Children's Book Classics - Kate Douglas Wiggin Edition: 11 Novels & 120+ Short Stories for Children. Kate Douglas Wiggin
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of your happy inspirations about that girl, Margaret,—she is a born story-teller. She ought to wander about the country with a lute under her arm. Is the Olivers’ house insured?”
“Good gracious, Jack! you have a kangaroo sort of mind! How did you leap to that subject? I’m sure I don’t know, but what difference does it make, anyway?”
“A good deal of difference,” he answered nervously, looking into the library (yes, Polly had gone out); “because the house, the furniture, and the stable were burned to the ground last night,—so the morning paper says.”
Mrs. Bird rose and closed the doors. “That does seem too dreadful to be true,” she said. “The poor child’s one bit of property, her only stand-by in case of need! Oh, it can’t be burned; and, if it is, it must be insured. I ‘m afraid a second blow would break her down completely just now, when she has not recovered from the first.”
Mr. Bird went out and telegraphed to Dr. George Edgerton;—
Is Oliver house burned? What was the amount of insurance, if any? Answer.
JOHN BIRD.
At four o’clock the reply came:—
House and outbuildings burned. No insurance. Have written particulars. Nothing but piano and family portraits saved.
GEORGE EDGERTON.
In an hour another message, marked “Collect,” followed the first one:—
House burned last night. Defective flue. No carelessness on part of servants or family. Piano, portraits, ice-cream freezer, and wash-boiler saved by superhuman efforts of husband. Have you any instructions? Have taken to my bed. Accept love and sympathy.
CLEMENTINE CHADWICK GEEENWOOD.
So it was true. The buildings were burned, and there was no insurance.
I know you will say there never is, in stories where the heroine’s courage is to be tested, even if the narrator has to burn down the whole township to do it satisfactorily. But to this objection I can make only this answer: First, that this house really did burn down; secondly, that there really was no insurance; and thirdly, if this combination of circumstances did not sometimes happen in real life, it would never occur to a story-teller to introduce it as a test for heroes and heroines.
“Well,” said Mrs. Bird despairingly, “Polly must be told. Now, will you do it, or shall I? Of course you want me to do it! Men never have any courage about these things, nor any tact either.”
At this moment the subject of conversation walked into the room, hat and coat on, and an unwonted color in her cheeks. Edgar Noble followed behind. Polly removed her hat and coat leisurely, sat down on a hassock on the hearth rug, and ruffled her hair with the old familiar gesture, almost forgotten these latter days.
Mrs. Bird looked warningly at the tell-tale yellow telegrams in Mr. Bird’s lap, and strove to catch his eye and indicate to his dull masculine intelligence the necessity of hiding them until they could devise a plan of breaking the sad news.
Mrs. Bird’s glance and Mr. Bird’s entire obliviousness were too much for Polly’s gravity. To their astonishment she burst into a peal of laughter.
“‘My lodging is on the cold, cold ground,
And hard, very hard is my fare!’”
she sang, to the tune of “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms.” “So you know all about it, too?”
“How did you hear it?” gasped Mrs. Bird.
“I bought the evening paper to see if that lost child at the asylum had been found. Edgar jumped on the car, and seemed determined that I should not read the paper until I reached home. He was very kind, but slightly bungling in his attentions. I knew then that something was wrong, but just what was beyond my imagination, unless Jack Howard had been expelled from Harvard, or Bell Winship had been lost at sea on the way home; so I persisted in reading, and at last I found the fatal item. I don’t know whether Edgar expected me to faint at sight! I ‘m not one of the fainting sort!”
“I ‘m relieved that you can take it so calmly. I have been shivering with dread all day, and Jack and I have been quarreling as to which should break it to you.”
“Break it to me!” echoed Polly, in superb disdain. “My dear Fairy Godmother, you must think me a weak sort of person! As if the burning down of one patrimonial estate could shatter my nerves! What is a passing home or so? Let it burn, by all means, if it likes. ‘He that is down need fear no fall.’”
“It is your only property,” said Mr. Bird, trying to present the other side of the case properly, “and it was not insured.”
“What of that?” she asked briskly. “Am I not housed and fed like a princess at the present moment? Have I not two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, and am I not earning twenty-five dollars a month with absolute regularity? Avaunt, cold Fear!”
“How was it that the house was not insured?” asked Mr. Bird.
“I ‘m sure I don’t know. It was insured once upon a time, if I remember right; when it got uninsured, I can’t tell. How do things get uninsured, Mr. Bird?”
“The insurance lapses, of course, if the premium is n’t regularly paid.”
“Oh, that would account for it!” said Polly easily. “There were quantities of things that were n’t paid regularly, though they were always paid in course of time. You ought to have asked me if we were insured, Edgar,—you were the boy of the house,—insurance is n’t a girl’s department. Let me see the telegrams, please.”
They all laughed heartily over Mrs. Greenwood’s characteristic message.
“Think of ‘husband’ bearing that aged ice-cream freezer and that leaky boiler to a place of safety!” exclaimed Polly. “‘All that was left of them, left of six hundred!’ Well, my family portraits, piano, freezer, and boiler will furnish a humble cot very nicely in my future spinster days. By the way, the land did n’t burn up, I suppose, and that must be good for something, is n’t it?”
“Rather,” answered Edgar; “a corner lot on the best street in town, four blocks from the new hotel site! It’s worth eighteen hundred or two thousand dollars, at least.”
“Then why do you worry about me, good people? I ‘m not a heroine. If I were sitting on the curbstone without a roof to my head, and did n’t know where I should get my dinner, I should cry! But I smell my dinner” (here she sniffed pleasurably), “and I think it ‘s chicken! You see, it’s so difficult for me to realize that I ‘m a pauper, living here, a pampered darling in the halls of wealth, with such a large income rolling up daily that I shall be a prey to fortune-hunters by the time I am twenty! Pshaw! don’t worry about me! This is just the sort of diet I have been accustomed to from my infancy! I rather enjoy it!”
Whereupon Edgar recited an impromptu nonsense verse:—
“There ‘s a queer little maiden named Polly,
Who always knows when to be jolly.
When ruined by fire
Her spirits rise higher.
This most inconsistent Miss Polly.”
Chapter XVI.
The Candle Called Patience
The burning of the house completely prostrated Mrs. Clementine Churchill Chadwick Greenwood, who, it is true, had the actual shock of the conflagration to upset her nervous system, though she suffered no financial loss.
Mr. Greenwood was heard to remark that he wished he could have foreseen that the house would burn down, for now he should have to move anyway,