Chapter VII: The Dove's Alighting

"IT'S all my fault," cried Margery repentantly, assuming the blame and the duty of repairing the damage to the snowy pine table at one and the same time. "I promised to look after the bread and put it into the oven, and between Aunt Keren's going and our trip to the attic, I never thought of it again. Bread is not such a simple thing; I wish we could buy our bread, as we did in town."

"No work is simple I find, dear," said her mother. "It takes all kinds of qualities to do anything well--which accounts for the prevalence of poor labor. Never mind the bread; it is beyond sweetening by any amount of soda. We will make more to-night, and subsist on biscuits and buckwheat cakes for dinner and supper."

"Buckwheat cakes are far from simple," Happie remarked, suggestively surveying a burn on her forefinger, the result of her recent failure with the delicacy in question.

"The cakes are simple; it's the griddle where the stick comes," said Margery.

"Literally, if you mean the sticking," smiled her mother.

Laura, standing with her face pressed against the steaming glass of the window pane, sighed heavily. Mrs. Scollard turned and crossing over to her side, looked for a moment out upon the reeking scene. The rain poured down in torrents, swept sidewise across the fields by the roaring wind. The ground looked black at a little distance, the trees bent their bare boughs to the storm's fury; not a sound, not a human being lightened the desolation of the outlook.

The lonely woman felt her heart tighten under the grip of a fresh tide of homesickness. Miss Bradbury had been trying of late to encourage her by hinting that if she were not perfectly restored to health in the autumn, she could spend the winter in the Ark, so at the worst there was no reason for anxiety. But what a life to lead, to condemn her clever children to! How could she bear it? Then the courage that made her all that she was, the courage that Happie had inherited, rose to answer her own question. She could bear it because she must bear it; she would fight for her health, and be able once more to work and to live for her children.

"When this storm has spent itself," she said brightly, "we shall see the spring fairly leaping forward in all its loveliness. This is a sort of aftermath of all winter's fury. It can't last long with such a wind as this raging, and when it passes you girls will find arbutus and hepatica, anemones, and very soon violets. It is going to be a wonderful country for flowers, for all sorts of beauty. I think we shall hear song birds in Crestville that we never heard before, and fancy what it will be to hunt for wild flowers at the foot of those glorious mountains! I think there could hardly be a more splendid view than ours."

Happie crept up and peeped slyly over her mother's shoulder. She saw a moisture on the long lashes that belied the blithe tone and the enthusiasm.

"It's just a trifle dim now, motherums," was all that Happie said, but the tone in which she said it made the words what they were meant to be--the salute of a good soldier to the courage of his superior officer.

"Oh, by and by will be a sweeter by and by, of course," Margery chimed in. "I suppose we shall all feel better when it clears up."

The dinner that day did not promise to be precisely a success. Polly and Penny had risen superior to the weather in such a game of romps that the baby appeared upon the scene decidedly cross. Bob came in wet through and exhausted from a tussle with the barn door which had to be rehung upon its broken hinges to protect the books still lying in their packing cases, stored in the rickety building. He found it impossible to talk; his muscles ached, he had pounded his thumb black and blue in his efforts at carpentering, and creeping chills, the result of his wetting, chased one another down his spine.

All that Happie had said of the preponderance of eggs in their limited bill of fare was strictly true. It was hard to consider a dinner satisfactory when its main dish was scrambled eggs, after one had had boiled eggs for breakfast, and was looking forward to fried eggs for supper. Dishes too had to be washed as they went along, for the supply of kitchen utensils was low until the mistress of the house should return with reinforcements.

"When we were in New York we turned a faucet, and took it for granted that hot water in the sink was a natural institution, like a hot spring. Now that we have to heat every drop we begin to realize it was a sort of phenomenon," sighed Margery, lifting the teakettle to the forward hole of the stove, and signaling Bob to put in another stick of wood before she set it down.

"We will hope that Aunt Keren may find the clean, rosy-cheeked young girl, or even the brown-faced-elderly-woman variation of the theme which Margery suggested," said Mrs. Scollard. "It is rather a struggle alone, without conveniences."

"There's a woman coming down the road, mama," said Polly, whose face, with Penny's, was pressed against the steaming window, looking out upon the universal wetness.

Laura dropped the towel, held ready for wiping dishes, though the water was not yet warm, and ran to look.

"She's very wet, mama, and she's fearfully long," Laura announced.

"And she's heading for here!" cried Bob, as if that were the acme of wonders.

"Can she be a lost Bittenbender?" suggested Happie.

The tall woman came in, when bidden to do so, and set herself, marvelously erect, on the edge of a chair.

"It's a very severe rain," remarked Mrs. Scollard, somewhat at loss how to treat her unexpected visitor.

"I've seen worse rains than this already," retorted the angular one. "Do you like it here?"

"We shall grow to be very fond of the place," said Mrs. Scollard cautiously. "We are trying not to be homesick. You see we have always lived in New York."

"And you are doing your own work yet!" exclaimed the visitor. "I heard you wasn't use to doin' nothin'. It's bad enough to be strangers without takin' all the hard jobs to once, yet! I wouldn't care if I was to help you a while; I've got time."

"Do you mean that you would stay here?" cried Mrs. Scollard, eagerly.

"Yes; I don't care if I do," answered the woman. "You just say so once, and I'll stay."

"Are you a losted Bippenbender? Happie said so," Penny cried shrilly and unexpectedly.

"A Bittenbender? What do you know about the Bittenbenders? No, I hain't a Bittenbender. I'm poor enough in money without bein' poor truck yet. My name's Rosie Gruber," said the stranger with an air of forever setting at rest any possible doubt as to her desirability.

Margery and Happie exchanged a sly glance of amusement; anything less like a rose than their caller would have been hard to find. But the important point was that she was willing to stay and do housework.

Mrs. Scollard, feeling that Miss Keren-happuch's quest was more than uncertain, and that almost any risk was better than their certain troubles, engaged her on the spot, and was as delighted as she was amused to see their new-bloomed Rose take off her wet hat, remove her long overshoes, produce from under the skirt of her own gown a blue checked gingham apron, and go down on her knees, instanter, to rake the ashes out from the stove.

"This fire's pretty near out," she remarked. "If you want to eat at twelve--you do, don't you?--you've got to get your potatoes over pretty soon, and this fire'll need an hour to get up. Your wood's almost all; hadn't you ought to git some?"

"Almost all what?" asked Bob. "Isn't it right; anything wrong with it?"

"It's almost all," repeated Rose firmly. "All--don't you know what that is? How many sticks do you see there? Isn't it almost all? Nothin' wrong with the wood if they was more of it. Say, there hain't nothin' wrong with the boy, is they? He looks so sorter dumb at a body yet!"

"He didn't quite understand," said Mrs. Scollard gently, as Bob turned away to conceal the broad grin spreading over his face as he caught their new acquisition's meaning, and Happie bolted from the room.

Peculiarities of dialect did not affect the relish of the dinner which this hardy Rose served at thirteen minutes after twelve. Everything did taste so good to the hungry, weary and lonely Scollards! Margery and Happie renewed their duets of old Patty-Pan days as they dried Rosie's dishes, and their mother sat down to write Miss Bradbury of her coming, and to tell her that she might return at once to the bosom of a greatly cheered family, for the maid they wanted had found them, and search for her on their side was no longer necessary.

The storm cleared away in the night, and the glorious sunrise of the morning ushered in the spring. With it came soft brooding days in which the grass and leaves wakened to life, the birds dropped down from the warm sky in daily increasing kinds and numbers, and the flowers of early May lifted up their delicate little faces. Polly and Penny came home daily with wilting hepatica and anemones and violets in their warm little hands, while the older children sought and found on their rambles the arbutus whose sweetness the winds bore into the chambers of the Ark, past the dainty new curtains.

Rosie proved a comfort in spite of angularity of form and peculiarities of speech. She was such a balm to perturbed minds and weary muscles that the children privately referred to her as "the Dove," for her coming had been the harbinger of peace to the Ark. She evidently regarded the entire family as helpless infants, needing her unceasing care and vigilance, and she gave them no less than she deemed they needed, piloting them through the waters of inexperience.

Miss Bradbury wrote that she was coming back. Margery and Happie speculated on the effect of Rosie and her employer on each other, but Happie felt sure that they would get on together, for each was in her way a character, and their sterling honesty was of much the same pattern.

Aunt Keren was going to bring them something that they would enjoy, "a species of toy," so she wrote, yet something that she hoped to make useful. They must get Jake to bring his three-seated wagon to the station if the young Scollards came to meet her, as she hoped they would.

They did, or at least Margery, Happie and Bob did, consumed with curiosity as to what they should find encumbering Miss Bradbury.

When she stepped briskly off the car on the steps which the grade of the track at Crestville compelled the porter to place for passengers, the Scollards saw her encumbrance, and hailed it with a shout. There, dismounting behind Miss Keren-happuch, so thoroughly laden that there seemed no question that lady was already making him useful, his cheerful face one mass of smiles, came Ralph Gordon!

Happie and Bob dashed at him regardless of a man with a fishing-pole, come up for trout, and collided violently with the combination. The brief mishap, though it left the traveler furious, did not dampen Happie's ardor. She shook both Ralph's hands so hard, and exclaimed: "Well, I never did!" so emphatically, and so many times, that there was no doubt of her pleasure at seeing her former neighbor. Bob slapped him on the back with such abandon that Ralph swallowed whole the durable black licorice drop with which he had been beguiling the last moments of the journey, and choked over it so violently that he had no breath to reply to the questions his friends hurled at him in rapid succession.

"I thought that you might like a guest, a crumb from your Patty-Pans, so to speak," said Miss Bradbury, surveying the effect of her surprise with much satisfaction. "Ralph has had a cold, and has been working too hard," she explained. "I need a boy to help Bob, so I took this one. I shall expect you to keep him hard at work, allowing no time for talk or play. How's your Charlotte-mother?"

"Better for your return, Aunt Keren," said Margery sweetly, but truthfully.

"What about Snigs?" asked Happie.

"At home with his mother," returned Aunt Keren. "But he will come up in the summer, by August, if not before."

"Is Ralph----" Happie began, but stopped herself before she had framed a question that might have been awkward to answer.

Miss Keren-happuch finished it for her. "Going to stay?" she said. "Yes, he is, or at least until something happens to call him home. Mrs. Gordon yielded to my arguments, and consented to lending him to us. I told her we needed him, especially Bob. So I captured him. Curious that I went to get a girl, and brought home a boy, an altogether unforeseen boy."

Jake Shale drove slowly up the hill. The young people talked incessantly, and all together. Miss Bradbury listened in a pleased silence that betrayed itself in her eyes, for her lips were unbending. She saw that already the effect of her transplanting the Scollards showed; they were blossoming out like the season under the warmth of freedom from anxiety.

Miss Bradbury found to her surprise that she herself was glad to get home, and thought of her coming in those terms. Down in the bottom of her staunch old heart, the good woman had not looked forward to a summer in the Ark with less than dread.

The children took Ralph out at once to display to him all the interesting points of Miss Bradbury's estate, leaving its owner to their mother, and to form the acquaintance of Rose Gruber, "the Dove," whose olive branch was waxing greener in the eyes of all the "Archeologists," as Bob called the inmates of the Ark. Though Happie said that she thought they "were more like Architects, for the dictionary said they made, built, planned, contrived, and that was a full description of the Scollards."

"The creek is high," Rosie called after Bob and Happie, as they followed Margery and Ralph out the side door.

"We are going over to it on our way back," Happie answered over her shoulder. "It does seem to me a pity to call a beautiful trout brook 'a crick,' just as if it were a sort of rheumatism! Brooks sound like lovely things, but cricks!" She ended her supplementary remarks to her companions with a tiny shudder.

"Books are in running brooks; is that why you like them?" suggested Ralph. "Or is it because they chatter, chatter as they flow--fellow feeling, you know?" He glanced slyly at Happie. "Creeks ought to chatter even more than brooks, being an American variety."

There was an old grist mill half a mile away from the Ark, turned, when it did turn, by a beautiful stream, a trout brook made up of many mountain springs, rising far up in the hills, and rushing through Madison County to the river, which should bear them on to the sea. Clear and brown were the waters of this brook, its bottom paved with stones, its banks, rising steep on the one side, and gently sloping on the other, grown with ferns, luxuriant with rhododendrons, and surmounted with pines, spruce and giant maples. It was an enchanted region to the Scollards, city bred, and "Patty-Pan" set hitherto. They were delighted to take Ralph to the brook and show him that if the Ark were shabby, the country was perfect--they discovered a strong sense of proud proprietorship in their breasts as they introduced Ralph to their haunts, and it dawned upon them that they must be beginning to feel at home.

The brook was indeed high that day; the falls over the mill-dam were yellow from the upstirring of recent rains, boiling and seething over the logs creditably to their exhibitors, and the foam-flecked waters ran swiftly down, under the bridge that crossed the road to their goal.

"Well, do you raise mermaids?" asked Ralph, pointing out into the middle of the stream. Then before the others could speak, his face and voice changed, and he cried out: "Good gracious, it's Penny!"

It was Penny, seated on a log which for the moment had lodged midstream, held by a rock which could not hold it long. In her arms the child held something yellow; Jeunesse Dorée, Happie saw at once. She looked wet, her soft hair hung heavy around her pale little face, but she held up her head valiantly, and clasped the kitten safe and dry to her breast.

"Happie, oh, Happie!" she cried, as she saw the group on the bank, and held out a hand appealingly. It nearly cost her balance; she shook on her perilous seat, and Margery hid her face, while Happie caught her breath.

Then she raised her voice and called: "Hold on, hold on tight, darling. Bob's coming!" As she spoke the log swung loose, and floated a few feet farther down the stream. Bob dashed out into the water, and Ralph followed him. The brook was so high, the motion of the water so swift that there was danger for one alone, should he lose his footing, and Bob could not swim.

Steadying each other, the two boys waded out, keeping upright with difficulty, and watching the rigid little figure towards which they were struggling, fearing every moment that it would be jarred from its perch.

The rocks were slippery under their feet, the water rose well above their knees, logs and debris came against them, the log drifted ahead of them, always a little further out of reach. Suddenly it struck against the support of the bridge, and Penny's head disappeared under the water.

It was Ralph, who, letting go of Bob's shoulder, threw himself downward towards the spot where the child had disappeared. As he did so, he heard the cry of anguish from the girls on the bank. He remembered, with a prayer in his heart, that the little creature would drift far more swiftly than the heavy log had done.

But in an instant she rose further down the stream, and Ralph struggled to his feet and threw himself towards her, instinctively realizing that he could reach her quicker by falling in her direction than by striving to walk or to swim in that seething water. Little Penny's devotion to her kitten was meeting its reward; clasping it tight to her breast, she could not throw up her arms, and her light body floated long enough for Ralph to seize it.

He pulled her towards him by her pink skirt, and Bob, seeing the rescue, darted to his aid, lost his footing, fell headlong into the water, but reached his friend nevertheless, and the two boys, with Penny and Dorée, clambered up under the bridge none the worse for their experience.

The terror-stricken girls ran, slipping and stumbling over rocks and roots, to join them, and nearly dismembered Penny in the effort to hug her simultaneously.

"We mustn't let mother see her like this; it would shock her too much even to think of the danger now it's over," said Margery. "We will take her to the barn and get Rosie to come there with water for a hot bath, and we'll put dry clothes on the darling, and mother shall not know of this till we are sure Penny's no worse for the scare. What were you doing, Pennypet? How did you get on that dreadful log, out in the middle of the brook?"

"I sat on it up by the dam," said Penny cheerfully--she was the least frightened of the excited group. "The log was up there when I began to sit on it, and Dorée was playing with me. He was playing he was a goldfish and I was a pink water lily--'cause I've got on my pinkie chamray, don't you see?" Penny indicated her best beloved pink chambray frock as she spoke, looking ruefully at its wet folds. "Then the log wented off--oh, Dorée and I played the goldfish had crawled up into the pink water lily, and we were having the most fun! That's 'cause I was holding him, don't you see? He had crawled up into the pink water lily, truly. But the log wented down the brook, and we didn't know it was going, but I wasn't much scared; I could hold Dorée, don't you see? And you came--I didn't know Ralphie had come to the Nark!" She reached over to pat Ralph's face. "I guess I could have sat on it ever so long--days 'n days!--only it bumped. I don't think Dorée's hurt." She peered anxiously at shivering Dorée, who was wrapped in her wet garments, making desperate efforts to get away and lick himself dry.

"I don't think he's at all hurt, you precious baby!" cried Happie. "Give me Dorée; I can keep him warmer than you can, because you're so wet. There! Now boys, hurry as fast as you can! You're both soaking, and I'm afraid Penny'll be sick, and I'm shaking with cold; I'm so nervous. Run!"

They ran, and by the time they had reached the barn, both the boys were warmed up. Rosie came out and rubbed Penny into a glow, put her into dry garments, and sent her forth, apparently as good as new.

Margery and Happie told the story of their adventure to Aunt Keren, but not to their mother, who was not yet strong enough to be startled.

Miss Bradbury listened to it without a comment, but when it was finished, she laid a hand caressingly on Ralph's arm. "I said I needed a boy! But I didn't know I needed a coast guard," she remarked. "You have begun your career in the Ark appropriately, Ralph; pulling in people from the flood!"