The Happy Venture by Edith Ballinger Price
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Edith Ballinger Price >> The Happy Venture
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"Thank you so very, very much!"
"You're very welcome," said the attorney, "and the best of luck to you
all!" When the glass door had closed behind the pair, Mr. Dodge sat
down before his desk and wiped his glasses. He looked at the dollar
bill, and then he said--quite out loud--
"Poor, poor dears!"
CHAPTER III
UP STAKES
That night, Kenelm could not sleep. He walked up and down his room in
the dark. His own head ached, and he could not think properly. The one
image which stood clearly out of the confusion was that of the
_Celestine_, raising gracious spars above the house-tops. The more he
thought of her, the more a plan grew in his tired mind. The crew of the
_Celestine_ must be paid quite well--he could send money home every week
from different ports--he could send gold and precious things from South
America. There would be one less person to feed at home; he would be
earning money instead of spending it.
He turned on his light, and quickly gathered together his hockey
sweater, his watch-cap, and an old pair of trousers. He made them into a
bundle with a few other things. Then he wrote a letter, containing many
good arguments, and pinned it on Felicia's door. He tiptoed downstairs
and out into the night. From the street he could see the faint green
light from his mother's room, where Miss McClough was sitting. He turned
and ran quickly, without stopping to think.
No one was abroad but an occasional policeman, twirling his night-stick.
On the wharves the daylight confusion was dispelled; there was no
clatter of teaming, no sound but the water fingering dank piles, and the
little noises aboard sleeping vessels. But the _Celestine_ was awake.
Lights gleamed aboard her, men were stirring, the great mass of her
canvas blotted half the stars. She was sailing, that night, for Rio de
Janeiro.
Ken slipped into the shadow of a pile-head, waiting his chance. His
heart beat suffocatingly; his hands were very cold. Quietly he stepped
under the gang-plank, swung a leg over it, drew himself aboard, and lay
flat on deck beside the rail of the _Celestine_ in a pool of shade. A
man tripped over him and stumbled back with an oath. The next instant
Ken was hauled up into the light of a lantern.
"Stowaway, eh?" growled a squat man in dungaree. "Chuck him overboard,
Sam, an' let him swim home to his mamma."
In that moment, Ken knew that he could never have sailed with the
_Celestine_, that he would have slipped back to the wharf before she
cast loose her hawsers. He looked around him as if he had just awakened
from sleep-walking and did not know where he found himself. He gazed up
at the gaunt mainmast, black against the green night sky, at the main
topsail, shaking still as the men hauled it taut.
"I'm not a stowaway," he said; "I'm going ashore now."
He walked down the gang-plank with all the dignity he could muster, and
never looked behind him as he left the wharf. He could hear the rattle
of the _Celestine's_ tackle, and the _boom, boom_ of the sails. Once
clear of the docks he ran, blindly.
"Fool!" he whispered. "Oh, what a fool! what a senseless idiot!"
The house was dark as he turned in at the gate. He stopped for an
instant to look at its black bulk, with Orion setting behind the
chimney-pots.
"I was going to leave them--all alone!" he whispered fiercely. "Good
Heavens!"
He removed the letter silently from Felicia's door,--he was reassured by
seeing its white square before he reached it,--and crept to his own
room. There a shadowy figure was curled up on the floor, and it was
crying.
"Kirk! What's up?" Ken lifted him and held him rather close.
"You weren't here," Kirk sniffed; "I got sort of rather l-lonely, so I
thought I'd come in with you--and the b-bed was perfectly empty, and I
couldn't find you. I t-thought you were teasing me."
"I was taking a little walk," Ken said. "Here, curl up in bed--you're
frozen. No, I'm not going away again--never any more, ducky. It was nice
in the garden," he added.
"The garden?" Kirk repeated, still clinging to him. "But you smell
of--of--oh, rope, and sawdust, and--and, Ken, your face is wet!"
* * * * *
Mrs. Sturgis protested bitterly against going away. She felt quite able
to stay at home. To be sure, she couldn't sleep at all, and her head
ached all the time, and she couldn't help crying over almost
everything--but it was impossible that she should leave the children.
In spite of her half-hysterical protests, the next week saw her ready to
depart for Hilltop with Miss McClough, who was to take the journey with
her.
"You needn't worry a scrap," laughed Felicia, quite convincingly, at the
taxi door. "We've seen Mr. Dodge, and there'll be money enough. You just
get well as quick as ever you can."
"Good-by, my darlings," faltered poor Mrs. Sturgis, quite ready to
collapse again. "Good-by, Kirk--my precious, precious baby! How can I!"
And the taxicab moved away, giving them just one glimpse of their mother
with her poor head on Miss McClough's capable shoulder.
"Well," Ken remarked, "here we are."
And there was really nothing more to be said on the subject.
Such a strange house! Maggie and Norah gone; Felicia cooking queer
meals--principally poached eggs--in the kitchen; Miss Bolton failing to
appear every morning at ten o'clock as she had done for the last three
years; Mother gone, and not even a letter from her--nothing but a
type-written report from the physician at Hilltop.
Gone also, as Kirk discovered, was the lowboy beside the library door.
It was a most satisfactory piece of furniture. From its left-hand corner
you could make a direct line to the window-seat. It also had smoothly
graceful brass handles, and a surface delicious to the touch. When Kirk,
stumbling in at the library door, failed to encounter it as usual, he
was as much startled as though he had found a serpent in its stead. He
tried for it several times, and when his hands came against the
bookshelves he stopped dead, very much puzzled and quite lost. Felicia
found him there, standing still and patiently waiting for the low-boy to
materialize in its accustomed place.
"Where is it!" he asked her.
"It's not there, honey," she said. "We're going to a different house,
and it's sent away."
"A different house! When? What _do_ you mean?"
"We've finished renting this one," said Felicia. "We thought it would be
nice to go to another one--in the country. Oh, you'll like it."
"How queer!" Kirk mused. "Perhaps I shall. But I don't know about this
corner; it used to be covered up. Please start me right."
She did so, and then ran off to attend to a peculiar pudding which was
boiling over on the stove. She had not told him that the low-boy was
sent away to be sold. When she and Ken had discovered the appalling sum
it would cost to move the furniture anywhere, they heartbrokenly
concluded that the low-boy and various other old friends must go to help
settle the accounts of Miss Bolton and the nurse.
"There are some things," Ken stoutly pronounced, however, "that we'll
take with us, if I have to go digging ditches to support 'em. And some
we'll leave with Mr. Dodge--I know he won't mind a few nice tables and
things."
For the "different house" was actually engaged. Mr. Dodge shook his head
when he heard that Ken had paid the first quarter's rent without having
even seen the place.
"Fine old farm-house," said the advertisement; "Peach and apple
orchards. Ten acres of land. Near the bay. Easy reach of city. Only
$15.00 per month."
There was also a much blurred photograph of the fine old farm-house,
from which it was difficult to deduce much except that it had a gambrel
roof.
"But it does sound quite wonderful," Felicia said to the attorney. "We
thought we wouldn't go to see it because of its costing so much to
travel there and back again. But don't you think it ought to be nice?
Peach and apple orchards,--and only fifteen dollars a month!"
"I dare say it is wonderful," said Mr. Dodge, smiling. "At any rate,
Asquam itself is a very pretty little bayside place--I've been there.
Fearfully hard to get your luggage, but charming once you're there.
Don't forget me! I'll always be here. And you'd better have a little
more cash for your traveling expenses."
"I hope it really came out of our money," Ken said, when he saw the
cash.
Nothing but a skeleton of a house, now. No landmarks at all were left
for Kirk, and he tumbled over boxes and crates, and lost himself in the
bare, rugless halls. The beds that were to be taken to Asquam were still
set up,--they would be crated next day,--but there was really nothing
else left in the rooms. Three excited people, two of them very tired,
ate supper on the corner of the kitchen table--which was not going to
the farm-house. That house flowered hopefully in its new tenants' minds.
Felicia saw it, tucked between its orchards, gray roof above gnarled
limbs, its wide stone door-step inviting one to sit down and look at the
view of the bay. And there would be no need of spending anything there
except that fifteen dollars a month--"and something for food," Felicia
thought, "which oughtn't to be much, there in the country with hens and
things."
It amused Kirk highly--going to bed in an empty room. He put his clothes
on the floor, because he could find no other place for them. Felicia
remonstrated and suggested the end of the bed.
"Everything else you own is packed, you know," said she. "You'd better
preserve those things carefully."
"Sing to me," he said, when he was finally tucked in. "It's the last
night--and--everything's so ugly. I want to pretend it's just the same.
Sing '_Do-do, petit frere_,' Phil."
Felicia sat on the edge of the bed and sang the little old French
lullaby. She had sung it to him often when she was quite a small girl,
and he a very little boy. She remembered just how he used to look--a
cuddly, sleepy three-year-old, with a tumble of dark hair and the same
grave, unlit eyes. He was often a little frightened, in those days, and
needed to hold a warm substantial hand to link him with the mysterious
world he could not see.
"_Do-do, p'tit frere, do-do_."
His hand groped down the blanket, now, for hers, and she took it and
sang on a bit unsteadily in the echoing bareness of the dismantled room.
A long time afterward, when Kenelm was standing beside his window
looking out into the starless dark, Felicia's special knock sounded
hollowly at his door.
She came over to him, and stood for a while silently. Then she turned
and said suddenly in a shy, low voice:
"Oh, Ken, I don't know how you feel about it, but--but, I think,
whatever awful is going to happen, we must try to keep things beautiful
for Kirk."
"I guess we must," Ken said, staring out. "I'd trust you to do it, old
Phil. Cut along now to bed," he added gruffly; "we'll have to be up like
larks to-morrow."
CHAPTER IV
THE FINE OLD FARM-HOUSE
Asquam proper is an old fishing-village on the bayside. The new Asquam
has intruded with its narrow-eaved frame cottages among the gray old
houses, and has shouldered away the colonial Merchants' Hall with a
moving-picture theater, garish with playbills and posters. Two large and
well-patronized summer hotels flourish on the highest elevation (Asquam
people say that their town is "flatter'n a johnny cake"), from which a
view of the open sea can be had, as well as of the peninsulas and
islands which crowd the bay.
On the third day of April the hotels and many of the cottages were
closed, with weathered shutters at the windows and a general air of
desolation about their windy piazzas. Asquam, both new and old,
presented a rather bleak and dismal appearance to three persons who
alighted thankfully from the big trolley-car in which they had lurched
through miles of flat, mist-hung country for the past forty minutes.
The station-agent sat on a tilted-up box and discussed the new arrivals
with one of his ever-present cronies.
"Whut they standin' ther' fer?" he said. "Some folks ain't got enough
sense to go in outen the rain, seems so."
"'T ain't rainin'--not so's to call it so," said the crony, whose name
was Smith. "The gell's pretty."
"Ya-as, kind o'," agreed the station-agent, tilting back critically.
"Boy's upstandin'."
"Which one?"
"Big 'n. Little 'un ain't got no git-up-'n'-git fer one o' his size.
Look at him holdin' to her hand."
"Sunthin' ails him," Smith said. "Ain't all there I guess."
The station-agent nodded a condescending agreement, and cocked his foot
on another box. At this moment the upstanding boy detached himself from
his companions, and strode to where the old man sat.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "can you tell me how far it is to the
Baldwin farm, and whether any of Mr. Sturgis's freight has come yet?"
"Baldwin fa'm?" and the station-agent scratched his ear. "Oh, you mean
out on the Winterbottom Road, hey? 'Beout two mile."
"And Mr. Sturgis's freight?"
"Nawthin' come fer that name," said the agent, "'less these be them." He
indicated four small packages in the baggage-room.
"Oh no," said Ken, "they're big things--beds, and things like that.
Well, please let me know if they do come. I'm Mr. Sturgis."
"Oh, you be," said the agent, comprehensively.
"Ain't gonna walk away out to the Baldwin place with all them valises,
air you?" Smith inquired, breaking silence for the first time.
"I don't know how else we'll get there," Ken said.
"_Yay_--Hop!" shouted Smith, unexpectedly, with a most astonishing
siren-like whoop.
Before Ken had time to wonder whether it was a prearranged signal for
attack, or merely that the man had lost his wits, an ancient person in
overalls and a faded black coat appeared from behind the baggage-house.
"Hey? Well?" said he.
"Take these folks up to the Baldwin place," Smith commanded; "and don't
ye go losin' no wheels this time--ye got a young lady aboard." At which
sally all the old men chuckled creakily.
But the young lady showed no apprehension, only some relief, as she
stepped into the tottering surrey which Hop drove up beside the
platform. As the old driver slapped the reins on the placid horse's
woolly back, the station-agent turned to Smith.
"George," he said, "the little 'un ain't cracked. He's blind."
"Well, gosh!" said Smith, with feeling.
Winterbottom Road unrolled itself into a white length of half-laid dust,
between blown, sweet-smelling bay-clumps and boulder-filled meadows.
"Is it being nice?" Kirk asked, for the twentieth time since they had
left the train for the trolley-car.
Felicia had been thanking fortune that she'd remembered to stop at the
Asquam Market and lay in a few provisions. She woke from calculations of
how many meals her family could make of the supplies she had bought,
and looked about.
"We're near the bay," she said; "that is you can see little silvery
flashes of it between trees. They're pointy trees--junipers, I think and
there are a lot of rocks in the fields, and wild-flowers. Nothing like
any place you've ever been in--wild, and salty, and--yes, quite nice."
They passed several low, sturdy farm-houses, and one or two boarded-up
summer cottages; then two white chimneys showed above a dark green
tumble of trees, and the ancient Hopkins pointed with his whip saying:
"Ther' you be. Kind o' dull this time year, I guess; but my! Asquam's
real uppy, come summer--machines a-goin', an' city folks an' such.
Reckon I'll leave you at the gate where I kin turn good."
The flap-flop of the horse's hoofs died on Winterbottom Road, and no
sound came but the wind sighing in old apple-boughs, and from somewhere
the melancholy creaking of a swinging shutter. The gate-way was grown
about with grass; Ken crushed it as he forced open the gate, and the
faint, sweet smell rose. Kirk held Felicia's sleeve, for she was
carrying two bags. He stumbled eagerly through the tall dry grass
of last summer's unmown growth.
"Now can you see it? _Now_?"
But Felicia had stopped, and Kirk stopped, too.
"Are we there? Why don't you say anything?"
Felicia said nothing because she could not trust her voice. Kirk knew
every shade of it; she could not deceive him. Gaunt and gray the "fine
old farm-house" stood its ground before them. Old it assuredly was, and
once fine, perhaps, as its solid square chimneys and mullioned windows
attested. But oh, the gray grimness of it! the sagging shutter that
creaked, the burdocks that choked the stone door-step, the desolate wind
that surged in the orchard trees and would not be still!
Ken did what Felicia could not do. He laughed--a real laugh, and swept
Kirk into warm, familiar arms.
"It's a big, jolly, fine old place!" he said. "Its windows twinkle
merrily, and the front door is only waiting for the key I have in my
pocket. We've got home, Quirk--haven't we, Phil?"
Felicia blessed Ken. She almost fancied that the windows did twinkle
kindly. The big front door swung open without any discourteous
hesitation, and Ken stood in the hall.
"Phew--dark!" he said. "Wait here, you fellows, while I get some
shutters open."
They could hear his footsteps sound hollowly in the back rooms, and
shafts of dusky light, preceded by hammerings and thumpings, began
presently to band the inside of the house. Felicia stepped upon the
painted floor of the bare hall, glanced up the narrow stairs, and then
stood in the musty, half-lit emptiness of what she guessed to be the
living-room, waiting for Ken. Kirk did not explore. He stood quite still
beside his sister, sorting out sounds, analyzing smells. Ken came in,
very dusty, rubbing his hands on his trousers.
"Lots of fireplaces, anyway," he said. "Put down your things--if you've
anywhere to put 'em. I'll load all the duffle into this room and see if
there's any wood in the woodshed. Glory! No beds, no blankets! There'll
_have_ to be wood, if the orchard primeval is sacrificed!" And he went,
whistling blithely.
"This is an adventure," Felicia whispered dramatically to Kirk. "We've
never had a real one before; have we?"
"Oh, it's nice!" Kirk cried suddenly. "It's low and still, and--the
house wants us, Phil!"
"The house wants us," murmured Felicia. "I believe that's going to help
me."
It was quite the queerest supper that the three had ever cooked or
eaten. Perhaps "cooked" is not exactly the right word for what happened
to the can of peas and the can of baked beans. Ken did find wood--not in
the woodshed, but strewing the orchard grass; hard old apple-wood, gray
and tough. It burned merrily enough in the living-room fireplace, and
the chimney responded with a hollow rushing as the hot air poured into
it.
"It makes it seem as if there were something alive here besides us,
anyway," Felicia said.
They were all sitting on the hearth, warming their fingers, and when the
apple-wood fire burned down to coals that now and again spurted
short-lived flame, they set the can of peas and the can of baked beans
among the embers. They turned them gingerly from time to time with two
sticks, and laughed a great deal. The laughter echoed about in the empty
stillness of the house.
Ken's knife was of the massive and useful sort that contains a whole
array of formidable tools. These included a can-opener, which now did
duty on the smoked tins. It had been previously used to punch holes in
the tops of the cans before they went among the coals--"for we don't
want the blessed things blowing up," Ken had said. Nothing at all was
the matter with the contents of the cans, however, in spite of the
strange process of cookery. The Sturgises ate peas and baked beans on
chunks of unbuttered bread (cut with another part of Ken's knife) and
decided that nothing had ever tasted quite so good.
"No dish-washing, at any rate," said Ken; "we've eaten our dishes."
Kirk chose to find this very entertaining, and consumed another
"bread-plate," as he termed it, on the spot.
The cooking being finished, more gnarly apple-wood was put on the fire,
and the black, awkward shadows of three figures leaped out of the bare
wall and danced there in the ruddy gloom. Bedtime loomed nearer and
nearer as a grave problem, and Ken and Felicia were silent, each
wondering how the floor could be made softest.
"The Japanese sleep on the floor," Ken said, "and they have blocks of
wood for pillows. Our bags are the size, and, I imagine, the
consistency, of blocks of wood. _N'est-ce pas, oui, oui_?"
"I'd rather sleep on a rolled-up something-or-other _out_ of my bag than
on the bag itself, any day--or night," Felicia remarked.
"As you please," Ken said; "but act quickly. Our brother yawns."
"Bedtime, honey," Felicia laughed to Kirk. "Even queerer than
supper-time was."
"A bed by night, a hard-wood floor by day," Ken misquoted murmurously.
"Hard-wood!" Felicia sniffed. "_Hard_ wood!"
The problem now arose: which was most to be desired, an overcoat under
you to soften the floor, or on top of you to keep you warm?
"If he has my overcoat, it'll do both," Ken suggested. "Put his sweater
on, too." "But what'll _you_ do?" Kirk objected.
"Roll up in _your_ overcoat, of course," Ken said.
This also entertained Kirk.
"No, but really?" he said, sober all at once.
"Don't you fret about me. I'll haul it away from you after you're
asleep."
And Kirk snuggled into the capacious folds of Ken's Burberry, apparently
confident that his brother really would claim it when he needed it.
Ken and Felicia sat up, feeding the fire occasionally, until long after
Kirk's quiet breathing told them that he was asleep.
"Well, we've made rather a mess of things, so far," Ken observed,
somewhat cheerlessly.
"We were ninnies not to think that none of the stuff would have come,"
Felicia said. "We'll _have_ to do something before to-morrow night. This
is all right for once, _but_--!"
"Goodness knows when the things will come," said Ken, poking at the
fore-stick. "The old personage said that all the freight, express,
everything, comes by that weird trolley-line, at its own convenience."
"Shouldn't you think that they'd have something dependable, in a summer
place?" Felicia signed. "Oh, it seems as if we'd been living for years
in houses with no furniture in them. And the home things will simply
rattle, here."
"I wish we could have brought more of them," Ken said. "We'll have to
rout around to-morrow and buy an oil-stove or something and a couple of
chairs to sit on. Ah hum! Let's turn in, Phil. We've a tight room and a
fire, anyhow. Shall you be warm enough?"
"Plenty. I've my coat, and a sweater. But what are you going to do?"
"Oh, I'll sit up a bit longer and stoke. And really, Kirk's overcoat
spreads out farther than you'd think. He's tallish, nowadays."
Felicia discovered that there are ways and ways of sleeping on the
floor. She found, after sundry writhings, the right way, and drifted off
to sleep long before she expected to.
Ken woke later in the stillness of the last hours of night. The room was
scarcely lit by the smoldering brands of the fire; its silence hardly
stirred by the murmurous hissing of the logs. Without, small marsh frogs
trilled their silver welcome to the spring, an unceasing jingle of tiny
bell-notes. Kirk was cuddled close beside Ken, and woke abruptly as Ken
drew him nearer.
"You didn't take your overcoat," he whispered.
"We'll both have it, now," his brother said. "Curl up tight, old man;
it'll wrap round the two of us."
"Is it night still?" Kirk asked.
"Black night," Ken whispered; "stars at the window, and a tree swaying
across it. And in here a sort of dusky lightness--dark in the corners,
and shadows on the walls, and the fire glowing away. Phil's asleep on
the other side of the hearth, and she looks very nice. And listen--hear
the toads?"
"Is that what they are? I thought it was a fairy something. They make
nice noises! Where do they live?"
"In some marsh. They sit there and fiddle away on bramble roots and sing
about various things they like."
"What nice toads!" murmured Kirk.
"_Sh-sh!_" whispered Ken; "we're waking Phil. Good night--good morning,
I mean. Warm enough now?"
"Yes. Oh, Ken, _aren't_ we having fun?"
"Aren't we, though!" breathed his brother, pulling the end of the
Burberry over Kirk's shoulders.
* * * * *
The sun is a good thing. It clears away not only the dark shadows in the
corners of empty rooms, but also the gloom that settles in anxious
people's minds at midnight. The rising of the sun made, to be sure,
small difference to Kirk, whose mind harbored very little gloom, and was
lit principally by the spirits of those around him. Consequently, when
his brother and sister began reveling in the clear, cold dawn, Kirk
executed a joyous little _pas seul_ in the middle of the living-room
floor and set off on a tour of exploration. He returned from it with his
fingers very dusty, and a loop of cobwebs over his hair.
"It's all corners," he said, as Felicia caught him to brush him off,
"_and_ steps. Two steps down and one up, and just when you aren't
'specting it."
"You'd better go easy," Ken counseled, "until you've had a personally
conducted tour. You'll break your neck."
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