Strawberry Acres Part 23

"Yes, and pink sweet peas beside them, to set one's teeth on edge. By the way, my sweet peas are in!" Her voice proclaimed triumph, and she led the way down one of the damp, moss-grown paths to a sunny spot where a long strip of freshly raked earth showed that somebody had lately been at work. "Bob dug it up for me, Uncle Timmy fertilized it, I raked it and planted the seeds, while the whole family stood around and gave advice.

Max wanted them sowed thinner and Alec thicker. I consulted the seed catalogue and the directions on the paper packet, and then sowed them just as my judgment directed."

"As you haven't a particle of judgment--"

"Experience, you mean. No, I haven't experience, but I consider that I have judgment, and I sowed the seeds according to that. In June I will pick you a gorgeous bunch of them."

"In June--if I'm not away somewhere. In which case you can send them to me in a paste-board box."

"Joey Burnside!" Sally picked up a rake lying in the path and brandished it fiercely. "Don't you dare to go away--anywhere. You're to come and visit me--from June till September."

"How would May till November do?"

"Still better. The idea of your expecting me to get along without you, the very first summer I live in a place big enough for anybody to visit me in! You can go off to your fas.h.i.+onable resorts in the winter, if you want to--I can spare you better, then. But this summer! Jo, think of the moonlight nights, with the odour of mignonette coming up to the porch from the garden--"

"I don't think the odour of the mignonette would carry so far."

"We can walk within range, then. And the evenings on the porch, with Mr.

Ferry and his sister over--and his sister's friend--"

"I didn't know he had a sister--or that the sister had a friend."

"She's been in Germany the last two years, living with an aunt, and studying music--the piano. The friend has a voice. Oh, we'll have the jolliest times--you can't think. And in July will be the haying. Jo, we'll have larks during haying--real country larks--and a barn dance.

You _can't_ go away anywhere--not even for a week-end house party! Say you won't!"

"You artful schemer--I don't see how I can," and Josephine looked as if she couldn't. "But see here, Sally. I couldn't come and visit you here and leave mother alone. You know she would go with me, if it were to the mountains or to the sea-side."

"I'd love to have her come too," said Sally, quickly, "if she would care to. How I wish she would. Then I shouldn't have to bother Mrs. Ferry to come over every time we had the young people all here. If I could just furnish the west wing for you--"

"Why not let us furnish it?" Josephine jumped at her opportunity.

Somehow, during the last few minutes she had become firmly convinced that she could not think of spending the summer months anywhere but at the farm. All sorts of pictures had leaped into her mind at Sally's outlines of what the summer was to be. The stage seemed set for happenings of extraordinary interest, from which she did not want to be left out. There would be other things going on at the old place besides ploughings and plantings, harvestings and thres.h.i.+ngs--or perhaps it might be that these very terms in the vegetable kingdom might come to be used significantly of doings in the human sphere of action.

Sally looked up with a flash of protest in her eyes. "Let you furnish it!" she exclaimed. "Oh, but I couldn't--I know what your furnis.h.i.+ng it would mean. Persian rugs and silk hangings, Satsuma jars and cut-gla.s.s bowls filled with roses. And on the other side of the hall our poor things would look"--she stopped short, and was silent for an instant.

Then, "I'm an envious pig," she owned. "If you'll only come you may furnish it in teak wood and Chinese embroidery, and I'll be contented on my--bare floors."

But Josephine's affectionate arm was around her friend's shoulders.

"Sally Lunn," said she, soothingly, "give us credit for better taste than that, entirely from the standpoint of harmony. In a summer home on a farm people of sense don't use Persian rugs or teak wood. We'd put plain white straw matting on the floors, hang muslin curtains at the windows, and use the simplest willow furniture to be had. The windows should be open every minute, and there would be bowls of roses about--only I'd rather it would be sweet-williams or clove-pinks. Sally, don't you adore the old-fas.h.i.+oned clove-pinks, with their dear, spicy smell? And the bowls themselves wouldn't be cut gla.s.s--I despise cut gla.s.s for old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers, and so do you. Now, will you let us come?"

Sally looked at her friend for a minute, thinking as she did so that for a rich girl Josephine Burnside possessed the sweetest common sense ever owned by anybody. Then she dropped her rake and pulled at Josephine's hand.

"Come!" she cried. "Let's go back and look at the west wing. And the bedrooms over it are the nicest in the house. I haven't used them only because they were so big. But you won't care how many acres of straw matting have to be used to cover them."

"Do you think Max will be willing for us to come?" Josephine asked with some anxiety, as they went in. "You remember, about the tent--"

"Oh, he's anxious now to get Jarvis on the ground. And he's spoken more than once about the desirability of our renting some of our unused s.p.a.ce, only of course I wouldn't hear of it, before, to strangers."

Josephine plunged into details. They would bring Joanna for the season, that paragon of cooks. She should a.s.sist Mary Ann--

At which Sally laughed, and said that if incompetent little Mary Ann could a.s.sist dignified, competent Joanna, it would be a matter for congratulation.

"We'll all dine together every night in the big dining-room, with all the windows also open, and more flowers on the table."

Josephine would have gone on to further details, but as they crossed the hall to the west wing, the knocker on the front door banged with a decisive sound, and Sally opened to find Donald Ferry on the threshold.

"I came on a matter of business," said he, when he had shaken hands, "if you can call asking a favour business. Shall I plunge into it?--A certain storage house in a city near our old home has gone out of commission, and we are notified that everything my mother has had stored there since we left the home must be moved at once. Now that my sister and her friend are to be here with us through the summer we should like to have my sister's piano where she could use it. But"--he spread out his arms with a gesture conveying the idea of great proportions--"the piano is a grand--and not a miniature grand at that--concert size. We couldn't possibly put it in our little house. Would it be asking too much of you to allow it to stand in one of your rooms through the summer, where Janet could do some practising on it? I a.s.sure you her practising is of the nature of a morning musicale," he added--as if Sally might need a.s.surance in the matter.

Sally turned to Josephine. "It's a special providence," said she solemnly, "to keep me from envying you your matting and willow furniture.

Will you have a concert grand in the west wing? I trow not."

Then she answered to her questioner. "Of course we shall be delighted,"

she told him. "And as I say, it will have a chastening effect on the Burnside family, who are thinking of furnis.h.i.+ng our west wing and spending the summer with us. I'm sure they won't think of bringing a grand piano out here."

Donald Ferry looked greatly pleased at this news. "That's fine," said he. "Mother has been promising Miss Constance Carew and Janet all sorts of pleasures in the country, and I should say this makes a sure thing of it. If four girls on a farm can't have a good time together--even when not aided and abetted by as many boys--there will be something wrong with them--and the boys. Can't we be called boys?--That's great news. And I may tell mother you will prove your good friends.h.i.+p by taking the white elephant of a piano? May we send it right away? You see, since it must be moved at once, it had best come where it is to stay. And we'll send around a tuner. Please use it all you can, just to keep it in good shape."

"I'm not the tiniest sort of a musician," said Sally regretfully. "But Josephine is--she'll keep it in tune for you. I'll merely see that it's dusted."

When he had gone Sally and Josephine looked at each other. "Miss Burnside," said Sally, solemnly, "I feel it in my bones that you and Miss Ferry and Miss Carew and Miss Lane are to take part, this summer, in a melodrama of thrilling interest. Country setting, background of hay-field, with cows coming down the lane. Curtain rises to the time of 'Sweet Lavender.' Miss Burnside is discovered, sun-bonnet on head, rake in hand, pretending to accomplish the bunching up of one hay-c.o.c.k before the sun goes down. Enter at right young city clergyman, also in rustic attire. At the same time, enter, left, Miss Carew, in rival sun-bonnet.

Miss Burnside gives one glance at her rival--"

But a warm hand over Sally's saucy mouth, and a protesting--"Sally Lane, if you begin that sort of thing I won't live a minute in your west wing,"--put an end to the stage directions.

"All right, dear," agreed Sally. "We won't talk any such silly stuff.

We'll be four little country girls together, playing in the hay, and if we want to go barefoot we will--when there's n.o.body to see. But I hope, don't you, Jo? that 'Miss Carew' isn't as grand as she sounds!"

CHAPTER XIII

AFTERNOON TEA

"I feel," said Sally Lane, impressively, "that the way to receive them properly is to have afternoon tea on the lawn. What is the use of having a lawn--even though it's still rather hummocky--and four magnificent ancestral oaks--ancestral oaks sounds like an English novel--if we don't have afternoon tea on It--under Them?"

She stood in the doorway of the front room in the west wing, where Mrs.

Burnside and Josephine were sitting, the one busy with some small piece of sewing, the other writing letters at a desk.

"Are they coming over before we call on them?" Josephine inquired, with poised pen. "Coming to-day? Why, they only arrived last night."

"I saw Mr. Ferry this morning, and he said he did not want to wait for us to come over with our hats and gloves on and call, he wanted to bring the girls and his mother over this afternoon, so as to lose no time in having them find out what was on the farther side of the hedge. I asked him why he hadn't brought them with him then--it was at eight o'clock this morning. But he said he wanted to bring them himself, and he was then on his way to his car--otherwise he thought he should not have hesitated at all on account of the hour. He said they were crazy to come."

"Sally! He didn't say they were _crazy_ to come."

"He didn't use that particular word, perhaps--men never do, of course.

But he said 'eager,' or 'anxious,' or something like that--it means the same thing. Evidently they've been told all about us. What would you give, Jo Burnside, to know how we've been described?"

"We probably haven't been described. Men never describe people. They just say, 'She's all right, you'll like her,' or something equally vague."

"It would give me a chance to wear my lilac muslin," mused Sally quite irrelevantly, but Josephine caught her meaning.