The Camerons of Highboro Part 13

"I am sure not." Aunt Jessica's busy hands went back to her yellow mixing-bowl. "You know where the Gordons live, don't you?--in the big brick house at the cross-roads."

"Yes," said Elliott, and her feet carried her out of the yard, stopping only long enough to let her get her pink parasol from the hall, and down the hill toward the cross-roads. It was odd about Elliott's feet, when she hadn't quite made up her mind whether or not she would go. Her feet seemed to have no doubt of it.

The pink parasol threw a becoming light on her face, as she knew it would, and the odor of heliotrope rose pleasantly in her nostrils as she walked along. But the basket grew heavy, astonishingly heavy. She wouldn't have believed a culling-basket with a few flowers in it could weigh so much. The farther Elliott walked, the heavier it grew. And she hadn't gone a quarter of the way, either.

A horse's feet coming up rapidly behind her turned the girl's steps to the side of the road. The horse drew abreast and stopped, prancing.

"Want a lift?" asked the man in the wagon. He was a big grizzled farmer, a friend of her uncle's.

Elliott nodded, smiling. "Oh, thank you!"

"Purty flowers you've got there."

"Aren't they lovely! Aunt Jessica is sending them to Mrs. Gordon."

"That's right! That's right! Say, just look at them pansies, now!

Flowers, they don't do nothin' but grow for that aunt of yours. She don't have to much more 'n look at 'em."

Elliott laughed. "She weeds them, I happen to know. I helped her this afternoon."

"Did you, now! But there's a difference in folks. Take my wife: she plants 'em and plants 'em, but she can't keep none. They up and die on her, sure thing."

Elliott selected a purple pansy. "This looks to me as though it would like to get into your b.u.t.tonhole, Mr. Blair."

"Sho, now!" He flushed with pleasure, driving slowly as the girl fitted the pansy in place, a bit of heliotrope nestling beside it.

"Smells good, don't it? Mother always had heliotrope in her garden.

Takes me back to when I was a little shaver."

Elliott's deft fingers were busy with the English daisies.

"Now don't you go and spoil your basket."

"No, indeed! see what a lot there are left. Here is a little nosegay for your wife. And thank you so much for the lift."

He cranked the wheel and she jumped out, waving her hand as he drove on. Queer a man like that should love flowers!

It was only when she was walking up the graveled path to the door of the brick house that she remembered to compose her face into a proper gravity. She felt nervous and ill at ease. But she needn't go in, she reminded herself, just leave the flowers at the door. If only there were a maid, which there probably wasn't! One couldn't count for certain on getting right away from these places where the people themselves met one at the door.

"How do you do?" said a voice, advancing from the right. "What a lovely basket!"

Elliott jumped. She was ready to jump at anything and she had been looking straight ahead without a single glance aside from a non-committal brick front. Now she saw a hammock swung between two trees, a hammock still swaying from the impact of the girl who had just left it.

She was the biggest girl Elliott had ever seen, tall and fat and shapeless and very plain. She was all in white, which made her look bigger, and her skirt was at least three years old. There was a faint trickle of brown spots down the front of it, too, of which the girl seemed utterly unaware.

"You don't have to tell me where those flowers come from," she said.

"You are Laura Cameron's cousin, aren't you? Glad to know you."

"Yes," said Elliott, "I am Elliott Cameron. Aunt Jessica sent these to your mother."

The girl's fingers felt cool and firm as they touched Elliott's, the only pleasant impression she had yet gathered.

"They look just like Mrs. Cameron. Sit down while I call Mother. Oh, she's not doing anything special. Mother!"

Elliott, conducted through the house to a wide veranda, sank into a chair, conscious in every nerve of her own slender waistline. What must it feel like to be so big? A minute later she seemed to herself to be engulfed between two mountains of flesh. A woman--more unwieldy, more shapeless, more oppressive even than the girl--waddled across the veranda floor. What she said Elliott really didn't know; afterward phrases of pleasure came back to her vaguely. She distinctly remembered the creaking of the rocking-chair when the woman sat down and her own frightened feeling lest some vital part should give way under the strain.

After a time, to her consciousness, mild blue eyes emerged from the ma.s.s of human bulk that fronted her; gray hair crinkled away from a broad white forehead. Then she perceived that Mrs. Gordon was not a very tall woman, not so tall as was her daughter. If anything, that made it worse, thought Elliott. Why, if she fell down, no one could tell which side up she ought to go--except, of course, head side on top. The idea gave her a hysterical desire to giggle. The fact that it would be so dreadful to laugh in this house made the desire almost uncontrollable.

And then the big girl did laugh about something or other, laughed simply and naturally and really pleasantly. Elliott almost jumped again, she was so startled. To her, there was something repulsive in the sight of so much human flesh. At the same time it discouraged her.

In the presence of these two she felt insignificant, even while she pitied them. She wished to get away, but instinctive breeding held her in her chair, chatting. She hoped what she said wasn't too inane; she didn't know quite what she did say.

Just then suddenly Harriet Gordon asked a question: "Has your aunt said anything yet about a picnic this summer?"

"I heard her say this afternoon that she felt just like one," said Elliott.

Mother and daughter looked at each other triumphantly. "What did I tell you!" said one. "I thought it was about time," said the other.

"Jessica Cameron always feels like a picnic in midsummer," Mrs. Gordon explained. "After the haying 's done. You tell her my little niece will want to go. Alma has been here three weeks and we haven't been able to do much for her. Do you think you will go, too, Harriet?"

"I'd rather not this time, Mother."

"The Bliss girls will probably go, and Alma knows them pretty well.

She won't be lonesome."

"Oh, no," said Elliott, "we will see that she isn't lonely."

"Must you go? Tell Mrs. Cameron we will send our limousine whenever she says the word." On the way back through the house Harriet Gordon paused before the picture of a young man in aviator's uniform. "My brother," she said simply, and there was infinite pride in her voice.

Elliott stumbled down the path to the road. She quite forgot to put up the pink parasol. She carried it closed all the way home. Were they limousine people? You would never have guessed it to look at them.

Why, she knew about picnics of that kind!--motor-car, luncheon-kit picnics! But what a shame to be so big! Couldn't they _do_ something about it? Good as gold, of course, and in such terrible sorrow! They weren't unfeeling. The girl's voice when she said, "My brother,"

proved that. It seemed as though knowing about them ought to make them attractive, but somehow it didn't. If they only understood how to dress, it would help matters. Queer, how nice boys could have such frumpy people! And Ted Gordon had been a perfectly nice boy. The picture proved that. But Aunt Jessica had been right about the flowers. The big woman and the farmer proved _that_. Altogether Elliott's mind was a queer jumble.

"She said she'd send back the basket to-morrow, Aunt Jessica," she reported. "Said she wanted to sit and look at it for a while just as it was. And Miss Gordon asked me to tell you that whenever you were ready for the picnic you must let her know and she would send around their limousine."

"If that isn't just like Harriet Gordon!" laughed Laura. "She is the wittiest girl! Didn't you like her, Elliott?"

Elliott's eyes opened wide. "What is there witty in saying she would send their limousine?"

Tom snorted. "Wait till you see it!"

"Why, she meant their hay-wagon! We always use the Gordon hay-wagon for this midsummer picnic. That's a custom, too."

Everybody laughed at the expression on Elliott's face.

"Not up on the vernacular, Lot?" gibed Stannard.

"When is the picnic to be, Mother?" asked Laura.

"How about to-morrow?"

"Better make it the day after," Father Bob suggested, and they all fell to discussing whom to ask.