repeated Dot, gravely. “Why, that’s the name of the lady that lives next to Uncle Rufus’ Petunia. She couldn’t be that little baby’s mother for she’s – oh! —awful black!”
“Aggie was speaking of another Venus, Dot,” laughed Ruth. “Fasten those little candle-holders securely, Aggie.”
“Sure!” agreed the second, and slangy, sister.
“I really wish we could light the whole room with candles, and not have the gas at all,” Ruth said. “It would be much nicer. Don’t you think so?”
“It would be scrumptious!” Aggie cried. “And you’ve got such a lot of those nice, fat, bayberry candles. Let’s do it!”
“But there are not enough candlesticks.”
“You can get ’em at the five-and-ten-cent store,” proposed Tess, who favored that busy emporium, “because you can get such a lot for your money!”
“Goosey!” exclaimed Agnes. “We don’t want cheap ones. How would they look beside those lovely old silver ones of Uncle Peter Stower’s?” and she turned to look at the great candelabra on the highboy.
Just then the door from the butler’s pantry opened slowly and a grizzled, kinky head, with a shiny, brown, bald spot on top, was thrust into the room.
“I say, missie!” drawled the voice belonging to the ancient head, “is yo’ done seen anyt’ing ob dat denim bag I has fo’ de soiled napkins? Pechunia, she done comin’ fo’ de wash, an’ I got t’ collect togeddah all I kin fin’ dis week. Dat fool brack woman,” Uncle Rufus added with disgust, “won’t do but dis one wash twill happen New Years – naw’m! She jes’ got t’ cel’brate, she say. Ma’ soul! what’s a po’, miserble nigger woman got t’ cel’brate fo’ Ah asks ye?”
“Why, Uncle Rufus!” cried Agnes. “Christmas is a birthday that everybody ought to celebrate. And I’m sure Petunia has many things to make her happy.”
“Just look at all her children!” put in Tess.
“Alfredia, and Jackson Montgomery Simms, and little Burne-Jones Whistler and Louise Annette,” Dot began to intone, naming the roll of Petunia Blossom’s piccaninnies.
“Don’t! Stop!” begged Agnes, with her hands over her ears and sitting down on the top step of the ladder.
“Ma soul!” chuckled Uncle Rufus, “if chillens come lak’ Chris’mus presents, all de rich w’ite folks would hab ’em an’ de po’ nigger folks would be habbin’ wot de paper calls ‘race sooincide’ – sho’ would!”
“I haven’t seen the laundry bag, Unc’ Rufus,” said Ruth, deep in thought.
Here Dot spoke up. “I ‘spect I know where it is, Unc’ Rufus,” she said.
“Wal! I ‘spected some ob yo’ chillen done had it.”
“You know,” said Dot, seriously, “my Alice-doll is real weakly. The doctors don’t give me much ’couragement about her. Her lungs are weak – they have been, you know, ever since that awful Trouble girl buried her with the dried apples.”
“Dat Lillie Treble. Ah ‘members hit – sho!” chuckled Uncle Rufus, the Corner House girls’ chief factotum, who was a tall, thin, brown old negro, round shouldered with age, but “spry and pert,” as he said himself.
“And the doctors,” went on Dot, waxing serious, and her imagination “working over time,” as Neale O’Neil would have said, “say it’s best for folks with weak lungs to sleep out of doors. So Neale’s built her a sleeping porch outside one of the windows in our bedroom – Tess’ and mine – and – and I used your napkin bag, Unc’ Rufus, for a sleeping-bag for my Alice-doll! I couldn’t find anything else that fitted her,” confessed the smallest Corner House girl.
“Well! of all the children!” cried Agnes, having taken her hands down from her ears to hear this.
“You shouldn’t have taken the bag without permission,” Ruth gravely told Dot.
But Uncle Rufus chuckled over it to a great extent. “Nebber did see de beat of dese young-uns!” he gasped finally. “If yo’ Uncle Peter was alive he sartain sho’ would ha’ laffed hisself up out’n hes sick-bed. Ma soul an’ body! W’y didn’t he know enough t’ hab yo’uns yere in de ol’ Corner House w’ile he was alive, ‘stid o’ waitin’ till he was daid t’ gib it t’ yo’?”
He would have gone out chuckling, only Ruth called after him: “Unc’ Rufus! Do you know if there are any more candlesticks around the house? Nice, heavy ones, I mean – good enough to put in the dining room here, and for company to see.”
“Candlesticks, missie? I ’spect dere is,” said the old negro man.
“Do you know where?” Ruth asked quickly.
“Bress yo’, honey! I ‘speck dey is up in de attic,” he said. “I don’ jes’ know whar – ”
“Oh, I know! I know!” cried Agnes, suddenly. “Over in that corner of the garret that we never cleaned, Ruth.”
“Did we fail to clear up any part of the garret?” asked the older girl, doubtfully.
“The place Tommy Rooney hid in when he was the attic goat,” Dot said solemnly.
“Ghost!” admonished Tess. “I do wish you’d get your words right, Dot Kenway.”
“I remember seeing some old brass candlesticks there,” Agnes went on to explain to Ruth. “They can be polished, I should think. They’re all green now.”
“Of course,” said Ruth, cheerfully. “Let’s go and look for them.”
“Oh, I want to go!” cried Dot, at once.
“May we all go, sister?” asked Tess.
“Of course you may come, kiddies,” said Agnes, hopping down from her perch.
They all trooped up the three flights of stairs to the huge garret, Dot leaving her “sleeping” needle sticking in a puff-ball of popcorn.
The front hall of the old Corner House, as Milton folk called the Stower homestead on the corner of Willow Street, opposite the Parade Ground, was two stories high.
Broad stairs, dividing when half way up into two separate flights, rose out of the middle of the reception hall, lined with its old-fashioned, walnut, haircloth furniture. A gallery ran all around the stair-well, off which opened the guest chambers of the house. Only one of these was in use. Aunt Sarah Maltby had it. Aunt Sarah was determined to have the best there was of everything.
The girls slept in rooms in one of the two ells, on this second floor. Above, in the third story of the same ell, slept Mrs. MacCall, their good Scotch housekeeper, and Linda, the Finnish girl. Uncle Rufus was stowed away in the other ell, in a little room he had occupied for almost twenty-six years. Uncle Rufus had been Uncle Peter Stower’s only retainer for many, many years before the Kenway girls came to live at the old Corner House.
Up another flight of stairs, the girls trooped to the garret, that extended the entire length and breadth of the main portion
