The Corner House Girls. Hill Grace Brooks
have to catch me first!” crowed the imp of mischief, who forgot very quickly the smarts of punishment. “Once I get armed and provisioned (I got more’n a loaf of bread and a whole tin of sardines hid away in a place I won’t tell you where!), I’ll start off and Mom won’t never find me – no, sir-ree, sir!”
“You see what a bad, bad boy he is, Dot,” sighed Tess. “I’m so glad we haven’t any brother.”
“Oh, but if we did have,” said Dot, with assurance, “he’d be a cowboy and not an Indian, from the very start!”
This answer was too much for Tess! She decided to say no more about boys, for it seemed as impossible to convince Dot on the subject as it was Aggie.
Aggie, meanwhile, was the busiest of the four sisters. There were so many girls she had to say good-by to, and weep with, and promise undying affection for, and agree to write letters to – at least three a week! – and invite to come to Milton to visit them at the old Corner House, when they once got settled there.
“If all these girls come at once, Aggie,” said Ruth, mildly admonitory, “I am afraid even Uncle Peter’s big house won’t hold them.”
“Then we’ll have an overflow meeting on the lawn,” retorted Aggie, grinning. Then she clouded up the very next minute and the tears flowed: “Oh, dear! I know I’ll never see any of them again, we’re going away so far.”
“Well! I wouldn’t boo-hoo over it,” Ruth said. “There will be girls in Milton, too. And by next September when you go to school again, you will have dozens of spoons.”
“But not girls like these,” said Aggie, sorrowfully. And, actually, she believed it!
This is not much yet about the old Corner House that had stood since the earliest remembrance of the oldest inhabitant of Milton, on the corner of Main and Willow Streets.
Milton was a county seat. Across the great, shaded parade ground from the Stower mansion, was the red brick courthouse itself. On this side of the parade there were nothing but residences, and none of them had been so big and fine in their prime as the Corner House.
In the first place there were three-quarters’ of an acre of ground about the big, colonial mansion. It fronted Main Street, but set so far back from that thoroughfare, that it seemed very retired. There was a large, shady lawn in front, and old-fashioned flower beds, and flowering shrubs. For some time past, the grounds had been neglected and some of the flowers just grew wild.
The house stood close to the side street, and its upper windows were very blank looking. Mr. Peter Stower had lived on the two lower floors only. “And that is all you will probably care to take charge of, Miss Kenway,” said Mr. Howbridge, with a smile, when he first introduced Ruth to the Corner House.
Ruth had only a dim memory of the place from that one visit to it when Uncle Peter chanced to be sick. She knew that he had lived here with his single negro servant, and that the place had – even to her infantile mind – seemed bare and lonely.
Now, however, Ruth knew that she and her sisters would soon liven the old house up. It was a delightful change from the city tenement. She could not imagine anybody being lonely, or homesick, in the big old house.
Six great pillars supported the porch roof, which jutted out above the second story windows. The big oak door, studded with strange little carvings, was as heavy as that of a jail, or fortress!
Some of the windows had wide sills, and others came right down to the floor and opened onto the porch like two-leaved doors.
There was a great main hall in the middle of the house. Out of this a wide stairway led upward, branching at the first landing, one flight going to the east and the other to the west chambers. There was a gallery all around this hall on the second floor.
The back of the Corner House was much less important in appearance than the main building. Two wings had been built on, and the floors were not on a level with the floors in the front of the house, so that one had to go up and down funny, little brief flights of stairs to get to the sleeping chambers. There were unexpected windows, with deep seats under them, in dark corners, and important looking doors which merely opened into narrow linen closets, while smaller doors gave entrance upon long and heavily furnished rooms, which one would not have really believed were in the house, to look at them from the outside.
“Oh-oo-ee!” cried Dot, when she first entered the big front door of the Corner House, clutching Tess tightly by the hand. “We could get lost in this house.”
Mr. Howbridge laughed. “If you stick close to this wise, big sister of yours, little one,” said the lawyer, looking at Ruth, “you will not get lost. And I guarantee no other harm will come to you.”
The lawyer had learned to have great respect for the youthful head of the Kenway household. Ruth was as excited as she could be about the old house, and their new fortune, and all. She had a little color in her cheeks, and her beautiful great brown eyes shone, and her lips were parted. She was actually pretty!
“What a great, great fortune it is for us,” she said. “I – I hope we’ll all know how to enjoy it to the best advantage. I hope no harm will come of it. I hope Aunt Sarah won’t be really offended, because Uncle Peter did not leave it to her.”
Aunt Sarah stalked up the main stairway without a word. She knew her way about the Corner House.
She took possession of one of the biggest and finest rooms in the front part, on the second floor. When she had lived here as a young woman, she had been obliged to sleep in one of the rear rooms which was really meant for the occupancy of servants.
Now she established herself in the room of her choice, had the expressman bring her rocking-chair up to it, and settled with her crocheting in the pleasantest window overlooking Main Street. There might be, as Aggie said rather tartly, “bushels of work” to do to straighten out the old house and make it homey; Aunt Sarah did not propose to lift her hand to such domestic tasks.
Occasionally she was in the habit of interfering in the very things the girls did not need, or desire, help in, but in no other way did Aunt Sarah show her interest in the family life of the Kenways.
“And we’re all going to have our hands full, Ruth,” said Aggie, in some disturbance of mind, “to keep this big place in trim. It isn’t like a flat.”
“I know,” admitted Ruth. “There’s a lot to do.”
Even the older sister did not realize as yet what their change of fortune meant to them. It seemed to them as though the fifty dollars Mr. Howbridge had advanced should be made to last for a long, long time.
A hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property was only a series of figures as yet in the understanding of Ruth, and Agnes, and Tess, and Dot. Besides, there was the uncertainty about Uncle Peter’s will.
The fortune, after all, might disappear from their grasp as suddenly as it had been thrust into it.
CHAPTER IV – GETTING SETTLED
It was the time of the June fruit fall when the Kenway girls came to the Old Corner House in Milton. A roistering wind shook the peach trees in the side yard and at the back that first night, and at once the trees pelted the grass and the flowers beneath their overladen branches with the little, hard green pellets that would never now be luscious fruit.
“Don’t you s’pose they’re sorry as we are, because they won’t ever be good for nothing?” queried Dot, standing on the back porch to view the scattered measure of green fruit upon the ground.
“Don’t worry about it, Dot. Those that are left on the trees will be all the bigger and sweeter, Ruth says,” advised Tess. “You see, those little green things would only have been in the way of the fruit up above, growing. The trees had too many children to take care of, anyway, and had to shake some off. Like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.”
“But I never did feel that she was a real mother,” said Dot, not altogether satisfied. “And it seems too bad that all those pretty, little, velvety things couldn’t turn into peaches.”
“Well,