The Carter Girls' Week-End Camp Part 13

Tucker wants me to help launch this girl. Well, I'll look her over first. No pig in a poke for me!" He took another of the very good cigars, not that he wanted it at that moment, but he might need it later on.

"Now this is what I want you to do, this is how I want you to be good to her." Hi Parker smiled a knowing smile. How many times had he been approached in just this way? "I don't want you to ask her to dance a german with you----"

Oh, what was the fellow driving at, anyhow?

"No, indeed! There is no man living that I would ask to do such a thing.

I feel it is a kind of insult to a girl to go around drumming up partners for her."

Mr. Parker gasped.

"What I want you to do for me is to persuade Mrs. Carter that this is a bad year to bring a girl out. You have already said you think it is, so you would be perfectly honest in doing so. The Carters' finances are at a low ebb and this fine girl, Douglas, is doing her best to economize and have the family realize the importance of it, and now her mother is determined that she shall stop everything and go into society."

Mr. Tucker, during the journey to Greendale, succeeded in convincing Mr.

Parker that it was an easy matter to persuade Mrs. Carter to give up the project.

"I'll do what I can, but if you take the matter so much to heart why don't you do it yourself, Tucker? I make it a rule not to b.u.t.t in on society's private affairs if I can possibly keep out of it."

"I ask you because I believe in getting an expert when a delicate operation is needed. You are a social expert and this is a serious matter."

The upshot was that Mr. Hiram G. Parker was flattered into making the attempt and Mrs. Carter's opinion of that gentleman's social knowledge was so great and her faith in him so deep-rooted that she abandoned her idea of forcing Douglas out for that season. She gave it up with a sigh of resignation. Anyhow, she was glad she had made Douglas bleach her complexion before Mr. Parker was introduced to her. The girl was looking lovely and the shyness she evinced on meeting that great man was just as it should be. Too much a.s.surance was out of place with a bud and this introduction and impression would hold over until another year.

CHAPTER XI

THE BIRD

"Softly a winged thing Floats across the sky, And earth from slumber waketh And looketh up on high, Sees it is only a bird-- A great white bird-- That floating thro' the darkness undisturbed Floats on, and on, and on."

Late sleeping in a tent is rather a difficult feat as the morning sun seems to spy out the sleeper's eyes and there is no way to escape him.

Some of the campers tied black ribbons around their eyes and some even used black stockings, but the first rays of the sun always found Nan stirring. It was not that she was especially energetic, she was indeed rather lazy, according to her more vigorous sisters, but the charm of the early morning was so wonderful that she hated to miss it lying in bed. It was also such a splendid time to be alone. The camp was a bustling, noisy place when everyone was up, and early morning was about the only time the girl had for that communing with herself which was very precious to one of her poetic temperament.

She slept in a tent, not only with her sisters but with Lil Tate and Tillie Wingo, now that the week-enders had swarmed in on them at such a rate, stretching their sleeping accommodations to the utmost. Of course it was great fun to sleep in a tent but there were times when Nan longed for a room with four walls and a door that she could lock. The next best thing to a door she could lock was the top of the mountain in the early morning. Unless some enthusiastic nature-lover had got up a sunrise party she was sure to have the top of the mountain to herself.

Mr. Tucker had divulged to her the night before that her mother had abandoned the designs she had been entertaining for Douglas, and she in turn had been able to pa.s.s on the good news to Douglas. Mrs. Carter had not told her daughter herself but was evidently going to take her own good time to do so. Their mother's being a bit cattish was not worrying either Douglas or Nan. They were too happy over the abandonment of the plan. Of course they could not help feeling that since the plan was abandoned, it would have been sweet of their mother to let Douglas know immediately since she was well aware of the fact that the idea was far from pleasing to her daughter. And since it would have been sweet of her to let her know the moment she had abandoned the plan, it was on the other hand slightly cattish of her to conceal the fact. Of course the girls did not call it cattish even in their own minds--just thoughtlessness. Douglas had no idea of how the change had come about, and Nan held her counsel. It was Mr. Tucker's and her secret.

As she crept out of the cot on that morning, before the sun was up, she glanced at her elder sister and a feeling of intense satisfaction filled her heart to see how peacefully Douglas was sleeping. Her beautiful hair, in a great golden red rope, was trailing from the low cot along the floor of the tent; her face that had looked so tired and anxious lately had lost its worried expression--she looked so young--hardly any older than Lucy, who lay in the next bed.

"Thank goodness, the poor dear is no longer worried," thought Nan devoutly as she slipped on her clothes and crept noiselessly out of the tent.

What a morning it was! The sun was not quite up and there was a silver gray haze over everything. The neighboring mountains were lost, as were the valleys. The air had a freshness and sweetness that is peculiar to dawn. "'The innocent brightness of a new-born day is lovely yet,'"

quoted Nan. "If I can only get to the top of the mountain before the sun is up!" She hurried along the path, stopping a moment at the spring to drink a deep draft of water and to splash the clear water on her face and hands. She held her face down in the water a moment and came up shaking the drops off her black hair, which curled in innumerable little rings from the wetting. She laughed aloud in glee. Life was surely worth living, everything was so beautiful.

The sides of the mountain were thickly wooded but at the top there was a smooth plateau with neither tree nor bush. One great rock right in the middle of this clearing Nan used as a throne whereon she could view the world--if not the world, at least a good part of Albemarle county and even into Nelson on one hand and Orange on the other. Sometimes she thought of this stone as an altar and of herself as a sun-worshipper.

On that morning she clambered up the rock just a moment before the sun peeped through a crack in the mist. She stood with arms outstretched facing the sun. The mists were rolling away and down in the valley she could distinguish the apple orchards and now a fence, and now a haystack. There a mountain cabin emerged from the veil and soon a spiral of thin blue smoke could be spied rising from its chimney.

"I wonder what they are going to have for breakfast!" exclaimed the wood nymph, and then she took herself to task for thinking of food when everything was so poetical. Just as she was wondering what the mountaineers who lived in that tiny cabin were going to cook on the fire whose smoke she saw rising in that "thin blue reek" the sun came up. A wonderful sight, but the sun has been rising for so many aeons that we have become accustomed to it. Something else happened at that moment, something we are not quite accustomed to even yet: Far off over the crest of a mountain Nan thought she saw an eagle. The first rays of the sun glinted on the great white wings. For a moment it was lost to view as it pa.s.sed behind a cloud and then it appeared again flying rapidly.

"It is coming this way, a great white bird! I am almost afraid it might pick me up in its huge talons and carry me off, carry me 'way up in the air--I almost hope it will--it would be so glorious to fly!"

She stood up on her throne and stretched her arms out, crying an invocation to the winged thing.

She heeded not the buzzing of the aeroplane as it approached. To her it was a great white bird and she only awakened from her trance when the machine had actually landed on her plateau.

The humming had stopped and it glided along the gra.s.s, kept closely cropped by Josephus, as this was his grazing ground when he was not busy pulling the cart. Nan stood as though petrified, a graceful little figure in her camp-fire girls' dress. Her arms were still outstretched as when she cried her invocation to the great white bird.

The machine came to a standstill quite close to her altar and a young man in aviator's costume sprang from it. Taking off his helmet and goggles, he made a low bow to Nan.

"Oh, mountain nymph, may a traveler land in your domain?"

"Welcome, stranger!"

"And may I ask what is this enchanted land?"

"This is Helicon--and you--who are you?"

"I am Bellerophon and yonder winged steed is Pegasus. Maid, will you fly with me?"

He held out his hand and Nan, with no more thought of the proprieties than a real mountain nymph would have had, let him help her into his machine. He wrapped a great coat around her, remarking that even nymphs might get cold, and seemingly with no more concern than Bill Tinsley felt over starting the mountain goat, he touched some b.u.t.tons and turned some wheels and in a moment the aeroplane was gliding over the plateau and then floating in the air, mounting slowly over the tree tops. Up, up they went and then began making beautiful circles in the air. Nan sighed.

"Are you scared?" and the aviator looked anxiously at his little companion. He had not resumed his helmet and goggles and his eyes were so kind and so merry that Nan felt as though she had known him all her life.

"Scared! Of course not! I am just so happy."

"Have you ever flown before?"

"Not in reality--but it is just as I have dreamed it."

"You dream then a great deal?"

"Yes! 'In a dream all day I wander only half awake.' I am sure I must be dreaming now."

"I, too! But then the best of life is the dreams, the greatest men are the dreamers. If it had not been for a dreamer, we could not have had this machine. Look! Isn't that wonderful?"

Nan was looking with all eyes at the panorama spread out below them. The sun was up now in good earnest and the mountains had shaken off the mist as sleepers newly aroused might throw off their coverlids. The orchards in the valleys looked like cabbage beds and the great mansions that adorn the hills and are the pride and boast of the county seemed no larger than doll houses. From every chimney in the valley smoke was arising. Nan was disgusted with herself that again the thought came to her:

"What are all of these people going to have for breakfast?"

They dipped and floated and curvetted. Nan thought of Hawthorne's description of Pegasus in the "Chimaera" and the very first opportunity she had later on she got the book and reread the following pa.s.sage:

"Oh, how fine a thing it is to be a winged horse! Sleeping at night, as he did, on a lofty mountain-top, and pa.s.sing the greater part of the day in the air, Pegasus seemed hardly to be a creature of the earth.

Whenever he was seen, up very high above people's heads, with the sunshine on his silvery wings, you would have thought that he belonged to the sky, and that, skimming a little too low, he had got astray among our mists and vapors, and was seeking his way back again. It was very pretty to behold him plunge into the fleecy bosom of a bright cloud, and be lost in it for a moment or two, and then break forth from the other side."

Once they went through a low-hanging cloud. Nan felt the drops of water on her face.

"Why, it is raining!" she cried.