Little Miss By-The-Day Part 27

Of course there was more than a possibility that Felicia might find something among Major Trenton's effects. The Portia Person was sure that another thirty days' stay could be secured to enable Felicia to go to the House in the Woods and see if she could find anything, but she made it quite clear to them that the old man's mental condition precluded the probability that he could be of any help to them.

"It's not fair--it's not fair--" her tempestuous heart beat angrily, "Always when I seem to find what I must have, it is as though I had found nothing. This is worse than when I lost Dudley Hamilt--it's not fair--"

She spoke the last three words aloud in her intensity, so bitterly, that the two men, packeting together the papers, turned quickly.

"It's beastly," agreed the Portia Person inadequately, "but you mustn't lose hope yet--"

She caught at his glib words eagerly.

"How silly of me! It was only the Tired part of me that spoke!" She smiled. "I am like Dulcie's Pandora a little. I have opened the box and let out all the troubles--but perhaps I haven't let out Hope-- probably everything is as right as right can be--in some of Grandy's papers--"

She was grateful that she had this hope to hold out to her "children"

--she thought of them always now as children, these folk who dwelt about her. Perhaps she caught that feeling from Molly, who mothered every one of them.

Of course the journey to the House in the Woods availed nothing. It only brought Felicia back, graver and quieter than ever. The Majorhadn't recognized her at all. He had merely called her Louisa and forbade her to go to Paris, and Piqueur, Margot, Bele, and Zeb had poured out their little troubles to her so that the trip had left her despondent.

She went back to her work dully; she st.i.tched as daintily and carefully as ever, but her whole spirit drooped. This was the end of all her high hopes and great dreams,--that in less than a fortnight she would have to give up the struggle.

At least she was very busy during those warm April days. She had amusing things to sew upon, little tarltan skirts for children who were to appear in a huge charitable "May Day" entertainment. They were of gay colors, those frills, like big holly-hocks, she thought as she flung the finished things into a hamper. She helped to make other costumes too, sitting with a score of seamstresses in the auditorium of one of the churches. These women talked a great deal about the entertainment. Naturally, each one of them talked only about the person or the committee who had hired her.

Yet engrossed in her anxieties for her household as she st.i.tched and st.i.tched Felicia listened not at all to the chatter about her. It was merely like the humming of the bees in her garden in the woods. She heard it but heeded it not, because her heart was intent upon her roses.

Because she was aware that the House would soon be taken away from her "children" she strove mightily to make these last days in it the most wonderful days in the garden of their lives. She never let them see that she feared. Just to hear her when she came home in the late afternoon was like listening to a symphony of inspiration. It began at the bas.e.m.e.nt door. How she braced herself for it! How she advanced, head up, lips smiling!

A word to Janet, grumbling over her cleaning; a quick grasp of Molly's warm hand--Molly was her hold on life in those discouraging days!

Molly, G.o.d bless her, would never admit defeat! Who fought out her part in the battle! She made their slender funds nourish their hungry bodies and she took nothing from Felicia but gave herself as royally as her little lady poured out herself to the others.

There was nothing sanctimonious about Felicia's handling of them. Like the old woman in the shoe, she scolded them "roundly." The Sculptor Girl still laughs over a never-to-be-forgotten-day, when Felice drifted into the nursery, her arms outstretched in droll swimming motions.

"Dulcie Dierckx! How dare you let me find you weeping again! When Pandora is almost here! I do declare you'll have to learn to swim and so will all of us if you're going to drip tears regularly, every day at five thirty--Molly says you're only hungry, n.o.body else is snivelling all over the place--"

"No, the lawyer c-c-cusses--" sobbed Dulcie.

"Then learn to cuss!" admonished Felice, but her eyes twinkled and the emotional Sculptor Girl's eyes twinkled back through her tears--all of them were for Felice, if that despotic person had only known it. For the young lawyer had been upstairs pouring out his despondent feelings on Dulcie,

"She has just about eight days more before she'll be dumped in the gutter, for there's no possible way out--"

A limp lot they were in the late afternoon, after they'd struggled all day with their unruly Muses and Pegasuses!

"Wouldn't it be droll," Felice asked Molly one day, "if I came home too tired some night and mixed them all up! And told the Inventor I thought his feeling was poetic and told Dulcie that she was getting a wonderful color into her work and talked about soul to the Cartoonist!" Sometimes it seemed to her that of all of them the Architect, with his head bent over his drawings under his evening lamp, typified the hopelessness of the whole scheme, as he wrought so painstakingly at his detailed drawings for the re-construction of the house, drawings that couldn't possibly ever be used! From some absurd fragment he would dreamily reconstruct--his adventures filled the house with nervous laughter.

As on the night when he discovered, high above the doorway in the bare old drawing-room, an ornate bit of copper grating that had escaped the clutches of the dirty filthy heathen. Most of the quaint old hot-tair registers--they had been wonderful bronze things--had been removed and ugly modern ones that did not fit had been subst.i.tuted. But this one grating--a delightful oval affair whereon chubby Vestal Virgins lifted delicate torches, had remained intact. The reason was plain enough, it was almost impossible to dislodge it. Even with the lawyer and the Cartoonist to help him, the enthusiastic Architect, balanced dangerously on one of Janet's ladders, could scarcely pry it loose. It was just after dinner. It had rained during the day so that the little garden was too damp for the evening and the whole household lingered idly in the bare drawing-room to tease the Architect. When the register was finally loosened, showers of ancient dust descended. The room echoed as with one mighty sneeze. Janet shrieked her dismay.

"Now look at the du-urt!" she wailed, "It's fairly in loomps and choonks!"

The Cartoonist stopped with an heroic sneeze to lift one of the "choonks." He dusted the bit of metal and bowed before Felicia.

"Here is the key to the secret chamber--" but Felicia instead of playing back with some mocking pretense as she usually did when any of them made melodramatic speeches to her, clasped her hands.

"Oh, how stupid I've been! That's the storeroom key! The one I threw away the day I was angry at Mademoiselle D'Ormy! And it tinkled down, down, down--" she was hurrying out of the room." All of us, now, we can go up--the store-room will be fun and maybe--" They were scrambling up the stairways, a laughing crew. "Bring something to break wood with you," called Felice over her shoulder, "for those shelves that Dulcie put over the door that we thought went into the front room--it doesn't go there! Wasn't I stupid! That's the door into the storeroom--it's the long narrow s.p.a.ce between the two walls and it had trunks and a bureau--"

It still had them! The men folks pulled out the dusty boxes into the immaculate neatness of the nursery floor and for the next two hours they delved and delved through the forgotten treasures. The Poetry Girl called it the "Night of a Thousand Hopes" but the Inventor sardonically added at midnight "of Blasted Hopes--"

The nursery looked like a New England attic when they had finished mauling. Felice gave things away recklessly, whenever one of them admired anything.

How they all shouted at the Painter Boy when he triumphantly pulled forth a sage green taffeta frock with long bell sleeves, voluminous skirts and quaintly square-cut neck.

"Look! all of us!" he shouted buoyantly as he limped across the room to hold it against Felicia's shoulders, "here's her color!"

"Put it on her!" begged the Architect's wife. In the end the women dressed her in it while the men folk trooped down stairs to mess Molly's speckless kitchen with their masculine ideas of how to make lemonade.

She curtsied to the Painter Boy good-humoredly.

"I don't feel at all like me! I feel like Josepha or Louisa or whoever she was who wore it--" she laughed. Her laughter was tremulous in spite of her bravest efforts. They were all of them on the ragged edge of tears. They'd hoped so that the storeroom would give the house back to them! Only the Painter Boy seemed not to care. He waited, his eyes gleaming, until after the others had trooped off to their own quarters, each with his or her bit of the loot. He caught at the hanging green sleeve. For that was the night the Painter Boy came into his own. The night he knew that he was going to paint The Spirit of Romance.

"You're so paintable!" he begged, "I know it's rotten to ask you to sit for me, you're so busy now with all of us on your mind and the sewing and posing for Dulcie that you'll think you just can't--but oh, Dulcie Dierckx--look at her! Isn't she paintable!"

Dulcie agreed she was.

Felicia shook her head.

"It's only the frock, Nor'. I'll lend it to you, I can't quite give it to you, I love it so--but you shall have a really model--we'll manage somehow--and you shall paint the frock--that's what's paintable--"

Of course in the end she didn't refuse him. She never refused them anything she could possibly manage, but it was rather difficult to find the time. She never knew exactly how she found it.

It was in the "paintable" green dress that she "pretended" her way to fame and it came about this way. Without actually realizing it she was getting accustomed to a fairly large audience on the Sunday afternoons when she whistled for the Wheezy's friends. They were so eager to hear her and their chance visitors were so numerous that the Matron arranged for her to do her "pretending" in the chapel hall at the front of the Home. And it was there that an enthusiastic member of the May Day committee chanced to hear her, one suns.h.i.+ny April Day, an enterprising member who bluntly asked Felicia Day if she wouldn't "pretend" for the May Day program at the Academy of Music. It didn't occur to Felicia to make excuses, especially when the committee member explained things a bit. The only thing at which she balked at all was when the energetic person murmured, "Name please?"

"I'm not--anybody--" explained Felicia, "I'm not even sure myself who I am--"

"But we have to have a name to print on the program--"

This was the first time that anybody who'd been asked to appear hadn't eagerly supplied much information as to middle initials!

"Vairee well," suggested Felicia, "we shall make up a name. I shall be called Madame Folie--no, Mademoiselle Folly--will that suit? Then if it has been a mistake to put me on your program that will be a small joke, eh?"

It looked very well indeed, "Vairee business-like"--

"Number 17--DIVERTISs.e.m.e.nT--Mademoiselle Folly in PRETENSES"

She didn't even bother to tell them about it at home. It seemed to her as casual as the Sunday afternoons when she whistled for [her accustomed audience of] the Wheezy and her friends. That is until the hectic morning when she obeyed a summons to rehearsal in the empty, auditorium--Felicia always says that the rehearsal was worse than May Day night! So too were the behind-the-scenes confusions and the nervous moments while the makeup artist dabbled her cheeks with rouge and pencilled her eyes--_that_ left her limp with stage fright.

After all, she thought as she waited her turn, "It's only for ten minutes! And an encore if they like me!"

The moment when she actually faced her first big audience--a tired and fluttering and yawning audience, for two hours of Brooklyn amateur talent will wilt even the most valiant listeners!--she had but one thought, and that was--that there wasn't any pattern to an audience!

Other thoughts raced like lightning.

"But I must remember to smile. They are persons and I have to please them, they're sounding rather fretty--"