CHAPTER VIII
BETTY DISCOVERS HER SPECIALTY
“STAYING in lodgings in a villa by the sea is awfully English, but so are a lot of other things,” said Madeline briskly. “We’ve seen about all there is to see in this neighborhood, and I think we ought to be pushing on.”
It was nearly a week after the ghost party. The girls had spent the two really pleasant days in visiting Glencoe and Iona, both of which were so lovely that Betty had insisted upon calling on the crusty old stationer to thank him for suggesting them. Now they were gathered in the sitting-room, Baedekers in hand, holding a conclave on where to go next.
“Oh, dear!” sighed Babe. “It’s been so jolly here! I wish we could settle down for all summer. But of course I know it would be silly to come way across the ocean and then just stick in one spot.”
“John’s not going to stay all summer, Babe,” said Babbie pointedly, for during the week the friendship between the man-hater and the woman-hater had progressed marvelously.
“Isn’t he?” Babe’s tone was as unconcerned as if she had not solemnly promised to furnish John with a dated itinerary of their trip, and to write him the very minute they changed their plans.
“Dwight thinks we ought to stay on here till he’s finished coaching me,” John had told her mournfully; “because there are so few distractions to take a fellow’s mind from his work. But it will be deadly dull after you’ve gone.”
“Have you a lot more to do?” Babe had asked.
“No. If I boned hard, I think I could finish in two weeks.”
“Then why in the world don’t you bone hard?” demanded Babe bluntly. “Then you can do as you please all the rest of the summer, can’t you?”
John nodded. “After he gets me off his hands, Dwight’s going to study at the British Museum and then at some big library in Paris. He’s getting material for his doctor’s thesis. I’m going to keep with him for a while and then join the governor somewhere and go home with him in time to start in at the same old grind next fall. I don’t envy myself the trip across, either,” sighed John.
“Why not?” demanded Babe. “You ought to like traveling with your father.”
John shrugged his shoulders. “He’ll be in the very dickens of a temper by that time. You see he’s been sent over here by his doctor for a long vacation, and he’s raging around Europe in his automobile, getting madder and madder every minute, because he’s on strict orders to do nothing but loaf, and he doesn’t dare to disobey instructions.”
“He’ll like it when he gets started,” suggested Babe, soothingly.
“Never,” laughed John. “You don’t know my father. The very mention of a vacation affects him just the way Miss Wales’s red cap did that old Scotch cow. You ought to see the letters he writes me. They get fiercer and fiercer each time.”
“Well, if he’s that kind it will please him to know that you’re working hard. So I advise you all the more to pitch in and hustle through,” Babe had finished, forcibly if not elegantly. “Give yourself two weeks—or three, to be perfectly safe—and then dare yourself to finish.”
“If I did that, I’d probably want to go sailing all the time, or I’d dawdle over an exciting novel and forget all about my limit.”
“I haven’t much use for a person who dares himself and then loses,” said Babe coolly. “Are you that sort?”
John did not answer at all at the time, but on the day the girls left Oban he took Babe to one side. “Meet you anywhere you like three weeks from day before yesterday,” he announced gaily.
“Good for you!” returned Babe. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“Here’s a pin to remind you of your promise,” said John, holding out a stick-pin set with a Scotch cairngorm. “Girls have such short memories.”
“They haven’t any shorter memories than boys,” declared Babe indignantly. “I’m just as much obliged for the pin, but I don’t need it.”
“Take it as a souvenir of Oban, then,” urged John.
Babe looked longingly at the sparkling yellow stone. “Do you take back what you said about girls’ memories?”
“Well, perhaps I don’t know much about the general run of girls,” John qualified. “Babbie Hildreth remembers her promises all right, and I’m sure you do.”
“You’re the one that’s likely not to be able to keep this particular promise,” said Babe, pinning the cairngorm into her blue tie, which showed it off to perfection. “You mustn’t come, you know, unless you’ve finished your work. College boys are such dreadful idlers.”
“They’re not,” declared John hotly. “I’ll show you that this one isn’t, anyhow.”
“All right,” laughed Babe. “And I’ll show you that my memory isn’t short. Then we shall be quits again.”
Babe wrote Bob all about the cairngorm pin, but she didn’t mention it to her traveling companions. Babbie would think she was silly to talk about it. She knew such loads of men, and they were always giving her flowers and pretty trinkets. So merely to avoid discussion Babe said nothing at all about the matter, letting the rest think that she had bought the pin herself as a memento of her dear Oban.
“Nothing else will be quite so nice!” she sighed as the train pulled out of the little station, and the others all felt a little the same way,—except Madeline, of course, who always loved beginnings.
“Why do we stay at Glasgow to-night?” she said. “We’ve done that already. Let’s take Mrs. Hildreth to a farewell tea at Miss Jelliff’s, and then go on to Balloch. There’s an inn there with the loveliest name—Tullichewan Inn. Doesn’t that sound quaint and out-of-the-way? Then we shall be one station further on toward the Trossachs, and we shan’t have to get up so early in the morning.”
“That argument appeals to me,” laughed Mrs. Hildreth, and it was settled to go on to Balloch.
“What are the Trossachs, anyway?” inquired Betty plaintively. “People have talked to me about the Trossachs ever since I knew I was coming to Scotland, but when I’ve asked just what they were, I never could find out.”
“This guide-book says that the word means ‘bristling country,’” Babbie explained. “All the hills that you coach over are thickly wooded. There are lakes, too, but I guess they haven’t anything to do with the name.”
Next day Babe amended the definition to “dripping country.” Scotch mists alternated with unmistakable showers all day, the hills were hidden behind thick mantles of gray fog, and the picturesque little lakes looked forlorn enough, with the big rain-drops pattering down on their placid waters.
“Catechism for travelers,” announced Babe. “Query one: How do you go through the Trossachs? Answer: In a rain. I know what you’re going to say, Betty, but I’ve talked to all the people on board who’ve been through before or who’ve had friends who’ve been through, and that’s the correct answer. Query two: What is a Trossach coach? Answer: A place where everybody’s umbrella drips on everybody else and pokes your hat off, and you wish you were snug at home by the fire. Besides, they aren’t coaches at all; they’re nothing but four-seated mountain-wagons. And I thought coaching was going to be one of the most glorious joys of the summer!” Babe sighed and carefully emptied the water out of the wrinkles in her ulster.
But the coaching trip through the English lakes satisfied Babe’s most extravagant anticipations. It came after a commonplace, very rainy week in Edinburgh, where everybody was too busy getting over colds caught in the Trossachs rain-storm to make any progress with “dominant interests.” It was a lovely, sparkling morning, and the coach which was to take them from Keswick to Windermere was a real coach, with seats inside for any one who was foolish enough to want them, seats on top which commanded a splendid view of the pretty English country, and a red-coated, red-faced English coachman who dropped his h’s and cracked his long whip in exactly the approved story-book fashion. But the most exciting part of the day came when they stopped for lunch at the little village of Grasmere.
“Three whole hours!” cried Babbie joyously. “Mother doesn’t feel like exploring, so she’s going to wait for us at the inn. Have lunch whenever you’re ready, mummie. If Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and the old church where he’s buried are too fascinating we may decide to save time by lunching aboard the coach on fruit and sweet chocolate.”
“I’m terribly afraid Dove Cottage will be like Burns’ birthplace,” said Madeline, as they started off. “Another maxim for travelers: Be cautious about poets’ homes. Anyhow Wordsworth never stayed in the house when he could help it on a day like this—I’m sure he didn’t. Let’s walk up that fascinating shady road first. It looks as if it led to something interesting.”
“Now Madeline,” protested Betty, “how does a road that leads to something interesting look different from one that doesn’t?”
“How indeed, man from Cook’s?” Babbie joined her, and the dispute waxed so warm that finally Madeline asked a little girl, who was eyeing them shyly over a garden fence, where this particular road went.
“Proves my point,” she announced triumphantly. “It goes to Easdale Tarn.”
“What’s a tarn?” asked Babe. “A lake? Then it doesn’t prove anything at all. Some lakes are interesting and some aren’t.”
“Don’t quarrel, children,” interposed Betty. “When we get to the tarn we can see whether it’s interesting.”
“But who knows how far it is?” objected Babbie. “Have we time to walk to it?”
The small girl had run off to play by this time, but a little old lady was pottering about among the flowers in another garden, and she told the girls that the tarn was only a mile away and showed them a cross-cut through the meadows.
Beyond that the road turned into a path and climbed up hills, and then down again, but mostly up, so that following it was hot and tiresome work.
“Maybe I’m not hungry,” sighed Babe. “Do you see that comfortable white farmhouse? When we go back let’s stop there and have lunch. They’d surely give us bread and milk out of pity for our famished state.”
“All right,” agreed Madeline, “but we’ve got to hurry right along now.”
Just then the path curved sharply, and around the turn they came suddenly upon an elderly gentleman who was sitting on a big stone, fanning himself with his Panama hat.
“My word!” he exclaimed, when he saw the girls. “What in creation are you young ladies doing away off here?”
Babbie was ahead. “Going to Easdale Tarn,” she explained demurely. “This is the right road, isn’t it?”
“Bless me, I don’t know,” said the elderly gentleman. “Never heard of Easdale Tarn till you mentioned it. My doctor told me to take a walk every day, and I chose this road because I happened to see it.”
“It’s rather hilly, isn’t it?” said Babe, who was quite out of breath.
The gentleman jumped up and waved a hand at his stone seat. “Sit down and get rested,” he commanded so peremptorily that Babe obeyed without a word.
“You too.” He pointed at Betty, who sank down beside Babe.
“I admire your energy,” the old gentleman went on briskly. “I always admire energy. But in this case it also excites my curiosity. Why are you all so anxious to go to Easdale Tarn?”
“To find out if it’s interesting,” explained Babe, and told the whole story of the dispute about the road.
The old gentleman laughed heartily, and then he sighed. “Wish I could get as excited as that about this milk-and-water scenery. Well, run along and find your tarn,—all but you,” indicating Betty. “You’re too tired to go any further. You’d better stay right here with me until the others get back.”
“I am tired,” admitted Betty, blushing furiously, “but I think I’d better go on. You said you were taking a walk, and I don’t want to keep you——”
“I said my doctor told me to take walks,” interposed the old gentleman irascibly. “At present I am sitting here enjoying the view, or, to speak quite truthfully, staring at the view without seeing it, and wishing I were back in New York.”
“But Betty wants to see the tarn too,” urged Babe, who resented such autocratic methods. “Come on, Betty. You can rest all the afternoon in the coach.”
Betty half rose, hesitated, and then something in the rather wistful smile that the old gentleman gave her from under his bushy eyebrows made her decide to stay.
“I’m afraid I am too tired to enjoy seeing anything more, even if it’s interesting,” she told the girls. “So if you’re sure you won’t mind waiting, sir—it’s rather lonely here to stay alone.”
“I assure you it will be only a pleasure to wait with you,” declared the old gentleman with fine, old-fashioned courtesy. “Solitary walks are a dull sort of amusement.”
So while the rest went in pursuit of the tarn Betty talked to the old gentleman. He was traveling alone, it seemed, for his health, and he hated traveling, hated doctors, and despised himself for having let one of them bundle him off willy-nilly, like a molly-coddle old woman who had nothing in the world to do but count her pulse and worry about her digestion.
“But don’t you think you’d get well faster if you just made up your mind to it and tried to enjoy things and have a good time?” asked Betty timidly.
“That’s what they all say,” retorted the old gentleman savagely. “‘Make up your mind to it. Why, you ought to consider yourself a lucky dog to be able to go off like this, chasing health around the world, if necessary. How we envy you!’ Envy! Well, they needn’t.” He smiled his wistful smile again. “Fact is, when I was young, I hadn’t any chance to play—I was too busy hustling to pay for bread and butter and an attic room. Now I’m too old to learn. But I like to see young people play well, if they work well too. I’ve got a boy—the young rascal—oh, well, you don’t want to hear me scold about my boy. Tell me where you’ve been and where you’re going and why it is that you like your Europe so well.”
So he led Betty on to tell him about the going-away party at Mary’s, about the senator and the emigrants and the ghost of Dunstaffnage; and they had gotten back to the United States and Harding College again, before the others appeared.
“My dear, I appreciate your staying to talk with me,” he said finally. “I had a daughter once, but she died. I should like her to have grown up to be like you,—or like that little tomboy that stood up to me and insisted you should go on if you pleased. I couldn’t get her for a private secretary next fall, could I? She wouldn’t cry if I happened to find fault with the way she took my dictation.”
Just then Babe herself appeared, leading the others.
“We didn’t find it,” she sang out cheerfully. “That old lady’s idea of a mile is exaggerated.”
“We didn’t dare go any further for fear of missing the coach and worrying mummie,” added Babbie.
“In a hurry to get back to the village, are you?” asked the old gentleman. “I’ve got a car waiting for me somewhere down there at the foot of the hill. You can all squeeze in for that little distance, can’t you?”
“Oh, thank you,” said Babe, “but we were going to have lunch first—bread and milk at the farmhouse near the foot of the hill, if they’ll give it to us. We’ve allowed time for that, and we’re just perishing of hunger. Thank you just as much about the ride.”
“Bread and milk at a farmhouse,” repeated the old gentleman briskly. “I—I believe I’m hungry too. Would it be intrusive——”
“Oh, please do come,” said Betty eagerly. “I’ve made you miss your lunch at the inn, I’m afraid.”
So the old gentleman scrambled down the hill with Betty and Babe, while Madeline and Babbie ran ahead to make sure of the luncheon and get the preparations for it under way. The bread and butter was so good and the milk so creamy, and they all ate and drank so much, while the old gentleman forgot to be annoyed at his unhappy plight and told funny stories of his motoring experiences in France,—neither he nor his chauffeur, it seemed, knew a word of any language but English,—that the time slipped by, and when Babe thought to look at her watch it was long past the hour that she had allotted to lunching.
“There’s Dove Cottage gone!” she announced in tragic tones. “And when we get back to America and people ask us about it, how we shall hate to say we were right here and didn’t take enough interest in Wordsworth to hunt up his house.”
“Never mind,” Madeline reassured her cheerfully. “We’ll just inquire in a casual way if they saw Easdale Tarn, when they were here, and that will settle them.”
“The only trouble is we didn’t see it either,” matter-of-fact Betty reminded her sadly.
The old gentleman was looking at his watch and muttering hasty calculations. “You shall see your Dove Cottage,” he announced triumphantly. “You didn’t count on going back in my car. Come along.”
The next minute they were tearing down the Easdale road at a rate that the old gentleman smilingly characterized as “about our usual speed, and we’ve only been arrested once so far.” When they reached the cottage he sat outside in the car, watch in hand, ready to give the signal for departure, and at the church he did the same thing. Then they whirled back to the inn, where Mrs. Hildreth was getting a little anxious about them, though, as Babbie pointed out, five minutes before the coach started was a whole lot of time—you could see all the regular sights of Grasmere in five minutes if you were a good manager.
Betty and Babe, who had taken a great fancy to the crusty old gentleman, stayed behind the others to say a more extended good-bye.
“We’re really very grateful to you,” Babe assured him gaily. “You’ve saved our reputations. But for you the Grasmere chapter of ‘B. A.’s Abroad’ would have had a disgraceful blank in it.”
“‘B. A.’s Abroad,’”—the old gentleman turned to Betty. “That’s the journal you told me about. B. A.—Benevolent Adventurers—that’s what you’ve been this morning. I haven’t had so good a time since I left New York. Thank you all, and you particularly, Miss——”
“Wales,” supplied Betty.
“Miss Wales, I hope we shall meet again during the summer. I’m going back to France, where they have respectable roads. Good-bye.”
“You’ve got to look out for Betty, mummie,” laughed Babbie, when they were settled again on the coach. “All the high-and-mighty personages just naturally gravitate to her. First there was the senator, and now this grand magnate. Who was he, Betty?”
“He didn’t tell me his name, and I didn’t like to ask.”
“He’s certainly a person of importance,” declared Madeline. “He talks about New York as if he pretty nearly owned it, and did you notice how frantically the inn servants flew around when he appeared?”
“I didn’t fly around when he appeared,” said Babe proudly, and was much amused and elated when Betty repeated what he had said about her.
“I think benevolent adventures are going to turn out to be Betty’s dominant interest,” said Babe, after relating the old gentleman’s interpretation of B. A. “First there were the emigrants and now this old gentleman. I wonder whom you’ll find next to cheer up.”
Betty laughed. “I think that’s a funny kind of a dominant interest for traveling. Why, you can be nice to people just as well when you’re at home.”
“Well, you’re elected to try it a while longer,” declared Babbie, “and see how it works. It’s certainly been amusing so far. The very point about a good dominant interest, you know, is that it’s queer. Anybody can take Gothic architecture or Mary Queen of Scots, but ghosts, tea-rooms, chimney-pots, and benevolent adventures show real originality. Girls, aren’t we having a good time?”