The Lilac Lady Part 25

Without waiting to hear what comments they might have to make about this plan, she flew around the corner Tony had indicated a moment before, and in through the great iron gates, standing slightly ajar. Following the wide walks leading from the front yard to the back, she came to another lower gate, where Ethel and Lottie met her; and in a jiffy the white ap.r.o.n was exchanged for the long, blue pinafore of the black-eyed child.

"You'll have to give her your hair-ribbon, too," said Ethel, surveying the two figures critically. "We don't wear ribbons here on common days, and that would give away that you weren't really Lottie."

Peace gleefully jerked off her rampant pink bow, and the older girl deftly tied it among the raven locks of the other orphan.

Tony and George now came slowly around the corner of the building, to discover whether the visitor had really kept her promise, and were themselves puzzled to know which was their mate and which the stranger child until Peace laughed. "That's where you are different," said George, critically. "You don't sound a bit alike. Come on and see who will be first to find out the secret."

So the masqueraders were led laughingly away to meet the other children, still boisterously playing at games under the trees. It did not take the fifty pair of sharp eyes as long to discover the difference as the five plotters had hoped, but they were all just as charmed with the result, and gave Peace a royal time. She was a natural leader and her lively imagination delighted her new playmates. But Lottie, in her borrowed finery, received scant attention, and being, unfortunately, rather a spoiled child, she resented the fact that Peace had usurped her place.

So she retired to the fence and pouted. At first no one noticed her sullen looks, but finally Ethel missed her, and finding her standing cross and glum in the corner, she tried to draw her into the lively game of last couple out, which the stranger had organized.

"I won't play at all," declared the jealous girl. "No one cares whether I'm here or not, and 's long as you'd rather have _her_, you can just have her!"

"But we wouldn't rather," fibbed the older girl. "She's our comp'ny and we have to be nice to her."

"'Cause you like her better'n you do me," insisted the other.

"No such thing! Come on and see!"

"I won't, either!"

"What's the matter?" asked Peace, hearing the excited voices and stepping out of line to learn the cause.

"Oh, Lottie's s.p.u.n.ky," answered Ethel carelessly, turning back to join her companions.

"I'm not! You horrid thing, take that!" Out shot one little hand and the sharp nails dug vicious, cruel scratches down Ethel's cheek.

"You cat!" cried Peace, horrified at the uncalled-for act, and springing at the white-ap.r.o.ned figure, she caught her by the shoulder, and shook her till her teeth rattled. Lottie doubled up like a jack-knife and buried her sharp teeth in the brown hand gripping her so tightly, biting so viciously that the blood ran and Peace screamed with pain.

Frightened at the sight of the two girls clinched in battle, the other children danced excitedly about the yard and shrieked wildly. Tony even started for the matron, but remembered the Lady Board meeting, and flew instead for the new cook, busy preparing refreshments for the distinguished visitors, gasping out as he stumbled into the kitchen, "Oh, come quick! There's a strange girl in the yard and Lottie's chewing her into shoe-strings!"

Bridget was new at the business, or she would never have meddled in the affair. Glancing out of the window, she saw what looked to be a small riot in the corner, and knowing that the matron and her a.s.sistants were engaged with their visitors in the other wing of the building, she dropped her plate of sandwiches, and rushed to the rescue as fast as her avoirdupois would permit. She was familiar enough with the rules of the inst.i.tution to know that the Home children did not wear white ap.r.o.ns and pink hair-ribbons except on special occasions, and also that fighting was severely punished. It never occurred to her that the matron was the proper authority to whom to report trouble. She made a lunge for the two struggling children, jerked them apart, shook them impartially, and blazed out in rich, Irish brogue, "Ye dirty spalpeens, phwat d'ye mane by sich disorderly conduct? It'll be a long toime afore ye'll iver git inside this fince again to play, ye black-eyed miss! Make tracks now or I'll call the p'lice! You, ye little beggar, march straight inter the house! The matron'll settle with ye good and plenty whin she gits toime!"

Both girls tried to explain, and the frightened, excited Home children shouted in vain. Irish Bridget seized the resisting Lottie, thrust her forcibly out through the gate, and hustled poor Peace into the dark entry, in spite of her protests and frantic kicking. "I'm not Lottie, I'm not Lottie!" she wailed. "I don't b'long here, I tell you!"

"I don't care if ye're Lottie or Lillie," screamed the angry cook, pinioning the struggling child and carrying her bodily up a short flight of stairs into a wide hall. "Ye've been breaking the rules by fightin'

and in that room ye go! The matron'll settle with ye afther a bit. An'

ye'll catch it good, too, if ye kape on screeching loike that."

Peace was dumped into a small, office-like apartment, the key turned in the lock, and she was left alone. Frantic with excitement and fear, she let out three or four piercing screams, rattled the k.n.o.b, and pounded the door until her fists were sore, but no one came to release her, and after a few moments she seemed to realize how useless it was to expect help from that quarter. She looked around her prison hopefully, curiously, for some other avenue of escape. A window stood open across the room, but the screen was fastened so tightly that she could not move it even when she threw her whole weight upon it. Besides, it was a long way to the ground below. Would she dare jump if the screen were not in her way?

Then her restless eyes spied the telephone on the desk behind her, and with a shriek of triumph she seized the receiver and called breathlessly over the wire, "h.e.l.lo, central! Give me the drug store where I telephone every day. Number? I don't know the number. It's on Hill Street and Twenty-ninth Avenue. What information do you want? Well, I've thunk of the drug store's name now. It's Teeter's Pharmacy, and it's on the corner--Well, I'm giving you the information 's fast as I can. My name is Peace Greenfield, and the crazy cook's taken me for someone else and shut me in when I don't b'long to this Home at all. I changed clothes with--well, what is the matter now? If you'll give me that drug store--Teeter's Pharmacy, corner of Hill Street and Twenty-ninth Avenue,--I'll have them go after Saint John, so's he can come and get me out of here. A--what? Policeman? Are you a p'liceman? No, I ain't one, and I don't want one! Do you s'pose I want to be 'rested for getting bit? Oh, dear, I don't know what you are trying to say! Ain't you central? Then why don't you give me Teeter's Pharmacy, corner of Hill Street and--now she's clicked her old machine up! Oh, how will I ever get out of here?"

Dismayed to find that central had deserted her, she puckered her face to cry, but at that moment there were hasty steps in the hall, a key grated in the lock, and the door flew open, showing a startled, white-faced woman and frightened Tony in the doorway, while a whole string of curious-eyed ladies were gathered in the hall behind them.

Silently Peace stared from one to another, and then as no one offered to speak, she asked, "Where's the cook? Have you seen her lately?"

"No," laughed the matron, very evidently relieved at her reception.

"Tony tells me that a mistake has been made and that you don't belong to the Home."

"He is right, I'm thankful to say," returned Peace with such a comical, grown-up air that the ladies in the hall giggled and nudged each other, and one of them ventured to ask, "Why?"

"Just think of having to live here day after day without any b.u.t.ter on your bread, or gravy for your potatoes, or sugar in your oatmeal, without any pies or cakes or puddings 'cept on Sundays and special holidays,--with only mush, mush, mush all the time, and not even all the milk you wanted, maybe! Hm! I'm glad I live in a house where there ain't any Lady Boards to tell us what we have to do and what we can have to eat. Come to think of it, I'm part of a _norphan_ 'sylum, really.

There's six of us at Grandpa Campbell's but he doesn't bring us up on mush. We have all the b.u.t.ter and sugar and gravy and pudding and sauce that we want--"

"This isn't an orphan asylum," said the matron kindly, wondering what kind of a creature this queer child was, but already convinced that Bridget had blundered, in spite of her startling resemblance to Lottie.

"It isn't? What do you call it then?"

"It is a Home for the purpose of taking care of children who have one or both parents living, but who, for some reason, cannot be taken care of in their own homes for a time."

"Oh! Then you take the place of mother to them?"

"I try to."

"Do you like your job?"

"Very, very much!"

"You do sound 'sif you did, but I sh'd think you'd hate to sit all those little children down to b.u.t.terless bread and gravyless potato and sugarless mush. Oh, I forgot! That ain't your fault. It's the Lady Board which says what you have to feed your children. Did you ever ask them--the ladies, I mean--to be common visitors and eat just what the rest of you had? I bet if you'd just try that, they'd soon send you something different! I don't see how you stay so fat and rosy with--but then you've only just come, haven't you? I s'pose there's lots of time to get thin in. I wonder if that's what is the matter with Lottie,"

Peace chattered relentlessly on. "She is awfully ugly today; but then I'd be, too, if I had to live on such grub. It's worse than we had at the little brown house in Parker--"

"If you will slip off that ap.r.o.n and come with me," interrupted the matron desperately, not daring to look at the faces of her dismayed "Lady Board," "we will find Lottie and get your own clothes so you can go home. The next time you come, be sure to get a permit first. Then this trouble won't happen again."

"Oh, will you let me come some more?"

"Aren't you Dr. Campbell's granddaughter? Tony said you were."

"Yes, he's my adopted grandpa now."

"Mrs. Campbell is interested in the Home--"

"Is she a splinter?"

"A _what_?"

Tony giggled and dodged behind the matron to hide his tell-tale face, and Peace, remembering Ethel's explanation, said hastily, "I mean a piece of the Lady's Board?"

"No, she is not one of the Board of Directors, if that is what you mean; but she often sends the children little treats--candy and nuts at Christmas time, or flowers from the greenhouse after the summer blossoms are gone."

"Oh, I see. She told me one time that she would take us to visit the Children's Home, but I didn't know it was this. We've got scarlet fever at our house--."

"Child alive! What are you doing here?"

"Oh, I ain't got it, and anyway, I haven't been home since our spring vacation in March. I am staying with Saint John, the new preacher at Hill Street Church, and I 'xpect if I don't get home pretty soon, he'll think I am lost, sure. I went down to the drug store to telephone grandma, and when Gussie told me they had gone to the Pine Woods, I was so mad for a time that I just boiled over. So I walked on and on till I came to this place. I never have been so far before, and I didn't know there was such a Home around here. I know they'll let me come often.

There aren't many children up our way to play with and sometimes it gets lonesome. There's Lottie now! Cook must have found out that I knew what I was talking about. Here's your ap.r.o.n, Lottie; and say, I'm awful sorry I shook you. Will you pretend I didn't do it, and be friends with me again?"

"I--I bit you," stammered the child, as much astonished at this greeting as were the matron and the "Lady Board," who still lingered in the hall, fascinated with this frank creature, who so fearlessly voiced her own opinions of their work.