“Upon my word, if I caught him misbehaving nowadays, I believe I should hesitate to remonstrate with him. He will soon be capable of remonstrating with me, at this rate. He is a goose,—oh, there ‘s no shadow of doubt as to that, but he ‘s an awfully nice goose.”
Mrs. Bird’s letter ran thus:—
“MY DEAREST POLLYKINS:–-We have lived without you just about as long as we can endure it. The boys have returned to school and college. Mr. Bird contemplates one more trip to Honolulu, and brother John and I need some one to coddle and worry over. I have not spoken to you of your future, because I wished to wait until you opened the subject. It is too late for you to begin your professional training this year, and I think you are far too delicate just now to undertake so arduous a work; however, you are young, and that can wait for a bit. As to the story-telling in the hospitals and asylums, I wish you could find courage and strength to go on with that, not for your own sake alone, but for the sake of others.
“As I have told you before, the money is set aside for that special purpose, and the work will be carried on by somebody. Of course I can get a substitute if you refuse, and that substitute may, after a little time, satisfy the impatient children, who flatten their noses against the window-panes and long for Mias Pauline every day of their meagre lives. But I fear the substitute will never be Polly! She may ‘rattle round in your place’ (as somebody said under different circumstances), but she can never fill it! Why not spend the winter with us, and do this lovely work, keeping up other studies if you are strong enough? It will be so sweet for you to feel that out of your own sadness you can comfort and brighten the lives of these lonely, suffering children and these motherless or fatherless ones. It will seem hard to begin, no doubt; but new life will flow in your veins when you take up your active, useful work again. The joyousness that God put into your soul before you were born, my Polly, is a sacred trust. You must not hide it in a napkin, dear, or bury it, or lose it. It was given to you only that you should share it with others. It was intended for the world at large, though it was bestowed upon you in particular. Come, dear, to one who knows all about it,—one whom you are sweet enough to call
“YOUR FAIRY GODMOTHER.”
“Mrs. Noble,” said Polly, with a sober smile, “the Ancon sails on the 20th, and I am going to sail with her.”
“So soon? What for, dear?”
“I am going to be a banian-tree, if you please,” answered Polly.
Chapter XV.
Life in the Birds’ Nest
Polly settled down in the Birds’ Nest under the protecting wing of Mrs. Bird, and a very soft and unaccustomed sort of shelter it was.
A room had been refurnished expressly for the welcome guest, and as Mrs. Bird pushed her gently in alone, the night of her arrival, she said, “This is the Pilgrim Chamber, Polly. It will speak our wishes for us.”
It was not the room in which Polly had been ill for so many weeks; for Mrs. Bird knew the power of associations, and was unwilling to leave any reminder of those painful days to sadden the girl’s new life.
As Polly looked about her, she was almost awed by the dazzling whiteness. The room was white enough for an angel, she thought. The straw matting was almost concealed by a mammoth rug made of white Japanese goatskins sewed together; the paint was like snow, and the furniture had all been painted white, save for the delicate silver lines that relieved it. There were soft, full curtains of white bunting fringed with something that looked like thistle-down, and the bedstead had an overhanging canopy of the same. An open fire burned in the little grate, and a big white and silver rattan chair was drawn cosily before it. There was a girlish dressing-table with its oval mirror draped in dotted muslin; a dainty writing-desk with everything convenient upon it; and in one corner was a low bookcase of white satinwood. On the top of this case lay a card, “With the best wishes of John Bird,” and along the front of the upper shelf were painted the words: “Come, tell us a story!” Below this there was a rich array of good things. The Grimms, Laboulaye, and Hans Christian Andersen were all there. Mrs. Ewing’s “Jackanapes” and Charles Kingsley’s “Water-Babies” jostled the “Seven Little Sisters” series; Hawthorne’s “Wonder-Book” lay close to Lamb’s “Tales from Shakespeare;” and Whittier’s “Child-Life in Prose and Poetry” stood between Mary Howitt’s “Children’s Year” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Child’s Garden of Verses.”
Polly sat upon the floor before the bookcase and gloated over her new treasures, each of which bore her name on the fly-leaf.
As her eye rose to the vase of snowy pampas plumes and the pictured Madonna and Child above the bookcase, it wandered still higher until it met a silver motto painted on a blue frieze that finished the top of the walls where they met the ceiling.
Polly walked slowly round the room, studying the illuminated letters: “And they laid the Pilgrim in an upper chamber, and the name of the chamber was Peace.”
This brought the ready tears to Polly’s eyes. “God seems to give me everything but what I want most,” she thought; “but since He gives me so much, I must not question any more: I must not choose; I must believe that He wants me to be happy, after all, and I must begin and try to be good again.”
She did try to be good. She came down to breakfast the next morning, announcing to Mrs. Bird, with her grateful morning kiss, that she meant to “live up to” her room. “But it’s going to be difficult,” she confessed. “I shall not dare to have a naughty thought in it; it seems as if it would be written somewhere on the whiteness!”
“You can come and be naughty in my bachelor den, Polly,” said Mr. Bird, smiling. “Mrs. Bird does n’t waste any girlish frills and poetic decorations and mystical friezes on her poor brother-in-law! He is done up in muddy browns, as befits his age and sex.”
Polly insisted on beginning her work the very next afternoon; but she had strength only for three appointments a week, and Mrs. Bird looked doubtfully after her as she walked away from the house with a languid gait utterly unlike her old buoyant step.
Edgar often came in the evenings, as did Tom and Blanche Mills, and Milly Foster; but though Polly was cheerful and composed, she seldom broke into her old flights of nonsense.
On other nights, when they were alone, she prepared for her hours of story-telling, and in this she was wonderfully helped by Mr. Bird’s suggestions and advice; for he was a student of literature in many languages, and delighted in bringing his treasures before so teachable a pupil.
“She has a sort of genius that astonishes me,” said he one morning, as he chatted with Mrs. Bird over the breakfast-table.
Polly had excused herself, and stood at the farther library window, gazing up the street vaguely and absently, as if she saw something beyond the hills and the bay. Mrs. Bird’s heart sank a little as she looked at the slender figure in the black dress. There were no dimples about the sad mouth, and was it the dress, or was she not very white these latter days?—so white that her hair encircled her face with absolute glory, and startled one with its color.
“It is a curious kind of gift,” continued Mr. Bird, glancing at his morning’ papers. “She takes a long tale of Hans Andersen’s, for instance, and after an hour or two, when she has his idea fully in mind, she shows me how she proposes to tell it to the younger children at the Orphan Asylum. She clasps her hands over her knees, bends forward toward the firelight, and tells the story with such simplicity and earnestness that I am always glad she is looking the other way and cannot see the tears in my eyes. I cried like a school-girl last night over ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ She has natural dramatic instinct, a great deal of facial expression, power of imitation, and an almost unerring taste in the choice of words, which is unusual in a girl so young and one who has been so imperfectly trained. I give