Dorothy's House Party

“Come this way, little lady. Come with me. Let us go into the house;” said the girl gently, and led the stranger to the window she had left open. “You must be the odd guest I needed for my House Party, to make the couples even, and so I bid you welcome. Strange, the window should be shut!”

But closed it was; nor could all the girl’s puny pounding bring help to open it. Against the front door the great tree still pressed and she could not reach its bell; and confused by all she had passed through Dorothy forgot that there were other entrances where help could be summoned and sank down on the piazza floor beside her first, her uninvited guest, to wait for morning.

CHAPTER IV

TROUBLES LIGHTEN IN THE TELLING

But a few moments sufficed to show that this would not do. Despite her own heavy kimono she was already chilled by the air of that late September night, while the little creature beside her was shivering as if in ague, although she seemed to be half-asleep.

She reasoned that Ephraim must have waked and closed the library window and departed to his own quarters. But there must be some way in which a girl could get into her own house; and then she exclaimed:

“Why, yes! The sun-parlor, right at the end of this very piazza. All that south side is covered with glass and if I can get a sash up we can climb through. The place is as nice as a bedroom. Anyway, I’ll try!”

She left the stranger where she lay and ran to make the effort, and though for a time the heavy sash resisted her strength, it did yield slightly and her fresh fear that it had been locked vanished. Yet with her utmost endeavor she could lift it but a few inches and she wondered if she would be able to get her visitor through that scant opening.

“I shall have to make her go through flat-wise, like crawling through fence bars, and I wonder if she will! Anyhow, I must try. I – I don’t like it out here in the night and we’ll both be sick of cold, and that would end our party.”

Dorothy never quite realized how that affair was managed.

Though the wanderer appeared to hear well enough she did not speak and had not from the first. Probably she could not, but she could be as stubborn and difficult as possible and she was certainly exhausted from exposure. It was a harder task than lifting the great window, but, at last, by dint of pushing and coaxing, even shoving, the inert small woman was forced through the opening and dropped upon the matted floor, where she remained motionless.

Dolly squeezed herself after and stooped above her guest, anxiously asking:

“Did that hurt you? I’m sorry, but there was no other way. Please try to get up and lie down. See? There are two nice lounges here and lots of ‘comfy’ chairs. Shawls and couch-covers in plenty – Why! it’ll be like a picnic!”

The guest made no effort to rise but waved the other aside with a sleepy, impatient gesture, then fell to shaking again as if she were desperately cold. Dorothy was too frightened to heed these objections and since it was easier to roll a lounge to the sufferer than to argue, she did so and promptly had her charge upon it; but she first stripped off the damp cotton gown from the shaking body and wrapped it in all the rugs and covers she could find. She did not attempt to penetrate further into the house then, because she knew that Ephraim had bolted and barred the door leading thither. She had watched him do so with some amusement, early in the evening, and had playfully asked him if he expected any burglars. He had disdained to reply further than by shaking his wise old head, but had omitted no precaution because of her raillery.

“Well, this may not be as nice as in my own room but it’s a deal better than out of doors. That poor little thing isn’t shivering so much and – she’s asleep! She’s tired out, whoever she is and wherever she came from, and I’m tired, also. I can’t do any better till daylight comes and I’ll curl up in this big chair and go to sleep, too,” said Dorothy to herself.

She wakened to find the sunlight streaming through the glass and to hear a chorus of voices demanding, each in a various key:

“Why, Dorothy C!” “How could you?” “Yo’ done gib we-all de wussenes’ sca’, you’ ca’less chile! What yo’ s’posin’ my Miss Betty gwine ter say when she heahs ob dis yeah cuttin’s up? Hey, honey? Tell me dat!”

But Dinah’s reproofs were cut short as her eye fell upon the rug-heaped lounge and saw the pile of them begin to move. As yet no person was visible and she stared at the suddenly agitated covers as if they were bewitched. Presently, they were flung aside; and revealed upon a crimson pillow lay a face almost as crimson.

“Fo’ de lan’ ob lub! How come dat yeah – dis – What’s hit mean, li’l gal Do’thy?”

Dolly had not long been missed nor, when she was, had anybody felt serious alarm, though the girl guests had both been aggrieved that she should not have wakened them in time to be prompt for breakfast. They dressed hurriedly when Norah came a second time to summon them, explaining:

“Miss Dorothy’s room is empty and her clothes on the chairs. I must go seek her for she shouldn’t do this way if she wants to keep cook good natured for the Party. Delaying breakfast is a bad beginning.”

Then Norah departed and went about her business of dusting; and it was she who had found the missing girl in the sun-parlor, and it had been her cry of relief that brought the household to that place.

Demanded old Ephraim sternly:

“Why fo’ yo’-all done leab yo’ baid in de middle ob de night an’ go sky-la’kin’ eround dis yere scan’lous way, Missy Dolly Calve’t? Tole me dat!”

“Why do you leave yours, to sleep on the library couch, Ephraim?” she returned, keenly observing him from the enclosure of her girl friends’ arms, who held her fast that she might not again elude them.

Ephraim fairly jumped; though he looked not at her but in a timid way toward Dinah, still bending in anxious curiosity over the stranger on the couch; and she was not so engrossed but that her turbaned head rose with a snap and she fixed her fellow servant with a fiercely glaring eye. Between these two equally devoted members of “Miss Betty’s” family had always existed a bitter jealousy as to which was the most loyal to their mistress’s interests. Let either presume upon that loyalty, to indulge in a forbidden privilege, and the wrath of the other waxed furious. Both knew that for Ephraim to have lain where Dorothy had discovered him, during that past night, was “intol’able” presumption, and at Dinah’s care would be duly reported upon and reprimanded.

Alas! The old man’s start and down-dropped gaze was proof in Dorothy’s opinion of a graver guilt than Dinah imputed to him, and when he made no answer save a hasty exit from the room her heart sank.

“Oh! how could he do it, how could he!” and then honesty suggested. “But I haven’t asked him yet if he did take the bills!” and she smiled again at her own thoughts.

Attention was now diverted to Dinah’s picking up the stranger from the couch and also departing, muttering:

“I ’low dis yeah’s a mighty sick li’l creatur’! Whoebah she be she’s done fotched a high fevah wid her, an’ I’se gwine put her to baid right now!”

Illness was always enough to enlist the old nurse’s deepest interest and she had no further reproof for the delayed breakfasts or Ephraim’s behavior.

There followed a morning full of business for all. Jim Barlow and old Hans, with some grumbling assistance from the “roomatical” Ephraim, whose “misery” Dinah assured him had been aggravated by sleeping on a cold leather lounge instead of in his own feather-bed – these three spent the morning in clearing away the fallen tree, while a carpenter from the town repaired the injured doorway.

When Dorothy approached Jim, intending to speak freely of her suspicions about the lost money, he cut her short by remarking:

“What silliness! Course, it isn’t really lost. You’ve just mislaid it, that’s all, an’ forgot. I do that, time an’ again. Put something away so careful ’t I can’t find it for ever so long. You’ll remember after a spell, and say, Dolly! I won’t be able to write that telegram to Mabel Bruce. I’ve got no time to bother with a parcel o’ girls. If I don’t keep a nudgin’ them two old men they won’t do a decent axe’s stroke. They spend all their time complainin’ of their j’ints!”

“Well, why don’t you get a regular woodman to chop it up, then?”

“An’ waste Mrs. Calvert’s good money, whilst there’s a lot of idlers on her premises, eatin’ her out of house and home? I guess not. I’d save for her quicker’n I would for myself, an’ that’s saying considerable. I’m no eye-servant, I’m not.”

“Huh! You’re one mighty stubborn boy! And I don’t think my darling Aunt Betty would hesitate to pay one extra day’s help. I’ve heard her say that she disliked amateur labor. She likes professional skill,” returned the girl, with decision.

James Barlow laughed.

“I reckon, Dolly C., that you’ve forgot the days when you and I were on Miranda Stott’s truck-farm; when I cut firewood by the cord and you sat on the logs an’ taught me how to spell. ’Twouldn’t do for me to claim I can’t split up one tree; and this one’ll be as neat a job as you ever see, time I’ve done with it. Trot along and write your own telegrams; or get that Starky to do it for you. Ha, ha! He thought he could saw wood, himself. Said he learned it campin’ out; but the first blow he struck he hit his own toes and blamed it on the axe being too heavy. Trot along with him, girlie, and don’t hender me talkin’.”

The “Little Lady of the Manor,” as President Ryall had called her, walked away with her nose in the air. Preferred to chop wood, did he? And it wasn’t nice of him – it certainly wasn’t nice – to set her thinking of that miserable old truck-farm and the days of her direst poverty. She was Dorothy Calvert now; a girl with a name and heiress of Deerhurst. She’d show him, horrid boy that he was!

But just then his cheerful whistling reached her, and her indignation vanished. By no effort could she stay long angry with Jim. He was annoyingly “common-sensible,” as he claimed, but he was also so straight and dependable that she admired him almost as much as she loved him. Yes, she had other friends now, and would doubtless gain many more, but none could ever be a truer one than this homely, plain-spoken lad.

She spied the girls and Monty in the arbor and joined them; promptly announcing:

“If our House Party is to be a success you three must help. Jim won’t. He’s going to chop wood. Monty, will you ride to the village and send that telegram to Mabel Bruce?”

The lad looked up from the foot he had been contemplating and over which Molly and Alfy had been bending in sympathy, to answer by another question:

“See that shoe, Dolly Calvert? Close shave that. Might have been my very flesh itself, and I’d have blood poisoning and an amputation, and then there’d have been telegrams sent – galore! Imagine my mother – if they had been!”

“It wasn’t your flesh, was it?”

“That’s as Yankee as I am. Always answer your own questions when you ask them and save a lot of trouble to the other fellow. No, I wasn’t hurt but I might have been! Since I’m not, I’m at your service, Lady D. Providing you word your own message and give me a decent horse to ride.”

“There are none but ‘decent’ horses in our stable, Master Stark. I shall need Portia myself, or we girls will. You can go ask a groom to saddle one – that he thinks best. I see through you. You’ve just been getting these girls to waste sympathy on you and you shall be punished by our leaving you alone till lunch time. I’ll write the message, of course. I’d be afraid you wouldn’t put enough in. Only – let me think. How much do telegrams cost?”

“Twenty-five cents for ten words,” came the prompt reply.

“But ten would hardly begin to talk! Is telephoning cheaper? You ought to know, being a boy.”