In Orchard Glen Part 9

"That's the seventeenth time you've been reminded of that," said Jimmie chidingly.

"I think John'll have to hitch up the team and take that jar over in the hay wagon," said Uncle Neil, "Christine doesn't seem to be able to manage it."

"She's shy about going to see Gavin," said John, looking at her with twinkling eyes over his paper. For John alone knew her guilty secret.

She hastily promised to take the jar the very next day, and managed to get the conversation back to the Harebell, which in time showed its shy self and was set down in the essay.

It was nearly a week before Christina managed to get away on her difficult errand. She did not want to go, certainly, but she was afraid of attracting more comment from John and Uncle Neil by staying.

It was a golden September day when she went up over the hills with a basket of apples from their best tree, and the special jar of her mother's black currant jelly. The air was motionless, the sky a perfect soft unclouded blue, the hills were amber, the hollows amethyst. The branches of the orchard trees behind the village houses sagged, heavy with their harvest, and gay as orchards gotten up for a garden party, all hung with fairy lantern globes of yellow and red.

The gardens were filled with ripened corn and great golden pumpkins.

The wild asters along the fences glowed softly purple.

Christina stepped over the warm yellow stubble singing, and climbed the hill to the old berry patch, where the briars grew more riotously every year. Gavin's cows were straying through the green and yellow tangle on his side of the fence and a bell rang musically through the still aisles. The Wizard of Autumn had been up here on the hills with his paints and had touched the sumachs along the fences till they looked like trees of flame. And he had been working on a bit of woodbine that now draped the old rail fence as with a scarlet curtain. A blue jay flashed through the golden silence waking the echoes with his noisy laughter and the flickers high up in the dead stumps called jeeringly to each other.

Christina came out of the Slash into the yellow sunshine of Gavin's fields, and as she did so, she suddenly dropped down behind the raspberry bushes that fringed the fence, quite in a panic. For a loud musical voice arose from the field just beyond the brow of the hill, Gavin was ploughing the back meadow and singing, and the song made Christina's heart heat hotly:

"Will ye gang to the Hielan's, Leezie Lindsay?

Will ye gang to the Hielan's wi' me?"

Hidden by the hill, and the screening bushes, she slipped away and took a devious course down the valley. But there was a lump in her throat as she went.

She ran past a clump of cedars and came out into view of Craig-Ellachie. The Grant Girls had given their home this name because of its a.s.sociation with their clan's history, but Nature had encouraged them, for behind the house, set back against the dark pine woods, rose a hill crowned by a towering rock. The cosy old white-washed house was set in the centre of a saucer-like valley. It was the original log house in which their parents had lived and had been added to here and there till it was beautifully picturesque just as the home of the Grant Girls should be.

But visitors to Craig-Ellachie never saw anything else after their first glimpse of the garden.

Every one wondered how it was that the Grant Girls' garden should outbloom all others, and that n.o.body else ever had any hope of first prize at the Fall fairs. One said it was the sheltered location of the place, others the low elevation, still others that it was the southern slope that made the Craig-Ellachie garden unfold the earliest crocus in Spring and hold safely the latest aster in Autumn. But wise folk, like Christina's mother, always held that it was the tender care of the three gardeners and the sunlight of their presence that made their flowers the wonder of the countryside.

Christina drew a breath of delight as it came into view. Dahlias and asters, rows and rows of them, clumps of feathery cosmos, hedges of flaming gladioli, dazzling golden glow and a dozen others she did not recognise made a glorious array. And the blooms were not confined to the garden proper that was spread out on the south side of the house.

They overflowed into the vegetable garden at the back, and spread around the lawn at the front. They strayed away along the fences and completely hedged the orchard. They even encroached upon the barnyard; the manure heap was screened from view by a wall of sunflowers and golden glow and a rainbow avenue of late phlox led down to the pig-pens.

Christina entered by the barnyard and came up through the kitchen garden where rows of cauliflower and cabbage and tomatoes alternated with pansies and mignonette and scarlet salvia. Every bed of onions was fringed with sweet alyssum, and rows of beets were flanked with rosemary and lavender. She opened the little wire gate that led into the garden proper and walked up under a long arched canopy of climbing roses and sweet peas that seemed, like the Grant Girls, to take no heed of the pa.s.sing of time but bloomed on as though it were June. As she disappeared into its green shade her eye caught a movement in one of the brown fields behind the barn. The two younger sisters were there digging potatoes.

There had been a day when the Grant Girls did all the work of field and farmyard, and their hands were hard and their backs bent. But since Gavin had grown to man's estate their lives had been easier. Indeed they were never done telling tales of how Gavie had forbidden their going into the fields. They boasted of his high handed airs, for hadn't he even chased Janet out of the barnyard, with the pitchfork, mind you, when she was determined to help him in with the hay. Eh indeed he was a thrawn lad, and n.o.body could manage oor Gavie!

And now that they had fallen upon easier days and Gavin's strong arms had taken up the heavier work, they had resumed many of the older tasks that long ago most farm women had gladly handed over to factory or mill. No cheese factory or creamery received a drop of milk or cream from Craig-Ellachie; and the Grant Girls still spun their own wool from their own sheep, and knit it into good stout socks for themselves and Gavin, and cousin Hughie Reid, and his big family of boys.

So this afternoon, Auntie Elspie, the eldest of the three, was sitting at the open kitchen door in the sunshine spinning. The soft September breeze swayed her white ap.r.o.n and pink-dotted calico dress. Behind her the wide, low-ceiled old kitchen fairly glittered in its cleanliness.

The high dresser with its blue plates, and the old chairs and table were varnished till they shone like mirrors. And the kitchen stove, used only in winter, for the wood-shed was the summer kitchen, blazed as it never had on a winter night, for on it stood a great blue pitcher filled with flaming gladioli.

Around Auntie Elspie were arranged the household pets, all sleeping in the sunshine; Auntie Flora's cat and two kittens, Auntie Janet's spaniel, and Gavin's fox terrier and two collies. The four dogs set up a loud clamour at the sight of the visitor, and went gambolling down the walk to meet her. At the sound the two workers in the field paused to look, and stood gazing until Christina disappeared indoors.

Auntie Elspie dropped her thread and came hurrying down the steps, saying in mild reproach, "Hoots, toots, what a noise!" And then in glad welcome, "Eh, eh, and it's little Christina! Eh, now, and wasn't it jist grand o' ye to come away over here--well--well--well--well!"

Mrs. Lindsay was the Grant Girls' oldest and dearest friend, and a visit from any of her family was an occasion of great rejoicing.

"Eh, well, well!" Auntie Elspie was patting Christina on the back, and taking off her hat in exuberant hospitality, mingling her words of welcome with admonitions to the riotous dogs which were bounding about making a joyous din.

"Eh, well, now, and your poor mother, she would be well! Hut, tut, Wallace! Bruce! Yon's no way to act. And wee Mary'll be getting married--Princie! Did ye ever see the like o' that? They're jist that glad to see ye. Wallace! Down, sir, down! Jist wait till Gavie gits home, Bruce, then ye'll mind! And Sandy's away to the college too.

Well, well, you Lindsays were all great for the books--come away in, hinny, come away. Down with ye, down!"

They went into the house, the dogs still bounding joyously about, for they knew that a guest at Craig-Ellachie was a great and glad event and that they must express their joy in a fitting manner.

Auntie Elspie was tall and thin and stooped. Her thin fair hair, almost white, was combed up in the fashion that had obtained when she was a girl. She wore a voluminous old dress of some ancient pattern of "print," that had been quite fashionable some twenty years earlier, but she was also clothed in the gay garment of youth which the Grant Girls always wore.

She managed to eject the joyous, scrambling quartette from the kitchen and led the visitor through the dusk of the parlour where Auntie Flora's organ stood with Gavin's fiddle on top of it, on into the gloom of the spare room, heaping welcomes upon her all the way, and asking after everything on the Lindsay farm from Grandpa's rheumatism to Christina's black kitten.

When Christina's hat was laid upon the high white crest of the billowing feather bed, and her hair smoothed before the little mirror on the dresser, Auntie Elspie led her away beyond the parlour into a close, hushed room, where the mother had lain an invalid for many years, and which was kept sacred to her memory. Here the Grant Girls h.o.a.rded all their mother's treasures: the photographs in oval frames on the wall, the high old dresser and the big sea chest filled with keepsakes, tenderly a.s.sociated with her life; the Paisley shawl she wore to church, the sea sh.e.l.ls she had brought from the old country, even the old china tea set that had been her one wedding gift.

Christina was placed in an old rocker, while Auntie Elspie displayed all the treasures as a girl shows her jewels to a companion, and Christina knew she was being shown a great honour, for only special friends were ever taken into Mother's Room.

The last jewel to be exhibited was the mother's photograph in an old leather case, velvet lined.

"Folks say that after a person dies, the picture begins to fade,"

Auntie Elspie said, wiping the shining surface tenderly. "But mother's picture is as bright as the day it was taken."

Christina looked at the strong, kindly face, with the white cap and the little knitted shawl and felt her heart contract at the yearning in the older woman's voice. Elspie was still a girl, longing for the touch of her mother's hand, though that mother had been gone twenty-five years.

"Perhaps it's because you keep her memory so bright, that the picture never fades," said Christina gently, and Auntie Elspie kissed her for sheer grat.i.tude.

When they came out into the sunshine of the kitchen again the other two sisters were there to add their welcome. They had hurried in to see who their visitor was and were overwhelmed with joy to find it was Mary Lindsay's girl.

"I told you it was little Christina, Flora," cried Auntie Janet triumphantly; "Flora said it was one o' the McKenzie girls!" And Flora admitted herself beaten.

The two were in their farming costumes, old bits of past grandeur, a purple velvet skirt for Janet and a sacque of ancient brocaded silk on Flora, both accompanied by Gavin's cast off boots and wide straw hats.

But the wearers received Christina in her trim blue skirt and white blouse, of the latest Algonquin style, with a high bred unconsciousness of clothes.

"Oh, I'm that glad you've come," cried Janet, shaking her fifteen-year-old ringlets from her big hat, "you've given us an excuse for a rest. We were jist doin' a bit of _gardenin'_. Weren't we, Flora?" she asked.

Auntie Flora's eyes twinkled, "Oh, yes, yes, jist _gardenin'_!" she declared, and the three Aunties burst out laughing, and Auntie Janet spread out her earth soiled hands with a comical gesture.

"We've been diggin' the potaties!" she whispered, her eyes dancing.

"But if Gavie caught us at it, we'd catch it! So we jist keep tellin'

him we've been _gardenin'_ an' he never suspects, an' he can't see us from where he's ploughin'!"

"An' we'll be finished in another day if he doesn't find out!" cried Auntie Flora exultingly.

"Aye, but jist wait, you'll get yer pay for yer pranks when he does find out," admonished Auntie Elspie, like an indulgent mother threatening her mischievous children with a father's punishment.

"Gavie jist won't let us put foot into the fields!" she added proudly.

But the two younger ones laughed recklessly. They would be up sides with Gavie yet, for all his high-handed, bossy ways!

They washed their hands, changed their shoes and put away their big hats, and all three bustled about getting tea. Christina would have preferred to slip away before Gavin came in, but she well knew that no human being had ever come to Craig-Ellachie and left again without sitting down to eat, and knew it was no use to protest.

So she went out into the garden to help Flora gather a bouquet for the table, and her hostess broke off armfuls of every sort of flowers she admired, making a great sheaf to carry home to her mother. They put the glorious ma.s.s into a shining tin pail to await her departure. Then Christina ran about the kitchen and pantry, helping set the best blue dishes on the table, and they all laughed and joked and had such a time, as though all four had just turned nineteen last May.

"Did ye hear that Elspie has a fellow, Christina?" called Auntie Flora from the cellar whither she had gone to fetch the cream.

"No," cried Christina, overcome with laughter, "she didn't tell me."