The Enchanted Barn by Grace Livingston Hill - HTML preview

CHAPTER XXVIII

The morning they all started back to the city was a memorable one. Graham had insisted that Shirley ask for a holiday until Tuesday morning so that she might go up with them in the car, and have the whole day to be at home and help her mother get settled. She had consented, and found to her surprise that Mr. Barnard was most kind about it. He had even added that he intended to raise her salary, and she might consider that hereafter she was to have ten dollars more per month for her services, which they valued very highly.

George had sent his resignation to the store and was not to go back at all. Graham had arranged that, for school began the day after his return and he would need to be free at once.

Elizabeth, to her great delight, was to go with the Hollisters and remain a few days until her parents returned. Mrs. Graham had written from the West making a proposition to Mrs. Hollister that Carol be allowed to go to school with Elizabeth the next winter, because Mrs. Graham felt it would be so good for Elizabeth to have a friend like that. Mrs. Hollister, however, answered that she felt it better for her little girl to remain with her mother a little longer; and that she did not feel it would be a good thing for her child, who would be likely to have a simple life before her with very few luxuries, to go to a fashionable finishing-school where the standards must all necessarily be so different from those of her own station in life, and, kind as the offer had been, she must decline it. She did not say that Carol had fairly bristled at the idea of leaving her beloved high school now when she was a senior and only one year before her graduation. That bit of horror and hysterics on Carol's part had been carefully suppressed within the four walls of her mother's room; but Elizabeth, deeply disappointed, had wept her heart out over the matter, and finally been comforted by the promise that Mrs. Hollister would write and ask Mrs. Graham to allow Elizabeth to go to school with Carol the coming winter. That proposition was now on its way West, together with an announcement of Sidney's engagement to Shirley. Sidney was confidently expecting congratulatory telegrams that morning when he reached the city. He had written his father in detail all about their plans for returning, and how the work at the old barn was progressing, and Mr. Graham, Senior, was too good a manager not to plan to greet the occasion properly. Therefore Graham stopped at his office for a few minutes before taking the family out to Glenside, and, sure enough, came down with his hands full of letters and telegrams, and one long white envelope which he put carefully in his breast pocket. They had a great time reading the telegrams and letters.

The way out to Glenside seemed very short now, watching as they did for each landmark. The children were as eager to get back as they had been to leave, and Star snuggled in between Harley's feet, held his head high, and smiled benevolently on everybody, as if he knew he was going home and was glad. They began to wonder about the chickens, and if the garden was all dried up, and whether the doves were all right. There was an undertone of sadness and suppressed excitement, for it was in the minds of all the Hollisters that the time in the old barn must of necessity be growing brief. The fall would soon be upon them, and a need for warmth. They must go hunting for a house at once. And yet they all wanted this one day of delight before they faced that question.

At last they reached the final curve and could see the tall old tree in the distance, and the clump of willows knee-deep in the brook. By common consent they all grew silent, watching for the first glimpse of the dear old barn.

Then they came around the curve, and there it was! But what was the matter?

Nobody spoke. It seemed as if they could not get their breath.

Shirley rubbed her eyes, and looked again. Mrs. Hollister gave a startled look from her daughter to Graham and back to the barn again. Elizabeth and Carol were utterly silent, grasping each other's hands in violent ecstasy. The boys murmured inarticulately, of which the only audible words were: "Good night! Some class!" Doris looked for a long second, puckered her lips as if she were going to cry, and inquired pitifully: "I yant my dear barn house home! I yant to doh home!" and Star uttered a sharp, bewildered bark and bounded from the car as if this were something he ought to attend to.

But before anybody could say anything more, Graham brought out the long white envelope and handed it to Shirley.

"Before you get out and go in I just want to say a word," he began. "Father and I both want Shirley to have the old barn for her very own, to do with as she pleases. This envelope contains the deed for the property made out in her name. We have tried to put it in thorough repair before handing it over to her, and if there is anything more she can think of that it needs we'll do that too. And now, welcome home to the old barn! Mother, may I help you out?"

"But there isn't any barn any more," burst forth the irrepressible Elizabeth. "The barn's gone! It's just a house!"

And, sure enough, there stood a stately stone mansion on a wide green terrace, where shrubs and small trees were grouped fittingly about, erasing all signs of the old pasture-land; and the old grassy incline to the door now rolled away in velvety lawn on either side of a smooth cement walk bordered with vivid scarlet geraniums. Trailing vines and autumn flowers were blossoming in jars on the wide stone railing. The old barn door had been replaced by glass which gave a glimpse of strange new rooms beyond, and the roof had broken forth in charming colonial dormer windows like a new French hat on a head that had worn the same old poke bonnet for years. No wonder Doris didn't recognize the dear old barn. It did seem as though a wizard had worked magic upon it. How was one to know that only a brief half-hour before the old gardener from the Graham estate set the last geranium in the row along the walk, and trailed the last vine over the stone wall; or that even now the corps of men who had been hastily laying and patting the turf in place over the terrace were in hiding down in the basement, with their wheelbarrows and picks and spades, having beat a hasty retreat at the sound of the car coming, and were only waiting till they could get away unobserved? For orders were orders, and the orders were that the work was to be done and every man out of sight by the time they arrived. A bonus to every man if the orders were obeyed. That is what money and influence can do in a month!

In due time they got themselves out of that car in a sort of bewildered daze and walked up the new cement path, feeling strangely like intruders as they met the bright stare of the geraniums.

They walked the length of the new piazza in delight. They exclaimed and started and smiled and almost wept in one another's arms. Graham stood and watched Shirley's happy face and was satisfied.

The first thing Doris did when she got inside the lovely glass door was to start to run for her own little willow chair and her own little old rag doll that had been left behind, and down she went on the slippery floor. And there, behold, the old barn floors too had disappeared under a coating of simple matched hardwood flooring, oiled and polished smoothly, and Doris was not expecting it.

She got up quickly, half ashamed, and looked around laughing.

"I vas skating!" she declared with a ringing laugh. "I skated yite down on mine nose."

Then she hurried more cautiously to the haven of her own chair, and with her old doll hugged to her breast she reiterated over and over as if to reassure herself: "Mine! Doris! Mine! Doris!"

Words would fail to describe all they said about the wonderful rooms, the walls all shining in a soft rough-finish plaster, tinted creamy on the upper half and gray below, and finished in dark chestnut trimmings; of the beautiful staircase and the wide bay window opening from the first landing like a little half-way room, with seats to rest upon. It was standing in this bay window that Graham first called Mrs. Hollister's attention to something strange and new outside behind the house. It was a long, low glass building with green things gleaming through its shining roof.

"There, mother," he said, coming up softly behind her. "There is your plaything. You said you had always wanted a hot-house, so we made you one. It is heated from a coil in the furnace, and you can try all the experiments with flowers you want to. We put in a few things to start with, and you can get more at your leisure."

Mrs. Hollister gave one look, and then turned and put her arms around the tall young man, reaching up on her tip-toes to do so, brought his handsome face down to hers, and kissed him.

"My dear son!" she said. That was all, but he knew that she had accepted him and given him a loving place with her own children in her heart.

There were shoutings and runnings up stairs and down by first one and then another. The bathrooms were discovered one by one, and then they had to all rush down into the basement by the new stairs to see the new laundry and the new furnace, and the entrance to the hot-house; and the hot-house itself, with its wealth of bloom transplanted from the Graham greenhouses.

They almost forgot the chickens and the doves, and the garden was a past Eden not to be remembered till long hours afterward.

The sunset was dying away in the sky, and the stars were large and few and piercing in the twilight night when Shirley and Sidney came walking up the terrace arm in arm, and found Doris sitting in the doorway cuddling her old rag doll and a new little gray kitten the farmer next door had brought her, and singing an evening song to herself.

Shirley and Sidney turned and looked off at the sky where a rosy stain was blending softly into the gray of evening.

"Do you remember the first night we stood here together?" Sidney said in a low tone, as he drew her fingers within his own. "I loved you then, Shirley, that first night——"

And then Doris's little shrill voice chimed above their murmurings:

"Oh, mine nice dear home! Mine kitty an' mine dolly! and mine piazza! and mine bafwoom wif a place to swim boats! an' mine fowers an' pitty house! No more barn! Barn all dawn! Never turn bat any moh! Oh, mine nice, pitty dear home!"