CHAPTER VI

“I WILL PAY FOR IT”

Kate was waked next morning by Elsie moving about in her room. She opened her eyes quickly and sat up. To her surprise Elsie was dressed and ready for the day. She looked as fresh as the July morning in a blue and white gingham, white sport shoes and stockings. Her hair was pinned up at her ears, and that made her look older but not less pretty than last night.

Kate was not a girl to wake up with a grudge on a morning like this, or on any morning, in fact. So she sang out now, “Hello!”

But Elsie, apparently, had not been mellowed by sleep. She responded to the “hello” with a nod. Then, much to Kate’s surprise, she came directly to the bed and picked up “The King of the Fairies” from the table there.

“Bertha told me you had borrowed my book,” she said. “I don’t mind your borrowing books. But I think you ought to ask. And Aunt Katherine didn’t give me this one. I’m going to read outdoors before breakfast, and I want ‘The King of the Fairies,’ if you don’t mind.”

Kate laughed. “It’s my copy, not yours,” she said. “Mother and I gave it to each other last Easter. It’s a perfectly great book, Mother thinks, and I brought it with me here because I love it so.”

Elsie was standing directly in the gilded morning sunlight. Kate had just waked up and her eyes were still a little dazed from sleep. That may account for her seeing again, flashingly, the comrade she had surprised in the mirror last night. Surely Elsie’s whole being in that flash radiated comradeship. And there was something more. Kate could not remember, but sometime in her life—it felt a long time ago—she had exchanged glances with that golden comrade! Or had it been just a vivid dream she had had, or perhaps only the ideal she had set up in her mind of the perfect comrade?

But Elsie almost instantly moved out of the sunlight nearer the bed, and everything was as before.

“Please pardon me,” she said coldly. “I don’t know why it never entered my head that you might have a copy of your own. That was stupid of me. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

“So it is still on,” Kate told herself, as Elsie left the room. “She hates me. She hates me just awfully. And that was awfully rude about the book, even if it had been hers! How _could_ she be so rude—to a _guest?_ She is afraid of me, too. She is afraid I will discover the secret of the orchard house. Why, perhaps she doesn’t hate me, personally at all. Mayn’t it be just fear that makes her like that? For she has no reason to hate me, and of course if she has some secret in the orchard house she has every reason to think I may discover it. For I do mean to explore it thoroughly when I get around to it.”

Somehow the conviction she had come to, that fear rather than personal dislike was ruling Elsie’s conduct, comforted her. Moreover, it was a perfect morning—sunshine, a light breeze at the curtains, birds carolling (how had she ever slept through the noise those birds were making?) and the room pervaded by flower scents from balcony and gardens. It was with a light heart, then, that Kate allowed Bertha to run her bath, lay out her clothes, and finally even brush the bobbed hair. Such unneeded service seemed absurd to Kate, but it was in the order of this household, and some fresh sweetness she had brought from sleep made her eager to harmonize herself as much as possible with the world she had come back to. But even so, in a minute when Bertha’s back was turned, Kate grabbed the brush from the dressing table and gave a quick, surreptitious stroke that turned the bang Bertha had created into a wing across her brows; for Bertha, experienced lady’s maid as she was, had not caught the knack of _that_ so quickly.

It was with a heart as bright as the morning that Kate finally went down the long stairs just as the soft-toned gong was sounding. There was no sign of breakfast being laid in the dining-room, so she wandered about the house, in and out of the rooms she had only glimpsed through open doors last night.

Everything was quite beautiful. Kate knew that Aunt Katherine had once been determined to “go in for art seriously.” But at that time money had been lacking for such a design, and she had with keen disappointment submitted to fate and become a school teacher. When wealth had suddenly come to her everyone thought she would, of course, take up study with some great master and become an artist. But this never came about. Perhaps the first disappointment had been too keen; perhaps in giving up her hope so definitely she had made it impossible for herself ever to renew it under any conditions. But now, wandering about these rooms that Aunt Katherine had made, Kate realized that she had turned artist in a way. Instead of painting on canvas she had created beauty in her environment. For her home was like a warmly painted picture with beautiful lights and shadows. And Kate soon felt as though she were walking around in a picture. The morning sunshine outside was its great gilded frame. That was how the utter silence and absence of human beings in these big downstairs rooms explained itself to her fancy; somehow she had walked into a picture painted by her great aunt, a picture hung up somewhere in an enormous gilded frame. This fancy stirred her imagination and she pretended so hard to herself that it became quite real.

That is why she almost started when she finally did hear voices and the clink of china. Coming out of the picture into everyday life, suddenly like that, was something of a jar. And she was probably late for breakfast wherever it was being served. She hurried her steps and found Aunt Katherine and Elsie already at the meal. They were sitting at a little table under a peach tree growing up between the flags of a terrace just outside a sunny breakfast-room. How delightful! Kate was glad now to step down out of the picture.

Aunt Katherine greeted her with a welcoming smile. And having just stepped down out of Aunt Katherine’s picture Kate felt that she understood her, that they were very close to each other really. How different, and how pleasantly different, Great Aunt Katherine was proving herself from Kate’s preconceived ideas of her.

Kate took the little garden chair waiting for her and unfolded her napkin. Coffee was percolating visibly in two large glass globes set one on top of the other before Aunt Katherine. The silver sugar bowl and cream pitcher turned all the sunlight that found them into a million diamond sparkles. A half grapefruit with ice snuggled about it was at Kate’s place. Kate lifted the slender pointed spoon made just for grapefruit, and gratefully tasted the tart pulp and juice.

“Elsie might have shown you the way,” Aunt Katherine was saying. “I thought of course you would come down together.”

“I am sorry I was late. But it was fun wandering around in the house trying to find you.” And then Kate told them all about how she had felt herself in a picture.

Aunt Katherine was pleased. “Was it really like that to you, my house?” she asked.

“Oh, yes! and more so than I know how to say. Most of the windows and doors open, the glimpses of tree branches and flowers and sky, the light and shade in the rooms, all the flowers in vases in surprising places, the colours of everything, the hangings——”

Kate stopped, embarrassed by her own enthusiasm, or perhaps discomfited by Elsie’s cool gaze. But she had said more than enough to give Aunt Katherine very real and deep pleasure.

“Then I see,” she told Kate, “why you did not mind wandering about alone or our seeming inhospitality. And I think your dress, my dear, fitted into the picture. It is a very poetic dress.”

Kate flushed with pleasure. “Mother would love to hear you say that,” she said. “We made it out of the new chintz curtains in her bedroom. You see I had to have some dresses, and there were the curtains. Mother thought——”

But at mention of her mother Kate saw in morning light what she had failed to see last night in lamplight: the deepening of pain lines around Aunt Katherine’s eyes and mouth, a cloud of pain somehow in her face. So she broke off her account of Katherine’s ingenuity.

“I’m glad you like it,” she finished lamely.

“I have brought you the key to the orchard house,” Aunt Katherine said, as though it were a matter she would like to be done with quickly. “Elsie will show you all over it and around it. Then I have an errand at the post office I wish you girls would do for me. I have a very busy morning ahead. The car is at your disposal this morning, and I should think you would take a good long ride. It is really too warm to do anything more energetic. At least, it promises to be a very warm day.”

Kate looked at the key which Aunt Katherine had handed her. It was an old-fashioned brass key, clumsy and heavy but not too big to go into her pocket. When she had tucked it away there she raised defiant eyes to Elsie. But her defiance suddenly turned to pity. Elsie looked so troubled!

Aunt Katherine with a word of apology to the girls picked up the mail now lying at her place and began reading the one or two personal letters she found among the circulars, pleas for charity, and advertisements. Kate leaned toward Elsie and said quickly and softly, “Don’t worry. You’re safe to-day and to-morrow, too, and for as long as you mind, I guess. If I see the little house sometime, what does it matter when?”

Elsie nodded to signify that she had caught the very low words, and her face cleared.

“Ungrateful thing! She might at least have thanked me,” Kate reflected.

But very soon she learned that Elsie was thanking her for that impulsive gesture of generosity in her own way. When they joined each other in the big car that was waiting for them at the door, half an hour later, Elsie was plainly trying to force herself to be friendly and natural. But since this friendliness was forced, Kate’s response to it was of necessity forced, too. Oh, how different everything was turning out between these two girls from the way Kate had dreamed it!

“Don’t you think Oakdale is pretty?” Elsie asked. “People care so much about their gardens. And then the streets are all so wide and shady, and where they aren’t wide they are just little lanes like ours that end perhaps in a gate or an open meadow. Those endings of streets seem romantic to me always.”

“Yes, I think they are romantic,” Kate agreed. “And when your lane turned all the away around and ended in the orchard, that must have been awfully romantic. I wonder why Aunt Katherine ever let the grass grow over it so that it got lost, the end of the lane!”

Something in Elsie’s restrained silence at this remark made Kate realize that she had blundered. Oh, dear! She hadn’t meant to. Truly! She tried to explain.

“You see it was my mother’s house, Elsie. You can’t know what fun it is to imagine your mother a little girl, to see for the first time the house where she was born and the places where she played. Everything about your mother’s childhood—well, there’s a kind of mystery about it.”

Elsie deliberately turned away her face. “Oh, I’m sorry. What an idiot I am! I had forgotten about your mother! How could I be such a—brute!”

Elsie looked at Timothy’s back steadily. “Don’t be so sorry as all that,” she replied coolly and without any apparent emotion in her voice. “My mother was killed in an automobile accident in France two years ago. But I never knew her, anyway. When I was at home she was usually somewhere else, at house-parties or sanitariums, or abroad. And I was only home for holidays. She sent me off to boarding school when I was eight. Her being dead hasn’t made much difference to me. I was terribly sorry for her when they told me, that was all. She was so pretty, and too young-seeming to be a mother. And she would have hated dying! Sometimes I _ache_ for her when I think of that. But that’s all.”

“Oh, how can you! How can you speak about a dead mother like that!” Kate’s heart was crying. But she only said, after a second: “There are lots of jolly-looking girls and boys in this town. Do you know them all? They keep looking at us, but you never speak. Don’t you _see_ people? Mother’s like that. She’s so absent minded.”

But even this was an unfortunate subject. Unlucky Kate!

“I know who most of them are but of course I don’t know them socially.”

This was amazing. “Why not?”

But here all Elsie’s attempt at friendliness broke down. She turned on Kate a tigerish face. “Yes, why not?” she almost hissed. “You know very well, Kate Marshall, why not. Here’s the post office.”

Kate was shocked. “Well, I certainly _don’t_ know ‘why not’,” she contradicted. “I haven’t the least idea—unless you treat them in the rude, horrid way you treat me.”

The car had drawn up to the curb and come to a stand-still before the pride of Oakdale’s civic life, its white marble post office built on the lines of a Greek temple. Elsie’s only answer to Kate’s denial was a shrug.

“Have you letters? And are there any errands?”

Timothy stood on the sidewalk asking for orders.

Elsie stood up quickly. “I’ll post the letters myself,” she answered him. Kate noticed for the first time a package that Elsie was carrying. Across the top the word “Manuscript” was written in a round hand, and the address was that of a publishing house and caught Kate’s attention because it was the same publishing house that had brought out “The King of the Fairies.” Kate read the large round black handwriting quite mechanically and without any motive of curiosity as Elsie stepped past her out of the car.

When Elsie was halfway up the post-office steps she turned and ran back to the curb. “Tell me,” she said, “didn’t Aunt Katherine ask us to do something for her? I’ve quite forgotten what it was.”

“Yes. A dollar book of stamps and ten special deliveries. She gave you the money.”

“Oh, thanks. Good for your memory.”

“What is she sending to those publishers?” Kate found herself wondering when the spinning glass doors had closed on her “cousin.” “There was a special delivery stamp on it, too. And it filled her mind so full that she quite forgot Aunt’s errands. Can Elsie be trying to _write_? Oh, wouldn’t that be exciting!”

“Now Holt and Holt’s,” Elsie ordered Timothy when she returned to the car.

“Holt and Holt’s is a grocery store. I noticed it as we came by,” Kate said. “I didn’t hear Aunt Katherine say anything about groceries.”

“Of course not. Julia, the cook, attends to all that over the telephone. This is my errand. Do you mind?”

Kate refused to rise to the sarcasm in Elsie’s “Do you mind?”

But at the grocers’ she said, “I think I’ll come, too, and stretch my legs.”

“All right.” But Kate distinctly felt that Elsie did not at all like the idea of having her companionship in the store. However, her pride would not let her turn back now, of course.

Elsie’s order was given briskly: “A head of crisp Iceland lettuce,” she said, “a small bottle of salad oil, genuine Italian, half a pound of almonds, half a dozen eggs, and the smallest loaf of bread you have. Oh, yes, and a pound of flour, if you sell so little.”

“Thanks,” said the young clerk who had written the order down in his book.

But Elsie waited. He looked at her inquiringly. “Anything more?”

“No. But I want what I ordered.”

“I thought we’d send it, of course. It will be quite a load.”

“No. Please do the things up and put them into my car for me. How much is it all?”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’re Miss Frazier, aren’t you? You folks have a charge account here.”

“However, I want to pay for these things myself. Do not by any means put them on Miss Frazier’s account.” Elsie spoke primly but with flushed cheeks that contradicted her outward composure.

“Thought I’d just tell you. Yesterday when you came in and paid for things Mr. Holt said there must be some mistake.”

“There is no mistake. And will you please put the box of eggs in a bag? Not just tie them with a string like that!”

“We’re going up your way, miss, in about ten minutes. Why don’t we take ’em?”

But Elsie shook her head, biting her lips with annoyance at the young man’s persistence. She commanded him to put the things into the car.

“To the Bookshop now,” she ordered Timothy as they started again.

At the Bookshop Kate did not speak of getting out, though it certainly attracted her more than the grocery store. But Elsie herself turned at the door. “Don’t you want to come, too, Kate?” she called. “It’s an awfully cunning little place.”

Kate and her mother were always drawn by bookshops wherever they found them, and they spent in them during the course of a year a sum that it would have taken no budget expert to see was all out of proportion to their income. But then, Katherine always said when the subject of “budgeting” came up that it was as foolish to make rules about the spending of money as it would be to make rules about the spending of time. It was a matter for the individual, strictly. Kate followed Elsie eagerly, now.

It was such a little shop that Kate, although she immediately gravitated toward a table of books that interested her particularly, could not avoid hearing Elsie’s conversation with the Bookshop woman.

“Have you Havelock Ellis’s ‘Dance of Life’?” she asked.

“Yes, a new order has just come in. I knew Miss Frazier wanted it and I was sending it up first thing this afternoon. Would you like to take it?”

“Yes, I’ll take one for my aunt, if she ordered it. I’ll take two. One is for myself, and I will pay for it.”

“Your aunt always charges. Sha’n’t I charge them both?”

“No, I will pay for it. How much is it?”

“Four dollars.”

“Four dollars! Oh, dear! So much?”

The woman was very obliging. “Why not charge it?” she suggested again, for Elsie was looking woefully into her purse.

“No. Let me think a minute. Well, I won’t buy it to-day.”

Elsie’s face had so fallen, she was so obviously disappointed, that Kate went over to her. “I have money,” she offered. “Five dollars. You can borrow from me.”

But as she spoke her glance quite unconsciously fell upon the purse opened in Elsie’s hand. A little roll of crisp bills lay there for any one to see, amounting surely to more than four dollars.

“No, thanks.” Elsie replied, snapping the purse shut. “Let’s go home.”

Kate turned it over quickly as they went back to the car. Why had Elsie acted, as she certainly had acted, as though she did not have four dollars in her purse when it was perfectly plain that she had more? And why did she want the book, anyway? Katherine had bought that book less than a week ago, and Kate had had an opportunity to look into it to find what of interest there might be for herself. She had found nothing. It was decidedly a book for adults, a rather deep book, and, to Kate’s mind, a dull book. But perhaps Elsie only wanted it to give away. Anyway, she would ask no questions. It was none of her business.

Timothy showed distinct surprise at Elsie’s nonchalant “Home, Timothy.” And Kate understood his surprise. Aunt Katherine had given them the car for the morning and Timothy was all prepared to start off on a long drive. But Elsie had apparently forgotten about this in her worry over the book. And Kate had no impulse to remind her. If things were only as one might expect them to be, not all so strangely mysterious and unpleasant, a car at her disposal and a comrade on a beautiful summer morning like this would have seemed the height of pleasure. But such a ride with Elsie would certainly be no fun, and she did not think until it was too late that she alone with Timothy might start off on an exploring adventure.

When they got out of the car in front of their own door, Timothy, as a matter of course, expected to take the packages from the grocery store around to the servants’ entrance. But Elsie held out her hands for them. He relinquished them to her, plainly puzzled. Surely they were groceries!

When the two girls stood together in the big front hall Kate said briefly: “Good-bye. I’m going out into the garden.”

“Wait on the terrace outside the drawing-room and I’ll come with you,” Elsie responded, very unexpectedly. “First I’ll just run up to my room with these bundles. I know a lot about the kinds of flowers and things in the garden. Let me show it all to you.”

Kate was almost dazed by this suggestion. She had certainly been made to feel that Elsie was only too eager to get rid of her company. She stood where she had been left, wondering.

Why had Elsie taken lettuce and oil and bread and eggs and flour and nuts up to her room? What could she ever do with them up there?

“I’ll not ask her about it,” she promised herself, “just not a thing. But I shall write to Mother and the boys this morning. I won’t tell Mother how horrid Elsie is being, though. She would be too disappointed for me. And I’m really not having such a bad time as it might sound. But I’ll tell the boys just everything. They will be as mystified as I am. And to think I was dissatisfied with them for chums and wanted a _girl_! I’ll appreciate them when I get back, that’s certain. Oh, of course! Why didn’t I think at first! Elsie doesn’t trust me in the garden alone! That’s why she wants to come with me. She is afraid I won’t keep my promise. She’s afraid I will go ‘prowling’ around the orchard house. I just wish I hadn’t promised not to use the key. It would be something to do with this morning she’s spoiled. And something to write Mother about. And it might explain some of the mystery. There _was_ a light last night. I saw it plain enough. The boys will be interested in all that. How soon can I expect letters from home, I wonder?”

With these thoughts Kate went out through the cool, shady drawing-room and on to the terrace. There in the shade of some trellised wisteria she sat down on a garden bench to wait for Elsie.