THE CAMERONS OF HIGHBORO

Now and then the accustomed world turns a somersault; one day it faces you with familiar features, the next it wears a quite unrecognizable countenance. The experience is, of course, nothing new, though it is to be doubted whether it was ever staged so dramatically and on so vast a scale as during the past four years. And no one to whom it happens is ever the same afterward.

Father came home one night from a week’s absence and said, as he unfolded his napkin, “Well, chicken, I’m going to France.”

“To France?” A little thrill pricked the girl’s spine as she questioned. “Is it Red Cross?”

“Not this time. An investigation for the government. It may, probably will, take months. The government wants a thorough job done. Uncle Samuel thinks your ancient parent competent to hold up one end of the thing.”

“Stop!” Elliott’s soft order commandeered all her dimples.

“I won’t have you maligning my father, you naughty man! Ancient parent, indeed! That’s splendid, isn’t it?”

“I rather like it. I was hoping it would strike you the same way.”

“When do you go?”

“As soon as I can get my affairs in shape—I could leave to-morrow, if I had to. Probably I shall be off in a week or ten days.”

“I suppose the government didn’t say anything about my investigating something, too?”

“Now you mention it, I do not recollect that the subject came up.”

She shook her head reprovingly, “That was an omission! However, I think I’ll go as your secretary.”

Mr. Cameron smiled across the table. How pretty she was, how daintily arch in her sweetness! “That arrangement would be entirely satisfactory to me, my dear, but I am not taking a secretary. I shall get one over there, when I need one.”

“But what can I go as?” pursued the girl. “I’d like to go as something.”

Heavens! she looked as though she meant it! “I’m afraid you can’t go, Lot, this time.”

She lifted cajoling eyes. “But I want to. Oh, I know! I can go to school in Paris.”

“I don’t eat much. Are you afraid of submarines?”

“For you, yes.”

“I’m not. Daddies dear, mayn’t I go? I’d love to be near you.”

“Positively, my love, you may not.”

She drew down the corners of her mouth and went through a bewitching imitation of wiping tears out of her eyes. But she wasn’t really disappointed. She had been fairly certain in advance of what the verdict would be. There had been a bare chance, of something different—that was all, and it didn’t pay to let chances, even the barest, go by default. So she crumbled her warbread and remarked thoughtfully, “I suppose I can stay at home, but it won’t be very exciting.”

“Of course. But the house—” The delicate brows lifted. “What were you thinking of doing with me?”

“Dumping you on the corner. What else?” The two laughed together as at a good joke. But there was a tightening in the man’s throat. He wondered how soon, after next week, he would again be sitting at table opposite that vivacious young face.

“Um-m-m.” Elliott did not commit herself. “Uncle Bob and Aunt Jessica are very nice, but I don’t know them.”

“House full of boys and girls. You won’t be lonely.”

The piquant nose wrinkled mischievously. “That would never do. I like my own way too well.”

He laughed. “And you generally manage to get it by hook or by crook!”

“I? You malign me. You give it to me because you like me.”

How adorably pretty she looked!

He laughed again. “You’ve got your old dad there, all right. Yes, yes, you’ve got him there!”

“Didn’t I tell you just now that you mustn’t call my father old?”

“Oh, I will,” Elliott received the letter without enthusiasm. “Very good of her, I’m sure. I’ll write and thank her to-morrow; but I think I’ll go to Aunt Nell’s.”

“Just as you say. You know Elinor better. But I rather incline to Bob and Jess. There is something to be said for variety, Lot.”

“Yes, but a year is so long. Why, Father Cameron, a year is three hundred and sixty-five whole days long and I don’t know how many hours and minutes and—and seconds. The seconds are awful! Daddles darling, I never could support life away from you in a perfectly strange family for all those interminable seconds!”

“I will—when I don’t have you to talk to. What’s the matter?”

“Bless me, I forgot to tell Miss Reynolds! Nell’s coming to-night. Wired half an hour ago.”

“Aunt Nell? Oh, jolly!” The slender hands clapped in joyful pantomime. “But don’t worry about Miss Reynolds. I will tell Anna to make a room ready. Now we can settle things talking. It’s so much more satisfactory than writing.”

The man laughed. “Can’t say no, so easily, eh, chicken?”

She joined in his laugh. “There is something in that, of course, but it isn’t very polite of you to insinuate that any one would wish to say no to me.”

“I stand corrected of an error in tact. No, I can’t quite see Elinor turning you down.”

That was the joy of these two; they were such boon companions, like brother and sister together instead of father and daughter.

But now Elliott, too, remembered something. “Oh, Father! Quincy has scarlet fever!”

“Scarlet fever? When did he come down?”

“Just to-day. They suspected it yesterday, and Stannard came over to Phil Tracy’s. To-day the doctor made sure. So Maude and Grace are going right on from the wedding to that Western ranch where they were invited. All their outfits are in the house here, but they will get new ones in New York.”

“Where’s James?”

“Uncle James went to the hotel, and Aunt Margaret, of course, is quarantined. Quincy isn’t very sick. They’ve postponed all their house-parties for two months.”

“H’m. Where do they think the boy caught it?”

“Not an idea. He came home from school Thursday.”

“Well, Cedarville will be minus Camerons for a while, won’t it?”

“It certainly will. Both houses closed—or Uncle James’s virtually so. Do you know what Aunt Nell is coming for?”

“Not the ghost of a notion. Perhaps she is going to adopt a dozen young Belgians and wants me to draw up the papers.”

“Mercy! I hope not a whole dozen, if I am to stay at Clover Hill with her. Half a dozen would be enough.”

“Want you at Clover Hill?” said Aunt Elinor, when the first greetings were over and she had heard the news. “Why, you dear child, of course I do! Or rather I should, if I were to be there myself. But I’m going to France, too.”

“To France!”

“Red Cross,” with an enthusiastic nod of the perfectly dressed head. “Lou Emery and I are going over. That’s what I stopped off to tell you people. Ran down to New York to see about my papers. It’s all settled. We sail next week. Now I’m hurrying back to shut up Clover Hill. Then for something worth while! Do you know,” the fine eyes turned from contemplation of a great mass of pink roses on the table, “I feel as though I were on the point of beginning to live at last. All my days I have spent dashing about madly in search of a good time. Now—well, now I shall go where I’m sent, live for weeks, maybe, without a bath, sleep in my clothes in any old place, when I sleep at all; but I’m crazy, simply crazy to get over there and begin.”

She let these things pass through her mind as she reviewed the situation. Proud and independent and poor—those were worthy qualities, but they did not make any family interesting. They were more apt, Elliott thought, to make it uninteresting. No, the Robert Camerons were out of the question, kindly though they might be. If she must spend a year outside her own home, away from her father-comrade, she preferred to spend it with her own sort.

Before she went to bed, Elliott, curled up on her window-seat, read Aunt Jessica’s letter. It was a good letter, a delightful letter, and more than that. If she had been older, she might, just from reading it, have seen why her father wanted her to go to Highboro. As it was, something tugged at her heartstrings for a moment, but only for a moment. Then she swung her foot over the edge of the window-seat and disposed of the situation, as she had always disposed of situations, to her liking. She had no notion that the Fates this time were against her.

“So they’re going to ship me up into the wilds of Vermont to Uncle Bob’s,” he ended his tale of woe. “They’ll be long on the soil, and all that rot. Have a farm, haven’t they?”

“I was invited up there, too,” said Elliott.

“You!” An instant change became visible in the melancholy countenance. “Going?”

“No, I think not.”

“Oh, come on! Be a sport. We’d have fun together.”

“I’ll be a sport, but not that kind.”

“Guess again, Elliott. You and I could paint the place red, whatever kind of a shack it is they’ve got.”

“Stannard,” said the girl, “you’re terribly young. If you think I’d go anywhere with you and put up any kind of a game on our cousins—cousins, Stan—”

“There are cousins and cousins.”

She shook her head. “No wilds in mine. When do you start?”

“To-morrow, worse luck! What are you going to do?”

She smiled tantalizingly. “I have made plans.” True, she had made plans. The fact that the second party to the transaction was not yet aware of their existence did not alter the fact that she had made them. Then she devoted herself to the despondent Stannard, and sent him away cheered almost to the point of thinking, when he left the house, that Vermont was not quite off the map.

“But, Elliott darling, you’d die in Vermont!”

“Oh, no!” said Elliott; “I don’t think I should find it pleasant, but I shouldn’t die.”

“Pleasant!” sniffed Miss Royce. “I should say not.”

“It is rather far away from everybody. Think of not seeing you for a year, Bess!”

“I don’t want to think of it. What’s the matter with your Uncle James’s house when the quarantine’s lifted?”

“Nothing. But it has only just been put on.”

“And the tournament next week. You can’t miss that! Oh, Elliott!”

“I think,” remarked Elliott pensively, “there ought to be a home opened for girls whose fathers are in France.”

“Why,” asked Bess, gripped by a great idea, “why shouldn’t you come to us while your uncle’s house is quarantined?”

Why not, indeed? Elliott thought Bess a little slow in arriving at so obvious and satisfactory a solution of the whole difficulty, but she was properly reluctant about accepting in haste. “Wouldn’t that be too much trouble? Of course, it would be perfectly lovely for me, but what would your mother say?”

“Mother will love to have you!” Miss Royce spoke with conviction.

They spent the rest of the afternoon making plans and Elizabeth went home walking on air.

“But her Aunt Elinor is going to France, and you know the James Camerons’ house is in quarantine. That leaves only the Vermont Camerons—”

“Oh, yes. I remember, now, there was a third brother. They have their plans, probably.”

And that was absolutely all Bess could get her mother to say.

“But, Mother,” she almost sobbed at last, “I—I asked her!”

“Then I am afraid you will have to un-ask her,” said Mrs. Royce. “We really can’t get another person into the house this summer, with your Aunt Grace and her family coming in July.”

Hours later, from a red-plush, Pullmanless train, Elliott Cameron stepped down to three people—a tall, dark, surprisingly pretty girl a little older than herself, a chunky girl of twelve, and a middle-sized, freckle-faced boy. The boy took her bag and asked for her trunk-checks quite as well as any of her other cousins could have done and the tall girl kissed her and said how glad they were to have the chance to know her.

“I am Laura,” she said, “and here is Gertrude; and Henry will bring up your trunks to-morrow, unless you need them to-night. Mother sent you her love. Oh, we’re so glad to have you come!”

Then it is to be feared that Elliott perjured herself. Her all-day journey had not in the least reconciled her to the situation; if anything, she was feeling more bewildered and put out than when she started. But surprise and dismay had not routed her desire to please. She smiled prettily as her glance swept the welcoming faces, and kissed the girls and handed the boy two bits of pasteboard, and said—Oh, Elliott!—how delighted she was to see them at last. You would never have dreamed from Elliott’s lips that she was not overjoyed at the chance to come to Highboro and become acquainted with cousins that she had never known.

A lady rose from the wide veranda of the white house, laid something gray on a table, and came smilingly down the steps. A little girl of eight followed her, two dogs dashed out, and a kitten. The road ran into the yard and stopped; but behind the house the hill kept on going up. Elliott understood that she had arrived at the Robert Camerons’.

The lady, who was tall and dark-haired, like Laura, but with lines of gray threading the black, put her arms around the girl and kissed her. Even in her preoccupation, Elliott was dimly aware that the quality of this embrace was subtly different from any that she had ever received before, though the lady’s words were not unlike Laura’s. “Dear child,” she said, “we are so glad to know you.” And the big dark eyes smiled into Elliott’s with a look that was quite new to that young person’s experience. She didn’t know why she felt a queer thrill run up her spine, but the thrill was there, just for a minute. Then it was gone and the girl only thought that Aunt Jessica had the most fascinating eyes that she had ever seen; whenever she chose, it seemed that she could turn on a great steady light to shine through their velvety blackness.

After supper every one seemed to feel it the natural thing to set to work and “do” the dishes, or something else equally pressing; at least every one for a short time grew amazingly busy. Even Elliott asked for an apron—it was Elliott’s code when in Rome to do as the Romans do—though she was relieved when her uncle tucked her arm in his and said she must come and talk to him on the porch. As they left the kitchen, the boy Bruce was skilfully whirling a string mop in a pan full of hot suds.

A gentle tap came at the door. “Are you asleep?” whispered a voice. “May I come in?”

Laura entered, a tall white shape that looked even taller in the moonlight.

“Are you sleepy?” she whispered.

“Not in the least,” said Elliott.

Laura settled softly on the foot of the bed. “I hoped you weren’t. Let’s talk. Doesn’t it seem a shame to waste time sleeping on a night like this?”

Elliott tossed her a pillow. It was comforting to have Laura there, to hear a voice saying something, no matter what it was talking about. And Laura’s voice was very pleasant and what she said was pleasant, too.

“Are you all in here?” presently inquired a third voice. “I could hear you talking and, anyway, I couldn’t sleep.”

“Come in,” said Elliott.

Gertrude burrowed comfortably down on the other side of her mother.

Elliott, watching the three on the foot of her bed, thought they looked very happy. Her aunt’s hair hung in two thick braids, like a girl’s, over her shoulders, and her face, seen in the moonlight, made Elliott feel things that she couldn’t fit words to. She didn’t know what it was she felt, exactly, but the forlornness inside her began to grow less and less, until at last, when her aunt bent down and kissed her and a braid touched the pillow on each side of Elliott’s face, it was quite gone.

“Good night, little girl,” said Aunt Jessica, “and happy dreams.”

Elliot opened her eyes to bright sunshine. For a minute she couldn’t think where she was. Then the strangeness came back with a stab, not so poignant as on the night before but none the less actual.

“Oh,” said a small, eager voice, “do you think you’re going to stay waked up now?”

Elliott’s eyes opened again, opened to see Priscilla’s round, apple-cheeked face at the door.

“It isn’t nice to peek, I know, but I’m going to get your breakfast, and how could I tell when to start it unless I watched to see when you waked up?”

“You are going to get my breakfast?” Elliott rose on one elbow in astonishment. “All alone?”

“Oh, yes!” said Priscilla. “Mother and Laura are making jelly, and shelling peas in between—to put up, you know—and Trudy is pitching hay, so they can’t. Will you have one egg or two? And do you like ’em hard-boiled or soft; or would you rather have ’em dropped on toast? And how long does it take you to dress?”

“One—soft-boiled, please. I’ll be down in half an hour.”

“Half an hour will give me lots of time.” The small face disappeared and the door closed softly.

As a matter of fact, Priscilla’s breakfast tasted delicious. The toast was done to a turn; the egg was of just the right softness; a saucer of fresh raspberries waited beside a pot of cream, and the whole was served on a little table in a corner of the veranda.

“Laura said you’d like it out here,” Priscilla announced anxiously. “Do you?”

“Very much indeed.”

“That’s all right, then. I’m going to have some berries and milk right opposite you. I always get hungry about this time in the forenoon.”

“When do you have breakfast, regular breakfast, I mean?”

“At six o’clock in summer, when there’s so much to do.”

Six o’clock! Elliott turned her gasp of astonishment into a cough.

“I sometimes choke,” said Priscilla, “when I’m awfully hungry.”

“Does Stannard eat breakfast at six?” Elliott felt she must get to the bed-rock of facts.

“Oh, yes!”

“What is he doing now?”

Priscilla wrinkled her small brow. “Father and Bruce and Henry are haying, and Tom’s hoeing carrots. I think Stan’s hoeing carrots, too. One day last week he hoed up two whole rows of beets; he thought they were weeds. Oh!” A small hand was clapped over the round red mouth. “I didn’t mean to tell you that. Mother said I mustn’t ever speak of it, ’cause he’d feel bad. Don’t you think you could forget it, quick?”

“I’ve forgotten it now.”

“Oh, yes,” said Elliott, “I can’t see any of it too soon.” But she was ashamed of her double meaning, with those round, eager eyes upon her. And her heart went down quite into her boots.

It was an enlightened but somewhat surfeited cousin whom Priscilla blissfully escorted into the summer kitchen, a big latticed space filled with the pleasant odors of currant jelly. On the broad table stood trays of ruby-filled glasses.

“We’ve seen all the creatures,” Priscilla announced jubilantly “and she loves ’em. Oh, the jelly’s done, isn’t it? Mumsie, may we scrape the kettle?”

Aunt Jessica laughed. “Elliott may not care to scrape kettles.”

Priscilla opened her eyes wide at the absurdity of the suggestion. “You do, don’t you? You must! Everybody does. Just wait a minute till I get spoons.”

“I don’t think I quite know how to do it,” said Elliott.

Elliott hesitated.

“I’ll show you.” The small hand shot in, scraped vigorously for a minute, and withdrew, the spoon heaped with ruddy jelly. “There! Mother didn’t leave as much as usual, though. I ’spect it’s ’cause sugar’s so scarce. She thought she must put it all into the glasses. But there’s always something you can scrape up.”

“It is delicious,” said Elliott, graciously; “and what a lovely color!”

Priscilla beamed. “You may have two scrapes to my one, because you have so much time to make up.”

Priscilla teetered a little on her toes. “I like you,” she said. “I like you a whole lot. I’d hug you if my hands weren’t sticky. Scraping kettles makes you awful sticky. You make me think of a princess, too. You’re so bee-yeautiful to look at. Maybe that isn’t polite to say. Mother says it isn’t always nice to speak right out all you think.”

“I didn’t know a kitchen,” Elliott spoke impulsively, “could be so pretty.”

“This is our work-room,” said her aunt. “We think the place where we work ought to be the prettiest room in the house. White paint requires more frequent scrubbing than colored paint; but the girls say they don’t mind, since it keeps our spirits smiling. Would you like to help dry these pans? You will find towels on that line behind the stove.”

That had been a good deal for Aunt Margaret to say. Elliott had realized it at the time and wondered a little; now she understood the words, or thought she did. Why, even drying milk-pans took on a certain distinction when it was done in Aunt Jessica’s presence!

Then Aunt Jessica said something that really did surprise her young guest. She had been watching the girl closely, quite without Elliott’s knowledge.

“Perhaps you would like this for your own special part of the work,” she said pleasantly. “We each have our little chores, you know. I couldn’t let every girl attempt the milk things, but you are so careful and thorough that I haven’t the least hesitation about giving them to you. Now I am going to wash the separator. Watch me, and then you will know just what to do.”

It was all so disconcerting that self-possessed Elliott stammered. She stammered from pure surprise and chagrin and a confusing mixture of emotions, but what she stammered was in answer to Aunt Jessica’s tone and extracted from her by the force of Aunt Jessica’s personality. The words came out in spite of herself.

“Oh—oh, thank you,” she said, a bit blankly. Then she blushed with confusion. How awkward she had been. Oughtn’t Aunt Jessica to have thanked her?

If Aunt Jessica noticed either the confusion or the blankness, she gave no sign.

“That will be fine!” she said heartily. “I saw by the way you handled those pans that I could depend on you.”

“Very particular,” said Aunt Jessica, and her dark eyes smiled on the girl.

The words, as she spoke them, sounded like a compliment. It mightn’t be so bad, Elliott reflected, to wash milk-pans every morning. And in Rome you do as the Romans do. She watched closely while Aunt Jessica washed the separator. She could easily do that, she was sure. It did not seem to require any unusual skill or strength or brain-power.

“It is not hard work,” said Aunt Jessica, pleasantly. “But so many girls aren’t dependable. I couldn’t count on them to make everything clean. Sometimes I think just plain dependableness is the most delightful trait in the world. It’s so rare, you know.”

The separator, however, must not commit her indiscriminately, she saw that clearly. Perhaps in fact, it would save her. Hadn’t Aunt Jessica said each had her own tasks? Ergo, you let others alone. But she had an uncomfortable feeling that this reasoning might prove false in practice; in this household a good many tasks seemed to be pooled. How about them?

But Aunt Jessica, without the least surprise in her voice, responded promptly: “Why, yes! We have three hours free now, and it seems a crime to stay in the house.”

What in the world did they mean?

Priscilla seemed to have no difficulty in understanding. She jumped up and down and cried: “Oh, goody! goody! We’re going to take our dinner out! We’re going to take our dinner out! Isn’t it jolly?”

She was standing in front of Elliott as she spoke, and the girl felt that some reply was expected of her. “Why, can we? Where do we go?” she asked, exactly as though she expected to see a hotel spring up out of the ground before her eyes.

Laura noticed the bewilderment on Elliott’s face. “Priscilla means that we are going to eat our dinner out-of-doors while the peas cook in the hot-water bath,” she explained. “Don’t you want to pack up the cookies? You will find them in that stone crock on the first shelf in the pantry, right behind the door. There’s a pasteboard box in there, too, that will do to put them in.”

“How many shall I put up?” questioned Elliott.

“Oh, as many as you think we’ll eat. And I warn you we have good appetites.”

By the time she had finished her calculations with the cookies, Aunt Jessica and Laura and Priscilla were ready. When Elliott emerged from the pantry, the little car was at the kitchen door, with a hamper and two pails of water in it, and on the back seat a long, queer-looking box that Laura told Elliott was a fireless cooker.

Elliott gasped. “You mean you carry it along to cook the dinner in?”

“Why, the dinner’s cooking in it now! Hop on, everybody. Mother, you take the wheel. Elliott and I will ride on the steps.”

“Stan,” she demanded, late that afternoon, “is there any tennis here?”

“Not so you’d notice it. What are you thinking of, in war-time, Elliott? Uncle Samuel expects every farmer to do his duty. All the men and older boys around here have either volunteered or been drafted. So we’re all farmers, especially the girls. Quod erat demonstrandum. Savvy?”

“Any luncheons?”

“Meals, Lot, plain meals.”

“Parties?”

Stannard threw up his hands. “Never heard of ’em!”

“Canoeing?”

“No water big enough.”

“I suppose nobody here thinks of motoring for pleasure.”

“Never. Too busy.”

“Or gets an invitation for a spin?”

“You’re behind the times.”

“So I see.”

“Harry told me that this summer is extra strenuous,” Stannard explained; “but they’ve always rather gone in for the useful, I take it. Had to, most likely. They’d be all right, too, if they didn’t live so. They’re a good sort, an awfully good sort. But, ginger, how a fellow’d have to hump to keep up with ’em! I don’t try. I do a little, and then sit back and call it done.”

Then she looked up and met the amused eyes of Bruce Fearing.

For a minute the hot color flooded the girl’s face. But she seized the bull by the horns. “I am cross,” she said, “frightfully cross!” And she looked so engagingly pretty as she said it that Bruce thought he had never seen so attractive a girl.

“Anything in particular gone wrong with the universe?”

“Everything, with my part of it.” What possessed her, she wondered afterward, to say what she said next? “I never wanted to come here.”

“That so? We’ve been thinking it rather nice.”

The boy’s eyes twinkled. “So that’s what’s bothering you, is it? Cheer up! You had the choice of how you’d come, didn’t you?”

“How?”

“Yes. Sometimes I think that’s all the choice they give us in this world. It’s all I’ve had, anyway—how I’d do a thing.”

“You mean, gracefully or—”

“I mean—”

“Hello!” said Stannard’s voice. “What are you two chinning about before the cows come home?”