Fathers
“But I did hear it—father.”
“You dreamed it, girlie—up so early.”
Dwight Grosvenor, father of Una, drew his hand across his forehead;
curiously enough, the rim of that high forehead looked damp—clammy as
the woods at daybreak.
“Pemrose—Pemrose will believe me that I heard it; that strange sound,
high piping—silvery hum. Pemrose will believe me.”
Pemrose Lorry looked in bewilderment from one to another—in the tempered
glare of a bright sun-parlor.
“It m-must have been the trees,” she ventured—her glance in the
direction of Una, the flower sprite, said that she was accustomed to the
whims of a girl as timid as she was finespun.
“But there wasn’t any breeze, I tell you!” Una stamped deliriously. “The
pines—the beeches—weren’t even stirring.”
Silent, for a moment, she gazed thoughtfully out at her May garden—at
the woods, the hills, beyond it.
“’Twasn’t like anything I ever heard before,” she murmured pensively.
“Not like any sound in Nature, at all! ’Twas like the fine small music
Andrew speaks of that calls the—fairies—”
“Andrew!” Her father suddenly set his foot down in relief—the vague
annoyance in his face melting, “I’ve a great mind to dismiss that
‘blellum.’ A fogy whose tongue drips folk lore as a rain streak drips
mist! Whose stories—”
“Ending with; ‘An if a’ tales be true,’ that’s no lie,” put in Pemrose
slyly, with a preoccupied glance at an adjoining room where, in splints
and bandages, a young aviator, with a mocking brown speck in one gray
eye, lay dreaming of his fiery “note.”
But, now, it was Una, petted child, who set her foot down, stamping it
again—stamping passionately:
“Dismiss Andrew—father!” she cried. “Andrew who picked me up bodily and
hurled me into the back of the car when I was out with him alone, six
months ago, and another auto, recklessly driven, came right for us round
a corner! Andrew who never thought of himself, at all—only of saving me!
Who—who was so badly battered—got some of the glass of the wind shield
into him—that he had to have....” She almost snapped her fingers at her
father.
“There! There, child! Of course I didn’t mean it.” The latter patted her
shoulder soothingly. “But I wish he’d shed his Scotch mists, anywhere
but in your ears.”
“Well—well, Andrew had nothing to do with this,” insisted Una, after a
cooling minute. “I did hear it, that funny—piping—hum. The Quaker Ladies
heard it, too—” her eyebrows arching merrily—“and _they_ thought ’twas
like the ringing and singing in harebells—”
“There now, Jack! There now!” Her father threw up his hands as he called
his only daughter by the name, occasionally, thrust upon her by her girl
chums, as a satire upon the “betty” element in her being so strong—on
her being as far as possible removed from what might, possibly, be known
as a “lassie-boy.” “There you are! You’re just steeped to the ears in
these flower legends, very finespun and poetic—but too airy an
atmosphere for a girl like you, with an imagination that ‘works
overtime.’ Oh! I’m glad of your new interest in your flowers; it
overcame your—”
“‘Sleepy fivvers,’” put in Una archly. “You used to say I was as lazy as
the white Star of Bethlehem, Daddy dear, and she’s a perfect dormouse,
garden dormouse—the little ‘ten o’ clock.’”
“But I—I’d like to see my little girl interested in something else, too,
to keep her earth-fast.” Mr. Grosvenor laid his arm tenderly around the
shoulders of his only child. “How—how about learning to run one of my
big cars? How about becoming interested in radio, like your friend
Pemrose? Oh-h! not in listening in on a concert. The laziest
lubber-sprite could do that!” with a laugh. “But in riding the whirlwind
and directing the storm,” gayly, “the jumble of noises coming through
the air taking you by storm. I declare if you could once gossip
familiarly of vacuum tube and variometer, current and condenser; if you
could pick up one sentence—one word even—from the dot and dash with
which the air is forever ticking, I might—”
“What! code. Telegraphy that—that horrid teaser!”
Una curled up like the finical Star of Bethlehem before the blinding
beat of a thunder shower.
“I might,” Mr. Grosvenor went on, unheeding, swinging his eyeglasses
judicially, “I might, even, decide that you were stern enough stuff, hot
stuff enough, to go into camp with the other girls, this summer, and not
infect them all with ‘peerie-weerie’ fears—fancies.”
“To camp!” It was a little diverted scream. “Oh! father, you know I’m
dying to go—go with Pemrose.”
“Well! I’m beginning to think it might really be better for you than
staying here under the care of a governess, while I—while I make a
flying trip, business trip, to Europe—and your mother goes to bring me
back,” with a shrug. “When do you start? What are your hiking plans?”
The big man of affairs, banker, financier, turned to Pemrose.
“Oh! we leave here—I leave here on the tenth of July, seven weeks from
now, to pick up my Camp Fire sisters just over the Massachusetts line,
where we follow the Greylock Trail until we strike the Long Trail
winding right through the Green Mountains, from end to end.”
The girl paused, the lure of the Long Trail unwinding itself remotely in
her blue eyes.
“But we don’t follow that, for long, either; we branch off along other
mountain trails and—and little snaky, brown roads that stand on their
hind legs and grope for the sky,” laughingly, “until—until—four days’
hiking and sleeping out at night—” Pemrose waved a letter, just
received—“we come to Mount Pocohosette at the heart of the Green
Mountains—”
“Pocohosette!” Una sprang erect and clapped her hands. “Why—why that’s
where your horse-farm is, Daddy, and I’ve never—never been up there.”
“I only bought it and stocked it last year, down in the valley, the rich
bottom lands at the foot, and put a ‘canny’ farmer in charge of my
Morgan thoroughbreds.” Mr. Grosvenor laughed. “Well, go on with your
program,” he looked at Pemrose.
“The mountain is very wild, so I understand—adventure by the yard!”
beamed the blue-eyed girl. “A—a rocky Balcony, half way up, where you
can stand on the lip of nothing and look down!”
“Oh-h! lovely,” shivered Una; for her such a breakneck blank had a
fascination—fancy could always people it.
“The Guardian—Guardian of our Camp Fire Group hopes to rent some old
farmhouse for a week or two.” Pemrose glanced at her letter.
“How about a month or two—eh?” The fluttering eyeglasses in Mr.
Grosvenor’s hand reflected, now, the deepest twinkle in the eye above
them—is there any role more gratifying to a “high-powered” humanitarian
than to play fairy godfather to a group of girls? “If—if I might
suggest,” he said slowly, “there’s a jolly nice sort of camp—pine-log
cabin—there already, on the breezy sidehill, just a mile and a half
above the horse-farm, which I used for hunting quarters, before I was
seized with the passion for raising Morgan horses. If your Group will
accept the loan of it ... there, I’ll write to the Guardian to-day.”
“Oh-h! Mr. Grosvenor....” The light fairly swooned in Pemrose’s blue
eyes.
“And if this daughter of mine will only strike a bargain on the dot and
dash ‘teaser’ just to show that she isn’t entirely such stuff as dreams
are made of,” with a laugh, “I might have radio installed for you—so
that you can, now and again, tune in on a concert, while camping on the
edge of nothing.”
“Boys—boys say that they have a respect for any ‘O. G.: Old Girl’, radio
slang, who can master code—the ‘crutch’, as they call it—because she has
to set her back to the wall to do it,” put in Pemrose roguishly. “And
then—” her hand went up, in excitement, to her dimpling chin—“we
wouldn’t have to depend altogether on my magic ring, radio ring, for
any—any little gleanings from the air.”
“Magic ring—humph!” The fairy godfather’s eyebrows were lifted—just a
little superciliously. “What can you pick up with a gewgaw like that—toy
set like that? Firing pellets at the moon, eh?” he winked quizzically.
“You forget—you forget that my father is an inventor, sir, and that he
has invented—discovered—a new crystal—‘radio soul’—which is an amplifier
as well as a detector!” Pemrose’s back was up and to the wall now, her
blue eyes flashing. “He—oh, he stumbled upon it while experimenting for
my ring. We all know that crystals up to this time have been crude
affairs,” vouchsafed the girlish radio fan, her chin in the air.
“A one-stage amplifier, I suppose—as well as a detector, sorting out
sounds from the air!” Mr. Grosvenor gasped.
“Oh, by George! child, I did forget that your father is the archwizard
who _has_ bombarded the moon with something more ponderable than
pellets. If any one can achieve the impossible—”
“He could have made me a ring with just an ordinary galena crystal, or
silicon,” murmured Pemrose shyly, as the great man paused, “with which I
could have picked up waves—sounds—not very far off. But—with this—my two
hundred feet of aërial out to a tree, my spiked heel in the mud,”
laughingly, “early in the morning, especially, I can—can glean snatches
of everything within five or six miles; further—further, if it’s dot an’
dash—a powerful station sending!”
“Oh, by Jove! I can fancy you standing round, out-of-doors, after
daybreak, with your shining halo—headpiece—on.” The tall man threw back
his shoulders, with a chuckle. “Well! maybe, you’ll be the woman with
power on her head who can ride Revelation.” He winked. “Revelation, son
of Revel, Morgan bay, fifteen hands high, good-natured,
well-trained—bridle-wise—but needing a rider with ‘pep’ to handle him!”
“I rode with father all last summer.” The “pep” leaked out of Pemrose’s
whisper into her red cheeks now—the sunburst of luck was too suffusing.
“Oh! there will be eight or nine horses, I expect, out in the Long
Pasture, on the sidehill. You girls can take turns in riding. Revel,
gentle little mother-horse—a baby could ride her—I meant to have her
brought down here this summer, for Una.”
“And—and I can ride her, up there, father!” Una flung her arms around
him—a clinging vine. Suddenly, however, she raised her head, as if
afraid that she might be riding Revel in a false habit. “But I did
hear-r it, father,” she persisted, “that silvery murmur—hum. And, oh!
that wasn’t all—only you’re so unbelieving. While I was listening,
wondering—wondering whether I could be strung on wires,” half
laughingly, half fearfully, “picking up sounds by radio, something fell
at my feet. A little bunch of wild flowers! I touched them. Something
stung me.”
Again she held up her slim fingers and looked at them curiously.
“Well, it left ‘nor mark nor burn’, child,” chaffed her father, catching
the hand and examining it, too. “Bah! Some boy playing a trick on
you—playing on a Jew’s harp! Don’t go into the wood again so—early—”
“It wasn’t! It wasn’t!” Passionately the vine tore itself from its
pedestal and maintained its own independent conviction.
But as Una caught the cloud, the vague cloud, descending again upon her
father’s face, her soft flower-heart capitulated.
“Well! all right, Daddy, if you want me to think that, I will—I’ll try
to,” she pledged. “You’re the dearest prince of a father ever was—and I
wouldn’t exchange you even for Pemrose’s Wizard,” with a little _moue_,
a little grimace in the direction of the other girl, who had turned
aside and was looking out through the plateglass panels towards the
mountains.
“There—I haven’t done your hair this morning, yet.”
Una pressed her father into a low wicker chair, perched upon his knee
and began twisting the dark, graying locks around her finger.
Pemrose, over her shoulder, watched them smilingly. She had no cause for
envy, she who wore a Wizard’s ring.
“Revel and Revelation!” she murmured beatifically. “But why-y did he
look so upset if he, really, didn’t believe that Una heard anything
unusual in the wood ... now, that’s what I’d like to know!”