Who? Why? Whence? Whither? What for? These were some of the questions that assailed Marm Lisa’s mind, but in so incoherent a form that she left them, with all other questions, unanswered. Atlantic and Pacific were curious, too, but other passions held greater sway with them; for when the children disappeared and the music ceased, they called loudly for more, and usually scratched and pinched Marm Lisa as they were lifted down from the fence; not seeing daily how anybody else could be held answerable for the cessation of the entertainment, and scratches and pinches being the only remedial agencies that suggested themselves.
On this particular occasion there were no bells, no music, and no mysterious swarming; but the heavenly apparition sat on the broad steps. Yes, it was she! Blue-grey eyes with darker lashes sweeping the warm ivory of her cheeks, sweet true lips for ever parting in kind words, the white surplice and apron, and the rememberable steel fillet. She had a little child in her lap (she generally had, by the way), and there were other tots clinging fondly to her motherly skirts. Marm Lisa stood at the foot of the steps, a twin glued to each side. She stared at Mistress Mary with open-mouthed wonder not unmixed with admiration.
‘That same odd child,’ thought Mary. ‘I have seen her before, and always with those two little vampires hanging to her skirts. She looks a trifle young to have such constant family cares; perhaps we had better “lend a hand.”’
‘Won’t you come in?’ she asked, with a smile that would have drawn a sane person up the side of a precipice.
Atlantic turned and ran, but the other two stood their ground.
‘Won’t you come up and see us?’ she repeated. ‘There are some fishes swimming in a glass house; come and look at them.’
Marm Lisa felt herself dragged up the steps as by invisible chains, and even Pacific did not attempt to resist the irresistible. Atlantic, finding himself deserted by his comrades, gave a yell of baffled rage, and scrambled up the steps after them. But his tears dried instantly at the sight of the room into which they were ushered; as large as any of the halls in which Aunt Cora spent her days, and how much more beautiful! They roved about, staring at the aquarium, and gazing at the rocking-horse, the piano, the drum, the hanging gardens, with speechless astonishment. Lisa shambled at their heels, looking at nothing very long; and when Rhoda (one of the neophytes), full of sympathy at the appearance of the wild, forlorn, unkempt trio, sat herself down on a sofa and gathered them about a wonderful picture-book, Mistress Mary’s keen eyes saw that Lisa’s gaze wandered in a few minutes. Presently she crept over the floor towards a table, and, taking a string from it, began to blow it to and fro as it hung from her fingers. Rhoda’s glance followed Mary’s; but it was only a fleeting one, for the four eyes of the twins were riveted on hers with devouring eagerness, while they waited for her explanation of the pictures. At the end of half an hour, in which the children had said little or nothing, they had contrived to reveal so many sorrowful and startling details of their mental, moral, and physical endowment, that Mistress Mary put on her hat.
‘I will go home with them,’ she said. ‘There is plenty of work here for somebody; I could almost hope that it won’t prove ours.’
‘It will,’ replied Rhoda, with a stifled sigh. ‘There is an old Eastern legend about the black camel that comes and lies down before the door of him upon whom Heaven is going to lay her chastening hand. Every time I have seen that awful trio on the fence-top, they were fairly surrounded by black camels in my imagination. Mistress Mary, I am not sure but that, in self-defence, we ought to become a highly specialised Something. We are now a home, a mother, a nursery, a labour bureau, a divorce court, a registry of appeals, a soup kitchen, an advisory hoard, and a police force. If we take her, what shall we be?’
‘We will see first where she belongs,’ smiled Mary. (Nobody could help smiling at Rhoda.) ‘Somebody has been neglecting his or her duty. If we can make that somebody realise his delinquencies, all the better, for the responsibility will not be ours. If we cannot, why, the case is clear enough and simple enough in my mind. We certainly do not want “Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin” written over this, of all doors.’
Rhoda’s hand went up to an imaginary cap in a gesture of military obedience. ‘Very well, my general. I fly to prepare weapons with which to fight Satan. You, of course, will take her; oh, my dear, I’m almost afraid you oughtn’t! I choose the bullet-headed blonde twin who says his name is “Lanty,” and reserve for Edith the bursting-with-fat brunette twin who calls herself “Ciffy.” Edith’s disciplinary powers have been too much vaunted of late; we shall see if Ciffy ruffles her splendid serenity.’
III
A FAMILY POLYGON
Mrs. Grubb’s family circle was really not a circle at all; it was rather a polygon—a curious assemblage of distinct personages.
There was no unity in it, no membership one of another. It was four ones, not one four. If some gatherer of statistics had visited the household, he might have described it thus:—
Mrs. S. Cora Grubb, widow, aged forty years.
‘Alisa Bennett, feeble-minded, aged ten or twelve years.
‘Atlantic and Pacific Simonson, twins, aged four years.’
The man of statistics might seek in vain for some principle of attraction or cohesion between these independent elements; but no one who knew Mrs. Grubb would have been astonished at the sort of family that had gathered itself about her. Queer as it undoubtedly was at this period, it had, at various times, been infinitely queerer. There was a certain memorable month, shortly after her husband’s decease, when Mrs. Grubb allowed herself to be considered as a compensated hostess, though the terms ‘landlady’ and ‘boarder’ were never uttered in her hearing. She hired a Chinese cook, who slept at home; cleared out, for the use of Lisa and the twins, a small storeroom in which she commonly kept Eldorado face-powder; and herself occupied a sofa in the apartment of a friend of humanity in the next street. These arrangements enabled her to admit an experimenter on hypnotism, a mental healer who had been much abused by the orthodox members of her cult, and was evolving a method of her own, an ostensible delegate to an Occidental Conference of Religions, and a lady agent for a flexible celluloid undershirt. For a few days Mrs. Grubb found the society of these persons very stimulating and agreeable; but before long the hypnotist proved to be an unscrupulous gentleman, who hypnotised the mental healer so that she could not heal, and the Chinese cook so that he could not cook. When, therefore, the delegate departed suddenly in company with the celluloid-underwear lady, explaining by a hurried postal card that they would ‘remit’ from Chicago, she evicted the other two boarders, and retired again to private life.
This episode was only one of Mrs. Grubb’s many divagations, for she had been a person of advanced ideas from a comparatively early age. It would seem that she must have inherited a certain number of ‘views,’ because no human being could have amassed, in a quarter of a century, as many as she held at the age of twenty-five. She had then stood up with Mr. Charles Grubb, before a large assembly, in the presence of which they promised to assume and continue the relation of husband and wife so long as it was mutually agreeable. As a matter of fact it had not been mutually agreeable to Mr. Grubb more than six months, but such was the nobility of his character that he never disclosed his disappointment nor claimed any immunity from the responsibilities of the marriage state. Mr. Grubb was a timid, conventional soul, who would have given all the testimony of all the witnesses of his wedding ceremony for the mere presence of a single parson; but he imagined himself in love with Cora Wilkins, and she could neither be wooed nor won by any of the beaten paths that led to other women. He foolishly thought that the number of her convictions would grow less after she became a wife, little suspecting the fertility of her mind, which put forth a new explanation of the universe every day, like a strawberry plant that devotes itself so exclusively to ‘runners’ that it has little vigour left for producing