Read Ebook: Peace on Earth Good-will to Dogs by Abbott Eleanor Hallowell

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Ebook has 308 lines and 13216 words, and 7 pages

ay he wanted to!"

With a crisp flutter of skirts Flame's Mother, herself, appeared abruptly in the door. Her manner was very excited.

"Why wherever in the world have you people been?" she cried. "Are you stone deaf? Didn't you hear the telephone? Couldn't you even hear me calling? Your Uncle Wally is worse! That is he's better but he thinks he's worse! And they want us to come at once! It's something about a new will! The Lawyer telephoned! He advises us to come at once! They've sent an automobile for us! It will be here any minute!... But whatever in the world shall we do about Flame?" she cried distractedly. "You know how Uncle Wally feels about having young people in the house! And she can't possibly go to Aunt Minna's till to-morrow! And...."

"But you see I'm not going to Aunt Minna's!" announced Flame quite serenely. Slipping down from her Father's lap she stood with a round, roly-poly flannel sort of dignity confronting both her parents. "Father says I don't have to!"

"Why, Flame!" protested her Father.

"No, of course, you didn't say it with your mouth," admitted Flame. "But you said it with your skin and bones!--I could feel it working."

"Not go to your Aunt Minna's?" gasped her Mother. "What do you want to do?... Stay at home and spend Christmas with the Lay Reader?"

"When you and Father talk like that," murmured Flame with some hauteur, "I don't know whether you're trying to run him down ... or run him up."

"Well, how do you feel about him yourself?" veered her Father quite irrelevantly.

"Oh, I like him--some," conceded Flame. In her bright cheeks suddenly an even brighter color glowed. "I like him when he leaves out the Litany," she said. "I've told him I like him when he leaves out the Litany.--He's leaving it out more and more I notice.--Yes, I like him very much."

"Yes, what do you want to do?" panted her Mother.

"Do you?" demanded his wife a bit pointedly.

"Oh, dear me, whatever in the world shall I do?" cried Flame's Mother. "I'm almost distracted! I'm--"

"When in Doubt do as the Doubters do," suggested Flame's Father quite genially. "Choose the most doubtful doubt on the docket and--Flame's got a pretty level head," he interrupted himself very characteristically.

"No young girl has a level heart," asserted Flame's Mother. "I'm so worried about the Lay Reader."

"Lay Reader?" murmured her Father. Already he had crossed the threshold into the hall and was rummaging through an over-loaded hat rack for his fur coat. "Why, yes," he called back, "I quite forgot to ask. Just what kind of a Christmas is it, Flame, that you want to make?" With unprecedented accuracy he turned at the moment to force his wife's arms into the sleeves of her own fur coat.

Twice Flame rolled up her cuffs and rolled them down again before she answered.

"I--I want to make a Surprise for Miss Flora," she confided.

"For Miss Flora?" gasped her Mother.

"Miss Flora?" echoed her Father.

"Why, at the Rattle-Pane House, you know!" rallied Flame. "Don't you remember that I called there this afternoon? It--it looked rather lonely there.--I--think I could fix it."

"Honk-honk-honk!" implored the automobile.

"Oh, my dear," deprecated Flame's Father. "Just as though the owners of the Rattle-Pane House would rent it to any one who wasn't respectable!"

"How old might this paragon be?" queried her Father.

"And is related in some way," persisted Flame, "to Edward the 2nd--Duke of York."

"Of that guarantee of respectability I am, of course, not quite so sure," said her Father.

With a temperish stamping of feet, an infuriate yank of the door-bell, Uncle Wally's chauffeur announced that the limit of his endurance had been reached.

Blankly Flame's Mother stared at Flame's Father. Blankly Flame's Father returned the stare.

"Smooth out your nose!" ordered her Mother. On the verge of capitulation the same familiar fear assailed her. "Will you promise not to see the Lay Reader?" she bargained.

"--Yes'm," said Flame.

PART II

It's a dull person who doesn't wake up Christmas Morning with a curiously ticklish sense of Tinsel in the pit of his stomach!--A sort of a Shine! A kind of a Pain!

"Glisten and Tears, Pang of the years."

That's Christmas!

"Glisten and Tears, LAUGH at the years!"

Flame Nourice certainly was willing to laugh at the years. Eighteen usually is!

Waking at Dawn two single thoughts consumed her,--the Lay Reader, and the humpiest of the express packages downstairs.

The Lay Reader's name was Bertrand. "Bertrand the Lay Reader," Flame always called him. The rest of the Parish called him Mr. Laurello.

It was the thought of Bertrand the Lay Reader that made Flame laugh the most.

"As long as I've promised most faithfully not to see him," she laughed, "how can I possibly go to church? For the first Christmas in my life," she laughed, "I won't have to go to church!"

With this obligation so cheerfully canceled, the exploration of the humpiest express package loomed definitely as the next task on the horizon.

Hoping for a fur coat from her Father, fearing for a set of encyclopedias from her Mother, she tore back the wrappings with eager hands only to find,--all-astonished, and half a-scream,--a gay, gauzy layer of animal masks nosing interrogatively up at her. Less practical surely than the fur coat,--more amusing, certainly, than encyclopedias,--the funny "false faces" grinned up at her with a curiously excitative audacity. Where from?--No identifying card! What for? No conceivable clew!--Unless perhaps just on general principles a donation for the Sunday School Christmas Tree?--But there wasn't going to be any tree! Tentatively she reached into the box and touched the fiercely striped face of a tiger, the fantastically exaggerated beak of a red and green parrot. "U-m-m-m," mused Flame. "Whatever in the world shall I do with them?" Then quite abruptly she sank back on her heels and began to laugh and laugh and laugh. Even the Lay Reader had not received such a laughing But even to herself she did not say just what she was laughing at. It was a time for deeds, it would seem, and not for words.

Certainly the morning was very full of deeds!

Surely it was four o'clock before she was even ready to start for the Rattle-Pane House. And "starting" is by no means the same as arriving. Dragging a sledful of miscellaneous Christmas goods an eighth of a mile over bare ground is not an easy task. She had to make three tugging trips. And each start was delayed by her big gray pussy cat stealing out to try to follow her. And each arrival complicated by the yelpings and leapings and general cavortings of four dogs who didn't see any reason in the world why they shouldn't escape from their forced imprisonment in the shed-yard and prance home with her. Even with the third start and the third arrival finally accomplished, the crafty cat stood waiting for her on the steps of the Rattle-Pane House,--back arched, fur bristled, spitting like some new kind of weather-cock at the storm in the shed-yard, and had to be thrust quite unceremoniously into a much too small covered basket and lashed down with yards and yards of tinsel that was needed quite definitely for something else.--It isn't just the way of the Transgressor that's hard.--Nobody's way is any too easy!

The door-key, though, was exactly where the old Butler had said it would be,--under the door mat, and the key itself turned astonishingly cordially in the rusty old lock. Never in her whole little life having owned a door-key to her own house it seemed quite an adventure in itself to be walking thus possessively through an unfamiliar hall into an absolutely unknown kitchen and goodness knew what on either side and beyond.

Perfectly simply too as the old Butler had promised, the four dog dishes, heaping to the brim, loomed in prim line upon the kitchen table waiting for distribution.

"Me-o-w," twinged a plaintive hint from the hallway just outside.

Without further parleying she doffed her red tam and sweater, donned a huge white all-enveloping pinafore, and started to ameliorate as best she could the Christmas sufferings of the "poor darlings" immediately at hand.

It was at least a yellow kitchen,--or had been once. In all that gray, dank, neglected house, the one suggestion of old sunshine.

"We shall have our dinner here," chuckled Flame. "After the carols--we shall have our dinner here."

Very boisterously in the yard just outside the window the four dogs scuffled and raced for sheer excitement and joy at this most unexpected advent of human companionship. Intermittently from time to time by the aid of old boxes or barrels they clawed their way up to the cobwebby window-sill to peer at the strange proceedings. Intermittently from time to time they fell back into the frozen yard in a chaos of fur and yelps.

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