CHAPTER XI

KRIS KRINGLE’S JINGLES

“It’s funny,” said Beth thoughtfully. “New York seemed to be doing all sorts of things when I came, and till now, and now it doesn’t seem to be doing anything else but get ready for Christmas.”

“Those are not really automobile horns you hear; they are Kris Kringle’s jingles!” laughed Natalie, pausing with the slender tip of her small screw pencil on her lip.

“What did Helen Van Voort send us last year, Nat?” asked Alys. Her brow was drawn by a vertical line of puzzle and her voice sounded worried. “I can’t remember whether she joined the C. C. C. or not, so I can’t tell whether to put her in the much or little column.”

“She sent us each a flower pin, don’t you remember? You liked mine better than yours. They were good ones. She belongs in the muchies,” replied Natalie.

Beth looked her curiosity over this cryptic conversation. Natalie saw the question in her eyes and laughed again.

“The C. C. C.’s are a club of girls. The three C’s stand for Commonsense Christmas Contributions. I named it. It means that the members will not go above a dollar in buying Christmas presents. Some of the girls joined and some didn’t. I’ll tell you one thing: it sounds all right, and we did it because there is such a crowd of girls whom we all know that it runs up to a fearful sum to buy decent things for each one! Besides we know a few who are really nicer girls, come from better families, than some of the richer ones, yet who haven’t enough to spend to afford fine gifts all around. But you have to work so hard to think up things for a dollar, and then spend so much time chasing around shops to get them, that you really might as well spend more than a dollar--it costs more than money to get through. Alys and I gave it up; some of the girls hold on. It’s terrible to try to remember which are Three C’s and which aren’t! You must send little gifts to the members, of course, or they’ll be disgusted that you got something expensive for them, when you’re supposed to know they’re C’s.” Natalie reached the end of this lengthy explanation with relief.

“But you have a long list!” cried Beth, glancing at the pad on which Natalie had been setting down names and at its counterpart on Alys’s knee. Only in a few cases had there been an article written down after a name and of these several had an interrogation mark after them, showing that these articles had not been finally decided upon.

“About seventy-five, not counting the family and the servants!” cried Alys fretfully.

“But at a dollar apiece--would that be little to spend for Christmas?” asked Beth.

“Tell us about your Christmases, little Cozbeth,” said Natalie gently.

“At home?” asked Beth, flushing. “Well, there aren’t any big stores in town. Some people send to Boston for their presents; lots of people buy from catalogues. Of course we have a Sunday-school celebration. Aunt Rebecca mostly gives me sensible things, things I’d have to have some time. Janie and I----” Beth stopped. She found it hard to describe the little gifts that she and Janie made each other with those long lists lying under her eyes upon her cousins’ knees. For the first time since she had really known them, she felt half afraid of Natalie and Alys.

“Janie and you got each other some nice little thing that you each knew the other wanted, or else made something,” Natalie said, with her mother’s tactful kindness. “That’s the best way to keep Christmas, but you can’t help doing as Romans do when you’re in Rome. Did you decide on everything you were going to get, Beth?”

Beth shook her head. “There aren’t many people I know,” she said, holding up a sheet of paper. “Janie and Daisy and Nell and Edith and May and Ruth--that’s all the girls. I’m going to subscribe for magazines for Aunt Rebecca; she’s crazy to read and she has used up ’most everything in the Public Library. I put down some sensible things for some people who haven’t any money. And I’m going to buy a lovely rose pink dress for Miriam Gaines. She’s a cripple from scarlet fever, but she’s young and I’m pretty sure she’d love a pink dress. People will all ask her why I ever in this world got her that, why I didn’t buy her a dark wrapper that would be useful. But I’m going to get a sort of dancing dress, ready made, as rose colored as it can be, and I sort of know Miriam will have a fit over it. I believe she’ll think she’s going to get well, else such a dress wouldn’t come for her; I can see her just living on it! And on Fourth of July, or days like that, I guess she’ll get her mother to put it on her. I think Christmas presents ought to be lovely, useless things that make you think things like fairy tales, even if they never come true. It seems to match Santa Claus stories better than sensible things do. Maybe they are useful things, if they make people happy.”

“Where could you have learned such heart wisdom, my Beth?” asked Mrs. Cortlandt. She had come in quietly behind Beth and her voice close beside her chair made the little girl jump. “That’s the trouble with this campaign for useful Christmas gifts; people test usefulness by the sense of touch. If you three lassies are ready, we’ll go shopping.”

“We’ll never be ready, mama,” sighed Alys. “We may as well start out and get what we know we want; it will take nearly every day from now on, anyway.”

Beth’s eyes dilated, then she looked a little cast down. “It wouldn’t take long to get my things, but I’d be glad to have them in the house a while to gloat over them,” she said.

Mrs. Cortlandt laughed, as she always laughed at Beth’s funny seriousness.

“Here is half of your Christmas spending money,” she said, straightening Beth’s hair ribbon by way of a caress. “Your uncle left me the hundred for you, but I brought you only half; you will have to shop more than once.”

“Half!” cried Beth, turning pale at the thought of being responsible for such a sum. “Fifty dollars? Oh, Aunt Alida, you’d better let me leave almost all of that here! Aunt Rebecca carries large sums like that in the waist of her dress when she goes to Boston to shop--she doesn’t often go! But I’d not have any place to carry it safely, because I button up in the back and I’d never be able to get it out.”

At this speech Natalie and Alys collapsed and Aunt Alida fairly shook Beth in a funny ecstasy of enjoyment of her.

“Uncle Jim was quite right: you are an Anomaly and a Survival, you little animate New England primer!” she cried. “Keep your purse hand in your muff till you are ready to use the money, and touch your selections with one hand only! Meet me down-stairs in half an hour, lassies.”

Aunt Alida hurried away with this injunction and Beth seized the opportunity to consult her cousins in regard to a gift for her, just as she had consulted Aunt Alida for them.

“Oh, no one ever knows what to get for mama,” cried Alys. “Lots of her friends ask us, but we never know. We three are going to have our pictures taken for her and, if we can, we are going to get father to sit, too. That would really please her, for there is no picture of him, except dreadful snapshot things, since we were babies. You have your picture taken with ours and we’ll get them framed prettily. You have yours alone, and then in a group with Dirk and us, and help us coax father to sit, and that will be the best thing you could give mama.”

“Isn’t that a little--sort of conceited? In me, I mean. Not you, because of course she’d love a picture of her own children. But wouldn’t it be queer in me to think she’d rather have my picture than--well, anything else?” asked Beth.

“Now, Bethie, don’t pretend you don’t know that mama loves you!” cried Natalie.

“Yes, better than our other cousins, her own nieces and nephews. She’d love a nice picture of you. There’s a splendid place on the avenue where we’re going; real portrait pictures they take,” Alys chimed in. “Oh, and why not send one to all your old friends in Massachusetts--send it instead of a Christmas card, to tell them where your present comes from! And two or three different ones to your friend Janie.”

“Alys has an idea, Beth!” added Natalie, refraining from suggesting what a hole this would make in Beth’s Christmas allowance and privately resolving to get her father to pay so much toward these pictures that Beth should never know what their actual cost had been.

“Well,” Beth submitted to their wisdom. “And for Uncle Jim? Is there anything on earth he wants? I thought I’d like to make him and your mother something.”

“Make father a case to carry his traveling slippers in,” said Natalie promptly. “You can easily do it; just an oblong with a flap; he will put it in his bag when he goes away for a night. It is a case to keep the slippers from touching other things--a white tie, for instance! If we don’t get ready we shall keep mama waiting. She always allows us enough time and then has no mercy on us for being behindhand. Mama demands punctuality from us in all our engagements.”

“Aunt Rebecca always says ‘procrastination is the thief of time’ and that if I get into the habit of being late I’ll be doubly dishonest, stealing my own time and other people’s too. It’s really strange how much alike Aunt Alida and Aunt Rebecca are in their way of seeing things, though they certainly aren’t one bit alike any other way, and Aunt Rebecca never would believe they could be alike at all,” said Beth scrambling her papers and pencil together and hastening off to prepare for her first extensive shopping on her own account.

It was noon when the Cortlandt car joined the line of its fellows skirmishing in and out before the doors of the great shops in and around Thirty-fourth Street. It deposited its four occupants at a vast plate glass doorway and disappeared to allow its successor to come up and to wait until it should be summoned to resume its passengers.

With what seemed to Beth like superhuman swiftness Natalie and Alys selected the gifts upon which they had already determined, said briefly: “Charged and sent,” and went on to the next purchase.

After a while Beth, too, woke up from her maze and decided upon her gifts for the girls at home. She found herself in possession of four bangles, almost alike, slender golden hoops, for the four girls who stood in the second tier of friendship toward her; these bangles were to be marked with the girls’ initials and sent to her uncle’s later, each in an alluring square box with white velvet lining.

She also found that she had bought for Janie an exquisite little circle brooch, set with sapphires, which, Beth foresaw, would match Janie’s eyes, and which Beth found appropriate, as well as satisfactory, for the clerk assured her that brooches of this sort were called “Friendship circles,” and that their endlessness was an emblem of true friendship, such as she knew hers and Janie’s would prove to be.

Aunt Alida, too, bought in this shop, so glorified by great spaces, fine bronzes, glittering gems, that it seemed ridiculous to speak of it as a shop. She bought swiftly and decidedly, at times secretly, so that the lynx-eyed girls did not know what it was that she had quickly ordered “charged and sent.” But she selected many things that Beth did see, with awe and admiration. Trinkets “for her girls’ other cousins,” she said, for her friends, silver mesh purses, beautiful things in leather and glass, as well as in gold, silver and jewels.

Beth recalled the three little shops at home, the gimcracks that were not pretty, nor useful, which appeared in them at this season, Janie’s and her own shopping in them, their long discussions over articles that cost about a quarter, or half, of a dollar, for which they had long saved their spending money! She deliberately pricked herself with the pin of Janie’s brooch to see if she were really here in the body, not dreaming in her small iron bed, in that far-off Massachusetts chamber which was hers.

Natalie saw her do this and demanded the reason for it.

“Nothing,” said Beth blushing. “Have you other cousins, Natalie? I haven’t any but you. It seems queer that you have any but me.”

“Mother’s sister’s boys and her brother’s girls,” replied Natalie. “The girls are in California; Aunt Justine is not well. The boys are living in Washington, the state. Uncle Hubert wanted them to study scientific agriculture, so he bought a big farm there. I suppose they will come east again. Of course you haven’t any cousins but us; father had no other sister but your mother, no brother. Oh, I forgot there might be Bristead cousins! Aren’t there?”

“No,” said Beth. “My father was the youngest of five children and the other four died of diphtheria, all together, when he was a baby. It must have been awful for their mother. Of course it kept me from any Bristead cousins, too.”

“We will lunch now, my dears; it is high time,” Aunt Alida interposed just then, opportunely, for Natalie hardly knew how to reply with proper sympathy to this story whose tragedy seemed spent and impersonal now.

Aunt Alida took her three to lunch at a place of the utmost perfection. Beth was getting used to imposing restaurants and they no longer took away her appetite. But the music of the small, but excellent orchestra made eating difficult; Beth was helpless under the spell of good music. Aunt Alida had chosen this place for its orchestra, knowing how Beth would enjoy it; for her own part she preferred music and eating separate.

“Is that three-quarter, or four-four time, Aunt Alida?” Beth asked after a long silence.

“Six-eight, dear. Why? And I didn’t know you had been taught music,” cried Aunt Alida.

“I was beginning to be taught; a new young lady came to live in our town and she was teaching me. I hadn’t gone far. The reason I asked was that I was trying to eat my roll in time and I couldn’t make my teeth keep right with four-four counting. No wonder, if it was six-eight! I didn’t have much in six-eight time, but I like it; it seems to go right along, so smooth and nice,” said Beth.

And this speech caused Alys to choke so violently over her lunch that it was a long while before she could stop coughing and eat again in any time whatever.

“I think I shall send Anna Mary with you to do some of your shopping, Beth,” said Aunt Alida. “She can take you to places where you can buy your serviceable articles for the people at home who have, as you said, ‘no money,’ and where you can find the rosy evening gown at lower prices than in this neighborhood. It will not matter if the dancing gown is not the very last utterance of fashionable magnificence, will it, dear?”

“No, indeed!” cried Beth. “I’ve been wondering if there weren’t any places in New York where they kept bargains. I think a bargain evening dress would be just the thing for a lame girl who wouldn’t ever wear it, don’t you?”

“I really do,” smiled Aunt Alida. She laid a crisp bill on the salver the waiter offered her and arose without waiting for him to return with change. Nothing so impressed and distressed little Beth’s frugal mind as the reckless way in which her aunt and uncle left change to be gathered up by those who served them in public places.

“Now, girleens, no more shopping to-day!” announced Aunt Alida as they entered the car. “I am going to a tea this afternoon and this evening to the opera, so I must rest and dress for the tea. Natalie, you and Alys and Beth had better ride; the afternoon is beautiful. I hope Dirk may be found to join you. We’ll drive around by the stable and tell Tim to be ready to go with you at--half-past three.” Aunt Alida consulted the tiny watch on her wrist before mentioning the hour.

“That’s good! I’ve been wishing for Trump, Aunt Alida,” cried Beth.

“I’ve no doubt he wishes for you, or at least would like to go out,” said Aunt Alida. “Beth, what else do you wish for? You are too big to write letters to Santa Claus, so you must be big enough to consult on your own Christmas presents.”

“Aunt Alida, there isn’t a thing, not one thing that I really want,” declared Beth earnestly. “There are lots of things I see that I’d like to have when I see them, but I see so many that I forget what they were the next minute. I honestly believe I’d like a doll that was very, very beautiful. I always thought there must be a perfectly lovely doll in the world, not like any I ever saw. But I couldn’t play with her if I had her, because when you get old for dolls they seem to stand off and not play with you. I’m just crazy about them, but I don’t know what to do with them the way I did. Janie could help me, but I couldn’t do it alone. So I don’t need even the doll. It is just like ‘Hush, my dear, lie still and slumber’; don’t you know? ‘All my wants are well supplied.’ And they certainly are.”

“Couldn’t Alys and I play dolls with you?” asked Natalie.

Beth shook her head decidedly. “I don’t believe you could have played dolls with me if you were Janie’s age; Janie’s not as old as I am,” she said. She looked at Natalie and Alys’s charming costumes, at their dawning young womanhood with penetrating eyes. “You are too far-off,” she added. “Alys is farther off than Natalie, though she is younger. You have too much. When you get bigger you have to want something in order to love dolls. I can’t play with them, but I love to cuddle them.”

“So do I, Beth,” said Natalie.

Mrs. Cortlandt looked at Beth, wondering for the unnumbered time at the thoughtfulness that this simple little girl sometimes displayed. When it came to heart knowledge, Beth always seemed to understand profound things that she could not possibly know.

“Yes, I guess you would like to cuddle them, Natalie,” said Beth, regarding her oldest cousin attentively. “Your eyes look cuddly.”

Aunt Alida telephoned the stable after they reached home, to save time, and sent the girls thither in the car after they had put on their riding habits. Dirk proved to be at home and he joined the riding party.

Tim had been bidden to ride beside Beth who, though she had by this time ridden several times in the park, was still lacking in self-confidence. Another groom accompanied Natalie and Alys, who were good riders, for such young ones, and who needed no more than an attendant should anything go wrong.

“I can’t help being glad, Tim, that Trump is no taller,” said Beth, as she and faithful Tim turned in at the park entrance in the rear of the small cavalcade. “It would not be far to fall off, if I had to fall.”

“No, Miss Beth, and I’m suspectin’ that had something to do with Mr. Cortlandt’s pickin’ the pony for you. That and his gentleness,” said Tim. He had become utterly devoted to Beth since he had esquired her. “She was that quaint and old-fashioned and sweet,” he told Mrs. Tim at home.

“I thought it was, Tim. I’d be afraid on a real horse, but Trump is like a footstool. He trots beautifully, though, doesn’t he? And he is the sweetest thing! I’m afraid to begin to love him, because it will be spring so soon and I’ll have to go home and leave him. But I don’t have to _begin_ to love him, because I just worshiped him the moment I saw---- What is that, Tim?” cried Beth sharply, interrupting herself.

“Sure it’s some kind of a to-do with a child,” replied Tim.

Tim on his horse and Beth on Trump hastened forward; the rest of the party was already out of sight around a curve of the bridle path. A small crowd had collected at a point a short distance ahead of Beth and her escort; they saw the gray form of a tall park policeman dominating it.

“I’ll have to run you in,” Beth heard the policeman say as she came up.

“Oh, what is it?” cried Beth, and a boy beside her explained that the forlorn little girl, whom the policeman held by the arm in a state of collapse, had been accused of snatching a lady’s purse and throwing it into the shrubbery on the mall beyond the bridle path, intending to find it later. But that the lady had felt the child’s touch and had pursued her here, whither the small footpad had run to escape her.

“Oh, I’m sure she didn’t!” cried Beth, slipping from Trump’s back to Tim’s horror and pushing her way over to the child. “You didn’t steal the purse, did you?” she cried.

The child looked up into the anxious face, scarcely older than her own, but far plumper, rosier and happier. She saw the pity in the sweet blue eyes and her own dark ones filled with tears.

“No, miss; oh, no, miss!” cried the little creature. Her thin body shook with sobs and she broke into passionate weeping, interrupted by Italian words.

“Why, there’s a purse!” cried Beth. Her eyes had spied a mesh purse dangling on the end of a long silver bar, held by a silver chain around the neck of the child’s accuser. The bar sustained an immense pillow muff. The muff nearly hid the purse, but its gleams chanced to fall under Beth’s eyes as she looked at the excited woman, who was eagerly clamoring for the arrest of the small robber and her immediate deportation to the reformatory. “Is that the purse you lost?” cried Beth.

The woman looked down, lifted the purse as if she suspected it of being capable of further tricks, and detached it gingerly from the muff bar.

“It was twitched--I suppose the muff bar caught it----” muttered the woman, and stopped, ashamed of her accusation and annoyed by the angry murmurs of the knot of people which had collected.

The poor frightened child, who had been in danger of arrest, sank in a pitiful heap of sobbing weakness on the ground, utterly unable to stand when the relief from her danger brought its reaction.

“I’ll walk, Tim, and let her ride Trump; it isn’t far,” said Beth. “Get on my pony, dear; he’s very low and very gentle; all you’ll have to do is to sit on him. I can’t ride, but I never have a bit of trouble staying on,” added Beth to the prostrate little victim.

“No, Miss Beth dear,” said Tim, inexpressibly touched and pleased. “I wouldn’t dare let you walk home, in your habit, too; they’d sure be blamin’ me. Here, boy; go call a taxi and there’ll be a quarter in it for you,” added Tim to the boy who had explained the situation to Beth. “Be quick with you!”

The boy ran off, open-mouthed with admiration for this little lady who had appeared in time to effect such a rescue.

Natalie, Alys and Dirk rode back with their groom to find out what had happened to Beth. When they heard the story Alys was half inclined to be annoyed at the oddness of it, but Natalie beamed on unconventional little Beth, and leaned over to pat Trump as a means to squeeze Beth’s hand slyly.

“You are going to be a little Saint Elizabeth, doing something for the unlucky ones all the time; I see that!” whispered Natalie.

“What a right all right you are, Beth Bristead!” cried Dirk, forgetting his audience and speaking aloud.

“She surely is!” cried a red-faced old gentleman standing by. “And I’m glad to learn her lovable little name.”

Beth was thankful when the messenger returned announcing that the taxicab, which he had fetched, was waiting at the head of the next path leading out from the bridle path to the drive.

“May I go with Dirk to see her off, Tim?” asked Beth.

“Sure; I’ll wait ye here,” replied Tim, already with Trump’s reins in his left hand.

Beth and Dirk led the trembling little Italian-American to the cab, escorted by a considerable proportion of the crowd. As they put her in Dirk asked her name and address.

“Annunciata Carmaldo,” the child told them, and that her home was quite across the city, in Second Avenue. She seemed to find the cab a species of smelling salts, for she revived from her fainting condition and began to sit up erect, even to assume small airs of importance, the moment she took her place within it. She bridled behind the doors which shut her in, her dark eyes peering over them, like a small seal in a tank.

“Maybe we shall see you again some day,” said Beth, bidding her good-bye. And, to her great embarrassment, the child leaned out and kissed Beth’s hands, raising them to her brow with fervor of adoration, while tears ran down her thin, pretty face, telling Beth of the gratitude for which the small Italian lacked all English words.

“Now that,” said Beth emphatically to Dirk as the cab rolled away and she and her cousin started back to their mounts, “that is what I call an adventure!”

“Were you really going to put that little Italiano on your pony and walk home, Beth?” asked Dirk, eyeing the little girl as if she were an entirely new specimen.

“Yes, of course; why not?” said Beth.

Dirk looked at her again, slapped his leg and laughed.

“Well, if I ever!” he cried, not explaining to Beth’s eager questioning what he meant.

That night Beth sat in her aunt’s room watching her made ready for the opera. It was an unfailing delight to Beth to see her beautiful aunt robed in her evening splendors, to watch the wonderful costumes adjusted and the flashing jewels placed in her dusky hair and on her white throat, scintillating among the laces on her breast.

Aunt Alida was to Beth the embodiment and illumination of all her dreams, a sort of combination of a royal princess, a fairy queen and a household goddess and mother whom she might worship, but must love. It had become a habit with Beth, and, consequently, with her cousins since she had come among them, to go to Mrs. Cortlandt’s room when she was dressing for a great occasion to absorb her loveliness and do her homage. Aunt Alida found no flattery that she received later in the evening in the great world half as sweet as this admiration from her children.

To-night Beth thought Aunt Alida had never been so beautiful--but she thought that each night! Anna Mary fastened a tiara of diamonds on her lady’s hair and clasped a long chain of perfect blue-white stones around her throat.

“You look like Iris!” cried Beth, as she caught the rainbow colors that flashed at her from the jewels.

“What do you know of Iris, small niece?” asked Uncle Jim, entering in sequence to his knock on his wife’s door.

“I know she was the rainbow and so is Aunt Alida,” Beth answered. “You look just as nice, in all that white linen front, as Aunt Alida does, Uncle Jim, but men can only be fine and nice; they can’t be wonderful.”

“Dear me, no; I should never so much as attempt to be wonderful, Bethie,” laughed Uncle Jim. “What’s this I hear about your wanting to give your pony to a beggar maid, while you walked? Saint Martin divided his cloak with a beggar; I don’t know which of the saints, if any, gave up his undivided horse to one.”

“She wasn’t a beggar, Uncle Jim,” Beth set him right. “And it was only while she was faint and had to get home. Was it wrong? Dirk roared laughing at me, but he wouldn’t tell me why.”

“It’s an unlikely thing to happen in New York,” said Uncle Jim.

“In New York? Oh! It’s--I suppose it would be something like my wearing the aprons here I used to wear at home?” Beth looked meditative.

“Do you like New York, Bethie?” asked her uncle, tipping up the thoughtful face.

“I just love it!” cried Beth fervently. “I used to be sort of jealous of it, in history, you know, its being settled before Massachusetts. I had to remember it was settled by the Dutch, and that Massachusetts had the Pilgrim Fathers to get over that 1614 date, when Plymouth was 1620. But now I don’t mind at all; I’d just as lief. It’s such a splendid place and it’s so good to me and I’m so happy here that I wouldn’t care if it had been Lief Ericsson settled it in the year 1000!”

“That’s fine and generous of you, Elizabeth, and I thank you in New York’s name! But after all it was settled by your Cortlandt ancestors, so you needn’t mind,” said Uncle Jim.

“I don’t think I ever realized I had Cortlandt ancestors then,” said Beth. She sprang up to hug him--carefully, because of his easily-crushed expanse of linen--for she thought her last speech made him look sorry.