Happiness Hill

by Grace Livingston Hill

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be a wonderful place to build a house?” exclaimed Jane. “Look what a view, and those beautiful trees, such lots of them! I wonder what’s beyond over on the other side.”

  “Let’s go and find out,” said Sherwood. “There seems to be a road turning off down a little way.”

  So they turned off to the right and skirted the place, coming at last to an opening among the trees, where a wagon track led in through a group of pines, evidently a natural forest growth.

  “Shall we turn in and see where it leads?” asked Sherwood.

  “Oh yes, unless you think we shall be intruding on private property.”

  “We can always turn back if we do not seem to be welcome.” Sherwood laughed, and they drove slowly in, winding among the trees—beech and oak and chestnut—all lovely in bright colors.

  “It seems like a fairyland,” said Jane. “What a lovely light the sun gives shining through these gorgeous colored leaves.”

  “But look what’s beyond,” said Sherwood as they emerged into an opening and suddenly glimpsed the view across the valley again, with open stretches to the left as well that showed more wooded hills, and here and there a turret of some lovely stone tower half- hidden among the foliage.

  They stopped the car and gazed both ways, silent in their admiration. Suddenly Jane exclaimed, “I believe that is the church we have just left! There is something about that tower—it looks like the church—could that be Bethayres?”

  “It certainly is!” said Sherwood. “We’ve come a roundabout way. Yes, look there, off to the right you can see the road down below, between the two red trees, and then here at that golden one it winds to the left.”

  “What a place to live, and go to that church!” said Jane. “My! I would like to hear sermons like that every Sunday.”

  “Yes, I’d like to hear more of that sort of preaching. Well, I suppose we must find our way out of this beautiful wilderness or the family will think we are lost.”

  “I hate to leave it,” said Jane, looking about to drink in the last glimpse of the view. “I suppose it is owned by some rich old party who has so many other homes he never thinks of building one here.”

  “Likely.” Sherwood laughed. “Or else he is holding this for a fancy price someday. It’s a valuable piece of land. I wouldn’t mind owning it.”

  They drove down into the main highway and saw the other car ahead of them. Betty Lou was waving her scarf at them.

  “They think we have lost our way,” said Sherwood, “but we’ll soon tell them better.” And he stepped on the gas and was soon flying by Tom with a honk of the horn and a greeting.

  It was pleasant when they got back to Flora Street, all hands getting the informal little Sunday night supper together. Tom cut thin slices of beef from last night’s pot roast, while Sherwood and Jane buttered thin slices of bread and laid the meat between them with a dab of mustard, mayonnaise, and pickle. Mother made a pot of cocoa, and Betty Lou whipped the cream, got the jelly from the preserve closet, and cut the nut cake with the pretty white frosting. And then Tom and Sherwood waited on them all. It had been a happy day.

  Sherwood went back to his boardinghouse that night, and a few minutes after he left there came a messenger boy from the hotel in the city bearing a note from Lauderdale:

  Dear Jane,

  Tried several times to get you on the phone this afternoon, but they said the line was busy. You should have a private wire. I meant to give you the enclosed last night but forgot it till you were gone. I have succeeded in getting seats in a balcony box for the whole season for the Friday evening concerts of the symphony orchestra. I am sending you yours and will ask you to meet me there. My train down from New York reaches the city just five minutes before eight, therefore I shall have all I can do to get there before the doors are closed, so please be on time.

  You made a great mistake not going with us today. We had a wonderful time. Gayle won the prize for swimming and your friend Carol carried off the bridge prize. But I suppose you have your own idea of thrills, and if you find them in churches, far be it from me to argue with you about it.

  Don’t be late.

  As ever,

  Lew

  Jane, as she looked at the ticket and then at the letter was divided between joy and disgust. She did love the music, and not many symphony concerts came her way. It was wonderful to think of going to a whole season of them. But she did not like the letter. Lew was still angry, that was plain to be seen. Neither did she like his way of ordering her to meet him at the hall. There were plenty of trains down from New York. Why couldn’t he take an earlier one? Other men did such things, she knew. And it wasn’t as if Lauderdale had pressing business that kept him late in the afternoon.

  She had a feeling that Sherwood would have managed it somehow, even with limitations of his small income and his hardworking position. She threw the letter on her bureau and went to bed, feeling that somehow it had left an unpleasant taste after the beautiful day. She wasn’t at all sure whether she was going to meet Lauderdale at that concert or not.

  Chapter 14

  But of course Jane went to the concert. When the time drew near she could not resist the temptation. Besides, Lauderdale had left her no address to write him, and it did seem mean to let him come all the way down from New York again for nothing. After all, he had tried to please her. He knew her joy in music. And why should she decline? It meant nothing to go to a concert with a man, and as long as he chose to select entertainment that she could enter into, what point would there be in refusing? She had no actual dislike for Lauderdale. It might be that she could lead him away from more worldly things. Perhaps the things about him that she disliked were the result of his upbringing, or lack of it, rather than from his own tastes.

  So she reasoned, and got herself up with the most immaculate care for the occasion.

  “What are you going to do tonight?” asked Sherwood just before closing time as he came out of the inner office where he had been closeted with Dulaney for the last hour and a half. “I was going to suggest—”

  But Jane never did find out what he had been going to suggest for she broke in upon him, “Oh, I’m sorry, but I’ve had an invitation to the symphony concert tonight. For all the season, isn’t that wonderful?”

  Her cheeks were glowing, and somehow she didn’t understand why she felt so self-conscious about it.

  “Very wonderful!” said Sherwood somewhat gravely, trying not to show his disappointment. “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?”

  “Oh, but you shouldn’t have, anyway!” rebuked Jane seriously. “Neither you nor I can afford symphony concerts. It’s only when they drop down right out of the blue for nothing that we can have them.”

  “I don’t know,” said Sherwood grimly. “I’m not sure but I might have managed it even on my present salary. I could have gone without lunches for a while.”

  “Oh John, for pity’s sake, be sensible!” Jane laughed. “You eat little enough now. Are you going to work all night tonight the way you did last night?” she asked, scanning his face anxiously. “You looked all tired out this morning.”

  “Not quite all night.” He grinned. “I’ll pull through, I guess.”

  “What on earth do they find to keep you so busy out of hours? I can’t see,” she asked suddenly.

  “Oh, just a little special side issue of my own,” he answered evasively. “By the way, does your symphony extend all through tomorrow, too? Because if it doesn’t, how about a ride tomorrow afternoon if the day is half-decent? How about going for another view from our hilltop before the weather gets too cold? The best of the foliage is gone, I’m afraid, but there will still be wonderful tracery of branches against a sky worth seeing.”

  “That will be wonderful!” said Jane with her rarest smile, and then somehow the symphony concert took on an added glamour, since it was to be followed by another nice time the next day.

  So Jane went to her symphony concert on Friday
night.

  “But isn’t he coming for you, dear?” asked her mother, as she watched her getting ready. “I thought you said Mr. Lauderdale was taking you.”

  “His train doesn’t get in till five minutes of eight, Mother dear,” said Jane, trying to put utmost cheerfulness and common sense into her tones.

  “Aw! Baloney!” sneered Tom, coming through the hall and stopping to look at his sister. “He’s a cheapskate, that’s what he is! He wants ta save the price of a taxi! Besides, he’s ashamed ta come inta Flora Street. Thinks we aren’t any of us good enough for his royal highness. If I was you, Jin, I’d ask him, ‘Who crowned you?’ just like that. Why doncha?”

  “Tom, you mustn’t annoy your sister,” reproached the mother gently. “Well, dear, I suppose he’ll arrange to come for you next time, won’t he? Perhaps he’s waiting for you to ask him to dinner. Why don’t you do it?”

  “Aw, good night! Mudge! You don’t know what yer talking about. If you ever ask that lily down here ta dinner, I’m done. I’ll leave home!”

  “Tom, stop your nonsense, don’t you see you are annoying your sister? Of course she’ll ask her friends here when she likes. It’s her home, too, you know.”

  Tom groaned and went stamping off downstairs. Jane, the tears near the surface, hurriedly tried to reassure her mother and get away before Tom came back from the garage.

  The concert was wonderful, and Lauderdale was courtesy itself. He knew good music and could discuss it intelligently, and he made the evening as enjoyable as possible. Jane had almost forgotten her annoyances until they got out to the street. But suddenly she remembered, for he was putting her into a taxi to send her home alone, saying he had to make the next train, as he had an appointment just after midnight to meet a man who was sailing for Europe in the morning. Well, of course there was nothing to be said to that, but Jane leaned out as the driver was about to start and signaled him to wait.

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said, trying to summon her most cordial smile, “that Mother sent word you were to come down in time to take dinner at our house next Friday.”

  A cold look overspread the handsome face. “Awfully kind, I’m sure,” he said in the tone a jellyfish might use if gifted with the faculty of speech, “but you see, that would be quite impossible. There’s a very important polo game next Friday, and I couldn’t possibly miss it. I have an engagement to take some friends, you know. Besides, I couldn’t think of beginning that sort of thing. My life is awfully full of engagements.” And he began to back away. “Good night! See you next Friday! It’s been a lovely evening with you!” And he was gone.

  Jane sat back in the taxi, weak with indignation. What did he mean anyway? Did he treat other people that way? And would she have to let her family know about it? Should she ever go again? How could she with self-respect?

  But by the time the taxi reached the corner of Flora Street, Jane had begun to reason herself out of her anger. Perhaps she was expecting too much. After all, when a man came from New York every week to spend an hour listening to music with a girl, it was something, wasn’t it? And perhaps if she urged any further he might think she was bidding for more of his company than he cared to give.

  With such lame fallacies, she soothed her ruffled dignity and came into the house with as much enthusiasm as she could muster to tell her waiting family about the wonderful music.

  The ride the next afternoon with Sherwood was only the beginning of a number of delightful excursions they took on Saturday afternoons after the office had closed. Sometimes it would be an expedition to some local spot of interest, a trip to the navy yard, the art gallery, or museum, or some nearby battleground. And often when the weather was not too bad, they would drive to the lovely hillside not far from Bethayres and turn in among the bare brown trees, bumping over the rough frozen road till they came to the clearing where they could see far off in either direction.

  They came to call it their hill, and they planned where a house should stand if they had the right to decide—how its windows should face, and where the great porch should stretch across to terraces and a swimming pool and sunken gardens down to the deep blue evergreen of the hemlock hedge at the road.

  Sometimes they brought Betty Lou with them, and she wandered about picking up winter treasures, pine cones to gild for the Christmas tree and curious seeded grasses and burrs. She carefully took up by its roots a strawberry vine, heavy with bright red berries. She would put it on a plate under a big glass bowl at home for winter beauty. Betty Lou loved the hillside and called it “our woods.” She found a little Christmas tree a foot high at the edge of the woods, and Sherwood dug it up for her with his pocket knife and took it home in his handkerchief for a table decoration.

  All three went up one day after a fall of light snow that spread a white blanket over the hill and penciled every frond of hemlock hedge and every twig of the bare brown trees with white. Jane had a small camera with her that she had used in the mountains, and they took a number of views that day.

  “Now,” said Jane, “they can’t quite take it away from us. We’ve got these pictures anyway, and if they turn out well, we can have some of them enlarged and framed just to remember it by. I suppose someday pretty soon this lovely spot will be sold, and perhaps somebody without any taste will buy it and put up an ugly house. But they shan’t spoil my memory of it anyway. What I can’t understand is why they have missed it so long.”

  “It does seem strange, doesn’t it?” said Sherwood. “It’s the loveliest place around here. I would much prefer it to that estate across the valley. But perhaps the owner means to keep it for himself.”

  So they talked about it and visited it and grew to love it more and more.

  Meantime the winter was well under way. Betty Lou was back in school, working hard. She had caught up for the month she had been absent by the shore and was forging ahead fast. Tom had been inveigled by Sherwood into taking up a course at night school and was spending most of his extra time studying, with the help of Sherwood, who managed to find time to drop around two or three evenings a week for at least a few minutes at a time.

  Sherwood had not asked Jane for another Friday evening. And Lauderdale came down regularly and met Jane at the concert. The family even ceased to mention the unusualness of the arrangement and settled down to expect Jane to be away every Friday night. “It’s Jane’s night at the orchestra,” they said, and seemed to forget there was any young man connected with it at all, though when she was gone Mr. Arleth would speak about it quite often to his wife: “Isn’t it strange that we have never met this friend of Jane’s? Are you sure he is all right, Mary?”

  And the mother would look troubled and say, “I think we can trust our girl, George. It does seem an odd way for him to act, never coming here at all, but as Jane says, it’s a long way to New York, and I suppose he is busy. I thought perhaps we ought to invite him at Christmas, although that might seem as if we were taking his attention for more than a mere acquaintance.”

  “Yes,” said the father, “perhaps we had better wait a little. Young people are more casual and informal in these days than you and I used to be. And as you say, Jane is pretty levelheaded. But I wonder if this young man is a Christian?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Mother, looking troubled.

  “We’ll just pray about it,” said the father with a smile. So they both prayed about it.

  And the weeks went by, and the concerts came and went and grew to be a habit, a pleasant interval in the week. Lauderdale never missed, and his manner was charming and just intimate enough to keep Jane interested. Sometimes she questioned herself where all this might be leading, and yet, since the day down by the shore when he had told her he loved her and tried to kiss her, he had never attempted to take up the conversation again.

  Sometimes Jane tried to think it out and wonder what she should say and do if he began to talk that way again, and wondered at herself that she was not sure. She knew from what the other girls at
the mountains had said that Lauderdale was considered to be a great “catch” and that the one who became his wife would be the envy of all his acquaintance. Luxury and travel and freedom from all financial stress, a constant whirl of pleasure, games and concerts, music and entertainments. Worldly amusements, yes, that she did not care for. But could she not win him away from such things? Why did she not seem able to try to talk with him seriously about the things they did not agree upon? She did not know, and gradually she settled down, content to enjoy the music and his company during that one brief evening a week. Time enough to think about it when matters changed. There was no decision called for now.

  So Jane drifted, and was happy.

  Thanksgiving passed rather prosaically, for Sherwood had been called upon to go to New England to his cousin’s wedding. Tom grumbled continually at his absence, and the rest of the family missed him silently. Jane wondered why a holiday was such an empty thing sometimes. But the concert came the next night to take her attention.

  The office was a busy place these days. Miss Forsythe was still detained in California, and her work still fell upon Jane. The extra week of her vacation was still delayed, and the days grew full to the brim.

  Christmas was hastening on. Betty Lou was making great preparations. She had something planned for every member of the family and Sherwood, and the bottom drawer of her bureau was kept sacredly locked now.

  It was the Friday morning before Christmas that Lauderdale telephoned Jane at the office. He said that he was coming down on the eleven o’clock train, and he wanted Jane to get off for the afternoon and take lunch and dinner with him. He was very insistent. He said he had something to show her and he must see her. In vain Jane told him how busy they were at the office. He would not take her refusal. So Jane finally compromised by asking Dulaney if she might get off at two o’clock, and Lauderdale reluctantly took what he could get.