The Camerons of Highboro Part 12

Then he began to load himself with ferns. Elliott wouldn't have supposed any one could carry as many as Bruce shouldered; he had great bunches in his hands, too.

"You look like a walking fernery," she said.

"Birnam Wood," he quoted and for a minute she couldn't think what he meant. "Better let me take some of those on the ground," he said.

"No, indeed! I am going to do my share."

Quietly he possessed himself of two of her bunches. "That's your share. It will be heavy enough before we get home."

It was heavy, though not for worlds would Elliott have mentioned the fact. She helped Bruce put the ferns in water, and she went out at night and sprinkled them to keep them fresh; but she had an excuse ready when Laura asked if she would like to go over to the little white-spired church on the hill and help arrange them.

Nothing would have induced her to attend the services, either, though afterward she wished that she had. There seemed to have been something so high and fine and--yes--so cheerful about them, so martial and exalted, that she wished she had seen for herself what they were like.

In Elliott's mind gloom had always been inseparably linked with a funeral, gloom and black clothes. Whereas Laura and her mother and Gertrude and Priscilla wore white. A good many things at the Cameron farm were very odd.

It was after every one had gone to bed and the lights were out that Elliott lay awake in her little slant-ceilinged room and worried and worried about Father, three thousand miles away. He wasn't an aviator, it was true, but in France wasn't the land almost as unsafe as the air? She had imagined so many things that might perfectly easily happen to him that she was on the point of having a little weep all by herself when Aunt Jessica came in. Did she know that Elliott was homesick? Aunt Jessica sat down on the bed, as she had sat that first night, and talked about comforting, commonplace things--about the new kittens, and how soon the corn might be ripe, and what she used to do when she was a girl in Washington. Elliott got hold of her hand and wound her own fingers in and out among Aunt Jessica's fingers, but in the end she spoke out the thing that was uppermost in her mind.

"Mother Jess," she said, using unconsciously the Cameron term; "Mother Jess, I don't like death."

She said it in a small, wabbly voice, because she felt very strongly and she wasn't used to talking about such things. But she had to say it. Though if the room hadn't been dark, I doubt if she could have got it out at all.

"No, dear," said Aunt Jessica, quietly. "Most of us don't like death.

I wonder if your feeling isn't due to the fact that you think of it as an end?"

"What is it," asked Elliott, "but an end?" She was so astonished that her words sounded almost brusque.

"I like to think of it as a coming alive," said Aunt Jessica, "a coming alive more vigorously than ever. The world is beginning to think of it so, too."

Elliott lay still after Aunt Jessica had gone out of the room and tried to think about what she had said. It was quite the oddest thing that anybody had said yet. But all she really succeeded in thinking about was the quiet certainty in Aunt Jessica's voice, the comforting clasp of Aunt Jessica's arms, and the kiss still warm on her lips.

CHAPTER VII

PICNICKING

"I feel like a picnic," said Mother Jess, "a genuine all-day-in-the-woods picnic."

It was rather queer for a grown-up to say such a thing right out like a girl, Elliott thought, but she liked it. And Aunt Jessica was sitting back on her heels, just like a girl too, looking up from the border where she was working. Elliott had caught sight of her blue chambray skirt under a haze of blue larkspurs and had come over to see what she was doing. It proved to be weeding with a clawlike thing that, wielded by Aunt Jessica's right hand, grubbed out weeds as fast as she could toss them into a basket with her left. Elliott was surprised. Weeding a flower-bed when, as she happened to know, the garden beets weren't finished did not square with her notions of what was what on the Cameron farm. She was so surprised that she answered absently, "That sounds fine. I think I feel so, too," and kept on wondering about Aunt Jessica.

"We usually have a picnic at this time of year when the haying is done," said that lady, and fell again to her weeding. "It is astonishing how fast a weed can grow. Look at that!" and she held up a spreading mat of green chickweed. "I have had to neglect the borders shamefully this summer."

Elliott squatted down beside her and twined her fingers in a tuft of gra.s.s. "May I help?" She gave a little tug to the gra.s.s.

"Delighted to have you. Look out! That's a Johnny-jump-up."

"Is it? Goodness! I thought it was a weed!"

"Here is one in blossom. Spare Johnny. He is a faithful friend till the winter snows."

"Johnny-jump-up." Elliott's laughter gurgled over the name. "But he does rather jump up, doesn't he? Funny little pansy thing! Funny name, too."

"Not so odd as a few others I know. Kiss-me-in-the-b.u.t.tery, for instance."

"Not really!"

"Honest Injun, as Priscilla says."

"These borders are sweet." The girl let her gaze wander up and down the curving lines of color splashed across the gentle slope of the hill. "But flowers don't stand much chance in a war year, do they? I know people at home who have plowed theirs up and planted potatoes."

"A mistake," said Aunt Jessica, shaking the dirt vigorously from a fistful of sorrel. "A mistake, unless it is a question of life and death. We have too much land in this country to plow up our flowers, yet a while. And a war year is just the time when we need them most.

No, I never feel I am wasting my time when I work among flowers."

"But they're not _necessary_, are they?" questioned Elliott. "Of course, they're beautiful; but I thought luxuries had to go, just now."

"Flowers a luxury? Oh, my dear little girl, put that notion out of your head quickly! American-beauty roses may be a luxury, and white lilacs in the dead of winter, but garden flowers, never! Wait till you see the daffodils dancing under those apple trees next spring!" And she nodded up the gra.s.sy slope at the apple trees as though she and they shared a delightful secret that Elliott did not yet know.

Privately the girl held a different opinion about next spring, but she wondered why Aunt Jessica should talk of daffodils. They seemed rather lugged into a conversation in July.

Mother Jess reached with her clawlike weeder far into the border. Her voice came back over her shoulder in little gusts of words as she worked. "Did you ever hear that saying of the Prophet?--'He that hath two loaves let him sell one and buy a flower of the narcissus; for bread is food for the body, but narcissus is food for the soul.'

That's the way I feel about flowers. They are the least expensive way of getting beauty and we can't live without beauty, now less than ever, since they have destroyed so much of it in France. There! now I must stop for to-day. Don't you want to take this culling-basket and pick it full of the prettiest things you can find for Mrs. Gordon?

Perhaps you would like to take it over to her, too. It isn't a very long walk."

"But I've never met her."

"That won't matter. Just tell her who you are and that you belong to us. Mrs. Gordon loves flowers, though she hasn't much time to tend them."

"I shouldn't think any one could have less time than you."

Aunt Jessica laughed. "Oh, I make time!"

Elliott picked up the flat green basket, lifted the shears she found lying in it, and went hesitatingly up and down the borders. "What shall I pick?"

"Anything. Suit yourself. Make the basket as pretty as you can. If you pick here and there, the borders won't show where you cut from them."

Mother Jess gathered up gloves and tools, and went away, tugging her basket of weeds. Elliott, left behind, surveyed the borders critically. To cut without letting it appear that she had cut was evidently what Aunt Jessica wanted. She reached in and snipped off a spire of larkspur from the very back of the border, then stood back to see what had happened. No, if one hadn't known the stalk had been there, one wouldn't now know it was gone. The thing could be done, then. Cautiously she selected a head of white phlox. The result of that operation also was satisfactory.

Up and down the flowery path she went, snipping busily. On the stalks of larkspur and phlox she laid a ma.s.s of pink snapdragons and white candytuft, tucking in here and there sprays of just-opening baby's-breath to give a misty look to the basket. A bunch of English daisies came next; they blossomed so fast one didn't have to pick and choose among them; one could just cut and cut. And oughtn't there to be pansies? "Pansies--that's for thoughts." Those wonderful purple ones with a sprinkling of the yellow--no, yellow would spoil the color scheme of the basket. These white beauties were just the thing. How lovely it all looked, blue and white and pink and purple!

But there wasn't much fragrance. Eye and nose searched hopefully.

Heliotrope!--just a spray or two. There, now it was perfect. Anybody would be glad to see a basket like that coming. Only, she did wish some one else were to carry it, or else that she knew the people. It might not be so bad if she knew the people. Why shouldn't Laura or Trudy take it? Elliott walked very slowly up to the house, debating the question. A week ago she wouldn't have debated; she would have said, "Oh, I can't possibly." Or so she thought.

"How beautiful!" said Aunt Jessica's voice from the kitchen window.

"You have made an exquisite thing, dear."

Elliott rested the basket on the window ledge and surveyed it proudly.

"Isn't it lovely? And I don't think cutting this has hurt the borders a bit."