CHAPTER III

THE CHANGELING

The cab stopped before a tall house, dressed in brown from head to foot. “It looks like Aunt Rebecca when she has on her brown mohair,” thought Beth, and the humorous resemblance cheered away a slight feeling of fear that crept over the little girl as she realized that she had come to stay long in this big brown stone house, so unlike the brown house in the village from which she had come.

The cab doors parted and swung back without a touch. It was magic, Beth thought, till she remembered the driver somewhere up aloft behind her.

Anna Mary delayed long enough to pay this lofty personage, who touched his tall hat in acknowledgment of his fee; Beth watched it all with wide eyes as she waited on the pavement.

“Now,” said Anna Mary, and Beth followed her up the steps.

A smiling young woman in a cap opened the door. “Oh, Anna Mary!” she said, but her eyes were on Beth in her home-made blue garments.

“Where’s Mrs. Hodgman?” asked Anna Mary resenting this maid’s unspoken criticism of Beth’s appearance. Anna Mary had a personal pride in everything and everybody belonging to the family which she served.

“Mrs. Hodgman is in her room down-stairs,” said the maid. Just then a serious looking woman came up from below, and Anna Mary went toward her.

“Mrs. Hodgman, this is Mr. Cortlandt’s niece, Miss Elizabeth Bristead, but she is called Miss Beth. I’ve this moment come back from fetchin’ her. Miss Beth, this is Mrs. Hodgman who looks after your aunt’s housekeepin’ for her,” said Anna Mary.

Puzzled Beth held out her hand. “I’m very well, thank you,” she said, before Mrs. Hodgman had a chance to ask after her health.

The housekeeper smiled. “I’m glad to hear it, my dear. You certainly look so,” she said. “Mrs. Cortlandt and Mr. Cortlandt are out, Anna Mary. Mrs. Cortlandt thought that you would come, but she wasn’t sure, because you forgot to telegraph. She left word that she should not be in before one, if she came as early as that, and if the little niece came that we were to make her comfortable. She said that you could stay with Miss Beth until she came home, for fear she might be lonely. She said you need do nothing in her room till she came, but stay up-stairs to make the child happy.”

“I suppose her room is ready?” asked Anna Mary. “I think she had better not meet her cousins to-night. Miss Beth, come and have supper, and then we’ll go up-stairs.”

“I don’t think I’m hungry,” said Beth cautiously, remembering how her appetite on the train had surprised her.

But Anna Mary did not wait for her to make sure; she led the way down the hall. “She’d better have supper in the breakfast room, don’t you think, Mrs. Hodgman? It’s more cozy,” she suggested.

Anna Mary pulled aside a heavy portière and touched a button. The light that leaped into the flower-shaped bulbs around the room revealed rose-colored silken covered walls, high wainscoting of a wood as fine and glossy as the silk above it, beautiful gold and rose window draperies, and furniture so fine that even Beth felt its perfection. She caught her breath.

“Is it a room, a room to use?” she cried.

“It’s the breakfast room, Miss Beth,” said the housekeeper. “It is said to be one of the most beautiful rooms of its kind in New York. I’ll see that a supper is sent up, Anna Mary. Riggs is out to-night, so Frieda will serve it.”

She left the room and Anna Mary removed Beth’s coat; then they both waited. It did not seem long to Beth before another maid came and began to lay a place at the table; she was so much interested in looking at the sparkling glass, the massive silver on a highboy at one end of the room, at the pictures, the carvings, all the marvels surrounding her, that she would willingly have waited far longer for the coming of supper. But now the deft maid silently spread a drawn-work cloth at one end of the table, set it with china so frail, so beautiful that Beth was not quite sure whether it was china or confections. Then she brought steaming chocolate in a pot that matched the tall cup which had especially fascinated Beth, cold chicken in a bed of cresses, the thinnest bread that Beth had ever seen, cakes that made all else of no consequence, and two or three fruits preserved in their own syrupy juices.

“Supper is served for your young lady, Anna Mary,” said the maid speaking low.

Anna Mary pulled back Beth’s heavy chair and the wondering child took her place. But this time she could hardly eat, delicious as everything was. The breakfast room had so filled her that food had no place after it.

“You’re not makin’ out much, Miss Beth, but maybe it’s as well. It’s likely late for the likes of you to be suppin’,” said Anna Mary kindly.

“I go to bed at half-past eight at home,” said Beth, glancing at the little sparkling clock that struck once to say that it was one-quarter after nine.

“Well then, we’ll have to hurry to catch up with the time that’s behind us,” said Anna Mary, and took Beth’s hand to get her away from a room that she saw had fascinated her.

She led her to an elevator in the hall. Mrs. Hodgman again met them at its door. “The little girl has been given the blue willow room on the third floor, Anna Mary,” she said. “Good-night, my dear; I hope you will rest well and waken very happy in these new surroundings.”

“Thank you,” said Beth. “I hope you will, too.” She was so bewildered at finding an elevator waiting for her in a private house that she did not know what she said; hitherto elevators had meant to her stores or hotels in Boston. This one was padded and cushioned in golden browns; it had mirrors all around its sides above its padded wainscoting. Beth felt as if she were being put into a jewel box, for the elevator was small. “I know exactly how my garnet ring felt when it came,” she said. Fortunately Anna Mary did not hear; she would have thought Beth’s journey had tired her into delirium.

The boy in a mulberry uniform who ran the elevator stopped it almost as soon as he had started it.

“This way,” said Anna Mary, and took Beth up the hall to a door which she opened. The room it revealed was lighted, the bedclothing was turned back, a fire burned on the hearth.

Beth stood still uttering a faint: “Oh!”

The room was not large, but it was square. Its woodwork was snowy white, its floor covered with a blue velvet carpet so thick and soft, so beautiful in shade that Beth dared not move across it. A white dresser stood between a cluster of blue flower lights; a white dressing table stood opposite between another such group of lights. Willow chairs, blue cushioned, or all snowy white, stood around; a teakwood table and a teakwood bookcase gave the tone needed to bring out the delicate beauty of this room, and the bedstead, a four poster with a blue tester, was made of willow, like the chairs, and covered with a white silk counterpane, embroidered with blue violets strewn all over its surface. Blue velour curtains over snowy lace ones shut off the light from the two windows and made a background for the whole.

“It isn’t my room, Anna Mary?” gasped Beth. Anna Mary had fearlessly crossed the delicate carpet and had opened a door and hung Beth’s coat--oh, if Miss Tappan could have dreamed of this room when she made that coat!--in what Beth supposed was the closet, and turned to her to get her hat.

“Whose else?” demanded Anna Mary. “In here’s your dressin’ room and wardrobes, Miss Beth. There’s runnin’ water here; you’ll likely share your cousins’ bathroom; I’ll show you it.” She led the way through the dressing room and through a small square entry with four doors opening on it, Beth’s door and three others.

“Those doors lead to your two young girl cousins’ rooms, Miss Natalie and Miss Alys’s apartments, and this is the bathroom which they use, and you will use it, or they wouldn’t have given you the room you have--it’s a family room, do you see? Guests never are put in this wing of the house, not outside guests,” explained Anna Mary.

“Yes,” said Beth, but she did not see in the least. All that she saw was a room that convinced her the whole thing was a fairy story into which she had got by some means, much as Alice fell into Wonderland, for no mere bathroom could be like this! The ceiling was thick, cloudy glass; through it a clear, soft light, like moonlight, flooded the room. The floor was white marble; at one point it began to slant down till it disappeared in a lake of water that gently rose up in varying depths to meet it. Up the white walls climbed vines abloom with pale tea roses; Beth had to touch them to be sure that they were painted. Over beyond the lake, which was the beautiful substitute for the tubs that Beth had seen, were water-lilies floating on a little pond separate from the lake--and these were real--they were growing there; Beth touched them and they bent under her finger and gave out their exquisite perfume.

“Mr. Cortlandt designed this swimmin’ tank himself, Miss Beth. It is the most beautiful private bathroom in town, they say,” said Anna Mary. “Your cousin, Master Dirk, has a much larger swimmin’ pool, but then his is the one off the gymnasium, and it’s used for that too; the young ladies’ bath is for them alone--only now you will use it.”

“How shall I ever, ever tell Aunt Rebecca so she’ll understand? I don’t understand myself,” said Beth going back to her blue room in the wake of Anna Mary in a sort of trance. “My cousins are not really young ladies, are they?” she asked arousing to what Anna Mary had said.

“Miss Natalie is fifteen years old, Miss Alys is something above twelve, and Master Dirk is nearly eleven,” said Anna Mary. “Your trunk hasn’t come, Miss Beth--those baggage transfer men, you can’t be dependin’ on them! I’ll borrow a night-dress of Miss Alys’s from her maid--she’s not much bigger than you, though she is older.”

Anna Mary disappeared. When she came back Beth had folded her gown over the back of a chair, and was brushing her hair with gingerly touches, born of her misgiving in using the wrought silver backed brush which she had found on her dressing table.

“Oh, that will never do, Miss Beth!” cried Anna Mary, and Beth flushed deeply as she said:

“I was afraid it wouldn’t, Anna Mary, but there wasn’t any other brush here. Mine will come to-morrow, won’t it?” She hastily replaced the elaborate brush on the table.

“It’s not the brush I meant,” said Anna Mary appropriating it. “But you must wait to have your hair brushed. I’ll do it to-night, but after this there’ll be some one to wait on you--I don’t know whether it will be Célie, Miss Natalie and Miss Alys’s maid, or another one. But it’s not proper for you to dress your own hair. Sit there, Miss Beth, in that low chair before the dressin’ table while I brush your hair. Why, it’s very nice hair, Miss Beth!” Anna Mary added, as Beth obeyed her and she began to brush out its crinkled masses. “Now to think such fine hair should be braided till a body would no more notice it than she would a manilla rope; it’s a cryin’ shame, so it is! We’ll have your hair washed till it’s as fluffy as corn silk and as bright, and we’ll dress it suitable, Miss Beth, and you’ll see! You must have a dressin’ slip of some sort to put on when your maid’s brushin’--but Mrs. Cortlandt will look after that. Now, Miss Beth, here’s the night-dress I borrowed from Miss Alys for you. Will I help you, or will you do for yourself from this on?”

“I always dress and undress myself, Anna Mary,” said Beth guessing at her meaning. “Oh, Anna Mary, you’ve brought something instead of a night-dress!”

She checked herself from saying “a party dress,” but that was what she thought Anna Mary lifted from the bed and shook out, of its folds--it was a gown of soft china silk, trimmed with delicate narrow lace and tied with long white ribbons.

“This is a night-dress, Miss Beth,” said Anna Mary glancing with understanding at Beth’s plain little white underwaist, and red and gray striped flannel petticoat. Beth caught the look and took the night-dress without another word. When she had put it on and had tied its ribbons and settled the lace around her tanned little hands she knelt beside the wonderful willow bed, and buried her face in the silken down comforter which had been revealed when Anna Mary folded the violet-embroidered counterpane. Beth still said “Now I lay me,” like the simple little girl that she was, but it is doubtful if she could get her mind on her prayers with the silken night-dress caressing the bare soles of her feet, and when she was about to lay her down to sleep in such a bedstead.

“Oh, Anna Mary, it can’t be true!” she sighed rapturously as a faint suggestion of a delicate odor met her as her head sank into the pillow and Anna Mary returned to be sure that she wanted nothing more. “I couldn’t want anything more, Anna Mary, because there isn’t anything more. And there’s no use going to sleep to dream of fairy-land, the way I did at home, for I see more fairy-land with my eyes open than I can dream. I’m perfectly happy, but I don’t think I can sleep, Anna Mary; it’s all so wakeful-wonderful!”

“Try, Miss Beth,” urged Anna Mary. “There’s so much for you to enjoy you want to get up bright and rested. Will I turn off all the lights, or leave some for you?”

“Maybe you’d better make it dark, Anna Mary, please, though it does seem a shame to waste such a room in black darkness. Good-night, and thank you very much,” said Beth pressing her hot cheek into the cool linen covered pillow and watching the turning of the switch that shut from her vision the beauties amid which she lay.

The light from Fifth Avenue gradually brought out some of the furnishings of the room in a gray dimness. The padded fall of the horses’ feet on the asphalt road below kept the little girl awake for a while, but the weariness of healthy childhood conquered at last, and Beth slept sound through the night and late into the morning.

It was Anna Mary who came to call her. Beth sat up, shocked to see by the little clock on the bookcase that it was nearly nine o’clock.

“Anna Mary!” she cried springing out of bed. “What time do you have breakfast?”

“Your cousins have theirs at eight, Miss Beth; your aunt wishes them to be at their lessons with their governess by nine. Sometimes your aunt does not breakfast with them, but most times she does,” said Anna Mary. “Your uncle went away early in his motor car, so this mornin’ your aunt breakfasted in her room. It doesn’t matter at all, and it’s lucky you slept so well. Your cousins do be crazy to see you, but it’s too late for this mornin’. Your aunt sent me to fetch you to her sittin’-room when you’ve dressed and breakfasted. She’s going to take you shoppin’.”

“Oh, help me hurry, please, Anna Mary, if you’ve time,” pleaded Beth.

“Isn’t that what I came for?” demanded Anna Mary obligingly getting down to pull on Beth’s stockings, though the little girl had no idea of receiving that sort of service.

It was a hurried toilet, and a hurried breakfast; it impaired Beth’s appetite to feel that her aunt was waiting, first to make her acquaintance, and then to take her out. She could not realize what Anna Mary told her of Mrs. Cortlandt’s needing longer than Beth was giving her to get through her daily duty of reading letters and dictating replies to her secretary. At last she followed Anna Mary to her aunt’s sitting-room door and for the first time shrank somewhat from the ordeal of meeting new relatives.

“Yes, come in,” called a pleasant voice as Anna Mary knocked. Beth slipped within the door and stood shyly on the threshold. She saw a slender, dark-eyed lady seated at a table before the hearth. She held out both hands to Beth and cried sweetly: “Is this my dear little niece from the Massachusetts hills? My dear, you don’t know how glad your uncle and I are to have his beloved sister Nannie’s little girl come to us! Come here and let me kiss and kiss you!”

[Illustration: BETH RAN OVER TO THE GRACIOUS LADY.]

Beth ran over to the gracious lady, melting in the warmth of this tender greeting, spoken in a beautifully modulated voice. She returned Mrs. Cortlandt’s kisses with her warm young cheek pressed against her Aunt Alida’s fragrant cool one, and gave her adoring love to her on the instant. She was a vision such as Beth’s eyes had never rested upon, beautifully gowned, exquisitely dainty, charming and pretty, and young! Beth had never associated aunthood with less than fifty years, basing her impression on Aunt Rebecca.

“We are going out immediately, Beth--the dear little quaint name! It precisely suits you, little pigeon!” she cried touching a silver call-bell on the table. “Frieda,” she said to the maid who responded, “call up the stables and bid John have the horses here as soon as he can; in the victoria, tell him, Frieda. And, Frieda, Miss Beth and I will lunch out. Tell Miss Natalie and Miss Alys that their cousin will be here this afternoon when they return from their ride at four. Tell them that they must wait patiently till then to see her.

“And now, little Beth, amuse yourself as you can while your aunt has Anna Mary get her ready to take you out for your first glimpse of the marvelous New York shops,” Aunt Alida added when Frieda had withdrawn noiselessly to do her bidding.

Beth was already clad in her coat and round hat with the ribbons whose difference of shade was more apparent here than it had been at home. There was no difficulty in amusing herself; Aunt Alida’s sitting-room was a treasure house about which Beth wandered with hands carefully clasped behind her back, inspecting and marveling. The time seemed short until Aunt Alida returned wrapped in heavy furs, her handsome face shaded by the great plumes on her velvet hat.

Beth got into the victoria and sank back on its mulberry-colored seat letting the footman draw around her the great bear robe, knowing now without doubt that she was Cinderella under the blessed spell of her fairy godmother’s magic. The footman climbed up beside the coachman, folded his mulberry-colored arms across his mulberry-colored breast--Beth did not yet know that Aunt Alida’s livery was mulberry-colored. The coachman gathered up the reins, holding his whip stiffly from under the fur cape that covered his mulberry-colored shoulders. The splendid horses, quite as splendid and prancing as any that drew the chariots in the June circus procession at home, started, champing their way slowly down the broad avenue beginning to fill with gay equipages, private and public.

Beth could hardly reply to Aunt Alida’s remarks. Her aunt saw that the child was swallowed up in the brilliant novelty of the great city, deliciously quivering lest they run into, or were run into by the vehicles that crowded the thoroughfare increasingly as they descended toward Murray Hill. The sun was shining from a cloudless sky, the rare, fleckless, one might almost say animated sky of a perfect autumn day in New York. The metropolis was giving its best--and New York’s best is much--to the little girl who had come to see it. Aunt Alida kindly let Beth alone to drink in and enjoy her first impressions in her own way. At a point where another broad street, this one alive with trolley cars, crossed the avenue on which they drove, Beth saw that their driver bore to the right, increasing the dangers of this hair-erecting drive by threading his way across the double lines of trolleys. He stopped at last before a large store; its windows were full of entrancing things. The footman sprang down to open the door, and stiffly touched his hat to Beth as she descended, to her great embarrassment. She followed her aunt into the shop, straight to an up-stairs department. Mrs. Cortlandt asked to be shown something the name of which Beth did not catch. The saleswoman brought her boxes upon boxes of the daintiest white things--and they were all exactly the size that Beth could not help seeing would fit herself!

Aunt Alida began to buy; Beth had never seen any one buy in this way. “Send me six of these, a dozen of those,” she ordered, and paid for nothing. But Beth saw that the people in the shop served her eagerly. Mrs. Cortlandt went swiftly from room to room. In the room where she looked at bewilderingly charming gowns, coats, guimpes, she began to consult Beth.

“Since these are to be yours, my dear, you may as well tell me what you like best of those I am willing that you should have,” she said.

To be hers! It took her breath away; it was impossible to prefer amid such equal beauty. Somehow Beth knew that a long coat, soft white furs, three hats of various types, each perfect of its kind; several dear, simple house gowns, street gowns, party gowns, frail white guimpes, shoes, an eider-down wrapper that made one long to be a little ill to wear it all day; a cunning miniature dressing wrap, like a grown lady’s, bedroom slippers, dancing slippers, a fan, gloves, and at last a bathing suit, had all been ordered home by her aunt--and they were all, all for Beth Bristead!

Beth walked behind her aunt to the ribbon counter where she bought a quantity of soft, wide ribbons, “for your hair, little Beth,” Aunt Alida explained.

For her hair! The beautiful ribbon that Aunt Rebecca’s sewing society had bought to make a ruffle around the sofa pillow they raffled at the fair was not as fine as these ribbons! Beth pinched herself; she was in an ecstasy, but it couldn’t possibly be real! She experimented with her soft flesh to see if it still was hurtable, every-day, little girl flesh.

“Now, Beth dear, we are going to lunch,” announced Aunt Alida. “I have had a few things sent out to the carriage for you to wear at once, and the rest will be delivered by to-night. I am ravenously hungry! Aren’t you hungry, little niece? You look--well, you look dazed, but I’m glad to say I think you look happy. Aren’t you hungry?”

“No, Aunt Alida, thank you; I’m not hungry--I’m a changeling,” said Beth solemnly.

“Which is a totally different complaint,” laughed Aunt Alida. “You funny morsel of a lassie! Aren’t you fond of pretty things, Bethie? Isn’t it fun to be a changeling? I give you my word I’ve had a perfectly beautiful time playing the fairy that changes you! Aren’t you happy, little niece?”

“Happy! Happy!” echoed Beth in a rapture beyond expressing.