A House Party with the Tucker Twins Part 6

"No! n.o.body ain't daid!" snapped an old man. "n.o.body ain't eben a-dyin'.

Now that thar d.i.c.k Lee done bought up th' only carsket in the sto' an'

my Luly is mighty low--mighty low."

"Sho-o' nuf I ain't heard tell of it. Is she in de baid?"

"Well, not ter say in de baid--but on de baid, on de baid. Anyhow 'tain't safe to count on her fer long. White folks is sho' graspin'

these days. They is sho' graspin'."

The old man departed on his way grumbling.

"Caroline Tucker, what did you sell that coffin to that young man for?"

demanded Dum sternly.

"Just to see if I could, Virginia Tucker. I told him I'd like to see him in a coffin lined with lavender, and he was so complimented, he immediately bought it to keep for a rainy day."

Dee and I had made so many sales that Annie had to send a telegram informing her father of the diminished stock. It was necessary to order another coffin immediately in case the ailing Luly might need it.

CHAPTER V

THE HUMAN FLY

GENERAL PRICE was vastly amused over the account of Dee's sale of the coffin to the amiable d.i.c.k. Miss Maria was frankly shocked, and Miss Wilc.o.x amazed and a little scornful.

"I never cared for slumming," she announced that night when we had retired to the girls' wing.

"But helping Annie Pore keep store is not slumming," said Dee, the dimple in her chin deepening.

Dee Tucker had a dimple in her chin just like her father. When father and daughter got ready for a fight, those dimples always deepened.

"Most kind of you, I am sure, although that sort of adventure never appealed to me. I have taught in the mission school in New York's East Side, but when the cla.s.s is over I always leave. I can't bear to mix with the lower cla.s.ses. It is all right to help them but not by mixing."

"But you don't understand,--Annie Pore is one of our very best friends.

She is not the lower cla.s.ses. She is better born than any of us and prettier and better bred and more accomplished----"

"Ah, indeed! I should like to behold this paragon."

"Well, you shall behold her all right! She is going to join us here in a day or so."

Jessie Wilc.o.x looked very much astonished and quite haughty. She could not understand the Prices asking such a person to meet her. The daughter of a country storekeeper was hardly one whom she cared to know socially.

Dee had gone about it the wrong way to make the spoiled beauty look with favor on the little English girl:--prettier, better born, better bred, indeed! As for accomplishments: what accomplishments could a dowdy little country girl have that she had not?

The Tuckers and Jessie Wilc.o.x were not hitting it off very well in the great bedroom which they shared. Dum had declared she would not move the fluffy finery which was spread out on her bed and she stuck to her word.

"What are you going to do with these duds?" she asked rather brusquely.

"Oh, you just put them back in my trunk," drawled the spoiled roommate.

"Humph! You had better ring for your maid. I'm not much on doing valet work."

With that she caught hold of the four corners of the bedspread and with a yank deposited the whole thing adroitly on the floor, b.u.t.ter side up.

Dee told me afterwards that Jessie's expression was one of complete astonishment. She was not used to being treated like the common herd.

Much Dum cared! She got into the great four-posted bed with perfect unconcern, while Dee tactfully helped the pouting Jessie to hang up her many frocks.

"She had better be glad I didn't go to bed on them," stormed the unrepentant Dum when she told me about it. "As for Dee: I was disgusted with her for being so mealy-mouthed. Catch me hanging up anybody's clothes! I bet you one thing,--I bet you she keeps her fripperies off my bed after this."

I was in a way sorry for Jessie. I know it must be hard to be a spoiled darling turned loose with the Tucker twins. They were always perfectly square and fair in all their dealings, but they demanded squareness and fairness in others. Jessie was evidently accustomed to being waited on and admired, and the Tuckers refused to do either of these things necessary for the happiness of their roommate. She had always chosen her friends with a view to setting off her own charms, girls who were homely, less vivacious, duller. It did not suit her at all to be outshone in any way. She was certainly the prettiest girl in the house-party, that is, before Annie arrived, but she was not the most attractive. There never were more delightful girls in all the world than the Tucker twins, witty, charming, vivacious, and very handsome. I could see their development in the two years I had known them and realized that they were growing to be very lovely women.

Mary Flannagan was n.o.body's pretty girl but she had something better than beauty, at least something that proves a better a.s.set in life: extreme good nature and a sense of humor that embraced the whole universe. She had humor enough to see a joke on herself and take it.

That, to me, is the quintessence of humor. Wherever Mary was there also were laughter and gaiety. She had a heart as big as all Ireland, from which country she had inherited her wit as well as her name.

Mary was not quite so bunchy as she had been. Two years had stretched her out a bit, but she would always be something of a rolypoly. She was as active as a cat, and so determined was she to end up as a character movie actress she never stopped her limbering-up exercises. After I would get in bed at night she would begin. She would turn somersaults, stand on her head, walk on her hands, do cart-wheels, bend the crab, fall on the floor at full length and do a hundred other wonderful stunts.

"I am so plain I'll have to go in for slap-stick comedy and maybe work up to the legit., but go in I will. Why, Page, there is oodlums of money in movies and think of the life!"

"I can see you, Mary, as a side partner to Douglas Fairbanks. Can you climb up a wall like a fly?" I laughed.

"No-o, not yet but soon! I can't get much practice in wall scaling. I am dying to try this wall outside our window. It is covered with ivy and would be easy as dirt, I know," and she poked her head out the window, gazing longingly at the tempting perpendicularity of the wall beneath.

Mr. Thomas Hawkins, alias Shorty, thought Mary was just about the best chum a fellow could have, and great was his joy when Fate landed him at the same country house with the inimitable Mary. Shorty, too, had made out to grow a bit since first we saw him make the great play in the football game at Hill Top. He was a very engaging lad with his tousled mane, rosy cheeks and clear boy's eyes.

"Is Shorty going to get into the movies, too?" I teased.

"No,--navy!"

"Oh, how splendid! I didn't know he had decided."

"Yes! He has talked to me a lot about it," said Mary quite soberly.

"What do you think about it?"

"Me? Why, I think our navy is going to have to be enlarged and I can't think of anybody better suited to it than Shorty. He is a descendant of Sir John Hawkins, you know, and that means seafaring blood in his veins."

How little did Mary and I think, as we lay in that great four-post bed and wisely discussed preparedness, that our country would really be at war in not so very many months, and that Shorty's entering the navy would be a very serious matter to all of his friends, if not to him.

No thoughts of war were disturbing us. The great war was going on, but then we were used to that and we were too young and thoughtless for it to bother us. It was across the water and no one we knew personally was implicated. Maxton was too peaceful a spot for one to realize that such a thing as bloodshed could go on anywhere in all the world. Our great room with its two huge beds and ma.s.sive wardrobe, bureau and washstand, had once sheltered Washington and later on Lafayette; and then as the ages had rolled by, General Lee had visited the Prices and had slept in the very bed where Mary and I were lying so sagely and smugly arguing for preparedness. Perhaps the mocking-bird that every now and then gave forth a silvery trill in the holly tree near our window was descended from the same mocking-bird that no doubt had sung to the great warrior as he lay in the four-poster.

How quiet it was! A whippoorwill gave an occasional cry away off in the woods, and once I heard the chugging of a small steamboat puffing its way up the river, and then a little later the swish swash on the sh.o.r.e of the waves made by the stern wheel. But for that, the night was absolutely still.

"Page," whispered Mary, "are you asleep?"

"Fortunately not, or I'd be awake," I laughed.

"I'm thinking about getting up and trying to scale that wall. I am 'most sure I could do it with all that ivy to dig my toes in."