Dandelion Cottage/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
Plans For Mrs. Crane's Old Age
DURING the lonely days immediately following Miss Blossom's departure, Mrs. Bartholomew Crane proved a great solace. The girls had somewhat neglected her during the preceding busy weeks; but with Miss Blossom gone, the cottagers became conscious of an aching void that new wall paper and lace handkerchiefs and a bank account could not quite fill; so presently they resumed their former habit of trotting across the street many times a day to visit good-natured Mrs. Crane.
Mrs. Crane's house was very small and looked rather gloomy from the outside because the paint had long ago peeled off and the weatherbeaten boards had grown black with age; but inside it was cheerfulness personified. First, there was Mrs. Crane herself, fairly radiating comfort. Then there was a bright rag carpet on the floor, a glowing red cloth on the little table, a lively yellow canary named Dicksy in one window, and a gorgeous red and crimson, but very bad tempered parrot in the other. There were only three rooms downstairs and two bed chambers upstairs. Mrs. Crane's own room opened off the little parlour and visitors could see the high feather bed always as smooth and rounded on top as one of Mrs. Crane's big loaves of light bread. The privileged girls were never tired of examining the good woman's patchwork quilts made many years previously of minute, quaint old-fashioned scraps of calico.
Even the garden seemed to differ from other gardens, for every inch of it except the patch of green grass under the solitary cherry tree was given over to flowers, many of them as quaint and old-fashioned as the bits of calico in the quilts, and to vegetables that ripened a week earlier for Mrs. Crane, than similar varieties did for any one else. Yet the garden was so little, and the variety so great, that Mrs. Crane never had enough of any one thing to sell. She owned her little home, but very little else. The two upstairs rooms were rented to lodgers, and she knitted stockings and mittens to sell because she could knit without using her eyes, which, like so many soft, bright black eyes, were far from strong; but the little income so gained was barely enough to keep stout, warm-hearted, over-generous Mrs. Crane supplied with food and fuel. The neighbours often wondered what would become of the good, lonely woman if she lost her lodgers, if her eyes failed completely or if she should fall ill. Everybody agreed that Mrs. Crane should have been a wealthy woman instead of a poor one, because she would undoubtedly have done so much good with her money. Mabel had heard her father say that there was a good-sized mortgage on the place, and Dr. Bennett had instantly added: "Now, don't you say anything about that, Mabel," but ever after that, Mabel had kept her eyes open during her visits to Mrs. Crane, hoping to get a glimpse of the dreadful large-sized thing that was not to be mentioned.
On one occasion she thought she saw light. Mrs. Crane had expressed a fear that a wandering pole-cat had made a home under her woodshed.
"Is mortgage another name for pole-cat?" Mabel had asked a little later.
"No," imaginative Jean had replied, "a mortgage is more like a great, lean, hungry, grey wolf waiting just around the corner to eat you up. Don't ever use the word before Mrs. Crane; she has one."
"Where does she keep it?" demanded Mabel, agog with interest.
"I promised not to talk about it," said Jean, "and I won't."
Miss Blossom had been gone only two days when something happened to Mrs. Crane. It was none of the things that the neighbours had expected to happen, but, for a little while, it looked almost as serious, Bettie, running across the street right after breakfast, one morning, with a bunch of fresh chickweed for the yellow canary, and a cracker for cross Polly, found Mrs. Crane, usually the most cheerful person imaginable, sitting in her kitchen with a swollen, crimson foot in a pail of luke-warm water, and groaning dismally.
"Oh, Mrs. Crane!" cried surprised Bettie. "What in the world is the matter? Are are you coming down with anything?"
"I've already come," moaned Mrs. Crane, grimly. "I was out in my back yard in my thin old slippers early this morning putting hellebore on my currant bushes and I stepped down hard on the teeth of the rake that I'd dropped on the grass. There's two great holes in my foot. How I'm ever going to do things I don't know, for 'twas all I could do to crawl into the house on my hands and knees."
"Isn't there something I can do for you?" asked Bettie, sympathetically.
"Could you get a stick of wood from the shed and make me a cup of tea? Maybe I'd feel braver if I wasn't so empty."
"Of course I could," said Bettie, cheerily.
"I tell you what it is," confided Mrs. Crane, "it's real nice and independent living all alone as long as you're strong and well, but just the minute anything happens, there you are like a Robinson Crusoe, cast away on a desert isle. I began to think nobody would ever come."
"Can't I do something more for you?" asked Bettie, poking scraps of paper under the kettle to bring it to a boil. "Don't you want Dr. Bennett to look at your foot? Hadn't I better get him?"
"Yes do," said Mrs. Crane, "and then come back. I can't bear to think of staying here alone."
For the next four days there was a deep depression in the middle of Mrs. Crane's puffy feather bed for the injured foot was badly swollen and Mrs. Crane was far too heavy to go hopping about on the other one. At first, her usually hopeful countenance wore a strained, anxious expression, quite pathetic to see.
"Now don't you worry one bit," said comforting little Bettie. "We'll take turns staying with you; we'll feed Polly and Dicksy, and I believe every friend you have is going to offer to make broth. Mother's making some this minute."
"But there's the lodgers," groaned Mrs. Crane, "both as particular as a pair of old maids in a glass case. Mr. Barlow wants his bed-clothes tucked in all around so tight that a body'd think he was afraid of rolling out of bed nights, and Mr. Bailey won't have his tucked in at all—says he likes 'em 'floating round loose and airy.' Do you suppose you girls can make those two beds and not get those two lodgers mixed up? I declare, I'm so absent-minded myself that I've had to climb those narrow stairs many a day to make sure I'd done it right."
"Don't be afraid," said Jean, who had joined Bettie. "Marjory's Aunty Jane has taught her to make beds beautifully, and I have a good memory. Between us we'll manage splendidly."
"But there's my garden," mourned the usually busy woman, who found it hard to lie still with folded hands in a world that seemed to be constantly needing her. "Dear me! I don't see how I'm going to spare myself for a whole week just when everything is growing so fast."
"We'll tend to the garden, too," promised Bettie.
"Yes, indeed we will," echoed Mabel "We'll water everything and weed"
"No you won't," said Mrs. Crane, quickly. "You can do all the watering you like, but if I catch any of you weeding, there'll be trouble."
The young cottagers were even better than their promises, for they took excellent care of Mrs. Crane, the lodgers, the parrot, the canary and the garden, until the injured foot was well again; but while doing all this they learned something that distressed them very much indeed. Of course they had always known in a general way that their friend was far from being wealthy, but they had not guessed how touchingly poor she really was. But now they saw that her cupboard was very scantily filled, that her clothing was very much patched and mended, her shoes distressingly worn out and that even her dish-towels were neatly darned.
"But we won't talk about it to people," said fine-minded Jean. "Perhaps she wouldn't like to have everybody know."
Even Jean, however, did not guess what a comfort proud Mrs. Crane had found it to have her warm-hearted little friends stand between her poverty and the sometimes-too-prying eyes of a grown-up world.
Unobservant as they had seemed, the girls did not forget about the Mother-Hubbard-like state of Mrs. Crane's cupboard. After that one of their finest castles in Spain always had Mrs. Crane, who would have made such a delightful mother and who had never had any children, enthroned as its gracious mistress. When they had time to think about it at all, it always grieved them to think of their generous natured, no-longer-young friend dreading a poverty-stricken, loveless and perhaps homeless old age, for that, they had discovered, was precisely what Mrs. Crane was doing.
"If she were a little, thin, active old lady, with bobbing white curls like Grandma Pike," said Jean, "lots of people would have a corner for her; but poor Mrs. Crane takes up so much room and is so heavy and slow that she's going to be hard to take care of when she gets old. Oh why couldn't she have had just one strong, kind son to take care of her?"
"When I'm married," offered Mabel, generously, "I'll take her to live with me. I won't have any husband if he doesn't promise to take Mrs. Crane, too."
"You shan't have her," declared Jean. "I want her myself."
"She's already promised to me," said Bettie, triumphantly. "We're going to keep house together some place, and I'm going to be an old-maid kindergarten teacher."
"I don't think that's fair, Bettie Tucker," said Marjory, earnestly. "I don't see how my children are to have any grandmother if she doesn't live with me. Imagine the poor little things with Aunty Jane for a grandmother!"