Strawberry Acres Part 16

Max reluctantly submitted, turned up his trousers widely, shouldered an umbrella, and the two set out. Sally looked after them, her hopes following them, for she had received a meaning look from Jarvis which told her that his schemes were already on foot. She had seen him in conference with his mother that afternoon, and was sure the two were agreed upon whatever suggestion of purchase Jarvis might be about to make. Yet Sally held her breath. What if--what if--Max should, after all, jump at the offer?

CHAPTER IX

MAX COMPROMISES

"I'll tell you what I'll do," said Maxwell Lane. "I'll compromise. If Sally and the rest of you will let up on your nonsensical plan of staying in this barracks all winter, I'll agree to stick it out till--November."

He encountered Sally's gaze. They were all upon the great, high-columned porch which gave to the front of the house its impressive air of being an old family mansion. It was a fortnight after the tent party--a fine August evening. Josephine and Jarvis Burnside had just driven out, and Donald Ferry, seeing them come, had strolled over. So not only Sally, but six other people, were hanging on Max's decision.

He had meant to say "till October." But as he met his sister's eyes it occurred to him that a compromise, which offered one month instead of six, might perhaps be considered a trifle too one-sided to be accepted as a compromise at all. So he finished the sentence, after a perceptible pause, with "till November." That, surely, was being generous, he considered. Just why all decisions should be made by him, as supreme arbiter, can hardly be explained, except that he had a.s.sumed that position three years before, when the other young Lanes had been negligible factors in all matters of business, and he, by the divine right of his twenty-one years, had, upon the death of his father, taken the management of the family affairs into his own hands.

Sally drew a long breath of relief. Anyhow, she now had more than two months' reprieve. By the end of that period something might happen to make Max willing to extend it. The tent had been put up again, and all but Max had returned to sleeping in it. He had announced that he cared to take no more chances with thunderstorms and cyclones, so Sally had arranged comfortable quarters for him in the house, in one of the smaller downstairs rooms, looking out upon the grove. There was a fireplace in this room, and Bob had placed a well-stocked wood-box beside it, so that his brother might have no excuse for feeling himself neglected.

"Your compromise gives you so much the bigger half of the bargain," said Josephine, her brilliant dark eyes fixed on Max, "that I think you ought to give Sally something to boot. Isn't that the word?"

"What does she want? The house furnished for the two months?"

"Much simpler than that. Sally and I want to have our friends out for a frolic."

"In an empty house?"

"Yes. What jollier place for a lot of fun? Only it wouldn't seem empty by the time we had put up a lot of flags and bunting and goldenrod and balsam branches. That long drawing-room of yours, with crash on the floor--and a harp and violins behind a screen--and Chinese lanterns all over the rooms and on the porch and down the driveway--"

Josephine's imagination worked fast. She had gone into a dozen specifications before Max could get a chance to interpose.

"Very fine, very fine! And a supper-table, loaded with salads and ices. Glorious idea! How much do you think all this would cost? Of course that's of no consequence, but just out of curiosity I should like to know."

"Goodness, we've boxes of lanterns, rolls of bunting and flags, and yards of crash left from parties way back to my first birthday ones," Josephine a.s.sured him. "As for the supper--" She paused to think it out, for party suppers are unquestionably expensive details.

"Wait till October and make it a husking-bee," suggested Donald Ferry.

He had become in these few weeks as much a member of this circle of friends as if he had always belonged to it. "Then you'll need only coffee and doughnuts and apples and that sort of thing. There'll be corn enough in my patch to trim your rooms, and plenty for the husking."

"Jolly!" exploded Bob.

"Fine!" cried Alec.

Sally's eyes were radiant. Even Uncle Timothy smiled. Max himself, being, after all, in spite of his grave air, only twenty-four, and capable of enjoying gay times like the rest of them, felt his indifference melt away.

"That would give us a chance to do something in return for all the invitations we've had ever since we've been in the apartment," urged Sally. "Wouldn't you like to ask your friends in the bank, Max?"

"If we had the thing, I shouldn't mind asking two of the fellows--Harper and Ward," Max admitted. "Oh, I suppose we'll have it. When Jo and Sally get their minds on anything, it has to go through. If you can figure it out so it doesn't mean a big bill, it may do very well as a wind-up to this out-door business."

This was being condescending, for Max; and Jarvis smiled to himself as he reflected that there's nothing like having your own way in big matters to make you decently amiable as regards small ones.

From this evening the arrangements for the October husking-bee occupied a more or less prominent part in the plans of the Lanes and their friends.

Meanwhile everybody, including Max himself--although he could seldom be made to admit it--thoroughly enjoyed the intervening weeks.

"Did you ever see finer corn than this?" asked Ferry, as he and Bob set up a great shock of rustling stalks at one end of the "drawing-room." "To be sure, I didn't plant it--I owe the owner of the place for that--but I hoed it, and I cut it, and I'm reaping the credit."

"It's magnificent, Mr. Ferry," Sally agreed readily, from the floor where she sat, fitting candles into Chinese lanterns of every form and hue, from small round ones to gorgeous great affairs of fantastic shape and design. It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and the entire force was busy. On the front porch Max and Josephine were hanging lanterns, while Alec was stringing wires among the trees and down the driveway. It was extraordinary how many lanterns the Burnsides seemed to have stored away, and in what fresh condition they were; the bunting and the flags, also.

Although some of this material showed unmistakable signs of use, bales more of it had had to be hastily rumpled by Josephine, to get it into the proper condition for lending.

"I'll tell you where I've put in my fine touches," chuckled Bob. "Those twenty jack-o'-lanterns of mine have teeth, every one of 'em. Maybe you don't think that was some work."

"Not only was it work, but it shows a trained sense of artistic effect,"

Ferry a.s.sured him. "That monster you've put on the porch, with four faces pointing to the four points of the compa.s.s, has Ja.n.u.s, the G.o.d of beginnings, beaten to a finish."

"Sally," Josephine called in at one of the front windows, "I've forgotten to tell you who are in town! Neil and Dorothy Chase. They just came last night. Don't you want to ask them out to-night?"

Alec, down the driveway, heard, and was first to shout his approbation of this idea: "_Sure_! Get 'em here and ask 'em if they think there's room enough to turn round in!"

Max, from the top of the step-ladder, added his approval: "Have them, whatever you do, Sally. Of all the chumps!"

Bob whistled. "Neil was afraid he'd burst our rooms in town," he recalled. "He can get as chesty as he likes out here. You'll have him, won't you, Sally?"

Sally looked up at their neighbour, who was laughing quietly at the comments. "You must think we have odd motives for our invitations."

"I think the house is going to give the impression to-night of being a hospitable mansion," he returned. "It will be just the time to invite anybody who likes s.p.a.ce and effect."

There could be no doubt of this. When all was done, even before the lanterns and the fires were lighted, the drawing-room, the hall, and the dining-room all had taken on such a festal air that it could occur to n.o.body to miss the furniture which ordinarily occupies houses of this character. Across the hall two rooms had been arranged for dressing-rooms, and even these were highly attractive.

After the lanterns were lighted, outside was fairyland! Inside, with the fireplaces burning huge logs and flashing intermittently over the scene, the jack-o'-lanterns grinning cheerfully from every corner, the flags and bunting contributing colour, and the ma.s.ses of evergreen and clumps of corn-shocks adding nooks and corners for shadows to dance in, there certainly could have been no quainter or prettier background for a party.

"What I want to know is, whether the lady of the manor feels her part.

She certainly looks it!"

It was Jarvis's greeting as he came up the steps into the big porch, after a hasty trip home to dress. Just as he approached the house a figure in white had come out of the doorway, and he congratulated himself on having caught Sally alone for the first time in several days.

Sally met him with an eager welcome: "Oh, I'm so glad you got back before the rest came! I wanted you here to help make things go from the beginning. Max is having fits with his tie, and Alec is in distress because his pumps don't look as smart as he thinks they ought. Even Bob is more than usually fussy about the parting of his hair!"

"Too bad, but such small anxieties always go along with dress occasions.

You don't answer my question. Do you feel like the mistress of an ancestral home?"

"Do I? I should say I didn't. I feel like a small girl giving her first party. I hadn't a thing to wear but this old white frock--it's lucky for me our lights are the sort they are. Electrics would show me up for what I am."

"Do you know what you are?"

"Hardly--to-night. What am I, do you think?"

"A healthy, happy, sensible girl, who doesn't care if she isn't wearing a fussy frock from the most expensive place in town. And if you were, you couldn't look nicer."

"Thank you. That's a straight masculine compliment, and I appreciate it.

How good it seems to see you without those blue gla.s.ses! Are you going to leave them off to-night?"