CHAPTER I
Her Great Idea
“Jack, Jack, I have had a truly wonderful inspiration!” cried Pam as she came dashing down the stairs like a whirlwind.
Unfortunately Barbara, the little maid-of-all-work, was at that moment toiling upwards with the soup tureen and a pile of plates on a tray. She was near the top, too, and very much out of breath. She had no strength to stand against the violent impact, but went down before it, being brought up in a heap at the turn of the stairs while tray, tureen, and plates went careering to the bottom, accompanied by a stream of soup.
“Now you’ve done it!” exclaimed Jack, with an ominous growl in his voice, as, leaning on his stick, he came limping from the kitchen to survey the ruins.
“Oh, haven’t I just!” cried Pam in heartfelt contrition. Then she gasped: “Whatever will Mother say?”
The afflicted Barbara, who still lay at the bend of the stairway where she had fallen, burst into noisy crying at this. She had been dismissed from her last place for ravages among the crockery, and if she had to leave the house of Mrs. Walsh for a similar cause, where would her character be?
“Dry up!” burst out Jack impatiently. “We have too much moisture here already by the look of it.” As he spoke he hopped aside to let a rivulet of soup go past him. Such good soup it had been too! The savoury odours steamed up under his nose, and as he was desperately hungry the waste was all the more exasperating.
Just at this moment the green baize door at the top of the stairs opened smartly, and Greg called down: “Jack, Mother says don’t let Barbara bring up the soup for another ten minutes, because Colonel Seaford has ’phoned to say that he can’t be here till then.”
“What luck!” exclaimed Pam. “Come along, Barbara, we can make a fresh lot of soup in ten minutes, and we will serve it in a salad bowl and porridge plates. Dear me, nothing is ever so bad that it might not be worse!”
“You can’t make soup out of nothing, and there is not a teacupful of stock in the house,” growled Jack.
“Wait and see!” laughed Pam, as she lightly sprang over the ruins at the bottom of the stairs, dodged brown rivulets of soup that meandered along the floor, and darted in at the kitchen door. “Come along, Barbara! England expects, &c.”
“If you had done your duty and looked where you were going, the soup would not have been spilled,” growled Jack, but Pam was too busy to heed him.
Seizing the empty soup saucepan, she half-filled it with hot water from the boiler and set it over the fire. Then she darted to the table, where she stood busily stirring, mixing, and pounding, calling all the time for a succession of things which Barbara was quick to supply. “There, that will do, I think,” she exclaimed in great satisfaction. “Corn flour, tomato powder, salt, pepper—a good lot of that—Worcester sauce, burnt sugar, and a dash of shrimp sauce just by way of piquancy. Very nice to look at, and interesting to taste; not very nourishing, perhaps, but that will not matter for once.”
The hot water was poured on the concoction, the stuff was returned to the saucepan and brought to the boil; then, the ten minutes being up, Pam carried the emergency soup to the dining-room herself, while Barbara collected the fragments of broken earthenware and swabbed up the river of soup with a grubby mop.
“Well, you take the cake, and no mistake about it, in rising to the occasion!” admitted Jack with grudging admiration, as he limped about the kitchen, getting ready for the fish course, and seeing that other things were keeping in a state of readiness.
Pam’s merry laugh rang out. “It is a mercy I can do so much, for it is my fate to be always creating situations that call for dispatch and skill in the managing.”
Jack looked at her in silent wonder. Somehow he always was wondering at Pam. It was barely more than half an hour by the clock since she had been drowned in tears because of that curt letter from Lady Dalby, who had written to say that as she could not have Miss Walsh when she needed her so much, she had secured another governess. Pam’s salary had not been much, but in poverty like theirs every little counts. There was the doctor’s bill for Muriel’s illness, with all the other bills which had sprung from the same source, while winter was coming on. But it was of no use to “grouse” over things, it did not make them the least bit better. So he left off speculating about Pam, and ordered Barbara round in fine style for the next twenty minutes, and the courses of the dinner went up one by one until it was all over.
When coffee had been taken to the drawing-room, Greg and Sid cleared the dinner-table, and then came down to their supper in the breakfast-room, which opened out of the kitchen. Pam, who had rushed upstairs to see if Muriel was comfortably asleep, came hurrying back to help in washing up the silver and glass.
Then, “What is your great idea?” asked Jack, who was seated on a high stool at the table, and was rapidly polishing the spoons and forks which Pam had washed.
She glanced round, saw that the door of the scullery, where Barbara was washing plates and dishes, was a little way open, and darting across the room closed it softly.
“Jack!” she cried, with positive rapture in her tone, as she plunged her hands into the soapy water again, “Jack, I am going to ask Mother to let me go to Grandfather!”
“You can’t go alone—you are only a girl!” he exclaimed, dropping a handful of spoons with a clatter because he was so amazed at the daring and audacity of Pam’s great idea.
She laughed softly; it always amused her to hear Jack talk in this fashion. She was four years older than he was, and although she lacked his steadiness and balance, she knew that she was vastly ahead of him when it came to dealing with an emergency. “You are a dear, Jack, but you have your limitations. You are quite early Victorian in your ideas of what girls should or should not do. But you have got to widen your outlook a bit before Mother comes down from the drawing-room, because you must back me up in this. We can always influence Mother when we stand solid, and my great idea is for the general good.”
“For instance?” Jack had retrieved the fallen spoons, and was polishing vigorously. Pam had a good many great ideas of one sort and another, but he had a cautious streak, and was not going to back her up in any wild scheme just because she wanted him to do so.
“Grandfather told Mother to send one of us out to him, and he promised to pay a salary. He said one of the children, but he did not mention whether it was a boy or a girl that he would prefer.” Pam put out her facts with a calm decision, and Jack nodded approvingly. “Very well, you can’t go. It will be another month before you can walk without a stick, and when you can, there is your work at Gay & Grainger’s waiting for you, while until you go back they are paying you——”
“A mere pittance—half a crown a week, accident insurance!” he groaned. “If only I had been over sixteen I could have had the proper State Insurance. It is a rotten shame, and the grossest injustice!”
“Be quiet, and let me talk!” Pam lifted an impatient hand to stay the tide of his eloquence, sprinkling him with soapy water in the process. “You have this pittance, and work waiting for you, but I have nothing. You also are twice the help to Mother that I am. Don’t interrupt! Compliments are not necessary at this juncture; we are out for facts without trimmings, and don’t you forget it. Suppose that you had gone out to Grandfather this month. Mother says the winters in New Brunswick are dreadfully cold. Being a boy, you would naturally have had to work out of doors, and if there is no woman in the house, you would have had little comfort when you came in. Now, if I go, the dear little old man can hardly send me out into the forest chopping trees down when the temperature is miles below zero, but I can make him so comfortable in the house that by the spring he will be wanting the lot of us.”
“Query as to that.” Jack shook his head, and reached for the plate basket to put away his spoons.
“Oh, but he will. I shall lay myself out to win his heart; then when he has got so fond of me that he simply can’t bear me out of his sight, I shall turn home-sick. I shall refuse my food, and tell him that I am pining for my family, that I can bear the cruel separation no longer. He will soften towards Mother then, and write her an imperative letter to sell up and come out to him without a moment’s unnecessary delay. Oh, I can manage him, I have no doubt of it at all!”
“I don’t think that I have either, if you go straight at it,” admitted Jack, who spoke from experience, knowing himself to be weak as water in the hands of Pam when she had really made up her mind to influence him. “The question in my mind is whether Mother and he will hit it off comfortably when they live together. She is mistress here, and does as she likes; but it would not be happy for her if the old man took to ordering her round as I do Barbara.”
“Indeed, no; but I tell you he can be managed, he must be managed for his own good,” she said earnestly. “If he is very happy and comfortable, he will not want to be tiresome. Think how good it will be for Muriel to have a country life for the next few years. Think, too, what it will do for the boys. Greg is growing much too fast. He ought to have quiet evenings, and to be in bed by eight o’clock, instead of which he and Sid are working hard until after nine on most evenings, waiting at table and clearing away, qualifying for posts as footmen and butlers, but missing all the free and easy life of boyhood that they ought to have.”
Jack drew a long breath which ended in a whistle.
“My word, if you talk to the old man like that, he will be sending for us all by the next boat! I will back you up for all I am worth, see if I don’t. Three cheers for Pam the Pioneer, the intrepid and the brave! Of all the great ideas you ever had, this is the greatest!”
Pam flushed with pleasure. Jack had the balance and steadiness which she lacked; he was apt to sit in judgment on her, and that sort of thing is rather unbearable as a rule. Her mother was always holding Jack before her eyes as a model to be studied and copied, which, of course, was more unbearable still; so that the present moment was sweet indeed, compensating for many a bad quarter of an hour which had come before.
“I must hurry up to Muriel now,” she said, ten minutes later, when they had discussed the scheme in all its bearings. “Be sure you stick by me, Jack, when it comes to the arguments, for you know I do not shine there.”
“Oh, I’ll stick by you, never fear,” he answered in a cheery tone. “I would do a good deal to see a way out of this boarding-house business. This stewing and grilling down here every night, to give those people upstairs a chance to overfeed themselves, gets on my nerves. The folks who are so keen on big dinners at eight o’clock at night ought to have to cook for themselves; then they would soon be cured of the habit.”
“I daresay they would, but think what a crowd of people would suffer from loss of income.” Pam laughed as she gave him a bear-like hug by way of showing her gratitude. “Think, too, what a slump there would be in the medical business, for Dr. Scott said yesterday that it was the people who ate too much who provided the doctors with a living.”
But Jack only grunted by way of answer, and then, taking his stick, limped out to the scullery to see if Barbara had fastened up for the night.