When Kate came to luncheon that day she was surprised to see a letter lying at her place. So soon? Why, she had not been here a day yet!
“It’s not your mother’s handwriting,” Aunt Katherine said, a little curiously.
“No, it’s from the boys. Oh, I’m so glad!”
“The boys?”
“Yes, I told you about them last night, you know. The twins. The Harts. How jolly of them to write me so soon!”
“But what can they have to tell you since yesterday?”
“It will be all about Mother, and much better than a letter from her herself because she doesn’t know how to tell about herself, you know. She’s always so silent on that subject. Do you mind, Aunt, if I just open it and peek?”
“Of course, my dear, read it. Elsie and I will excuse you.”
But there was almost no letter inside. There was one paragraph in the exact centre of a big square sheet of yellow notepaper, written in a script so small and round and legible that it was almost print like. But the very wide margins were bordered with a series of pen sketches that told a story in its progressive action something in the way a moving picture does. It was the story of a picnic the Harts had arranged for yesterday afternoon with Katherine the guest of honour. Professor Hart, in an endeavour to rescue the lunch basket which had fallen into a brook, had evidently fallen in after it. That perhaps was the high mark in the artist’s work. But the picnic had been chock full of adventure one could see at a glance; and Lee’s quick humour and real art had turned even the worst mishaps into fun.
The paragraph was in Sam’s hand, and began: “Dear Kate, if you are well it is well. We also are well.” Apparently he had nothing whatsoever to say, but he said it cheerfully.
Kate crinkled up her eyes and laughed so wholeheartedly over the nonsense that she felt herself rude. She passed the paper to Aunt Katherine. “You will see that I can’t help it,” she explained.
And Aunt Katherine, after she had studied the pictures a few seconds and skimmed the paragraph, laughed, too, a light, genuinely amused laugh. “It’s not only funny, though,” she insisted, “it’s artistic. Which boy drew these pictures?”
“Lee. He’s always sketching. He means to be a real artist.”
“I think he is that already. All he needs now is study. I would say he has a future if he has the will to stick to it.”
Aunt Katherine now handed the letter to Elsie and turned back to Kate to remark: “Your mother, on accepting my invitation for you, mentioned the fact that you were lonely, in need of friends as much as Elsie. But I don’t see how any one could be more companionable or amusing than these boys, from your descriptions and this letter.”
Kate glowed at Aunt Katherine’s appreciation of Sam and Lee. “Oh, Mother meant girl friends. There just doesn’t happen to be any one near my age in Ashland. And while boys are all right, they aren’t exactly the same.”
Elsie had lost some of her indifference and coldness over the letter. She was almost smiling, in fact. Now she was actually smiling. Kate beamed. This was certainly the most natural minute and the happiest since her arrival. She blessed the Hart boys for having created it.
But Aunt Katherine was surprised when it developed that the girls had not been exploring the countryside in the car that morning.
“Didn’t you use Timothy at all?” she asked.
“Just for errands in the town. Kate wrote letters and I picked and arranged flowers, and read ‘The King of the Fairies.’”
“One would think, Elsie, you possessed only one book. When are you going to finish with ‘The King of the Fairies’?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Elsie’s tone had fallen suddenly into sulkiness.
But though Aunt Katherine did not seem to notice the sudden chilling of the atmosphere, Kate did and spoke quickly, a trifle nervously.
“Haven’t you read ‘The King of the Fairies,’ Aunt Katherine?”
“Why, no. It’s a fairy story, a child’s book. It surprises me that Elsie, a big girl of fifteen, finds it so fascinating.”
“Mother finds it fascinating, too,” Kate hurried to assure her. “And I know it just about by heart. Mother keeps saying it’s the most beautiful love story she ever read. And even the boys like it. They felt just the way you do about its title. But once they got into it they couldn’t stop. If you read it yourself you’d see why.”
Kate was fairly radiant with her enthusiasm about this book. Her aunt smiled into her eager eyes. “I shall certainly look it over, then,” she promised. “It must be an unusual book to inspire such loyalty.”
“I’ll bring my copy down and put it on your reading table right after luncheon.”
“You have a copy with you! It must be a favourite! Thank you, Kate.”
But Elsie did not offer a word to this topic. She sat, colder than ever, looking at the wall to the right of Kate’s shoulder.
“As Timothy hasn’t been working this morning, I think I shall have him take me in to Boston this afternoon,” Aunt Katherine said, as she helped the girls to lemon ice which had just been set before her in a frosted bowl. “Driving is about the coolest thing one can do to-day. Will either or both of you come with me?”
“Oh, yes. I should love to.” Kate was secretly relieved that with this promise she would not be thrown alone with Elsie again that afternoon. And she was even more relieved when Elsie said, “I don’t believe I’ll go, thank you, Aunt Katherine. I shall read or do something here.”
As Kate was on her way up to get her hat for the drive she was stopped at the stair-turning by a woman who had come through a door connecting with a different staircase. She was a middle-aged, plump person with graying curly hair, in a starched black and white print dress, almost entirely concealed by a crisp white apron. It was the cook, Julia.
“How do you do, Miss Kate,” she said, hurriedly, and almost in a whisper. “Excuse me, but I just had to ask how is your blessed mother? Miss Frazier never tells us anything at all. She ain’t sick or anything, is she, and that’s why you’re here?”
Kate reassured her. “But did you know Mother?” she asked.
“Of course. We all did, ’cept Isadora. She’s new since. Your mother was for ever in and out of the house and we all loved her. Didn’t she ever tell you the time she broke her arm falling on the kitchen stairs? And she never cried, if you’ll believe me. Only moaned just a bit, even when the doctor come and fixed it. Miss Frazier was away and old Mr. Frazier, too. So I had to manage. Didn’t she ever tell you?”
Kate had to admit that she had never heard the story.
“Well, she wan’t one to talk about herself, she wan’t. Always interested in you and sort of forgot herself like.”
Kate nodded at that. Evidently Julia did know her mother.
“And you say she’s perfectly well? We’ll all be grateful for that.”
Aunt Katherine’s voice came up to them from the hall at this point. She was talking to Elsie. As quickly as she had appeared, Julia whisked about and was out of the door through which she had come. But quick as a wink, and almost as if by magic, before she vanished she had produced from somewhere a gingerbread man and pushed it into Kate’s hand.
Kate looked at the gift, amused, when Julia was gone. “She couldn’t have realized how old I am,” she thought, smiling. “She thinks I’m just Mother’s ‘child.’” Up in her room she hid it under her pillow.
* * * * * * * *
It was pleasant speeding along with her aunt toward Boston, creating their own breeze as they went through the hot July afternoon.
“Now tell me, Kate,” Aunt Katherine questioned her abruptly as soon as they were on their way. “Are you and Elsie getting on well? Are you becoming friends?”
This was difficult for Kate. She hesitated. “I don’t think Elsie likes me,” she said finally. “She tries to be—polite, I think.”
“Not like you? Nonsense! How could she help liking you?”
Kate laughed. “I suppose you can’t like everybody,” she said modestly. “But Elsie doesn’t seem to like very many people. That boy and girl next door—she doesn’t play with them.”
“Oh, Rose and Jack Denton. You know the reason for the coldness there, of course. But you are quite different.”
“No, I don’t know the reason. Why hasn’t she friends here? I don’t know anything. She hasn’t explained at all.”
Aunt Katherine showed real surprise. “Do you mean your mother hasn’t told you why things are difficult for Elsie? Is she as ashamed as that? Well, she feels even more strongly than I had suspected then.”
Bitterness and sorrow had settled on Aunt Katherine’s features.
“I don’t think Mother knew anything to tell me,” Kate protested. “Why are things difficult for Elsie?”
“If your mother hasn’t told you, she wouldn’t want me to. That is certain. But I am surprised she let you come, feeling so. However, since she did let you come, and you have no prejudice, Elsie has no business to include you in her rages. You are the one person in the world she should be friendly with and grateful to. And, you know, I am sure she exaggerates other people’s attitude, anyway. The young people would be friendly enough if she would only go halfway.”
Aunt Katherine put her hand on Kate’s arm and continued earnestly: “That is one reason why I wanted you to come so much, to help us break the ice. Friday I am giving a party in your honour, Kate, an informal little dance.”
Kate clasped her hands. For a minute she forgot all the mystery that had gone before in her aunt’s speech.
“A dance! Oh, Aunt Katherine, how beautiful of you!” To herself she added, “Glory, glory! Already things are beginning to happen just as Mother said they would.”
“I have asked fifteen boys and thirteen girls. They have all, every one, accepted! If that doesn’t prove how mistaken Elsie is, I am a very foolish woman.”
“Elsie hasn’t mentioned the party to me,” Kate wondered aloud.
“No. I haven’t told her anything about it yet. I wanted you here and established first. I hoped that once you and she were having a happy, gay time together, she would soften, feel more in the mood. Most of the young people I have asked she had met when visiting me during school vacations. She was very popular with them before—well, before. But there are a few new families who have come to Oakdale since—well, since.”
“Before what? Since what?” If it was rude of Kate, she could not help it. It was all too mystifying.
“But that’s just what I can’t tell you, since Katherine hasn’t. Only, your not knowing makes it a bit complicated. No, I’m not sure of that. It may make everything more simple, more natural. But tell me, can’t you be friends with Elsie? She needs your friendship and companionship more than you can guess, my dear.”
“I’m sorry. Perhaps we shall be friends yet. But she does act awfully queer. Oh, it’s mean of me to talk about her so. Perhaps I’ve done something. Perhaps there’s a reason.”
“Well, she’s a strange child. Strange! But she used to be different. I always thought she seemed a little lost and lonely, you know. That was mostly because of her mother—no mother at all, in reality. Just a butterfly. In spite of that Elsie was agreeable and tender once. Quite a dear. But since she has come to live with me she has been entirely a changed person. You must believe, though, Kate, that there is no more reason for her to be unfriendly toward you than there is for her to be unfriendly toward me. And I am speaking truly when I say there has hardly been a friendly moment between us since she came into my home. She is polite, beautifully polite. I suppose that absurd fashionable boarding school she was sent to taught her manners. But it goes no deeper. How do you feel about it? Is there anything unkind or wrong in the way I treat Elsie? Have you noticed anything in the brief time you have been here?”
Kate was amazed to have Aunt Katherine so appealing to her. All barriers were down between them. They were talking as two girls might, or two women.
“Nothing unkind, of course! I don’t know how you could be kinder. But, Aunt Katherine, do you truly like Elsie? It may be that she feels, in spite of your kindness, that you just don’t like her.”
“Does it seem that way to you?”
“No—perhaps not. But there is something in your voice when you speak to her—a difference. I don’t know how to express it. If you truly don’t like her, perhaps you can’t help showing it a little.”
Aunt Katherine said no more for a while. But she was thinking. “It’s queer,” she said finally, “very queer, the way I am talking to you. I am treating you as though you were your mother almost. And you are like your mother, in deep ways. Only you are franker, more open. You say right out the things that she might think but wouldn’t say. Well, and since I am saying things right out, too—I don’t like Elsie. You are right there. I tried to. But I simply couldn’t. She is too unnatural, too cold and heartless, and perhaps self-seeking. The irony of it is that she is all I have left to love, the only person in the world who needs me now—or, rather, the only person who will let herself use me. But I can’t like her.”
Kate was embarrassed at this revelation, and at the same time deeply sorry for her aunt. For the present the subject dropped between them.
* * * * * * * *
In Boston Kate looked about her with the greatest interest as the car crept through the crowded business section. She had been in Boston before on brief holiday visits with her mother, stopping at little boarding houses, and spending most of the time in art galleries or the Museum or on trolley rides to places of historical interest. But now she was seeing it from a new angle, leisurely and in comfort. There was no jostling, no hurrying, no aching feet.
They drew up to a curb in Boylston Street. Timothy got out and came around for orders. “Go up and ask Mr. O’Brien to come down to the car, Timothy. Tell him I have only a minute.”
Almost at once a spruce, energetic-looking young man stood at the car door, his straw hat in his hand.
“Wouldn’t it be better to have our interview, no matter how brief, in my office, Miss Frazier?” he suggested deferentially.
Miss Frazier shook her head with decision. “No. I just want to ask you one question. Is there any news?”
Mr. O’Brien glanced toward Kate significantly.
“This is my niece,” Miss Frazier informed him but not at all in the way of an introduction. “Tell me, have you the slightest news?”
“Nothing that is very certain. We have a new clue, perhaps. But I cannot go into that before your niece, Miss Frazier.”
“Oh, this is not Elsie. It’s another niece, a blood relation. And I do not intend to climb those stairs to your office. You can surely give me some hint.”
“There is an elevator. You forget.”
“No matter. I am not going up. Be quick, please. Naturally, I am impatient.”
Kate was certainly catching a glimpse now of the bossy Aunt Katherine of tradition.
“Well, we just have an idea. We should like to know whether your other niece, Miss Elsie, ever comes into Boston alone. Has she been in this week, say?”
“Why, no. Certainly not. Bertha, her maid, is with her when I am not. She is a chaperon as well as a maid. I trust her. She happens to be a very remarkable woman for a servant.”
“Miss Elsie does come in, then, without you sometimes? Is she planning to come soon again?”
“Why, yes. But what this has to do with the business I can’t see. I’m sending her in to-morrow with her maid and Miss Kate to buy party frocks and see ‘The Blue Bird.’”
“Excellent!” Mr. O’Brien seemed much pleased. “Will they go directly to the store?”
“Yes, Pearl’s. A modiste on Beacon Street.”
“Very good. May I have one word in your ear?”
“I see no reason.” But Miss Frazier leaned a little toward the insistent young man while he lowered his voice so that Kate did not catch one word of what he said.
Her aunt laughed, amused apparently. “Much good that will do you. I have told you, Mr. O’Brien, there is not a chance in the world that Miss Elsie knows any more than we do.”
“However, you do not object?”
“No. Except that it is a foolish waste of time.”
“We shall not lose time through it, I assure you. Other members of my staff are working on other clues. Precious few there are, though.”
“If that is all I will say ‘good afternoon,’ then.” Miss Frazier settled back in her seat. “You will call me up, of course, the minute there is anything definite.”
“Of course. But does Miss Elsie often answer the telephone?”
“Sometimes. Very seldom. I tell you, Mr. O’Brien, there is no rhyme or reason to your suspicions in that direction.”
“Even so, Miss Frazier, I beg you to adjure Miss Kate here to secrecy. She should, on no condition, tell Miss Elsie one word she has heard.”
Miss Frazier nodded, glancing at Kate. Kate’s return look carried her promise. “I shall hope for something more definite when next I hear from you, Mr. O’Brien. Good afternoon. Home, Timothy.”
Mr. O’Brien stood on the curb while the big car pulled out. There was a troubled, displeased expression on his face, Kate thought. She knew that he resented very much the interview not having been more private.
“Is he a detective?” she asked her aunt curiously.
“Yes, a private detective, and a very good one. But perhaps he is right, Kate, and you had better forget all about him. If he is doing the job I suppose he has a right to do it in his own way.”
A private detective! And what had a detective to suspect of Elsie! But Kate took her aunt’s hint and asked no more questions.
Their way home took them by the Green Shutter Tea Room, a quaint little place built by a stream in a grove of maples. The tables were set out under the trees. Aunt Katherine suggested that they stop. And when they were seated opposite each other at a little round green table, their order given, they smiled at each other contentedly, like friends of long standing.
“You haven’t told me a word about how you like the orchard house!” Aunt Katherine said. “Did you go all over it? The study is really the nicest room. Did you like that? And did you see your mother’s old playroom?”
Kate hesitated to confess to her aunt that she had not been near the orchard house. It might involve Elsie too much. She remembered Elsie’s plea last night. So she hesitated, feeling her cheeks redden. But after an instant she said, “I think I shall save it for a day when there isn’t so much to do. It’s a darling house, but I haven’t been in.”
“After the party on Thursday I am hoping that all your days here will be full of things to do, yours and Elsie’s, too. She will begin to have the life of other girls again. For myself I have hardly cared a bit. I had rather grown away from my old friends, anyway, and larger interests, or at least more impersonal interests, have been absorbing me of late years. But now I’m pocketing my pride for Elsie’s sake, and going more than halfway toward reconciliations.... Madame Pearl, the woman to whom I am sending you to-morrow for frocks, is an artist in her way. You two girls must choose dresses that not only become yourselves but go well together.”
For Kate all the puzzling hints that ran through her aunt’s conversation were forgotten in this new subject. “But Mother and I thought my pink organdie would do for a party, if you gave one. You haven’t seen it. I shall wear it for dinner to-night.”
“No, I haven’t seen it, but I am sure it is very dainty and pretty. Even so, this is to be Elsie’s first real party, and her first real party frock. And it will be more appropriate for you to have dresses that match in a way, or contrast with each other artistically. You will let me give you such a gift, won’t you, Kate?”
There was surprising entreaty in Aunt Katherine’s dark eyes, and fear, too. Would Kate be simply an echo of her mother? Would she rise up in pride and say, “No charity, thanks”?
Meanwhile, Kate was thinking rapidly. She had no idea whatever whether her mother would want her to accept a party frock from Aunt Katherine or not. But quickly she decided that her mother would want her to speak for herself now, that this was a matter between herself and her aunt.
“Of course I shall love to have a party dress,” she exclaimed. “Oh, but you are good to me, Aunt Katherine! And it will be my first as well as Elsie’s.”
Miss Frazier flushed, pleasure all out of proportion to the event, seemingly, shining from her eyes. She said “Thank you, my dear,” in as heartfelt accents as though Kate herself were the donor.
Kate laughed at that, her eyes crinkling, and after the laugh her mouth still stayed tilted up at the corners. “Oh, I’m so excited,” she exclaimed. “But aren’t you going to Boston with us, to Madame Pearl’s, to help us choose?”
“No, I think not. Bertha has excellent taste, and Madame Pearl herself would not make a mistake. And I think that the more I am out of it the better the chance is that you and Elsie will find each other. A day together, shopping, lunching at my club, and seeing ‘The Blue Bird’ afterward ought to give two girls all the opportunity they need to get over any strangeness.”
“‘The Blue Bird’! Well, it’s just as Mother said it would be, wonderful things galore! Oh, dear! I wish she could know this minute that I’m to see ‘The Blue Bird’! We’ve read it, of course. But to see it! I shall write her again to-night—and the boys, too.”
Kate was sitting with clasped hands, her hazel eyes narrowed and golden with light. She was almost little-girlish in her excitement and pleasure, and of course the corners of her mouth were uptilted at their most winged angle. Aunt Katherine, watching her, thought, “She is better than pretty, this grand-niece of mine. She is fascinating. Just to look at her stirs your imagination.”
But she said, “Eat your toast before it is cold, I advise you. And don’t neglect the marmalade. It is unusually good marmalade they serve here at the Green Shutter.”
And so Kate came to earth. “But such a nice earth!” she said to herself.
Before they had finished their tea, Aunt Katherine rose to a pitch of confidences that surprised herself. But it was just exactly as though in Kate she had found a friend, a friend to whom she was able to open her heart. At this moment in her life Miss Frazier needed this sort of a confidante badly. They were talking about Elsie again and her coldness and indifference to Kate.
“There is one obvious explanation for it,” Aunt Katherine said. “I can think of no other. She may be jealous. She may have been jealous from the first minute of your arrival.”
Kate was too surprised to think at all. “Jealous—of me? Why?”
“That you might take her place with me, cheat her somehow of what she apparently considers hers. She sees, as you have guessed, that I do not like her. May she not be all the more jealous of you just because of that?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” Kate was thinking clearly again. “She isn’t horrid like that. I know it. She’s too beautiful and lovely. There’s something about her that makes any such idea just impossible. She mayn’t like me, and I may be cross with her, but for all that—for all that I know she’s not a mean person, Aunt Katherine.”
Kate was amazed herself at having so suddenly become Elsie’s champion. Loyalty to that strange girl had apparently been born in her all in a second. Or was it loyalty only to the comrade she had glimpsed flashingly, once in the mirror last night, and once in sunshine this morning? Whatever it was to, it was very real and staunch.
Aunt Katherine’s face lightened remarkably. “You may be right, and I earnestly hope you are,” she said. “For if Elsie were unfriendly toward you for any such reason—well, it would be the last straw, the very last.”
As they spun along toward home through the cooling air, Miss Frazier’s expression grew happier and happier. Kate had done for her what she could not do for herself: lightened real suspicions, and eased her heart.
It was almost dinner time when they arrived. If Kate was to don her pink organdie she would have to hurry. She raced up the stairs and found Bertha in her room waiting for her.
“You have only ten minutes, Miss Kate,” she warned. “Your bath is set.”
A glance showed Kate the pink organdie freshly pressed, crisp and cool, hung over a chair back, and the white slip to go under it on the bed. Her pumps were set down by the dressing table and some fresh stockings near on a stool. Two baths a day! How comfortable! Kate, still aglow with her afternoon, had quite forgotten her self-consciousness with this lady’s maid.
“Has Miss Elsie dressed?” she asked.
Bertha answered rather worriedly: “No, and none of us have seen her all afternoon. I do wish she would come up. I can’t think how she’s been amusing herself, or where.”
Kate herself began to wonder, when she had had her bath and was freshly dressed. “There’s the gong!” she exclaimed.
But simultaneously with the note of the gong Elsie’s door slammed and there she was in the bathroom door.
“I’m late,” she called, but not at all ruefully. “No time to dress, Bertha. Hello, Kate.”
“You’ll have to wash your face, whether there’s time or not,” Bertha assured her. “And your hair, it’s a sight! Where did you get like that?”
Elsie laughed, elfin laughter. “Never mind where. And you aren’t my nurse. You’re my tiring-woman. Bear that in mind, Mrs. Bertha.”
Bertha’s worried face changed into a beaming one. Elsie in such good spirits! That was the best that Bertha asked of life, Kate intuitively felt.
But it was true enough. Elsie very much needed washing and brushing. Her nose and forehead were beaded with little drops of perspiration, her cheeks were a burning red, as though she had been sitting over a fire, or perhaps long in the sun, and there were smudges of what looked like flour on chin and arms. As for her hair, it was all in little damp curls across her brow and over her ears: one side had come completely undone, and showered down on to her shoulder.
“I can’t for the life of me see how you ever got in such a mess,” Bertha murmured happily as she officiated in Elsie’s hurried cleaning up. “You might just as well be a cook in a kitchen! But, oh, dear! What’s that burn?”
“It is horrid, isn’t it?” Elsie agreed.
“Well, I think you need a nurse more than a lady’s maid! Did Julia let you get near the stove on this broiling day? Here’s some olive oil.”
After another minute of scurrying Elsie appeared in Kate’s door. “It was nice of you to wait for me,” she said. “But I’m afraid I’ve made you late.”
Aunt Katherine lifted her brows when she saw Elsie still in her blue and white morning dress. But the fact that the girls had come in together, actually arm-in-arm, made up for much. In fact, it put Aunt Katherine into a light and gay mood. Things were beginning to go as she had planned now. At dinner she told Elsie about the party set for Friday night. And Elsie, who herself was in a gay spirit, thanked her aunt prettily for everything—the coming party, the promised frock, and the seats for “The Blue Bird.”
“Why, she is a human being, after all,” Kate admitted. “This morning and last night seems like some dream I had about her.” And Kate opened her hazel eyes a little wider now as she looked at Elsie across the table. She was on the watch for the reappearance of the vanishing comrade.
That evening again Miss Frazier sent the girls to walk in the garden. She herself settled down in the big winged chair under her especial reading lamp and picked up “The King of the Fairies,” which Kate had not forgotten to place there.
The orchard drew all Kate’s attention once they were out in the growing starlight. She looked toward it often as they paced back and forth on the garden paths. At first she talked to Elsie about her afternoon, the ride, and the Green Shutter Tea Room. But Elsie, though she listened with interest, and even took pains to ask questions, in return gave Kate no information as to how she had spent the hours. Even so, Elsie was so completely changed that finally Kate had the hardihood to tell her laughingly about the light she had seen in the orchard house last night before falling to sleep.
“I am sure I saw the light. But of course I couldn’t have heard the door,” she finished. “That must have been imagination, for sound doesn’t carry like that.”
But at this mention of the orchard house Elsie’s new manner fell from her as though she had dropped a cloak. She stiffened as they walked and her voice took on restraint.
“If you imagined the sound of the door, why wasn’t the light imagination, too?” she asked reasonably. “Or it may have been fireflies in the trees. See them now.”
It was true enough. Over in the orchard fireflies were twinkling, almost in clouds.
“It wasn’t like firefly light, just the same.”
“Well, you were almost asleep, weren’t you? It was probably fireflies and sleepiness all mixed up.”
Kate did not acknowledge that she was impressed by this reasoning. But deep in her mind she was.
“And you’re not to tell Aunt Katherine about the light. Promise me that. She would go investigating then. You’ve got to promise.”
Kate’s quick temper flashed up and ruined the new relation between them at Elsie’s brusque command.
“I haven’t got to promise. Why do you think you can boss me like that?”
Elsie’s answer to that was a tossed head. “I’m going in,” she said shortly.
“I’m not.” Kate sat down abruptly in a garden chair they were passing. When Elsie had gone on Kate bit her lip, hard, hard to keep back the tears. “Now I’ve spoiled everything,” she accused herself bitterly. “Why did I have to go talking about the orchard house at all? Everything was so jolly, so right at last! Elsie was beginning to be more than decent. What an idiot I am!”
She leaned her head down upon the arm of the chair. Then the inner, more tranquil Kate came forward. “Think about the King of the Fairies,” she said. “Look as he looked, see as he saw. Perhaps if you do, all this trouble will dissolve in light. Get above the quarrel.”
And as she sat curled up there, she tried hard to follow the inner Kate’s directions. She tried to look at the orchard with the different seeing. If she followed the King of the Fairies’ directions, mightn’t she see the all of things as the girl and boy on the fence had seen the all? She stayed very still, and watched, expectantly.
Elsie came back to her, silent as a shadow. It was almost as though she could read Kate’s thoughts; for she knelt down by her on the dewy grass, and putting her face quite close to Kate’s said in a low voice, but earnestly: “I’ll tell you this much, Kate Marshall, there is something fairyish about that little orchard house. If things fairyish show to you around it or in it, it is because they are there. This is no lie. I cross my heart. But you aren’t wanted there. And unless you are very mean you will keep your promise to me and not go near.”
Then Elsie floated away, and was lost to Kate in the garden shadows, like a fairyish thing herself.
Kate started up. Had she dreamed Elsie’s coming back, and her words? She had been in such a different state of mind trying to see as the King of the Fairies saw, that she hardly knew. Anyway, big girl of fifteen that she was, she began looking again toward the orchard house with deepened expectancy.
If Elsie had thought to tease or bewilder Kate in the garden last night by asserting that fairies actually had something to do with the orchard house she would have been disappointed now if she could read Kate’s mind as she lay awake in the early morning. A sense of something exciting in the day had waked her before dawn. The excitement, of course, was the party frock that Aunt Katherine had promised her, and “The Blue Bird.”
“I can hardly believe that I am going to have such a wonderful day,” she thought. “Is it really happening to me? Will the morning ever come?”
She had no idea what time it was but she could see that the sky was beginning to lighten. She felt that she could never go to sleep again and she felt very hungry. Ah-ha! She remembered the gingerbread man under her pillow. She had put it there simply to hide it and meaning to get rid of it somehow without Elsie or Bertha seeing. She had not thought she would ever want to eat it! It was too childish. But now she pulled it out, and leaning up on her elbow ate every last crumb.
This elbow position brought the orchard into her view, or rather its growing outlines in the approaching dawn. She recalled last night and Elsie’s emphatic assurance that fairies somehow had a hand in the mystery. Perhaps most other girls of fifteen would simply have laughed at Elsie and not for an instant accepted it as a possibility, fairies not entering into their scheme of things. But fairies did enter into Kate’s scheme of things and always had. There she was different. But there was a reason for her difference.
When she was a little girl of seven she had seen what she thought was a fairy; and it had made such an impression on her mind that when she grew older and came to the age of doubt she simply went on knowing. She had seen what she had seen, and that was all there was to it. Moreover, her mother had seen it, too, or something like it. It was hardly likely that both of them could have been utterly deceived.
It happened when she and Katherine had gone for a walk on a June Saturday. They started very early in the morning and walked very far, for a seven-year-old. But it was Saturday and they were both free, Kate from the lessons which her mother set her, and Katherine from teaching. And it was June. So they did not seem to get tired a bit, but walked and walked, and explored. Toward noon they came to a high meadow hilltop. There they lay down, flat on their backs among the Queen Anne’s lace, buttercups, and daisies, their arms across their eyes, their faces turned directly up toward the sun. It was luncheon time, but they did not care. The sunshine soaking into them and the smell of warm grass and earth were better than food.
They lay still for a long time, not even speaking to each other. Perhaps the little Kate slept. And they thought of getting up and starting for home only when the sun in the sky told Katherine that it must be past two o’clock.
Halfway down the hill pasture stood a little beach wood. They took their way through that because it looked so cool and inviting, and because Katherine knew there was a spring there among some rocks where they could get long, satisfying drinks of cold water. It was there they saw the fairy. They saw her just as they came out of the bright sunlight into the green, cool shade of the wood and stood above the water. She was at the other side of the spring facing them. She was looking down at her reflection in the water, not at all aware of their approach.
Kate saw her as a lovely girl in a floating green garment. Her feet and arms were bare and shining and it was their shining that made Kate know, even in that first instant before the fairy had glanced up, that she was unearthly. Kate and Katherine stood as still as the leaves on the trees in that still wood, awed and entranced. Then the little Kate whispered “Mother!” and pointed. At that whisper the fairy lifted her eyes. Kate saw the surprise in her eyes and a dawning—something; was it friendliness, or a smile? There was not time to know; for the fairy flashed backward and up on to a stone behind her across which the sunlight fell. And there she was lost in the sunlight. They simply could not see her any more.
But Kate had never forgotten that instant when they stood looking at the fairy while she was plain to view. And she had never forgotten the expression on her mother’s face after the fairy had vanished. It was such a delighted expression, so startlingly satisfied.
But that night, in talking it over, it came out that mother and daughter had not seen exactly the same thing. Katherine was sure that the being who had stood looking down at the spring was taller than human, grander, with a more tranquil, noble face, And her garment, she said, was the colour of sunlight, not green at all. Little Kate protested that. No, she was just a slim girl and her garment was green. Why, Kate remembered exactly how it hung almost to her bare ankles, without fluttering or motion in that still wood. The golden gown Katherine had seen had blown back, she said, as in a strong wind, although she herself felt no breath of air.
The end of their discussion came to this. Katherine said it might be that the sun in the high meadow together with their having had no luncheon had made them see not quite true. When they came suddenly into the cool, green shaded wood out of the glare their eyes played them tricks. What seemed like a person standing above the spring may have been simply an effect of sunlight striking through leaves.
“You remember, don’t you,” Katherine had ended, “how she vanished into sunlight when you said ‘Mother’? Well——”
And Katherine had left it at that. “Well——” But she had warned little Kate not to talk about it.
“People will think I had no business letting you go without luncheon so,” she gave as her reason, laughingly.
But just because she had promised Katherine that she would not talk about having seen a fairy, Kate had thought about it all the more. And she never went into a cool wood out of hot sunlight without hoping to surprise a fairy again. What she had seen she had seen, and that was all there was to it!
So now to Kate the thought that fairies might somehow be connected with the little orchard house did not seem at all an impossibility. Elsie certainly had not acted or looked as though she were lying. And it was perfectly true that from the minute Kate herself had first caught sight of the orchard house she had felt that there was something very special about it—more special than just the fact that it was the house where her mother had been born and grown up and married. When Elsie called out “Fairies, beware! Orchard House, beware!” Kate had been pricked with the feeling of listening ears. She had felt somehow that the warning was truly heard and taken.
She stretched now to her full length between her scented sheets. “I do wish the dawn would hurry up and dawn!” she thought. “The minute it’s a bit light enough I’ll get up, take a cold bath, dress, and get out into the orchard. If fairies are there, dawn ought to be as easy a time to see them as any. I’ll keep my promise about the key. But I’ve a perfect right in the orchard.”
She fell asleep then and dreamed about the orchard house. The King of the Fairies was there, waiting for her on the doorstep. She sat down beside him and at once began to see things different, to see them, as the King of the Fairies said, “whole.” There was a lot to the dream—colour, adventure, and music, and above all, the sight of things “whole.” But Kate, when she woke, had quite lost it. The dream had become just tag ends of brightness left floating in her mind.
* * * * * * * *
To her surprise morning was fully established, birds were singing in high chorus, and water was running loudly into the tub!
Bertha appeared in the bathroom door. “Miss Elsie got ahead of us,” she informed Kate brightly. “She must have been quieter than a mouse to have had her bath and all and not waked you. Now I suppose she’s out in the orchard or somewhere. It’s a beautiful day.”