Little Miss By-The-Day Part 26

"Will you let him pretend with us?" the child asked Felicia gravely.

And, Felicia looking at the tired face of the man in the doorway, nodded. He sat down on the edge of the larger bed and if Felicia was aware of him after that she didn't let him know it. Precious golden moments of happiness began to drip into the little room as incessantly as the silvery gray drops of the rain fell outside.

"This," confided Felicia "is a story about a girl who wanted to write a letter. She was a very pretty girl, a French girl. Do you understand French? I don't very well. I didn't learn it when I was little like you--so we'll tell it in English the way Margot--who is a nice fat, comfortable woman who lives in the little house in the woods right beside my big house in the woods--tells me. I'll whistle the gay tune about the girl who is going to write the letter until you can sing it with a tra-la-la-la so--and then while you make the music we'll pretend I'm the girl who wants Peirrot to open his door so she can write the letter by the moonlight because her candle had blown out.

Her fire was quite low--she was cold," the children shivered sympathetically, "first we will do the tune--so."

Felicia's beautiful lips closed. Remember that you could hardly see her lips move when she whistled and remember how very beautiful her whistle was! Such a gay little tune, that old, old tune, _Au Clair de la Lune!_ The wide-eyed children watched her, humming as she motioned. The tired man on the edge of the bed watched her, humming unconsciously as the little song sang itself into his eager ears. Higher and sweeter and faster the tripping tune came. Felice was clapping her slender hands to give them the time and now the two children and their father were singing it uproariously while Felice on her ha.s.sock gestured and spoke the words.

"--open your door, Peirrot--" Oh Margot! with your translation that should not offend your atheistic master by telling his granddaughter what _Dieu_ really means! The tired man, who'd known the song when he was a boy, was already laughing at Margot's version. But when Felicia came to "_Pour l'amour de Dieu_" and merrily cried out "For the love of Mike" he caught up a pillow and hugged it as he howled his unholy glee.

The four of them shouted together, shouted youthfully, buoyantly, savagely, not caring in the least at what they shouted.

"Oh! Oh!" exulted Felice, "how _de_-liciously happy we are--"

Under the noise of their merriment the outer door had opened and closed; the tread of overshoes pattered quietly along the hall--she stood in the doorway plump and puffing, her finery bundled clumsily under her coat. She wasn't very pretty. It didn't seem as if she'd ever been young, and it seemed as though she was the angriest woman in the world. And her voice thin, soprano, nasal, rose above the joyous shouting of the merry-makers.

"You didn't know how to run the sewing machine!" she mocked the little woman who was rising from the ha.s.sock, "you didn't know how to use the flat-iron! You were much too fine to do the work you came to do! But the minute my back is turned you sit there playing with my children--"

the anger was rising higher and higher now, "and flirting with my husband--" The man arose.

"Bertha!" he exclaimed. But even above the strident shrill of the scolding and the abrupt command of the man's voice and the frightened wail of the littlest girl, rose the cry of Felicia's own anger. Did I say her employer was the angriest woman in the world? I was mistaken.

The angriest woman in the world was Felicia Day.

Tiny in stature, absurdly dowdy she stood. She didn't raise her voice after that first cry but its deep contralto seemed to penetrate everywhere. All the petty insults that she had endured through all the dreadful Thursdays seemed as nothing compared to the unjust a.s.sault of this unfair person.

"You'd better not talk any more," Felicia's clear voice interrupted the angry tirade. "Because I'm not listening and I'm sure you don't know yourself what you're saying. All day long I've been wondering what I could pretend you were like. First I pretended you were a big coa.r.s.e zinnia. I don't like zinnias at all but some people do--they are gay and bold. Part of the time I thought I'd pretend you were a weed--a rather pretty weed that chokes flowers out if you don't watch it--but you aren't even as much use as a weed--"

Her employer gave a little scream. She stepped closer to her husband and shook his arm a little. He was staring, as though hypnotized, at Felice.

"Stop her! Make her stop!" the woman screamed. "She's insulting me!

Make her stop!"

He pulled himself together.

"Of course you must stop!" he spoke sternly as though he were speaking to a naughty child. "You must be out of your wits to talk that way!

You'd--you'd better go--" he ended tamely.

"Much better," Felicia agreed. "But I'd much better go after I get through telling her what I'm going to pretend she is! She's exactly like the Black Blight--that horrid black thing that makes the green leaves droop and the gay little flowers shrivel up--there's only one thing to do to keep it from killing the whole garden--that's to burn it out with coals!"

"Stop that!" the man commanded sharply.

Felicia coolly folded her arms.

"I can't," she answered quietly, "not till I'm through. For I've started now. Besides--" her eager words tumbled more gently now, "all the morning through she told me about things I didn't know--things of which I was ignorant. She thought it vairee dreadful that I did not know how to work with a flat-iron--she thought it vairee stupid that I could not manage the sewing machine--and I was ashamed because I did not know vairee much--and I would be glad if she would tell me how to do these things I do not know. Now, I know something that she does not know--" she stepped very close to the amazed woman, "something I think--she will like to hear about--" a cooing sweetness crept into Felicia's tones, the naive earnestness, the gentle candor of her appeal, silenced both the man and the woman. "She will like to hear about the way to be a mother. I know exactly the way--it's like this-- it isn't a bit like the way you do it--" her clear eyes looked straight into those of the awed person before her. "The way you do it is not at all pretty--not at all amusing--you shout and scold and fret and 'don't--don't don't'--all the time! That's not the way to be a mother!" Felicia's eyes grew tender, her hand touched the woman's hand and patted it rea.s.suringly. "I'll tell you the vairee best way to be a mother--evairy morning you have some one make you vairee, vairee pretty with a little lace cap and a rosy pillow--you must stay in your bed and wait till your children come to see you and then you must smile at them and speak vairee softly--this way, saying 'Go out in the garden and be happy, my dears!' And when they come back to you at twilight, oh so vairee happy--" her voice wavered, she was no longer looking at them, she was looking far back across the years. She shivered a little.

"That's the time for you to say, 'Ah, Felicia, you look as though you'd been vairee happy today--in your garden--"

The man strode toward her eagerly. He put his hands on her heaving shoulders and dragged her toward the light.

"Who are you?" he demanded sharply, "tell me quickly, who are you?"

And Felicia looked at him, still dazed, still drifting happily on the flood of her beautiful memories.

"Why, of course I know you--" she whispered gently, "I've been looking everywhere to find you. You're my Portia Person--only the Portia part of you is all quite lost--"

CHAPTER VI

THE LAST PRETENDING

The Portia Person and the young lawyer bent over a long table littered with papers from the young lawyer's portfolio and the storeroom trunks. They were sitting in the young lawyer's room, the room that had been Grandy's and from the mantelpiece the portrait of Grandy's father looked down upon them. His faintly ironical smile seemed to mock their baffled efforts to disentangle the mystery. The tide wind blew in softly from the river; the lights in the quaint old gas fixtures flared waveringly, but the wide room was very still.

In Grandy's "forty winks" leather chair by the fireside sat Felicia, her hair smoothly parted, her tiny figure trig in one of the Sculptor Girl's much mended frocks. She sat primly upright as she always sat, but her sleek head bent itself charmingly--Felicia was knitting. She was weaving a shawl for the Wheezy, a gay red shawl. The warm glow of the wool cast a faint tinge of color upward over her pale cheeks; whenever the Portia Person or the young lawyer asked her a question, as they frequently did, she let her work rest in her lap and answered quietly, her great eyes lifted hopefully.

From the garden they could hear the faint rumble of men's voices, the Architect and the Inventor and the Cartoonist and the Painter Boy and the two new chaps, slender Syrians; (Felicia had found them a few days before starving in a cellar where they were experimenting with reproductions of antique pottery and had brought them and their potter's wheels and their kiln home to live in the gla.s.sed-in room. It was there in the autumn following that they perfected those wonderful bronze and turquoise glaze ceramics that delighted the whole art world)--from the nursery above came trailing the high sweet murmur of the Sculptor Girl and the Poetry Girl and the Architect's wife and the Milliner and the folk-dance teacher--in the kitchen Janet MacGregor and Molly O'Reilly wrangled half-heartedly over religious differences but each and every one of these inimitable persons cared not a whit about the thing he or she pretended to be discussing. Each of them wanted to scream,

"What's happening? Why don't you say what you've found out? Why don't you tell us something?"

Eight o'clock, nine o'clock, ten o'clock--Molly O'Reilly couldn't endure the suspense any longer. She cunningly stacked a tray with nut- bread sandwiches and a pitcher of milk and strode bravely up the stairs to Grandy's room.

"Miss Day, darlint," she called through the half opened door, "I've the matter of a nibble of food here--"

Felicia did not put down the knitting, she merely lifted her head.

"How sweet of you, Molly O'Reilly, come in--this is Mr. Ralph. Mr.

Ralph, I know you'll like Molly O'Reilly--" Molly put down the tray, her hands were trembling so she couldn't trust them.

"It's dying we all are wid curiosity, Mr. Portia Ralph. You should have a heart--" her speech was bolder than her beseeching eyes, "what wid the men all rarin' about the bit of garden, calling, 'Molly, isn't she coming down?' and the girls, calling down the kitchen tube, 'Molly aren't they through talking?' I'm fair getting nervous myself--we feel like witches we're that flighty--"

"The poor children!" Felicia sighed heavily. "Are you sure we couldn't tell them anything?" she consulted the Portia Person anxiously. He was biting absent-mindedly into the sandwich Molly had almost shoved into his hand; he was eyeing the milk which that astute person was pouring out for him.

"Just a word, maybe," wheedled Molly.

He smiled, a wry smile.

"We're making some headway," he vouchsafed, "but of course we've only begun really--" Molly took to herself no comfort from his casual tone.

She fixed an inquiring eye on the lawyer's despondent shoulders and went out without another word. But back in the kitchen she thumped her bread outrageously as she kneaded it,

"Lawyers is the numbskull boys," she grumbled, "I belave none of them know their business--"

Half past ten o'clock, eleven o'clock, half past eleven--Felicia still knitted, she could no longer see what she was knitting. Her eyes were blurred with unshed tears. It wasn't for herself that she cared, it was for all of the rest of them. From the stairway she could hear Molly's voice comforting the Architect's wife as they helped her down from the nursery to Maman's room,

"Sure, they's no need to worry. Take a peep through the door at Miss Felice. She's just knitting whilst they confab. Sure wid a couple o'

hundred papers alyin' there they couldn't get through in no hurry now, could they?"

She managed to wave her hand gaily as they pa.s.sed but her heart beat rebelliously. "I just can't, can't, can't give up their house--oh, wherever could I put them all? I couldn't take them to the House in the Woods. I couldn't let them go back--oh, oh, I can't lose their house--"

Out of the ma.s.s of things that the Portia Person had tried to make clear to her Felicia could only grasp this; that the house was hers but the taxes and interest and fines must all be paid if it were to remain hers; that Certain Legal Matters had really taken everything that had been left her from the Montrose estate; that he couldn't be found; that there was some other property and money somewhere in France; that the Portia Person had seen some of the papers concerning it when he was a young lawyer, when Felice was a little girl; that these papers had been put into Mademoiselle's hands for safe-keeping when Maman went away; that Mademoiselle D'Ormy was to give them to Felicia when Felicia was eighteen. But though they had ransacked every paper that they could find in the old boxes and the cupboards they could find nothing that had any bearing on the case.