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By Clara Louise Burnham


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CLEVER BETSY

[Illustration: SHE SANK INTO THE ARMS THAT CLASPED HER]




CLEVER BETSY

A Novel

    by
    Clara Louise Burnham

    With Illustrations by
    Rose O’Neill

[Illustration]

    BOSTON AND NEW YORK
    HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
    The Riverside Press Cambridge
    1910




    COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

    _Published September 1910_




CONTENTS


         I. OPENING THE COTTAGE          1
        II. MISTRESS AND MAID           16
       III. IRVING BRUCE                27
        IV. MRS. POGRAM CONFIDES        38
         V. ROSALIE VINCENT             47
        VI. THE LAST STAGE              62
       VII. THE NATIONAL PARK           75
      VIII. THE BLONDE HEAVER           87
        IX. THE FOUNTAIN HOUSE         102
         X. ON THE RIVERSIDE           117
        XI. FACE TO FACE               131
       XII. THE FAITHFUL GEYSER        150
      XIII. THE HEIRESS                160
       XIV. THE LOOKOUT                176
        XV. AN EXODUS                  189
       XVI. BETSY’S GIFT               202
      XVII. SUNRISE                    217
     XVIII. HOMEWARD BOUND             232
       XIX. MRS. BRUCE’S HEADACHE      246
        XX. BETSY’S APPEAL             258
       XXI. A RAINY EVENING            270
      XXII. THE WHITE DOVE             282
     XXIII. THE DANCE                  296
      XXIV. THE CLASH                  313
       XXV. WHITE SWEET PEAS           327
      XXVI. IN BETSY’S ROOM            338
     XXVII. BETSY RECEIVES             355
    XXVIII. GOOD-BY, SUMMER            369
      XXIX. THE NEW YEAR               387




CLEVER BETSY




CHAPTER I

OPENING THE COTTAGE


“HELLO there!” The man with grizzled hair and bronzed face under a
shabby yachting-cap stopped in his leisurely ramble up the street of
a seaport village, and his eyes lighted at sight of a spare feminine
figure, whose lean vigorous arms were shaking a long narrow rug at a
cottage gate. “Ahoy there—The Clever Betsy!” he went on.

The energetic woman vouchsafed a sidewise twist of her mouth intended
for a smile, but did not cease from her labors, and a cloud of dust met
the hastened approach of the seaman.

“Here, there’s enough o’ that! Don’t you know your captain?” he went
on, dodging the woolen fringe which snapped near his dark cheek.

“_My_ captain!” retorted the energetic one, while the rug billowed
still more wildly. She was a woman of his own middle age, and the cloth
tied around her head did not add to her charms; but the man’s eyes
softened as they rested on her.

“Here! You carry too much sail. Take a reef!” he cried; and deftly
snatching the rug, in an instant it was trailing on the walk behind
him, while Betsy Foster stared, offended.

“How long ye been here, Betsy?”

“A couple o’ days,” replied the woman, adjusting the cheese-cloth
covering more firmly behind her ears.

“Why didn’t ye let a feller know?”

“Thought I wouldn’t trouble trouble till trouble troubled me.”

The man smiled. “The Clever Betsy,” he said musingly. They regarded one
another for a silent moment. “Why ain’t ye ever clever to me?”

She sniffed.

“Why don’t ye fat up some?” he asked again.

“If I was as lazy as you are, probably I should,” she returned, with
the sidewise grimace appearing again, and the breeze from the wide
ocean a stone’s throw away ruffling the sparse straight locks that
escaped from her headdress.

“Goin’ to marry me this time, Betsy?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Same old reason.”

“But I _tell_ ye,” said the man, in half-humorous, half-earnest appeal,
“I’ve told ye a dozen times I didn’t know which I liked best then. If
you’d happened to go home from singin’-school with me that night it
would ’a’ ben you.”

“And I say it ain’t proper respect to Annie’s memory for you to talk
that way.”

“I ain’t disrespectful. There never were two such nice girls in one
village before. I nearly grew wall-eyed tryin’ to look at you both at
once. Annie and I were happy as clams for fifteen years. She’s been
gone five, and I’ve asked ye four separate times if you’d go down the
hill o’ life with me, and there ain’t any sense in your refusin’ and
flappin’ rugs in my face.”

“You know I don’t like this sort o’ foolin’, Hiram. I wish you’d be
done with it.”

“I ain’t ever goin’ to be done with it, Betsy, not while you live and I
live.”

“Have some sense,” she rejoined. “We both made our choice when we were
young and we must abide by it—both of us.”

“You didn’t marry the Bruce family.”

“I did, too.”

Betsy Foster’s eyes, suddenly reminiscent, did not suit in their
expression the brusqueness of her tone. She saw again her young self,
heart-sick with the disappointment of her girlish fancy, leaving this
little village for the city, and finding a haven with the bride who
became her friend as well as mistress.

“I did, too,” she repeated. “It was my silver weddin’ only last week,
when Mr. Irving had his twenty-fourth birthday.”

“Is Irving that old? Bless me! Then,” hopefully, “if he’s twenty-four
he don’t need to be tied to your apron-strings. Strikes me you’re as
much of a widow as I am a widower. There ain’t many o’ the Bruce family
left for you to be married to. After Irving’s mother died, I can see
plain enough why you were a lot o’ help to Mr. Bruce; but when he
married again you didn’t have any call to look after him any longer;
and seein’ he died about the same time poor Annie did, you’ve been free
as air these five years. You don’t need to pretend you think such an
awful lot o’ the widder Bruce, ’cause I know ye don’t. Don’t ye suppose
I remember how all your feathers stood on end when Mr. Bruce married
her?”

Betsy gave a fleeting glance over her shoulder toward the window of the
cottage.

“’Twasn’t natural that I should want to see anybody in Irving’s
mother’s place, but she’s—”

“I remember as if ’twas yesterday,” interrupted Hiram, “how you said
’twas Irving she married him for; how that she could never keep her
fingers out of any pie, and she didn’t like the hats Mr. Bruce bought
for Irving, so she married him to choose ’em herself.”

Betsy’s lips twitched in a short laugh. “Well, I guess there was
somethin’ in that,” she answered.

Hiram pursued what he considered his advantage. “When Irving was on the
football team at college, you told me yourself, standin’ right by this
gate, that she’d go to the game, and when she wasn’t faintin’ because
he was knocked out, she was hollerin’ at him how to play.”

Betsy bridled. “Well, what’s all this for?” she demanded.

“It’s to show you plain as the nose on your face that if you ever was
married to the Bruce family you’re a widder now; just as much as I’m a
widower.”

“No, sir, for better or for worse,” returned Betsy doggedly.

“Get out. They’re dead, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce, both dead; and the widder
Bruce nothin’ at all to you.”

“Stepmother to Mr. Irving,” declared Betsy.

“Well, he’s used to it by this time. Had twelve years of it. Holy
mackerel, that kid twenty-four! I can’t realize it. His mother—”

“No, no,” said Betsy quickly.

“Well, _she_ anyway, Mrs. Bruce, went over to Europe to meet him last
year, didn’t she, when she took you?”

“Of course she did. He went abroad when he left college, and do you
suppose she could stand it not to be in part of his trip and tell him
what to do?”

“There now! It’s plain how you feel toward _that_ member o’ the family.”

“But I told you, didn’t I? Can’t you understand English? I told you
‘for better or for _worse_.’”

“Go ’long, Betsy, go ’long! That husky football hero don’t need you
to fight his battles. If she presses him too hard, he’ll get married
himself. I guess he’s got a pretty solid place in the bank. When did
you get back?”

“A month ago.”

“Mrs. Bruce come down here with you?”

Hiram’s eyes as he asked the question left his companion’s face for the
first time, and roved toward the windows of the cottage retreating amid
its greenery.

As if his question had evoked the apparition, a light-haired lady
suddenly appeared in the open doorway. She was a woman of about
forty-five years, but her blonde hair concealed its occasional silver
threads, and her figure was girlishly slender. She regarded the couple
for a moment through her gold eye-glasses, and then came down the steps
and through the garden-path.

“I thought I couldn’t be mistaken, Captain Salter,” she said
graciously, extending one hand, ringed and sparkling, and with the
other protecting the waves of her carefully dressed hair from the
boisterous breeze.

The captain, continuing to trail the rug behind him, touched his cap
and allowed his rough fingers to be taken for a moment.

“The Clever Betsy here was carrying too much sail,” he explained. “I
took ’em down.”

Mrs. Bruce laughed amiably.

“And found you’d run into a squall, no doubt,” she responded, observing
her handmaid’s reddened countenance.

Mrs. Bruce’s eyes could be best described as busy. There was nothing
subtle about her glances. She made it quite evident that nothing
escaped her, and the trim exactness of her dress and appearance seemed
to match her observations.

“It seems good to be back in Fairport,” she went on. “One summer’s
absence is quite enough, though I plan to slip away just for a little
while to take a look at the Yellowstone this year.”

“That so? Should think you’d had travelin’ enough for one spell,”
rejoined Hiram.

“Oh, it’s an appetite that grows with what it feeds on, Captain Salter.
I dare say you have been a rover, too. I know how all you sea-captains
are.”

“No’m. My line’s ben fish, mostly.”

“And,” added Mrs. Bruce, “taking care of us poor land-lubbers in
summer. My son was well satisfied with your sale of his boat. I don’t
know whether he will get another this summer or not. You’ll be here as
usual, I hope?”

“Looks that way.”

“I’m glad. I’m positively attached to the Gentle Annie.”

“Haven’t got her no more,” returned Hiram quietly. “I’ve parted with
her.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I suppose the new one’s better.”

“Well, she’s just as good, anyway.”

“But if she’s not better, I don’t see why you let the Annie go.”

“’Taint always in our power to hold on to things when we’d like to,”
responded Hiram equably.

Mrs. Bruce’s eyes shone with interest behind her bi-focals. “Poor man!”
she thought. “How improvident these ignorant people are! Probably went
into debt, and had to lose his boat, and calculated on doing enough
business this summer to pay for the new one.”

“And what,” she asked, with an air of gracious patronage, “will you
call this one? Gentle Annie second, of course.”

He shook his head, his sea-blue eyes fixed intrepidly on the object of
his affections, who regarded him threateningly.

“Can’t be any Annie second,” he returned quietly.

“Now I think you make a great mistake, Captain Salter,” said Mrs.
Bruce, with vigor. “For your own welfare I feel you ought to keep that
name. The summer people have been attached to the Gentle Annie so long,
and had such confidence in her.”

Hiram nodded; but Mrs. Bruce could not catch his fixed eye as she
wished, to emphasize her point.

“They were right,” he answered. “She was a good craft.”

“Confidence in her and you too, I should have said, of course,” went on
the lady.

“Yes, we sort o’ went together, pretty comfortable; but—well, I’ve lost
her.”

“Yes, but there’s a good-will goes with the name. You make a great
mistake not to keep it. Captain Salter and the Gentle Annie; people
have said