaise-longue with its flowered chintz cus.h.i.+ons, beside the fire--

When Felicia saw that she reached out her arms and sighed contentedly, rapturously--

"Oh! it's home--it's really home--"

Who shall say which of them won the greater triumph in those mad April days? Sometimes it seemed as though it must be the valiant Janet, who fought with soap and brushes and won Gargantuan victories over squalor and filth. Sometimes it seemed as though it were the belligerent Dulcie, who bravely tried to forget that she had ever wept over "wet mud" and wanted to die--die! Why, she couldn't live hard enough, the days seemed so short! She threw herself heart and soul into the fray; she grubbed in the bit of garden, she toiled upstairs and down with the clumsy paint brushes. Whenever she lacked for pence she strode forth to the art school where she had once been a pupil in the days before "Uncle Al" had put her money into the disastrous plumbing venture, and boldly demanded the right to pose at fifty cents an hour.

With the bravado born of her new grip on life she brazenly descended on the "beastly Aunt Jen" and demanded and received her trunks and personal trinkets.

As for Felice, her victories were humbler--they were small, silent victories over Self. In the long hours while she sat sewing she fought out her little battle--the battle of hating uncongenial toil. It was not easy, for she had an honest hatred of it.

Not even the goal in sight could make her like being a "by-the-day."

Moreover as she grew wiser in the matter of reckoning she realized the utter impossibility of actually earning, with her hands, the appalling sum that she owed. She could only work on blindly from day to day, hoping, hoping against hope that she would find the Portia Person. She never gave that up. Long hours after her day's work was over she kept following elusive trails that led nowhere. She would never admit defeat in that respect. She would find him and she was sure that he could solve the difficulties that beset her.

Slowly she was evolving a philosophy of life. It began with a bitter feeling that she had been cheated, that Grandy hadn't been fair to her, to let her grow up so ignorant of life, so ignorant of the ways to earn a living. But gradually she began to discover that neither Grandy nor Mademoiselle nor Maman herself could have taught her to live.

"It's my stub, stub, stubborn way--" she chided herself, "I won't let any one tell me--I think it's only when I work that I learn--Work!

that's the thing to learn with--it's like the 'Binnage'--the second digging of the garden to make things grow--its not pleasant but after all--it must be done."

Next she found out that it wasn't enough to work--you must like to do it! Janet now, she _liked_ to clean--and so she did it beautifully, did it superlatively, whereas when Dulcie or Felice tried, it was only half done. So Felice set herself to "like to" be a "by-the-day."

And that was the time she discovered that to like to do anything you must make it genuinely amusing.

"We should be immensely gay when we're working, shouldn't we, Dulcie?"

she asked one evening when they leaned far out of the windows to watch the s.h.i.+ps in the harbor. "Think how gay the sailors are. I remember one who whistled while he cleaned the deck--he did it very quickly, much more quickly than the stupid boys who didn't whistle--I think when I sew I shall whistle,--not aloud--" she laughed, "it would wake folks' babies! But in my heart--"

She watched Janet vigorously sweeping the area-way.