Strawberry Acres Part 11

It was as Mrs. Burnside had said. If anybody could manage Max's proud stubbornness, it was Jarvis, with his cool command of himself and his inborn habit of courtesy to everybody. Yet even Jarvis had his hands full to-night. Max's physical condition of fatigue and overwrought nerves made him more than ordinarily captious and difficult to handle.

"Confound you, you've got me in a corner!" he muttered. "That's what I don't like. If you had come out in the open with your plans--"

"You'd have refused me."

"You just said you counted on my generosity. If you were so sure of it, why didn't you ask for it?"

Jarvis laughed. "Oh, be reasonable! Don't you let people plot, at Christmas time and on birthdays, to take you by surprise? You hardly call it not being in the open because they don't ask your permission to present you with a house-jacket or a fountain-pen!"

The horses trotted briskly on, quiet ensuing behind them for a little while. Max fell into a sulky silence; Sally into a happy one, as she leaned out, watching for the final turn in the road before the pines should come into sight. Jarvis was wondering just how Max would behave, and hoping that Sally's pleasure would blind her eyes to her brother's dissatisfaction. He was counting a good deal on the impression his camp would make. As he thought it would look in the moonlight, with a little camp fire before it, it seemed to him it must appeal to anybody.

Sally gave a little cry. "There's the grove! How big and dark it looms up at night! I can smell it before I get near it--in my imagination. I've been smelling it all these hot days, and longing for it. Oh, what's that at the back? Didn't you see a flash of something?"

Sally was fairly hanging out of the carriage, her gaze feasting on the cool depths of gloom under the tall trees, when she caught sight of the little leaping flames of the camp fire.

"Somebody must be in there," agreed Josephine. "Perhaps it's Mr. Ferry, who lives next door, in the white cottage. Remember my telling you about him? Max gave him leave to inhabit the grove all he liked."

"Everything's so dry, he might set it on fire," considered Sally anxiously.

"You won't fear any such carelessness on his part when you see him,"

Josephine a.s.sured her confidently.

The carriage turned in at the gate. In another minute it had reached a point where the tent began to show from behind a clump of bushes. Sally's hand clutched Max's shoulder. Her brother was ill-humouredly surveying the signs of occupancy of the debatable ground.

"Why, there's a tent there!" she cried. "A big tent, and some one in front! Who is it--do you know?" She turned excitedly to Josephine; then she touched Jarvis's shoulder. "I seem to be doing all the exclaiming,"

she declared. "You people must know about this. Is it--is it a _surprise_?"

"It seems to be," replied Jarvis, turning to see her face, as the fire-light struck it, aglow with wonder and antic.i.p.ation.

Josephine caught her hand. "It's on your land, Sally dear," she said. "Do you mind?"

"Did it ever strike you," said Jarvis, quickly, in Max's ear, "that this _is_ Sally's land, and Alec's, and Bob's, quite as much as yours?"

Mrs. Burnside came out to greet the party, and Sally tumbled into her welcoming arms, hugging her frantically, and pulling away from her again to look about her. She seemed a different girl from the limp and languid one who had climbed into the carriage an hour before.

"Isn't it absolutely enchanting?" she exclaimed, gazing eagerly into the big tent, the open flaps of which showed an outer room arranged with rugs, chairs, couch, and table. Other open flaps at the corners of this outer enclosure invited exploration, and Sally promptly obeyed the summons. She found four smaller rooms, securely part.i.tioned by high, tightly stretched canvas walls. She came back beaming.

"What does it all mean?" she begged. "Are we to stay here to-night? Was there ever anything so inviting as those beds and cots? I could hardly keep from falling into one of them."

"You may fall into one as soon as you choose," said Josephine, gleefully. "The one on the southeast corner is yours, the one with the blue j.a.panese rug on the floor and the wicker chair with the blue cus.h.i.+on. We've sent a telephone message to the rest of your family, so they won't expect you back."

Jarvis, returning with Max from the bestowal of his horses in the barn, found his mother and the two girls sitting in a row upon a rustic seat at a little distance from the tent, their faces toward the camp fire, now a mere flicker, which n.o.body had taken the trouble to revive. It was too hot a night for camp fires, except as welcoming beacons.

"Well?" questioned Jarvis, standing before the three, upon whom the bright midsummer moonlight streamed so luminously that the white figures were visible in every detail.

"Well?" responded Josephine.

"Very well, I think," added Mrs. Burnside.

"More than well!" And Sally clasped her hands in a way both characteristic and eloquent. "A dozen tonics couldn't have made me feel so much stronger as the notion of sleeping in that big white tent. I wish I knew just what the thermometer says it is in the flat at home.

Oh, poor Uncle Timmy, and Bob and Alec! How I wish they were here--don't you, Max?"

It would have taken a harder heart than that which beat wearily in Max's breast to allow him to answer his sister sullenly.

"You like it, Sally?" he asked, taking a position where the moonlight did not illumine his face.

"Like it!" she exclaimed. "Jo says we're to stay if you are willing--live in this tent, and have the others out, and Mary Ann Flinders! We won't need Mary Ann long. I'll be strong enough myself to cook in another week.

Oh, wasn't it dear and kind of these people to plan this for us?"

What could he do or say against it all without seeming a churl and an ingrate? But before he could formulate the inwardly grudging yet outwardly appreciative reply he felt forced to make, Jarvis himself had interposed with a flow of lively talk, explaining to Sally various details of arrangement, and sparing Max the necessity of making any insincere speeches. And the next thing that happened was the setting forth by Josephine, on the table in the tent's outer room, of a light but tempting supper, brought from home in a hamper--the product of no Mary Ann Flinders, but of the Burnside cook.

"Mm--mm!" The soft but eloquent sound came from Sally's closed lips when she had taken her first taste of a sandwich of unknown but delicious compound. "Was ever anything so good? Max, boy, please try one, quick!

What is this perfect drink, Joey?--how it does go to the spot! Oh, if you are all half as happy as Sally Lunn, you don't know how to express it!"

"We're even happier," said Josephine, laughing softly, "for it seems at last as if we have Sally Lunn back."

Jarvis had hard work to keep his own pleasure properly subdued. He sat just across the table from Max, and the light from two candles shone revealingly into his satisfied face. He put on his goggles to screen his eyes, hoping that they might a.s.sist in concealing his content. Until Max gave in and agreed to it all, it would never do to let anybody but Sally crow with delight.

Mrs. Burnside insisted on an early bedtime for Sally, and the convalescent reluctantly admitted that not even joy was wholly sustaining to such weakness of limb as was still hers. So she submitted, with a sigh of appreciation, to being tucked away in the bed in the southeast enclosure of the tent, and soon was lying peacefully there, watching through her open tent-flap the moonlight as it lay on the open lawn, beyond the vista of trees. The air was now stirring refres.h.i.+ngly through the grove, and Sally, under the thinnest of light summer blankets, was absolutely comfortable and restful, as she had not been for many weary nights.

In the adjoining room, Max was asleep in two minutes after he had stretched himself upon his cot. Outside, by the embers of the camp fire, Jarvis and Josephine exchanged a brief conversation.

"Is he taking it worse or better than you expected?" Josephine asked, in the lowest of whispers.

"He took it like the b.u.mptious idiot he can be, at first. He's a trifle calmer now. I'm hoping by morning he'll be reasonable."

"Don't you think he must see the beauty of it when he looks at Sally?"

"One would think so. I suppose we mustn't blame him too much, for he certainly is worn out with work in this heat, and isn't himself. If he'll only be sensible, the staying here will do him as much good as it will Sally. She is pleased isn't she?"

"Pleased doesn't express it. But she thinks it's all my doing."

"Don't let her think anything else. It was your suggestion, and you've done half the work."

"It was Mr. Ferry's suggestion. Did you know he put up that rustic bench out there this afternoon? Made it out of the tree he chopped down."

"I didn't stop to wonder how it came there. I wonder if Max noticed it? I suppose he will think that was more of our impudence. It was kind of Ferry, though. He'll be a good neighbour for them."

"Oh, Jarvis, how I wish we could all stay here, too!"

Her brother gave vent to a curious little e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, whether of agreement or dissent she could not tell. "Of course we can't," he said shortly.

"Perhaps Max will come round and ask us to put up another tent for ourselves."

"Not much he won't. Never mind, I'm satisfied if he submits to this."

When Max opened his eyes the next morning it was difficult for him to realize where he was. He lay staring at the flecks of sunlight on the pine-needle-strewn ground, wondering how it happened that he had not wakened in damp discomfort from hot and perspiring slumbers. Before he felt himself fully awake he was conscious of a voice a few feet away, exclaiming:

"Oh, Mr. Ferry, how kind of you! What splendid strawberries! Out of your own garden? You must be an accomplished gardener." It was Josephine's voice.