Little Miss By-The-Day Part 3

In the garden Felice told Mademoiselle D'Ormy who the curly-haired person was--it was not for nothing that Felice had been staring at the pictures in the big Shakespeare Ill.u.s.trated on the drawing-room table.

"It's the Portia Person who is talking with Maman--" she a.s.sured Mademoiselle gravely, "she looks like a man but she's really a lady--"

The Portia Person was surely as gentle as a lady when he hurried into the garden a little later and sent Mademoiselle back to his client by the fireside. He looked down at Felice--she was embroidering that day, seated primly before the ebony tambour frame.

"Felicia," he said chokily, "will you try to remember something? Will you try to remember--if--if your mother goes away and you're ever in trouble that you're to come to see me? That my name is Ralph--John Ralph? And that you'll find me at Temple Bar, here in Brooklyn?"

"Yes, Portia Person," she answered sweetly, after she had risen as Mademoiselle had told her to when a visitor should arrive. Although she must have been eleven she was trembling with excitement, because he was her first visitor. "Yes, Portia Person, I will--only, how will I know--that I am in--Trouble--where is Trouble?"

Which seemed to make it hard for the Portia Person.

"I mean, if there's anything you need that you haven't--if there's anything you want some one to tell you about--now do you know?"

She nodded thoughtfully.

"Why, there are things right now that I want some one to tell me about--"

Before he could tell her any of them Mademoiselle came swiftly and let him out through the stable gate talking excitably and softly in French, which Felicia thought most unfair of her.

It is not at all strange that she does not remember when her mother died. You see sometimes there were several days when her mother was too tired or too ill to see such a vigorous person as Felice must have been. She merely remembers that there came a time when she was no longer asked to tiptoe past the door on the second floor landing. But she does remember that the thin visaged old French woman wept one day when she asked her,

"Shall we not go tell Maman I was happy today in the garden?"

She remembers it because they were the first tears she had ever seen and she clapped her hands and said "How queer, Mademoiselle! There are little rains in your eyes."

She did not ask to see her mother any more, for when she did Mademoiselle would answer "Not to-day." It was somehow a rather difficult time for them all; the Major was morose and sullen and Mademoiselle often had "little rains" in her eyes. She was not very patient with the lively young person who had grown tall enough to reach even the topmost drawer of the high walnut bureau.

Felicia was exploring them thoroughly one rainy afternoon while Mademoiselle dozed by the nursery fireside. She found a beautiful box with an inlaid cover that was filled with all sorts of fascinating trinkets; earrings and breastpins and droll bracelets of tarnished silver set with jade and coral--queer little letters folded in triangles with gay red wax seals, addressed in French, most of them--a soft black lace shawl--Felicia was trailing about grandly when Mademoiselle awoke to rage and scold.

The child was beginning to long for freedom, she was constantly questioning. Octavia's gentle raillery, Octavia's delicious half answers to the "Whys and wheres and whens and whats" had satisfied, but Mademoiselle's abrupt, "I can't tell you--" "It does not concern you--" "Zat is not of consequence--" were teaching the child to scheme. She was perpetually trying to find out for herself the things that Mademoiselle declined to tell her. She was especially curious about Maman's closed door. Mademoiselle refused to open it.

But there came a day, when Mademoiselle wasn't looking, when Felice tapped gently at her mother's door and opened it and went in. And when she saw the empty bed and the empty chair she ran in great glee to her grandfather.

"Oh, Oh," she cried, "Why didn't you tell me that Maman had gone to the House in the Woods? Why didn't you let me go with her? For she said we would make the garden together!"

He did not answer her at once.

"How did you know?"

"Because Babiche is gone," she answered triumphantly. "And Babiche wouldn't be gone from the house unless Maman were gone--so they've gone to the House in the Woods--to attend to the garden--with--" she frowned until she remembered "with Piqueur--unless he is too old to help--and now I will go--"

It was curious how his voice faltered, he looked tireder and more unhappy than in the days when Octavia had made a game of making him happy.

"Felicia," he groped for words as he faced the questioning-eyed child, "I--we--you--cannot go to the House in the Woods just now--I have Certain Legal Matters that must be attended to--but we--we will go some day--"

She accepted this with all the earnestness of her eleven years. But at the door she paused, shyly. He looked very "cross and worried."

"This afternoon, if you wish," she said, "I will play chess with you.

I can do three gambits. I tried them alone yesterday. We'll not play in Maman's room--but in the garden--"

But for some strange reason he did not smile at all when he called "Check!" He only bent his head over her hand and kissed it as he had kissed her mother's. It was the first caress he had ever given her.

She put the hand against her cheek and loved it when he was gone. And clambering up to bed she paused outside her mother's door.

"Maman, we were a little happy in the garden--" she whispered, "were you happy in your garden?"

Interminable days followed, dreary days punctuated with quarrel after quarrel. It sometimes seemed to Octavia's unhappy daughter that there was nothing she could touch without Mademoiselle's disapproval.

The garments that had hung in the wardrobes, lovely things that tempted the beauty-loving child, were all packed away in the storeroom back of the linen closet; the bits of ornaments and jewelry that Octavia had let the child play with were all tucked away.

"It was Maman's--do not touch it!" "That was Louisa's, you cannot have it!" Or most fearful cry of all, "Put that shawl back, Felicia! It was Madame Josepha's--Louisa herself never wore it, it cost so much!"

The storeroom key was kept in the pocket of Mademoiselle's black silk ap.r.o.n. Gradually the miserly soul locked away all that seemed desirable or lovely to Felicia.

Of course there came a day when she stole the key and when she hid herself a whole blissful afternoon and rummaged joyously through dusty bandboxes and huge curved-top trunks. She had opened an iron-bound box last. And in the top had found a case marked,

"Mme. J. Trenton, 8 Rue de la--"

the rest was blurred. There were a lot of papers--all of them in French, in a queer old case of crushed leather. And when she thrust them carelessly underneath she found the tiniest muslin garments she had ever seen. They puzzled her greatly; she held one against her cheek instinctively.

"What a very little woman must have worn you--" she whispered, "As little as--" she frowned, "the thing made of string in the shop where we got the Wheezy--as little as Babiche. I wish--I wish I could have seen as little a woman as that--"

She sprang up startled, Mademoiselle was coming. Felicia had the door locked and was standing outside, a slim, dusty, shining-eyed figure when the woman began berating her. The girl slid cunningly along the wall, for Mademoiselle's wrinkled, trembling hand was stretched out as she demanded the key.

There was a grating, a round bronze grating in the side wall for the furnace pipe. Felice moved toward it. She was not answering Mademoiselle; just breathing hard, just staring.

Suddenly the key dropped. The two could hear it tinkling, down, down, through the rusty metal of the furnace pipe.

And that was the moment that the infuriated little French woman struck Felice.

The child was nearly as tall as the woman, she could have struck back, but instead she ran. She fled down the stairway, her angry breath coming in choking gasps. She flung herself against the door of her mother's room.

"Maman! Maman!" she screamed.

And that was where the Major found her.

"I hate--hate--hate--Mademoiselle!" And down the stair came the thin visaged French woman crying.

"And I monsieur, I hate zis ongrateful child! I theenk I hate your whole ongrateful race--I served your wife like one slave! And for Miss Octavia I was like two slaves! Zis child has ever hated me! I am weary of your whole race--I shall go back to ze country where I belong--"

So there they stood, those two antagonists, the woman with her eyes snapping and the outraged child with the tears streaming.

"Felicia," the Major's tone was terrifying, "you must apologize at once!"

Felicia was silent. She shook her head. The Major bowed to the French woman. "I apologize for her," he continued. "But I think Mademoiselle D'Ormy, you are right. She is growing into a woman and you are growing into a child--" And whatever else he said after Felice had fled to the garden doesn't matter. Yet two days later when Mademoiselle bade her farewell the two enemies flung themselves on each others' necks and wept. Much to the disgust of the Major, who fairly shoved Mademoiselle away and who appeared not to see the sobbing and impetuous young person who dashed headlong to the nursery.

But after that life was much more serene, much sweeter. To be sure she could no longer ransack the storeroom. She never had to explain to the Major what had occasioned that last tempestuous quarrel but she roamed at will through the whole dusty house and possessed herself gloriously of all its treasures.

You should have seen her in those days, tricking herself out in what finery she could muster from the walnut bureau. For after Mademoiselle's departure the afternoon chess prolonged itself into twilight and Felicia proudly dined with the Major instead of in the nursery.