Strawberry Acres Part 29

"You're not the real thing--never will be. Look at those girls!" He pulled off his straw hat as two figures appeared in the doorway. "Nice farmers' folks they are!"

"We're glad you think we're nice," responded Sally, gathering her white skirts about her. "Jo, be careful--don't get that peaches-and-cream frill against the running board."

Jarvis's reposeful posture had become an active one, and he took care that neither peach-coloured skirts nor white ones fluttered against anything on the outside of the car that might soil them.

"Here come Constance and Janet. Aren't they imposing society ladies now?"

and Sally stood up to wave at the two coming through the hedge, accompanied by Janet's brother. Ferry had an eye upon the porch and meant to spend the evening consoling his friends for the absence of the usual feminine contingent.

"You exquisite person--may I venture to sit beside you?" whispered Sally, as Constance, in trailing pale gray with bands of violet velvet, a s.h.i.+mmering cloak of the same hues enveloping her like a mist, took the place beside her. "This is the singer, not my friend Constance.

I'm--just--a little--afraid of you!"

"Nonsense!" Constance's warm hand caught Sally's beneath the cloak. "You know I don't like show singing--or anything that goes with it."

"Don't forget your promise--" Josephine called back, as the big car, with its rainbow-tinted load rolled away.

An answering shout from the porch, accompanied by the waving of several arms, conveyed a.s.surance.

"What promise?" asked Janet, turning to the others. Being the smallest of the party she occupied one of the folding seats which enable a roomy tonneau to hold five people.

"The boys are coming after us--we don't know how. Doesn't that give you courage to face the evening?" murmured Josephine, and the expression on Janet's face became decidedly more hopeful.

"But how can they come? They've only your brother's car!" she said in Josephine's ear.

"Don't know, and don't care. They'll come--and rescue us from our fate."

They felt, during the following hours, that they needed the cheering prospect of a merry home-going, to enable them to bear the rigours of the form of entertainment offered them. It was not that the affair differed much from affairs of its sort, but the fact that it did not materially differ might have been what made it seem so tiresome. Possibly the effect of a summer of out-door, home merrymaking, under the least conventional of conditions, had been to make formal entertaining under a roof seem more than ordinarily fatiguing and pointless. The handsome rooms were hot, in spite of open windows; the guests quite evidently were making heroic efforts to seem gay. Somehow even Janet's brilliant music stirred only a perfunctory sort of applause.

"Never played so badly in my life," whispered the performer, when she regained Josephine's side, after her second number.

"You played perfectly, as you always do."

"I played like an automaton--a 'piano-player.' Don't pretend you don't know the difference."

"I understand, of course. But, you know, we shouldn't really like to have you play for the bishop and these people as you do for us on your own piano."

"The poor bishop! Doesn't he look like a martyr? I'm sure he's delightful--in his own library, or at his friends' dinner-tables--but he hates this sort of thing. He's beautifully polite, but he's bored. My only hope is that Con will revive him. It's her turn next."

If anything could revive a weary bishop, who had that day attended two funerals and a diocesan convention, it would be both the sight and the sound of Miss Constance Carew.

"Isn't she _dear_?" breathed Sally, in Josephine's ear, as Constance took her place, her slender, gray-clad figure and interest-stirring face a notable contrast to the personality of the professional singer who had opened the program of occasional numbers, interspersed through an evening of--so-called--conversation. Sally's hands were unconsciously clasped tight all through the song, and her eyes left the singer's face only long enough to observe that the bishop's tired eyes were also fixed upon the creator of all those wonderful, liquid notes, and to fancy that, for the moment, at least, he forgot how hot his neck was inside his close, clerical neckwear.

"That pays me for coming," was the reward Constance had from Sally, whose praise she had somehow come to value more highly than that of most people she knew. Sally might be no musician herself, but she was a most sympathetic listener, and could appreciate the points singers love to have appreciated, as few people can.

"That pays me!" Constance answered, drawing a long breath. "But, Sally, will it never end? It's nearly eleven, now."

"Thank heaven! I'd lost all count of time. The boys said they'd be here at eleven. But Dorothy is not to know they're within five miles of here.

She'd never forgive them."

As she spoke a maid came to her elbow and handed her a note. Retiring to a secluded corner to read it, Sally returned with triumphant eyes. "We're to go down the lawn to a gate that opens on the other road. They're there. Now--to get away from Dorothy."

This proved difficult.

"Not let Neil take you back? Why not? How will you get back? But you're not going yet?"

"Both the girls have performed twice, with two encores. You don't expect any more of them this hot night? Your bishop is going to sleep; do let him off and send him to bed. Yes, we must go now. They've sent for us.

Don't bother about how we're going to get back--Neil will be thankful not to have to take us."

Thus Sally. And when Dorothy persisted in exclamations and questions her guests fell into a little gusto of enthusiasm over the stately old house which Neil had bought after he had to give up the Maxwell Lane place, and diverted Dorothy's attention. Sally also praised everything she could honestly praise in relation to the affair of the evening--and not a thing she couldn't, for Sally was the most honest creature alive. Somehow at last she got her party away from their hostess, taking advantage of the bishop's approach to whisper hastily--"Here comes your guest of honour.

Now do attend to him and forget us!"--and so had them all out a side door and off down the lawn out of range of the lighted windows. As they hurried along in their airy dresses, they were pulling off long, hot gloves, and saying, still under their breath, "Oh, isn't it good to get out?" They were laughing softly, and breathing deep breaths of the warm summer air, and looking up at the starlit sky.

"Now where is that gate?" They had reached the high fence at the back of the grounds.

"Here you are--this way," came back a low voice, and a doorway in the fence swung open. There was a rush of skirts, and the four were out in the road at the back of the suburban place, a country road on which stood, most appropriately, a long hay-wagon, cus.h.i.+oned with hay and rugs, drawn by a pair of farm horses, with Jake Kelly in command. Four other dark figures were grouped about the back end.

"You splendid things!"

"What a jolly idea!"

"Oh, what a delicious change from a hot music-room!"

"Here's Mother Burnside, tucked away in the corner. How good of you to come, you patient person!"

"Now tell us all about it," demanded Donald Ferry of Sally, next whom, at the end of the load, he sat. It may be noted that Jarvis had not been found, of late, at Sally's elbow. Without a suggestion of seeming avoidance on her part, or of umbrage on his, the two no longer fell to each other as a matter of course. Sally's plea had had the effect she wished for. Both Constance and Janet appeared to like Jarvis immensely, and Sally could not detect any failure on his part to enjoy their society. She told herself it was a very good thing that she had been so frank with him.

"All about it?" She was answering Ferry's question. "Why, I don't need to tell you. You know, without having been there, exactly how things went."

"More or less, probably. Was it very hot?"

"Stifling! How could it be anything else on an August night? Janet vows her fingers burned on the keys. But she played beautifully, of course, and the bishop had a little interval of being glad he was there. Poor man--I wonder if anything can be warmer than a clerical waistcoat."

"Nothing, except a clerical collar, I believe. Did Constance have a bad time of it, too? She doesn't like singing in hot rooms."

"She sang like an angel. The bishop opened his eyes and stared at her all through, and applauded so vigorously it must have made him several degrees warmer. But she deserved it."

"I don't doubt it. And what did you and Miss Josephine do?"

"Stood about and tried to look pleased and happy. My gloves felt like furs and a soapstone, and I couldn't think of anything intelligent to say to anybody."

Ferry laughed. "I wonder if anybody ever does say anything intelligent at such entertainments. Did Mr. Neil Chase himself rise to the occasion and play the genial host as he should?"

"I think he mostly spent the evening sitting on the porch rail at the farthest corner away from the drawing-room."

"The memory of the fellows lounging comfortably on your porch undoubtedly made his role seem the harder by contrast. I saw a longing look in his eye as he drove away, and had an idea he might be back. But I suppose he couldn't get out of it."

"No--their 'country home' isn't much like our 'country home.' Oh, isn't this air delicious? Do you suppose Constance would be willing to sing in it? Wouldn't it sound like a part of the summer night out here?"

They were bowling along the quiet country road, only the chirp of many locusts, the rumble of the wheels, and the sound of their own voices to break the stillness. Ferry leaned forward. Constance was at the farther end of the wagon, between Jarvis and Max.

"Constance!" he called softly. Sally thought she would not hear, but she did. Ferry's voice, even in its subdued tones, possessed that carrying quality which is the peculiar acquirement of the trained public speaker.