Little Miss By-The-Day Part 5

"This is too far for Dudley Hamilt to come--he will nevaire find me--"

She scarcely spoke to the Major. Poor Major! He walked the deck, his thin cane, tap, tap, tapping and his great caped coat bundled tight around him.

The morning of the second day they changed to an even smaller and dingier steamer. That was the day that the spring rain fell heavier and heavier. Felice lay bundled in blankets in the narrow stateroom and cried softly. There wasn't even a stewardess on this steamer to comfort her. Sometimes the Major stopped outside and asked her quietly what she would like. There was nothing she liked, but in the mid- afternoon she pulled herself together and let the Major wrap her coat about her and leaned on his arm to limp out of her stateroom and down the wobbling gang-plank and across a dirty, water-soaked wharf to the platform where the local train awaited. And after that she sat another dreary hour, while the ancient engine complainingly coughed its way through the bleak, gray woods to the ugly brown station that was their destination.

It was late afternoon. The rain had not really ceased to fall, but the sky was clearing a bit in the west as the girl stared curiously about her, while the baggage man helped the trainmen with their luggage.

Suddenly the girl cried out with joy,

"Look, there is Maman's cart--"

For around the corner of the station s.p.a.ce crept an ox-cart driven by a half grown boy. But in the hollow of the plains, just before he had reached that dreary town, the boy had stopped his cart and gathered sprawling boughs of wild cherry blossoms, those first harbingers of spring in that bleak northern country, and fastened them to the wooden yoke that held the oxen to the wagon and tied the lovely things sweet with rain, to the poles at the rear and made a sort of fairy chariot for the little lady who was coming to dwell in the woods.

He smiled at her under his slouchy cap as he stumbled stiffly toward the Major.

"The horse," he stammered, "--her foot got sore las' thing--this were all we had to fetch ye in--Piqueur--he's too old fur drivin' to the village any more, so Margot--she sends me--"

There were chairs in the back of the ox cart, odd chairs built of bent hickory with buffalo robes tucked in them. The boy swung Felice into one of them easily. He tucked the soft fur about her vigorously.

"Better wrop up good," he warned her solemnly, "S'cold." He was perfectly good-humored at the Major's sharp reprimand at the way he handled the luggage. The Major clambered in, the oxen started slowly.

As soon as they had pa.s.sed through the ugly village they turned out of the woods into a narrow road through sandy plains, an interminable road it seemed to Felice. Last year's sere leaves rattled on the scrub oaks; the wind-blown juniper bushes made dark spots against the wet brown of the sand and the cart swayed lumberingly through the heavy road. The girl was cold and tired and hungry but she held her head high and gazed straight before her into the fast falling twilight.

Up hill, the narrow winding road across that almost endless plain led.

Sometimes the boy let the oxen stop to rest and the rising steam from their wet flanks told how hard even those st.u.r.dy beasts found the climb. Just as she was thinking that she could endure it no longer, Felice glimpsed a faint light on a plateau-like place above them. The boy gestured with his whip.

"Thar, Major," he called back cheerfully over his shoulder, "We're a- gittin' thar--"

They were through the plains at last, ascending a sharp, rocky road for the last quarter of a mile which grew still narrower but was lined with enormous bare trees that creaked and moaned in the evening wind.

Felice was really very frightened.

"Now that's luck," cried the boy cheerily, looking back at her. He was pointing with his crude whip. It was quite dark now save for a faint light below the horizon of the sand dunes, but over her shoulder as she looked where he gestured Felice saw the thin crescent of the new moon.

When she looked ahead again she could glimpse the dark outlines of the great stone house. It looked cold and formidable. It was set far back from the rising road, a long way back from the ma.s.sive gate posts beside the tiny gate house where flickering lights burned on the sills of three little mullioned windows. They drove through the gates, across the flagstone-paved drive of the stable yard and came to a slow stop under the inky shadows of the wooden gallery that was built across the front of the house. A woman was hurrying down the sagging steps, such a fat, comfortable woman that Felice unconsciously leaned toward her even before she could see the alert black eyes and the wide smiling mouth. She held a lantern high above her gray curly head. It shone upon the figure of a bent old man, who stood, his cap in his hands, at the foot of the steps. He was weeping. His voice was throaty with suppressed sobs and Felice couldn't understand at all what he said because he cried out in French when he saw the Major. But she could understand the welcome cheer of the fat woman's greeting as she called,

"It's all ready--supper and all--just as though it were twenty years ago, Monsieur! Ah--" sympathy rang in her voice as the Major helped Felice descend, "I did not know--she is--lame--" Her lantern was on the ground now, her st.u.r.dy arm had encircled the slender figure in the coat, "Margot will help--so--"

And that was the way that Felice went into the House in the Woods.

That was the way she entered the broad and draughty hall, with the formidably big rooms on either side dimly lighted by the queer candle lamps and the faint glow from the fires on the chilly marble hearths.

A table was set before the fire in the dining salon. It looked dismayingly long, with its deep lace cover and the branched candelabra. The very height of the carved chairs that were placed at either end seemed appalling.

But when Felice was seated in one of them, with her coat still huddled about her, she looked around with artless curiosity, and watched as in a dream, while the Major put his hand on Margot's st.u.r.dy shoulder.

"You've kept it well--" was all he said. But when he had dropped his hand Margot was wiping her eyes on her ap.r.o.n.

Piqueur served supper, his old hands trembling as he placed the dishes before them. A hot thin soup, that warmed Felice and made her send a wavering smile across the table, a platter of ham boiled in apple cider whose delicious odors made her sniff hungrily, and after he had served the meat the old man put thin gla.s.ses beside their plates and brought a bottle of wine, wrapped carefully in an old napkin, and stood behind his master's place.

And the Major, standing after he had filled Felice's gla.s.s, lifted his own high:

"Felicia," he said slowly, "We will drink to your home coming--"

It was all so, strange that she did not notice until Piqueur set a dish of custard before her that all the silver with which she was eating was marked with the same odd mark that had adorned her silver drinking mug back in the nursery in Brooklyn. She stared at it as she held a thin spoon aloft.

"Look, Grandy," she cried, "it has my honey bee!"

He nodded.

He scarcely seemed to heed her, already he had risen and was pacing restlessly about the room, peering out the windows, addressing staccato questions in French to Piqueur. He pulled the shabby silken rope at the doorway and a bell trilled somewhere faintly. Margot came running.

"It is good to hear" she said as she entered. And helping Felice up the circular stairway she murmured tenderly, "You cannot know, Miss Felicia, how glad we are, my uncle Piqueur and I, that the house is opened once more--you're not so tall as your mother, are you?" She was positively chattering now. Felice caught her arm more closely.

"Oh, where is Maman?" she demanded. Margot shook her head. She sighed.

She was opening the door of the upper room. She did not answer for a full moment. Her lips worked nervously before she spoke.

"She is not here. But this is the bed where she always slept when she was young--the bed at which she laughed so much--ah, Miss Felicia, don't you think you will like it? See how droll--" her brown wrinkled hand rested on a beautifully carved corner post, "These are little monkeys climbing for fruit--when she was a baby Mademoiselle Octavia used to put her hands on them so--"

Felice smiled.

"I know. She used to tell me," she confided. "She told me that Poquelin, the father of Moliere, made it." She was wan with fatigue, poor child, even after she lay, warm and cozy, in the great bed that had been her mother's. And the last thing she saw as she closed her eyes in the wavering candle light was Margot's fat and comfortable figure, trudging toward the fireplace to spread out her coat to dry--

It had been a fearful week for Margot, this week since the Major's curt message to make the house ready had come. For all that she was forty-five and st.u.r.dy and skilful at the myriad tasks that her uncle Piqueur's rheumatism and age had gradually let fall upon her shoulders during the slow pa.s.sing years, this had been a job that put her on her mettle. Eighteen years of dust and disorder had Margot somehow or other weeded out of that building. But even with the pale spring suns.h.i.+ne and wind to help her and even with the huge fires they had kept kindled all day in the broad fireplaces, the corridors were still damp and cold and musty. And she was weak with fatigue and excitement.

She sat down beside the fireplace, her tired body relaxing as she stared through the gloom at the figure in the canopied bed.

"She is not so beautiful as Octavia--" she thought, "but she is very sweet--and her eyes--they have that same longing to be happy--" she sighed as she tiptoed clumsily out of the room and down the draughty stairway. She stood respectfully beside the Major's chair. "Monsieur,"

she said gravely, "does Miss Felicia know anything at all about all of us?"

He looked up at her quickly, his dark eyes sparkling with anger at her audacity, but something in her sober, respectful gaze quieted him.

"I do not desire that she shall--" he answered. "It is better not to have her--but--" his voice faltered. "I regret that she does not understand that her mother--that Miss Octavia--" his thin old hand tightened its grip on the frail arm of the chair, "I do not know," he ended miserably, "just how it came about that she is expecting to find Miss Octavia here--in the garden. Perhaps you can tell her something to comfort her--perhaps--"

Gray-haired, wrinkled, her skin brown from exposure, Margot leaned forward, her eyes s.h.i.+ning with excitement.

"Sometimes I think," she said distinctly, "that Miss Octavia _is_ in the garden, Monsieur--" She laughed softly at his start. "Do not think I am out of my wits--" She tapped her head significantly. "I do not mean like a ghost--I do not see her. Only there is something, most of all in the springtime--that makes me happy. Perhaps Octavia's daughter will feel it. Perhaps that thing, whatever it is, will make it easier for me--"

she wiped her eyes, "to answer all things she will ask me--"

Upstairs in the four-poster bed that Poquelin had carved, Felicia slept, she smiled as she stirred in her slumbers. She was very tired.

"Maman," she muttered drowsily as the Major paused outside her door on his way to his room, "In the garden--" and the Major listened and sighed.

She awoke to the diddling drone of Piqueur's quavering voice. In the clear sweetness of the May morning above the twittering of the birds it raised itself, the quaint measures delighting her ears. Even in Piqueur's thin falsetto the old melody sang itself--tender, graceful, spirited, never lagging--he was dropping pea seeds into the trench that Margot had prepared in the kitchen dooryard, he was always content when he was planting.

Felicia limped to the window across the moth-eaten carpet with its faded doves and roses. She flung the cas.e.m.e.nt out and listened eagerly.

"Piqueur," she cried entreatingly "tell me just what it says--that song you sing." But it was Margot who leaned on her hoe and looked up at the girl and laughed.

"He sings of a girl--of more than one girl--who takes care of sheep-- the song tells them to hurry up--that time drips through the fingers like water--" Margot's own throaty voice joined l.u.s.tily into her uncle's refrain, but a second later she was translating once more.

"You must find your fun in the spring forests--when you're young--"

The girl in the window above them clapped her hands. A slender black- haired, eager-eyed dryad, whose shabby brocaded dressing gown trailed around her bandaged foot--

"Oh, wait! wait!" she cried, "Wait until I can do it--" her lips pursed themselves delicately and a second later the lilting trill of her lovely whistle took up the refrain of Maitre Guedron's song.