AFTERNOON TEA
"I feel," said Sally Lane, impressively, "that the way to receive them
properly is to have afternoon tea on the lawn. What is the use of having
a lawn--even though it's still rather hummocky--and four magnificent
ancestral oaks--ancestral oaks sounds like an English novel--if we don't
have afternoon tea on It--under Them?"
She stood in the doorway of the front room in the west wing, where Mrs.
Burnside and Josephine were sitting, the one busy with some small piece
of sewing, the other writing letters at a desk.
"Are they coming over before we call on them?" Josephine inquired, with
poised pen. "Coming to-day? Why, they only arrived last night."
"I saw Mr. Ferry this morning, and he said he did not want to wait for us
to come over with our hats and gloves on and call, he wanted to bring the
girls and his mother over this afternoon, so as to lose no time in having
them find out what was on the farther side of the hedge. I asked him why
he hadn't brought them with him then--it was at eight o'clock this
morning. But he said he wanted to bring them himself, and he was then on
his way to his car--otherwise he thought he should not have hesitated at
all on account of the hour. He said they were crazy to come."
"Sally! He didn't say they were _crazy_ to come."
"He didn't use that particular word, perhaps--men never do, of course.
But he said 'eager,' or 'anxious,' or something like that--it means the
same thing. Evidently they've been told all about us. What would you
give, Jo Burnside, to know how we've been described?"
"We probably haven't been described. Men never describe people. They just
say, 'She's all right, you'll like her,' or something equally vague."
"It would give me a chance to wear my lilac muslin," mused Sally quite
irrelevantly, but Josephine caught her meaning.
"Afternoon tea on the lawn? Then do let's have it. Anything to see you in
that lilac muslin."
"Then we'll trail over the lawn to meet them--only the lilac muslin
doesn't trail--and we'll hold out our hands at a medium sort of angle, so
that we'll be prepared to reciprocate whatever sort of high-low shake
fresh from abroad they give us. Since Dorothy Chase came back last fall
she gives a side-to-side jerk that stops your breath short just where it
happens to be at the moment. What do you suppose they'll be like? Young
ladies from two years' residence in Germany, or just plain, jolly girls?"
Josephine shook her head, but her mother replied in a quiet tone of
conviction: "I doubt if the daughter of that family will be anything
but a simple-mannered girl, no matter how experienced she may be in
foreign usages."
Sally nodded. "So I'm hoping. But 'Miss Carew'--with a voice--sounds more
formidable. It's for Miss Carew I'm going to have afternoon tea. I'll go
out now and make my little cakes. And I'll have very, very thin bread and
butter. I've just one cherished jar of the choicest Orange Pekoe, so the
tea will be above reproach. And my one pride is my linen--you know how
much mother always kept--not only her own but Grandmother Rudd's." Then
she vanished, quite suddenly, from the doorway, as if, having once
mentioned the mother of whom she seldom spoke, she could not come back
again to other subjects until a period of silence had intervened.
"I'm so anxious to see her put away the black clothes," said Josephine
to her mother. "It will be good for her to wear the lilac muslin, for now
she's made it she can't bring herself to put it on, though she knows how
we all want to see her in colours again. Speaking of colours--Jarvis said
this morning that by the fence in the south meadow the grass was blue
with wild violets. I believe I'll go and pick a big bunch for Sally's
tea-table."
"It seems rather early for tea on the lawn," suggested Mrs. Burnside,
"though I couldn't bear to damp Sally's ardour by saying so."
"Oh, it's really very warm, and the lawn seems quite dry. I don't
blame Sally for wanting to show off the 'ancestral oaks.' It's almost
like June."
But--alas for plans which count upon the most June-like May weather--no
guests were served with afternoon tea that day except under a roof more
substantial than the low-hanging boughs of the great oaks. At
mid-afternoon, treacherously enough, the sky showed not a cloud, except
over beyond the timber lot, where they had risen to some height before
they could be discerned from the lawn. There Sally, lilac-clad, was
laying her fine linen cloth, setting out her thin teacups of the old
gold-banded china, and arranging Josephine's blue meadow-violets in a
curious, engraved glass bowl of Grandmother Rudd's. A small gust of wind,
lifting the edges of the heavy damask cloth and nearly capsizing the
violets, first called her attention to a change in the weather. Uncle
Timothy, bringing out chairs at her behest, paused and scanned the
horizon with an experienced eye.
"Looks a little dubious to me, Sally," he observed, although he came on
with his chairs. "Company due pretty soon?"
"It's four o'clock--they'll come very soon, for I sent word that we'd
have tea early on account of its growing cool after five. Yes--there is a
little bit of a dark cloud in the south beyond the woods, but you don't
think it will bring rain right away, do you?"
"If it begins to blow, it will--look out, there--" for another
brisk little zephyr lifted the corner of the tea-table cloth again,
and threatened the teacups. "Weather changes pretty suddenly
sometimes, in May."
"But the sun is so bright--and a minute ago I was thinking that it was
lucky the branches are so thick on this old oak, for the sunshine was
really uncomfortably hot. It can't rain right away. I'll bring out
everything, and be ready to offer them tea the minute they've said 'Good
afternoon.'"
Sally hurried away to the house, leaving Uncle Timothy standing
guard over the tea-table and keeping a weather eye on the gathering
patch of clouds.
But it could rain right away, as it presently proved. By the time Sally
crossed the lawn with her plates of bread and butter and tiny sugary
cakes, Mary Ann following with the tray holding the tea equipage, there
were strong indications of what was soon to happen. Sally had not more
than decided that it was best to retreat to the porch and await
developments, than the first drops on her upturned forehead warned her
that the retreat could not be too hasty.
The Ferry party, coming through the gap in the hedge a few minutes
earlier than they would have done if it had not seemed expedient to
forestall the gathering shower, saw the scurrying hosts. Jarvis and Max
were with them, for it was Saturday afternoon. The Ferrys themselves were
forced to make haste also, and as a result, guests and hostess, tea-tray
and chairs, bread-and-butter and violets, reached the shelter of the big
porch at nearly the same time, and sixty seconds later the first pursuing
dash of rain rattled against the pillars.
"It's too bad," cried Sally, breathless and laughing, as she turned
around to greet her guests, little curls escaping about her forehead and
over her ears, in spite of all her previous care to insure their smooth
order. But her hand gave warm welcome all around the circle, and she led
the party into the wide hall, now transformed by the waxing of its dark
floor and the presence of several old-time rag rugs, into a
hospitable-looking entrance. "Put the tea-table here by the open door,
please, Max," she directed. "We'll be as near out of doors as we can."
At the first sound of voices Mrs. Burnside and Josephine had appeared,
and between them things were in order in the new setting in less time
than it takes to tell it. A great bunch of daffodils on an old table near
the door made the spot seem quite festive enough for the occasion, and
Sally, when she had caught her breath and pushed back the distracting
curls, proved herself to possess a fair amount of the poise of the
accustomed hostess whom nothing can really upset. She rearranged her
tea-table just inside the hall door, and before she had finished, a dash
of sunshine fell across it, making her declare, as she settled the bowl
of violets, that if the shower could just have confined its efforts to
her garden, which needed watering, and not to sprinkling the lawn, which
didn't need it, she would not have felt so ungrateful to it.
"And we came especially to see the garden," said Janet Ferry. "We've
heard of that garden in every letter since the first of April." She
looked at her brother with a mischievous twinkle in her hazel eyes, much
like his own.
"Do tell me what you have heard," said Sally serenely, preparing to make
her tea, and sending Max for the hot water. "The really important things,
like the coming up of the sweet peas, or unimportant ones, like the
strange way the weeds have of appearing faster than the seeds?"
From the nonchalance of this question it will be seen that Sally herself
thought nothing of the fact that items concerning her garden should have
seemed of sufficient importance to go into the letters of a brother whose
time was ordinarily occupied with affairs much more momentous. The garden
was of overwhelming importance to Sally, why shouldn't it be interesting
to everybody? But there were two people in the company besides his sister
who glanced rather quickly at Donald Ferry. He, however, seemed to think
there could be no reason for anybody's minding what he might choose to
write about.
"Here were two girls," he said, from his position in the doorway,
where he stood leaning against the lintel, watching the process of tea
making, "writing long descriptions of all sorts of rural beauties
they had discovered in their travels about Germany and France--given
them as a reward for long study by a discerning aunt. They professed
special interest in gardens. Should I refrain from telling them about
the only one in sight, even though it couldn't be said to have reached
the show stage?"
"You certainly didn't refrain," said Miss Constance Carew, smiling at him
from her seat near Sally. "We were told that if we would spend the summer
here, one of our chief joys would be the old, box-bordered garden."
"So long as it helped to bring you, I don't regret it," said he,
returning the smile in a way which made those who observed decide at once
that these other two were old and familiar friends. Miss Carew, though
she was not precisely a pretty girl, was really beautiful when she
smiled, and had, at all times, an undeniable charm about her which came
from one knew not just what. She was rather tall but very graceful, and
her manner had about it an indefinable something which made one like to
watch her, admiring each move she made as something done just a little
differently from the way other people did it.
Sally poured her tea, and the three young men handed about the cups.
Everybody fell to talking at once. Max, who had had an approving eye
on Miss Janet Ferry from the first, and had decided that he should much
prefer her conversation to that of her more impressive friend, drew up
a chair beside her when his duties were over, and presently proved her
to be as blithely entertaining as her appearance had promised. She was
a small person in stature, but her personality was one not to be
ignored. She looked like a miniature edition of her brother, heavy
braids of the same red-brown hair wound about her small head, the same
brilliant, good-humoured hazel eyes looking out of a prepossessing
young face, and the same seemingly quick appreciation of everything
other people said and did making her a delightful person to talk with.
Max, as he supplied her with bread-and-butter, plied her with questions
about her life in Germany, and listened to her vivacious stories of her
experiences, thinking that it was a long time since he had met a girl
he liked so well.
"You don't know how much it means to Constance and Janet to find two
girls of their own sort so near," declared Donald Ferry, bringing his cup
to take it with Josephine close beside the doorway. "I think they've been
feeling a little dubious over finding us out here in a place which had
neither lake, seashore, nor mountains to recommend it."
"Perhaps they're still feeling so," suggested Josephine. "There's not
much about tea in a shower to cheer their spirits."
"Do they look as if they needed cheering?"
Josephine glanced from Janet, laughing whole-heartedly at something Max
was apparently describing with great eloquence, to Constance Carew,
leaning back in her chair and looking up at Jarvis, who stood beside her,
with the smile which made her face a picture to study.
"It's delightful for us, I'm sure, that they've come," Josephine
said warmly.
"You'll find Janet up to the wildest schemes for sport you can devise.
And Constance, though she looks so stately, can unbend like a
school-girl. As for her voice--you must hear her pretty soon. Janet is
anxious to touch her old piano again, and both are always obliging with
their music. They are equal to quite a concert between them."
"So we've been hoping. Sally has dusted the piano no less than five
times to-day in anticipation. You can't think what a pleasure it is to
Sally just to see that piano standing there. It happens to be almost
the precise duplicate of the one that was sold when her old home was
broken up."
"I'm glad. I hope she uses it?"
"Not in a way that she would let me call using it. She sits down
and plays little bits--mostly out of her head, I think. She--Why,
what's that?"
It was Bob, tearing by the front door and yelling as he ran:
"Team running away in the south meadow--man knocked down!"
In an instant three teacups clinked and clattered as they were set
hastily down, and three male figures bolted out of the door, without
apology further than three ejaculations of surprise and chagrin. Mr. Rudd
followed at a brisk walk. As for the portion of the company remaining,
they also put aside teacups and plates, and followed Sally to the
living-room.
They ran in to the four windows of the long room, between two of which
stood the piano. Janet Ferry gave it a private nod and pat as she went
by, whispering, "You dear old thing! I'll speak to you as soon as I can."
They could see the runaway team, a plough jerking at their heels, dashing
madly across the furrows, one of the horses apparently much wilder than
the other. They saw Jarvis, Ferry, and Max reach the rail fence at nearly
the same moment, and go over it at a rate of speed which suggested danger
to trousers-legs. Bob could be discerned, racing frantically in the wake
of the careering horses, and in the nearer distance Mr. Rudd could be
heard shouting something wholly unintelligible.
One of the running figures halted near the fence, stooping, and the
watching eyes understood that the presumably injured ploughman was
lying there.
"It's Don that has stopped," said Janet Ferry to her mother. "Now
he'll probably have a new case on his hands. I do hope the man isn't
much hurt."
"I can't stay here to look!" cried Sally, and, gathering up her lilac
skirts, ran away out of the room. In a moment they saw her flying across
the wet grass, her tea-party forgotten.
"I am going too," and Janet Ferry, delicate folds of pale gray silk
caught up as Sally had caught up her muslin, was off in Sally's train.
Josephine and Constance Carew looked at each other. The guest nodded. "I
don't mind the wet grass," said she--though one glance at the ephemeral
fabric of her frock made Josephine say, as the two hurried to the hall,
"Had you really better? The grass is soaking."
"Who cares for clothes when there's a runaway?" replied Miss Carew.
"Besides, this will tub, and yours won't."
"But the man may be badly hurt," and away went Josephine, high-heeled
pumps making her flight a trifle dangerous, over the slippery turf. And
her guest ran at her side.
By the time they reached the meadow fence the team had been brought
panting to a standstill, cornered by Bob and Jarvis at the far end of the
meadow. When Donald Ferry looked up from the prostrate form of the
ploughman, he beheld four figures in dainty dresses also brought to a
stand-still by a splintery rail fence over which it did not seem
discretion to attempt to scramble unless the need were dire.
It was not dire. Jake Kelly had only been stunned by striking his head
upon a big stone just upturned by his plough. He was already opening his
eyes and the colour was returning to his sunburned face. He put his hand
to his head.
"All right," called Ferry to the row of anxious faces by the fence, at
which the tense expressions relaxed, and certain dimples began to play.
If nobody were seriously hurt, the situation certainly had its amusing
side. Five minutes ago they had all been demurely drinking afternoon tea,
with the most correct society manners evident on all sides. They had not
known each other very well, but each had wondered what the others were
like upon less formal occasions. And suddenly a decidedly less formal
occasion had been precipitated into their midst.
"Guess I ain't much the wuss for wear," declared Jake Kelly, sitting up.
"All's hurt's my feelin's at havin' that there team git away from me like
that. The old mare's steady's a clock--thought she could hold the young
one down, if he did git lively. Dunno now what he took off at. Serves me
right for trustin' 'em a minute while I lit up my pipe."
Bob, on the old mare's back, and Jarvis, at the bits of the young horse,
were bringing back the plough undamaged by its brisk career across the
field. Jarvis certainly presented a somewhat incongruous appearance in
his afternoon attire, as he plunged along the furrows in foot-gear not
intended for locomotion over freshly ploughed land. Jake rose to his
feet, answering the queries of Ferry at his side as to his fitness for
continuing work with a decided: "Sure I am. Sha'n't get even with myself
for that fool trick till I've done a good dozen furrows. You don't ketch
that there pair o'hosses gittin' away from Jake Kelly again this day!"
"The rescue party may as well go back to the teacups," observed
Jarvis, as the whole group, standing partly on the one and partly on
the other side of the rail fence, watched the now subdued team take a
fresh start under the guidance of a vigilant driver with a large bump
on the back of his head, which he had refused to have treated in any
way but with contempt.
Saying which, Jarvis mounted the fence--tearing a slight rent near the
hem of his trousers-leg because he was not looking where he went. He had
been observing the effect of the now brilliant sunshine on an uncovered
fair head, and in the fashion of Jake he accepted the proffered sympathy
of Bob on the disaster to his clothing with a murmured: "Serves me right
for not attending strictly to business."
The company marched back in more orderly ranks than it had come forth.
Max found himself by the side of Constance Carew, and discovered that she
had quite as strong a sense of humour as Janet Ferry, for she described
to him most amusingly the way in which the four girls had abandoned all
concern for their afternoon finery, and had rushed forth prepared to help
bear a stretcher down a wet ploughed field, or share in dashing about in
the attempt to catch the runaway team.
"This is what comes," said he, in reply, and looking around at Sally with
mirth in his eye, "of trying to be fashionable on a farm."
"Trying to be fashionable!" cried Sally, behind him, catching the words.
"I was merely trying to be hospitable. But Fate evidently didn't mean I
should be either. Twice in one afternoon!"
"Let's go back and turn the tea-drinking into a musicale," suggested
Ferry. "I know my sister is longing to get her hands on the piano."
"You shouldn't propose to have your own family perform," Janet reproached
her brother.
"Why shouldn't I? I haven't heard you play for two years, nor Constance
sing for three. No false modesty shall keep me from demanding to be
satisfied."
"I heard somebody telling somebody else I had dusted the piano five times
to-day," said Sally, as she led the way in, "and I surely ought to be
rewarded for such care as that."
So they trooped in, a somewhat less faultlessly attired party than they
had gone out, for Sally's curls were more rebellious than ever,
Josephine's skirts had a mud stain on their hem, Jarvis's rent showed
plainly, and everybody's foot-gear was decidedly the worse for the run
over wet sod and fresh earth. But they had left behind them all stiffness
born of untried acquaintance, had discovered that there was nobody in the
company who could not be depended upon to play a gallant part in whatever
emergency might arise, and were in a mood thoroughly to enjoy the
remainder of the visit.
Without being asked again Janet went straight to the piano, sat down at
it as if it were the old friend it claimed to be, and with one or two
affectionate soft layings of her hands upon it in almost noiseless
chords, as if she were asking it something to which it responded under
its breath, swept into a movement from one of the greatest compositions
the world knows.
When she finished she looked up at her brother, who had come to stand
close beside the instrument. Her eyes were full of tears, and his were by
no means free from a suspicion of moisture. Evidently the sound of the
familiar keys had many associations for both, and they were associations
which their mother shared, for her face was turned away toward the open
window, and she was very still.
But in a minute more Janet had turned to beckon to her friend, and was
beginning an accompaniment without so much as waiting for Constance to
reach the piano. Smiling, the tall girl found a place beside it just in
time to take up her part. And then--the listeners held their breath. The
golden notes rang through the rooms and out upon the warm May air, while
the singer herself seemed as little to be "performing" as if the song had
been a mere child's play tune.
"What made you start with that?" protested Constance, in her friend's
ear, the moment it was over. "Such a show song!"
But Donald, from the other side of the piano, leaned across. "Don't
mind," he whispered. "Any of the simple things would have done us out
just now."
Constance nodded quickly. The next minute, with a word to Janet, she had
plunged into a gay little German song, with a spirit in it as light as
the spring itself, and every one was smiling.
When they had gone, Jarvis, passing through the hall with a glance into
the room where the piano stood, caught a glimpse of Sally standing by the
open window, looking after the four who were just disappearing through
the hedge. He crossed the room softly and looked out over her head.
"They're all right, aren't they?" said he.
"Splendid!" agreed Sally. "I like them both, even more than I expected."
Then she added, in a lower tone, "I'd give the hair off my head to be
able to make such music as that, either with my hands or with my voice."
Jarvis, smiling to himself, unperceived touched one fair strand with a
reverent hand. "I wouldn't give," said he, "even for such magnificent
music as that, so much as that one curl over your right ear--if another
wouldn't grow there in its place."
Sally faced about. "The idea!" said she. "Of course you wouldn't. It's
not yours, sir, to give! But I'd cut it off, when you weren't looking!"