The real princess

Front matter

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“ Did you ever see the real princess, Mr. John?”— Page 31

THE

Chapter I

“ Mr. John!”

The bent figure of the old gardener straight¬ ened up between the rows of hollyhocks at the sound of the small voice, and peered out from the mass of leaves that almost enveloped him. These were old Mr. John’s two favorites— flowers and children, and he had never been known to resist an appeal from either.

“ Hello, Marjory! ” he called in a friendly voice, as he caught sight of a blue-ginghamed form on the other side of the garden wall. A tawny head bobbed up suddenly beside the dark one that showed above the blue gingham. “ Why, here’s Billy, too! Come in and stay a while, can’t ye? How’s the limb to-day, boy? ”

“ ’S all right,” the boy answered as usual. Billy’s left hip was out of working order as the result of a fall in his babyhood, and he was forced to go about the greater part of the time with the aid of a crutch. Whatever the need of his body, Billy’s mind had no sympathy with crutches, and he scowled impatiently now as he was forced to let Marjory assist him over the low brick wall.

“ I’ll just go on with these beds if you don’t mind,” said Mr. John, as, trowel in hand, he again bent over the plants. The boy and girl dropped on the grass behind him and gazed happily about. Then Marjory was recalled to the business of the moment by a furtive nudge from Billy.

“ Mr. John, Billy wants a whistle like the one you made for me. Do you suppose you could make him one now? ”

Marjory proffered her request in perfect confidence. She knew it was his delight to distribute these little knickknacks of his own making among his friends.

“ I want it like hers, only bigger—^this big, see? ” Billy stretched his fingers along the grass to outline the rather large dimensions of the desired whistle. Mr. John looked around just as Billy, by a happy thought, was increas¬ ing the length by some inches.

“ Seems to me you must want a factory

THE EEAL PEESTCESS whistle,” he remarked, taking up his spade, ‘‘ Well, maybe I could make you one to-night, Billy, but I’ll have to be working here in the garden all day. You see, the lady’s written she’s cornin’ home.”

“The lady!” Marjory repeated, casting a wondering glance up toward the towering brick house that stood at the head of the slope. It had stood so long without an occupant, except old Mr. John, that Marjory had almost reached the conclusion that there never was to be any; and Mr. John was so hospitable whenever she and Billy came to the big garden, as they did frequently, that it was hard to think of it as not his own.

“Yes, the lady that owns this place. Didn’t I ever tell you about these folks? I guess Billy knows about them. It’s likely you’ve spent more time wonderin’ what the inside of the house looks like, than about the people who used to live in it,” he chuckled. “ Well, she’s cornin’ home.”

“ Where’s she been? ” demanded Billy, as he and Marjory stared up at the tall windows with close-shut blinds.

“ Well, I’ll tell you about them,” answered Mr. John, beginning to pick up his tools. “ But I’ll have to be moving, or I won’t get the place picked up before she comes. You come along with me while I tie up those vines along the porch. A whole lot of her folks used to live here with her before I came—her sister’s family ’twas. The sister’s husband had busi¬ ness over in England, and one summer they all set out for there—all but the lady that’s cornin’ now. She went to Boston to see ’em off. That was the last time she saw them.”

“ Oh, I remember,” put in Billy. ‘‘ Aunt Martha said they were shipwrecked, and they were all drowned, and the lady here wouldn’t come back after that.”

“Yes, that was it,” said the gardener. “And I don’t blame her much, though it happened ten or eleven years ago. But it seems she’s got trace of one of the sister’s children that was rescued and taken to England—there was two little girls, and now she’s found her, and’s bringing her home to live with her here.”

“Didn’t they find the other little girl?” asked Marjory wide-eyed, for this story was all strange to her as she was a newcomer in the little town.

“ Drowned, too, I guess,” returned Mr. John sadly. Then his face brightened, for he knew that what he was about to say would interest one of his imaginative listeners, at any rate. “ But this one she’s bringin’ home—I hear it said she’s a princess.”

‘‘A princess! ” exclaimed Marjory in amaze¬ ment. But Billy was skeptical.

“ Ho! How could she be? ” he questioned.

They don’t have princesses in Ameriea.”

“No, but her father was French,” said Mr. John, well pleased with the effect that his words had made. “ I guess it’s true, Billy. Miss Cauleigh, that’s the owner, said in her letter only yesterday—‘ I’m bringing the prin¬ cess’ daughter,’—^those were her very words.”

“A princess!” breathed Marjory, her mind on the heroines of the many tales she had read in Ihe children’s corner of the village library. “ A real princess! ”

“ Well, I don’t suppose she’ll have anything to do with common folks, then,” concluded Billy practically. “ Course she’ll go to school at home, and have nothing but royalty around her.”

“ Oh, do you think it will be that way, Mr. John? ” asked Marjory, her visions of frolick¬ ing with a real live princess dispelled in a breath.

“And if you pass her on the street, even, you’ll have to say, ‘ How do you do, your Highness? ’ or ‘ Good evening, your Maj¬ esty,’ ” went on Billy, delightedly strength¬ ening his point. ,

Marjory sat quietly beside him on the wide porch steps, staring in an absent-minded way at Mr. John’s broad back as he mounted a ladder to reach the top of the thick honeysuckle vines. But even Billy’s discouraging remarks about the exclusive habits of princesses could not take all the exultation from her face.

“A real live princess!” she repeated slowly but enthusiastically. “ Why, of course she’ll be friendly, Billy. All really truly princesses are lovely—they can’t help being so. But we should have to be awfully nice for her to want to be acquainted with us, you know.”

“ Princess or not, she wouldn’t be worth knowing if she was too stuck up to play with any boy or girl that has good manners, and knows how to play fair,” commented Mr. John. “ Of course, though, she’d be ’way above play¬ ing with anybody that quarreled,” he added artfully.

Marjory looked into his face a moment and then down at the stone beneath her feet. She turned toward Billy a little shamefacedly.

“ We don’t quarrel so very-” she began,

but stopped at the sound of a high-pitched, rasping voice.

“Mar-jory! Mar-jor-ry!”

“ I’m coming! ” she called back as she started down the steps. The spell was broken for the day, and potato-peeling and dish-washing must take its place; but at night-time, when all was quiet about her and time was hers again for a little while, her dreams could be devoted wholly and unreservedly to that fascinating subject, a real princess.

“ Good-bye, Billy,” she said wistfully. “ Come over in the orchard to-morrow after¬ noon ; IVe got lots to talk about.”

Chapter II

‘‘ The more I think about it, the more things I can think of that we’ll have to be careful about when we play with the princess,” said Marjory, as she and Billy settled themselves at last in the soft lush grass of the orchard that lay back of the shabby Huxton house. Mar¬ jory was only resigning herself to call it home, for the dreams of a real home which the little girl had cherished all through those ten long years at the orphan asylum had been rudely dispelled upon her arrival here. Miss Sapphira Huxton, who brought her from the home, “ on trial for adoption,” as she put it, had taken note of Marjory’s straight, lithe body and clear-cut features; but she had failed to take into consideration the dreaminess of the girl’s dark eyes. So it was to Marjory’s sorrow that both the house and herself were regarded by their guardian as instruments only to be used

for every-day living. What did it matter if the house did need a fresh coat of paint to make a proper setting for the fine old elms in front of it, or whether Marjory had not a single frock that gave her any pleasure in the wearing? But philosophic Marjory was now very grate¬ ful for even one hour of rest in the orchard after the long, tiresome season of picking over dried currants for Miss Sapphira’s use on bak¬ ing day.

“ Billy, weVe got to practise how to act every minute before she comes,” went on Mar¬ jory, tucking an offensive patch on the blue gingham away from sight under one knee.

“You mean when to say ‘ your Majesty,’ and ‘ your Highness ’ ? ” questioned the boy, a little doubtfully.

“No, things lots more important than that. Anyway, I don’t believe she’ll want us to bother about saying that every time we see her. But if she does, of course we must. What I was thinking about was this, Billy,” explained Marjory earnestly. “ It’s just as Mr. John said, she must never see us quarreling, and to be sure of that, I suppose we mustn’t do it at all.”

“ Well, we don’t quarrel because we want to,” reasoned Billy with energy. “We do it because we have to.”

“ Oh, no, we don’t have to,” returned Mar¬ jory quickly. “ Don’t you remember, in those stories the good princess is always just as quiet when her sisters get to quarreling? ”

“ Oh, then there are bad princesses! Maybe this one will be bad! ” cried Billy, who was really more interested in the latter variety.

“ Oh, no,” protested Marjory almost in tears. “ Oh, Billy, you will spoil it all! No, she is good and beautiful like the ones we read about. I’m sure she is.”

“All right, I’d just as soon she would be.” Mindful of their resolutions about quarreling, Billy kept the peace.

“ Then there’s another thing. All the prin¬ cesses I’ve read about don’t care anything about clothes. Of course they like jewels and satins and things because they’re pretty to look at, but for every day, they’d just as soon go around in old—old—^well, clothes like mine.” Marjory looked down a. little more hopefully on the despised gingham. “ Because, of course, you can see they’re princesses, no matter what they have on.”

Well, that’s the way you ought to feel, Marjory,” remarked Billy carelessly, for this question of clothes did not touch his sympathies in any great degree. The stronger and coarser the weave of his little khaki trousers, the less likely they would be to get torn, and so the more he admired them. Soft silks and muslins held no charms for him.

Marjory gazed at him a moment in silence. Then an exultant smile dawned on her face.

“ Why, William Barnard, that’s just what I’ll do,” she cried enthusiastically. “ I’ll pre¬ tend I’m a princess, too; then, of course, every¬ thing I do will be all right. And you must be a prince, Billy.”

“Ho! A lame prince!” rejected the hoy scornfully, and yet with a shade of wistfulness in his voice.

“ Of course; why, don’t you remember the Little Lame Prince? ” cried Marjory. “ You didn’t catch him worrying over his troubles while he had his traveling cloak!

“ But I haven’t got a cloak.”

“ You’ve got a mind, and that’s just as good,” returned his companion staunchly. “ You can’t keep your mind from wandering off and seeing things, no matter how lame you are! ”

“ Well, that’s so,” Billy acknowledged,

“ Then we’ll do it.” Marjory clapped her hands at so novel a break in the monotony of her matter-of-fact life. “ And we’ll begin to feel like a really truly prince and princess by the time the real princess comes. Oh, I wonder what her name is! ”

“ Boucher—that’s the name of the man that used to live on the hill, Aunt Martha says.”

“ But what’s her first name? ”

“ I don’t know. They were just babies when they went away from here, you know. I guess I was, too; anyway, I don’t remember anything about them.”

“But real princesses! Oh, Billy, next to having a sister of my very own, I think a princess would be the very nicest person to play with that we could ever think of.”

“ If she’s nice; and if we think she’s nice, then she ought to be,” remarked Billy.

“ Yes, that’s another thing we must think about while we’re a prince and princess,” added Marjory. “ Real princesses never have any¬ thing to do with people that are horrid, you know. They just go on being good and kind themselves, so everybody about them just has to be good and kind, too.”

“ Say, Marjory,” concluded Billy after a moment’s reflection, “ I believe it would be lots easier for us if your first wish came true. It would be lots more comfortable playing with your sister than with a regular story-book princess.”

Chapter III

“ Now, Marjory/' said Miss Sapphira Huxton, the morning after the conversation in the orchard, “ I think that six months is plenty long enough time for you to get acquainted with my way of living.” Miss Sapphira gave an emphatic squeeze to the dish-towels which she was putting through a last rinsing. “For my part, I think it’s time you began to have some method in your plan of living.”

“ You mean I’d better get up earlier, and things like that? ” asked Marjory doubtfully, as she put away the last saucer in the neat cup¬ board.

“ Oh no, child,” laughed Miss Sapphira, for no matter what faults her little ward might have, laziness, at least, was not among them. The ten monotonously regular years at the orphanage had seen to that.

“ I can’t see just what you mean, Aunt Sapphira,” Marjory’s brow wrinkled per¬ plexedly, “ unless it’s that you think I waste lots of time out of school.”

THE EEAL PEESTCESS

“ Well, it’s partly that, Marjory. My father used to tell his children to make every¬ thing they did count. For instance, I notice that you got one of those silly girls’ books out of the library again yesterday.”

Marjory looked distressed. Was this privi¬ lege of drawing books from the library, her one chance of seeing how other girls lived who were more favorably situated than herself, to be denied her? She had taken it for granted that it was everybody’s right to imagine pleas¬ ures for himself by reading about them and, as she had told Billy, to dream dreams. Marjory began to look rebellious.

“ Oh, there’s nothing absolutely wrong about those books, Marjory,” Miss Sapphira hast¬ ened to assert. “ But I’m sure they can’t do you any good. And as for the story part of them, I’m sure that a well-written history makes just as interesting reading. So I think it would be best for you to take back that library book, and get an American history to read instead. That’s what I used to do when I was little, and it was good for me.”

Marjory stood silent, not really compre-

THE KEXL” PEESTCESS bending the edict that had fallen upon her until Miss Sapphira was continuing the ex¬ planation of this new “ method.”

“ Then in my day, each of us children, boys and girls alike, made a whole patchwork quilt from start to finish by ourselves; IVe got my eldest brother Henry's quilt up on my spareroom bed this minute.”

For an instant Marjory did not catch the application of this remark to herself, and only her sense of humor was touched. The vision of a row of little khaki-trousered boys like Billy industriously pricking their stubby fingers over a series of big, unwieldy quilts struck her as overwhelmingly funny. Marjory laughed out loud.

“ Oh, Aunt Sapphira, you don’t mean that the boys had to make quilts, too! ” she protested unbelievingly.

“ Why, of course I mean it. Why not? It was good for them,” asserted Miss Sapphira, vigorously scrubbing the already spotless kitchen table to lend emphasis to her words. “ Yes, indeed, we all had to make one, and that’s what I want you to do.”

Marjory looked horror-stricken. “ But Aunt Sapphira, I can’t sew. I don’t like to,” she faltered.

Miss Sapphira picked up her words quick as a flash. “ That’s just why I want you to make one, Marjory. My father made it a rule for each of us to do at least one thing a day that we hated. It was the same way with clothes, too. He thought it was good discipline to wear clothes that you didn’t like. So instead of each one having one pretty dress, we each had a very plain, dark-colored one to wear for best. Of course I didn’t like to wear it then, but I can see now, after all these years, that it was splendid discipline.”

Marjory stood in awed silence during the whole of this speech. The manners and customs of Aunt Sapphira’s family as she had depicted them sounded like the old fairy tales of bur¬ densome tasks and penances that she had just been forbidden to read.

“ Well, Marjory,” said Miss Sapphira, bringing the little girl out of her revery with a start, “ we won’t begin on the quilt to-day, because I’ll have to go up and hunt in the attic for some pieces, but I guess there are plenty of other things you can do. Now, for this morning’s task, just pick out some one hard thing that you think needs to be done, but dis¬ like doing. What shall it be? ”

Marjory gazed at her adopted aunt un¬ happily. Then a thought flashed across her mind. A princess! What would she do? Why, this situation seemed very like that of some of the story-book princesses, when they forced themselves to do penance for allowing themselves to think even a foolish thought. Now a real princess would go ahead and per¬ form the hated task without the least bit of grumbling or hesitation; and Marjory, for a time at least, was a princess.

Why, a princess would do it. Aunt Sapphira!” she exclaimed, speaking her thoughts aloud; then added slowly, “ I think I hate to put my bureau drawers in order about as badly as anything. I’ll go right up and put them in apple-pie order this minute.” With a bright look that mystified Miss Sapphira, she was off. A little tune drifted down the stairs after her.

Left alone in the kitchen, the lady turned to whisk off an obtrusive fly from her spotless table.

“ Well, I did get a lucky find in that child! ” she thought to herself. “ To think how we kids used to yell and squeal over that order! But whatever could she have meant by a princess being willing to do it? That’s beyond me! ”

Up-stairs in the close little bedroom under the southwest eaves, Marjory was enthusias¬ tically emptying the bureau drawers on her little white bed, and thinking busily in the meantime.

“ This isn’t so bad when I really get at it,” she consoled herself. “ I haven’t got so many things that keeping my drawers neat should be such a great burden. Now a real princess, with all her ribbons and laces and silks, would have to work awfully hard to keep them in order; so I’m lucky that way. I’ll never have that many.”

Carefully she refolded the meager supply of hair-ribbons and laid them in a smooth pile in the drawer; then she attacked the freshly starched heaps of underwear in the second drawer, which were not quite in ‘‘ princess ” order. Each was carefully marked with an “ M. B.”, a relic of the old orphanage days, when underclothing was the only individual possession that Marjory had. What the “ B stood for she had never known. She knew only that those two initials had been pains¬ takingly embroidered on the tiny articles of clothing which, as a baby, she had worn when the stranger left her at the orphanage; and the head of the institution had urged Miss Sapphira to continue the use of them in the faint hope of learning the child’s family identity in the vears to come.

Marjory pushed the last drawer into place with a sigh of relief. “ That’s done! But the rest of it—^never to read any more stories, and that awful quilt! ” Marjory sat down on the bed, looking discouraged at the prospect of life before her. Then she straightened up and her eyes sparkled. “Well, I told Billy that we had our minds, anyway, whatever happened, and so we have. The only difference now is that I’ll have to live my stories instead of read¬ ing them. But oh,” she added with a gleam of fun, “ I can’t help thinking how awfully sorry I could have been for Aunt Sapphira’s poor little brothers! ”

Chapter IV

Billyh’s whistle was not done when he and Marjory peeped in upon the gardener at work again, two days later, in the rose arbor belong¬ ing to the big house upon the hill. Mr. John shook his head regretfully.

“ No, no,” he said, pulling away at a longbranch that had grown up beyond the trellis into a near-by tree, “ Tm sorry, lad, but this business of gettin’ ready for the folks takes all my time, it seems. Why,” he stopped a moment to lean a hand against an upright bar of the trellis, “ I was workin’ over the vines on that big porch till after sunset the other night; then the moon came up to make me stay a while longer. No, Billy, you’ll have to wait a bit for that whistle; but never ye fear, you’ll have it sometime.”

Snip, went the pruning-shears, and another runaway rose-branch came tumbling to the ground. Marjory and Billy, watching, found

seats along one side of the pretty little rose arbor. Billy leaned the hated crutches up against the side of a pillar and settled himself comfortably on the bench.

“ That’s all right, Mr. John,” he said pleasantly. “ I’m glad you haven’t started, because I wanted to tell you again to be sure and make it a big one. There’s no hurry about it. Take your time, but make it as big, oh ever so big, as you can.”

Marjory beside him was gazing past Mr. John’s big figure toward the side of the house which showed above the heavily massed shrubbery surrounding it. Instead of being sleepily shuttered, as it had been when she had looked before, all the blinds of the house were wide open and the shades in each window were drawn high. The flutter of a white cloth showed in one as she looked.

“Why!” she exclaimed. “Has somebody come already? Look, some one’s shaking a dust-cloth! ”

Mr. John turned and glanced at the house as she spoke, but quickly went back to his work. “ It’s Mrs. Prentice and a helper in there,” he explained. “ They’re cleaning the whole house, so that when Miss Cauleigh gets here, everything will be spick and span and ready for her. It’s pretty dusty, with nobody in it all these years. I opened it up and it was a mighty queer-looking place, I can tell ye,— everything in big white cloths to keep it from the dust—all the carpets rolled up, and musty as the hold of one of these banana boats out here on the ocean. My, it was big enough to make a body shiver just to smell the air! And those big white things all about the big rooms looked like ghosts ready to jump out at a body! ” He sniffed a little nervously, and stopped to glance in the direction of the house. “ It’s a good thing that the folks are cornin’ back here to live. I don’t like to see a big house like that standing around empty so long.”

“ There must be lots and lots of room in it,” mused Marjory, chin in hand, staring at the blank windows with the deepest interest. “ It would have to be a pretty nice house for a princess to want to live there. I s’pose she used to have her own private suite of rooms and a lady’s maid and lots of other servants to wait on her and amuse her, didn’t she? ”

Mr. John began to gather up the clipped rose-branches into a heap, and smiled a little at this question. “ Well,” he answered, “ that sounds like what they have in books, but for a fact, I can’t tell you whether it was so in this house or not. My work was in the garden, not around the house. But I reckon if she wanted to live in America, she’d take to American ways and not have all the fuss and feathers of foreign royalty where it wasn’t fittin’.”

“ Did you ever see the real princess, Mr. John? ” Marjory leaned forward wide-eyed in her eagerness. Her chances to come as close as this to scenes and people that might be walk¬ ing in story-books had been very few in the orphan asylum; and the life at Miss Sapphira’s was no less matter-of-fact. Marjory could not miss the opportunity of finding out about the princess, even at the risk of seeming a little curious.

The gardener straightened up over the pile of tangled rose-branches. He took off his bat¬ tered brown hat and thoughtfully rubbed his forehead.

“ Well, now,” he said, “ there’s a poser. Did I? ” He was lost in thought for a moment. “ I was younger then than I am now, but I wasn’t here very long before they left the house in my care,” he continued. “ Can’t think that they ever acted as if she was a member of a r’yal family, but come to think of it, I do remember Miss Cauleigh’s sister. She was a little thing, with lots of black hair and great big brown eyes. She liked the pansies, I remember. She never could get enough of them—treated them as if they was all children, talked to them an’ petted them.”

Marjory clapped her hands, her eyes round with excitement. “ Oh, I like that! ” she ex¬ claimed in delight. “ That is just what a princess would do—w^alk in her garden every day and talk to the pansies. Wliere was it, Mr. John—where was the pansy bed? ”

Mr. John, the branches filling his arms, nod¬ ded toward a bare space at one side of the rosetrellis. Part of ’em were here,” he said, “ and the rest were over on the east side of the house. There was a great round bed over there, set in the middle of the lawn. Mv, how those pansies did bloom! They got the early sun and then shade the rest of the day; that’s what pansies like! Well, there are mostly weeds now. If you want to come along with me, perhaps we can take a peep into the house,” he added kindly, enjoying the children’s in¬ terest in the big house and its story.

Marjory and Billy eagerly accepted the in¬ vitation and followed their friend up the flagged garden walk with unconcealed interest. The little girl, lost in a fairy dream in which she, just every-day Marjory Huxton, found herself walking in a garden and into a great house belonging to a real princess, almost stumbled in her haste to get up the front steps.

“ Careful! ” warned Mr. John gently, look¬ ing over his shoulder at his small guests. “ ’Twouldn’t do to break your nose over get¬ ting into a house on your first visit. Well, here’s the winter sun-room, where they used to keep all the plants from the garden that would live over the winter.”

The three entered a large double glass door which opened upon a glassed-in room, bright as the day outside, but standing strangely still and empty of all except a single dusty-looking rocking-chair. The chill of the long-closed house had not yet left it in spite of the o]Den windows. Marjory and Billy felt themselves shivering a little as they peered ahead into the darkness of the rooms beyond, their eyes daz¬ zled from the white light outside.

“Oh—ee!” came from Marjory, as they followed Mr. John through the door beyond. He had spoken true. The room in which they were standing was crowded full of whiteshrouded shapes of every size. Above them, in the morning light, a crystal chandelier glit¬ tered. The light from its shining balls was re¬ flected manv times in the long mirrors on the walls at the side and in the oval one over the large fireplace. They twinkled back and forth at each other like live jewels. The floors were bare and gleaming. The great roll of rugs that lay piled in one corner would soon make the rooms seem more homelike. This room seemed to be the central parlor, for doors opened from every side. Farther on, ahead of them, they could see other twinkling chande¬ liers shining in the light of other windows.