CHAPTER XIX
PLANS FOR THE FUTURE
New York! The very sound of the name thrilled me. It was all I could do to keep from following the twins in their demonstration of joy and gratitude lavished on their father. I contented myself, however, by rumpling up my father's hair.
"When?" gasped Father, when I had finished with him.
"Immediately if not sooner!" said Zebedee, coming out unscathed from the embraces of his girls. "I have been thinking a lot about it and I really believe it would be the best thing for them. They can in a way find themselves, and they don't get in any more scrapes without us than they do with us."
"That's so," agreed Father.
"Oh, we won't get in any scrapes at all!" declared Dee.
"Not a single one, if you only trust us!" maintained Dum.
"I'm not going to take my oath upon it that you won't get into some, but if you talk over anything you are contemplating, in the way of adventure, with wise little Page, I don't believe your scrapes will amount to much."
Zebedee always complimented me by insisting that my judgment was good, and for a wonder, the girls did not mind when he praised me. They were very jealous of their father's praise when it was laid on too thickly, except where I was concerned, but they agreed with him heartily when he lauded me to the skies.
"You shouldn't say that," I said, blushing. "I might prove myself unworthy of the trust imposed in me,—and then what?"
"Then I shall have to declare myself at fault in character reading."
"But, Page, you know you always hold us down! When we get into trouble it is against your judgment. If we listen to you, we keep straight," said Dum.
"You mean I preach!"
"That's the funny thing about you, Page: you give us sage, grown-up advice without preaching. We wouldn't listen a minute if you preached."
"All right, I promise never to do that objectionable thing," I laughed. "But really and truly, I don't think Father ought to afford this trip for me."
"Child, it's not a trip," and Father put his arm around me again. "It's part of your education. New York need not be such an expensive place if you girls go there with economical ideas in your heads, instead of extravagant ones."
"Certainly! We had better allowance them and that will be part of their training, as well as what they will get from the several schools. My girls know very little about finances and it is high time they learned. Experience is the only way for them to learn, as whenever I try to instill in them principles of economy they say I am Mr. Tuckerish," and Zebedee tried to look stern.
The idea of his instilling principles of economy in anybody's mind was so funny all of us had to laugh. One thing Mr. Tucker insisted on was not spending money until you had it; but the minute you did have it, what was it meant for but to spend? "Easy come, easy go!" was the motto for the whole Tucker family.
"Oh, we will live so cheap I haven't a doubt we'll save oodlums of money!" cried Dum. "Mrs. Edwin Green told me a lot about how cheap one can live in Bohemia. She told us whenever we went to New York she was going to give us a letter of introduction to her brother and sister-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Kent Brown."
Mrs. Edwin Green was the lovely young woman we had met in Charleston when we took our famous trip down there. She was a Miss Molly Brown of Kentucky who had married Professor Edwin Green of Wellington College. They were the very nicest couple I ever knew and we became great friends with them. We corresponded with her and a letter from "Molly Brown" was highly prized by all of us.
"Yes, and she said we were to visit her at Wellington if we got anywhere near. Won't it be great?" and Dee danced around the library from pure glee.
"How will we live in New York?" I asked. "Shall we board or what?"
"Board, by all means! If you try to live any other way you will run into debt, I am afraid," said Zebedee.
"But we just naturally despise boarding," pouted Dum. "We've been boarding all our lives, it seems to me."
"But when you board, you are in a measure chaperoned," said her cautious parent.
"Chaperoned! Oh, Zebedee, you make me laugh. What boarding-house keeper has time to chaperone? Besides, isn't Page along to chaperone?"
"What do you think about it, Page? Come along now with that sage advice," teased Father.
"I have never boarded and don't know how I'd like it, but it seems to me the best thing for us to do would be to board when we first get there, and then if we can't stand it, take a little flat and keep house, or rather, flat."
"Ah, I see why your advice is so sought after by our worthy friends, the Tuckers; you are as wise as Solomon and cut the baby in two and satisfy all parties. You will go to boarding to suit Tucker and then get a flat to suit the daughters, eh, honey?"
"Fifty-fifty is a safe course to pursue, and safety first is best and wisest for an official umpire," I maintained.
"I must say that the oracle has spoken well," said Zebedee. "Of course, if they are not happy boarding they must not keep to it, but it is better for them to start that way. They can learn the ropes and decide later on to get a flat if it seems wiser. We can go on with them and establish them, eh, doctor?"
"I reckon so, if my patients behave. Now that old Mrs. Reed is dead, I can leave perhaps—Ellen Miller's baby safely here, too!"
"Oh, Father, that will be simply grand, if you can only go!"
"I haven't had a trip for a long, long time, and I think it is up to me to treat myself."
All of us thought so, too. It made it easier for me if Father was contemplating going with us for a little recreation. He worked so hard, had so little fun in his life. What fun there was he made for himself by treating life as something very amusing when all was told. His patience was only equalled by his sense of humor.
"Don't give out that you are going on a trip, Father, and then all of your cranky patients won't have time to trump up any illnesses. If Sally Winn hears of your intended departure, she will get up seven fits of heart failure and more fluterations and smotherines than enough to keep you at home."
"Poor Sally! I wish she could go on a trip herself. It would do more towards curing her than all the pink, pump water in the world."
Sally Winn was Father's hypochondriacal patient who called him up at all hours of the day and night for an imaginary heart trouble that was supposed to be carrying her off. She did not feel safe with Father out of the county and never let him get away if she could help it.
"Why don't you suggest it to her? She might come on and visit her cousin, Reginald Kent."
"Reginald Kent! By Jove, I forgot that fellow when I proposed New York as a good place for you girls to top off your very incomplete education," and Zebedee groaned.
"Well, what is the matter with Reginald Kent?" bridled Dum.
"Matter! Nothing's the matter, that's what's the matter. See here, Dum Tucker, if you go to New York and fall in love with that good-looking, clever young man I'll kill myself," declared the desperate Zebedee, always afraid that some man would come along and cut him out with his girls.
"Nonsense, Zebedeedlums! Reginald Kent will have to fall in love with me before I fall in love with him."
"Well, if that's so, I'll fix him! I'll tell him what a bad proposition you are: mean, ungenerous, deceitful, secretive. I'll put him on to you." As these were all the things Dum was not, we felt safe.
"Shan't we let Mary Flannagan know our plans? She may want to join us there," suggested Dee.
"Of course we want dear old Mary," Dum and I cried together.
We all of us thought with regret of what a winter like the one we were planning to have would have meant to Annie Pore.
Mary was a great favorite with both Father and Mr. Tucker, so they readily consented to our writing to her, suggesting that she should join us in New York if her mother thought well of the plan.
"She can go on with her movie stunts, and take up dancing and gym work in real earnest under the right instructors," said Dee.
"I hope she won't try to climb down any walls in New York," I laughed. "We mustn't get in a flat with ivy on the walls."
"Oh, so it is to be a flat, is it? I understood you were to board first," said Zebedee, pretending to be insulted.
"So we are, but of course we will end up in a flat, and I fancy Mary will stand in awe of the boarding-house keeper enough to keep her from scaling her walls."
Our whole evening was spent in talking over our plans for topping off our education in New York. Father and Zebedee were like two boys in the suggestions they made. They had perfect faith in us, knowing that we had sense enough to bring us safely through the experience. I have wondered since if our mothers had been alive if they would have consented to the plan, but, of course, if our mothers had been alive, our education would not have been quite so loose-jointed. Mothers are much more particular than fathers about their daughters' education.
MAMMY SUSAN, HOWEVER, HAD HER SAY OUT IN REGARD TO MY GOING AWAY FROM HOME. [Page 282].
To be sure, Mrs. Flannagan did consent to Mary's going, but then she was rather a haphazard lady herself, looking upon life with a humorous twinkle in her Irish eye. She believed heartily in the doctrine of live and let live, and, forsooth, if Mary had mapped out for herself a career as a movie actress, why let her work it out! She, her mother, was certainly not going to block her game.
Mammy Susan was the one who kicked up about my going. For once she and Cousin Park Garnett were of the same mind. Cousin Park almost got out an injunction on Father to restrain him as one who was not in his right mind. A lunacy commission would have had him locked up in the State Asylum, according to that irate dame.
She never would have known about my going if she had not chosen to make a visitation at Bracken just when I was in the throes of getting ready to spend the winter in New York. Her own house was having some repairs, so she had made a convenience of our hospitality to escape the discomforts of paperhangers and painters. I was afraid at first that she would stay so long Father could not get away, but a lawsuit she was engaged in came to court and she was forced to cut her untimely visit short. I found out afterwards that the case, which was a trifling matter of back-yard fences, was put up first on the docket by some adroit wire-pulling done by no less a person than Mr. Jeffry Tucker, the ever ready. It was done so silently that Cousin Park never found it out. She was forced to return to her dismantled house, much to the regret of the workmen who were revelling in the absence of an exacting housekeeper.
Mammy Susan, however, had her say out in regard to my going away from home: "I's gonter speak my min' if'n it's the las' ac' er my life. Gals ain't called on ter be a-trapsin' all the time. Mammy's baby ain't never gonter be content at Bracken no mo'. Always a-goin' an' never a-comin'. An' me'n Docallison so lonesome, too. I wisht you was twins—I 'low I'd keep one er you at home."
"Which one, Mammy Susan?"
"T'other one!"