looking down at her quizzically, as he had a trick of doing. "Gail
must want you by this time."
"Gail!" stammered Joy. Then her courage came back, as it usually did
when she summoned it, and she laughed.
"Heavens, I am discovered!" she quoted. "Why, John, you don't mean
to tell me you ran away too?"
"I didn't run away," countered John. "I promised Philip yesterday
that I'd stay here to luncheon with him. In fact, I think I promised
to summon you. I stopped at the house to do it just now and found
you here already. I explained matters to Gail, and she is up in
Mother's room, having her luncheon there."
He turned to the children. "Say good-by to Joy now, infants--I'm
going to take her away with me."
"You do that a great deal of the time, it seems to me," observed
Philip regretfully. "But of course, I suppose she really does belong
to you."
"Exactly," laughed John, lifting the little boy up to kiss him. "She
does. Come, my property."
They got into the car amicably, laughing over Philip. But John
wasn't through with her.
"Was it quite courteous, my dear," he asked gently, but with a
certain firmness, "to leave Gail that way? It was only a chance that
I was able to explain it. In a sense she was a guest in your house."
Joy flamed up.
"Was it quite courteous of Gail," she demanded passionately, "to
come in and take my house away from me, and demand that I hand her
over the housekeeping--no, not demand it, calmly take it?"
John looked a little perplexed for the moment, which gave Joy time
to calm down a little, and remind herself that men were like that.
"Somehow one doesn't expect Gail to be considerate," he explained
finally. "It--well, it isn't one of her qualities. I think I heard
her say once that she had never found it necessary. But you--I
expect so much more of you, Joy!"
One would suppose that this might have been soothing. John seemed to
consider it so. But it wasn't.
"She's so charming that nobody expects anything else of her," Joy
flashed back, "and I have to be good, because all people can like me
for is my goodness--is that what you mean?"
And she stood up, as the car slowed before the Hewitt house, and
sprang out. She had seen Clarence Rutherford sunning himself
expectantly on the steps.
"There's the man who sent her over, if you approve of it all so
highly," were her departing words to John. "I promise not to be
inhospitable to him!"
She waved her hand.
"Mr. Rutherford!" she called. "Come on down and go off somewhere
with me!"
Clarence unfolded himself with more haste than usual, and obliged.
"To the end of the world, Sorcerette, or any little place like
that," he said sweetly. "I have no car, alas, but I can telephone
for one."
"No, don't," said Joy, whose one idea was to get away. "Just go into
the house and bring me my cap and any wrap you can find."
She did not dare look back to John. She felt she was being
everything she oughtn't to, but she also felt that she had cause.
"Here's your hat," said Clarence, coming out with it, and refraining
from completing the quotation. "Where do you want to go? I have many
beautiful plans to offer you, principally about your being leading
lady in my comic opera. You are going to have to get an extension of
parole from the dear ones at home."
"Oh, do you really think I can act in it?" asked Joy happily as they
went down the leafy road together. She gave a little frisk as she spoke.
"Of course you can," said he. "As a matter of fact, that's my
principal reason for getting it up. I have a book that contains all
the Gilbert librettos in my most bulging pocket. You and I will
wander out into the wonderful autumn woods, and sit down on a soft,
pleasant log, and pick out the opera, and the cast, and be happy
generally. Only I won't play unless, as I explained last night, you
are a leading lady with a real star part. As I'm a wonderful stage
manager I feel strongly that it will be thus."
"Thank you," said Joy amiably but absently. Something appalling had
just occurred to her.
"Good gracious," she told him, "it's a special occasion, and the
cook and the waitress are both going off to funerals or something,
and Gail is going to have to get that whole dinner single-handed!"
CHAPTER TWELVE
DINNER FOR FIVE
Clarence smiled most agreeably.
"You should try to be more of an optimist, dear Joy," he reproved.
"Try to live up to your name."
"I got it out of Blake," said Joy, "or they did--and I never did see
why you should live up to a name your grandfather pinned on you out
of a poetry book."
"Pardon this seeming curiosity," hinted Clarence, "but didn't you
ever have any parents, not even to the extent of their having a
chance to name you?"
"They died before I was born," Joy explained. "At least, as much as
they could. My father quite did and my mother died before I was a
week old. So Grandfather had it all to do, as far as naming went.
You know that horrid poem--
_"I have no name--
I am but three days old:"_
"And it's called Infant Joy, and so was I."
"They seem to have begun wrecking your taste for literature early,"
observed Clarence.
"Oh--literature!" said Joy wearily.
"Your tone hints that we didn't come off to discuss the poets. You
are quite right, Sorcerette. When two charming young persons like
ourselves are alone together on a wonderful fall afternoon they
should discuss only each other. And you must admit that my
references to literature were only incidental to yourself."
"Well, anyway," stated Joy, pausing as they strolled, and beginning
to braid into a garland a handful of wild asters she had gathered,
"anyway, I ought to go back to the house and help Gail get dinner.
John likes things just so."
"Heavens, how marital!" sighed Clarence, wincing. Then suddenly he
seemed more in earnest than Joy had ever known him. "Can't you ever
talk or think of anything but the admirable John? How on earth did
he get you so thoroughly broken in?"
Joy's cheeks flamed.
"He didn't 'break me in,'" she defended. "But I think I ought to see
to it that things are all right. You see, when your cousin came and
offered to take over the housekeeping--if she wasn't your cousin, I
might say she got it away from me--she thought she was helping
herself to a 'nice, clane, aisy job,' as the Irishman said about
being a bishop. It really isn't fair to let her in for work she
didn't expect."
The look Clarence bent on her this time held genuine admiration.
"I think it is exceedingly fair," was all he said.
"Really?" she asked. She certainly did not want to go back to the
house, and, noble as Clarence might think her, she didn't feel a bit
like taking orders from Gail.
"She has made her bed--or it may even be, her beds," said Clarence.
"Now why don't you let her lie in it, or them?"
"Well, I don't want to go home," said Joy a little sadly.
"Let us be optimists, as I suggested some yards back," said Clarence
cheerfully. "Let us think of the wonderful effect it will all have
on Gail's moral nature. By the time she has produced the
eight-course dinner which I gather the worthy Dr. Hewitt requires to
keep him the good citizen he is, she will be ennobled to a terrible
degree. You have heard of the ennobling influence of toil, dear
child?"
"I have, but I never believed in it," said Joy. "It makes you cross,
especially peeling potatoes, and it's bad for your hands. And
judging by the number of maids who steal, it doesn't work at all."
"I suppose," Clarence resigned himself, "that if Melisande were
still spared to us in the flesh, she really would have talked this
way, except that she would have used a few more dots. But one is an
idealist. One is jarred. If you could recite, in your soft,
clear-cut voice that is so admirably adapted for poetry, a few
stanzas of something heartbreaking----" voluntarily.
Joy, not unnaturally, lost patience.
"I have spent my whole life, or a lot more of it than I want to,
reciting heartbreaking poetry," she told him. "If you want it, go
buy a phonograph record. And if you want me out here in the woods
with you, stop talking about it!"
She really shouldn't have been so cross. Clarence was supposed to be
very clever when he talked. But just then she was only half
listening to him, and there came a sudden vision of the night
before--the cozy room, and the wood fire, and John across from her,
smiling gravely at her, and talking in a way that didn't make her
feel, as Clarence's way did, that he was laughing at her underneath,
when he thought she couldn't see.
John had told her once that his ideal girl wore something white or
blue, and had her hair parted, and was connected in his mind some
way with a wood fire. And he had talked and acted as if she was that
girl. She'd had on the little blue dress that she'd bought, and made
look modern with a fichu of Mrs. Hewitt's....
Clarence's voice interrupted her thoughts, rather plaintively.
"Dear Joy! I _will_ buy a phonograph record! I will buy a whole
album of them. I will purchase a copy of the Last Ravings of John
McCullough, and have it rave to me the last thing every night, as a
penance, if you will only stop looking off into space, and give at
least a fair imitation of knowing that I exist."
Joy's heart misgave her. She really wasn't being very polite.
"Of course you exist," she said penitently. "And you are very nice
and polite, in your way, and you must make allowance for my not
being clever. I keep telling you that all the time."
"I am delighted that you are not, as you call it, clever," said
Clarence with undoubted sincerity. "You lack verbal dexterity of a
certain kind, because you have never associated freely with people
you could be disrespectful to. But you are quite a new kind of girl,
or else a survival, and I adore you for it. I never thought I was
going to adore any one so much. Why, I even think it is humorous
when you sit on me, and that, my dear, is a very bad symptom. In
short, I am very much in love with you."
Clarence had a habit of talking that way, and Joy didn't pay much
attention to it. In a phrase of his own, it was like kissing over
the telephone--it didn't get you anywhere, but it had a cunning
sound. It has a warming feeling to think that any one is in love
with you, even if you know they aren't. She said as much.
But Clarence became what was, for him, sulky. Clarence had one
curious thing about him: he never showed his temper at all, but you
couldn't be with him ten minutes without being morally certain that
he had a very bad and sullen one, which he merely kept concealed for
reasons of his own. Whereas John Hewitt's temper, which
undisguisedly was in existence, wasn't a thing you ever thought of
excepting rather amusedly and affectionately. It was such a
little-boy thing in comparison with the grown-up, responsible rest
of him! It would undoubtedly appear some time this afternoon or
evening. At the thought of it Joy felt her usual affectionate
amusement. When it was over he would be very sorry.
"You haven't told me anything about the comic opera yet," she hinted
to Clarence, who had been quite silent for the last while. "Don't
you want to?"
"I do!" said Clarence, coming out of his muse and turning into his
ordinary self. "We will sit down on the next stump or stone we see,
and go into the matter thoroughly."
It was a large flat stone, with a tree for Joy to lean against. They
sat down on it, and Clarence pulled the libretto book out of his
pocket, and they went to work.
Joy knew the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from a copy of the words
that had always been around the house. So there was no delay while
she read the book through, as Clarence seemed to have expected.
"To my mind it lies between 'Patience' and 'Iolanthe,'" said
Clarence. "The 'Mikado' has been done to death, and so has 'Trial by
Jury.' And 'Princess Ida' is too full of blank verse, and the men's
solos are too hard."
So far as Joy was concerned nothing had been done to death. She
would quite willingly have been the humblest chorus-girl in
"Pinafore," if Clarence had willed to have that much-done classic.
But he seemed determined to have her play a large part in whatever
it was, and to have whatever it was _Iolanthe_. He wanted to be
_Strephon_, it seemed; in fact, he had been. And he wanted Joy
for the _Phyllis_ or _Iolanthe_.
Joy had a faint feeling that Phyllis Harrington ought to have the
part with her own name, but Clarence explained that names had
nothing whatever to do with it unless you were a movie star, when
you used your first name in order to make the public more interested
in your personality.
"We will give Gail the part you don't want," he told her, "as a
punishment for not letting you cook your eight-course dinner
tonight. By the way, we must time ourselves to get back and eat it.
I wonder whether Gail can cook. On second thoughts, why not stay out
till it's over?"
"The play!" said Joy imperatively.
"Well," he said, yielding, "would you rather be a fairy princess or
a shepherdess from Arcady? I'd prefer to have you the shepherdess,
for personal reasons. I wish to be the shepherd."
"Whatever you say," said Joy absently. "It's getting colder. Hadn't
we better walk a little?"
"Very well," said Clarence. "We can argue as we walk."
The problem of making sixteen young women willing to be a chorus and
of finding sixteen or twenty young men to be anything, took them
quite a while to discuss. They walked on as they talked, until it
began to get darker.
"By the way, have you any idea where we are?" inquired Clarence,
stopping short to look about him. "New England woods are not my
native habitat."
"Nor mine," said Joy, startled. "I think we ought to go back to the
high road."
"If there's any left to go back to," suggested Clarence. "We've been
on one way-path after another so long that I don't think I could
find it again."
They turned around, and continued to follow way-paths back. Clarence
had no pocket compass, such as people who get lost ought to possess.
And it was getting relentlessly darker and darker. Joy had never
been lost before, and she was surprised to find the feeling of panic
that possessed her when she grasped the fact that neither of them
knew where they were. Finally they gained a clear space where there
was a tolerably traveled-looking road.
"If we wait here somebody may come along," said Clarence. "Jove, I'm
hungry!"
"So am I," said Joy.
But there wasn't anything to do about _that_. Finally Joy
remembered that she had some chocolate in her little handbag, and
they divided it and ate it. After that life was a little brighter.
"Do you suppose we'll have to stay here all night?" demanded Joy.
"We'll freeze to death if we do."
"No, I don't," said Clarence. "But, Joy dear, if we do----"
The mockery was all out of his voice.
"Oh, don't talk about it!" she exclaimed. "Surely somebody will come
get us--or couldn't we go up this road till we find a farmhouse?"
"If you like," said Clarence.
They rose and walked on for a while.
"Oh, listen!" Joy whispered. "I hear something!"
"It's a car," said Clarence hopefully.
And it was. It was John's car, with John in it, and the temper Joy
had been thinking of tenderly was with him. He was evidently
thoroughly angry, for he scarcely spoke, even when he found them.
"See here, Hewitt," Clarence protested. "You aren't doing the thing
at all properly. You should say, 'My own! At last I have found you!'
instead of backing up the car with a short sentence like that."
What John had said, as a matter of fact, was, "Get in the car. It's late."
He did come to a little at Clarence's flippant reminder, and smiled
reluctantly.
"Well, you see, it was self-evident. I _had_ found you both. You
oughtn't to have walked so far if you didn't know where you were going."
"It is also self-evident that it is late," said Clarence stiffly,
and, it must be confessed, a little sulkily. "Nevertheless, we're
having a very pleasant time.... Is dinner over?"
John, for no apparent reason, smiled frankly at this. "Not in the
least," he said. "They are waiting dinner till the prodigals'
return. My mother has had hers sent up to her, but Gail and your
friend Tiddy are kindly keeping the rest of it hot."
It is a quicker journey in a car than when you stroll leisurely
along, discussing light opera and your disposition. They were
surprised to find how near, comparatively, they were, to the village.
"Joy, do you suppose I am invited to dinner?" asked Clarence in a
stage whisper. "If it is not thus I shall probably starve by the
roadside, because Gail sent her mother to a bridge-and-high-tea
before she went, and the maids there had no orders about food.
That's why I was prowling about the hospitable Hewitt mansion."
Joy couldn't help smiling. "I think you must be," she said.
But she didn't understand John's allusion to Tiddy. He was abjectly
devoted to Gail, but it did seem that devotion had its limits, when
it came to following her to somebody else's house.
"What is Tiddy doing in these parts?" Clarence asked for her, as
people so often do ask your questions for you if you only give them
time. "Dinner-party, is it?"
"Tiddy," said John dryly, "is making himself useful."
"That is nothing at all new in Tiddy's life," said Gail's cousin.
"People who dwell about Gail do. Am I to understand that he is chief
cook and bottle-washer?"
"You are," said John.
They got out and went into the house, Joy feeling as mussy as only a
girl can who has been away from home all day. She followed the
curious-minded Clarence into the kitchen.
The sight that met their eyes was an interesting one. The kitchen
was a pleasant sight to any one from outside, being warmed and
lighted. It was further decorated by Gail, in a very low and
clinging black frock trimmed with poppies, which it occurred to Joy
must have been in the grip. She was sitting in absolute idleness in
a kitchen chair, with her feet on a footstool, and Tiddy, swathed in
an apron with pink checks, was engaged at the kitchen range.
"Good work, old boy!" Clarence called out to him. "What have you got?"
Tiddy turned a scarlet face toward him, and waved one hand, with a
spoon in it.
"Gail said there had to be a good dinner," he said worriedly, "but I
don't know how to make many things. This is soup.... It doesn't look
right to me, somehow. Come here, Clarence, and give it a once over."
Joy, leaning against the lintel with John a little behind her as
usual, couldn't help but admire Gail. She knew perfectly well that
it would never have occurred to her in Gail's place to sit placidly
in a chair while a lad who ought to have been at home studying-Tiddy
was cramming to catch up with his class at college--wrestled with
the stove. But, after all, that was the sort of thing she had always
read of sirens doing. And even if the victim was only a little
college boy, of what Clarence called frying size, it was a sight to
make one wishful. Also apprehensive--mightn't Gail set John peeling
potatoes next? That sight would be an annoying one from various angles.
John showed no signs of being about to yield, at least at the
moment. He joined Clarence in teasing Tiddy, who took it very
sweetly, but he finally came forward and showed the lad how to
manage the drafts.
"Call us when you're ready, Cookie," said Clarence amiably, and
sauntered out. John followed him.
"Can't I help?" asked Joy, staying conscientiously behind. She still
felt that it was her responsibility.
"Not a bit," said Gail. "We're getting along wonderfully. You'd
better go up and get straightened out, though--you look blown to
bits. Oh, and send John back as you go through, Tiddy can't do the
drafts right."
Joy went out obediently.
"John, I am to send you back as I go through. Tiddy can't do the
drafts right," she repeated in a colorless voice that had anger
underneath it, and walking on as she spoke.
"Drafts--nonsense--Gail's lonesome," Clarence answered cheerfully,
from the couch where he had thrown himself.
"All right," said John, who was the soul of politeness, but an
annoyingly dense person compared to Clarence, it seemed to Joy. He
went out. Joy ran upstairs as fast as she could go. She arrived at
the top, breathless and still angry, and remembered that she ought
to go in and see Mrs. Hewitt. But the lights were low, generally a
sign that the lady was asleep, so she went on to her own room.
"Blown to bits!" she said to herself bitterly, stopping opposite her
confidant, the mirror. "And _she_ sitting on a chair looking
like Marie Antoinette being taken to execution in a kitchen chair!"
It was a breathless and tautological remark, but it relieved her
feelings. "I oughtn't to feel that way," she reminded herself.
"Because after all, Gail _was_ here first!"
This didn't seem to make much difference in the feelings. And it was
unquestionable that she was blown about, and very young and owned no
black dress with poppies, nor yet any college boy who would cook for
her at a wave of the hand.
She pawed her wardrobe through furiously. Joy was always very
dependent for encouragement on the clothes she wore. The proper gown
could make her feel the way it looked, always. They almost had moods
sewed into them around the bottom, she thought sometimes.
The way she had felt last time she wore the amber satin with the
poem to it, that one she had hated so furiously--could she feel that
way again if she put on the dress? She'd felt young--oh, yes, but as
if youth were a perfectly splendid thing to have. And very alive,
and superior, and rebellious. And ready to have a lover, and to
treat him, if necessary, like a dog--like a whole kennel of dogs!
So she put it on. She made herself exactly the little princess of
Grandfather's reception days, trailing chiffon panels, swinging
jewel-filleted braids and all, and swept downstairs with her head high.
Tiddy had by this time managed to get the dinner on the table, and
the other two men, out of sheer pity, were helping him. In fact,
having enthroned Gail at the table, they were making a frolic of the
whole thing.
"Here, catch the steak, Rutherford," John was saying cheerfully. And
Clarence, with carving-knife and fork outheld, was making as neat a
catch as possible.
"Here, Tiddy, don't try to stagger in along under those biscuits.
You made 'em. That kind takes two strong men--I know, I've eaten
your biscuits before."
"I made these the regular way, with yeast," said Tiddy in an injured
voice. "_I_ couldn't help it if they didn't rise in the oven.
Go rag the cookbook."
Joy could stand it no longer. Forgetting her real state, she rushed
out on them, where they wrestled with the dinner and Tiddy. They
were playing handball with the biscuits by this time.
"Oh, _Tiddy!_ You didn't put _yeast_ in those biscuits!"
she reproached him. "Why, you poor unfortunate boy, yeast has to
rise over night, or an afternoon anyhow! They're no use!"
They all three stopped simultaneously at the vision which she had
quite honestly forgotten she presented. Tiddy listened humbly, and
Clarence made a low bow.
"The Queen came in the kitchen, speaking bread and honey," he quoted
appositely, while John looked both pleased and proud.
"There, I told you so," he said with triumph. "I said you were in
wrong with those biscuits. Joy always knows."
"'It was the very best butter,'" quoted Tiddy (who was not without a
sense of humor), from "Alice."
"But what can we do?" asked John, who was concentrated on the
situation. "The steak's all right--any idiot can broil steak, as
Tiddy has proved--" he had to stop short to dodge a biscuit--"and
the soup came out of a can, so maybe that'll do. But there isn't a
bit of bread, and we simply have to have it. At least I suppose so."
"Get me an apron, please," Joy asked of the surroundings, and two
aprons were offered her excitedly by three willing hands. She pinned
both on, as a precaution against ruining the amber satin, though she
didn't much mind if it had been ruined, and began by investigating
the soup. It was the best canned tomato bisque, but its cook had not
known or read that it should be watered, or milked, and it was so
thick it was almost stiff. She sent Clarence for milk out of the
refrigerator, and treated it properly. Then she looked at the
biscuits, such as had escaped destruction. They were indeed hopeless.
"I can make biscuits in a minute, but it will take a half-hour to
bake them in this range," she told them, where they stood, anxiously
awaiting her verdict. "If you didn't mind having them baked on a
griddle----"