Little Miss By-The-Day Part 7

He turned slowly. He stepped bravely toward her and lifted her hand and kissed it.

"You look very charming, my dear," he murmured, he was breathing hard, "very charming--I'll go back to the stable, if you'll excuse me-- Margot will show you the other things--" he was in the doorway now, his head held high, "as she told you they've all been kept for you carefully. I hope they will make you very happy."

He closed the door softly.

Things to make her happy! Ah! Margot! Cunning Margot! spreading the treasures of those dear dead women before their imperious little descendant! Wise old Margot, who must speak so carefully that she will not break that girl's heart! Margot, who must undo all the trouble that years of evasions from Grandy and lies from Mademoiselle D'Ormy have stored up for her!

With what infinite tact did she bring them out, those vanities And trinkets of those girls of bygone days; with what adroit eloquence did she introduce all their foibles and virtues to Felicia! Oh, but she was a fine old gossip, was Margot! She couldn't quite trust herself to touch Octavia's clothes that first day. She plunged wildly into Louisa's.

While Felice's hands were busy over a s.h.a.green jewel case filled with hideous garnet and gilt breast-pins and bracelets of the sixties, Margot leaned from the cas.e.m.e.nt and called,

"Bele, oh, Bele! You careless boy! Bring some wood for Miss Felice!

Make a fire up here! It's damp!"

And while the boy, embarra.s.sed and awkward, was kindling the fire Margot fled to the kitchen to juggle wildly with her pots and pans and leave a thousand directions for Piqueur about what to serve for the Major's lunch.

"Never tell me a man knows how to bring up a child," she scolded as she stirred her soup, "never tell me that! He's done as well as he could but he's made a fine mess of it--the poor child! Thinking Miss Octavia would be here--not knowing so much as a new-born kitten-- that's as much sense as she has--as a little new-born kitten!"

And she hurried back with a delectable luncheon on a tray.

Outside the sun had hid itself and the fickle spring clouds were dripping over the desolate garden. But at the fireside, curled up in the winged chair with her bandaged foot propped comfortably on a foot- stool, Felicia sat through the long afternoon and chattered and laughed and clapped her little hands.

Oh, those foolish clothes that had belonged to Louisa! With their silly--whaleboned waists and their grotesque basques and impossible pleatings! Felicia couldn't get one of those bodies half around her healthy young waist. But she liked the bonnets and the shawls. They were adorable. The shawls were so soft, so quaintly shaped, the bonnets were fairly ravis.h.i.+ng. Felicia tried them on, peering into a carved tortoise sh.e.l.l hand mirror, and giggled whimsically at the little flowered ones with lacy ties and the stuffy winter ones with velvet bows.

"Miss Louisa was very handsome," Margot informed her, "My aunt says she was the handsomest girl she ever saw--but very high-minded, very uppis.h.!.+"

"I know about her," Felice answered easily, "Mademoiselle D'Ormy belonged to her. Louisa went to Paris, you know, and Mademoiselle lived there. Mademoiselle used to tell me she bought clothes and clothes and clothes! Are these those clothes?"

Margot nodded.

"Josepha's clothes came from Paris too--" she spread a great brocaded velvet coat before her, "Josepha wasn't pretty at all like the rest of them, she looked like her father, they said, and he was a homely old man--Josepha had a temper--I never saw her--I wasn't even born when she went away, but my aunt served her and she said Mistress Josepha had an air--a way with her--if things didn't suit her--" she lowered her voice impressively--"Ah--what she wouldn't do, that Josepha! Once my aunt took her an omelette--a beautiful omelette cooked with chopped fine carrots and peas and parsley and a big tall gla.s.s of milk for her breakfast, but Josepha, she had desired broiled chicken that morning, so she walked straight to the window here where I'm standing and threw the omelette out--She would always throw things--that one--her shoes-- or anything--when she was angry--"

Felicia blushed.

"Margot," she confided, "this morning when I was angry I was like that--I wanted to throw things, only I hadn't anything just then to throw--but when I was little I did--my bath sponge, you know, and once a key--" she grew thoughtful, "the key to the storeroom where Mademoiselle hid things--Margot, you won't hide these things, will you?" she hugged a wee m.u.f.f jealously to her breast, "You won't, will you?"

Margot chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. The room was filled with the finery she had dragged from the tall wardrobe. On the chairs, over the bed, hanging from the pegs of the cupboard, of every conceivable color and shape, those forgotten clothes glimmered and shone.

"These are the oldest of all--" Margot was kneeling and tugging at a carved cedar chest that was under the bed, "These are the things that belonged to the first one of you, the things that belonged to Prudence Langhorne." She dragged the chest triumphantly to the girl's side. "On top,--" the odor of the cedar was wafted out into the room like the odor of the pine plains through which Felice had been driving yesterday, "here, these are things she had when she came to live in this house that was built for her--plain enough, eh?" She spread the gray stuffs and brown linsey woolseys out scornfully. Their voluminous skirts and long tight sleeves and queer flat yellowed collars were stupid enough in the midst of all the splendor about them. "But look, now look, what she wore after she came--"

Felicia looked. And not even all the frills and fabrics that she had already exclaimed over could compare with the loveliness of these frocks of Mistress Prudence. They were so dainty, so fragile I With their delicate yellowed laces! They were so soft and faded with age!

Each little frock was packed by itself in a yellowed linen case, each had shoes and stockings and sometimes a gay little head dress folded away with it. Short-waisted, scant skirted--

"Oh! Oh!" cried Felice, "these are the ones I love best of all! These are the ones I'll wear! Oh Margot! That darling rosy one!" She bobbed out of the chair excitably, "Look at the little silver shoes for it!

Oh Margot, dress me in it at once! Oh, Margot! How pretty I'll be for dinner every day--"

You should have seen her when she limped down the stairs for supper!

Margot had brought her one of the Major's canes and tied some faded cherry ribbons on its gold handle. Piqueur was just lighting the candles when the two descended. Grandfather sat by the fire, his head drooping. It had been a hard day, this day he had spent with old memories. He had grieved over Octavia, he had yearned for Louisa, he had pondered mightily concerning Josepha who had been so angry with him when he had married her daughter. But he'd thought not at all of little Madame Folly in whose house he sat and brooded, not until he looked up and saw her great-great-granddaughter standing in the doorway, dressed in a cherry-colored gown, all gay with tarnished silver ribbons and yellowed lace. Because she didn't know any other way to dress her hair, she had tucked it in its usual knot at the nape of her lovely neck, but on top the neat parting was perched a narrow gold circlet with a tiny cherry-colored plume and she held her head audaciously high as she swept him a mighty curtsy.

"Louisa's things aren't pretty at all," she babbled breathlessly, "and Josepha's I can't wear--but oh, Grandy, aren't Prudence's just sweet!"

"They look like Imprudence's," he bantered as he rose.

She brought forth other treasures from under her curved arm.

"And look! Little chess men and a little chess board. Get a table!

I'll checkmate you before even dinner is ready! Margot has to go brown the chickens--hurry Margot, I'm hungry--"

She had come into her own. She was like a young queen come to her throne. From that very moment she ruled them all,--Grandy, Margot, Piqueur and Bele as though they were her slaves.

She adored every inch of her domain, she could scarcely wait for the ankle to heal so that she could rove about the overgrown paths in the woods and tumbled walks and weed-covered lawns. She could not get up early enough in the morning to do all her eager young heart longed to do. Rebuilding the garden was a sacred trust; hadn't Maman told her to do it? All day long, her serious face shaded by the old garden hat, her slender hands encased in the gauntleted gloves, she prowled about the terraces or rummaged in the tool house, usually with the beloved THEORY AND PRACTISE OF GARDENING under her arm. Sometimes she spread it open on a dilapidated bench so that she could read its solemn dissertations. The very t.i.tle page appalled one with the gravity of the task. In flouris.h.i.+ng type it boasted of its august contents--

Wherein Is fully handled all that relates to the fine gardens commonly called pleasure gardens as Parterres, Groves, Bowling Greens.

Containing Divers plans and general dispositions.

Methods of planting, and raising in little time, all the plants requisite in a garden.

Done from the French original in Paris anno domini 1709

Daytime was not long enough for its perusal. Night after night, she sat hunched up in the Poquelin bed and pored over her beloved book.

Sometimes after she read she would run and peer out from her cas.e.m.e.nt window in the moonlight and scowl over the wilderness that lay below her, the wilderness that had once been a garden. The cleared s.p.a.ce that stretched for two or three hundred yards before the house was divided into three flat terraces whose crumbling banks had lost their once careful outlines; and at the bottom of the lowest terrace a tottering lattice, sagging with old vines, made a background for the fountain in whose rubbish-filled depths a chubby cupid struggled patiently with an impossible marble duck.

"If I could only see how it went--" she would fret, "I can't see which one of them it is."

For in the back of the Garden book were many folded charts and maps, so big that they stretched out enormously over the counterpane of the bed. Sometimes Felicia thought that Mistress Prudence' garden must have been built after "The Sixteenth Practise"--that was a brave plan "with three terraces and a fountain at the base," but sometimes she thought it must be after the "single star cut into cabinets."

At first she contented herself with gardening in the Bowling Green with Piqueur feebly turning over the weedy sod and Bele tramping to and fro with barrows of manure. Her Bowling Green was in the very center of the second terrace. She had discovered that directly she began.

"In France," she read, "a bowling green differs from what you call a bowling green in England. We mean no other by this word than certain hollow sinking and slopes of turf which are practised in the middle of a parterre. A Bowling Green is the most agreeable compartment of a garden, when rightly placed most pleasant to the eye beside the pleasure it affords us of lying on its sloping banks in the shade during hottest weather."

Only it wasn't so easy to read as it looks now we're writing it over.

For "The Theory and Practise of Gardening" made you rub your eyes and groan, it was such a puzzling sort of book. To begin with its type was bewildering with its s's all turned like f's and its italics so thin you could scarcely decipher them. Besides that, the author, who remained discreetly anonymous, but none the less unwarrantably conceited, had a maddening way of spreading over a whole page the way not to do things--he didn't state at the start that it was the wrong way he was relating, he just meandered on, letting the reader suppose that was the rightest way possible as he wrote at length pertaining to:

"How to grow Box Trees from seed.

"The box tree is a green shrub of greatest use and one of the most necessary in the garden. There are two sorts, the dwarf box which we French call Buis A' Artous much used for planting the embroidery of Parterres. It naturally does not grow very much which makes it called dwarf box. The other kind is the Box Tree of the woods, which advances much higher and has bigger leaves which make it fit to form Pallisades and green Tufts for Garnis.h.i.+ng. It comes up in the shade but is a long time gaining any considerable height. It is put to a great many petty uses, as making b.a.l.l.s--as the climate of France is very different from that of the Indies in the degree heat _it is better to raise from slips and layers than to try to sow seed which is a great time coming up_."

The book quite frankly disclosed the terrors as well as the joys of the game. It was most disconcerting to read of

"The Distempers and Insects that Attack....The great Enemies are Rabbets, Garden Mise, Moles, Caterpillars, Maybugs, Ants, Snails, Turks, Canthardies and an abundance of weeds, the names of which are unknown to us--"

She shouted with youthful laughter as she read it, the echoes of her merriment sounding through the empty halls. She doubled her little fist and shook it toward the candle, flickering low in its socket.

"That's what has hidden the garden," she murmured, "that's why I can't see it--" she wrinkled her nose in disgust. "--Abundance-of-weeds-- Piqueur and Bele will settle you!"

All through the verdant spring, all through the quick hot summer the girl puzzled over the unanswered riddle--the scheme of the garden.

Piqueur and Bele and Margot toiled valiantly pulling up the myriad abundance-of-weeds, but in vain. It was not until the resplendent autumn had pa.s.sed that she had any inkling of the real pattern. There came a glorious moonlit night, a chilly night when she snuggled under the blankets and yawned over the chapter that told her "how to mulch plants for winter." The wind blew so chill that at midnight she pattered across the old carpet to make the cas.e.m.e.nt fast. The whole cleared s.p.a.ce below her glistened with the fairy glamour of the first frost. Under the magic silvery whiteness the lost "parterres and cabinets and lozenges" with their paths and borders stood out as clearly in the moonlight as the day when Madame Prudence's workmen had charted them there. She laughed aloud as she ran back and turned to the map labelled "The twentieth and laft practife which is the most superb and which is The Bifected Oval."

"Oh, Oh!" she murmured as she leaned across the stone sill, unmindful of the cold, to blow a tiny kiss to the fountain cupid, "How stupid I was not to see! You just live in half the oval and the kitchen garden and the stables are the other half--"