Part 1 (1/2)
The Girl Scouts Rally.
by Katherine Keene Galt.
CHAPTER I
Three little girls sat in a row on the top step of a beautiful home in Louisville. At the right was a dark-haired, fairylike child on whose docked hair a velvet beret, or French officer's cap, sat jauntily. Her dark eyes were round and thoughtful as she gazed into s.p.a.ce. There was a little wrinkle between her curved black brows.
Beside her, busily knitting on a long red scarf, sat a sparkling little girl whose hazel eyes danced under a fringe of blond curls. Her dainty motions and her pretty way of tossing back her beautiful hair caused people to stop and look at her as they pa.s.sed, but Elise was all unconscious of their admiration. Indeed, she was almost too shy, and few knew how full of fun and laughter she could be.
The third girl wore a businesslike beaver hat over her blond docked hair, and her great eyes, blue and steady, were levelled across Elise, who knitted on in silence, to the dark girl in the velvet cap.
Helen Culver spoke at last. ”Well, Rosanna, what are you thinking? Have you any plan at all?”
The dark child spoke. ”No, Helen, I can't think of a thing. It makes me _so_ provoked!”
”Tell me, will you not?” asked Elise in her pretty broken English. She was trying so hard to speak like Rosanna and Helen that she could scarcely be prevailed upon to say anything in French.
Many months had pa.s.sed since Elise, in the care of the kind ladies of the American Red Cross, had come over from France to her adopted guardian, young Mr. Horton. She had grown to be quite American during that time, and was very proud of her attainments. The dark and dreadful past was indeed far behind, and while she sometimes wept for her dear grandmother, who had died in Mr. Horton's tender arms in the old chateau at home, she loved her foster mother, Mrs. Hargrave, with all her heart.
And with Elise laughing and dancing through it, the great old Hargrave house was changed indeed. While Elise was crossing the ocean, Mrs.
Hargrave had fitted up three rooms for her. There was a sitting-room, that was like the sunny outdoors, with its dainty flowered chintzes, its ivory wicker furniture, its plants and canaries singing in wicker cages.
Then there was a bedroom that simply put you to sleep just to look at it: all blue and silver, like a summer evening. Nothing sang here, but there was a big music box, old as Mrs. Hargrave herself, that tinkled Elise to sleep if she so wished. And the bathroom was papered so that you didn't look at uninteresting tiles set like blocks when you splashed around in the tub. No; there seemed to be miles and miles of sunny sea-beach with little sh.e.l.ls lying on the wet sand and sea gulls swinging overhead.
Mrs. Hargrave was so delighted with all this when it was finished that it made her discontented with her own sitting-room with its dim old hangings and walnut furniture.
”No wonder I was beginning to grow old,” she said to her life-long friend, Mrs. Horton. ”No wonder at all! All this dismal old stuff is going up in the attic. I shall bring down my great great-grandmother's mahogany and have all my wicker furniture cus.h.i.+oned with parrots and roses.”
”It sounds dreadful,” said Mrs. Horton.
”It won't be,” retorted her friend. ”It will be perfectly lovely. Did you know that I can play the piano? I can, and well. I had forgotten it.
I am going to have birds too--not canaries, but four cunning little green love-birds. They are going to have all that bay window for themselves. And I shall have a quarter grand piano put right there.”
”I do think you are foolish,” said Mrs. Horton, who was a cautious person. ”What if this child turns out to be a failure? All you have is my son's word for it, and what does a boy twenty-four years old know about little girls? You ought to wait and see what sort of a child she is.”
”I have faith, my dear,” said her friend. ”I have been so lonely for so many long years that I feel sure that at last the good Lord is going to send me a real little daughter.”
”Cross-eyed perhaps and with a frightful disposition,” said Mrs. Horton.
”All children look like angels to Robert.”
Mrs. Hargrave was plucky. ”Very well, then; I can afford to have her eyes straightened, and I will see what I can do about the temper.”
”I won't tease you any more,” said Mrs. Horton. ”Robert says the child is charming and good as gold. I know you will be happy with her, and if you find that she is too much of a care for you, you can simply throw her right back on Robert's hands. I don't like to have him feel that he has no responsibility in the matter.”
Elise proved to be all that Mrs. Hargrave had dreamed, and more. She sang like a bird and Mrs. Hargrave found her old skill returning as she played accompaniments or taught Elise to play on the pretty piano. And the little girl, who was perfectly happy, repaid her over and over in love and a thousand sweet and pretty attentions. Dear Mrs. Hargrave, who had been so lonely that she had not cared particularly whether she lived or died, found herself wis.h.i.+ng for many years of life.
The three little girls, Elise, Rosanna, of whom you have perhaps read, and her friend Helen Culver were great friends.
They went to school and studied and played together, and Rosanna and Helen were both Girl Scouts. Elise was to join too, as soon as she could qualify. At present, as Uncle Robert said slangily, she was ”stuck on pie.” She could not make a crust that could be cut or even _sawed_ apart although she tried to do so with all the earnestness in the world.