The old man seemed to be overcome with emotion, then suddenly recalling his customer’s errand, he shuffled away to procure the package of detective stories for which she had called. During his absence Roberta went back of the counter, reached for a book on an upper shelf and, while so doing, dislodged several others that tumbled about her, revealing, as though it had been hidden in the dark recess back of them, the rare book which that morning had been taken from the Schmidt Antique Shop.
That, then, was what the old man meant when he said that his Marlitta would not go unless she could “go honest.”
The girl quickly replaced the books and then stood deep in thought. What could she do? What should she do? She knew that the gentle bookseller had taken the rare volume merely to try to save the life of the one dearest to him. When he returned with the package the girl heard herself asking:
“But you, if your Marlitta went to the home country, would you not be very lonely?”
There was infinite sadness in the faded eyes and yet, too, there was something else, a light from the soul that true sacrifice brings.
“Ah, that I also might go,” he said; then with a gesture that included all of the small dark shop, he added, “but these old books are all I have and they do not sell.”
At that moment Roberta recalled the name of Lionel Van Loon, who, as Miss Peerwinkle had assured her, would pay one thousand dollars for the rare book and its mate. For a thoughtful moment the girl gazed at the lilac, then decided to tell the little old man all that she knew.
At first she regretted this decision when she saw the frightened expression in his gentle, child-like face, but she hastened to assure him that she only wanted to help him, and so she was asking him to send the stolen book back to the antique shop by mail.
When this had been done, Roberta, returning from the corner post box, found the old man gazing sadly at another volume which the girl instantly knew was the prized mate of the one she had just mailed.
“It’s no use without the other,” the bookseller told her, “and Mr. Schmidt wouldn’t pay what it’s worth. He never does. He crowds the poor man to the wall and then crushes him.”
“I have a plan,” the girl told him. “Will you trust me with this book for a little while?”
Trust her? Who would not? For reply the old man held his treasure toward her. “Heaven bless you,” was all that he said.
It was four o’clock when Bobs descended from a taxicab and mounted the steps of a handsome brown stone mansion on Riverside Drive. Mr. Van Loon was at home and, being a most kindly old gentleman and accustomed to receiving all manner of persons, he welcomed Roberta into his wonderful library, listened courteously at first, but with growing interest, when he realized that this radiant girl had a book to sell which she believed to be both rare and valuable. The eyes of the cultured gentleman plainly revealed his great joy when he actually saw the long-sought first volume.
“My dear young lady,” he said, “you cannot know what it means to me to be able to obtain that book. I know where I can find its mate and so, I assure you, I will purchase it, the price being?—” He paused inquiringly.
Roberta heard, as though it were someone else speaking, her own voice saying: “Would one thousand dollars be too much, Mr. Van Loon?”
To a man whose hobby was collecting books, and who was many times a millionaire, it was not too much. “Will you have cash or a check?” he inquired.
“Cash, if you please.”
It was six o’clock when Bobs handed the money to the overjoyed bookseller, who could not thank her enough. The little old woman again was by the window and she smiled happily as she listened to the words of the girl that fairly tumbled over each other in their eagerness to be spoken.
Then reaching out a frail hand to her “good man,” and looking at him with a light in her eyes that Bobs would never forget, she said: “Caleb, now we can both go home to our children.”
Roberta promised to return the following day to help them prepare for the voyage. She was turning away when the little woman called to her: “I want you to have my lilac,” she said, as she held the blossoming spray toward the girl.
It was half past six o’clock when Bobs reached home. Gloria was watching for her rather anxiously, but it was not until they were gathered about the fireplace for the evening that Bobs told her story.
“Here endeth my experience as a detective,” she concluded.
But Roberta was mistaken.
CHAPTER XI
A QUEER GIFT
True to her promise Roberta had gone on the following afternoon to assist her new friends to prepare for their voyage, but to her amazement she found that they had departed, but the janitress living in the basement was on the watch for the girl and at once she ascended the stone stairs and inquired: “Are you Miss Dolittle?”
Bobs replied that she was, and the large woman, in a manner which plainly told that she had a message of importance to convey, whispered mysteriously, “Wait here!”
Down into the well of a stairway she disappeared, soon to return with an envelope containing something hard, which felt as though it might be a key.
This it proved to be. The writing in the letter had been painstakingly made, but the language was not English, and Bobs looked at it with so frankly puzzled an expression that the woman, who had been standing near, watching curiously, asked: “Can I read it for you?”
Strange things surely had happened since the Vandergrifts had gone to the East Side to live, but this was the strangest of all. It was hard for Roberta to believe that she heard aright. The old man had written that his entire stock was worth no more than five hundred dollars, and since Roberta had procured more than that sum for him, he was making her a gift of the books that remained, and requested that she remove them at once, as the rent on the shop would expire the following day.
The janitress, with an eye to business, at once said that her son, Jacob, was idle and could truck the books for the young lady wherever she wished them to go. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when this conversation took place, and at five o’clock Gloria and Lena May, returning from the Settlement House, were amazed to see a skinny horse drawing a two-wheeled ash cart stopping at the curb in front of the Pensinger mansion. The driver was a Hebrew lad, but at his side sat no less a personage than Roberta, who beamed down upon her astonished sisters.
After a moment of explanation the three girls assisted the boy Jacob to cart all the books to one of the unoccupied upper rooms, and when he had driven away Roberta sank down upon a kitchen chair and laughed until she declared that she ached. Lena May, busy setting the table for supper, merrily declared: “Bobs, what a girl you are to have adventures. Here Glow and I have been on the East Side just as long as you have, and nothing unusual has happened to us.”
“Give it time,” Roberta remarked as she rose to wash her hands. “But now I seem to have had a new profession thrust upon me. Glow, how would it do to open an old book shop out on the front lawn?”
“I’ll prophesy that these books will fill a good need some day, perhaps, when we’re least expecting it,” was Gloria’s reply.
Then, as they sat eating their evening meal together and watching the afterglow of the sunset on the river, that was so near their front door, at last Bobs said: “Do see those throngs of poor tired-out women trooping from the factory. Now they will go to the Settlement House and get their children, go home and cook and wash and iron and darn and—” she paused, then added, “How did we four girls ever manage to live so near all this and know nothing about it? I feel as though I had been the most selfish, useless, good-for-nothing—”
“Here, here, young lady. I won’t allow you to call my sister such hard names,” Glow said merrily as she rose to replenish their cups of hot chocolate. Then, more seriously, she added as she reseated herself: “Losing our home seemed hard, but I do believe that we three are glad that something happened to make us of greater use in the world.”
“I am,” Le
na May said, looking up brightly. She was thinking of the sand pile at the Settlement House over which she had presided that afternoon.
And Gloria concluded: “I know that I would be more nearly happy than I have been since our mother died, if only I knew where Gwendolyn is.”
And where was Gwendolyn, the proud, selfish girl who had not tried to make the best of things? Gloria would indeed have been troubled had she but known.
CHAPTER XII
A YOUNG MAN ENTERS
It was early Sunday morning. “Since we are to have your little friend, Nell Wiggin, to dinner today,” Gloria remarked as the three sat at breakfast, “suppose we also invite Miss Selenski. It will be a nice change for her.”
“Good!” Bobs agreed. “That’s a splendid suggestion. Now what is the program for the day?”
“Lena May has consented to tell Bible stories to the very little children each Sunday morning at the Settlement House,” Gloria said, “and I have asked a group of the older girls who are in one of my clubs to come over here this afternoon for tea and a quiet hour around the fireplace. I thought it would be a pleasant change for them, and I want you girls to become acquainted with them so when I mention their names you will be able to picture them. They really are such bright, attractive girls! The Settlement House is giving them the only chance that life has to offer them.” Then, smiling lovingly at the youngest, Gloria concluded: “Lena May has consented to pour, and you, Bobs, I shall expect to provide much of the entertainment.”
Roberta laughed. “Me?” she asked. “What am I to do?”
“O, just be natural.” Gloria rose and began to clear the table as she added: “Now, Bobs, since you have to go after your friend, Miss Wiggin, Lena May and I will prepare the dinner. We have it planned, but we’re going to surprise you with our menu.”
It was nine o’clock when Roberta left the Pensinger mansion. It was the first Sunday that the girls had spent on the East Side, and what a different sight met the eyes of Bobs when she started down the nearly deserted street, on one side of which were the wide docks.
Derricks were silent and the men who lived on the barges were dressed in whatever holiday attire they possessed. They were seated, some on gunwales, others on rolls of tarred rope, smoking and talking, and save for an occasional steamer loaded with folk from the city who were sailing away for a day’s outing, peace reigned on the waterfront, for even the noise of the factory was stilled.
Turning the corner at Seventy-eighth Street, Roberta was surprised to find that the boys’ playground was nearly deserted. She had supposed that at this hour it would be thronged. Just as she was puzzling about it, a lad with whom she had a speaking acquaintance emerged from a doorway and she hailed him:
“You’re all dressed up, Antovich, aren’t you? Just like a regular little gentleman. Are you going to Sunday school?”
“Oh, no, ma’am; that is, I dunno as ’tis. Mr. Hardinian doesn’t go to call it that. He calls it a boys’ club by Treasure Seekers. There’s a clubhouse over to Seventy-fifth Street. I say, Miss Bobs, I wish for you to come and see it. I sure wish for you to.”
Roberta assured the eager lad that she might look in a little later, then bidding him good-bye, she turned in to the model tenement house to ask Miss Selenski to a one o’clock dinner.
“Oh, how lovely and sunny and sweet smelling your little home is,” Bobs said three minutes later when she had been admitted to the small apartment, the front windows of which overlooked the glistening blue river.
“I like it,” was the bright reply of the slender dark-eyed girl who lived there.
Bobs continued: “How I wish the rich folk who built this would influence others to do the same. Take that rookery across the street, for instance. It looks as though a clap of thunder would crash it to the ground, and it surely is a fire trap.”
“It is indeed that,” Miss Selenski said, “and though I have reported it time and again, the very rich man who owns it finds it such excellent income property that he manages to evade an injunction to have the place torn down. Some day we’ll have a terrible tragedy of some kind over there, and then perhaps—” she paused and sighed. “But, since we can’t help, let’s talk of pleasanter things.”
Bobs then informed Miss Selenski that she had come to invite her to dinner that day, and the little agent of the model apartments indeed was pleased, and replied: “Some time soon I shall invite you girls over here and give you just Hungarian dishes.” Then Bobs departed, and as she walked down Fourth Avenue she glanced with rather an amused expression up at the windows of the Detective Agency of which, for so brief a time, she had been an employee. She wondered what that good-looking young man, James Jewett, had thought of her, for, surely, her recent employer would have at once telephoned that as a detective she had been “no good.” Then she decided that she probably never would learn, as she most certainly would not again return to the agency. But little do we know what fate holds in store for us.
Nell Wiggin was ready and waiting, and she looked very sweet indeed, with her corn yellow hair fluffed beneath her neat blue hat, her eyes eager, her cheeks, usually pale, flushed with this unusual excitement. Her suit was neat and trim, though made of cheap material.
“You’re right on time to the very minute, aren’t you, Miss Dolittle?” she said happily, as she opened the door to admit her new friend.
“I sure am,” was the bright reply. “I’m the original on the dot man, or young lady, I should say.” But while Bobs was speaking there was misgivings in her heart. She had forgotten to ask Gloria what she ought to do about her name. Should they all be Dolittles or Vandergrifts? She decided to take Nell into her confidence and tell her the story of the assumed name.
The listener did not seem at all surprised. “Lots of girls who go out to work change their names,” she said. “It’s just as honest as writing stories under a different name, I should think.”
“That’s so,” Roberta agreed, much relieved. “A nom-de-plume isn’t much different.”
“And so you are a detective?” Nell looked at her friend with a little more awe, perhaps.
“Heavens no! Not now!” Bobs was quick to protest. “I merely tried it, and failed.”
“Well, as it turned out, a detective wasn’t needed on that particular case.” Nell was giving Bob the very information she was eager to receive, but for which she did not wish to ask. “The next day the stolen book came back by mail.” Roberta knew that she ought to register astonishment, but instead, she laughed. “What did Mr. Schmidt say?” she inquired.
“Oh, they all put it down to conscience. That does happen, you know. You read about conscience money being returned every now and then in the newspapers, but the strangest part was, that that very afternoon Mr. Van Loon came in and said that he had been able to obtain the first volume and wished to purchase the second. Mr. Schmidt was out at the time, and so Miss Peerwinkle sold it to him for five hundred dollars.”
Bobs wanted to laugh again. It amused her to think that she had driven the better bargain, but she thought it unwise to appear too interested in the transaction, and so she changed the subject, and together they walked up Third Avenue.
“How different it all is on Sunday,” Nell Wiggin smiled happily at her new friend. She had indeed spoken truly. The vendors’ carts were conspicuous by their absence and the stores, if they were open, seemed to be more for the social gathering of foreign folk dressed in their gay best, than for active business. Even the elevated trains thundered overhead with much longer intervals in between, and sometimes, for as long as fifteen minutes, the peace of Sunday seemed to pervade that unlovely East Side.
Bobs, noting a Seventy-fifth Street sign, stopped and gazed down toward the river, and sure enough she saw a long, low building labeled Boys’ Club House.
“Let’s go through this way to Second,” Bobs suggested. In front of the clubhouse there was a group of boys with faces so clean that they shone, and one of these, leaving the others, raced up to the girls
, and taking his friend by the hand, he said: “Oh, Miss Bobs, you did for to come, didn’t you? Please stop in by the clubhouse. It will to please Mr. Hardinian.”
Roberta’s smile seemed to convey consent, and she found herself being rapidly led toward a wide-open door. Nell willingly followed. The sound of band practice came from within, but, when the lad appeared with the smiling guest, a young man, who had been playing upon a flute, arose and at once advanced toward them. What dark, beautiful eyes he had! “Why,” Roberta exclaimed in surprise. “We saw Mr. Hardinian the very first day we came in this neighborhood to live. He was helping a poor sick woman who had fallen, and—” But she could say no more, for the small boy was eagerly telling the clubmaster that this was his “lady friend” and that her name was Miss Bobs. The young man smiled and said that he was always glad to have visitors. “What a musical voice!” was Bobs’ thought.
Then, turning to the girl who had remained by the open door, she held out a hand. “This is my friend, Nell Wiggin. I am sure that we will both be interested in knowing of your work, Mr. Hardinian, if you have time to spare.”
“Indeed I have, always, for those who are interested.” Then the young man told them of his many clubs for boys.
Roberta looked about with interest. “Why are there so many wide shelves all around the walls, Mr. Hardinian?” she asked at last.
The young man smiled. “If you will come some night at ten o’clock you will find a little street urchin, some homeless little fellow, tucked up in blankets asleep on each of those shelves, as you call their bunks. Maybe you do not know, but even in the bitterest winter weather many small boys sleep out in the streets or creep into doorways and huddle together to keep warm. That is, they used to before I came. Now they are all welcome in here.”
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