Kit of Greenacre Farm Part 6

"I have a perfectly darling room. It looks right out over Lake Michigan. There's a big square bay window to it, that overhangs the edge of the bluff like the balcony of a Spanish beauty. Our back garden just topples right over into a ravine that ends up short on the sh.o.r.e. I never saw such abrupt little chasms in my life. Uncle Ca.s.sius was showing me the layers of strata there that a little recent landslide had shown up, and he says that the formation is just exactly like it is out west in Wyoming and Colorado.

"Aunt Daphne is just a dear. It's more fun to hear her tell of how she worried over a boy coming into the family. The whole house is filled from one end to the other with Uncle Ca.s.sius'

treasures that he's been collecting for years. You're liable to stumble over a stuffed armadillo or a petrified slice of some prehistoric monster anywhere at all. I found a mummy case in the library closet, but there wasn't anything in it at all, and I was awfully disappointed. I don't know but what I like it after all, although I miss you fearfully, dear nestful of robins. I don't even dare to think there are about a thousand miles between us.

"This is all I can write to you to-night because I'm so sleepy I can hardly keep my eyes open. Aunt Daphne just came in and kissed me good-night. She told me again how glad she is that I'm not a boy. Uncle Ca.s.sius hasn't committed himself yet, but I think he's curious about me anyway. Good-night all, and write oodles of news to me.

"Devotedly yours, KIT.

"_Sign of the Mummy, Delphi, Wis_."

At the same moment that Kit was writing home, the Dean and Miss Daphne stepped out on the broad veranda. Every evening about nine-thirty pa.s.sers-by might have seen the flickering glow of the Dean's good-night cigar. He was not an habitual smoker, but the evening cigar was a sort of nocturnal ceremonial. It gave him an excuse to step out into the fragrant darkness of the garden walk for a quiet little stroll before bedtime, and usually Miss Daphne would try to join him.

So to-night they paced together, discussing the girl with the red curls who had come to them from far-off New England, in lieu of the boy they had sent for.

"There's no reason," remarked the Dean, reflectively, "why the child should not have a pleasant visit, since she is here. I have had a long conversation with her, and while I would not say that she was exceptionally--er----"

"Bright," suggested Daphne.

"I should like to call it intellectual," the Dean said kindly, "she is keenly impressionable and self-reliant. I think I may be able to interest her, at least in a simplified course of study. I have always believed that boys were more amenable to routine discipline in education than girls, but we shall see."

Miss Daphne's eyes, if he could only have seen them, held a twinkle of mirth, and her smile was a little more p.r.o.nounced than usual.

"I think," she said, softly, "that she is a very lovable, attractive girl.

I am quite relieved, brother, not to have a boy in the house."

Kit wakened the following morning with the sunlight calling to her. It was early, but back on the farm the girls usually rose about five. There did not seem to be any one stirring yet, so she dressed quietly, and found her way down-stairs. The Dean kept a cook, gardener and second girl. Kit heard Delia, the latter, singing in the dining-room and went out at once to make friends with her.

"Is it very far down the bluff to the sh.o.r.e, Delia?" she asked, eagerly.

"I'm dying to climb down there, if I have time before breakfast."

"Sure, Miss, it's as easy as rolling off a log. You take the roundabout way through the garden, and the little path, behind the tool shed, and you just follow it until you can't go any farther, and there's the bluff. I haven't been down myself, but Dan says there's a little path you take to the sh.o.r.e if you don't mind scrambling a bit."

Kit waved good-bye to her and went in search of the path. She found Dan, the gardener, raking up leaves in the back garden. He was a plump rosy-cheeked old Irishman, his face wrinkled like a winter pippin, and he lifted his cap at her approach with a smile of frank curiosity and approval.

A half-grown black retriever came bounding to meet her, his nose and forepaws tipped with white.

"That's a welcome he's giving you you wouldn't have had if you'd been a boy, Miss," Danny said, shrewdly. "I'm glad to meet you, and hope you'll like it here."

Kit was stroking Sandy's silky curls. His real name he told her was Lysander. Anything that the Dean had the naming of received the benediction of ancient Greece, but Sandy, in his puppyhood, had managed to acquire a happy diminutive.

"I don't see," Kit said, laughingly, "why you dreaded a boy coming. I know some awfully nice boys back home, and there's one specially"--she paused just a moment, before she added--"named Billie. He's kind of related to us, because his grandfather married Cousin Roxy, and she's my father's cousin. It's a little bit hard to figure it out, but still we're related, and we're very, very good friends. I think he's just the kind of a boy the Dean expected to see, but perhaps he'll get used to me. Do you think he will?"

"Sure, it's like asking me could he get used to the suns.h.i.+ne," answered Danny, gallantly.--"If you leave it to Sandy to find the sh.o.r.e, he'll take you the quickest way."

CHAPTER IX

ALL SANDY'S FAULT

Everything was so different from the Connecticut verdure and underbrush.

Instead of the thick, lush growth which came from richly watered black loam, here one found sand cherries and little dwarf willows and beeches springing up from the sand. Tall sword gra.s.s waved almost like Cousin Roxy's striped ribbon gra.s.s in the home garden, and wild sunflowers showed like golden glow here and there.

The beach was level and rockless, different entirely from the Eastern Atlantic sh.o.r.es, but the sand was beautifully white and fine, and there were great weather-beaten, wave-washed boulders lying half buried in the sand, also trunks of trees, their roots uprearing grotesquely like strange heads of animals. Kit thought whimsically how the Dean might have added them with profit to his prehistoric collection. There was no glimpse or hint of the town to be seen down here. Not even a boat house, only one long pier. About a mile and a half from sh.o.r.e was a lights.h.i.+p, and farther out a white steamer showed in perfect outline against the blueness of the morning sky.

Kit followed Sandy's lead, hardly realizing the distance she was covering, until he suddenly disappeared behind a nosing headland. When she rounded it, she saw a cottage built close under the shelter of the bluff. The sand drifted like snow half-way up to its windows. It had been painted red once, but now its old clapboards were the color of sorrel, and weather-beaten and wave-washed like the boulders. There were fish nets drying on tall staples driven in behind a couple of overturned rowboats, and at that first glimpse it seemed to her as if there were children everywhere. Four stalwart boys from fourteen to eighteen worked over the nets, mending them; around the back door there were four or five more, and sitting in the sunlight in a low rocking-chair was an old woman as picturesque as some ancient sibyl.

Sandy seemed to greet them as old acquaintances, so Kit called good-morning in good old Yankee fas.h.i.+on. The boys eyed her, somewhat askance, and all of the children scurried like a flock of startled chickens as she came up the boardwalk to the kitchen door, but the old grandmother kept serenely on paring potatoes, calm-eyed and unembarra.s.sed.

"How do you do?" said Kit, smilingly. "I'm Dean Peabody's grandniece. I just came west yesterday, and Sandy brought me here this morning. I didn't know where he was going, but he seemed to know the way."

The old woman's brown eyes followed the movement of the dog.

"He ver' fine, that dog," she said, deliberately. "He come ver' often. I know him since he is un pet.i.t chien, ver' small pup--so beeg." She measured with her hand from the ground.

"Do you know the Dean?" Kit asked, sitting down on the doorstep beside her. "He lives up in the big house on the bluff, where the pine and maples are."

The old woman shook her head placidly.

"I not go up that bluff in forty-eight year."

Kit's eyes widened with quick interest. Just then a girl a little older than herself came out of the kitchen door. Two long braids of straight brown hair hung over her shoulders, and her dress was slouchy and gypsy-like. She looked at Kit with quiet, steady scrutiny, and then questioningly over at the boys. But Kit herself relieved the tension.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. "I think you've got an awfully nice place down here. I like it because it looks old like our houses back home. All the other places I've seen since I came west have looked so newly painted."

"This isn't new," the girl told her slowly. "This place belonged to my grandfather's father, Louis Beaubien. There were Indians around here then.

Most of them 'Jibways."

Jean used to say that the instant Kit's curiosity was aroused, she was just exactly like a squirrel after nuts, and here was an entirely new field of romance and adventure to be uncovered. She fairly sniffed the air. The wonderful old grandmother, basking in the sun with memories of the past like a Mother Time. The strong, tanned boys working at the nets, the flock of dark-skinned youngsters, and the girl, Marcelle, whom she was to know so well before her stay in Delphi was over.

She hurried back, eager to ask questions about the Beaubiens, and found herself late for breakfast the very first morning she was there. The Dean's face was a study as she entered, and Miss Daphne's fingers fluttered somewhat nervously over the coffee urn, and fragile cups. Kit was out of breath, and so full of excitement that she did not even notice the air was chill.

"I've had a perfectly wonderful time," she began. "No coffee, Aunt Daphne, please. Mother doesn't allow me to have any. It's all Sandy's fault. I just wanted to run down the bluff to the sh.o.r.e, and he led me way round that headland to the funniest old house, half-sunken in the sand, and I got acquainted with the old grandmother and Marcelle. The boys and the little youngsters seemed half-scared to death at the sight of me, and so I didn't bother to get acquainted with them yet."

The Dean looked up at her over his gla.s.ses with a quizzical expression, and Miss Daphne fairly caught her breath.

"The Beaubiens on the sh.o.r.e, my dear?" she asked. "Those half-breed French Canadians?"

"Well, I didn't know just what they were," answered Kit, cheerfully, "but I think they're awfully interesting. Don't you think that they look like the Breton fisher people in some of the old French paintings? That girl looked just exactly like the youngest one crossing the sands at low tide at St. Malo. We have the painting at home, and I love it. And there was another girl about thirteen that I saw staring at me from the kitchen, and she looked just like 'The Song of the Lark' girl where she's crossing the fields at dawn."

"The Beaubiens have not a very good reputation, my dear," the Dean coughed slightly behind his hand as he spoke. "The present generation may be law-abiding, but even within my memory, the Beaubiens had a little habit of smuggling."

"Smuggling?" repeated Kit, interestedly. "How could they smuggle way off here?"

"Very easily. There were schooners that used to make the run down from the Canadian sh.o.r.e around the Straits carrying contraband goods in war time.