The Other Girls Part 47

"It is you that flies out with taking for granteds," said Kate Sencerbox, in a subdued monotone of quietness. "I was only going to remark that we had got neither cellar windows, nor attic skylights after all. I'm favorably surprised with the accommodations. I've paid four dollars a week for a great deal worse. And I wouldn't cast reflections by arguing objections that haven't been made, if I were the leader of this enterprise, Miss Bree."

"Kate! That's what I call real double lock-st.i.tch pluck! That goes back of everything. You needn't shut up any more. Now let's come down and see about supper."

They had pinned on linen ap.r.o.ns, with three-cornered bibs; such as they wore at their machines. When they came down into Mrs.

Scherman's room, that young matron said within herself,--"I wonder if it's real or if we're in a charade! At any rate, we'll have a real tea in the play. They do sometimes."

"What is the nicest, and quickest, and easiest thing to get, I wonder?" she asked of her waiting ministers. "Don't say toast. We're so tired of toast!"

"Do you like m.u.f.fins and stewed oysters?" asked Bel Bree, drawing upon her best experience.

"Very much," Mrs. Scherman answered.

And Kate, looking sharply on, delighted herself with the guarded astonishment that widened the lady's beautiful eyes.

"Only we have neither m.u.f.fins nor oysters in the house; and the grocery and the fish-market are down round the corner, in Selchar Street."

"I could go for them right off. What time do you have tea?"

Really, Asenath Scherman had never acted in a charade where her cues were so unexpected.

"I wonder if I'm getting mixed up again," she thought. "Which _is_ the cook?"

Of course a cook never would have offered to go out and order m.u.f.fins and oysters. Mrs. Scherman could not have _asked_ it of the parlor-maid.

Kate Sencerbox relieved her.

"I'll go, Bel," she interposed. "I guess it's my place. That is, if you like, Mrs. Scherman."

"I like it exceedingly," said Asenath, congratulating herself upon the happy inspiration of her answer, which was not surprise nor thanks, but cordial and pleased enough for either. "The shops are next each other, just beyond Filbert Street. Have the things charged to Mrs. Francis Scherman. A quart of oysters,--and how many m.u.f.fins?

A dozen I think; then if there are two or three left, they'll be nice for breakfast. They will send them up. Say that we want them directly."

"I can bring the m.u.f.fins. I suppose they'll want the oyster-can back."

It may be a little doubtful whether Kate's spirit of supererogatory doing would have gone so far, if it had not been for the deliciousness of piling up the wonder. She retreated, upon the word, magnanimously, remitting further reply; and Bel directly after descended to her kitchen, to make the needful investigations among saucepans and toasters.

"Don't be frightened at anything you may find," Mrs. Scherman said to her as she went. "I won't answer for the insides of cupboards and pans. But we will make it all right as fast as possible. You shall have help if you need it; and at the worst, we can throw away and get new, you know. Suppose, Bel," she added, with enchanting confidence and accustomedness, "we were to have a cup of coffee with the oysters? There is some real Mocha in the j.a.panned canister in the china closet, and there are eggs in the pantry, to clear with; you know how? Mr. Scherman is so fond of coffee."

Bel knew how; and Bel a.s.sented. As the door closed after her, below stairs, Mrs. Scherman caught up Sinsie into her lap, and gave her a great congratulatory hug.

"Do you suppose it will last, little womanie? If it isn't all gone in the morning, what comfort we'll have in keeping house and taking care of baby!"

The daughter is so soon the "little womanie" to the mother's loving antic.i.p.ation!

Marmaduke was l.u.s.tily struggling with and shouting to a tin horse six inches long, and tipping up a cart filled with small pebbles on the carpet. He was outside already; the housekeeping was nothing to him, except as it had to do with the getting in of coals.

When Mr. Scherman opened the front door, the delicious aroma of oysters and coffee saluted his chilled and hungry senses. He wondered if there were unexpected company, and what Asenath could have done about it. He pa.s.sed the parlor door cautiously, but there was no sound of voices. Up-stairs, all was still; the children were in crib and cradle, and Asenath was shaking and folding little garments,--shapes out of which the busy spirits had slidden.

He came up behind her, where she stood before the fire.

"All well, little mother?" he questioned. "Or tired to death? There are festive odors in the house. Has anybody repented and come back again?"

"Not a bit of it!" Sin exclaimed triumphantly, turning round and facing him, all rosy with the loving romp she had been having just a little while before with her babies. "Frank! I've got a pair of Abraham's angels down-stairs! Or Mrs. Abraham's,--if she ever had any. I don't remember that they used to send them to women much, now I think of it, after Eve demeaned herself to entertain the old serpent. Ah! the _babies_ came instead; that was it! Well; there is a couple in the kitchen now, at any rate; and they're toasting and stewing in the most E--_lys_ian manner! That's what you smell."

"Angels? Babies? What terrible ambiguity! What, or who, is stewing, if you please, dear?"

"m.u.f.fins. No! oysters. There! you sha'n't know anything about it till you go down to tea. But the millennium's come, and it's begun in our house."

"I knew that, six years ago," said Frank Scherman. "There are exactly nine hundred and ninety-four left of it. I can wait till tea-time with the patience of the saints."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"LIVING IN."

Desire Ledwith went over to Leicester Place with Bel Bree, when she returned there for the first needful sorting and packing and removing. Bel could not go alone, to risk any meeting; to put herself, voluntarily and unprotected in the way again. Miss Ledwith took a carriage and called for her. In that manner they could bring away nearly all. What remained could be sent for.

Miss Smalley possessed some movables of her own, though the furnishings in her room had been mostly Mrs. Pimminy's. There were some things of her aunt's that Bel would like, and which she had asked leave to bring to Mrs. Scherman's.

The light, round table, with its old fashioned slender legs and claw feet, its red cloth, and the books and little ornaments, Bel wanted in her sleeping-room. "Because they were Aunt Blin's," she said, "and nothing else would seem so pleasant. She should like to take them with her wherever she went."

The two trunks--hers and Katy's--(Bel had Aunt Blin's great flat-topped one now, with its cushion and flounce of Turkey red; and Kate had speedily st.i.tched up a cover for hers to match, of cloth that Mrs. Scherman gave her) stood one each side the chimney,--in the recesses. A red and white patchwork quilt, done in stars, Bel's own work before she ever came to Boston, lay folded across the foot of the bed, in patriotic contrast with the blue,--reversing the colors in stars and stripes. Bel had found in the attic a discarded stairway drugget, scarlet and black, of which, the centre was worn to threads, but the bright border still remained; and this she had asked for and sewed around the square of neutral tinted carpet, upon whose middle the round table stood, covering its dullness with red again, the color of the cloth. There was plenty of bordering left, of which she pieced a foot-mat for the floor before the dressing-gla.s.s, and in the open grate now lay a little unlighted pile of kindlings and coals, as carefully placed behind well blackened bars and a facing of paper, as that in the parlor below.

"It looks nice," Bel said to Mrs. Scherman, "and we don't expect to light it, unless one of us is sick, or something."

"Light it whenever you wish for it," Mrs. Scherman had replied. "I am perfectly willing to trust your reasonableness for that."

So on Sunday afternoons, or of a bitter cold morning, they had their own little blaze to sit or dress by; and it made the difference of a continual feeling of cheeriness and comfort to them, always possible when not immediately actual; and of a bushel or two of coal, perhaps, in the winter's supply of fuel.

"Where were the babies of a Sunday afternoon,--and how about the offered tending?"

This was one more place for them also; a treat and a change to Sinsie and Marmaduke, or a perfectly safe and sweet and comfortable resource in tending Baby Karen, who would lie content on the soft quilts by the half hour, feeling in the blind, ignorant way that little babies certainly do, the novelty and rest.

The household, you see, was melting into one; the spirit of home was above and below. It was home as much as wages, that these girls had come for; and they expected to help make it. Not that they parted with their own individual lives and interests, either; every one must have things that are separate; it is the way human souls and lives are made. It would have been so with daughters, or sisters. But in a true living, it is the individual interests that at once aggregate and specialize, it is a putting into the common stock that which must be distinct and real that it may be put in at all. It was not money and goods alone, that the early Christians had in common.

Instead of a part of their house being foreign and distasteful,--tolerated through necessity only, that the rest might be ministered to,--there was a region in it, now, of new, extended family pleasure. "It was as good as building out a conservatory, or a billiard-room," Asenath said. "It was just so much more to enjoy."

There was a little old rocking-chair, railed round till it was almost like a basket, with just a break in the front palings to sit into. It had a soft down cushion, covered with a damask patterned patch of wild and divaricating device; and its rockers were short, giving a jerk and thud if you leaned to and fro in it, like the trot an old nurse gives a child in an ordinary, four-legged, impracticable seat. All the better for that; the rockers were not in the way; and all Aunt Blin had wanted of it as a sewing chair, was to tip conveniently, as she might wish to bend and reach, to pick up scissors or spool, or draw to herself any of those surroundings of part, pattern, or material, which are sure, at the moment one wants them to be on the opposite side of the table.

Bel brought this away from Leicester Place, and had it in the kitchen. Mrs. Scherman, then seeing that there remained for Kate only the choice of the four wooden chairs, and pleased with the cosy expression they were causing to pervade their precincts, suggested their making s.p.a.ce for a short, broad lounge that she would spare to them from an upper room which was hardly ever used. It was an old one that she had had sent from home among some other things that were reminiscences, when her father and mother, the second year after her marriage, had broken up their household in New York, and resolved on a holiday, late in life, in Europe. It was a comfortable, shabby old thing, that she had used to curl up on to learn her German, with the black kitten in her lap, and the tip of its tail for a pointer. She had always meant to cover it new, but had never had time. There was a large gray travelling shawl folded over it now, making extra padding for back and seat, and the thick fringe fell below, a garnishing along the front.

"Let it be," said Asenath. "I don't think you'll set the soup-kettle or the roasting-pan down on it; and you can always shake it out fresh and make it comfortable. It was only getting full of dust up-stairs. There's a square pillow in the trunk-room that you can have too, and cover with something. A five minutes' level rest is nice, between times, I know. I wonder I never thought of it before."

How would Bel or Kate have ever got a "five minutes' level rest,"

over their machine-driving at Fillmer & Bylles? Bel had said well, that girls and women need to work under cover; in a _home_, where they can "rest by s.n.a.t.c.hes." A mere roof is not a cover; there may be driving afield in a great warehouse, as well as out upon a plantation.

The last touch and achievement was more of the dun-gray carpet, like that in their bedroom, and more of the scarlet and black stair-border, made into a rug, which was spread down when work was over, and rolled up under the table when dinner was to dish, or a wash was going on. They had been with Mrs. Scherman a month before they ventured upon that asking.