A Bookful Of Girls Part 21

Olivia was thinking of that as she stood on the veranda an hour later, looking down upon the flowery kingdom to which all her interest and ambition had been pledged. Yes, it was lovely, lovely in the long afternoon light, and it would have been lovelier still with the gleaming marble she had dreamed of. She really tried to keep her mind upon it, to forget the little drama over there in the stuffy tenement.

But no; she was too good a gardener for that. Was not a whole family broken and wilting for lack of means to transplant it?

The doctor had ordered Mrs. O'Trannon to Colorado, and Mike had dropped his work as "finisher"--whatever that might be--and had gone out to prepare the way for the others to follow. He had found no chance to work at his trade, but he had got a job on a ranch, where the pay was small, but the living good. A fine place it would be for the invalid and the children, when once he could get together the money to send for them. But meanwhile here they were, and the winter coming on.

As Olivia stood looking down upon her beloved garden, she could not seem to see anything but brown stalks and dead blossoms. All that lavish colour looked fict.i.tious and transitory; she had somehow lost faith in it.

Mrs. O'Trannon had been pleased with the flowers; she had grown up on a farm, she said. Sure she never'd ha' got sick at all if she'd ha'

stayed where she belonged. But then, where would Mike have been, and the babies? And where would Mike be, and the babies, Olivia thought with a pang,--where would they be if the mother wilted and died? She turned, suddenly, and pa.s.sed in at the gla.s.s doors and on to her father's study.

At sight of the kind, quizzical face lifted at her entrance, Olivia winced a bit. About an hour and a half it must be, since he said it, and he had given her a year! As if that made any difference! she told herself, with a little defiant movement of the chin, as she crossed the room and seated herself at the opposite side of the big writing-table where she could face the music handsomely.

"Well, Olivia; changed your mind yet?" the professor inquired, struck, perhaps, by the resolution of her aspect.

"Yes," she answered, in an impressive tone, "I've thought of something I should prefer to a sun-dial."

Dr. Page took off his gla.s.ses and laid them upon his open book. He did not really imagine that she was serious--such a turn-about-face was too precipitate even for Olivia; but it pleased him to meet her on her own ground.

"And what is it this time? A sixty-inch telescope? Or a diamond tiara?"

"Well, no. Those are things I had not thought of--before! It's a kind of gardening project--a little matter of transplanting."

"Will it cost a hundred and fifty dollars?"

"About that, I should think, to do it properly and comfortably.

And--it can't wait till June. It's the kind of transplanting that has to be done in the autumn."

Then, dropping the little fiction, and resting her chin upon her folded hands, the better to transfix her father's mocking countenance,--"Papa," she said, "there's a poor family down at the Corners,--our neighbours, you know,--and the mother is dying for want of transplanting, just like the beautiful hydrangea--you remember?--that I didn't understand about till it was too late. I never knew what too late meant, till I saw that splendid great bush lying stone-dead on the ground when we came home from the Adirondacks last year. A great healthy hydrangea dying just for lack of the right kind of soil! And now, here is this good human woman, that might live out her life and bring up her little family, and be happy and useful for years to come. Such a nice woman she must be to name her babies Patsy and Biddy, when she might have called them Algernon and Celestina, you know, and just spoiled it all!--and such a nice, kind husband to take care of her on a big ranch where there's good air, and lots to eat, and plenty of work and not too much, and--why Papa!

they might have a garden out there! who knows? What a thing that would be for the prairie! A real New England garden!"

"With a sun-dial?" the professor interposed.

For an instant Olivia's face fell, but only for an instant.

"I've been thinking," she said, with a very convincing seriousness, "that perhaps a sun-dial is not so important, after all. At any rate it's not so important as the mother of a family; now, is it, Papa?"

"That depends upon the point of view," the professor opined. "As a high light among the rose-bushes I should be constrained to give my vote for the sun-dial."

Olivia sprang to her feet.

"That means that you are coming straight over with me to see Mrs.

O'Trannon," she cried, "and that you are going to have the whole family packed off to Colorado quicker'n a wink! Come along, please!

There's plenty of time before dinner!"

"It's just another of Nature's miracles!" Olivia observed, as she and her father stood one morning in late October watching the workmen pack the sods about the beautiful pedestal, now securely planted upon its base of cement and broken stone. "It always makes me think of the wonderful things that came up in those tin cracker-boxes you used to make such fun of. There really doesn't seem to be any place too unlikely for Nature to set things going in."

The marble was but roughly hewn, in lines that held the suggestion of an hourgla.s.s. The top only was smoothly finished, while here and there on the curving sides the hint of a leaf, a blossom, a trailing vine, came and went with the point of view, like cloud-pictures or the pencillings of Jack Frost. It was as if a 'prentice-hand had tried to express the soul of an artist, too self-distrustful to work more boldly.

"Funny, how things come into your head," Olivia went on. "Do you know, Papa, that day when I was helping Mrs. O'Trannon with her preposterous packing and suddenly came upon this miracle hidden away under an old bedquilt, the only thing I could think of was the way my first pentstemons came out, 'white with purple spots,' exactly as I had chosen them by the seed-catalogue. And to think that she had bought it for a dollar of that poor stone-cutter's widow that was moving out--bought it to make pastry on because the top was smooth and cold!

And then had never had time to make but one pie in the three years! I wish you could have heard her tell about it. 'Faith, it cost me a dollar, me one pie did, an' Mike says it's lucky it was that I didn't make a dozen whin they come so high! Silly b'y, that Mike!' O Papa, isn't it heavenly that they're together again?"

"So you think there is nothing Nature can't do?" Dr. Page mused, with apparent irrelevance. "How about the sun-dial itself?"

"Oh, Nature will attend to that, too."

"She will, will she? And in what particular tin cracker-box should you look for it to come up?"

"It wouldn't be polite to say," Olivia declared, looking with unmistakable significance straight into her father's face.

"Saucebox!" he chuckled.

And when, in early June, the bra.s.s disk of the sun-dial had begun its record of happy hours, and still Olivia toiled with unabated zeal at her garden, the rose of health blooming ever brighter in her face, a great sense of satisfaction and approval took possession of her father's mind. But he only remarked, in a casual manner, as they sat together on the white bench one fragrant sunset hour:

"After all, I'm not sure but Nature's biggest miracle has been performed in the saucebox."

And Olivia, smiling softly, answered: "I told you, you know, that there isn't any place too unlikely for Nature to set things going in!"

BAGGING A GRANDFATHER

"I'll warrant that 'he, she, or it' will come! Di usually bags her game!"

The speaker, Mr. Thomas Crosby, must have had implicit faith in his daughter's prowess to venture such a confident a.s.sertion as that, for he was quite in the dark as to who "he, she, or it" might be.

It was a cozy November evening, when open fires and friendly drop-lights are in order, and the three grown-folks of the family were enjoying these luxuries. Mr. Crosby was supposed to be reading his paper, but he had a sociable way of letting fall an occasional item of interest, or of letting fall the paper itself, at the first hint of interest in the remarks of his wife and daughter.

Only within a very short time had there been three grown-folks in the family, unless, indeed, we count Rollo, the Gordon setter, who had attained his majority years ago. Di, who was but just turned sixteen, really did not like to remember how very recently she had been sent to bed at eight o'clock!

Could Mr. Crosby have guessed the scheme which was occupying the active brain of the young person engaged in embroidering harmless bachelor's b.u.t.tons upon a linen centrepiece, he would have been very much astonished,--whether pleasurably or otherwise, events alone must show. And since events had been taken in hand by Di the revelation was not likely to be long delayed.

The incident which had elicited her father's declaration of confidence was a request on Di's part to be allowed the privilege of inviting a guest of her own choosing to the Thanksgiving dinner. The family party was to be materially reduced this year, for Mrs. Crosby's mother and sister, their only available relatives, were at that moment sojourning in Rome, where, if they were sufficiently mindful of current maxims to do as the Romans do, they were very unlikely to meet with any satisfactory combination of turkey and plum-pudding. It was with that fact in view, that Di felt a fair degree of a.s.surance in preferring her request. They all liked each other, of course, better than they liked anybody else, but, really, one must do something a little out of the common on Thanksgiving day.

"Certainly," Di's mother had agreed; "you shall invite any one you choose. I have been wishing we could think of some one to ask, but people all have their own family parties on Thanksgiving day. Is it to be one of your girl friends?"

"That is my secret," Di had replied, sedately; "but, whoever it is, he, she, or it is a very important personage, and will have to be treated with great consideration!"

"And how is that very _un_important personage, Di Crosby, going to get hold of so great a dignitary?" Mrs. Crosby had laughingly inquired. At which juncture Mr. Crosby had expressed his belief that Di would bag her game.

That the prospective dinner should be incomplete was all the harder, considering the fact that the Crosbys were, by good rights, the possessors of that most desired ornament of such an occasion,--a _bona fide_ grandfather. Not only was old Mr. Crosby living, and in excellent health, but his residence was not above a dozen blocks removed from his son's house. And yet no grandfather had ever graced their Thanksgiving feast.

Family quarrels are an unpleasant subject at the best, and since Di herself had never learned the precise cause of the long estrangement between father and son, in which the old gentleman had decreed that his son's wife and children should share, it is hardly worth while to recount it here. Suffice it to say, that it was a very old quarrel indeed, older than Di herself, and one to which Mr. and Mrs. Crosby never alluded.

It was six years ago, when Di, the eldest of the children, was ten years of age, that she had come home from school one day, breathless with excitement.

"Mamma!" she cried, bursting into the room where her mother was changing the baby's frock: "Mamma! Have I got a grandfather?"