So Caroline jumped in. What else could she do? And in the joy and excitement of setting out on a delightful journey, she almost forgot that she had thought it of prime importance, only last night, to telephone Jacqueline, and she quite forgot the string of beads (Jacqueline’s beads!) that she had left upon the dressing-table.
It was Sallie who found those beads later, when she went to “do” the room that was Caroline’s. Being neat and methodical, Sallie took the beads and dropped them into the Dresden china trinket box upon the dressing-table, and then in the excitement of hurrying off on her own holiday, she too forgot them—but not forever!
CHAPTER XXXI
A LETTER FROM ALASKA
Cousin Marcia Vintner, who was Aunt Eunice’s cousin, and stood to Jacqueline in some obscure relationship that Caroline never was able to work out, had thoughtfully gone away for the summer to the Bosphorus. The cottage that she left at the disposal of her friends was what Caroline, only five weeks removed from Cousin Delia’s crowded quarters, would have called a house, and a very nice one.
The cottage, since Cousin Marcia wished to call it so, was of gray, weathered shingles, with latticed casements and a craftily contrived sag in the ridgepole, and it stood in a little tangle of old-fashioned flowers, on the side of a hill that sloped down to the rocks and the sea. Inside there was a living room, with a great brick fireplace and walls sheathed in dark wood. The piano held the place of honor, with its gleaming keyboard turned toward the windows.
There was a wee dining room, with cottage furniture of black and yellow, and dishes black and yellow, too. In the kitchen, all white and blue tiles, was Cousin Marcia’s Jenny, a black woman who went with the house and made beaten biscuit and sugar jumbles, such as Caroline had never tasted before. Upstairs were darling bedrooms, with casements that looked to the sea. Caroline’s room was all in delft blue and orange, like the sea in some lights and the smooth western clouds when the sun has just set.
There were books in the house, and magazines, and there were pretty things to sew, which Aunt Eunice had brought along. Out of doors were the downs, where Caroline went walking with a Cousin Penelope who seemed younger and gayer and lovinger than she had been in Longmeadow. There were the rocks, with their treasure-pools of seaweed and shells and strange live things that stayed rooted or moved so sluggishly they barely seemed to move. There were the white sands, where Caroline played with a basket of new toys, fluted dishes, flower-shapes, fish-shapes that molded the moist sand into forms of beauty. There were the waves, where Caroline paddled or sometimes, with little gasps at the cold shock of them, ventured to bathe, and bathed most willingly, when Cousin Penelope was near.
People came and went. Children from the near-by cottages, all on the lordly scale of Cousin Marcia’s dwelling, played with Caroline on the beach and among the rocks. Lovely ladies, mothers and sisters of the children, and all young alike, came to tea with Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope, and Caroline wore one of Jacqueline’s pretty frocks, the corn-colored net or the hemstitched white crêpe de chine with the old rose pipings, and passed the Dresden plate of cakes or the silver dish of plump bonbons.
Madame Woleski came, not for a week, but for three full days of enchantment, and made music for them evenings in the soft light of the candles. She kissed Caroline when she went away, and told her she was mastering some of her faults of technique. Let her work hard and not be discouraged! From Madame Woleski that was much more than gushing praises from another, and so the music-loving soul in Caroline, that her mother had fostered, knew and understood.
Wonderful days by the sea—days in which Jacqueline in the Meadows was almost forgotten, as Jacqueline herself had told Caroline to forget—days indeed when Caroline almost believed that she was Jacqueline, and that all this happiness and love and the singing piano were to be hers forever.