Little Miss By-The-Day Part 8

She could scarcely wait for morning to impart her wonderful news to Grandy and the others.

"Some say it can be done within five years, but ye author believes from experiences both at Versailles and in ye south of England that a decade or more is necessary to establish any garden--"

Which warning from the fat brown leather book made it easier for Felice, you see, because she never hoped to accomplish the garden in a little time. Besides, Piqueur was, as Octavia had foretold "too old."

But it was Margot--oh, heaven-sent Margot, and the adoring, clumsy Bele who toiled like four men, and so cabinet by cabinet, parterre by parterre, terrace by terrace, the superb old garden began to grow lovely once more.

Think of the victory of the summer when the hedges were at last properly trimmed! Think of the joy of the flatly rolled turf, the spring that they found a ma.s.sive iron roller in an unused shed at the back of the carriage house! Think of the wonder of that day when the little fountain laughed again, its pipe unchoked and its overflow trickling neatly away under the hidden terra-cotta drains!

The busy days lost themselves in weeks, the weeks dripped endlessly from season to season. By the time the second spring had come it was as though Felicia had lived in the House in the Woods forever.

The only links with the old life were the two or three visits of Certain Legal Matters; and as Felice hated him as much as ever she hid herself all she could during his short stays.

It was during his second visit that Felicia had her first real encounter with the doughty lawyer. It was in March that he came, and Felicia and Margot were deep in their spring plans. They needed a great many things that they didn't have for the garden. It was practical Margot who suggested casually,

"Why couldn't you ask Mr. Burrel? He could send them to the junction and I could go with the oxen--I have always asked him for vegetable seeds when I sent the spring list of supplies--write in a paper, Cherie, all that we need--put down the roses and the trees and the lily bulbs and all--tell him that he must send them."

She was rather cunning about it, was Felice. She waited until the lawyer was strolling impatiently in the gallery waiting for the cart to drive around from the stable. She approached him boldly, holding out her list.

"These are some things we need for our garden," she said. "You will please have them sent at once."

He stared at the imperious young creature. It was the first time she had ever voluntarily spoken with him. He took the list. He was very ill at ease.

"I am not certain," he began as he stared amazed at the lengthy order, "that I can arrange for--er--"

Inwardly quaking Felice answered him. Her low voice sounded astonis.h.i.+ngly calm to her.

"But we must have them," she announced. She played her trump card valiantly, "You can give it back to me if you can't get them, I have another person--who can attend to--Certain Legal Matters for me--" Her voice trailed faintly, she was really rather frightened.

"May I ask whom?" the lawyer demanded in amazement.

"I know where he is," she a.s.serted childishly. "He is in Temple Bar, Brooklyn, and he would get them for me quickly, I'm sure. You see, in April we shall need these things for the planting. He told me--" she added this with delicious positiveness, "to remember to let him know if you did not manage things properly."

The cart had clattered around now, Piqueur was waiting politely. The lawyer frankly gaped at her, his eyes narrowed. He looked very pale in the afternoon light. His thick hand reached out for the list.

"I--I will see that you get what you wish, Miss Felicia--" he capitulated. "You do not need to ask any one else about it--I'm glad to do you the favor--"

And all the way across the Pine Plains to the station he questioned Piqueur as to whether the Major or Felice had had any visitors. But Piqueur, who had always hated the lawyer, cunningly evaded the cross- examination. And in less than a week after Burrel's departure Margot drove the ox-cart across the plains and brought it back fairly laden with florists' crates and boxes.

Life was not all easy. Keeping the Major happy grew more and more difficult. If Felicia found the House in the Woods joyous, he did not.

He brooded restlessly save for the hours they spent together over the chess board or at dinner; sometimes he slowly paced the long gallery or the hallways, but more often he sat gloomily, his hand on his cane, his chin resting on his hand and looked sadly across the terrace where Felice directed her workers. He, like Piqueur, was growing "too old."

He was really seventy-four that summer. Margot knew when his birthday came and tried to make a little feast but he ignored it. He tried to pretend a polite interest in the reconstruction of the garden but his heart was not in it. He liked better to sit indoors in his carved chair. Even on the warmest days when evening came he wanted a fire kindled on the chilly marble hearth.

Felicia labored patiently at "making him happy." She had long since made him a partner in her own game that she called pretending.

"Pretending" just as in the old days when she had played with Maman.

Of course, she had to whistle to pretend and he still affected a scorn of the whistling he had once forbidden. The "pretending" usually took place directly after dinner. She would kiss the top of his forehead audaciously and dance before him with a deep curtsy.

"Let's pretend, Grandy! Let's pretend I'm not Felice! Let's pretend I'm a blanchisseuse--that's a washerlady. This is a thing that Piqueur's mother learned in France when she was young--whenever Margot and I spread our linen on the gra.s.s to bleach we whistle this--"

Or sometimes she would demurely a.s.sure him that she was, "--a girl who's pulling roses to sell the man who makes perfume--" She would s.n.a.t.c.h up her needlework basket and swing it at her hip and pull the roses down from the mantelpiece vases and all the while she would whistle, with her dear little chin perkily lifted and her sparkling eyes watching to see if the Major was listening.

The song he liked best of all was the song of the hunt. I think he liked the audacity with which she appropriated his peaked hat and perched it jauntily on her own head and caught away his cane to use for a riding crop. "This song," she would explain joyously, "is for autumn, when all the men and women are waiting on their restless horses for the master of the hunt to blow his horn--" Her cupped hands at her lips made a beautiful horn and her whistle rang valiantly in the great ceilinged room but the hunting song usually lost itself in a whirr of laughter and frills as the huntress dropped breathless on the footstool at the Major's side and put her sleek head against his knee.

"Grandy," she whispered once, "You stub-stub-stubborn man! Why don't you learn to pretend! Why don't you make believe they're all here?"

she waved her hand toward the portraits around them! "I pretend they're proud, proud, proud I'm here! It must have been vairee stupid for them before I came!"

The Major was not her only audience. She frequently "pretended" for Margot and Piqueur and Bele, prancing gaily-about them in their snug kitchen on the long winter evenings when they huddled by their fire.

For them she whistled all the droll bits of Marthy's songs that she remembered. Piqueur only listened solemnly, with his smothered briar pipe held politely in his hand; but Margot, buxom, and red cheeked with her iron gray hair tucked under her flaring cap would sit and gape and laugh and quite forget her knitting whenever she could hear,

"He who would woo a widow must not dally He must make hay while the sun doth s.h.i.+ne He must not say 'Widow, be mine--be mine!--'"

Felicia's absurd whine for the timorous lover always made Bele snort from his corner,

"But boldly cry 'Widow, thou MUST--'"

Ah, the deep contralto of that boyish voice of hers roundly mouthing the pompous swain's wooing!

She could always make Margot cry when she "pretended" _The Wreck of the Polly Ann_--with her gray eyes wide with excitement as she described the rolling waves from the top of the rigging! I don't suppose she ever knew all of the words of any of these songs or ballads, she never did any of them quite the same any time, but she caught at the plot and she babbled a sc.r.a.p or two of the chorus and she always knew every lilting turn of the tunes.

There was one "pretend" she could only do when she was alone. She did not try it often. Sometimes on the spring nights when the tender breezes let the half-awakened wistaria flutter outside her window, she would blow out all her candles and lean far across the sill and stare at her unfinished garden.

And when the house was still, oh, heart-breakingly still, she would kneel beside the bed and whisper,

"Let's pretend! Let's pretend we're back in your room, Maman! Let's pretend it's THAT NIGHT! Let's pretend they've just brought me in from the garden! And that you're laughing a little because you've heard him say,

"'Second cap I've lost here! Lost one when I was a little shaver!

There was a girl--why, girl--!'

"Oh Maman! Maman! If you'd only been there! You wouldn't have brought me away!"

She kept the choir boy's black velvet cap in the lowest drawer of the wardrobe. Once Margot saw it when she was tidying things.

"I don't remember this--" she murmured curiously.

And Felicia had s.n.a.t.c.hed it away jealously and cuddled it under her chin.

"Because that's mine!" she had retorted pa.s.sionately, "It's mine!

Mine! And it didn't belong evaire to any other woman only me!"

And the years slipped away like Time in Maitre Guedron's song and every year the garden grew a little lovelier and every year Felicia grew a little more sedate and every year Piqueur and the Major grew "too old." Until Piqueur no longer left his fireside and as for the Major--well, there came a day when the Major fell prostrate by the staircase and lay for a long time breathing very hard. That was a terrifying time until Bele brought a doctor from the village. He was a good little doctor, round faced and pink cheeked, quite the youngest thing, save Bele, that Felicia had seen in many years. And he pulled the Major back to something like life--a something that played chess very slowly and sometimes called Felicia Octavia and sometimes querulously murmured,

"Louisa, I forbid you to go to Paris--it's a bad business--"

She "pretended" nothing in these days, simply went gravely about the myriad tasks that awaited her, directing the stupid Bele, helping the white haired Margot, sitting proudly at the head of the table smiling across at a black eyed old gentleman who muttered and fumbled peevishly at his food or quite forgot to eat at all until she coaxed him. She always smiled at dinner; one should smile at dinner even though one feels very, very sad. And after dinner one must make an attempt to give a querulous old man his game of chess. And let his cold lips caress one's hand when Bele comes to put him to bed.

But after that, especially if it was spring, she would wander restlessly in her garden or pace back and forth in her high ceilinged bed chamber. And sometimes she would kneel beside her window and murmur a little prayer--she didn't know it was a prayer, it was just a sc.r.a.p of something she remembered--

"'I can't get out--I can't get out!' cried the starling," which isn't in any prayer book of course, save the prayer book of a woman's imprisoned heart.