Chapter X: Happie's Temptation

WHEN it was all over, and "the rest" had been met by easy and reassuring stages, Bob said that he believed Gretta _was_ worth the trouble. Happie was satisfied with this concession; she expected no greater enthusiasm from Bob on the subject of a mere girl.

When Don Dolor was led out, Happie saw the force of his christening. Polly said, without intent to be funny, that "he was more like a clothes horse"; the framework of his anatomy was nearly as fully in evidence.

"Oh, the poor thing!" cried Happie, instantly loving him because of his unloveliness.

"My goodness, it's time he was sent into the country for his health!" cried Gretta, shocked into forgetfulness of her shyness. "But he isn't old, and he doesn't look sick; he's been starved and overworked. He'll come out all right."

This dictum was a great comfort, for Gretta was supposed to know more about horses than many of the Crestville men; she loved them, and had learned about them through that love.

"I don't think he ought to walk about," said Polly anxiously. "He looks as if he might go all to little bits. Can't you just rest him, Bob?"

"We're going to let you ride him up and down in your doll carriage, Polly," said Ralph.

"It isn't big enough," said serious Polly, and Gretta laughed as heartily as the others.

Gentle Mrs. Scollard's greeting left the girl timid and awkward, while Miss Keren-happuch she answered without hesitation, and with a laugh in her eyes, to Happie's surprise, who had looked for the reverse effects.

Then Don Dolor was led back to his sore-needed rest, and as Gretta said she must not stay this first time, Margery and Happie walked down the road with her.

All down the road Margery laughed at Gretta's funny sayings, while Happie looked as proud as a cat with a kitten.

"Come soon again, come often after tea," said Margery, as they paused at the Neumann gate for the prolonged parting of girlhood.

"I shall," said Gretta with a prompt decisiveness that delighted Happie. "After I get my work done, my cousins haven't any right to keep me home, and I'm coming if you'll leave--let me."

"We'd be only too glad," said Margery heartily. "We haven't any girls up here to run in; all our friends are in New York, so come up to keep us from getting lonely, Gretta."

Happie only squeezed Gretta's hand. She was delighted that Margery and her "treasure trove," as the boys called her, got on so well together, and bright visions of Gretta's future danced before the warm brown eyes which revealed to the world the love in Happie's generous heart.

* * * * *

A week later Miss Bradbury came down in the morning with the ravages of sleeplessness plainly visible on her face.

"I've heard noises all night," she said in reply to inquiries. "I don't know what they were, but I dislike them. Boys, I wish you would drive down to the store and buy that watchman's rattle we saw there, and stop at Peter Kuntz' and tell him I'll buy his dog."

"There wouldn't be much use in rattling, dear Miss Keren," laughed Mrs. Scollard. "Nobody could hear you."

"And don't you know you asked us to put those bean poles in the garden, and set the pea brush?" added Bob. "They really need doing, and we can't do that and go to the village too."

"Then Happie must get Gretta to drive down with her," said Miss Bradbury decidedly. "I haven't been free from nerves all my life to let them get the upper hand of me now without an effort to check them. I must have the rattle and the dog. Don Dolor is able to make the trip now."

He was. If any one doubted the effect of plenty of food and care, Don Dolor Bonaparte, could he have met the sceptic, would have converted him by the most eloquent of preaching--personal example. In that one week he had become another horse. He had put on flesh, he had begun to get glossy, he held up his head as hope awoke in his equine breast, and he showed unmistakable symptoms of returning to the beauty that had once been his. Bob was devoted to him; he had hard work to tear himself from him long enough to perform his tasks on the farm, which were many and irksome, and took a great deal of time.

When they had leisure, Bob and Ralph took their books into the orchard where they allowed the don to graze while they read, prostrate in the long grass. Poor Don Dolor appreciated the kindness to which he was not accustomed. Sometimes when Bob was deep in his plot, the don would come up and nose him caressingly as one who would say: "You can't imagine how different all this is, nor how I thank you!"

So he was entirely able to go to the village in pursuit of his mistress' rattle and dog, and Happie was only too glad of the chance to borrow Gretta and take the drive. She had found the drive up from the station almost too much for her on that April night when she had first taken it, but how pleasant it was now to go slowly along the shaded road, hearing the quail whistling in the fields, and the catbird warbling his June ecstasy!

"Somehow I feel as if I had never seen the country till this year," said Happie looking about her with ineffable content as she and Gretta wound carefully down the steep hill. "It's queer, because I used to go away every summer till the last two, but I feel as if something had awakened in me this year; it all seems different and lovelier."

"That's because you had a hard time before you came. It makes people see and feel to have a hard time--unless it's a hard enough time to dull them," said Gretta. "That's one reason, and the other is that you have a home here this year. I never was away from here, but I'm pretty sure no other place ever looks the way home does. You wouldn't see this road as you do if you didn't feel your home was at one end of it."

Happie turned in her seat to look at Gretta. She considered her clever, but she was perpetually surprised at the insight this girl betrayed, now that she dared reveal herself.

"I see that's true when you say it, Gretta," she cried. "But I don't believe I should have found it out for myself. How do you know things like that?"

"I've been alone 'most all the time," said Gretta. "That makes a body think; I always thought more than I talked. Then not having any real home of my own makes a difference. I always felt I'd love my own home, because I love Crestville so, even if I can't love Eunice's house much. I guess it's because I've had hard times myself that I know what hard times teaches people."

"Teach, dear, when there are more than one thing of which you are speaking," said Happie, with a pat of apology for the correction.

But Gretta did not mind being corrected. "Teach, then," she said. "But it seems queer to take off an s on one word, when you put it on the other. I'll never learn."

"You learn wonderfully; it doesn't matter much anyway," said Happie with a new perception of essentials of which she would not have been capable a year before. "But it does matter that you have hard times! Cheer up, pretty Gretta! I'm certain they won't last much longer."

"They're half over already since you came," said Gretta with her adoring look.

"You love this place," Happie resumed, acknowledging this remark with a squeeze, "and you'd like to live here all your days--you'd be perfectly happy if you owned a house like the Ark, for instance. Yet here am I wondering if I can stand living in it, for unless mother gets decidedly better, Aunt Keren says we may stay on in the Ark all winter, and of course we should have to. Isn't life queer and mixy? By the way, what did your Cousin Eunice mean that day when she made me so hopping, by saying you ought to own that house?"

"Nothing; just nonsense; Eunice is always saying things," said Gretta hastily. Which was so true that Happie accepted the answer without further thought.

They drew up at the little store, which was at once a miniature department store and the post-office. A rail ran along the upper side of the store for the convenience of customers whose horses would not stand without tying; here the girls fastened the don, who stood out quite beautiful in contrast to a dingy white horse on his right, a horse all speckled with black, as if some one had been doing spatterwork on him with an unsteady hand and too coarse a comb. On the don's left, to enhance his line lines, drooped Joel Lange's _café au lait_ mule, and Happie suddenly felt proud of her well-built steed.

Happie took her mail and followed Gretta to the other side of the store. There were two letters for her mother, one for Margery and three for herself, besides Miss Bradbury's daily budget of letters and papers, and Ralph's equally reliable letter which came every day from his mother and Snigs.

It proved how far Happie had traveled on the road to contentment and interest in her new home that she no longer tore open her New York missives with trembling fingers and brimming eyes as she had done during her first six weeks of exile from her friends.

Gretta was buying blue and white checked gingham for aprons, thread, outing flannel of a despondent shade of gray to match Eunice's sample, stove blacking and a bread pan, bartering for a small portion of the cost of these, twenty-seven eggs which her cousins had confided to her care for this end.

Happie bought only darning cotton, but she invested in fig paste and sour balls, the most attractive candy that she found in the boxes ranged side by side in the show-case. They had red-lettered labels on their ends of such misleading character that it was evident that they were boxes remaining from bygone days, whose original contents had long been purchased by youthful Crestvillians.

"I can't get the brown calico Reba wanted; it's all," said Gretta, and then blushed at her relapse into the vernacular and added hastily: "I'm ready if you are."

"I'm ready," said Happie, wrenching herself from the contemplation of the portraits on a poster of some incredibly corpulent hens and pigs, professing to have been nourished by a powder which the poster advertised.

"Wait here and I'll bring the horse to the steps," said Gretta, going with indifference between Don Dolor, the _café au lait_ mule and the spatterwork horse.

Happie jumped into the buggy, smiling with pleasure. There was something cozy about a trip to the village store, doing everything for oneself, and watching life at close range. She had completely forgotten the original errand on which she had come.

Don Dolor trotted along briskly, head up and his black flanks shining in a way that reflected credit on Bob's amateur grooming, for they shone enough to reflect anything else as well as credit.

"I'll read my letters if you don't mind, Gretta," said Happie. She had fallen into the habit of reading the girls' letters to this lonely girl at her side. Happie's friends belonged to the world into which her father and mother were born, a world of wealth and pleasure, and their letters gave Gretta insight into lives very different from her own, into which they brought new personal interests. She had grown to know Happie's friends through this introduction. Happie now read pages of merry-making at the seashore, whither Edith had gone early; of still gayer doings in New York, where Elsie Barker lingered, going to roof gardens and summer operas to her lively heart's content, and of the most delightful times of all which Eleanor Vernon was having traveling up the Hudson to Niagara, the St. Lawrence, Montreal and Quebec.

Happie drew a long breath as she laid down this last letter. "That's the trip I most want to take on this side the ocean," she said soberly.

Gretta looked at her anxiously. She was more than desirous that Happie should not miss her old friends, nor long for the pleasures of town, and her chief earthly hope just now was that Happie might become too attached to Crestville to be willing to go back.

"I don't see how you stand it," she said, with the deep design of hearing what Happie would reply. "Don't you wish that one of the fairies you were reading me about would fly down and offer you the chance to get away from here, and have the kind of good times your friends are having?"

"It might frighten Don Dolor; I think from his appearance when he came that he isn't used to good fairies," laughed Happie. Then the smile faded and she looked gravely up the road ahead of her. It ascended steeply, and as they followed it the mountains began to come in sight over the hill crest. All along the way the huckleberries were in bloom, and the sheep laurel touched grayness of rocks, and brownness of ill-nourished brambles into brightness with its purpling pink.

Up the rough roads which opened at intervals through the woods on either side of the main road, one saw masses of pink and white beauty, announcing the perfection of the mountain laurel growing and blossoming aside from the thoroughfares. And the rhododendron buds of the previous autumn were swelling and showing pink along their cone-like edges, under the light brown of their sticky outer covering. Soon the roadside would be glorified by their splendor. Cleared fields made patches of vivid green against the serried trunks of the trees in the woods, and the breeze blew down, pure and vivifying from the mountains.

Happie drew another long breath. She would like to join her friends, but this was beautiful. It seemed, even to her inexperience, a life of greater reality; of peace that was beyond estimate, and she was not sure that she would give it up if she could.

"I don't know, Gretta, whether I wish for that fairy or not," she said seriously. "I do begin to love my life here. Of course those letters set my feet twitching and my heart throbbing to go after those nice girls and their nice times, but I'm not sure. And when I think of you, and that you'd miss me and be more lonely for having had me, then I am sure! I am glad to stay here, Gretta," she added, remembering that this was what Gretta was longing to hear her say.

Gretta smiled, and then sighed. "You try to think so, but I wouldn't like to give you the chance to get away; I'm afraid Crestville couldn't hold you."

Gretta jumped down at the Neumann gate and Happie drove home alone, a task that would have been adventuresome, considering that she had never driven, had not Don Dolor a strong desire to get back to his stable and an accurate knowledge of where to find it.

"Hallo there, Icaria!" cried Bob coming around the corner to help his sister. "How did you get on driving the borrowed chariot?"

"I couldn't be as classical as you are, not if I were a Wingless Victory," said Happie, stubbing her toe as she jumped from the buggy, and landing on one knee on the turf.

"You're wingless all right," laughed Bob. "That comes of trying to wither your brother when he makes graceful allusions to Icarus--gets his genders right, too!"

"Pooh! You got Ralph to help you with that careless allusion; got out your Bulfinch's Age of Fable to find out who it was that drove his father's chariot, most likely, to be ready to impress me," said Happie rubbing her bruised knee. "We got on all right; I believe the don's going to turn out a fine horse."

"He's one already," said Bob. "Come to ride to the barn, Penny?" he asked as Penny appeared on the top step looking wistful. "And Laura, the dignified? Ralph is going to take the horse around. Any one else coming forth? You can ride in layers such a short distance."

"I don't mind if I come fourth," said Polly, misinterpreting Bob's meaning. "That'll be two for the seat, and another two in their laps."

"Twice two are four, problematical Polly," laughed Bob. "You are _forth_ already in my sense, but you may be _fourth_ in yours, if you want to be. Go ahead, Ralph. I'll be there on foot in a week or so to unharness."

Happie ran into the house. She found her mother sewing, and Margery, looking sweet and young ladyfied, bending over her Mexican work.

"Six letters, motherums; two yours, one Margery's, three mine," Happie said, throwing herself down and fanning herself with her hat.

Mrs. Scollard read her first letter, which proved to be but a note, then opened the second one, read it, glanced at her two daughters with heightened color, and read it over. The elder girl was reading her letter from a girl friend, and trying not to show that it moved her, while the other munched a square of fig paste, looking absently out of the window, blissfully unconscious of what was in her mother's mind.

"This letter is from Auntie Cam, girls," Mrs. Scollard said at last.

"Yes, I thought so," said Happie. "She's a nice Auntie Cam, nicer than most own aunts; what does she say? I was wondering, motherums, if Aunt Keren would mind if we got a boulder and made a rockery out there on the side of the lawn? Only it isn't a lawn; it's just grass."

"Now, Happie, why don't you let mother tell us about Auntie Cam?" protested Margery. "As if you wanted to make a rockery this moment, right on top of your own question!"

"Somebody--two bodies, in a way--has an invitation from Auntie Cam that I rather dread to deliver," said their mother slowly.

Happie straightened her listless young figure and Margery dropped her letter, turning to her mother with parted lips, that asked the question they did not utter.

"Auntie Cam says, my dear lassies, that she would like to have Happie"--Margery turned away to hide the tears that sprang into her eyes in spite of herself, and Happie caught her breath--"have Happie come to her in New York, where she has returned on business for a few days, and go back with her to spend the rest of the summer with her and Edith at Bar Harbor, coming home by way of the White Mountains in September."

"Oh, mother, mother!" cried Happie springing up and whirling about in a delirium of joy.

"And she says, furthermore, that Elsie Barker will be there next month," continued Mrs. Scollard.

"I know, I know; I got a letter from her to-day! Did you ever hear of such a magnificent, glorious, blissful thing in all your life?" Happie demanded of no one in particular.

"Auntie Cam says that she asks Happie because she is Edith and Elsie's friend, and because she regards her as especially her girl, but that if for any reason Happie would not care to go, or could not go, she will take Margery instead, and not quarrel with her good fortune, but consider herself very fortunate--so she says--to be allowed to borrow either of my girls," said Mrs. Scollard with a smile of pleasure in this appreciation of her girls. "Now the invitation is Happie's first, I gather from your showing no sort of reluctance when you heard of it, Hapsie dear, that you are willing to accept Auntie Cam's invitation. There isn't much need of asking if you want to go! I didn't realize that you would hail the chance to get away with such boundless rapture; I really thought you were getting contented in Crestville. You have been a good child to hide your feelings so bravely, Hapsie-girl, and you deserve your good fortune. What's the matter?"

Happie's ecstasy was fading out, and in its place a troubled look was creeping into her eyes as she turned them upon Margery. Margery had risen, and was looking so hard out of the window that there was no possibility of thinking she was interested merely in the familiar apple trees and the long grass, fast ripening into Don Dolor's hay. It did not need the tear that splashed on the window sill to tell Happie that her sister was struggling to hide a disappointment too bitter to be borne without a struggle.

Happie spoke slowly, with an effort. "Why, I have been contented here lately, motherums," she said. "Of course I was glad at first when I thought of going to Bar Harbor, and with Auntie Cam. It would be a perfectly scrumptious time! But when I remember how long it would be--I'd have to be away from home so long--maybe I'd better--I don't have to decide this minute, do I, mother?" She stopped her hesitating suggestions, feeling that her voice was getting unreliable. It seemed to her that never in all her life had she been so tempted.

Her mother saw her glance at Margery, and divined the truth.

"My dear, unselfish girl!" she thought. But all she said was: "Of course you do not have to decide at once, Hapsie. You ought to have at least one night in which to decide between the rival attractions of two such resorts as Bar Harbor and Crestville!"

Happie smiled dismally. "I'll go up-stairs to think; I can think better there. I'm afraid when I look out of our window at my mountains I'll decide to stay here," she said, and ran away with her brown paper bag of plebeian candies on which a tear of sacrifice fell as she ran.