[CHAPTER SIX]
ITS LEAN-TO ROOM
Bruce went away on Monday, with Basil and Bartlemy to support him, and with his arms and hands still bound up. He resolutely turned his back on the temptation to let his wounds serve as an excuse for prolonging days which had been among the pleasantest of his life, in spite of physical suffering.
Miss Charlotte had been persuaded by the council of all her friends to abandon indefinitely her intention of rebuilding her house. It was irreplaceable; nothing could restore to her the walls permeated with the love and associations of a lifetime, and there was room for her and need of her, as Mrs. Grey urged her to remember, in the little grey house. So, for that winter at least, the little house was the richer by another inmate, and the Greys set about fitting for her use the room in the lean-to, to which Rob had been wont to repair through her childhood and big-girlhood for solitude and inspiration. It really was a dear room, although one could not stand erect in all parts of it to view its charms. On either side of the door by which it was entered sat a low rush-bottomed chair, with yellow stripes running around its grooved back much dimmed and worn by years of service. At each end of the room was a window; between the corner and one of these windows stood a mahogany bedstead, with rolling head and footboard of equal height. Beside the other window stood a high mahogany bureau, with carved columns unnecessarily upholding its swelled front upper drawer, and with two small drawers raising its top into a second story. Above this bureau hung an old gilt mirror, divided across its top by a strip of gilt framing a pleasing representation of two white houses facing a common, through which a walk, bordered by the stiffest of trees, mounted to the village church. The lean-to roof slanted rapidly down from these windows on each side of the room towards the south, but the few feet between the ceiling and the floor on that side were broken by two half windows, their tiny panes contriving to let in a little of the southern sunshine and breeze, and a glimpse of the apple-trees beyond. It really was a most lovable and harmonious room, and its quaintness seemed the proper setting for Cousin Peace's sweet aloofness from the world of to-day.
Rob came alone to begin dismantling the room of its mementos of the time when she had been the Scheherazade of Fayre, and had told stories to the children for money which the Grey family had then so sorely needed. These mementos were the absurdities which Battalion B had showered upon her. The mottoes which Bartlemy had illuminated still adorned the walls; Rob smiled and then sighed as she took them down, one after the other—"Young Robin Grey came a-Courtin' We," "Plain Tales for the Bills," and other ridiculous sentiments which the boys had contributed for her to hang in her auditorium, so they declared, but which had hung here all this time, here where Rob used to come to prepare her stories. Battalion B's other contributions to her enterprise were also piled on the chairs and in the corners of this room—rattan rods, slates, primers, a pedagogue's cap, and an impossible false front of yellow flax, with its wide cotton parting; this Bruce had sent her.
Rob laid her treasures in the clothes-basket, amusement and regret written on her face. She was still young—just over the line, childhood not out of sight behind her, but its very nearness made it worse to know that it was inaccessible. Those had been hard days, but they had been pleasant ones, and sixteen was a delightful age! Eighteen's two additional years made great differences.
Rob folded the false front down its parting and smoothed its flaxen locks meditatively. No shadow had come over the jolly comradeship that had been established between her and Bruce at their first meeting; he was still her boy friend, treating her with that fine mixture of consideration, perfect understanding and equality which is the ideal of American boy and girl friendship. But Rob felt quite sure that Bruce's chummy manner hid quite as much of another sort of affection for her as Basil quietly, but frankly showed for Wythie, and which Wythie accepted with her sweet, honest single-mindedness. Rob had no desire to exchange her most precious comradeship for love, and Bruce was too keen-eyed not to know that, and not to retain the good he had by the utmost vigilance, biding his time in the hope of making himself indispensable to Rob. Bruce was nineteen; Rob felt sometimes, and for a brief moment as if she were drifting towards a trap, for she was a little girl at heart still, and shrank like a wild bird from a retaining hand.
"It is a great pity to be eighteen, and it's a greater pity that your friends have to grow up," Rob said aloud, depositing the false front on the top of her collection in the clothes-basket, and recalling Bruce's expression when he left the little grey house on Sunday night to be ready for an early start to college Monday morning. He had bidden her good-bye with his old chummy pat on the shoulder, given with the finger-tips which protruded from the bandages of his right hand. All that he had said was: "Good-bye, Bobs Bahadur; you've been to me the trump you always are. I'll pour oil on the troubled waters for you if ever you get into trouble—hot water, I suppose I could more appropriately have said. I don't suppose I'll ever have a chance to tend you wounded, as you did me, because Bobs Bahadur is a general that doesn't know defeat, but I'll read to you if you are laid up, and return my obligations in any other way, if I have the chance. A wounded hero might have worse nurses than you and Wythie, and Prue, too, between her pursuit of knowledge."