The new mistress of the Hall, in her vigorous young interest in all things, included naturally a keen enjoyment of the village love affairs, she liked to hear the histories of the old families all about, she wanted to know the occupants of every shabby old surrey that drew up at the post-office while the mail was being "sorted." But if the conversation turned to mere idle talk and speculation, she was conspicuously silent. And upon an occasion when Mrs. Adams casually referred to a favorite little piece of scandal, Mrs. Burgoyne gave the conversation a sudden twist that, as Mrs. White, who was present, said later, "made you afraid to call your soul your own."
"Do you tell me that that pretty little Thorne girl is actually meeting this young man, whoever he is, while her mother thinks she is taking a music lesson?" demanded Mrs. Burgoyne, suddenly entering into the conversation. "There"s nothing against him, I suppose? She COULD see him at home."
"Oh, no, he"s a nice enough little fellow," Mrs. White said, "but she"s a silly little thing, and I imagine her people are very severe with her; she never goes to dances or seems to have any fun."
"I wonder if we couldn"t go see the mother, and hint that there is beginning to be a little talk about Katherine," mused Mrs. Burgoyne.
"Don"t you think so, Mrs. Adams?"
"Oh, my goodness!" Mrs. Adams said nervously, "I don"t KNOW anything about it! I wouldn"t for the world--I never dreamed--one would hate to start trouble--Mr. Adams is very fond of the Thornes--"
"But we ought to save her if we can, we married women who know how mischievous that sort of thing is," Mrs. Burgoyne urged.
"Why, probably they"ve not met but once or twice!" Mrs. White said, annoyed, but with a comfortable air of closing the subject, and no more was said at the time. But both she and Mrs. Adams were a little uneasy two or three days later, when, returning from a motor trip, they saw Mrs. Burgoyne standing at the Thornes" gate, in laughing conversation with pretty little Katherine and her angular, tall mother.
"And there is nothing in that story at all," said Mrs. Burgoyne later, to Mrs. Carew.
"I suppose you walked up and said, "If you are Miss Thorne, you are clandestinely meeting Joe Turner down by the old mill every week!""
laughed Mrs. Carew.
"I managed it very nicely," Mrs. Burgoyne said, "I admired their yellow rose one day, as I pa.s.sed the gate. Mrs. Thorne was standing there, and I asked if it wasn"t a Banksia. Then the little girl came out of the house, and she happened to know who I am--"
"Astonishingly bright child!" said Mrs. Carew.
"Well, and then we talked roses, and the father came home--a nice old man. And I asked him if he"d lend me Miss Thorne now and then to play duets--and he agreed. So the child"s been up to the Hall once or twice, and she"s a nice little thing. She doesn"t care tuppence for the Turner boy, but he"s musical, and she"s quite music-mad, and now and then they "accidentally" meet. Her father won"t let anyone see her at the house.
She wants to study abroad, but they can"t afford it, I imagine, so I"ve written to see if I can interest a friend of mine in Berlin--But why do you smile?" she broke off to ask innocently.
"At the thought of your friend in Berlin!" said Mrs. Carew audaciously.
For she was not at all awed by Mrs. Burgoyne now.
Indeed, she and Mrs. Brown were growing genuinely fond of their new neighbor, and the occupants of the Hall supplied them with constant amus.e.m.e.nt and interest. Great lady and great heiress Sidney Burgoyne might be, but she lived a life far simpler than their own, and loved to have them come in for a few minutes" talk even if she were cutting out cookies, with Joanna and Ellen leaning on the table, or feeding the chickens whose individual careers interested her so deeply. She walked with the little girls to school every morning, and met them near the school at one o"clock. In the meantime she made a visit to the Mail office, and perhaps spent an hour or two there, or in the markets; but at least three times a week she wandered over to Old Paloma, and spent the forenoon in the dingy streets across the river. What she did there, perhaps no one but Doctor Brown, who came to have a real affection and respect for her, fully appreciated. Mrs. Burgoyne would tell him, when they met in some hour of life or death, that she was "making friends."
It was quite true. She was the type of woman who cannot pa.s.s a small child in the street. She must stop, and ask questions, decide disputes and give advice. And through the children she won the big brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers of Old Paloma. Even a deep-rooted prejudice against the women of her cla.s.s and their method of dealing with the less fortunate could not prevail against her disarming, friendly manner, her simple gown and hat, her eagerness to get the new baby into her arms; all these told in her favor, and she became very popular in the shabby little settlement across the bridge. She would sit at a sewing-machine and show old Mrs. Goodspeed how to turn a certain hem, she would prescribe barley-water and whey for the Barnes baby, she would explain to Mrs. Ryan the French manner of cooking tough meat, it is true; but, on the other hand, she let pale little discouraged Mrs. Weber, of the Bakery, show her how to make a German potato pie, and when Mrs. Ryan"s mother, old Mrs. Lynch, knitted her a shawl, with clean, thin old work-worn hands, the tears came into her bright eyes as she accepted the gift. So it was no more than a neighborly give-and-take after all. Mrs. Burgoyne would fall into step beside a factory girl, walking home at sunset. "How was it today, Nellie? Did you speak to the foreman about an opening for your sister?"
the rich, interested voice would ask. Or perhaps some factory lad would find her facing him in a lane. "Tell me, Joe, what"s all this talk of trouble between you and the Lacy boys at the rink?"
"I"m a widow, too," she reminded poor little Mrs. Peevy, one day, "I understand." "Do let me send you the port wine I used to take after Ellen was born," she begged one little sickly mother, and when she loaned George Manning four hundred dollars to finish his new house, and get his wife and babies up from San Francisco, the transaction was made palatable to George by her encouraging: "Everyone borrows money for building, I a.s.sure you. I know my father did repeatedly."
When more subtle means were required, she was still equal to the occasion. It was while Viola Peet was in the hospital for a burned wrist that Mrs. Burgoyne made a final and effective attempt to move poor little Mrs. Peet out of the bedroom where she had lain complaining, ever since the accident that had crippled her and killed her husband five years before. Mrs. Burgoyne put it as a "surprise for Viola," and Mrs. Peet, whose one surviving spark of interest in life centred in her three children, finally permitted carpenters to come and build a porch outside her dining-room, and was actually transferred, one warm June afternoon, to the wide, delicious hammock-bed that Mrs.
Burgoyne had hung there. Her eyes, dulled with staring at a chocolate wall-paper, and a closet door, for five years, roved almost angrily over the stretch of village street visible from the porch; the perspective of tree-smothered roofs and feathery elm and locust trees.
""Tisn"t a bit more than I"d do for you if I was rich and you poor,"
said Mrs. Peet, rebelliously.
"Oh, I know that!" said Mrs. Burgoyne, busily punching pillows.
"An", as you say, Viola deserves all I c"n do for her," pursued the invalid. "But remember, every cent of this you git back."
"Every cent, just as soon as Lyman is old enough to take a job," agreed Mrs. Burgoyne. "There, how"s that? That"s the way Colonel Burgoyne liked to be fixed."
"You"re to make a note of just what it costs," persisted Mrs. Peet, "this wrapper, and the pillers, and all."
"Oh, let the wrapper be my present to you, Mrs. Peet!"
"No, MA"AM!" said Mrs. Peet, firmly. And she told the neighbors, later, in the delightfully exciting afternoon and evening that followed her installation on the porch, that she wasn"t an object of charity, and she and Mrs. Burgoyne both knew it. Mrs. Burgoyne would not stay to see Viola"s face, when she came home from the hospital to find her mother watching the summer stars p.r.i.c.k through the warm darkness, but Viola came up to the Hall that same evening, and tried to thank Mrs.
Burgoyne, and laughed and cried at once, and had to be consoled with cookies and milk until the smiles had the upper hand, and she could go home, with occasional reminiscent sobs still shaking her bony little chest.
"What are you trying to do over there?" asked Dr. Brown, coming in with his wife for a rubber of bridge, as Viola departed. "Whereever I go, I come across your trail. Are we nursing a socialist in our bosom?"
"No-o-o, I don"t think I"m that," said Sidney laughing, and pushing the porch-chairs into comfortable relation. "Let"s sit out here until Mr.
Valentine comes. No, I"m not a socialist. But I can"t help feeling that there"s SOME solution for a wretched problem like that over there," a wave of the hand indicated Old Paloma, "and perhaps, dabbling aimlessly about in all sorts of places, one of us may hit upon it."
"But I thought the modern theory was against dabbling," said Mrs.
Brown, a little timidly, for she held a theory that she was not "smart." "I thought everything was being done by inst.i.tutions, and by laws--by legislation."
"Nothing will ever be done by legislation, to my thinking at least,"
Mrs. Burgoyne said. "A few years ago we legislated some thousands of new babies into magnificent inst.i.tutions. Nurses mixed their bottles, doctors inspected them, nurses turned them and washed them and watched them. Do you know what percentage survived?"
"Doesn"t work very well," said the doctor, shaking a thoughtful head over his pipe.
"Just one hundred per cent didn"t survive!" said Mrs. Burgoyne. "Now they take a foundling or an otherwise unfortunate baby, and give it to a real live mother. She nurses it if she can, she keeps near to it and cuddles it, and loves it. And so it lives. In all the asylums, it"s the same way. Groups are getting smaller and smaller, a dozen girls with a matron in a cottage, and hundreds of girls "farmed out" with good, responsible women, instead of enormous refectories and dormitories and schoolrooms. And the ideal solution will be when every individual woman in the world extends her mothering to include every young thing she comes in contact with; one doll for her own child and another doll for the ashman"s little girl, one dimity for her own debutante, and another just as dainty for the seventeen-year-old who brings home the laundry every week."
"Yes, but that"s puttering here and there," a.s.serted Mrs. Brown, "wouldn"t laws for a working wage do all that, and more, too?"
"In the first place, a working wage doesn"t solve it," Mrs. Burgoyne answered vigorously, "because in fully half the mismanaged and dirty homes, the working people HAVE a working wage, have an amount of money that would amaze you! Who buys the willow plumes, and the phonographs, and the enlarged pictures, and the hair combs and the white shoes that are sold by the million every year? The poor people, girls in shops, and women whose babies are always dirty, and always broken out with skin trouble, and whose homes are hot and dirty and miserable and mismanaged."
"Well, make some laws to educate "em then, if it"s education they all need," suggested the doctor, who had been auditing every clause of the last remark with a thoughtful nod.
"No, wages aren"t the question," Mrs. Burgoyne reiterated. "Why, I knew a little Swedish woman once, who raised three children on three hundred dollars a year."
"She COULDN"T!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mrs. Brown.
"Oh, but she did! She paid one dollar a week for rent, too. One son is a civil engineer, now, and the daughter is a nurse. The youngest is studying medicine."
"But what did they EAT, do you suppose?"
"Oh, I don"t know. Potatoes, I suppose, and oatmeal and baked cabbage, and soup. I know she got a quart of b.u.t.termilk every day, for three cents. They were beautiful children. They went to free schools, and lectures, and galleries, and park concerts, and free dispensaries, when they needed them. Laws could do no more for her, she knew her business."
"Well, education WOULD solve it then," concluded Mrs. Brown.
"I don"t know." Mrs. Burgoyne answered, reflectively, "Book education won"t certainly. But example might, I believe example would."
"You mean for people of a better cla.s.s to go and live among them?"
suggested the doctor.
"No, but I mean for people of a better cla.s.s to show them that what they are striving for isn"t vital, after all. I mean for us to so order our lives that they will begin to value cleanliness, and simplicity, and the comforts they can afford. You know, Mary Brown," said Mrs.
Burgoyne, turning suddenly to the doctor"s wife, with her gay, characteristic vehemence, "it"s all our fault, all the misery and suffering and sin of it, everywhere!"
"Our fault! You and me!" cried Mrs. Brown, aghast.
"No, all the fault of women, I mean!" Mrs. Burgoyne laughed too as Mrs.