The Camerons of Highboro

Excerpt

CHAPTER I
ELLIOTT PLANS AND FATE DISPOSES

Now and then the accustomed world turns a somersault; one day it faces you with familiar features, the next it wears a quite unrecognizable countenance. The experience is, of course, nothing new, though it is to be doubted whether it was ever staged so dramatically and on so vast a scale as during the past four years. And no one to whom it happens is ever the same afterward.

Elliott Cameron was not a refugee. She did not trudge Flemish roads with the pitiful salvage of her fortunes on her back, nor was she turned out of a cottage in Poland with only a sackful of her household treasures. Nevertheless, American girl though she was, she had to be evacuated from her house of life, the house she had been building through sixteen petted, autocratic years. This is the story of that evacuation.

It was made, for all the world, like any Pole’s or Serbian’s or Belgian’s; material valuables she let pass with glorious carelessness, as they left the silver spoons in order to salvage some sentimental trifle like a baby-shoe or old love-letters. Elliott took the closing of her home as she had taken the disposal of the big car, cheerfully enough, but she could not leave behind some absurd little tricks of thought that she had always indulged in. She was as strange to the road as any Picardy peasant and as bewildered, with—shall I say it?—considerably less pluck and spirit than some of them, when the landmarks she had lived by were swept away. But they, you see, had a dim notion of what was happening to them. Elliott had none. She didn’t even know that she was being evacuated. She knew only that ways which had always worked before had mysteriously ceased working, that prejudices and preoccupations and habits of mind and action, which she had spent her life in accumulating, she must now say good-by to, and that the war, instead of being across the sea, a thing one’s friends and cousins sailed away to, had unaccountably got right into America itself and was interfering to an unreasonable extent in affairs that were none of its business.

Father came home one night from a week’s absence and said, as he unfolded his napkin, “Well, chicken, I’m going to France.”

They were alone at dinner. Miss Reynolds, the housekeeper, was dining out with friends, as she sometimes did; nights that, though they both liked Miss Reynolds, father and daughter checked with a red mark.

“To France?” A little thrill pricked the girl’s spine as she questioned. “Is it Red Cross?”

“Not this time. An investigation for the government. It may, probably will, take months. The government wants a thorough job done. Uncle Samuel thinks your ancient parent competent to hold up one end of the thing.”

“Stop!” Elliott’s soft order commandeered all her dimples.

“I won’t have you maligning my father, you naughty man! Ancient parent, indeed! That’s splendid, isn’t it?”

“I rather like it. I was hoping it would strike you the same way.”

“When do you go?”

“As soon as I can get my affairs in shape—I could leave to-morrow, if I had to....