Kit of Greenacre Farm Part 24

"No, she isn't any such thing. I want to know if you and Ralph are engaged. I don't see why you should try to keep it a secret when everybody thinks you are anyway. And a wedding in the family would be so exciting."

But Jean shook her head, coloring quickly, and hurried down-stairs, with only a laugh for an answer. Kit stared out of the window, rather resentfully. She would be sixteen in November, and Jean was past eighteen.

Eighteen loomed ahead of her as a year of discretion, a time when you naturally came into your heritage of mature reason and common sense. She remembered once the Dean remarking that the human brain did not reach its full development until eighteen, and how at the time she resented it, feeling absolutely sure at fifteen there was nothing under the sun she could not understand fully.

But the tumble in the river and peril to her life had left her completely stranded, as it were, upon an unknown sh.o.r.e of indecision. Evidently it was just what Billie had called it, a fool stunt for her to try and row up that river alone. Kit had always gone rather jauntily on her way doing as she thought best with an unshakable confidence that nothing could happen to her. Now she suddenly faced life with a new respect for the unexpected.

Snags and sunken trees in the way of intrepid voyagers were evidently facts which one had to guard against.

Another thing, there was a very uncomfortable sensation around Kit's crown of glory, for her enemy had heaped coals of fire on her head, and returned good for evil in such an overwhelming measure, she never could repay him.

Surely twenty-four hours had made an enormous difference in Kit's outlook on life, for she considered these things instead of the pink negligee on the foot of the bed.

The afternoon of the third day she was allowed to sit down on the veranda in a large willow armchair. Helen and Doris hovered over her quite as if she had been the heroine of some romantic adventure, and nearly all the tent colonists visited her in relays. Billie came up last of all, and brought her a live walking-stick on a spray of sa.s.safras, as a special token, but Stanley did not appear.

"He's gone off up in the hills," Billie told her, "chasing some kind of a new moth. You'd be awfully dead by now, Kit, if he hadn't happened to see you go down, because I was in the tent and didn't know anything about it.

But it was just like him to dash after you, and pull you out. He did that one day in Was.h.i.+ngton last winter, and saved a little darky from being run down by a fire engine. I told him he was a regular emergency doctor. I wish I could be like he is; I mean right on the job when there's any real danger."

Kit leaned her chin reflectively on her hand.

"Heroes are such uncomfortable people in everyday life, Billie," she said. "Everybody, even Dad and mother, keep telling me how everlastingly grateful I must be to him for saving my life. I don't see what I can do except thank him, and I have done that."

"Treat him decently," Billie suggested, encouragingly. "Even if you don't like him, hide it."

"Oh, I like him well enough," Kit answered, "only he's never seemed like Ralph, and Honey, and you. I guess I've always resented every one thinking he was so wonderful. It was as though he had had a sort of sweet revenge on me for taking him for a berry hooker."

She stopped as Ralph and Jean came slowly up the drive together. Jean's arms were filled with early goldenrod, and she had some woodbine leaves fastened in a close fillet crown about her smooth dark hair. Ralph came up the veranda steps and seated himself on a pile of straw mats beside the willow chair.

"We've just decided," he announced, "and Jean says I may tell you all.

It's going to happen in September, so she can go west with me. How do you like your new brother, Kit?"

"I approve," answered Kit, solemnly. "You know I've always liked you, Ralph, and I hereby bestow the hand of Jean upon you with all my blessings. Are you going to let her keep on painting?"

"She can do anything she likes," Ralph promised. "And if she can find any more beautiful scenery than we have in Saskatchewan and throughout Northwest Canada, then I'll live and die right here in Gilead."

If it had been any one but Ralph MacRae, Mrs. Robbins said, the family would never have given its united consent to Jean's marriage, but ever since that first summer when he had arrived at Greenacres as their unknown landlord, Ralph had been accepted as one of the family circle.

Piney and Honey were delighted over this new bond between the two families.

"We will be all cousins by marriage now," Piney said, "and if you girls don't let me be a bridesmaid, too, I'll never pa.s.s your portals again."

CHAPTER x.x.x

FACING REALITY

The wedding was set for the twentieth of September, and the last of the tent colony departed two weeks previously. The boys had gone first of all, and then the art students. The night before they left there had been a moonlight lawn party up at Greenacres, with dancing in a pavilion of young willows built by the boys. Kit declared she had never imagined anything so easy and so striking. With a good floor laid for dancing, they had erected a framework and then tied the willow trees to this on the four sides of the pavilion. Crisscrossing overhead were rows of j.a.panese lanterns. Old Cady Graves paced up and down playing his violin, as usual, and calling off for the quadrille, in his high pitched rhythmic cadence.

But the biggest surprise of all came when Bryan Ormond, who had stirred the musical circles of two worlds, took his place on the little country platform and played for them on his 'cello. The Judge and Mrs. Ellis enjoyed it just as the Robbinses did. It was a novel treat to hear the strains of Lizst and Chopin sounding in the purple silences of those old country hills, but when he had finished, Cynthy leaned over to Kit, who sat next to her and who was in an uplifted rhapsody of meditation.

"Do you suppose he'd be willing to play 'Home, Sweet Home' on that thing if we asked him to? 'Tain't nothin' but a big fiddle, is it?"

Before Kit could answer, Madame Ormond herself stood facing them on the veranda steps under the big yellow porch light, and instead of any grand-opera aria, her golden voice floated out for them, singing Cynthy's favorite as surely it had never been sung before in Gilead.

After it was all over and the girls were in their own rooms, Kit stepped to Helen's door for an extra match, and found her standing before the mirror, a long green velvet portiere draped around her shoulders, and a strip of gold braid banding her hair. She turned around with quick embarra.s.sment, and exclaimed breathlessly:

"Oh, Kit, please don't tell. I was just trying to look like Isolde. Madame Ormond has a photograph of herself dressed like this, and I was wondering if I ever would sing it."

Kit wrapped her arms around her as she stood behind her, almost as if she would have protected her from any dizzy flights of fancy.

"You look more like Brunehilda the Golden-haired," she said. "There's one thing about us Robbinses, n.o.body can say that we lack courage in our ambitions."

"Oh, but Kit, Madame Ormond says that she is sure my voice will develop into something worth while."

"Well, let's hope so, anyhow," Kit answered, practically, but with an affectionate squeeze that took away any offense from her words. "You know that old favorite saying of Cousin Roxy's, 'It's better to aim at the stars and hit the bar post, than to aim at the bar post and hit the ground.'"

Helen turned around, an anxious look in her blue eyes.

"You're always so matter-of-fact, Kit. You see, I am fourteen now, and it's about time I was having some kind of an ambition. Isn't there anything at all that you long to do more than anything in the world?

Something that you've thought and thought about for months and months until it became like a light ahead of you?"

Kit sat down on the edge of the bed and thought a minute. Life had never presented itself to her in vistas. She lived each day as it came with an unconquerable optimism, such as no one else except Cousin Roxy seemed to possess in the family.

"Don't worry, Kit," Mrs. Ellis was wont to say to her, cheerily. "Good works and an abiding faith yoked up with a sense of humor will carry any one to the golden gates."

And perhaps secretly Kit had always considered personal ambition a little private form of selfishness. As she ransacked her mind now, trying to find her own ambition and get it safely on a pin for examination like one of Billie's specimens, only her old-time love of forestry answered her.

"I guess I'm a kind of a gypsy, Helenita," she sighed regretfully, "'cause there isn't anything I really want to do so much as travel and hit new trails. I don't just want to start out like Jean is doing and rush over three thousand just to settle down at the other end for ever and ever. I'd want to keep on going. It's such a comfort to know that the world is round after all, and you can't topple off the end."

Helen regarded her doubtfully.

"You know, I heard Stanley talking almost exactly like that. He said that after his work was finished in France he would just want to travel on and on into all the beautiful, lonesome places of the world, where there had never been any war."

Kit stared at her in startled amazement.

"In France?" she repeated. "Billie never said a word about it."

"I heard him telling father he was leaving this fall with one of the engineering units from Virginia on reconstruction work in the forests.

Why, Kit?"

"Nothing," answered Kit, shortly. "Take off that golden crown and get to bed. It's after midnight. You'll probably dream of being a grand-opera queen, and wake up in the morning hearing Doris calling the guinea hens."

Two days later the Ormonds left. The little camp over on the island had broken up the day before. Billie had gone up to his grandfather's to spend a few days before returning to school, but Stanley remained over at Greenacres as Mr. Robbins' guest.

With a steady income a.s.sured him by the Dean's gift, Mr. Robbins was planning to develop the farm along the intensive lines he had always longed for. The girls on their side were fairly gloating over their own harvesting from the summer labors. Sally had made her own profit out of the little store, and the tent colony had yielded dividends sufficient to give each of the older girls a golden nest egg. Most of Jean's was going into her trousseau, but Kit took hers on the quiet and dropped it into her mother's lap as Mrs. Robbins sat reading in her favorite chair on the veranda.

"But, Kit, I don't need it now, dear," protested her mother. "Why don't you buy yourself some things that you've been wanting? I don't mean useful things. I mean 'white hyacinths' to feed the soul."