CHAPTER II
BEAUTIFUL BELLAIRE
The great day had come, and with it the girls arrived in Bellaire, after a delightful motor trip from Pennsylvania. Stopping in the morning at New York, Mr. Harris, whose guests they were, piloted them to one of the big hotels, where their own touring car took its place in the long line of handsome motors, and where Collins, the Harris chauffeur, looked quite as important as any of the other uniformed drivers.
"Now, suppose we were all piled up with hat boxes," whispered Grace to
Madaline, for Grace had a distinct liking for good style.
"But isn't it warm?" remarked Cleo, whose tangled tresses had a way of gathering heat. "I almost wish I had worn a thin blouse."
"We'll order a light lunch, Kimball," remarked Mrs. Harris to her husband, "as the girls can scarcely wait to get out to Bellaire. Then I'll return with you, and we will leave them to their fate. I'm sure it will be a kind fate when directed by your good natured sister. Hope she won't spoil them." And the waiter returning with the order would surely have smiled, had he been human, and not a waiter, for the group awaiting his approach made small effort to conceal his welcome.
En route once more from New York to Bellaire it seemed but a few minutes' run, when finally they drew up to the big rustic house, set back in a rocky nook against the mountain.
"Oh, isn't it lovely!" exclaimed Madaline, "and everything is so clear after smoky Pennsylvania."
"Yes, Bellaire is beautiful," Cleo replied, with a show of pride that her relation should be the benefactor. "I know we'll have a wonderful time. Aunt Audrey is like a girl herself, and she knows what girls enjoy."
"Oh, her husband is the author, isn't he?" Grace remembered. "We'll have a chance to see how he writes all his funny books."
"'Fraid not," said Cleo, "Uncle Guy is away. We are going to have everything to ourselves but his study. You can be sure that's all locked up. But look! See that queer woman dressed like a gypsy! See her going along by the hedge! What—do you suppose she is looking for?"
"Early dandelions, perhaps," ventured Mrs. Harris, who had overheard the question as she stopped in her luggage directions to Collins.
"But she isn't like a gypsy either," Cleo insisted. "Look at the lace head dress!"
"And the girl with her," interposed Grace. "My, but she's dressed queer, too. Looks like something from the stage or movies."
The old woman and child had now come up to the big gateway, where the touring car was parked awaiting the exit of another motor that happened to be standing in the Dunbar driveway. As the strange little girl gazed at the tourists she dropped something—a book—and the woman with her, evidently a caretaker, shook her violently at the trivial accident.
"Oh!" exclaimed Grace. "How rough, just for dropping a book!"
"But look! how that girl stares!" whispered Madaline. "As if she couldn't get her eyes off us."
"Isn't the girl pretty," commented Cleo. The tourists were now gazing with fascinated interest at the old woman in her remarkable garb, and the brown-haired child, with the strange, glaring eyes, that seemed to affix themselves on the three scout girls. Altogether she seemed quite unlike other children. Her heavy brown braids hung over her shoulders like a picture of Marguerite in the opera, while her white gauzy dress was banded around with rows of black velvet, just like the artistic costumes worn in Greek plays. This style on so young a child gave a very stagy and quaint effect. She, like the woman, had a piece of lace on her head, but the one was white, the other black.
"See, they have been gathering flowers," decided Cleo, and at that moment the woman picked up the book, and attempted to drag the child away in spite of the latter's very evident desire to stare longer at the faces in the big touring car. "I should like to know where they live. We must find out if Aunt Audrey knows them."
"Can't get at my note book," remarked Grace, as Collins started in the drive, "but I am sure not to forget that girl."
"Nor the old woman," added Madaline. "I shouldn't want her for a nurse." And the last glimpse of the strangers showed the child still dragging behind the woman.
The excitement of arriving at Cragsnook, with its joys of new-found interest, however, soon erased the picture of the pathetic little child and her caretaker from the minds of the three scouts, and when next morning Mrs. Harris bade them good-by and started back to New York, she had no idea what part that first incident of their arrival would play in the children's vacation at Bellaire. In the care of Mrs. Guy Dunbar, otherwise Audrey Harris, sister to Cleo's father, the girls were indeed well placed and safely established, but Bellaire, being a mountain town near New York, possessed many possibilities for exploration, and at this delightful task the girls determined to set out promptly, for even vacation is not interminable.
"You may roam as far as you like," Aunt Audrey told them next morning, when the call of summer fairly shouted in each pair of expectant ears. "The girls next door, Lucille and Lalia, are coming over to meet you, and they will show you all the roads, and ways to get lost and found in."
"But, Aunt Audrey," began Cleo, "we saw the queerest woman yesterday just as we arrived. She was dressed like—well, like a circus person, and she had a little girl with her who just looked scared to death. Do you know who she could be?"
Aunt Audrey burst into a musical laugh. "Many Bellairites dress like circus folks," she answered. "In fact Uncle Guy often charges me with that sort of thing. But what was the special offense of your circus lady? What did she look like particularly?"
"Oh, she wore a black lace scarf on her head, and had some sort of big flowered skirt, and a waist with sleeves like airships. Then the little girl looked like a Greek dancer, and seemed scared to death," illustrated Cleo.
"I don't happen to place that piece of scenery," replied Mrs. Dunbar facetiously, "but if you see her again, and I'm within call, give me a whistle, and I'll report for inspection duty. You know I do quite a bit of painting, and I might like to have a model of that sort. I am sure old Sophia (or is she Azirah?) would fill in beautifully on an oil I am making of yon mountain," with a hand wave in the direction of the gray hills looming in hazy tints and shadowy glows against the early morning sky. Mrs. Dunbar was a beautiful woman, just young enough, rompish enough, and wise enough to get a very good time out of life, and pass some of the pleasure on. With her ashen blonde hair and very deep blue eyes, she looked like a "piece of scenery" herself, as she fluttered about the breakfast room—which was a porch opening from the dining-room, while she made her young visitors happy with her charming grace and genial hospitality.
Grace and Madaline were fascinated by the artistic arrangements of the Dunbar home, but with one member an author and the other a painter, surely unusual taste and effect were to be expected.
"What wonderful plants and vines, and how early for them to be so—profuse!" Grace felt safe in remarking, growing things always seeming exempt from the rule against remarks and criticism.
"Yes, we have a patent hot-house," replied Mrs. Dunbar, "and it works better than the big one out at the garage. You see, Jennie, our cook, is an old fashioned Jersey woman, and she is resourceful, I must admit. See that little shed made of boxes against the kitchen window? Well, Jennie does all her winter gardening in that, heats and irrigates it directly from the kitchen. She claims the steam of cooking is the very best propagator, and we all have to agree with her. Just see the sweet potato vine and the peanuts. Don't they look like the very finest ivies?"
The girls examined the fine growing tendrils that climbed so gracefully from a tiny brick wall, just edging the breakfast room. The "wall" was composed of white tile bricks, and the soft green vines, tumbling over the edges, and capering up on the window ledges, made an effect at once free and conventional.
"Peanuts and sweet potatoes!" exclaimed Madaline. "Who would think they grew such beautiful, soft green vines!"
"I'll leave Cleo to show you about," announced Mrs. Dunbar. "I'm going to a town meeting this morning. We are working for a circulating library, to give reading to the people tied up in the hills. You see stretched out there, over the golf links as far as you can see, are farmers' homes. The folks are always so busy, and always so tired, they very seldom get to our pretty library, so we can see no good reason why we can't send our library put to them by motor. And you youngsters will be interested in knowing this plan includes Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts as distributors. Help yourselves to investigating," she concluded, snatching up her white sailor hat and jabbing it on her head with a most determined if a bit reckless slam. "I'm off till lunch, one thirty, you know. Have a nice time," and Audrey Dunbar was off to tackle the novel project of a traveling library for New Jersey farmers.
Left to themselves the girls literally broke loose, and it was not surprising that Jennie should leave her work more than once, to watch surreptitiously, lest some of her choice baby begonias, set out in their tiny and perishable hand painted pots, come to grief in the rampage of the romping girls.
"Good to populate this big house," commented Jennie, "but swoopy to start out with." At the same time Jennie smiled approvingly as she stopped to watch the three girls run from vase to picture, and from curios to brasses, in their tour of inspection through the artistic home of Guy and Audrey Dunbar. Just now all three chums were squatted on a beautiful old blue Chinese rug, noses almost buried in the silky fiber, each declaring the tones were different blues from those discovered by the other.
A tap-tap of the brass knocker on the "pig-door" off the side porch announced the callers, Lalia and Lucille Hayden, and brought the scout girls up from their rug inspection.
Having met their neighbors the evening previous, the three visitors were soon ready to join them in the proposed tramp over Second Mountain.
"Our violets are just violeting," began Lucille, a jolly little girl who looked like a Japanese doll, with her glossy hair all drawn back in the ultra fashioned style, quite novel to the girls from Pennsylvania. "And there's no end of bunnies, if you like them," she went on, "although I must confess a rabbit or a rat is apt to make me jump at any time. Some of the boys from the academy are in the cross-country run, and they're due over the Ridge this morning. We may get a chance to cheer them if we hurry along," she finished.
No need to urge the girl scouts toward that prospective goal, and a few minutes later the mountain paths registered the first steps in the vacation days of the True Tred Girls.
And the path trodden pointed the way to strange adventures—strange even for such experienced hikers as were the visiting girl scouts.