mended the seat of his little trousers. And father looked and looked at the house and said, ‘Bless its heart!’ and said if he were rich he would buy the dear thing that afternoon and sleep in it that night; and asked you if you didn’t wish you’d married the other man, and you said there never was another man, and you asked father if he thought on the whole that he was the poorest man in the world, and father said no, the very richest, and he kissed us all round, do you remember?”
“Do I remember? O Nancy, Nancy! What do you think I am made of that I could ever forget?”
“Don’t cry, Muddy darling, don’t! It was so beautiful, and we have so many things like that to remember.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Carey, “I know it. Part of my tears are grateful ones that none of you can ever recall an unloving word between your father and mother!”
“The idea,” said Nancy suddenly and briefly, “is to go and live in that darling house!”
“Nancy! What for?”
“We’ve got to leave this place, and where could we live on less than in that tiny village? It had a beautiful white-painted academy, don’t you remember, so we could go to school there,—Kathleen and I anyway, if you could get enough money to keep Gilly at Eastover.”
“Of course I’ve thought of the country, but that far-away spot never occurred to me. What was its quaint little name,—Mizpah or Shiloh or Deborah or something like that?”
“It was Beulah,” said Nancy; “and father thought it exactly matched the place!”
“We even named the house,” recalled Mother Carey with a tearful smile. “There were vegetables growing behind it, and flowers in front, and your father suggested Garden Fore-and-Aft and I chose Happy Half-Acre, but father thought the fields that stretched back of the vegetable garden might belong to the place, and if so there would be far more than a half-acre of land.”
“And do you remember father said he wished we could do something to thank the house for our happy hour, and I thought of the little box of plants we had bought at a wayside nursery?”
“Oh! I do indeed! I hadn’t thought of it for years! Father and you planted a tiny crimson rambler at the corner of the piazza at the side.”
“Do you suppose it ever ‘rambled,’ Muddy? Because it would be ever so high now, and full of roses in summer.”
“I wonder!” mused Mother Carey. “Oh! it was a sweet, tranquil, restful place! I wonder how we could find out about it? It seems impossible that it should not have been rented or sold before this. Let me see, that was five years ago.”
“There was a nice old gentleman farther down the street, quite in the village, somebody who had known father when he was a boy.”
“So there was; he had a quaint little law office not much larger than Peter’s playhouse. Perhaps we could find him. He was very, very old. He may not be alive, and I cannot remember his name.”
“Father called him ‘Colonel,’ I know that. Oh, how I wish dear Addy was here to help us!”
“If he were he would want to help us too much! We must learn to bear our own burdens. They won’t seem so strange and heavy when we are more used to them. Now go to bed, dear. We’ll think of Beulah, you and I; and perhaps, as we have been all adrift, waiting for a wind to stir our sails, ‘Nancy’s idea’ will be the thing to start us on our new voyage. Beulah means land of promise;—that’s a good omen!”
“And father found Beulah; and father found the house, and father blessed it and loved it and named it; that makes ever so many more good omens, more than enough to start housekeeping on,” Nancy answered, kissing her mother goodnight.
Chapter VII.
“Old Beasts Into New”
Mother Carey went to sleep that night in greater peace than she had felt for months. It had seemed to her, all these last sad weeks, as though she and her brood had been breasting stormy waters with no harbor in sight. There were friends in plenty here and there, but no kith and kin, and the problems to be settled were graver and more complex than ordinary friendship could untangle, vexed as it always was by its own problems. She had but one keen desire: to go to some quiet place where temptations for spending money would be as few as possible, and there live for three or four years, putting her heart and mind and soul on fitting the children for life. If she could keep strength enough to guide and guard, train and develop them into happy, useful, agreeable human beings,—masters of their own powers; wise and discreet enough, when years of discretion were reached, to choose right paths,—that, she conceived, was her chief task in life, and no easy one. “Happy I must contrive that they shall be,” she thought, “for unhappiness and discontent are among the foxes that spoil the vines. Stupid they shall not be, while I can think of any force to stir their brains; they have ordinary intelligence, all of them, and they shall learn to use it; dull and sleepy children I can’t abide. Fairly good they will be, if they are busy and happy, and clever enough to see the folly of being anything but good! And so, month after month, for many years to come, I must be helping Nancy and Kathleen to be the right sort of women, and wives, and mothers, and Gilbert and Peter the proper kind of men, and husbands, and fathers. Mother Carey’s chickens must be able to show the good birds the way home, as the Admiral said, and I should think they ought to be able to set a few bad birds on the right track now and then!”
Well, all this would be a task to frighten and stagger many a person, but it only kindled Mrs. Carey’s love and courage to a white heat.
Do you remember where Kingsley’s redoubtable Tom the Water Baby swims past Shiny Wall, and reaches at last Peacepool? Peacepool, where the good whales lie, waiting till Mother Carey shall send for them “to make them out of old beasts into new”?
Tom swims up to the nearest whale and asks the way to Mother Carey.
“There she is in the middle,” says the whale, though Tom sees nothing but a glittering white peak like an iceberg. “That’s Mother Carey,” spouts the whale, “as you will find if you get to her. There she sits making old beasts into new all the year round.”
“How does she do that?” asks Tom.
“That’s her concern, not mine!” the whale remarks discreetly.
And when Tom came nearer to the white glittering peak it took the form of something like a lovely woman sitting on a white marble throne. And from the foot of the throne, you remember, there swam away, out and out into the sea, millions of new-born creatures of more shapes and colors than man ever dreamed. And they were Mother Carey’s children whom she makes all day long.
Tom expected,—I am still telling you what happened to the famous water baby,—Tom expected (like some grown people who ought to know better) that he would find Mother Carey snipping, piecing, fitting, stitching, cobbling, basting, filing, planing, hammering, turning, polishing, moulding, measuring, chiselling, clipping, and so forth, as men do when they go to work to make anything. But instead of that she sat quite still with her chin upon her hand, looking down into the sea with two great blue eyes as blue as the sea itself. (As blue as our own mother’s blue velvet bonnet, Kitty would have said.)
Was
