This is true, no doubt, but there are other ways of making yourself remembered, and I am willing that you should think kindly of Cousin Ann whenever you use the new pump.
The second improvement I wish made with the money is the instalment of a large furnace-like stove in the cellar, which will send up a little heat, at least, into the hall and lower rooms in winter. You will probably have to get the owner"s consent, and I should certainly ask for a five years" lease before expending any considerable amount of money on the premises.
If there is any money left, I should suggest new sills to the back doors and those in the shed. I noticed that the present ones are very rotten, and I dare say by this time you have processions of red and black ants coming into your house. It seemed to me that I never saw so much insect life as in Beulah.
Moths, caterpillars, brown-tails, slugs, spiders, June bugs, horseflies, and mosquitoes were among the pests I specially noted. The Mr. Popham who drove me to the station said that snakes also abounded in the tall gra.s.s, but I should not lay any stress on his remarks, as I never saw such manners in my life in any Christian civilized community. He asked me my age, and when I naturally made no reply, he inquired after a few minutes"
silence whether I was unmarried from choice or necessity. When I refused to carry on any conversation with him he sang jovial songs so audibly that persons going along the street smiled and waved their hands to him. I tell you this because you appear to have false ideas of the people in Beulah, most of whom seemed to me either eccentric or absolutely insane.
Hoping that you can endure your life there when the water smells better and you do not have to carry it from the well, I am
Yours affectionately,
ANN CHADWICH.
"Children!" said Mrs. Carey, folding the letter and slipping the check into the envelope for safety, "your Cousin Ann is really a very good woman."
"I wish her bed hadn"t come down with her," said Gilbert. "We could never have afforded to get that water into the house, or had the little furnace, and I suppose, though no one of us ever thought of it, that you would have had a hard time doing the work in the winter in a cold house, and it would have been dreadful going to the pump."
"Dreadful for you too, Gilly," replied Kathleen pointedly.
"I shall be at school, where I can"t help," said Gilbert.
Mrs. Carey made no remark, as she intended the fact that there was no money for Gilbert"s tuition at Eastover to sink gradually into his mind, so that he might make the painful discovery himself. His fees had fortunately been paid in advance up to the end of the summer term, so the strain on their resources had not been felt up to now.
Nancy had disappeared from the room and now stood in the doorway.
"I wish to remark that, having said a good many disagreeable things about Cousin Ann, and regretting them very much, I have placed the four black and white marble ornaments on my bedroom mantelpiece, there to be a perpetual reminder of my sins. You Dirty Boy is in a hundred pieces in the barn chamber, but if Cousin Ann ever comes to visit us again, I"ll be the one to confess that Gilly and I were the cause of the accident."
"Now take your pencil, Nancy, and see where we are in point of income, at the present moment," her mother suggested, with an approving smile.
"Put down the pension of thirty dollars a month."
"Down.--Three hundred and sixty dollars."
"Now the hundred dollars over and above the rent of the Charlestown house."
"Down; but it lasts only four years."
"We may all be dead by that time." (This cheerfully from Gilbert.)
"Then the interest on our insurance money. Four per cent on five thousand dollars is two hundred; I have multiplied it twenty times."
"Down.--Two hundred."
"Of course if anything serious happens, or any great need comes, we have the five thousand to draw upon," interpolated Gilbert.
"I will draw upon that to save one of us in illness or to bury one of us," said Mrs. Carey with determination, "but I will never live out of it myself, nor permit you to. We are five,--six, while Julia is with us," she added hastily,--"and six persons will surely have rainy days coming to them. What if I should die and leave you?"
"Don"t, mother!" they cried in chorus, so pa.s.sionately that Mrs. Carey changed the subject quickly. "How much a year does it make, Nancy?"
"Three hundred and sixty plus one hundred plus two hundred equals six hundred and sixty," read Nancy. "And I call it a splendid big lump of money!"
"Oh, my dear," sighed her mother with a shake of the head, "if you knew the difficulty your father and I have had to take care of ourselves and of you on five and six times that sum! We may have been a little extravagant sometimes following him about,--he was always so anxious to have us with him,--but that has been our only luxury."
"We saved enough out of exchanging the grand piano to pay all the expenses down here, and all our railway fares, and everything so far, in the way of boards and nails and Osh Popham"s labor," recalled Gilbert.
"Yes, and we are still eating the grand piano at the end of two months, but it"s about gone, isn"t it, Muddy?" Nancy asked.
"About gone, but it has been a great help, and our dear little old-fashioned square is just as much of a comfort.--Of course there"s the tapestry and the Van Twiller landscape Uncle gave me; they may yet be sold."
"Somebody"ll buy the tapestry, but the Van Twiller"ll go hard," and Gilbert winked at Nancy.
"A picture that looks just the same upside down as the right way about won"t find many buyers," was Nancy"s idea.
"Still it is a Van Twiller, and has a certain authentic value for all time!"
"The landscapes Van Twiller painted in the dark, or when he had his blinders on, can"t be worth very much," insisted Gilbert. "You remember the Admiral thought it was partridges nesting in the underbrush at twilight, and then we found Joanna had cleaned the dining room and hung the thing upside down. When it was hung the other end up neither father nor the Admiral could tell what it was; they"d lost the partridges and couldn"t find anything else!"
"We shall get something for it because it is a Van Twiller," said Mrs.
Carey hopefully; "and the tapestry is lovely.--Now we have been doing all our own work to save money enough to make the house beautiful; yet, as Cousin Ann says, it does not belong to us and may be taken away at any moment after the year is up. We have never even seen our landlord, though Mr. Harmon has written to him. Are we foolish? What do you think, Julia?"
XV
BELONGING TO BEULAH
The Person without a Fault had been quietly working at her embroidery, raising her head now and then to look at some extraordinary Carey, when he or she made some unusually silly or fantastic remark.
"I"m not so old as Gilbert and Nancy, and I"m only a niece," she said modestly, "so I ought not to have an opinion. But I should get a maid-of-all-work at once, so that we shouldn"t all be drudges as we are now; then I should not spend a single cent on the house, but just live here in hiding, as it were, till better times come and till we are old enough to go into society. You could scrimp and save for Nancy"s coming out, and then for Kathleen"s. Father would certainly be well long before then, and Kathleen and I could debut together!"
"Who wants to "debut" together or any other way," sniffed Nancy scornfully. "I"m coming out right here in Beulah; indeed I"m not sure but I"m out already! Mr. Bill Harmon has asked me to come to the church sociable and Mr. Popham has invited me to the Red Men"s picnic at Greentown. Beulah"s good for something better than a place to hide in!
We"ll have to save every penny at first, of course, but in three or four years Gilly and I ought to be earning something."
"The trouble is, I _can"t_ earn anything in college," objected Gilbert, "though I"d like to."
"That will be the only way a college course can come to you now, Gilbert," his mother said quietly. "You know nothing of the expenses involved. They would have taxed our resources to the utmost if father had lived, and we had had our more than five thousand a year! You and I together must think out your problem this summer."
Gilbert looked blank and walked to the window with his hands in his pockets.
"I should lose all my friends, and it"s hard for a fellow to make his way in the world if he has nothing to recommend him but his graduation from some G.o.d-forsaken little hole like Beulah Academy."
Nancy looked as if she could scalp her brother when he alluded to her beloved village in these terms, but her mother"s warning look stopped any comment.
Julia took up arms for her cousin. "We ought to go without everything for the sake of sending Gilbert to college," she said. "Gladys Ferguson doesn"t know a single boy who isn"t going to Harvard or Yale."
"If a boy of good family and good breeding cannot make friends by his own personality and his own qualities of mind and character, I should think he would better go without them," said Gilbert"s mother casually.
"Don"t you believe in a college education, mother?" inquired Gilbert in an astonished tone.