Part 4

“I’d rather have these gorgeous hills than all the mountains going,” Kit declared with her usual forcefulness. “We seem to be going up higher and higher all the time.”

“So we are,” Jean told her. “It’s a steady rise from New London to Norwich, then up to our own Quinnebaug hills. Are you warm enough, Mom?”

“Plenty,” said Mrs. Craig happily. “Though it is ever so much cooler here than on Long Island, isn’t it?”

“We’ve got an open log fire in your room all ready for you,” Jean replied. “You can just sit and toast away to your heart’s content.”

“For gosh sake, who ever had the courage to carry all the rocks for these stone walls?” asked Kit.

“Those are the stones that were ploughed up when the land was cultivated,” answered Jean. “The land here is particularly stony, so instead of wooden fences, the farmers use the stones they uncover for marking off their boundaries. Our house will probably have them too.”

“Oh, how you talk, dear,” laughed Mrs. Craig. “When we haven’t even a home yet. You’d think there was a baronial estate waiting for us.”

“There is,” Jean answered mysteriously. “Becky and I think that we’ve found the right place. Dad hasn’t seen it, of course, but I found it, and Becky said we couldn’t get it because somebody’d died, and it had gone to people out West.”

“Which gave our precious old Jean a chance to delve into mystery,” Kit suggested. “Yes, yes, go on, kid. You’re killing us with suspense. What did you find out?”

“Oh, I found him,” said Jean, enthusiastically. “He lives away out West in Saskatoon, and has never even seen this place, so he’s willing to sell it for almost nothing, $4,000, and even that includes the water power.”

Kit shook her head deploringly.

“Listen to the poor child, Mom. She chats of thousands as if they were split peas and she was making soup.”

“Shut up, Kit. He’ll rent it for sixty-five dollars a month, timber rights reserved excepting for our own use, and we can sell the hay.”

“How many rooms, dear?” asked Mrs. Craig.

“Seven,” replied Jean. “They call it Woodhow and I think it’s a beautiful name.”

“Where is it?” Doris inquired cautiously.

“When can we move in?” Tommy asked practically.

“Well, you can see the roof, I think, as soon as we get up to the top of Peck’s Hill. I’ll stop then. It’s fearfully lonesome, and maybe you’d rather be in the village. Becky says that some people do say—”

“Make her shut up,” Kit exclaimed. “Jean, you’re talking exactly like Becky. Isn’t she, Mother?”

“Never mind, dear. Go right on,” comforted Mrs. Craig, smiling at the eager young face beside her. Three weeks at Maple Grove had surely taken a lot of the spread out of Jean’s sails.

“I don’t think we’d be one bit lonely. It’s about a mile from Maple Grove, and half a mile from Mr. Peck’s place down the valley, and the mail goes right by the door. And there’s an old ruined stone mill on an island, and a waterfall, and a bridge, and big pines along the terrace in the front yard. It does need painting, I suppose, and shingling in spots, and the porch lops a little bit where it needs shoring up, Matt told me—” Jean stopped for breath.

“Specify Matt,” Doris asked mildly. “We don’t know a thing about Matt, Jeannie.”

“He’s the hired man, and he can do anything.”

“But, dear,” interrupted Mrs. Craig, “can’t you realize that there must be something wrong with it or it never would be rented for such a sum.”

“Oh, there is,” Jean replied promptly. “It’s too far from the railroad or village, and the mill burned down six years ago, and the owner died from the shock of losing everything he had, and there it stands, going to rack and ruin, Becky says, waiting for the Craigs to appear and turn it into a home.”

“How about school?” asked Kit suddenly.

Jean waved her hand grandly.

“Who wants a school out here? But if you’re so set on one, there’s a school over at the Gayhead crossroads. There’s a school bus that picks the kids up and takes them home again at night.”

“Jean has us all moved and settled already,” Mrs. Craig said. “I’m sure I’d like to be near where Rebecca lives.”

“Well, there it is,” Jean exclaimed happily. Ella Lou pricked up her ears and started to whine excitedly. Down one little hill, up another, over a culvert, and suddenly there appeared white chimneys rising above an apple orchard at the top of the hill.

“There it is,” she said, pointing to it with her hand. “Seven miles from nowhere, but right next door to heaven.”

8. The House on the Hill

The following morning Miss Craig said she thought she would drive down to Woodhow with Margaret Ann herself, and they’d look it over.

“If you children feel like coming down, why don’t you walk over. You can take the short cut through the woods. It’s not far. Like enough you’ll find some bloodroot out by now and saxifrage too. Don’t be like Jean, though. The other day she came up from the brook and said she’d found a calla lily, and it was just skunk cabbage.”

So the girls and Tommy took the short cut through the woods. They were just beginning to show signs of spring. The trees were bare, but under the dry leaves they found the new life springing. It was all new and interesting to them. Down at the Cove they had been in a beautiful part of Long Island but it was all restricted property. Here the woods and meadows spread for miles in every direction. Every pasture bar seemed to invite one to climb over it and explore. And where the woods ended in rocky pastures and wide spreading fields, they came out to a spot where they overlooked Woodhow and its grounds.

Becky and Mrs. Craig were there before them. The side door stood hospitably open and Ella Lou was lying on the front porch just as though she belonged there. It was a curiously interesting old place. First of all, a rock wall enclosed the grounds, with rock columns at the two entrance gates. These were wide, for the drive entered on one side, wound around the house, and came out on the other road, as the house stood at a corner.

The house itself looked like a glorified farmhouse, although it was hard to place it in the history of architecture.

“I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the porch,” said Mrs. Craig.

“That isn’t Mid-Victorian, Mother darling,” Jean interposed. “That’s the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan Women had any time to sit out on porches, so all the houses were made plain-faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn’t that so, Becky?”

“Well, I declare, Jeannie,” laughed Becky, “maybe you’re right. I’d say, though, it was mostly a hankering after modernization. I don’t set much store by it myself, so long as I’ve got plenty of flowering shrubs around a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you’ve got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and peonies, and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden.”

“A rose garden!” Kit and Doris gasped.

“Let’s go and see if we can find it,” cried Jean.

Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found one terrace that dipped into a sunken space once walled in. Now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose bushes, and several of the large bushes looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Tommy declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilothouse off some boat.

Doris, sitting down on the broad front steps, was listening to the music of falling water in the distance and the wind overhead in the great, slumberous pines. There were four of these, two on each side of the long terrace, with rock maples down near the rock wall and several pear and cherry trees. Along the terrace were flower beds, three on each one, outlined with clam shells.

“Miss Trowbridge used to have gladiolus set out in those beds, with pansies and sweet alyssum set around the edges, and outside again, old-hen-and-her-chickens. They looked real pretty.”

“Who was Miss Trowbridge, Becky?” asked Mrs. Craig. She sat beside Jean, her hands clasped lightly in her lap, her hat lying beside her. There was a look of content on her face, a look that had been a stranger there for many months. Tommy tossed a spray of half-blossomed cherry twigs in her lap and ran away again.

“She was sister to the Trowbridge that owned the mills. She married some man out in Canada, lived awhile out there, then gave up and died. She never did have much backbone that I could see, but she loved flowers. Did you notice a big glass bay window off the dining room? She called that her conservatory. I remember asking her once if it was her ‘conversationary,’ and how she did laugh at me! Well, every one can’t be expected to know everything. It’s all I can do to keep up with Elmhurst these days. Her name was Francelia and she married a McRae.”

“But who had the place after she and her brother died?”

Rebecca never believed in directness when it came to genealogies. She delighted in them, and would slip her glasses down to the middle of her long nose, elevate her chin, and go after a family tree like a government forester.

“Well, according to my way of thinking, it should belong to Sally Hancock and her brother Buzzy. His name’s Seth, but they call him Buzzy. Their mother was Luella Trowbridge, sister to Francelia and Tom who owned the mills, but she married Clint Hancock against everybody’s word, and her father cut her off in his will, and never saw her from the day she was married. Tom did the same, but Francelia used to go over and see her after Sally and Buzzy were born. They live down near Nantic. You must have passed the house, little bit of a gray one with rambler roses all over it, and a well sweep at one side. The property went to Francelia after Tom died, and she had one boy. He’s out in Northwest Canada now and don’t give a snap of his finger for this place, when there’s Sally and Buzzy loving it to death and can’t hardly walk on the grass. Still, I suppose if they went to law, they’d get nothing out of it after all the lawyers had been satisfied.”

Kit and Doris listened open-eyed.

“My goodness, Becky,” exclaimed Kit, “how on earth do you ever manage to keep track of all of them?”

“Keep track of them? Land, child, that ain’t anything after you’ve been to school with them and lived neighbors all your life. You children will like Sally and her brother, and maybe you can help put a little happiness into their lives, poor youngsters.”

“Oh, Mom, I love this place already,” whispered Jean contentedly, snuggling close to her mother’s side.

“Do you, dear?” Mrs. Craig smiled down into her eldest child’s face. For some reason she always waited for Jean’s judgment and opinion.

“Yes, I do, because it isn’t really a farm and still we can have a garden and sell the hay and get out wood and raise all we need for ourselves. I don’t think we can do much else the first year, can we, Becky?”

“If you do all that you’ll be getting along fine. I’m going to start you off chicken raising with a lot of little ones from my incubator. You can buy all you want for ten cents apiece, and if you get about fifteen last year pullets and a rooster, you’ve got your barnyard family all started.”

“Oh, I’d like to take care of the incubator chickens. May I, please?” begged Tommy instantly. “I think one of the saddest things in life is to be hatched without a mother.”

“Sympathetic Tommy,” laughed Kit, catching him down on the grass and rolling him over. “He’s going to adopt all the chickens and gosh knows what else.”

“I’m going to keep bees,” Doris announced dramatically, yet with a certain aloofness in her manner. “I want a garden and bees that bring me home the honey from the clover fields.”

“Lovely,” Jean exclaimed, hugging her knees, and rocking to and fro contentedly. “You always select such royal occupations, Doris. I shall be the middleman of the farm. I am going to find markets for all you raise. I’ll make the farm pay expenses. We’ll need a trailer to attach to the rear bumper of the car to hold the produce. I think we ought to go into the village soon and see about getting one. I want the place, don’t you Mother?”

“I think I shall love it,” said Mrs. Craig, lifting her face to the swaying pine boughs overhead. “I wish that I could stay here now and not have to go away at all.”

“We’d better get started,” said Becky. She rose from the porch step. “Ella Lou’s begun to get restless and that’s to let me know it’s almost noon. She can always tell the time when the sun gets high.”

“I feel sure Mom wants the place, don’t you, Jean?” Kit asked as they went up through the woods towards home. “All the time we were going through the house I could see every bit of our furniture in the right places there. And there’s so much room that Dad will hardly know the difference between this place and the old one at the Cove. He could have that room overlooking the valley on the second floor. You can see the big brown stone dam from there and the ruins of the mill, and hear the falling water. I wish we had time to climb out over the old dam to the mill.”

“It’s better than living right in a village,” Jean answered, pushing aside the young birches that crowded the way. “I rather dreaded that somehow. Everybody’d want to know all about us right off, and why we came up, and what ailed Dad, and everything else. I hope, though, Mother won’t be lonely here. You know, kids, it’s lonely for a woman like her, where Becky doesn’t mind it.”

“We’ll have to pitch in and make up to her for everything she’s left behind,” said Doris solemnly.

“Dear old Dorrie.” Kit put her arm around her sister and squeezed her affectionately.

“It’s all a question of system,” Jean thought aloud, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray flannel slacks. “We’ll have to make a business of living, and learn how to do things we hate to do with the least effort.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you’re just a bluffer, Jean Craig,” exclaimed Doris suddenly, “just a bluffer. Anyone would think to hear you talk that you actually enjoyed going without things. Of course when we’re with Mother and Dad, or even Becky, we have to put on a whole lot, but when we’re alone I do think we might at least be sincere with ourselves. We all know how we feel at heart about this sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Kit, on the offensive instantly. “What are you driving at?”

“Giving up everything we’ve been used to, and living out here in the woods. I’m going to miss the girls most of all.”

“Well, we don’t like losing everything any better than you do, Doris,” Jean said soothingly. “Only—”

“Don’t pat me,” retorted Doris, shaking off her hand. “I know I’m selfish, and I’m beginning to feel sorry I said anything. Only it does look so bleak and forlorn here somehow.”

“But if you have to do a thing, why, you just have to do it, that’s all,” Kit declared. “It’s better to make up your mind you’re going to like it, besides, I really think I am. Look at that cow ahead of us. It must have strayed.”

Through the birches ahead they could see some object obstructing the narrow path, its back towards them. Large as a cow it was, and reddish brown, but in place of short horns, this animal had spreading antlers, and Jean caught sight of its round puff of a tail.

“Hey, kids, it’s a deer!”

At her voice the deer started and pushed into the thick underbrush until it came to a stone wall. They watched it rise and clear it at a bound like a thoroughbred horse, its knees bent under, its head held high. Then it was gone.

“Well, isn’t that simply breathtaking, but I mean, simply divine? Wish we could tame some, don’t you?”

They all agreed.

Tommy ran along the path ahead of them. “I like this ever so much better than the Cove,” he called. “It’s all so wild and free.”

They paused at a spur of land that looked out over the long valley. Little River flowed in a winding course marked by alders and willows. Now that there was no foliage to obscure the view, they could catch a glimpse here and there of a red roof or a white chimney. There was the Smith mill, then the old white Murray homestead with its weather vane standing on a little hill like a big yardarm at large. Then came their own old ruined mill, half tumbling down, with empty window casings, all overgrown with woodbine and poison ivy. Farther up the valley one caught the hum of another mill, purring musically in a sort of crescendo scale ending in a snappy zip as the log broke.

As they neared Maple Grove, Jean exclaimed suddenly, “I just seem to have the feeling that we all belong here somehow! I know we’re going to love it.”

9. Fateful Moment

That very night a council was held of what Mr. Craig termed “the Board of Amateur Experts.”

“I think I need Matt in here for support,” he said laughingly from his favorite resting place, the old-fashioned, high-backed couch in the sitting room.

Maple Grove was a large, comfortable house. There was a front entrance, a side entrance and a well room at the back of the kitchen. There was a parlor and a front bedroom, a side bedroom and a big sunny sitting room that was dining room also, and finally the old kitchen with its Dutch oven and hooks in the ceiling for hanging up smoked beef and bacon sides.

Not that Becky ever used the Dutch oven nowadays except to store things away in. She had instead a fine modern electric stove over which she hovered like a sorceress from five A. M. to eleven A. M., producing such marvels of cookery that held the girls spellbound—raised doughnuts with jam inside and powdered sugar outside, apple turnovers made with Peck’s Pleasants and rich Baldwins, ginger cookies, large as saucers with scalloped edges, soft and rich as butterscotch, and pies, with rich, flaky crust and delectable filling in endless varieties. Jean declared that she had learned more about cooking in the few weeks she had lived at Maple Grove than in all her life before.

“Well, there’s cooking and cooking, girls,” Rebecca had replied placidly, fishing for brown doughnuts with her long, hand-wrought iron fork. “It’s one thing to cook when you’ve got everything to do with, and quite another when you are eternally figuring out how to make both ends meet. Of course, I don’t have to do that. Land knows there’s plenty to eat and more too, but it’s all plain food, and you’ve got to learn how to toss vegetables around in forty different ways out here if you want any variety.”

It was that evening that the Board of Amateur Experts discussed everything that lay ahead of them from the said vegetables to chickens, cows, horses, and farm implements.

Mr. Craig had seemed relieved when he was sure that his wife approved of Woodhow. It was near Maple Grove and Rebecca, he said, and they would surely need both many times during their first experimental year in the country. Also, it was on the mail route, and not too large a place in acreage for them to handle. There was a good apple orchard, a little run-down, but it would be all right with pruning and proper care. Besides, there were four good pear trees, two large cherry trees, white hearts and red, and three crabapple trees.

“Guess if you hunt around, you might find some quinces too, and plenty of berries and currants,” Rebecca said. “It’s been let go to waste the past few years, and it’ll take a year or more to get it back into shape. You’d better write out West and get a three-year lease, with option of purchase.”

“We couldn’t think of buying it, even with a GI loan from the government,” Mrs. Craig demurred, “but we might try the three-year lease. What do you think, dear?”

“I should write tonight,” Mr. Craig told her confidently. “Even if I should gain my health completely, we could still stay up here summers, and you all would enjoy it, I know. Look at Tommy’s red cheeks, and Jean looks like another girl. If I keep on much longer on Becky’s cooking, I expect to be mowing hay in the lower meadows by July.”

So the letter was written, the wonderful letter freighted with so many hopes. All the youngsters escorted Mrs. Craig down to the mailbox at the crossroads the next noon. It was truly a fateful moment, as Kit remarked solemnly. So much depended upon the nature of the answer from far-off Saskatoon. Perched on the fence rail Tommy began to whistle loudly.

“What’s his name, Mom?” asked Kit.

“Ralph McRae,” Jean answered for her mother.

“You know, really, Tommy,” protested Doris, “if you could just see how ridiculous you look on that fence rail, you’d come down.”

But Tommy ignored her and kept to the rail all the same, whistling. Even Kit felt the inspiration of the moment.

“Oh, I love these April mornings! You can smell everything that’s sweet and new in the air, can’t you, Mom? And I found arbutus buds down in the pines too, and an old crow’s nest, and the crocuses are up.”

Mrs. Craig lifted her face to the blue sky with its great white clouds that drifted up from the south and sighed contentedly.

“There comes the mailman down the wildwood way,” Jean called from the curve of the road.

Already they had grown to watch for mail as the one real event of the day. Mr. Ricketts, the rural free delivery carrier, was a typical product of a small community, with his cap pushed back on his head, a smile of perpetual well-being on his face.

“Looks like we’d get a spell of fine weather,” he called. “Tell Miss Craig I noticed a postcard for her about her subscription being up for her floral monthly, and if she ain’t going to renew hers, I’ll send in my own for this year.”

“Now just hear that,” exclaimed Becky when she was given the message. “He’s read my floral monthly regularly coming along the route. Well, I don’t know as I mind. He’s a real good mail carrier anyhow, and all men have failings. But Tom Ricketts knows better than to read my floral monthly without so much as by your leave. But I’ll renew it.”

“He must have read the postcard too,” said Doris.

“Read it?” Becky sniffed audibly. “I’d like to see anything get by them down at that post office. They know a sight more about you than you do yourself. Postmaster Willetts could sit down singlehanded and write a history of the local inhabitants of this town just from memory and postcards, I don’t doubt a bit.”

The very next day the girls and Tommy went again to Woodhow. The keys were at Mr. Weaver’s, the next house down the road from Maple Grove. It was a rambling gray house sitting far back from the road and facing the western hills. Philip Weaver lived there alone. He was ninety-one and had had six wives, Rebecca told them.

“Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly’s buried them all reverently and properly.”

They found the old man working at a carpenter’s bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean-shaven. Tommy said he looked like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she’d ever seen, and the most Winsome smile.

“Winsome? Philly Weaver Winsome?” laughed Rebecca when she heard it. “Well, I must say, Kit, that is the best description yet. Winsome!”