Brenda's Bargain Part 25

"I hardly expected to find so many of you here," said Philip. "Surely some of you intend to go as nurses to help your suffering countrymen."

"Angelina," responded Miss South, "is the only one of us who is desperately in earnest about becoming a nurse."

"So far as I can remember she has all the qualities that a nurse ought not to have."

"Oh, you are rather severe; she is not quite so bad, yet I doubt that she would make a good nurse. But she really is interested, and I have known her to make many sacrifices this spring to help the soldiers."

"She thinks that the Red Cross costume would be very becoming, and that is the secret of her interest," said Brenda, with a slight tinge of bitterness.

"What do you hear from the seat of war?" asked Philip, turning to Brenda, as if to change the subject.

"Oh, I never hear anything. Agnes and Ralph have letters, but I have too much to do to bother about the war."

Brenda's tone belied her words, and Philip wisely attempted no rejoinder. A moment later she made an excuse for leaving the party in group.

"Ralph," explained Julia, "expects to go abroad in a few days; his uncle is very ill in Paris, and it is necessary that he should see him. I believe that Agnes is not sorry that he has decided to go. Otherwise, I am sure that he would soon be starting for Cuba."

"It's hard for any one to stay behind," said Philip; and then as Inez and Nellie came out from the house with a message for Miss South and Julia, the duty of entertaining Philip fell on Pamela. He never knew just how it happened, but soon he was opening his heart to her more freely than he had ever opened it to any one else; and when their little talk was over he felt that at least one person realized that in staying North at a time when men were needed in the South he was truly trying to do his best. Undoubtedly Julia understood this, and Miss South, and all sensible people who saw that Mr. Blair's health was now so precarious; but Pamela made it so clear to Philip that his duty to his father was really the higher duty, that he left the Mansion in a much more cheerful frame of mind than that in which he had approached it.

"It is just as she says," he thought, as he walked homeward. "If my country were attacked, or if our flag were in danger, then it would be the duty of every man to rush to the front. But now--why, when it comes to fighting on land, we'll just have another walkover like the battle of Manila Bay."

He stepped briskly down the hill toward his home.

"What a bright girl Miss Northcote is, and how thankful she must be that her teaching is almost over for the year. Though she never admits it, she must find teaching very tiresome."

Pamela was glad, indeed, that her school tasks were over in season to give her a week or two for special study, as she was anxious to do her very best in the work that she had chosen at Radcliffe this year. The two courses would count toward her post-graduate degree. Strangely enough, a few days before the examination she had a chance to put her own theories of duty into practice.

A telegram from Vermont told her that her aunt had been thrown from a carriage and seriously injured, and that in her moments of delirium she was constantly calling for her. It took Pamela but a few moments to decide, and packing a small trunk she was ready for the evening train North.

"My examinations can wait until next year," she replied to Julia's expostulations; "and even if they could not, this is really the only thing for me to do."

Though for many years her relatives had been far from sympathetic, Pamela recalled the days of her childhood, when they offered her a home, and when in a clumsy way they had tried to make her happy. Knowing how her uncle had depended on his wife, she could not bear to think of his helplessness, and to help him became at once her nearest duty.

Thus it happened that when Philip a few days later came again to the Mansion for counsel, he found Pamela gone. Julia, too, happened to be out, and Brenda, with whom he talked, was so downcast that he was obliged to put himself in the most cheerful frame of mind to a.s.sure her that there was not the least danger of actual fighting.

"Why, before you know it, they'll all come marching home, and there'll be processions and speeches and all the things that conquering heroes expect--"

"They won't be conquering heroes if they haven't done any fighting."

"Don't interrupt; and you can throw a wreath at Arthur's feet."

"I wasn't thinking of Arthur."

"Excuse me, but I think that you were; and then, well--and then they will live happy ever after."

"Philip Blair, you are too absurd. Conquering heroes and wreaths, indeed!"

But Philip's nonsense had made Brenda smile, and for the time she was decidedly more cheerful.

When Mr. and Mrs. Barlow went down to Rockley, Brenda had simply refused to go. When they told her that she would suffer in town from the heat, she replied that she did not care, she hoped, indeed, that she would suffer, and concluded by saying emphatically that she was tired of being a mere idler.

"But since you are so unused to hard work, and to the city in hot weather, you must not overdo now. I do wish, Brenda," and Mrs. Barlow's tone was unusually serious, "that you could do things in moderation. If you had taken a little more interest in the work at the Mansion last winter, perhaps you would not feel it necessary to go to extremes now."

"It isn't extremes now, only I have more time to give to Julia, and I don't feel like going to Rockley; and why should any one care, especially as you have Agnes and Lettice with you."

Mrs. Barlow for the time said no more. She managed, however, to persuade Brenda to spend a day or two each week at Rockley, usually Sat.u.r.day and Sunday; and every Wednesday a large box of flowers was sent up to the school with a card marked, "With love, from little Lettice."

Concetta was now more than ever devoted to Brenda, and the latter found her conversation more entertaining than that of any of the others,--possibly because she heard more of it. Often during the hour before bedtime she sat on the old rattan settle in the vestibule, while the tongue of the little Italian girl rattled on over a great variety of topics. Maggie, pa.s.sing in or out sometimes after watering the plants in the little garden, often felt like sitting down beside Brenda, but she was never asked to join the two, and, unasked, she would not venture.

Then to console herself she would put her hand on the crumpled letter at the bottom of her pocket. There was one person who cared for her, and Tim, knowing that his letters would not be intercepted by Mrs. McSorley, wrote to her often. His description of his life with the troops seemed to her most wonderful, and oh! how she longed to show to the others that picture that he had had taken of himself in uniform and broad campaign hat.

Angelina's interest in the war turned chiefly on her belief that she was destined to be a nurse. A large red cross cut from flannel she had sewed to her sleeve, and she told the younger girls that as soon as her mother should give her permission she was going to Cuba. "As soon, at least, as there's been a perfectly dreadful battle; of course I don't want to go until I can be of real use."

As a matter of fact Angelina had little prospect of entering upon this career of nurse, though she cherished the hope that her mother and Miss Julia might some time give their consent.

From Tampa in June Arthur wrote home much about the condition of the volunteers who had gone to the war without suitable equipment, and the fingers of the young girls at the Mansion flew more swiftly, that they might the more surely increase their quota of comfort bags.

"Just think of Toby's having to work like a laborer," said Nora, two of whose brothers had already found their way to the army in the front at the South. "He says that if it were not for the hammock that he sleeps in at night he never could stand the heat; but oh, dear! I do hope that there won't be any real fighting. Where do you suppose that the Spaniards are now?"

"Off this coast, probably," said Edith; "they say there's a big pile of coal at Salem, and that the Spanish ships will be sure to try to get it.

I wish we were going to Europe this summer, for I'm afraid that I should not enjoy seeing a battle."

"Well, I'd sooner see one than feel one, as might be the case if there should be fighting off this coast; but I am sure that this will not be the case, and we must feel that our part in the war is simply to keep up our own courage, and that of our friends and relations, especially of those who have gone to the war marching toward Cuba."

This was the sensible view to take, and Nora was only one of many girls whose chief work those long spring days consisted in cutting out garments, in hemming and sewing, in knitting bandages, and in following the directions of those older women who had organized themselves to care for the needs of the soldiers in the field.

Some of them, I am afraid (but we will whisper this), were a little impatient that nothing happened; that is, that there had been no fighting. But they were those who had no relatives and no friends in the army.

Brenda waited eagerly for each letter from Arthur, for he wrote frequently from Tampa to Agnes. Ralph had already reached Paris, and the house at Rockley seemed strangely quiet; for Lettice was a demure little girl, playing very quietly in her corner of the garden or the drawing-room.

Two letters of Arthur's had lain unanswered, and now Brenda was unwilling to make up for her neglect. "Arthur should write to me," she said to herself, although she really knew that she could hardly expect such a concession from even a young man far less proud than Arthur Weston. Yet Brenda for a time tried to nurse a grievance, rather vainly, it must be admitted, essaying to persuade herself that Arthur was in the wrong.

In the mean time, at the Mansion, she was really very helpful. She was especially zealous in taking the girls to some of the factories that Julia and Miss South thought it well for the girls to visit in little groups. Thus the process of biscuit-making, and spice-making, and half a dozen other processes had been made clear to them in the course of the spring, and Brenda said that in accompanying Miss South and the girls on these expeditions she gained much more than she ever had from the occasional historic pilgrimages that she had sometimes made with her cousins.

The girls of the Mansion made one or two historic pilgrimages, too. In Brenda there was not a deep poetic vein, and something akin to this is needed to make one thoroughly appreciate historic surroundings. In the bustling factories she found something with which her spirit was more in sympathy.

The questions asked by the girls with her diverted her; the explanations given by their guides in these places took her out of herself.

During the summer the girls were to be invited to New Hampshire; for Julia had been able to arrange with a farmer living not far from the home of Eliza, her former maid, to have half a dozen of the girls board with him for two months, while two were to be under the care of Eliza.

Julia or Miss South was to be at the farmer's during all the stay of these girls, but on the whole the summer was to be considered a time of recreation rather than work, and what the girls should learn in the country was to be gained rather by observation than by direct teaching.

As the choice had been given them, three or four had preferred to return to their own families for the summer rather than to go to the country, and thus the number to be looked after was not too large for the successful carrying out of Julia's vacation plans. Her first intention had been to take a house and equip it for summer work, carried on upon the same plan as that of the Mansion in the winter, but her uncle and aunt and others had pointed out so clearly the disadvantages of this scheme that she had quickly given it up. The girls were likely to return to their duties in the autumn much fresher, and much readier to set to work, than if they had had the same kind of household tasks that fell to them in winter.

Mr. and Mrs. Barlow wished that Julia had planned to close the Mansion on the first of June instead of July, for they saw that Brenda had no intention of coming down to Rockley permanently until July.

"Surely you are not so very much needed at this season. Julia and Miss South could undoubtedly get some one else to take your place," her mother remonstrated; and Brenda merely replied:

"Oh, I am needed; I like to feel that I am needed, and besides it is my own choice; I am staying in town because I want to."

It was evidently useless to argue, and Mrs. Barlow made no further effort to persuade her to change her mind. Naturally, however, she was somewhat concerned to notice that Brenda was growing paler and thinner.