Part 4

She leaned out from the buggy, glowing, eager, sure of sympathy, in spite of the apparent lack of enthusiasm.

“I’m going to Pittsfield, Jimmy. I’m going to have a new hat—with pink roses!”

Jimmy Dawes’ eyes sought Archibald’s.

“Ain’t girls the limit?” he said genially, as man to brother man.

But Pegeen refused to be suppressed.

“’N’ a new dress ’n’ shoes!” she confided happily.

Jimmy, having asserted the superiority of his sex, like many a male creature before him, felt that he could afford to humor the inferior feminine.

“That’s great!” he said with warm friendliness. “You’ll look fine.”

Pegeen beamed upon him. “I knew you’d be glad,” she said. “This is Mr. Archibald, Jimmy. I’m seeing to him.”

The grin on the boy’s face widened to show more of his white teeth. There was something refreshingly wholesome about the soundness and whiteness of those teeth, the amplitude of the grin, the clear frankness of the eyes, the tanned ruddiness of the skin, the sturdiness of his two brown legs.

“I guess you’ll get seen to all right, if Peg’s on the job,” he said.

“Come down and see us, Jimmy,” urged Pegeen.

“Yes, do. Come down and go fishing with me,” added Archibald, and then wondered at himself for having said it. He had never cared for small boys—nor for small girls. Come to think of it, he had never really known any.

“All right. I’ll show you some dandy pools.” Jimmy’s acceptance was prompt and blithe. He was used to comradeship and confident that Peg wouldn’t vouch for an undesirable.

“He’s the nicest boy,” Archibald’s companion explained as they drove away. “Mostly they pester, you know, but Jimmy doesn’t. He treats you as if you were another boy ’n’ when you can’t do things, he sort of pretends it’s because you don’t want to ’n’ the other boys don’t dare be horrid when he’s around ’cause he can do most everything better than they can, and he licked every single one of them—when he first came. He said he didn’t do it because he was mad, but just to show them and get it over.”

“He hasn’t always lived here then?” asked Archibald.

“Oh, no. He just stays with his grandfather and grandmother. His father married again down in New York ’n’ I guess Jimmy missed his mother ’n’ then his father didn’t think cities were good for boys, ’n’ old Mrs. Dawes adores Jimmy, ’n’ so he’s going to live here for awhile. Mr. Colby—the minister, you know—teaches him queer things like Latin and algebra ’n’ some day he’ll have to go away and be educated and rich.”

Her lips drooped woefully at the thought—but reassurances came quickly. “He says he’s such an awful dub at Latin that he won’t be ready for college for years ’n’ years. That’s lucky anyway.”

The road left the Valley behind and climbed skyward between lines of wonderfully built stone walls that had little in common with the vagabond, straggling stone heaps that marked property confines in the Valley. Behind the walls orchards clung to the sloping hillsides—old orchards that gave evidences of early care and training but were lapsing from grace in their latter days. They had not been able to live up to the walls that enclosed them, yet the broad spreading trees had a dignity of their own. They were decaying but they had given bountifully in their day. One felt that.

“The men who built these walls were in earnest,” Archibald said reflectively as he eyed the width and height of them, their perfect alignment, their broad level tops.

Pegeen nodded.

“Shakers,” she explained. “I guess they’re always awfully in earnest, only they used to build fences ’n’ now they mostly pray. You see there don’t seem to be many men with them now and women have got to pray when they’re in earnest. They can’t build walls.”

“That may be one way of building walls.”

She saw what he meant. Pegeen usually saw what people meant. That was one reason she was such a comforting small person.

“Yes, I know, but it’s sort of nice to leave walls standing up to show for years ’n’ years. Women bake ’n’ scrub ’n’ wash dishes ’n’ the next day it’s all gone and has to be done over again. The Shaker women are working like sixty and they’re perfectly splendid at praying, but the farms are running down. I do think it’s sort of discouraging being a woman—but I like it.”

“Bless your heart!” There was a tenderness for more than the child in Archibald’s eyes as he looked down into the sensitive, glowing face—a sudden tenderness for all the dear women who found their womanhood discouraging, yet gloried in it.

Faces looked out through the shining windows of the great brick buildings as the man and girl drove through the Shaker village—sweet, kindly faces that smiled in return to Pegeen’s waving hand.

“They’re such dears,” she said enthusiastically. “They wanted me to come up here when I didn’t have anybody, but I’d rather come sometimes for a little while and then go away where the folks aren’t so holy and clean all the time. I love them to death and it’s terribly noble to go off and not get married and wear scoop bonnets and keep your floors as white as chalk, but I guess I’m not noble inside—’n’ anyway, if all the women went off and were holy and clean who’d see to the dirty and unholy folks?”

“Peggy,” said Archibald, earnestly, urgently, “if you should ever feel an attack of cleanly holiness coming on—the noble kind—fight it off. Take something for it. We unholy dirty sinners need you.”

“Don’t worry.” Pegeen’s tone was reassuring. “I’m not going to wear a scoop bonnet—not while there are hats with pink roses on them—but the Shakers are darlings all the same. Miss Moran just loves them.”

“She’s a very loving person.” There was an edge of criticism in his voice.

Pegeen thought it over.

“Yes, she is,” she admitted finally. “She loves most anybody—but then there are a few she loves _especially_ and that’s quite different. It’s like being loved by a foreign missionary and being loved by your mother, you know. I’d lots rather be loved because I was nice than because I was a human soul, wouldn’t you?”

“I would,” assented Archibald with fervor.

When Susy, the Neal horse, had been intrusted to the tender care of a livery stable hostler in Pittsfield and the two whom she had brought from over the hills turned their faces toward Ranson and Kirby’s Dry Goods Emporium, Pegeen’s feet absolutely refused to conduct themselves sedately. Skip they would, in spite of all of her ideas of seemly behavior. Four sedate steps and then a skip was the final compromise, and in order to achieve that Peg had to anchor to something substantial.

She slipped a small brown hand into her companion’s large one and looked up at him with dancing eyes.

“If I don’t hold on to something, I’ll go up like a balloon,” she confided. “I don’t feel as if I weighed anything—especially my feet ’n’ my heart.”

Archibald squeezed the small hand tightly.

“Miss Pegeen O’Neill, if you should let your feet float up and your head thump down, I should consider you a Young Person unfit to be trusted with a hat trimmed in pink roses.”

She chuckled gaily.

“But think of the chance the new shoes and stockings would have,” she urged. “I guess I can stay down though, if you don’t let go.”

So they went into the shop hand in hand. Salesfolk and customers looked at the pair—and looked again, and smiled—kindly smiles, touched with curiosity. The two were so oddly mated—the tall lean man with his clean-cut, homely, clever face, his air of authority, his loose-hanging, irreproachably-cut, well-worn tweeds, the slim shabby little girl with happiness flooding her eyes, dimpling her cheeks, playing over her lips.

“Ain’t she a good feeler though!” a blonde at the ribbon counter remarked to the girl next to her. “Makes you ache to see anybody as pleased with things as all that.”

“I c’d be sort of pleased with his Nibs myself,” admitted the friend. “Nobody’s pretty boy but kind of mannish and looks as if he had the price, and c’d be parted from it if he felt good and like it. Guess he’s feelin’ like it all right too. Wonder who they are? The kid’s in right. Anybody c’n see that!”

Archibald, still holding Pegeen’s hand, appealed to a stately and suave floorwalker.

“I want to do some shopping for this young lady,” he explained—“a good deal of shopping, and I’m hopelessly incapable. Now you must have some woman about the place who could take us in hand—sort of advisory committee, pilot, first-aid rôle, some one with good sense and good taste. We’re strong on taste ourselves but we’re not so sure of our sense, eh, Peg?”

She beamed up at him and then transferred the beam to the floorwalker who melted into a semblance of human interest and enthusiasm.

“Our Miss Carter’s just what you need,” he said. “I’ll send for her. She’ll be invaluable. I’d go with you myself, only duty—and of course a woman—”

“Exactly,” agreed Archibald.

Our Miss Carter materialized as a plump little woman with a firm chin, a pleasant voice, and kindly brown eyes behind eyeglasses. She understood the situation at once, without fuss, without debate. Archibald gave her Miss Moran’s list and she read it gravely.

“The hat and the parasol seem to be the most important things,” she said without hesitation. “Suppose we get them first.”

Pegeen’s hand squeezed Archibald’s ecstatically. Here was a sensible, intelligent person with a sense of values.

The pink roses were not “large pink roses” after all. Not that a heavily marcelled and enameled daughter of Israel, under Miss Carter’s stimulus, did not show the shoppers an uncommonly fine line of enormous pink roses. She was unflagging in her efforts. She called Pegeen “my dear” from the start and after the first few hats, bestowed an occasional “my dear” upon Archibald, in her fine glow of friendly feeling; but there was a certain mushroom-brimmed little hat, faced in pink and wreathed in wild roses, to which Pegeen lost her heart utterly, irrevocably, at first sight.

“They’re so darling and Valleyish,” she explained to Archibald, and he understood what she meant. Moreover, the piquant little face and the wild-rose hat rimed in a way to satisfy his artist soul and to strengthen his growing conviction that Pegeen was headed toward beauty and already well on the way. The parasol was easily chosen—a pink one to match the hat—but on the subject of frocks, there was serious debate. Archibald centered his affections upon a pink linen that Miss Carter considered impracticable from the point of view of laundering.

“Of course if she could afford to have a great many,” she began. The artist waved the laundry problem aside.

“We will take the pink one,” he announced firmly, and Pegeen heaved a sigh of satisfaction, though she had nobly sided with the advisory committee on the subject of laundering.

“And a couple of white things,” said Archibald,—“and then be as practical as you please, so long as practical doesn’t mean ugly.” There were ten frocks in the pile when they called a halt and Pegeen’s astonished eyes were so widely, darkly blue that they seemed to fill most of her face. “Now a coat and raincoat,” prompted the Fairy Godfather,—and when the coats were chosen, he felt in his pockets for his pipe.

“I’m through,” he said,—“you can run the rest of the show, on your own, Miss Carter. There’s the list, and you know what a girl her age ought to have. Get her shoes big enough and buy her everything she needs. Then I want you to take her somewhere and put her into the pink outfit—whole business; I’ll be out in front when you get through.”

An hour later, as he sat on a nail-keg in front of the hardware store next door, a vision appeared to him—a vision in pink—a vision of youth incarnate, all smiles and blushes, and tremulous hope, and heart-clutching fear.

Slowly, she turned round before him, once—twice. Then she stood still and looked at him anxiously from under the rose-wreathed new hat.

“Do you like me?” she asked, her voice high and wobbly from excitement.

“Ye gods!” he murmured feebly. “Is this the young person who is seeing to me?”

“Yes, sir,” she assured him hastily. “She’s got work clothes too, but she’s adventuring to-day.”

“My dear,” said Archibald, half seriously, “in a few years, it will be a very perilous adventure to look as pretty as all that.”

They went in to pay the bill and to thank Miss Carter, who tried in vain to look as though she had not been watching them through the window and as though she were not consumed by curiosity about them. Then they strolled away down Main Street and once more the little brown hand slipped into the big brown one.

“I don’t feel so skippy,” Pegeen explained, “but my throat’s funny and I’ve got to squeeze something. I wish I had the Johnston twins here. They are so fat and soft and nice to hug.”

At the hotel where the two lunched, they apparently created a ripple in the summer crowd’s sea of dullness. Even the dowagers and spinsters knitting on the long verandas looked interested and dropped a stitch or two as the apparition in pink lilted past them; and when Pegeen, seated at a table in the big dining-room smiled shyly, radiantly, confidingly, at the world from under the brim of the rose-wreathed hat, the world smiled back at her without reservation. It was as though the spirit of eternal youth had passed that way and set even the most scarred world-worn hearts beating to forgotten tunes.

The child’s eyes were like stars, her cheeks were pinker than her dainty frock. Happiness—unalloyed, effervescent, illimitable happiness enveloped her from the most aspiring tendril of the wild rose wreath to the toe-tips of the shining new shoes. And when she looked across the table at the Fairy Godfather in prosaic tweed, adoration elbowed rapture in the look.

“I’ve got my legs twisted around the table leg, so I can’t float up,” she told him, leaning forward and speaking in confidential tones, out of consideration for the waiter, “but I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if something would go bang, and I’d wake up at Mrs. Benderby’s in my old blue gingham and find out that I’d been dreaming you and the hat and everything.”

She behaved very prettily in spite of her excitement. Watching her, Archibald found himself thinking of what Mrs. Neal had said about the frail, proud, little mother whom love and life had broken. The hint of race and breeding in Pegeen’s face must have come from her—the dainty ways of the child too. There was no awkwardness about the small girl’s manner though this was her first introduction to a hotel menu, a waiter’s service, a crowd’s scrutiny. Archibald had wondered often at the purity of her speech, which for all its childish inconsequence held none of the vulgarisms of the untrained, and now he realized that her table manners, like her grammar, must have had early and thorough attention. Poor little mother, how she would love the child now! How she must have loved the father of the child when she tossed her own world aside for him!

“You’re looking sorry!” said the girl across the table from him. She was amazed—reproachful. How was it possible for any one to be sorry on such a day!

“I was being sorry for all the fairy god-fathers whose godchildren aren’t exactly like you, Peggy,” the man explained, and she forgave him.

The drive home was quieter than that of the morning. Pegeen was as happy as she had been, but between the happiness of anticipation and the happiness of content, the heart travels far. She was satisfied now to lean against the shabby, leather-covered back of the buggy-seat and watch the shadows lengthen across the meadows and steal silently up towards the sun-gilded hilltops.

Once in a while she looked up at Archibald to see if he was contented too. Their eyes met and then they went back to their thoughts and dreams. There were snatches of talk, flung out from Pegeen’s drifting thoughts. She wondered why pink was the happiest color and she wondered whether the black sheep in a flock was proud or ashamed, and she thought the father birds must teach the baby birds to fly because it would give mother birds nervous prostration to do it, and she guessed God didn’t give you any credit for loving all his works when you were very happy because it was easy as rolling off a log, and she was quite sure that people who lived in white houses were happier than people who lived in gray houses, and she was afraid Miss Moran would think they’d spent too much money.

“She’s coming up to see things just as soon as we get home. She promised she would. Maybe she’ll be there when we get there. We’re driving so slowly and I told her we’d surely be home before six.”

“Why bless my soul, Peg, are we fixed for visitors?” Archibald’s tone held consternation, but Pegeen treated his doubt with scorn.

“Everything’s as clean as can be, and fresh flowers and a fire laid, and I told her the key would be under the loose brick, if anything kept us and she got there first.”

It occurred to the man that there would be something extremely agreeable about finding the Smiling Lady waiting in the shack when evening brought him home. He was reconciled to the leisureliness of Susy’s ambling gait, but Pegeen insisted upon speed. She was afraid that it wouldn’t be light enough for everybody to see her hat and dress, unless they hurried.

“Of course they’d see it afterwards,” she admitted, “but they’ll be watching and it would be nice for them to talk about this evening—’n’ then I promised Jimmy.”

So Susy was urged to do her best and the sun was still shining on the Valley when the returning adventurers turned into Pisgah’s main street and encountered Jimmy Dawes, still barefoot but painfully scoured and elegant in a clean shirt and flaming red tie.

Archibald stopped without orders and Pegeen stood up in the buggy to give her friend the full benefit of her glory. She even raised the pink parasol to add to the scenic effect.

“Well, by Jingo, would you have thought it!”. Jimmy’s amazement was most satisfactory. “Ain’t she a peach?” he asked Archibald with that awed bewilderment with which the masculine always regards feminine metamorphoses. “Why, Peg, you’re getting good-looking.”

“I’ve got,” said Pegeen, with no undue elation but with deep conviction. There had been mirrors in Ranson and Kirby’s Emporium and she had consulted them without prejudice.

“Of course I’m not going to wear these all the time, but I’m not bad even in the dark gingham ones,” she asserted tranquilly.

“Well, don’t get stuck on yourself, that’s all,” counseled Jimmy.

“Gracious, no. It’s only the clothes,” she explained. “I’m not any different.”

The Valley was provided with something to talk about that evening. The fading sunlight rallied and glowed upon the pink frock and the roses, as Pegeen made her triumphal journey along the white road. An astonishing number of the Valley folk happened to be leaning over front gates or sitting on front stoops or standing in front doorways. Peggy waved her pink parasol at all and to those who came down to the gates, she called gay greetings and snatches of information about the wonderful happenings of the day.

“If it wasn’t so late, we’d stop and tell them all about everything,” she said to Archibald. “It seems almost mean not to. They’d enjoy it so much, but anyway they’ve seen this dress and my hat and parasol, and that’s a lot. Ginsy Shalloway could talk about that much for weeks ’n’ weeks. Maybe it’s nicer for them to have things spread out and not know about the other clothes and dinner at the hotel and the floorwalker and Miss Carter and everything all at once. I’m going to tell Miss Moran every single thing, though. I feel as if I’d have to tell it all to somebody this very night or I’d explode, and she’s the nicest person possible to tell things to. She always understands exactly how everything was and how you felt and what you thought. You don’t have to explain a bit—just tell her things as fast as ever you can ’n’ she keeps up. Don’t you think the nicest people in the world are the people you don’t have to explain to?”

“I don’t know but what you are right,”—Archibald thought it over. “Yes; I’m sure you’re right, Peg. It’s a great thing to have any one understand when you do explain; and if somebody understands without having to explain—yes; you’re undoubtedly right.”

“Well, Miss Moran’s like that. You tell her a word or two and she knows the rest. That’s why she gets on with all kinds of people the way she does.”

Mrs. Neal was at the gate when Susy stopped before it, and Mr. Neal, thin, leathery, solemn mannered but twinkling eyed, rose from a chair on the porch and strolled out to take the horse.

“Land’s sakes, Peg, you’re a treat!”—Mrs. Neal’s fat face was radiant with delight. “Talk about fine feathers! Why, that’s as tasty a hat as I ever saw, and as sweet a face under it, I don’t care where the next comes from.”

Pegeen opened her parasol and turned round and round excitedly before her admirer.

“’N’ there’s more in boxes,” she announced. “Heaps—’n’ there was strawberry ice cream ’n’ finger bowls ’n’—We’ve got to go, Miss Moran’ll be there, but just as soon as I get my breakfast dishes washed I’ll run down ’n’ tell you all about everything. Oh, Mrs. Neal, it was perfectly grand. It was better ’n the measles—only, of course I love Miss Moran best. Anyway I love her just as well. Seems as if I could love anybody though, when I’ve got this hat and dress ’n’ parasol. I’m sorry I ever said Benny Crocker was a nasty little toad. He isn’t really, ’n’ anyway toads are kind of cunning.”

“I guess all the unloving things you ever said wouldn’t make much of a spot on your pink outfit,”—Mrs. Neal chuckled reassuringly—“and, if you ask me, it’s the toad you wasn’t fair to when you compared that Crocker imp to it. I’m partial to toads myself. They’re my best help in the garden.”

“Good night.” Pegeen stretched two thin arms up, slipped them round the neck of the woman who stooped to her, and kissed the broad expanse of cheek. “Maybe you don’t like kissing,” she said apologetically, “but I couldn’t help it. I hope I won’t meet anybody I oughtn’t to kiss to-night, ’cause, like as not, I’d up and do it anyway. Good night, Mr. Neal.”

She gave Susy a love pat.

“You won’t ever be a plain farmhorse any more, Susy,” she said. “You’ve been part of an adventure.”

“Like’s not she’ll be too upity to plow at all,” drawled Mr. Neal.

“She’ll plow lots better,”—Pegeen was sure of it “She’ll have something to remember and something to look forward to—’cause anything that’s happened once could happen again. Things like plowing and washing dishes are fun if something has happened and something’s going to happen. Good night, everybody. I s’pose I don’t really need my parasol open but I do love to carry it that way.”

She and Archibald went away up the meadow path, arms full of packages, hearts full of content. It had been a good day.

Mrs. Neal listened to the happy, excited voice of the small girl as it floated back to her on the still evening air.

“Well, Pa,” she said, with smiling satisfaction, “looks as if that child’s guardian angel’d sat up at last and took notice.”

There were lights in the shack. Archibald and Peggy saw them as soon as they turned into the meadow.

“She’s there!” the child cried happily. “I knew she’d wait. She’s splendid about promises. My, isn’t it good to come home!”

To Archibald’s astonishment, it _was_ good to come home. He could not remember ever having had the feeling before. Involuntarily he quickened his steps. The end of a happy day and some one waiting, and the lights of home.

Pegeen ran on ahead, with a shrill shout of greeting, and suddenly a girl’s figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted grayly ’twixt twilight and lamplight.

“Welcome, wanderers!” cried a gay voice.

Pegeen was caught in strong, young arms, hugged, kissed, questioned, all in a breath.