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Title: The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor
Author: Johnston, Annie F. (Annie Fellows), 1863-1931
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor" ***
Works of
ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
=The Little Colonel Series=
(_Trade Mark, Reg. U. S. Pat. Of._)
Each one vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel Stories $1.50
(Containing in one volume the three stories, "The
Little Colonel," "The Giant Scissors," and
"Two Little Knights of Kentucky.")
The Little Colonel's House Party 1.50
The Little Colonel's Holidays 1.50
The Little Colonel's Hero 1.50
The Little Colonel at Boarding-School 1.50
The Little Colonel in Arizona 1.50
The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation 1.50
The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor 1.50
The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding 1.50
The above 9 vols., boxed 13.50
_In Preparation_--A New Little Colonel Book 1.50
* * * * *
The Little Colonel Good Times Book 1.50
=Illustrated Holiday Editions=
Each one vol., small quarto, cloth, illustrated, and printed in colour
The Little Colonel $1.25
The Giant Scissors 1.25
Two Little Knights of Kentucky 1.25
Big Brother 1.25
=Cosy Corner Series=
Each one vol., thin 12mo, cloth, illustrated
The Little Colonel $.50
The Giant Scissors .50
Two Little Knights of Kentucky .50
Big Brother .50
Ole Mammy's Torment .50
The Story of Dago .50
Cicely .50
Aunt 'Liza's Hero .50
The Quilt that Jack Built .50
Flip's "Islands of Providence" .50
Mildred's Inheritance .50
=Other Books=
Joel: A Boy of Galilee $1.50
In the Desert of Waiting .50
The Three Weavers .50
Keeping Tryst .50
The Legend of the Bleeding Heart .50
Asa Holmes 1.00
Songs Ysame (Poems, with Albion Fellows Bacon) 1.00
* * * * *
=L. C. PAGE & COMPANY=
=200 Summer Street Boston, Mass.=
[Illustration: "LLOYD ... TOOK HER PLACE BESIDE THE HARP"
(_See page 68_)]
The Little Colonel:
Maid of Honor
By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON
Author of "The Little Colonel Series," "Big Brother," "Ole Mammy's
Torment," "Joel: A Boy of Galilee," "Asa Holmes," etc.
Illustrated by ETHELDRED B. BARRY
[Illustration]
BOSTON * L. C. PAGE
& COMPANY * PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1906_
BY L. C. PAGE & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)
* * * * *
_Entered at Stationers' Hall, London_
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_
First Impression, October, 1906
Third Impression, August, 1907
Fourth Impression, April, 1908
Fifth Impression, March, 1909
Sixth Impression, February, 1910
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. AT WARWICK HALL 1
II. AT WARE'S WIGWAM 19
III. IN BEAUTY'S QUEST 31
IV. MARY'S "PROMISED LAND" 43
V. AT "THE LOCUSTS" 58
VI. THE FOX AND THE STORK 70
VII. THE COMING OF THE BRIDE 88
VIII. AT THE BEECHES 113
IX. "SOMETHING BLUE" 136
X. "A COON HUNT" 158
XI. THE FOUR-LEAVED CLOVER 178
XII. THE WEDDING 198
XIII. DREAMS AND WARNINGS 216
XIV. A SECOND MAID OF HONOR 241
XV. THE END OF THE HOUSE-PARTY 258
XVI. THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR 275
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
"LLOYD ... TOOK HER PLACE BESIDE THE HARP"
(_See page 68_) _Frontispiece_
"IT NEEDED NO SECOND GLANCE TO TELL HIM WHO SHE WAS" 20
"HE WAS LEANING FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR, TALKING TO JOYCE" 66
"A TALL, ATHLETIC FIGURE IN OUTING FLANNELS" 84
"A LONG-DRAWN 'O-O-OH' GREETED THE BEAUTIFUL TABLEAU" 132
"'ALL YOU GIRLS STANDING WITH YOUR HANDS STUCK THROUGH THE BARS'" 163
"'THEY STEPPED IN AND ROWED OFF DOWN THE SHINING WATERWAY'" 171
"'ONE, TWO, THREE--_THROW_!'" 253
THE LITTLE COLONEL,
MAID OF HONOR
CHAPTER I.
AT WARWICK HALL
It was mid-afternoon by the old sun-dial that marked the hours in
Warwick Hall garden; a sunny afternoon in May. The usual busy routine of
school work was going on inside the great Hall, but no whisper of it
disturbed the quiet of the sleepy old garden. At intervals the faint
clang of the call-bell, signalling a change of classes, floated through
the open windows, but no buzz of recitations reached the hedge-hidden
path where Betty Lewis sat writing.
The whole picturesque place seemed as still as the palace of the
Sleeping Beauty. Even the peacocks on the terraced river-front stood
motionless, their resplendent tails spread out in the sun; and although
the air was filled with the odor of wild plum blossoms, the breeze that
bore it through the arbor where Betty sat, absorbed in her work, was so
gentle that it scarcely stirred the vines around her.
With her elbows resting on the rustic table in front of her, and one
finger unconsciously twisting the lock of curly brown hair that strayed
over her ear, she sat pushing her pencil rapidly across the pages of her
note-book. At times she stopped to tap impatiently on the table, when
the word she wanted failed to come. Then she would sit looking through
half-closed eyes at the sun-dial, or let her dreamy gaze follow the lazy
windings of the river, which, far below, took its slow way along between
the willows.
As editor-in-chief of _The Spinster_, there was good reason why she
should be excused from recitations now and then, to spend an afternoon
in this retreat. This year's souvenir volume bade fair to be the
brightest and most creditable one ever issued by the school. The English
professor not only openly said so, but was plainly so proud of Betty's
ability that the lower classes regarded her with awe, and adored her
from a distance, as a real live genius.
Whether she was a genius or not, one thing is certain, she spent hours
of patient, painstaking work to make her writing measure up to the
standard she had set for it. It was work that she loved better than
play, however, and to-day she sighed regretfully when the hunter's horn,
blowing on the upper terrace, summoned the school to its outdoor sports.
Instantly, in answer to the winding call, the whole place began to
awaken. There was a tread of many feet on the great staircase, the outer
doors burst open, and a stream of rollicking girls poured out into the
May sunshine.
Betty knew that in a few minutes the garden would be swarming with them
as if a flock of chattering magpies had taken possession of it. With a
preoccupied frown drawing her eyebrows together, she began gathering up
her papers, preparatory to making her escape. She glanced down the long
flight of marble steps leading to the river. There on the lowest
terrace, a fringe of willow-trees trailed their sweeping branches in the
water. Around the largest of these trees ran a circular bench. Seated on
the far side of this, the huge trunk would shield her from view of the
Hall, and she decided to go down there to finish.
It would never do to stop now, when the verses were spinning themselves
out so easily. None of the girls, except her four most intimate friends,
would dare think of following her down there, and if she could slip away
from that audacious quartette, she would be safe for the rest of the
afternoon.
Peering through a hole in the hedge, she stood waiting for them to pass.
A section of the botany class came first, swinging their baskets, and
bound for a wooded hillside where wild flowers grew in profusion. A
group on their way to the golf links came next, then half a dozen tennis
players, and the newly organized basket-ball team. A moment more, and
the four she was waiting for tramped out abreast, arm in arm: Lloyd
Sherman, Gay Melville, Allison and Kitty Walton. Gay carried a kodak,
and, from the remarks which floated over the hedge, it was evident they
were on their way to the orchard, to take a picture which would
illustrate the nonsense rhyme Kitty was chanting at the top of her
voice. They all repeated it after her in a singsong chorus, the four
pairs of feet keeping time in a soldierly tread as they marched past the
garden:
"Diddledy diddledy dumpty!
Three old maids in a plum-tree!
Half a crown to get them down,
Diddledy diddledy dumpty!"
Only in this instance Betty knew they were to be young maids instead of
old ones, all in a row on the limb of a plum-tree in the orchard, their
laughing faces thrust through the mass of snowy blossoms, as they waited
to be photographed.
"Diddledy diddledy dumpty"--the ridiculous refrain grew fainter and died
away as the girls passed on to the orchard, and Betty, smiling in
sympathy with their high spirits, ran down the stately marble steps to
the seat under the willow. It was so cool and shadowy down there that at
first it was a temptation just to sit and listen to the lap of the water
against the shore, but the very length of the shadows warned her that
the afternoon was passing, and after a few moments she fell to work
again with conscientious energy.
So deeply did she become absorbed in her task, she did not look up when
some one came down the steps behind her. It was an adoring little
freshman, who had caught the glimmer of her pink dress behind the tree.
The special-delivery letter she carried was her excuse for following.
She had been in a flutter of delight when Madame Chartley put it in her
hand, asking her to find Elizabeth Lewis and give it to her. But now
that she stood in the charmed presence, actually watching a poem in the
process of construction, she paused, overwhelmed by the feeling that she
was rushing in "where angels feared to tread."
Still, special-delivery letters are important things. Like time and tide
they wait for no man. Somebody might be dead or dying. So summoning all
her courage, she cleared her throat. Then she gave a bashful little
cough. Betty looked up with an absent-minded stare. She had been so busy
polishing a figure of speech to her satisfaction that she had forgotten
where she was. For an instant the preoccupied little pucker between her
eyebrows smote the timid freshman with dismay. She felt that she had
gained her idol's everlasting displeasure by intruding at such a time.
But the next instant Betty's face cleared, and the brown eyes smiled in
the way that always made her friends wherever she went.
"What is it, Dora?" she asked, kindly. Dora, who could only stammer an
embarrassed reply, held out the letter. Then she stood with toes turned
in, and both hands fumbling nervously with her belt ribbon, while Betty
broke the seal.
"I--I hope it isn't bad news," she managed to say at last. "I--I'd hate
to bring _you_ bad news."
Betty looked up with a smile which brought Dora's heart into her throat.
"Thank you, dear," she answered, cordially. Then, as her eye travelled
farther down the page, she gave a cry of pleasure.
"Oh, it is perfectly lovely news, Dora. It's the most beautiful surprise
for Lloyd's birthday that ever was. She's not to know till to-morrow.
It's too good a secret to keep to myself, so I'll share it with you in a
minute if you'll swear not to tell till to-morrow."
Scarcely believing that she heard aright, Dora dropped down on the
grass, regardless of the fact that her roommate and two other girls were
waiting on the upper terrace for her to join them. They were going to
Mammy Easter's cabin to have their fortunes told. Feeling that this was
the best fortune that had befallen her since her arrival at Warwick
Hall, and sure that Mammy Easter could foretell no greater honor than
she was already enjoying, she signalled wildly for them to go on without
her.
At first they did not understand her frantic gestures for them to go on,
and stood beckoning, till she turned her back on them. Then they moved
away reluctantly and in great disgust at her abandoning them. When a
glance over her shoulder assured her that she was rid of them, she
settled down with a blissful sigh. What greater honor could she have
than to be chosen as the confidante of the most brilliant pupil ever
enrolled at Warwick Hall? At least it was reported that that was the
faculty's opinion of her. Dora's roommate, Cornie Dean, had chosen Lloyd
Sherman as the shrine of her young affections, and it was from Cornie
that Dora had learned the personal history of her literary idol. She
knew that Lloyd Sherman's mother was Betty's godmother, and that the two
girls lived together as sisters in a beautiful old home in Kentucky
called "The Locusts." She had seen the photograph of the place hanging
in Betty's room, and had heard scraps of information about the various
house-parties that had frolicked under the hospitable rooftree of the
fine old mansion. She knew that they had travelled abroad, and had had
all sorts of delightful and unusual experiences. Now something else fine
and unusual was about to happen, and Betty had offered to share a
secret with her. A little shiver of pleasure passed over her at the
thought. This was so delightfully intimate and confidential, almost like
taking one of those "little journeys to the homes of famous people."
As Betty turned the page, Dora felt with another thrill that that was
the hand which had written the poem on "Friendship," which all the girls
had raved over. She herself knew it by heart, and she knew of at least
six copies which, cut from the school magazine in which it had been
published, were stuck in the frames of as many mirrors.
And that was the hand that had written the junior class song and the
play that the juniors gave on Valentine night. If reports were true that
was also the hand which would write the valedictory next year, and which
was now secretly at work upon a book which would some day place its
owner in the ranks with George Eliot and Thackeray.
While she still gazed in a sort of fascination at the daintily manicured
pink-tipped fingers, Betty looked up with a radiant face. "Now I'll read
it aloud," she said. "It will take several readings to make me realize
that such a lovely time is actually in store for us. It's from
godmother," she explained.
"DEAR ELIZABETH:--As I cannot be sure just when
this will reach Warwick Hall, I am sending the
enclosed letter to Lloyd in your care. A little
package for her birthday has already gone on to
her by express, but as this bit of news will give
her more pleasure than any gift, I want her to
receive it also on her birthday. I have just
completed arrangements for a second house-party, a
duplicate of the one she had six years ago, when
she was eleven. I have bidden to it the same
guests which came to the first one, you and
Eugenia Forbes and Joyce Ware, but Eugenia will
come as a bride this time. I have persuaded her to
have her wedding here at Locust, among her only
kindred, instead of in New York, where she and her
father have no home ties. It will be a rose
wedding, the last of June. The bridegroom's
brother, Phil Tremont, is to be best man, and
Lloyd maid of honor. Stuart's best friend, a young
doctor from Boston, is to be one of the
attendants, and Rob another. You and Joyce are to
be bridesmaids, just as you would have been had
the wedding been in New York.
"Eugenia writes that she bought the material in
Paris for your gowns. I enclose a sample, pale
pink chiffon. Like a rose-leaf, is it not? Dressed
in this dainty color, you will certainly carry out
my idea of a rose wedding. Now do not let the
thoughts of all this gaiety interfere with your
studies. That is all I can tell you now, but you
may spend your spare time until school is out
planning things to make this the happiest of
house-parties, and we will try to carry out all
the plans that are practicable. Your devoted
godmother,
"ELIZABETH SHERMAN."
Betty spread the sample of chiffon out over her knee, and stroked it
admiringly, before she slipped it back into the envelope with the
letter. "The Princess is going to be so happy over this," she exclaimed.
"I'm sure she'll enjoy this second house-party at seventeen a hundred
times more than she did the first one at eleven, and yet nobody could
have had more fun than we did at that time."
Dora's eager little face was eloquent with interest. Betty could not
have chosen a more attentive listener, and, inspired by her flattering
attention, she went on to recall some of the good times they had had at
Locust, and in answer to Dora's timid questions explained why Lloyd was
called The Little Colonel and the Princess Winsome and the Queen of
Hearts and Hildegarde, and all the other titles her different friends
had showered upon her.
"She must have been born with a gold spoon in her mouth, to be so
lucky," sighed Dora, presently. "Life has been all roses for her, and no
thorns whatever."
"No, indeed!" answered Betty, quickly. "She had a dreadful
disappointment last year. She was taken sick during the Christmas
vacation, and had to stay out of school all last term. It nearly broke
her heart to drop behind her class, and she still grieves over it every
day. The doctors forbade her taking extra work to catch up with it. Then
so much is expected of an only child like her, who has had so many
advantages, and it is no easy matter living up to all the expectations
of a family like the old Colonel's."
Betty's back was turned to the terraces, but Dora, who faced them,
happened to look up just then. "There she comes now," she cried in
alarm. "Hide the letter! Quick, or she'll see you!"
Glancing over her shoulder, Betty saw, not only the four girls she had
run away from, but four others, running down the terraces, taking the
flight of marble steps two at a time. Gay's shoe-strings were tripping
her at every leap, and Lloyd's hair had shaken down around her shoulders
in a shining mass in the wild race from the orchard.
Lloyd reached the willow first. Dropping down on the bench, almost
breathless, she began fanning herself with her hat.
"Oh!" she gasped. "Tell me quick, Betty! What is the mattah? Cornie Dean
said a messenger boy had just come out to the Hall on a bicycle with a
special-delivery lettah from home. I was so suah something awful had
happened I could hardly run, it frightened me so."
"And we thought maybe something had happened at 'The Beeches,'"
interrupted Allison, "and that mamma had written to you to break the
news to us."
"Why, nothing at all is the matter," answered Betty, calmly, darting a
quick look at Dora to see if her face was betraying anything. "It was
just a little note from godmother. She wanted me to attend to something
for her."
"But why should she send it by special delivery if it isn't impawtant?"
asked Lloyd, in an aggrieved tone.
"It is important," laughed Betty. "Very."
"For goodness' sake, what is it, then?" demanded Lloyd. "Don't tease me
by keeping me in suspense, Betty. You know that anything about mothah or
The Locusts must concern me, too, and that I am just as much interested
in the special lettah as you are. I should think it would be just as
much my business as yoah's."
"This does concern you," admitted Betty, "and I'm dying to tell you, but
godmother doesn't want you to know until to-morrow."
"To-morrow," echoed Lloyd, much puzzled. Then her face lighted up. "Oh,
it's about my birthday present. Tell me what it is _now_, Betty," she
wheedled. "I'd lots rathah know now than to wait. I could be enjoying
the prospect of having whatevah it is all the rest of the day."
Betty clapped her hands over her mouth, and rocked back and forth on the
bench, her eyes shining mischievously.
"_Do_ go away," she begged. "_Don't_ ask me! It's so lovely that I can
hardly keep from telling you, and I'm afraid if you stay here I'll not
have strength of character to resist."
"Tell _us_, Betty," suggested Kitty. "Lloyd will hide her ears while you
confide in us."
"No, indeed!" laughed Betty. "The cat is half out of the bag when a
secret is once shared, and I know you couldn't keep from telling Lloyd
more than an hour or two."
Just then Lloyd, leaning forward, pounced upon something at Betty's
feet. It was the sample of pink chiffon that had dropped from the
envelope.
"Sherlock Holmes the second!" she cried. "I've discovahed the secret. It
has something to do with Eugenia's rose wedding, and mothah is going to
give me my bridesmaid's dress as a birthday present. Own up now, Betty.
Isn't that it?"
Betty darted a startled look at Dora. "Well," she admitted, cautiously,
"if it were a game of hunt the slipper, I'd say you were getting rather
warm. That is _not_ the present your mother mentioned, although it _is_
a sample of the bridesmaids' dresses. Eugenia got the material in Paris
for all of them. I'm at liberty to tell you that much."
"Is that the wedding where you are to be maid of honor, Princess?" asked
Grace Campman, one of the girls who had been posing in the plum-tree,
and who had followed her down to hear the news.
"Yes," answered Lloyd. "Is it any wondah that I'm neahly wild with
curiosity?"
"Make her tell," urged an excited chorus. "Just half a day beforehand
won't make any difference."
"Let's all begin and beg her," suggested Grace.
Lloyd, long used to gaining her own way with Betty by a system of
affectionate coaxing hard to resist, turned impulsively to begin the
siege to wrest the secret from her, but another reference to the maid of
honor by Grace made her pause. Then she said suddenly, with the
well-known princess-like lifting of the head that they all admired:
"No, don't tell me, Betty. A maid of _honah_ should be too honahable to
insist on finding out things that were not intended for her to know. I
hadn't thought. If mothah took all the trouble of sending a
special-delivery lettah to you to keep me from knowing till my birthday,
I'm not going to pry around trying to find out."
"Well, if you aren't the _queerest_," began Grace. "One would think to
hear you talk that 'maid of honor' was some great title to be lived up
to like the 'Maid of Orleans,' and that only some high and mighty
creature like Joan of Arc could do it. But it's nothing more than to go
first in the wedding march, and hold the bride's bouquet. I shouldn't
think you'd let a little thing like that stand in the way of your
finding out what you're so crazy to know."
"_Wouldn't_ you?" asked Lloyd, with a slight shrug, and in a tone which
Dora described afterward to Cornie as simply withering.
"'Well, that's the difference, as you see,
Betwixt my lord the king and _me_!'"
To Grace's wonder, she dropped the sample of pink chiffon in Betty's
lap, as if it had lost all interest for her, and stood up.
"Come on, girls," she exclaimed. "Let's take the rest of those pictuahs.
There are two moah films left in the roll."
"I might as well go with you," said Betty, gathering up the loose leaves
that had fallen from her note-book. "It's no use trying to write with my
head so full of the grand secret. I couldn't possibly think of anything
else."
Arm in arm with Allison, she sauntered up the steps behind the others to
the old garden, which was the pride of every pupil in Warwick Hall. The
hollyhocks from Ann Hathaway's cottage had not yet begun to flaunt their
rosettes of color, but the rhododendrons from Killarney were in gorgeous
bloom. As Lloyd focussed the camera in such a way as to make them a
background for a picture of the sun-dial, Betty heard Kitty ask: "You'll
let us know early in the morning what your present is, won't you,
Princess?"
"Yes, I'll run into yoah room with it early in the mawning, just as soon
as I lay eyes on it myself," promised Lloyd, solemnly.
"She can't!" whispered Betty to Allison, with a giggle. "In the first
place, it's something that can't be carried, and in the second place it
will take a month for her to see all of it herself."
Allison stopped short in the path, her face a picture of baffled
curiosity. "Betty Lewis," she said, solemnly, "I could find it in my
heart to choke you. Don't tempt me too far, or I'll do it with a good
grace."
Betty laughed and pushed aside the vines at the entrance to the arbor.
"Come in here," she said, in a low tone. "I've intended all along to
tell you as soon as we got away from Grace Campman and those freshmen,
for it concerns you and Kitty, too. You missed the first house-party we
had at The Locusts, but you'll have a big share in the second one. For a
June house-party with a wedding in it is the 'surprise' godmother has
written about in Lloyd's birthday letter."
CHAPTER II.
AT WARE'S WIGWAM
In order that Lloyd's invitation to her own house-party might reach her
on her birthday, it had not been mailed until several days after the
others. So it happened that the same morning on which she slipped across
the hall in her kimono, to share her first rapturous delight with Kitty,
Joyce Ware's letter reached the end of its journey.
The postman on the first rural delivery route out of Phoenix jogged
along in his cart toward Ware's Wigwam. He had left the highway and was
following the wheel-tracks which led across the desert to Camelback
Mountain. The horse dropped into a plodding walk as the wheels began
pulling heavily through the sand, and the postman yawned. This stretch
of road through the cactus and sage-brush was the worst part of his
daily trip. He rarely passed anything more interesting than a
jack-rabbit, but this morning he spied something ahead that aroused his
curiosity.
At first it seemed only a flash of something pink beating the air; but,
as he jogged nearer, he saw that the flash of pink was a short-skirted
gingham dress. A high-peaked Mexican hat hid the face of the wearer, but
it needed no second glance to tell him who she was. Every line of the
sturdy little figure, from the uplifted arms brandishing a club to the
dusty shoes planted widely apart to hold her balance, proclaimed that it
was Mary Ware. As the blows fell with relentless energy, the postman
chuckled.
"Must be killing a snake," he thought. "Whatever it is, it will be
flatter than a pancake when she gets through with it."
Somehow he always felt like chuckling when he met Mary Ware. Whatever
she happened to be doing was done with a zeal and a vim that made this
fourteen-year-old girl a never-failing source of amusement to the
easy-going postman. Now as he came within speaking distance, he saw a
surrey drawn up to the side of the road, and recognized the horse as old
Bogus from Lee's ranch.
[Illustration: "IT NEEDED NO SECOND GLANCE TO TELL HIM WHO SHE WAS"]
A thin, tall woman, swathed in a blue veil, sat stiffly on the back
seat, reaching forward to hold the reins in a grasp that showed both
fear and unfamiliarity in the handling of horses. She was a new
boarder at Lee's ranch. Evidently they had been out on some errand for
Mrs. Lee, and were returning from one of the neighboring orange-groves,
for the back of the surrey was filled with oranges and grapefruit.
The postman's glance turned from the surrey to the object in the road
with an exclamation of surprise. One of the largest rattlesnakes he had
ever seen lay stretched out there, and Mary, having dropped her club,
was proceeding to drag it toward the surrey by a short lasso made of a
piece of the hitching-rope. The postman stood up in his cart to look at
it.
"Better be sure it's plumb dead before you give it a seat in your
carriage," he advised.
Mary gave a glance of disgust toward the blue-veiled figure in the
surrey.
"Oh, it's _dead_," she said, witheringly. "Mr. Craydock shot its head
off to begin with, over at the orange-grove this morning, and I've
killed it four different times on our way home. He gave it to me to take
to Norman for his collection. But Miss Scudder is so scared of it that
she makes me get out every half-mile to pound a few more inches off its
neck. It was a perfect beauty when we started,--five feet long and
twelve rattles. I'm so afraid I'll break off some of the rattles that
I'll be mighty glad when I get it safely home."
"So will I!" ejaculated Miss Scudder, so fervently that the postman
laughed as he drove on.
"Any mail for us?" Mary called after him.
"Only some papers and a letter for your sister," he answered over his
shoulder.
"Now why didn't I ask him to take me and the snake on home in the cart
with him?" exclaimed Mary, as she lifted the rattler into the surrey by
means of the lasso, and took the reins from the new boarder's uneasy
hands. "Even if you can't drive, Bogus could take you to the ranch all
right by himself. Lots of times when Hazel Lee and I are out driving, we
wrap the reins around the whipholder and let him pick his own way. Now
I'll have to drag this snake all the way from the ranch to the Wigwam,
and it will be a dreadful holdback when I'm in such a hurry to get there
and see who Joyce's letter is from.
"You see," she continued, clucking cheerfully to Bogus, "the postman's
mail-pouch is almost as interesting as a grab-bag, since my two brothers
went away. Holland is in the navy," she added, proudly, "and my oldest
brother, Jack, has a position in the mines up where mamma and Norman
and I are going to spend the summer."
Three years in the desert had not made Mary Ware any the less talkative.
At fourteen she was as much of a chatterbox as ever, but so diverting,
with her fund of unexpected information and family history and her
cheerful outlook on life, that Mrs. Lee often sent for her to amuse some
invalid boarder, to the mutual pleasure of the small philosopher and her
audience.
The experiment this morning had proved anything but a pleasure drive for
either of them, however. Timid Miss Scudder, afraid of horses, afraid of
the lonely desert, and with a deathly horror of snakes, gave a sigh of
relief when they came in sight of the white tents clustered around the
brown adobe ranch house on the edge of the irrigating canal. But with
the end of her journey in sight, she relaxed her strained muscles and
nerves somewhat, and listened with interest to what Mary was saying.
"This year has brought three of us our heart's desires, anyhow. Holland
has been wild to get into the navy ever since he was big enough to know
that there is one. Jack has been looking forward to this position in the
mines ever since we came out West. It will be the making of him,
everybody says. And Joyce's one dream in life has been to save enough
money to go East to take lessons in designing. Her bees have done
splendidly, but I don't believe she could have _quite_ managed it if
Eugenia Forbes hadn't invited her to be one of the bridesmaids at her
wedding, and promised to send her a pass to New York."
She broke off abruptly as Bogus came to a stop in front of the tents,
and, standing up, she proceeded to dangle the snake carefully over the
wheel, till it was lowered in safety to the ground. Ordinarily she would
have lingered at the ranch until the occupant of every tent had strolled
out to admire her trophy, and afterward might have accepted Hazel Lee's
invitation to stay to dinner. It was a common occurrence for them to
spend their Saturdays together. But to-day not even the promise of
strawberry shortcake and a ride home afterward, when it was cooler,
could tempt her to stay.
The yellow road stretched hot and glaring across the treeless desert.
The snake was too heavy to carry on a pole over her shoulder. She would
have to drag it through the sun and sand if she went now. But her
curiosity was too strong to allow her to wait. She must find out what
was in that letter to Joyce. If it were from Jack, there would be
something in it about their plans for the summer; maybe a kodak picture
of the shack in the pine woods near the mines, where they were to board.
If it were from Holland, there would be another interesting chapter of
his experiences on board the training-ship.
Once as she trudged along the road, it occurred to her that the letter
might be from her cousin Kate, the "witch with a wand," who had so often
played fairy godmother to the family. She might be writing to say that
she had sent another box. Straightway Mary's active imagination fell to
picturing its contents so blissfully that she forgot the heat of the
sun-baked road over which she was going. Her face was beaded with
perspiration and her eyes squinted nearly shut under the broad brim of
the Mexican sombrero, but, revelling in the picture her mind called up
of cool white dresses and dainty thin-soled slippers, she walked faster
and faster, oblivious to the heat and the glaring light. Her sunburned
cheeks were flaming red when she finally reached the Wigwam, and the
locks of hair straggling down her forehead hung in limp wet strings.
Lifting the snake carefully across the bridge which spanned the
irrigating canal, she trailed it into the yard and toward the
umbrella-tree which shaded the rustic front porch. Under this sheltering
umbrella-tree, which spread its dense arch like a roof, sat Joyce and
her mother. The heap of muslin goods piled up around them showed that
they had spent a busy morning sewing. But they were idle now. One glance
showed Mary that the letter, whosever it was, had brought unusual news.
Joyce sat on the door-step with it in her lap and her hands clasped over
her knees. Mrs. Ware, leaning back in her sewing-chair, was opening and
shutting a pair of scissors in an absent-minded manner, as if her
thoughts were a thousand miles away.
"Well, it's good news, anyway," was Mary's first thought, as she glanced
at her sister's radiant face. "She wouldn't look so pretty if it wasn't.
It's a pity she can't be hearing good news all the time. When her eyes
shine like that, she's almost beautiful. Now me, all the good news in
the world wouldn't make _me_ look beautiful, freckled and fat and
sunburned as I am, and my hair so fine and thin and straight--"
She paused in her musings to look up each sleeve for her handkerchief,
and not finding it in either, caught up the hem of her short pink skirt
to wipe her perspiring face.
"Oh, _what_ did the postman bring?" she demanded, seating herself on the
edge of the hammock swung under the umbrella-tree. "I've almost walked
myself into a sunstroke, hurrying to get here and find out. Is it from
Jack or Holland or Cousin Kate?"
"It is from The Locusts," answered Joyce, leaning forward to see what
was tied to the other end of the rope which Mary still held. Seeing that
it was only a snake, something which Mary and Holland were always
dragging home, to add to their collection of skins and shells, she went
on:
"The Little Colonel is to have a second house-party. The same girls that
were at the first one are invited for the month of June, and Eugenia is
to be married there instead of in New York. Think what a wedding it will
be, in that beautiful old Southern home! A thousand times nicer than it
would have been in New York."
She stopped to enjoy the effect her news had produced. Mary's face was
glowing with unselfish pleasure in her sister's good fortune.
"And we're to wear pale pink chiffon dresses, just the color of wild
roses. Eugenia got the material in Paris when she ordered her
wedding-gown, and they're to be made in Louisville after we get there."
The light in Mary's face was deepening.
"And Phil Tremont is to be there the entire month of June. He is to be
best man, you know, since Eugenia is to marry his brother."
"Oh, Joyce!" gasped Mary. "What a heavenly time you are going to have!
Just The Locusts by itself would be good enough, but to be there at a
house-party, and have Phil there and to see a wedding! I've always
wanted to go to a wedding. I never saw one in my life."
"Tell her the rest, daughter," prompted Mrs. Ware, gently. "Don't keep
her in the dark any longer."
"Well, then," said Joyce, smiling broadly. "Let me break it to you by
degrees, so the shock won't give you apoplexy or heart-failure. The rest
of it is, that _you_--Mary Ware, are invited also. _You_ are invited to
go with me to the house-party at The Locusts! And _you'll_ see the
wedding, for Mr. Sherman is going to send tickets for both of us, and
mamma and I have made all the plans. Now that she is so well, she won't
need either of us while she's up at the camp with Jack, and the money
it would have taken to pay your board will buy the new clothes you
need."
All the color faded out of the hot little face as Mary listened, growing
pale with excitement.
"Oh, mamma, is it _true_?" she asked, imploringly. "I don't see how it
can be. But Joyce wouldn't fool me about anything as big as this, would
she?"
She asked the question in such a quiver of eagerness that the tears
sprang to her eyes. Joyce had expected her to spin around on her toes
and squeal one delighted little squeal after another, as she usually did
when particularly happy. She did not know what to expect next, when all
of a sudden Mary threw herself across her mother's lap and began to sob
and laugh at the same time.
"Oh, mamma, the old Vicar was right. It's been awfully hard sometimes to
k-keep inflexible. Sometimes I thought it would nearly k-kill me! But we
did it! We did it! And now fortune _has_ changed in our favor, and
everything is all right!"
A rattle of wheels made her look up and hastily wipe the hem of her pink
skirt across her face again. A wagon was stopping at the gate, and the
man who was to stay in one of the tents and take care of the bees in
their absence was getting out to discuss the details of the
arrangement. Joyce tossed the letter into Mary's lap and rose to follow
her mother out to the hives. There were several matters of business to
arrange with him, and Mary knew it would be some time before they could
resume the exciting conversation he had interrupted. She read the letter
through, hardly believing the magnitude of her good fortune. But, as the
truth of it began to dawn upon her, she felt that she could not possibly
keep such news to herself another instant. It might be an hour before
Joyce and her mother had finished discussing business with the man and
Norman was away fishing somewhere up the canal.
So, settling her hat on her head, she started back over the hot road, so
absorbed in the thought of all she had to tell Hazel that she was wholly
unconscious of the fact that she was still holding tightly to the rope
tied around the rattler's neck. Five feet of snake twitched along behind
her as she started on a run toward the ranch.
CHAPTER III.
IN BEAUTY'S QUEST
"Fortune has at last--fortune has at last--
Fortune has at last changed in our _fa_-vor!"
A hundred times, in the weeks that followed, Mary turned the old Vicar's
saying into sort of a chant, and triumphantly intoned it as she went
about the house, making preparations for her journey. Most of the time
she was not aware that her lips were repeating what her heart was
constantly singing, and one day, to her dire mortification, she chanted
the entire strain in one of the largest dry-goods stores in Phoenix,
before she realized what she was doing.
She had gone with Joyce to select some dress material for herself. It
had been so long since Mary had had any clothes except garments made
over and handed down, that the wealth of choice offered her was almost
overpowering. To be sure it was a bargain counter they were hanging
over, but the remnants of lawn and organdy and gingham were so
entrancingly new in design and dainty in coloring, that without a
thought to appearances she caught up the armful of pretty things which
Joyce had decided they could afford. Clasping them ecstatically in an
impulsive hug, she sang at the top of her voice, just as she would have
done had she been out alone on the desert: "Fortune has at last changed
in our _fa_-vor!"
When Joyce's horrified exclamation and the clerk's amused smile recalled
her to her surroundings, she could have gone under the counter with
embarrassment. Although she flushed hotly for several days whenever she
thought of the way everybody in the store turned to stare at her, she
still hummed the same words whenever a sense of her great good fortune
overwhelmed her. Such times came frequently, especially whenever a new
garment was completed and she could try it on with much preening and
many satisfied turns before the mirror.
It was on one of these occasions, when she was proudly revolving in the
daintiest of them all, a pale blue mull which she declared was the color
of a wild morning-glory, that a remark of her mother's, in the next
room, filled her with dismay. It had not been intended for her ears,
but it floated in distinctly, above the whirr of the sewing-machine.
"Joyce, I am sorry we made up that blue for Mary. She's so tanned and
sunburned that it seems to bring out all the red tints in her skin, and
makes her look like a little squaw. I never realized how this climate
has injured her complexion until I saw her in that shade of blue, and
remembered how becoming it used to be. She was like an apple-blossom,
all white and pink, when we came out here."
Mary had been so busy looking at her new clothes that she had paid
little attention to the face above them, reflected in the mirror. It had
tanned so gradually that she had become accustomed to having that
sunbrowned little visage always smile back at her. Besides, every one
she met was tanned by the wind and weather, some of them spotted with
big dark freckles. Joyce wasn't. Joyce had always been careful about
wearing a sunbonnet or a wide brimmed hat when she went out in the sun.
Mary remembered now, with many compunctions, how often she had been
warned to do the same. She wished with all her ardent little soul that
she had not been so careless, and presently, after a serious,
half-tearful study of herself in the glass, she went away to find a
remedy.
In the back of the cook-book, she remembered, there was a receipt for
cold cream, and in a magazine Mrs. Lee had loaned them was a whole
column devoted to face bleaches and complexion restorers. Having read
each formula, she decided to try them all in turn, if the first did not
prove effective.
Buttermilk and lemon juice were to be had for the taking and could be
applied at night after Joyce had gone to sleep. Half-ashamed of this
desire to make herself beautiful, Mary shrank from confiding her
troubles to any one. But several nights' use of all the home remedies
she could get, failed to produce the desired results. When she anxiously
examined herself in the glass, the unflattering mirror plainly showed
her a little face, not one whit fairer for all its treatment.
The house-party was drawing near too rapidly to waste time on things of
such slow action, and at last, in desperation, she took down the
savings-bank in which, after long hoarding, she had managed to save
nearly two dollars. By dint of a button-hook and a hat-pin and an hour's
patient poking, she succeeded in extracting five dimes. These she
wrapped in tissue paper, and folded in a letter. In a Phoenix
newspaper she had seen an advertisement of a magical cosmetic, to be
found on sale at one of the local drug-stores, and this was an order
for a box.
She was accustomed to running out to watch for the postman. Often in her
eagerness to get the mail she had met him half a mile down the road. So
she had ample opportunity to send her order and receive a reply without
the knowledge of any of the family.
It was a delicious-smelling ointment. The directions on the wrapper said
that on retiring, it was to be applied to the face like a thick paste,
and a linen mask worn to prevent its rubbing off.
Now that the boys were away, Mary shared the circular tent with Joyce.
The figures "mystical and awful" which she and Holland had put on its
walls with green paint the day they moved to the Wigwam, had faded
somewhat in the fierce sun of tropical summers, but they still grinned
hideously from all sides. Outlandish as they were, however, no face on
all the encircling canvas was as grotesque as the one which emerged from
under the bed late in the afternoon, the day the box of cosmetic was
received.
Mary had crept under the bed in order to escape Norman's prying eyes in
case he should glance into the tent in search of her. There, stretched
out on the floor with a pair of scissors and a piece of one of her old
linen aprons, she had fashioned herself a mask, in accordance with the
directions on the box. The holes cut for the eyes and nose were a trifle
irregular, one eye being nearly half an inch higher than the other, and
the mouth was decidedly askew. But tapes sewed on at the four corners
made it ready for instant use, and when she had put it on and crawled
out from under the bed, she regarded herself in the glass with great
satisfaction.
"I hope Joyce won't wake up in the night and see me," she thought.
"She'd be scared stiff. This is a lot of trouble and expense, but I just
can't go to the house-party looking like a fright. I'd do lots more than
this to keep the Princess from being ashamed of me."
Then she put it away and went out to the hammock, under the
umbrella-tree, and while she sat swinging back and forth for a long
happy hour, she pictured to herself the delights of the coming
house-party. The Princess would be changed, she knew. Her last
photograph showed that. One is almost grown up at seventeen, and she had
been only fourteen, Mary's age, when she made that never to be forgotten
visit to the Wigwam. And she would see Betty and Betty's godmother and
Papa Jack and the old Colonel and Mom Beck. The very names, as she
repeated them in a whisper, sounded interesting to her. And the two
little knights of Kentucky, and Miss Allison and the Waltons--they were
all mythical people in one sense, like Alice in Wonderland and Bo-peep,
yet in another they were as real as Holland or Hazel Lee, for they were
household names, and she had heard so much about them that she felt a
sort of kinship with each one.
With the mask and the box tucked away in readiness under her pillow, it
was an easy matter after Joyce had gone to sleep for Mary to lift
herself to a sitting posture, inch by inch. Cautiously as a cat she
raised herself, then sat there in the darkness scooping out the smooth
ointment with thumb and finger, and spreading it thickly over her
inquisitive little nose and plump round cheeks. All up under her hair
and down over her chin she rubbed it with energy and thoroughness. Then
tying on the mask, she eased herself down on her elbow, little by
little, and snuggled into her pillow with a sigh of relief.
It was a long time before she fell asleep. The odor of the ointment was
sickeningly sweet, and the mask gave her a hot smothery feeling. When
she finally dozed off it was to fall into a succession of uneasy dreams.
She thought that the cat was sitting on her face; that an old ogre had
her head tied up in a bag and was carrying it home to change into an
apple dumpling, then that she was a fly and had fallen into a bottle of
mucilage. From the last dream she roused with a start, hot and
uncomfortable, but hardly wide awake enough to know what was the matter.
The salty dried beef they had had for supper made her intensely thirsty,
and remembering the pitcher of fresh water which Joyce always brought
into the tent every night, she slipped out of bed and stumbled across
the floor toward the table. The moon was several nights past the full
now, so that at this late hour the walls of the tent glimmered white in
its light, and where the flap was turned back at the end, it shone in,
in a broad white path.
Not more than half awake, Mary had forgotten the elaborate way in which
she had tied up her face, and catching sight in the mirror of an awful
spook gliding toward her, she stepped back, almost frozen with terror.
Never had she imagined such a hideous ghost, white as flour, with one
round eye higher than the other, and a dreadful slit of a mouth, all
askew.
She was too frightened to utter a sound, but the pitcher fell to the
floor with a crash, and as the cold water splashed over her feet she
bounded back into bed and pulled the cover over her head. Instantly, as
her hand came in contact with the mask on her face, she realized that it
was only her own reflection in the glass which had frightened her, but
the shock was so great she could not stop trembling.
Wakened by the sound of the breaking pitcher and Mary's wild plunge back
into bed, Joyce sat up in alarm, but in response to her whisper Mary
explained in muffled tones from under the bedclothes that she had simply
gotten up for a drink of water and dropped the pitcher. All the rest of
the night her sleep was fitful and uneasy, for toward morning her face
began to burn as if it were on fire. She tore off the mask and used it
to wipe away what remained of the ointment. Most of it had been
absorbed, however, and the skin was broken out in little red blisters.
Maybe in her zeal she had used too much of the magical cosmetic, or
maybe her face, already made tender by various applications, resented
the vigorous rubbings she gave it. At any rate she had cause to be
frightened when she saw herself in the mirror. As she lifted the pitcher
from the wash-stand, she happened to glance at the proverb calendar
hanging over the towel-rack, and saw the verse for the day. It was
"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
The big red letters stood out accusingly.
"Oh dear," she thought, as she plunged her burning face into the bowl of
cold water, "if I hadn't had so much miserable pride, I wouldn't have
destroyed what little complexion I had left. Like as not the skin will
all peel off now, and I'll look like a half-scaled fish for weeks."
She was so irritable later, when Joyce exclaimed over her blotched and
mottled appearance, that Mrs. Ware decided she must be coming down with
some kind of rash. It was only to prevent her mother sending for a
doctor, that Mary finally confessed with tears what she had done.
"Why didn't you ask somebody?" said Joyce trying not to let her voice
betray the laughter which was choking her, for Mary showed a grief too
deep to ridicule.
"I--I was ashamed to," she confessed, "and I wanted to surprise you all.
The advertisement said g-grow b-beautiful while you sleep, and now--oh,
it's _spoiled_ me!" she wailed. "And I can't go to the house-party--"
"Yes, you can, goosey," said Joyce, consolingly. "Mamma has Grandma
Ware's old receipt for rose balm, that will soon heal those blisters.
You would have saved yourself a good deal of trouble and suffering if
you had gone to her in the first place."
"Well, don't I know that?" blazed Mary, angrily. Then hiding her face in
her arms she began to sob. "You don't know what it is to be uh-ugly like
me! I heard mamma say that I was as brown as a squaw, and I couldn't
bear to think of Lloyd and Betty and everybody at The Locusts seeing me
that way. _That's_ why I did it!"
"You are not ugly, Mary Ware," insisted Joyce, in a most reproving
big-sisterly voice. "Everybody can't be a raving, tearing beauty, and
anybody with as bright and attractive a little face as yours ought to be
satisfied to let well enough alone."
"That's all right for _you_" replied Mary, bitterly. "But you aren't
fat, with a turned-up nose and just a little thin straight pigtail of
hair. You're pretty, and an artist, and you're going to be somebody some
day. But I'm just plain 'little Mary,' with no talents or _anything_!"
Choking with tears, she rushed out of the room, and took refuge in the
swing down by the beehives. For once the "School of the Bees" failed to
whisper a comforting lesson. This was a trouble which she could not seal
up in its cell, and for many days it poisoned all life's honey.
Presently she slipped back into the house for a pencil and box of paper,
and sitting on the swing with her geography on her knees for a
writing-table, she poured out her troubles in a letter to Jack. It was
only a few hundred miles to the mines, and she could be sure of a
sympathetic answer before the blisters were healed on her face, or the
hurt had faded out of her sensitive little heart.
CHAPTER IV.
MARY'S "PROMISED LAND"
It was a hot, tiresome journey back to Kentucky. Joyce, worn out with
all the hurried preparations of packing her mother and Norman off to the
mines, closing the Wigwam for the summer, and putting her own things in
order for a long absence, was glad to lean back in her seat with closed
eyes, and take no notice of her surroundings. But Mary travelled in the
same energetic way in which she killed snakes. Nothing escaped her.
Every passenger in the car, every sight along the way was an object of
interest. She sat up straight and eager, scarcely batting an eyelash,
for fear of missing something.
To her great relief the peeling process had been a short one, and thanks
to the rose balm, not a trace of a blister was left on her smooth skin
to remind her of her foolish little attempt to beautify herself in
secret. The first day she made no acquaintances, for she admired the
reserved way in which her pretty nineteen-year-old sister travelled, and
tried to imitate her, but after one day of elegant composure she longed
for a chance to drop into easy sociability with some of her neighbors.
They no longer seemed like strangers after she had travelled in their
company for twenty-four hours.
So she seized the first social opportunity which came to her next
morning. A middle-aged woman, who was taking up all the available space
in the dressing-room, grudgingly moved over a few inches when Mary tried
to squeeze in to wash her face. Any one but Mary would have regarded her
as a most unpromising companion, when she answered her question with a
grumbling "Yes, been on two days, and got two more to go." The tone was
as ungracious as if she had said, "Mind your own business."
The train was passing over a section of rough road just then, and they
swayed against each other several times, with polite apologies on Mary's
part. Then as the woman finished skewering her hair into a tight knot
she relaxed into friendliness far enough to ask, "Going far yourself?"
"Yes, indeed!" answered Mary, cheerfully, reaching for a towel. "Going
to the Promised Land."
The car gave a sudden lurch, and the woman dropped her comb, as she was
sent toppling against Mary so forcibly that she pinned her to the wall a
moment.
"My!" she exclaimed as she regained her balance. "You don't mean clear
to Palestine!"
"No'm; our promised land is Kentucky," Mary hastened to explain. "Mamma
used to live there, and she's told us so much about the beautiful times
that she used to have in Lloydsboro Valley that it's been the dream of
our life to go there. Since we've been wandering around in the desert,
sort of camping out the way the old Israelites did, we've got into the
way of calling that our promised land."
"Well, I wouldn't count too much on it," advised the woman, sourly.
"They say distance lends enchantment, and things hardly ever turn out as
nice as you think they're going to."
"They do at our house," persisted Mary, with unfailing cheerfulness.
"They generally turn out nicer."
Evidently her companion felt the worse for a night in a sleeper and had
not yet been set to rights with the world by her morning cup of coffee,
for she answered as if Mary's rose-colored view of life so early in the
day irritated her.
"Well, maybe your folks are an exception to the rule," she said,
sharply, "but I know how it is with the world in general. Even old Moses
himself didn't have his journey turn out the way he expected to. He
looked forward to _his_ promised land for forty years, and then didn't
get to put foot on it."
"But he got to go to heaven instead," persisted Mary, triumphantly, "and
that's the best thing that could happen to anybody, especially if you're
one hundred and twenty years old."
There was no answer to this statement, and another passenger appearing
at the dressing-room door just then, the woman remarked something about
two being company and three a crowd, and squeezed past Mary to let the
newcomer take her place.
"_She_ was more crowd than company," remarked Mary confidentially to the
last arrival. "She took up most as much room as two people, and it's
awful the way she looks on the dark side of things."
There was an amused twinkle in the newcomer's eyes. She was a much
younger woman than the one whose place she had taken, and evidently it
was no trial for her to be sociable before breakfast. In a few minutes
she knew all about the promised land to which the little pilgrim was
journeying, and showed such friendly interest in the wedding and the
other delights in store for her that Mary lingered over her toilet as
long as possible, in order to prolong the pleasure of having such an
attentive audience.
But she found others just as attentive before the day was over. The
grateful mother whose baby she played with, welcomed her advances as she
would have welcomed sunshine on a rainy day. The tired tourists who
yawned over their time-tables, found her enthusiastic interest in
everybody the most refreshing thing they had met in their travels. By
night she was on speaking terms with nearly everybody in the car, and at
last, when the long journey was done, a host of good wishes and
good-byes followed her all down the aisle, as her new-made friends
watched her departure, when the train slowed into the Union Depot in
Louisville. She little dreamed what an apostle of good cheer she had
been on her journey, or how long her eager little face and odd remarks
would be remembered by her fellow passengers.
All she thought of as the train stopped was that at last she had reached
her promised land.
Those of the passengers who had thrust their heads out of the windows,
saw a tall, broad-shouldered young man come hurrying along toward the
girls, and heard Joyce exclaim in surprise, "Why, Rob Moore! Who ever
dreamed of seeing _you_ here? I thought you were in college?"
"So I was till day before yesterday," he answered, as they shook hands
like the best of old friends. "But grandfather was so ill they
telegraphed for me, and I got leave of absence for the rest of the term.
We were desperately alarmed about him, but 'all's well that ends well,'
He is out of danger now, and it gave me this chance of coming to meet
you."
Mary, standing at one side, watched in admiring silence the easy grace
of his greeting and the masterful way in which he took possession of
Joyce's suit-case and trunk checks. When he turned to her to acknowledge
his introduction as respectfully as if she had been forty instead of
fourteen, her admiration shot up like mercury in a thermometer. She had
felt all along that she knew Rob Moore intimately, having heard so much
of his past escapades from Joyce and Lloyd. It was Rob who had given
Joyce the little fox terrier, Bob, which had been such a joy to the
whole family. It was Rob who had shared all the interesting life at The
Locusts which she had heard pictured so vividly that she had long felt
that she even knew exactly how he looked. It was somewhat of a shock to
find him grown up into this dignified young fellow, broad of shoulders
and over six feet tall.
As he led the way out to the street and hailed a passing car, he
explained why Lloyd had not come in to meet them, adding, "Your train
was two hours late, so I telephoned out to Mrs. Sherman that we would
have lunch in town. I'll take you around to Benedict's."
Mary had never eaten in a restaurant before, so it was with an inward
dread that she might betray the fact that she followed Joyce and Rob to
a side-table spread for three. In her anxiety to do the right thing she
watched her sister like a hawk, copying every motion, till they were
safely launched on the first course of their lunch. Then she relaxed her
watchfulness long enough to take a full breath and look at some of the
people to whom Rob had bowed as they entered.
She wanted to ask the name of the lady in black at the opposite table.
The little girl with her attracted her interest so that she could hardly
eat. She was about her own age and she had such lovely long curls and
such big dark eyes. To Mary, whose besetting sin was a love of pretty
clothes, the picture hat the other girl wore was irresistible. She
could not keep her admiring glances away from it, and she wished with
all her heart she had one like it. Presently Joyce noticed it too, and
asked the very question Mary had been longing to ask.
"That is Mrs. Walton, the General's wife, you know," answered Rob, "and
her youngest daughter, Elise. You'll probably see all three of the girls
while you're at The Locusts, for they're living in the Valley now and
are great friends of Lloyd and Betty."
"Oh, I know all about them," answered Joyce, "for Allison and Kitty go
to Warwick Hall, and Lloyd and Betty fill their letters with their
sayings and doings." Mary stole another glance at the lady in black. So
this was an aunt of the two little knights of Kentucky, and the mother
of the "Little Captain," whose name had been in all the papers as the
youngest commissioned officer in the entire army. She would have
something to tell Holland in her next letter. He had always been so
interested in everything pertaining to Ranald Walton, and had envied him
his military career until he himself had an opportunity to go into the
navy.
Presently Mrs. Walton finished her lunch, and on her way out stopped at
their table to shake hands with Rob.
"I was sure that this is Joyce Ware and her sister," she exclaimed,
cordially, as Rob introduced them. "My girls are so excited over your
coming they can hardly wait to meet you. They are having a little
house-party themselves, at present, some girls from Lexington and two
young army officers, whom I want you to know. Come here, Elise, and meet
the Little Colonel's Wild West friends. Oh, we've lived in Arizona too,
you know," she added, laughing, "and I've a thousand questions to ask
you about our old home. I'm looking forward to a long, cozy toe-to-toe
on the subject, every time you come to The Beeches."
After a moment's pleasant conversation she passed on, leaving such an
impression of friendly cordiality that Joyce said, impulsively, "She's
just _dear_! She makes you feel as if you'd known her always. Now
toe-to-toe, for instance. That's lots more intimate and sociable than
tête-à-tête."
"That's what I thought, too," exclaimed Mary. "And isn't it nice, when
you come visiting this way, to know everybody's history beforehand! Then
just as soon as they appear on the scene you can fit in a background
behind them."
It was the first remark Mary had made in Rob's hearing, except an
occasional monosyllable in regard to her choice of dishes on the bill
of fare, and he turned to look at her with an amused smile, as if he had
just waked up to the fact that she was present.
"She's a homely little thing," he thought, "but she looks as if she
might grow up to be diverting company. She couldn't be a sister of
Joyce's and not be bright." Then, in order to hear what she might say,
he began to ask her questions. She was eating ice-cream. Joyce, who had
refused dessert on account of a headache, opened her chatelaine bag to
take out an envelope already stamped and addressed.
"If you'll excuse me while you finish your coffee," she said to Rob,
"I'll scribble a line to mamma to let her know we've arrived safely.
I've dropped notes all along the way, but this is the one she'll be
waiting for most anxiously. It will take only a minute."
"Certainly," answered Rob, looking at his watch. "We have over twenty
minutes to catch the next trolley out to the Valley. They run every
half-hour now, you know. So take your time. It will give me a chance to
talk to Mary. She hasn't told me yet what her impressions are of this
grand old Commonwealth."
If he had thought his teasing tone would bring the color to her face, it
was because he was not as familiar with her background as she was with
his. A long apprenticeship under Jack and Holland had made her proof
against ordinary banter.
"Well," she began, calmly, mashing the edges of her ice-cream with her
spoon to make it melt faster, "so far it is just as I imagined it would
be. I've always thought of Kentucky as a place full of colored people
and pretty girls and polite men. Of course I've not been anywhere yet
but just in this room, and it certainly seems to be swarming with
colored waiters. I can't see all over the room without turning around,
but the ladies at the tables in front of me and the ones reflected in
the mirrors are good-looking and stylish. Those girls you bowed to over
there are pretty enough to be Gibson girls, just stepped out of a
magazine; and so far--_you_ are the only man I have met."
"Well," he said after a moment's waiting, "you haven't given me your
opinion of _me_."
There was a quizzical twinkle in his eye, which Mary, intent upon her
beloved ice-cream, did not see. Her honest little face was perfectly
serious as she replied, "Oh, _you_,--you're like Marse Phil and Marse
Chan and those men in Thomas Nelson Page's stones of 'Ole Virginia,' I
love those stories, don't you? Especially the one about 'Meh Lady.' Of
course I know that everybody in the South can't be as nice as they are,
but whenever I think of Kentucky and Virginia I think of people like
that."
Such a broad compliment was more than Rob was prepared for. An
embarrassed flush actually crept over his handsome face. Joyce, glancing
up, saw it and laughed.
"Mary is as honest as the father of his country himself," she said.
"I'll warn you now. She'll always tell exactly what she thinks."
"Now, Joyce," began Mary, indignantly, "you know I don't tell everything
I think. I'll admit that I did use to be a chatterbox, when I was
little, but even Holland says I'm not, now."
"I didn't mean to call you a chatterbox," explained Joyce. "I was just
warning Rob that he must expect perfectly straightforward replies to his
questions."
Joyce bent over her letter, and in order to start Mary to talking again,
Rob cast about for another topic of conversation.
"You wouldn't call those three girls at that last table, Gibson girls,
would you?" he asked. "Look at that dark slim one with the red cherries
in her hat."
Mary glanced at her critically. "No," she said, slowly. "She is not
exactly pretty now, but she's the ugly-duckling kind. She may turn out
to be the most beautiful swan of them all. I like that the best of any
of Andersen's fairy tales. Don't you? I used to look at myself in the
glass and tell myself that it would be that way with me. That my
straight hair and pug nose needn't make any difference; that some day
I'd surprise people as the ugly duckling did. But Jack said, no, I am
not the swan kind. That no amount of waiting will make straight hair
curly and a curly nose straight. Jack says I'll have my innings when I
am an old lady--that I'll not be pretty till I'm old. Then he says I'll
make a beautiful grandmother, like Grandma Ware. He says her face was
like a benediction. That's what he wrote to me just before I left home.
Of course I'd rather be a beauty than a benediction, any day. But Jack
says he laughs best who laughs last, and it's something to look forward
to, to know you're going to be nice-looking in your old age when all
your friends are wrinkled and faded."
Rob's laugh was so appreciative that Mary felt with a thrill that he was
finding her really entertaining. She was sorry that Joyce's letter came
to an end just then. Her mother's last warning had been for her to
remember on all occasions that she was much younger than Joyce's
friends, and they would not expect her to take a grown-up share of their
conversation. She had promised earnestly to try to curb her active
little tongue, no matter how much she wanted to be chief spokesman, and
now, remembering her promise, she relapsed into sudden silence.
All the way out to the Valley she sat with her hands folded in her lap,
on the seat opposite Joyce and Rob. The car made so much noise she could
catch only an occasional word of their conversation, so she sat looking
out of the window, busy with her thoughts.
"Sixty minutes till we get there. Now it's only fifty-nine. Now it's
fifty-eight--just like the song 'Ten little, nine little, eight little
Indians.' Pretty soon there'll just be one minute left."
At this exciting thought the queer quivery feeling inside was so strong
it almost choked her. Her heart gave a great thump when Joyce finally
called, "Here we are," and Rob signalled the conductor to stop outside
the great entrance gate.
"The Locusts" at last. Pewees in the cedars and robins on the lawn;
everywhere the cool deep shadows of great trees, and wide stretches of
waving blue-grass. Stately white pillars of an old Southern mansion
gleamed through the vines at the end of the long avenue. Then a flutter
of white dresses and gay ribbons, and Lloyd and Betty came running to
meet them.
CHAPTER V.
AT "THE LOCUSTS"
Lloyd and Betty had been home from Warwick Hall only two days, and the
joyful excitement of arrival had not yet worn off. The Locusts had never
looked so beautiful to them as it did this vacation, and their
enthusiasm over all that was about to happen kept them in a flutter from
morning till night.
When Rob's telephone message came that the train was late and that he
could not bring the girls out until after lunch, Lloyd chafed at the
delay at first. Then she consoled herself with the thought that she
could arrange a more effective welcome for the middle of the afternoon
than for an earlier hour.
"Grandfathah will have had his nap by that time," she said, with a saucy
glance in his direction, "and he will be as sweet and lovely as a May
mawning. And he'll have on a fresh white suit for the evening, and a
cah'nation in his buttonhole." Then she gave her orders more directly.
"You must be suah to be out on the front steps to welcome them,
grandfathah, with yoah co'tliest bow. And mothah, you must be beside him
in that embroidered white linen dress of yoahs that I like so much. Mom
Beck will stand in the doahway behind you all just like a pictuah of an
old-time South'n welcome. Of co'se Joyce has seen it all befoah, but
little Mary has been looking foh'wa'd to this visit to The Locusts as
she would to heaven. You know what Joyce wrote about her calling this
her promised land."
"I know how it is going to make her feel," said Betty. "Just as it made
me feel when I got here from the Cuckoo's Nest, and found this 'House
Beautiful' of my dreams. And if she is the little dreamer that I was the
best time will not be the arrival, but early candle-lighting time, when
you are playing on your harp. I used to sit on a foot-stool at
godmother's feet, so unutterably happy, that I would have to put out my
hand to feel her dress. I was so afraid that she might vanish--that
everything was too lovely to be real.
"And now, to think," she added, turning to Mrs. Sherman and
affectionately laying a hand on each shoulder, "it's lasted all this
time, till I have grown so tall that I could pick you up and carry you
off, little godmother. I am going to do it some day soon, lift you up
bodily and put you into a story that I have begun to write. It will be
my best work, because it is what I have lived."
"You'd better live awhile longer," laughed Mrs. Sherman, "before you
begin to settle what your best work will be. Think how the shy little
Elizabeth of twelve has blossomed into the stately Elizabeth of
eighteen, and think what possibilities are still ahead of you in the
next six years."
"When mothah and Betty begin to compliment each othah," remarked Lloyd,
seating herself on the arm of the old Colonel's chair, "they are lost to
all else in the world. So while we have this moment to ou'selves, my
deah grandfathah, I want to impress something on yoah mind, very
forcibly."
The playful way in which she held him by the ears was a familiarity no
one but Lloyd had ever dared take with the dignified old Colonel. She
emphasized each sentence with a gentle pull and pinch.
"Maybe you wouldn't believe it, but this little Mary Ware who is coming,
has a most exalted opinion of me. From what Joyce says she thinks I am
perfect, and I don't want her disillusioned. It's so nice to have
somebody look up to you that way, so I want to impress it on you that
you're not to indulge in any reminiscence of my past while she is heah.
You mustn't tell any of my youthful misdemeanahs that you are fond of
telling--how I threw mud on yoah coat, in one of my awful tempahs, and
smashed yoah shaving-mug with a walking-stick, and locked Walkah down in
the coal cellah when he wouldn't do what I wanted him to. You must 'let
the dead past bury its dead, and act--act in the living present,' so
that she'll think that _you_ think that I'm the piece of perfection she
imagines me to be."
"I'll be a party to no such deception," answered the old Colonel,
sternly, although his eyes, smiling fondly on her, plainly spoke
consent. "You know you're the worst spoiled child in Oldham County."
"Whose fault is it?" retorted Lloyd, with a final pinch as she liberated
his ears and darted away. "Ask Colonel George Lloyd. If there was any
spoiling done, he did it."
Two hours later, still in the gayest of spirits, Lloyd and Betty raced
down the avenue to meet their guests, and tired and travel-stained as
the newcomers were, the impetuous greeting gave them a sense of having
been caught up into a gay whirl of some kind. It gave them an excited
thrill which presaged all sorts of delightful things about to happen.
The courtly bows of the old Colonel, standing between the great white
pillars, Mrs. Sherman's warm welcome, and Mom Beck's old-time curtseys,
seemed to usher them into a fascinating story-book sort of life, far
more interesting than any Mary had yet read.
Several hours later, sitting in the long drawing-room, she wondered if
she could be the same girl who one short week before was chasing across
the desert like a Comanche Indian, beating the bushes for rattlesnakes,
or washing dishes in the hot little kitchen of the Wigwam. Here in the
soft light shed from many waxen tapers in the silver candelabra,
surrounded by fine old ancestral portraits, and furniture that shone
with the polish of hospitable generations, Mary felt civilized down to
her very finger-tips: so thoroughly a lady, through and through, that
the sensation sent a warm thrill over her.
That feeling had begun soon after her arrival, when Mom Beck ushered her
into a luxurious bathroom. Mary enjoyed luxury like a cat. As she
splashed away in the big porcelain tub, she wished that Hazel Lee could
see the tiled walls, the fine ample towels with their embroidered
monograms, the dainty soaps, and the cut-glass bottles of toilet-water,
with their faint odor as of distant violets. Then she wondered if Mom
Beck would think that she had refused her offers of assistance because
she was not used to the services of a lady's maid. She was half-afraid
of this old family servant in her imposing head-handkerchief and white
apron.
Recalling Joyce's experiences in France and what had been the duties of
her maid, Marie, she decided to call her in presently to brush her hair
and tie her slippers. Afterward she was glad that she had done so, for
Mom Beck was a practised hair-dresser, and made the most of Mary's thin
locks. She so brushed and fluffed and be-ribboned them in a new way,
with a big black bow on top, that Mary beamed with satisfaction when she
looked in the glass. The new way was immensely becoming.
Then when she went down to dinner, it seemed so elegant to find Mr.
Sherman in a dress suit. The shaded candles and cut glass and silver and
roses on the table made it seem quite like the dinner-parties she had
read about in novels, and the talk that circled around of the latest
books and the new opera, and the happenings in the world at large, and
the familiar mention of famous names, made her feel as if she were in
the real social whirl at last.
The name of copy-cat which Holland had given her proved well-earned now,
for so easily did she fall in with the ways about her, that one would
have thought her always accustomed to formal dinners, with a deft
colored waiter like Alec at her elbow.
Rob dined with them, and later in the evening Mrs. Walton came strolling
over in neighborly fashion, bringing her house-party to call on the
other party, she said, though to be sure only half of her guests had
arrived, the two young army officers, George Logan and Robert Stanley.
Allison and Kitty were with them, and--Mary noted with a quick indrawn
breath--_Ranald_. The title of _Little_ Captain no longer fitted him. He
was far too tall. She was disappointed to find him grown.
Somehow all the heroes and heroines whom she had looked upon as her own
age, who _were_ her own age when the interesting things she knew about
them had happened, were all grown up. Her first disappointment had been
in Rob, then in Betty. For this Betty was not the one Joyce had pictured
in her stories of the first house-party. This one had long dresses, and
her curly hair was tucked up on her head in such a bewitchingly
young-ladified way that Mary was in awe of her at first. She was not
disappointed in her now, however, and no longer in awe, since Betty had
piloted her over the place, swinging hands with her in as friendly a
fashion as if she were no older than Hazel Lee, and telling the way she
looked when _she_ saw The Locusts for the first time--a timid little
country girl in a sunbonnet, with a wicker basket on her arm.
The military uniforms lent an air of distinction to the scene, and
Allison and Kitty each began a conversation in such a vivacious way,
that Mary found it difficult to decide which group to attach herself to.
She did not want to lose a word that any one was saying, and the effort
to listen to several separate conversations was as much of a strain as
trying to watch three rings at the circus.
Through the laughter and the repartee of the young people she heard Mrs.
Walton say to Mr. Sherman: "Yes, only second lieutenants, but I've been
an army woman long enough to appreciate them as they deserve. They have
no rank to speak of, few privileges, are always expected to do the
agreeable to visitors (and they do it), obliged to give up their
quarters at a moment's notice, take the duties nobody else wants, be
cheerful under all conditions, and ready for anything. It is an
exception when a second lieutenant is not dear and fascinating. As for
these two, I am doubly fond of them, for their fathers were army men
before them, and old-time friends of ours. George I knew as a little lad
in Washington. I must tell you of an adventure of his, that shows what a
sterling fellow he is."
Mary heard only part of the anecdote, for at the same time Kitty was
telling an uproariously funny joke on Ranald, and all the rest were
laughing. But she heard enough to make her take a second look at
Lieutenant Logan. He was leaning forward in his chair, talking to Joyce
with an air of flattering interest. And Joyce, in one of her new
dresses, her face flushed a little from the unusual excitement, was
talking her best and looking her prettiest.
[Illustration: "HE WAS LEANING FORWARD IN HIS CHAIR, TALKING TO JOYCE"]
"She's having a good time just like other girls," thought Mary,
thankfully. "This will make up for lots of lonely times in the desert,
when she was homesick for the high-school girls and boys at Plainsville.
It would be fine if things would turn out so that Joyce liked an army
man. If she married one and lived at a post she'd invite me to visit
her. Lieutenant Logan might be a general some day, and it would be nice
to have a great man in the family. I wish mamma and Jack and Holland
could see what a good time we are having."
It did not occur to Mary that, curled up in a big chair in the corner,
she was taking no more active share in the good times than the portraits
on the wall. Her eager smile and the alert happy look in her eyes showed
that she was all a-tingle with the unusual pleasure the evening was
affording her. She laughed and looked and listened, sure that the scene
she was enjoying was as good as a play. She had never seen a play, it is
true; but she had read of them, and of player folk, until she knew she
was fitted to judge of such things.
It was a pleasure just to watch the gleam of the soft candle-light on
Kitty's red ribbons, or on the string of gold beads around Allison's
white throat. Maybe it was the candle-light which threw such a soft
glamour over everything and made it seem that the pretty girls and the
young lieutenants were only portraits out of a beautiful old past who
had stepped down from their frames for a little while. Yet when Mary
glanced up, the soldier boy was still in his picture on the wall, and
the beautiful girl with the June rose in her hair was still in her
frame, standing beside her harp, her white hand resting on its shining
strings.
"It is my grandmothah Amanthis," explained Lloyd in answer to the
lieutenant's question, as his gaze also rested admiringly on it. "Yes,
this is the same harp you see in the painting. Yes, I play a little. I
learned to please grandfathah."
Then, a moment later, Mary reached the crown of her evening's enjoyment,
for Lloyd, in response to many voices, took her place beside the harp
below the picture, and struck a few deep, rich chords. Then, with an
airy running accompaniment, she began the Dove Song from the play of
"The Princess Winsome:"
"Flutter and fly, flutter and fly,
Bear him my heart of gold."
It was all as Mary had imagined it would be, a hundred times in her
day-dreams, only far sweeter and more beautiful. She had not thought how
the white sleeves would fall back from the round white arms, or how her
voice would go fluttering up like a bird, sweet and crystal clear on the
last high note.
Afterward, when the guests were gone and everybody had said good night,
Mary lay awake in the pink blossom of a room which she shared with
Joyce, the same room Joyce had had at the first house-party. She was
having another good time, thinking it all over. She thought scornfully
of the woman on the sleeping-car who had told her that distance lends
enchantment, and that she must not expect too much of her promised land.
She hoped she might meet that woman again some day, so that she could
tell her that it was not only as nice as she had expected to find it,
but a hundred times nicer.
She reminded herself that she must tell Betty about her in the morning.
As she recalled one pleasant incident after another, she thought, "Now
_this_ is _life_! No wonder Lloyd is so bright and interesting when she
has been brought up in such an atmosphere."
CHAPTER VI.
THE FOX AND THE STORK
Lloyd Sherman at seventeen was a combination of all the characters her
many nicknames implied. The same imperious little ways and hasty
outbursts of temper that had won her the title of Little Colonel showed
themselves at times. But she was growing so much like the gentle maiden
of the portrait that the name "Amanthis" trembled on the old Colonel's
lips very often when he looked at her. The Tusitala ring on her finger
showed that she still kept in mind the Road of the Loving Heart, which
she was trying to leave behind her in every one's memory, and the string
of tiny Roman pearls she sometimes clasped around her throat bore silent
witness to her effort to live up to the story of Ederyn, and keep tryst
with all that was expected of her.
When a long line of blue-blooded ancestors has handed down a heritage of
proud traditions and family standards, it is no easy matter to be all
that is expected of an only child. But Lloyd was meeting all
expectations, responding to the influence of beauty and culture with
which she had always been surrounded, as unconsciously as a bud unfolds
to the sunshine. Her ambition "to make undying music in the world," to
follow in the footsteps of her beautiful grandmother Amanthis, was in
itself a reaching-up to one of the family ideals.
When the girls began calling her the Princess Winsome, unconsciously she
began to reach up to be worthy of that title also, but when she found
that Mary Ware was taking her as a model Maid of Honor, in all that that
title implies, she began to feel that a burden was laid upon her
shoulders. She had had such admirers before: little Magnolia Budine at
Lloydsboro Seminary, and Cornie Dean at Warwick Hall. It was pleasant to
know that they considered her perfection, but it was a strain to feel
that she was their model, and that they copied her in everything, her
faults as well as her graces. They had followed her like shadows, and
such devotion grows tiresome.
Happily for Mary Ware, whatever else she did, she never bored any one.
She was too independent and original for that. When she found an
occasion to talk, she made the most of her opportunity, and talked with
all her might, but her sensitiveness to surroundings always told her
when it was time to retire into the background, and she could be so dumb
as to utterly efface herself when the time came for her to keep silent.
A long list of delights filled her first letter home, but the one most
heavily underscored, and chief among them all, was the fact that the big
girls did not seem to consider her a "little pitcher" or a "tag." No
matter where they went or what they talked about, she was free to follow
and to listen. It was interesting to the verge of distraction when they
talked merely of Warwick Hall and the schoolgirls, or recalled various
things that had happened at the first house-party. But when they
discussed the approaching wedding, the guests, the gifts, the
decorations, and the feast, she almost held her breath in her eager
enjoyment of it.
Several times a day, after the passing of the trains, Alec came up from
the station with express packages. Most of them were wedding presents,
which the bridesmaids pounced upon and carried away to the green room to
await Eugenia's arrival. Every package was the occasion of much guessing
and pinching and wondering, and the mystery was almost as exciting as
the opening would have been.
The conversation often led into by-paths that were unexplored regions to
the small listener in the background among the window-seat cushions:
husbands and lovers and engagements, all the thrilling topics that a
wedding in the family naturally suggests. Sometimes a whole morning
would go by without her uttering a word, and Mrs. Sherman, who had heard
what a talkative child she was, noticed her silence. Thinking it was
probably dull for her, she reproached herself for not having provided
some especial company for the entertainment of her youngest guest, and
straightway set to work to do so.
Next morning a box of pink slippers was sent out from Louisville on
approval, and the bridesmaids and maid of honor, seated on the floor in
Betty's room, tried to make up their minds which to choose,--the kid or
the satin ones. With each slim right foot shod in a fairy-like covering
of shimmering satin, and each left one in daintiest pink kid, the three
girls found it impossible to determine which was the prettier, and
called upon Mary for her opinion.
All in a flutter of importance, she was surveying the pretty exhibit of
outstretched feet, when Mom Beck appeared at the door with a message
from Mrs. Sherman. There was a guest for Miss Mary in the library. Would
she please go down at once. Her curiosity was almost as great as her
reluctance to leave such an interesting scene. She stood in the middle
of the floor, wringing her hands.
"Oh, if I could only be in two places at once!" she exclaimed. "But
maybe whoever it is won't stay long, and I can get back before you
decide."
Hurrying down the stairs, she went into the library, where Mrs. Sherman
was waiting for her.
"This is one of our little neighbors, Mary," she said, "Girlie
Dinsmore."
A small-featured child of twelve, with pale blue eyes and long, pale
flaxen curls, came forward to meet her. To Mary's horror, she held a
doll in her arms almost as large as herself, and on the table beside her
stood a huge toy trunk.
"I brought all of Evangeline's clothes with me," announced Girlie, as
soon as Mrs. Sherman had left them to themselves. "'Cause I came to stay
all morning, and I knew she'd have plenty of time to wear every dress
she owns."
Mary could not help the gasp of dismay that escaped her, thinking of
that fascinating row of pink slippers awaiting her up-stairs. From
bridesmaids to doll-babies is a woful fall.
"Where is your doll?" demanded Girlie.
"Oh, I haven't any," said Mary, with a grown-up shrug of the shoulders.
"I stopped playing with them ages ago."
Then realizing what an impolite speech that was, she hastened to make
amends by adding: "I sometimes dress Hazel Lee's, though. Hazel is one
of my friends back in Arizona. Once I made a whole Indian costume for it
like the squaws make. The moccasins were made out of the top of a kid
glove, and beaded just like real ones."
Girlie's pale eyes opened so wide at the mention of Indians that Mary
almost forgot her disappointment at being called away from the big
girls, and proceeded to make them open still wider with her tales of
life on the desert. In a few moments she carried the trunk out on to a
vine-covered side porch, where they made a wigwam out of two hammocks
and a sunshade, and changed the waxen Evangeline into a blanketed squaw,
with feathers in her blond Parisian hair.
Mom Beck looked out several times, and finally brought them a set of
Lloyd's old doll dishes and the daintiest of luncheons to spread on a
low table. There were olive sandwiches, frosted cakes, berries and
cream, and bonbons and nuts in a silver dish shaped like a calla-lily.
For the first two hours Mary really enjoyed being hostess, although now
and then she wished she could slip up-stairs long enough to see what the
girls were doing. But when she had told all the interesting tales she
could think of, cleared away the remains of the feast, and played with
the doll until she was sick of the sight of it, she began to be heartily
tired of Girlie's companionship.
"She's such a baby," she said to herself, impatiently. "She doesn't know
much more than a kitten." It seemed to her that the third long hour
never would drag to an end. But Girlie evidently enjoyed it. When the
carriage came to take her home, she said, enthusiastically:
"I've had such a good time this morning that I'm coming over every
single day while you're here. I can't ask you over to our house 'cause
my grandma is so sick it wouldn't be any fun. We just have to tiptoe
around and not laugh out loud. But I don't mind doing all the visiting."
"Oh, it will spoil everything!" groaned Mary to herself, as she ran
up-stairs when Girlie was at last out of sight. She felt that nothing
could compensate her for the loss of the whole morning, and the thought
of losing any more precious time in that way was unendurable.
Mrs. Sherman met her in the hall, and pinched her cheek playfully as she
passed her. "You make a charming little hostess, my dear," she said. "I
looked out several times, and you were so absorbed with your play that
it made me wish that I could be a little girl again, and join you with
my poor old Nancy Blanche doll and my grand Amanthis that papa brought
me from New Orleans. I'll have to resurrect them for you out of the
attic, for I'm afraid it has been stupid for you here, with nobody your
own age."
"Oh, no'm! Don't! Please don't!" protested Mary, a worried look on her
honest little face. She was about to add, "I can't bear dolls any more.
I only played with them to please Girlie," when Lloyd came out of her
room with a letter.
"It's from the bride-to-be, mothah," she called, waving it gaily.
"She'll be heah day aftah to-morrow, so we can begin to put the
finishing touches to her room. The day she comes I'm going to take the
girls ovah to Rollington to get some long sprays of bride's wreath. Mrs.
Crisp has two big bushes of it, white as snow. It will look so cool and
lovely, everything in the room all green and white."
Mary stole away to her room, ready to cry. If every morning had to be
spent with that tiresome Dinsmore child, she might as well have stayed
on the desert.
"I simply have to get rid of her in some way," she mused. "It won't do
to snub her, and I don't know any other way. I wish I could see Holland
for about five minutes. He'd think of a plan."
So absorbed was she in her problem that she forgot to ask whether the
kid or the satin slippers had been chosen, and she went down to lunch
still revolving her trouble in her mind. On the dining-room wall
opposite her place at table were two fine old engravings, illustrating
the fable of the famous dinners given by the Fox and the Stork. In the
first the stork strove vainly to fill its bill at the flat dish from
which the fox lapped eagerly, while in the companion picture the fox sat
by disconsolate while the stork dipped into the high slim pitcher, which
the hungry guest could not reach.
Mary had noticed the pictures in a casual way every time she took a seat
at the table, for the beast and the bird were old acquaintances. She had
learned La Fontaine's version of the fable one time to recite at
school. To-day, with the problem in her mind of how to rid herself of an
unwelcome guest, they suddenly took on a new meaning.
"I'll do just the way the stork did," she thought, gleefully. "This
morning Girlie had everything her way, and we played little silly baby
games till I felt as flat as the dish that fox is eating out of. But she
had a beautiful time. To-morrow morning I'm going to be stork, and make
my conversation so deep she can't get her little baby mind into it at
all. I'll be awfully polite, but I'll hunt up the longest words I can
find in the dictionary, and talk about the books I've read, and she'll
have such a stupid time she won't want to come again."
The course of action once settled upon, Mary fell to work with her usual
energy. While the girls were taking their daily siesta, she dressed
early and went down into the library. If it had not been for the fear of
missing something, she would have spent much of her time in that
attractive room. Books looked down so invitingly from the many shelves.
All the June magazines lay on the library table, their pages still
uncut. Everybody had been too busy to look at them. She hesitated a
moment over the tempting array, but remembering her purpose, grimly
passed them by and opened the big dictionary.
Rob found her still poring over it, pencil and paper in hand, when he
looked into the room an hour later.
"What's up now?" he asked.
She evaded his question at first, but, afraid that he would tease her
before the girls about her thirst for knowledge and her study of the
dictionary, and that that might lead to the thwarting of her plans, she
suddenly decided to take him into her confidence.
"Well," she began, solemnly, "you know mostly I loathe dolls. Sometimes
I do dress Hazel Lee's for her, but I don't like to play with them
regularly any more as I used to,--talk for them and all that. But Girlie
Dinsmore was here this morning, and I had to do it because she is
company. She had such a good time that she said she was coming over here
every single morning while I'm here. I just can't have my lovely visit
spoiled that way. The bride is coming day after to-morrow, and she'll be
opening her presents and showing her trousseau to the girls, and I
wouldn't miss it for anything. So I've made up my mind I'll be just as
polite as possible, but I'll do as the stork did in the fable; make my
entertainment so deep she won't enjoy it. I'm hunting up the longest
words I can find and learning their definitions, so that I can use them
properly."
Rob, looking over her shoulder, laughed to see the list she had chosen:
"Indefatigability,
Juxtaposition,
Loquaciousness,
Pabulum,
Peregrinate,
Longevous."
"You see," explained Mary, "sometimes there is a quotation after the
word from some author, so I've copied a lot of them to use, instead of
making up sentences myself. Here's one from Shakespeare about alacrity.
And here's one from Arbuthnot, whoever he was, that will make her
stare."
She traced the sentence with her forefinger, for Rob's glance to follow:
"_Instances of longevity are chiefly among the abstemious_."
"Girlie won't have any more idea of what I'm talking about than a
jay-bird."
To Mary's astonishment, the laugh with which Rob received her confidence
was so long and loud it ended in a whoop of amusement, and when he had
caught his breath he began again in such an infectious way that the
girls up-stairs heard it and joined in. Then Lloyd leaned over the
banister to call:
"What's the mattah, Rob? You all seem to be having a mighty funny time
down there. Save your circus for us. We'll be down in a few minutes."
"This is just a little private side-show of Mary's and mine," answered
Rob, going off into another peal of laughter at sight of Mary's solemn
face. There was nothing funny in the situation to her whatsoever.
"Oh, don't tell, Mister Rob," she begged. "Please don't tell. Joyce
might think it was impolite, and would put a stop to it. It seems funny
to you, but when you think of my whole lovely visit spoiled that way--"
She stopped abruptly, so much in earnest that her voice broke and her
eyes filled with tears.
Instantly Rob's laughter ceased, and he begged her pardon in such a
grave, kind way, assuring her that her confidence should be respected,
that her admiration of him went up several more degrees. When the girls
came down, he could not be prevailed upon to tell them what had sent him
off into such fits of laughter. "Just Mary's entertaining remarks," was
all he would say, looking across at her with a meaning twinkle in his
eyes. She immediately retired into the background as soon as the older
girls appeared, but she sat admiring every word Rob said, and watching
every movement.
"He's the very nicest man I ever saw," she said to herself. "He treats
me as if I were grown up, and I really believe he likes to hear me
talk."
Once when they were arranging for a tennis game for the next morning, he
crossed the room with an amused smile, to say to her in a low aside:
"I've thought of something to help along the stork's cause. Bring the
little fox over to the tennis-court to watch the game. If she doesn't
find that sufficiently stupid, and you run short of big words, read
aloud to her, and tell her that is what you intend to do every day."
Such a pleased, gratified smile flashed over Mary's face that Betty
exclaimed, curiously: "I certainly would like to know what mischief you
two are planning. You laugh every time you look at each other."
Girlie Dinsmore arrived promptly next morning, trunk, doll, and all,
expecting to plunge at once into an absorbing game of lady-come-to-see.
But Mary so impressed her with the honor that had been conferred upon
them by Mr. Moore's special invitation to watch the tennis game that she
was somewhat bewildered. She dutifully followed her resolute hostess to
the tennis-court, and took a seat beside her with Evangeline clasped in
her arms. Neither of the children had watched a game before, and Girlie,
not being able to understand a single move, soon found it insufferably
stupid. But Mary became more and more interested in watching a tall,
athletic figure in outing flannels and white shoes, who swung his racket
with the deftness of an expert, and who flashed an amused smile at her
over the net occasionally, as if he understood the situation and was
enjoying it with her.
Several times when Rob's playing brought him near the seat where the two
children sat, he went into unaccountable roars of laughter, for which
the amazed girls scolded him soundly, when he refused to explain. One
time was when he overheard a scrap of conversation. Girlie had suggested
a return to the porch and the play-house, and Mary responded,
graciously:
[Illustration: "A TALL, ATHLETIC FIGURE IN OUTING FLANNELS"]
"Oh, we did all that yesterday morning, and I think that even in the
matter of playing dolls one ought to be abstemious. Don't you? You
know Arbuthnot says that 'instances of longevity are chiefly among
the abstemious,' and I certainly want to be longevous."
A startled expression crept into Girlie's pale blue eyes, but she only
sat back farther on the seat and tightened her clasp on Evangeline. The
next time Rob sauntered within hearing distance, a discussion of
literature was in progress, Mary was asking:
"Have you ever read 'Old Curiosity Shop?'"
The flaxen curls shook slowly in the motion that betokened she had not.
"Nothing of Dickens or Scott or Irving or Cooper?"
Still the flaxen curls shook nothing but no.
"Then what have you read, may I ask?" The superior tone of Mary's
question made it seem that she was twenty years older than the child at
her side, instead of only two.
"I like the Dotty Dimple books," finally admitted Girlie. "Mamma read me
all of them and several of the Prudy books, and I have read half of
'Flaxie Frizzle' my own self."
"_Oh!_" exclaimed Mary, in a tone expressing enlightenment. "I _see_!
Nothing but juvenile books! No wonder that, with such mental pabulum,
you don't care for anything but dolls! Now when I was your age, I had
read 'The Vicar of Wakefield' and 'Pride and Prejudice' and
Leather-stocking Tales, and all sorts of things. Probably that is why I
lost my taste for dolls so early. Wouldn't you like me to read to you
awhile every morning?"
The offer was graciousness itself, but it implied such a lack on
Girlie's part that she felt vaguely uncomfortable. She sat digging the
toe of her slipper against the leg of the bench.
"I don't know," she stammered finally. "Maybe I can't come often. It
makes me wigglesome to sit still too long and listen."
"We might try it this morning to see how you like it," persisted Mary.
"I brought a copy of Longfellow out from the house, and thought you
might like to hear the poem of 'Evangeline,' as long as your doll is
named that."
Rob heard no more, for the game called him to another part of the court,
but Mary's plan was a success. When the Dinsmore carriage came, Girlie
announced that she wouldn't be over the next day, and maybe not the one
after that. She didn't know for sure when she could come.
Rob stayed to lunch. As he passed Mary on the steps, he stooped to the
level of her ear to say in a laughing undertone: "Congratulations, Miss
Stork. I see your plan worked grandly."
Elated by her success and the feeling of good-comradeship which this
little secret with Rob gave her, Mary skipped up on to the porch, well
pleased with herself. But the next instant there was a curious change in
her feeling. Lloyd, tall and graceful in her becoming tennis suit, was
standing on the steps taking leave of some of the players. With
hospitable insistence she was urging them to stay to lunch, and there
was something in the sweet graciousness of the young hostess that made
Mary uncomfortable. She felt that she had been weighed in the balance
and found wanting. The Princess never would have stooped to treat a
guest as she had treated Girlie. Her standard of hospitality was too
high to allow such a breach of hospitality.
Mary had carried her point, but she felt that if Lloyd knew how she had
played stork, she would consider her ill-bred. The thought worried her
for days.
CHAPTER VII.
THE COMING OF THE BRIDE
Early in the June morning Mary awoke, feeling as if it were Christmas or
Fourth of July or some great gala occasion. She lay there a moment,
trying to think what pleasant thing was about to happen. Then she
remembered that it was the day on which the bride was to arrive. Not
only that,--before the sun went down, the best man would be at The
Locusts also.
She raised herself on her elbow to look at Joyce, in the white bed
across from hers. She was sound asleep, so Mary snuggled down on her
pillow again, and lay quite still. If Joyce had been awake, Mary would
have begun a long conversation about Phil Tremont. Instead, she began
recalling to herself the last time she had seen him. It was three years
ago, down by the beehives, and she had had no idea he was going away
until he came to the Wigwam to bid them all good-by. And Joyce and Lloyd
were away, so he had left a message for them with her. She thought it
queer then, and she had wondered many times since why his farewell to
the girls should have been a message about the old gambling god, Alaka.
She remembered every word of it, even the tones of his voice as he said:
"Try to remember just these words, please, Mary. Tell them that '_Alaka
has lost his precious turquoises, but he will win them back again some
day_.' Can you remember to say just that?"
He must have thought she wasn't much more than a baby to repeat it so
carefully to her several times, as if he were teaching her a lesson.
Well, to be sure, she was only eleven then, and she had almost cried
when she begged him not to go away, and insisted on knowing when he was
coming back. He had looked away toward old Camelback Mountain with a
strange, sorry look on his face as he answered:
"Not till I've learned your lesson--to be 'inflexible.' When I'm strong
enough to keep stiff in the face of any temptation, then I'll come back,
little Vicar." Then he had stooped and kissed her hastily on both
cheeks, and started off down the road, with her watching him through a
blur of tears, because it seemed that all the good times in the world
had suddenly come to an end. Away down the road he had turned to look
back and wave his hat, and she had caught up her white sunbonnet and
swung it high by its one limp string.
Afterward, when she went back to the swing by the beehives, she recalled
all the old stories she had ever heard of knights who went out into the
world to seek their fortunes, and waved farewell to some ladye fair in
her watch-tower. She felt, in a vague way, that she had been bidden
farewell by a brave knight errant. Although she was burning with
curiosity when she delivered the message about the turquoises and Alaka,
and wondered why Lloyd and Joyce exchanged such meaning glances,
something kept her from asking questions, and she had gone on wondering
all these years what it meant, and why there was such a sorry look in
his eyes when he gazed out toward the old Camelback Mountain. Now, in
the wisdom of her fourteen years, she began to suspect what the trouble
had been, and resolved to ask Joyce for the solution of the mystery.
Now that Phil was twenty years old and doing a man's work in the world,
she supposed she ought to call him Mr. Tremont, or, at least, Mr. Phil.
Probably in his travels, with all the important things that a civil
engineer has to think of, he had forgotten her and the way he had romped
with her at the Wigwam, and how he had saved her life the time the
Indian chased her. Being the bridegroom's brother and best man at the
wedding, he would scarcely notice her. Or, if he did cast a glance in
her direction, she had grown so much probably he never would recognize
her. Still, if he _should_ remember her, she wanted to appear at her
best advantage, and she began considering what was the best her wardrobe
afforded.
She lay there some time trying to decide whether she should be all in
white when she met him, or in the dress with the little sprigs of
forget-me-nots sprinkled over it. White was appropriate for all
occasions, still the forget-me-nots would be suggestive. Then she
remembered her mother's remark about that shade of blue being a trying
one for her to wear. That recalled Mom Beck's prescription for
beautifying the complexion. Nothing, so the old colored woman declared,
was so good for one's face as washing it in dew before the sun had
touched the grass, at the same time repeating a hoodoo rhyme. Mary had
been intending to try it, but never could waken early enough.
Now it was only a little after five. Slipping out of bed, she drew
aside the curtain. Smoke was rising from the chimney down in the
servants' quarters, and the sun was streaming red across the lawn. But
over by the side of the house, in the shadow of Hero's monument, the dew
lay sparkling like diamonds on the daisies and clover that bloomed
there--the only place on the lawn where the sun had not yet touched.
Thrusting her bare feet into the little red Turkish slippers beside her
bed, Mary caught up her kimono lying over a chair. It was a long,
Oriental affair, Cousin Kate's Christmas gift; a mixture of gay colors
and a pattern of Japanese fans, and so beautiful in Mary's eyes that she
had often bemoaned the fact that she was not a Japanese lady so that she
could wear the gorgeous garment in public. It seemed too beautiful to be
wasted on the privacy of her room.
Fastening it together with three of Joyce's little gold pins, she stole
down the stairway. Mom Beck was busy in the dining-room, and the doors
and windows stood open. Stepping out of one of the long French windows
that opened on the side porch, Mary ran across to the monument. It was a
glorious June morning. The myriads of roses were doubly sweet with the
dew in their hearts. A Kentucky cardinal flashed across the lawn ahead
of her, darting from one locust-tree to another like a bit of live
flame.
The little red Turkish slippers chased lightly over the grass till they
reached the shadow of the monument. Then stooping, Mary passed her hands
over the daisies and clover, catching up the dewdrops in her pink palms,
and rubbing them over her face as she repeated Mom Beck's charm:
"Beauty come, freckles go!
Dewdops, make me white as snow!"
The dew on her face felt so cool and fresh that she tried it again, then
several times more. Then she stooped over farther and buried her face in
the wet grass, repeating the rhyme again with her eyes shut and in the
singsong chant in which she often intoned things, without giving heed to
what she was uttering. Suddenly, in the midst of this joyful abandon, an
amused exclamation made her lift her head a little and open her eyes.
"By all the powers! What are you up to now, Miss Stork?"
Mary's head came up out of the wet grass with a jerk. Then her face
burned an embarrassed crimson, for striding along the path toward her
was Bob Moore, cutting across lots from Oaklea. He was bareheaded, and
swinging along as if it were a pleasure merely to be alive on such a
morning.
She sprang to her feet, so mortified at being caught in this secret
quest for beauty that her embarrassment left her speechless. Then,
remembering the way she was dressed, she sank down on the grass again,
and pulled her kimono as far as possible over the little bare feet in
the red slippers.
There was no need for her to answer his question. The rhyme she had been
chanting was sufficient explanation.
"I thought you said," he began, teasingly, "that you were to have _your_
innings when you were a grandmother; that you didn't care for beauty now
if you could have a face like a benediction then."
"Oh, I didn't say that I didn't care!" cried Mary, crouching closer
against the monument, and putting her arm across her face to hide it.
"It's because I care so much that I'm always doing silly things and
getting caught. I just wish the earth could open and swallow me!" she
wailed.
Her head was bowed now till it was resting on her knees. Rob looked down
on the little bunch of misery in the gay kimono, thinking he had never
seen such a picture of woe. He could not help smiling, but he felt mean
at having been the cause of her distress, and tried to think of
something comforting to say.
"Sakes alive, child! That's nothing to feel bad about. Bathing your face
in May-day dew is an old English custom that the prettiest girls in the
Kingdom used to follow. I ought to apologize for intruding, but I didn't
suppose any one was up. I just came over to say that some business for
grandfather will take me to town on the earliest train, so that I can't
be on hand when the best man arrives. I didn't want to wake up the
entire household by telephoning, so I thought I'd step over and leave a
message with Alec or some of them. If you'll tell Lloyd, I'll be much
obliged."
"All right, I'll tell her," answered Mary, in muffled tones, without
raising her head from her knees. She was battling back the tears, and
felt that she could never face the world again. She waited till she was
sure Rob was out of sight, and then, springing up, ran for the shelter
of her room. As she stole up the stairs, her eyes were so blinded with
tears that she could hardly see the steps; tears of humiliation, that
Rob, of all people, whose good opinion she valued, should have
discovered her in a situation that made her appear silly and vain.
Luckily for the child's peace of mind, Betty had also wakened early that
morning, and was taking advantage of the quiet hours before breakfast to
attend to her letter-writing. Through her open door she caught sight of
the woebegone little figure slipping past, and the next instant Mary
found herself in the white and gold room with Betty's arm around her,
and her tearful face pressed against a sympathetic shoulder. Little by
little Betty coaxed from her the cause of her tears, then sat silent,
patting her hand, as she wondered what she could say to console her.
To the older girl it seemed a matter to smile over, and the corners of
her mouth did dimple a little, until she realized that to Mary's
supersensitive nature this was no trifle, and that she was suffering
keenly from it.
"Oh, I'm so ashamed," sobbed Mary. "I never want to look Mister Rob in
the face again. I'd rather go home and miss the wedding than meet him
any more."
"Nonsense," said Betty, lightly. "Now you're making a mountain out of a
mole-hill. Probably Rob will never give the matter a second thought,
and he would be amazed if he thought you did. I've heard you say you
wished you could be just like Lloyd. Do you know, her greatest charm to
me is that she never seems to think of the impression she is making on
other people. Now, if she should decide that her complexion would be
better for a wash in the dew, she would go ahead and wash it, no matter
who caught her at it, and, first thing you know, all the Valley would be
following her example.
"I'm going to preach you a little sermon now, because I've found out
your one fault. It isn't very big yet, but, if you don't nip it in the
bud, it will be like Meddlesome Matty's,--
"'Which, like a cloud before the skies,
Hid all her better qualities.'
"You are self-conscious, Mary. Always thinking about the impression you
are making on people, and so eager to please that it makes you miserable
if you think you fall short of any of their standards. I knew a girl at
school who let her sensitiveness to other people's opinions run away
with her. She was so anxious for her friends to be pleased with her that
she couldn't be natural. If anybody glanced in the direction of her
head, she immediately began to fix her side-combs, or if they seemed to
be noticing her dress, she felt her belt and looked down at herself to
see if anything was wrong. Half the time they were not looking at her at
all, and not even giving her a thought. And I've known her to agonize
for days over some trifle, some remark she had made or some one had made
to her, that every one but her had forgotten. She developed into a
dreadful bore, because she never could forget herself, and was always
looking at her affairs through a magnifying-glass.
"Now if you should keep out of Rob's way after this, and act as if you
had done something to be ashamed of, which you have not, don't you see
that your very actions would remind him of what you want him to forget?
But if when you meet him you are your own bright, cheerful, friendly
little self, this morning's scene will fade into a dim background."
Only half-convinced, Mary nodded that she understood, but still
proceeded to wipe her eyes at intervals.
"Then, there's another thing," continued Betty. "If you sit and brood
over your mortification, it will spread all over your sky like a black
cloud, till it will seem bigger than any of the good times you have
had. In the dear old garden at Warwick Hall there is a sun-dial that has
this inscription on it, 'I only mark the hours that shine,' So I am
going to give you that as a text. Now, dear, that is the end of my
sermon, but here is the application."
She pointed to a row of little white books on the shelf above her desk,
all bound in kid, with her initials stamped on the back in gold. "Those
are my good-times books. 'I only mark the hours that shine' in them, and
when things go wrong and I get discouraged over my mistakes, I glance
through them and find that there's lots more to laugh over than cry
about, and I'm going to recommend the same course to you. Godmother gave
me the first volume when I came to the first house-party, and the little
record gave me so much pleasure that I've gone on adding volume after
volume. Suppose you try it, dear. Will you, if I give you a book?"
"Yes," answered Mary, who had heard of these books before, and longed
for a peep into them. She had her wish now, for, taking them down from
the shelf, Betty read an extract here and there, to illustrate what she
meant. Presently, to their astonishment, they heard Mom Beck knocking at
Lloyd's door to awaken her, and Betty realized with a start that she
had been reading over an hour. Her letters were unanswered, but she had
accomplished something better. Mary's tears had dried, as she listened
to these accounts of their frolics at boarding-school and their
adventures abroad, and in her interest in them her own affairs had taken
their proper proportion. She was no longer heart-broken over having been
discovered by Rob, and she was determined to overcome the sensitiveness
and self-consciousness which Betty had pointed out as her great fault.
As she rose to go, Betty opened a drawer in her desk and took out a
square, fat diary, bound in red morocco. "One of the girls gave me this
last Christmas," she said. "I never have used it, because I want to keep
my journals uniform in size and binding, and I'll be so glad to have you
take it and start a record of your own, if you will."
"Oh, I'll begin this very morning!" cried Mary, in delight, throwing her
arms around Betty's neck with an impulsive kiss, and trying to express
her thanks.
"Then wait till I write my text in it," said Betty, "so that it will
always recall my sermon. I've talked to you as if I were your
grandmother, haven't I?"
"You've made me feel a lot more comfortable," answered Mary, humbly,
with another kiss as Betty handed her the book. On the fly-leaf she had
written her own name and Mary's and the inscription borne by the old
sun-dial in Warwick Hall garden:
"_I only mark the hours that shine._"
It was after lunch before Mary found a moment in which to begin her
record, and then it was in unconscious imitation of Betty's style that
she wrote the events of the morning. Probably she would not have gone
into details and copied whole conversations if she had not heard the
extracts from Betty's diaries. Betty was writing for practice as well as
with the purpose of storing away pleasant memories, so it was often with
the spirit of the novelist that she made her entries.
"It seems hopeless to go back to the beginning," wrote Mary, "and tell
all that has happened so far, so I shall begin with this morning. Soon
after breakfast we went to Rollington in the carriage, Joyce and Betty
and I on the back seat, and Lloyd in front with the coachman. And Mrs.
Crisp cut down nearly a whole bushful of bridal wreath to decorate
Eugenia's room with. When we got back May Lily had just finished putting
up fresh curtains in the room, almost as fine and thin as frost-work.
The furniture is all white, and the walls a soft, cool green, and the
rugs like that dark velvety moss that grows in the deepest woods. When
we had finished filling the vases and jardinières, the room itself all
snowy white and green made you think of a bush of bridal wreath.
"We were barely through with that when it was time for Lloyd and Aunt
Elizabeth to go to the station to meet Eugenia. There wasn't room for
the rest of us in the carriage, so Betty and Joyce and I hung out of the
windows and watched for them, and Betty and Joyce talked about the other
time Eugenia came, when they walked up and down under the locusts
waiting for her and wondering what she would be like. When she did come,
they were half-afraid of her, she was so stylish and young-ladified, and
ordered her maid about in such a superior way.
"Betty said it was curious how snippy girls of that age can be
sometimes, and then turn out to be such fine women afterward, when they
outgrow their snippiness and snobbishness. Then she told us a lot we had
never heard about the school Eugenia went to in Germany to take a
training in housekeeping, and so many interesting things about her that
I was all in a quiver of curiosity to see her.
"When we heard the carriage coming, Betty and Joyce tore down-stairs to
meet her, but I just hung farther out of the window. And, oh, but she
was pretty and stylish and tall--and just as Betty had said,
_patrician_-looking, with her dusky hair and big dark eyes. She is the
Spanish type of beauty. She swept into the house so grandly, with her
maid following with her satchels (the same old Eliot who was here
before), that I thought for a moment maybe she was as stuck-up as ever.
But when she saw her old room, she acted just like a happy little girl,
ready to cry and laugh in the same breath because everything had been
made so beautiful for her coming. While she was still in the midst of
admiring everything, she sat right down on the bed and tore off her
gloves, so that she could open the queer-looking parcel she carried. I
had thought maybe it was something too valuable to put in the satchels,
but it was only a new kind of egg-beater she had seen in a show-window
on her way from one depot to another. You would have thought from the
way she carried on that she had found a wonderful treasure. And in the
midst of showing us that she exclaimed:
"'Oh, girls, what do you think? I met the dearest old lady on the
sleeper, and she gave me a receipt for a new kind of salad. That makes
ten kinds of salad that I know how to make. Oh, I just can't wait to
tell you about our little love of a house! It's all furnished and
waiting for us. Papa and I were out to look all over it the day I
started, and everything was in place but the refrigerator, and Stuart
had already ordered one sent out.'
"Then Lloyd opened the closet door and called her attention to the great
pile of packages waiting to be opened. She flew at them and called us
all to help, and for a little while Mom Beck and Eliot were kept busy
picking up strings and wrapping-paper and cotton and excelsior. When we
were through, the bed and the chairs and mantel and two extra tables
that had been brought in were piled with the most beautiful things I
ever saw. I never dreamed there were such lovely things in the world as
some of the beaten silver and hand-painted china and Tiffany glass.
There was a jewelled fan, and all sorts of things in gold and
mother-of-pearl, and there was some point lace that she said was more
suitable for a queen than a young American girl. Her father has so many
wealthy friends, and they all sent presents.
"Opening the bundles was so much fun,--like a continual surprise-party,
Betty said, or a hundred Christmases rolled into one. Between times when
Eugenia wasn't exclaiming over how lovely everything was, she was
telling us how the house was furnished, and what a splendid fellow
Stuart is, and how wild she is for us to know him. I had never heard a
bride talk before, and she was so _happy_ that somehow it made you feel
that getting married was the most beautiful thing in the world.
"One of the first things she did when she opened her suit-case was to
take out a picture of Stuart. It was a miniature on ivory in a locket of
Venetian gold, because it was in Venice he had proposed to her. After
she had shown it to us, she put it in the centre of her dressing-table,
with the white flowers all around it, as if it had been some sort of
shrine. There was a look in her eyes that made me think of the picture
in Betty's room of a nun laying lilies on an altar.
"It is after luncheon now, and she has gone to her room to rest awhile.
So have the other girls. But I couldn't sleep. The days are slipping by
too fast for me to waste any time that way."
The house was quiet when Mary closed her journal. Joyce was still asleep
on the bed, and through the open door she could see Betty, tilted back
in a big chair, nodding over a magazine. She concluded it would be a
good time to dash off a letter to Holland, but with a foresight which
prompted her to be ready for any occasion, she decided to dress first
for the evening. Tiptoeing around the room, she brushed her hair in the
new way Mom Beck had taught her, and, taking out her prettiest white
dress, proceeded to array herself in honor of the best man's coming.
Then she rummaged in the tray of her trunk till she found her pink coral
necklace and fan-chain, and, with a sigh of satisfaction that she was
ready for any emergency, seated herself at her letter-writing.
She had written only a page, however, when the clock on the stairs
chimed four. The deep tones echoing through the hall sent Lloyd bouncing
up from her couch, her hair falling over her shoulders and her long
kimono tripping her at every step, as she ran into Joyce's room.
"What are we going to do?" she cried in dismay. "I ovahslept myself, and
now it's foah o'clock, and Phil's train due in nine minutes. The
carriage is at the doah and none of us dressed to go to meet him. I
wrote that the entiah bridal party would be there."
Joyce sprang up in a dazed sort of way, and began putting on her
slippers. The bridesmaids had talked so much about the grand welcome the
best man was to receive on his entrance to the Valley that, half-awake
as she was, she could not realize that it was too late to carry out
their plans.
"Oh, it's no use trying to get ready now," said Lloyd, in a disappointed
tone. "We couldn't dress and get to the station in time to save ou'
lives." Then her glance fell on Mary, sitting at her desk in all her
brave array of pink ribbons and corals.
"Why, Mary can go!" she cried, in a relieved tone. "I had forgotten that
she knows Phil as well as we do. Run on, that's a deah! Don't stop for a
hat! You won't need it in the carriage. Tell him that you're the maid of
honah on this occasion!"
It was all over so quickly, the rapid drive down the avenue, the quick
dash up to the station as the train came puffing past, that Mary had
little time to rehearse the part she had been bidden to play. She was so
afraid that Phil would not recognize her that she wondered if she ought
not to begin by introducing herself. She pictured the scene in her mind
as they rolled along, unconscious that she was smiling and bowing into
empty air, as she rehearsed the speech with which she intended to
impress him. She would be as dignified and gracious as the Princess
herself; not at all like the hoydenish child of eleven who had waved her
sunbonnet at him in parting three years before.
The sight of the train as it slowed up sent a queer inward quiver of
expectancy through her, and her cheeks were flushed with eagerness as
she leaned forward watching for him. With a nervous gesture, she put her
hand up to her hair-ribbons to make sure that her bows were in place,
and then clutched the coral necklace. Then Betty's sermon flashed across
her mind, and the thought that she had done just like the self-conscious
girl at school brought a distressed pucker between her eyebrows. But the
next instant she forgot all about it. She forgot the princess-like way
in which she was to step from the carriage, the dignity with which she
was to offer Phil her hand, and the words wherewith she was to welcome
him. She had caught sight of a wide-brimmed gray hat over the heads of
the crowd, and a face, bronzed and handsome, almost as dear in its
familiar outlines as Jack's or Holland's. Her carefully rehearsed
actions flew to the winds, as, regardless of the strangers all about,
she sprang from the carriage and ran along bareheaded in the sun. And
Phil, glancing around him for the bridal party that was to meet him, was
surprised beyond measure when this little apparition from the Arizona
Wigwam caught him by the hand.
"Bless my soul, it's the little Vicar!" he exclaimed. "Why, it's like
getting back home to see _you_! And how you've grown, and how really
civilized you are!"
So he _had_ remembered her. He was glad to see her. With her face
glowing and her feet fairly dancing, she led him to the carriage,
pouring out a flood of information as they went, about The Locusts and
the wedding and the people they passed, and how lovely everything was in
the Valley, till he said, with a twinkle in his eyes: "You're the same
enthusiastic little soul that you used to be, aren't you? I hope you'll
speak as good a word for me at The Locusts as you did at Lee's ranch. I
am taking it as a good omen that you were sent to conduct me into this
happy land. You made a success of it that other time; somehow I'm sure
you will this time."
All the way to the house Mary sat and beamed on him as she talked,
thinking how much older he looked, and yet how friendly and brotherly he
still was. She introduced him to Mrs. Sherman with a proud,
grandmotherly air of proprietorship, and took a personal pride in every
complimentary thing said about him afterward, as if she were responsible
for his good behavior, and was pleased with the way he was "showing
off."
Rob came over as usual in the evening. Phil was not there at first. He
and Eugenia were strolling about the grounds. Mary, sitting in a hammock
on the porch, was impatient for them to come in, for she wanted to see
what impression he would make on Rob, whom she had been thinking lately
was the nicest man she ever met. She wanted to see them together to
contrast the two, for they seemed wonderfully alike in size and general
appearance. In actions, too, Mary thought, remembering how they both had
teased her.
She had not seen Rob since their unhappy encounter early that morning,
when she had been so overcome with mortification; and if Betty had not
been on the porch also, she would have found it hard to stay and face
him. But she wanted to show Betty that she had taken her little sermon
to heart. Then, besides, the affair did not look so big, after all that
had happened during this exciting day.
As they waited, Joyce joined them, and presently they heard Lloyd coming
through the hall. She was singing a verse from Ingelow's "Songs of
Seven:"
"'There is no dew left on the daisies and clover.
There is no rain left in the heaven.
I've said my seven times over and over--
Seven times one are seven.'"
Then she began again, "'There is no dew left on the daisies and
clover--'" Rob turned to Mary. "I wonder why," he said, meaningly.
The red flashed up into Mary's face and she made no audible answer, but
Joyce, turning suddenly, saw to her horror that Mary had made a saucy
face at him and thrust out her tongue like a naughty child.
"Why, Mary Ware!" she began, in a shocked tone, but Betty interrupted
with a laugh. "Let her alone, Joyce; he richly deserved it. He was
teasing her."
"Betty was right," thought Mary afterward. "It _was_ better to make fun
of his teasing than to run off and cry because he happened to mention
the subject. If I had done that, he never would have said to Betty
afterward that I was the jolliest little thing that ever came over the
pike. How much better this day has ended than it began."
CHAPTER VIII.
AT THE BEECHES
The invitation came by telephone while the family was at breakfast next
morning. Would the house-party at The Locusts join the house-party at
The Beeches in giving a series of tableaux at their lawn fête that
night? If so, would the house-party at The Locusts proceed immediately
to The Beeches to spend the morning in the rehearsing of tableaux, the
selection of costumes, the manufacture of paper roses, and the pleasure
of each other's honorable company in the partaking of a picnic-lunch
under the trees?
There was an enthusiastic acceptance from all except Eugenia, who, tired
from her long journey and with many important things to attend to,
begged to be left behind for a quiet day with her cousin Elizabeth.
Mary, tormented by a fear that maybe she was not included in the
invitation, since she was a child, and all the guests at The Beeches
were grown, could scarcely finish her breakfast in her excitement. But
long before the girls were ready to start, her fears were set at rest by
the arrival of Elise Walton in her pony-cart. She wanted Mary to drive
to one of the neighbors with her, to borrow a bonnet and shawl over
fifty years old, which were to figure in one of the tableaux.
Elise had not been attracted by Mary's appearance the day she met her in
the restaurant and was not sure that she would care for her. It was only
her hospitable desire to be nice to a guest in the Valley that made her
comply so willingly to her mother's request to show her some especial
attention. Mary, spoiled by the companionship of the older girls for the
society of those her own age, was afraid that Elise would be a
repetition of Girlie Dinsmore; but before they had gone half a mile
together they were finding each other so vastly entertaining that by the
time they reached The Beeches they felt like old friends.
It was Mary's first sight of the place, except the glimpse she had
caught through the trees the morning they passed on their way to
Rollington. As the pony-cart rattled up the wide carriage drive which
swept around in front of the house, she felt as if she were riding
straight into a beautiful old Southern story of ante-bellum days. Back
into the times when people had leisure to make hospitality their chief
business in life, and could afford for every day to be a holiday. When
there were always guests under the spreading rooftree of the great
house, and laughter and plenty in the servants' quarters. The sound of a
banjo and a negro melody somewhere in the background heightened the
effect of that illusion.
The wide front porch seemed full of people. Allison and Kitty looked up
with a word of greeting as the two girls came up, one carrying the
bonnet and the other the shawl, but nobody seemed to think it necessary
to introduce Elise's little friend to the other guests. It would have
been an embarrassing ordeal for her, for there were so many strangers.
Mary recognized the two young lieutenants.
With the help of a pretty brunette in white, whom Elise whispered was
Miss Bonham from Lexington, they were rigging up some kind of a coat of
mail for Lieutenant Logan to wear in one of the tableaux. Ranald, with a
huge sheet of cardboard and the library shears, was manufacturing a pair
of giant scissors, half as long as himself, which a blonde in blue was
waiting to cover with tin foil. She was singing coon songs while she
waited, to the accompaniment of a mandolin, and in such a gay,
rollicking way, that every one was keeping time either with hand or
foot.
"That is Miss Bernice Howe," answered Elise, in response to Mary's
whispered question. "She lives here in the Valley. And that's Malcolm
MacIntyre, my cousin, who is sitting beside her. That's his brother
Keith helping Aunt Allison with the programme cards."
Mary stared at the two young men, vaguely disappointed. They were the
two little knights of Kentucky, but they were grown up, like all the
other heroes and heroines she had looked forward to meeting. She told
herself that she might have expected it, for she knew that Malcolm was
Joyce's age; but she had associated them so long with the handsome
little fellows in the photograph Lloyd had, clad in the knightly
costumes of King Arthur's time, that it was hard to recognize them now,
in these up-to-date, American college boys, who had long ago discarded
their knightly disguises.
"And that," said Elise, as another young man came out of the house with
a sheet of music in his hand for Miss Howe, "is Mister Alex Shelby. He
lives in Louisville, but he comes out to the Valley all the time to see
Bernice. I'll tell you about them while we drive over to Mrs. Bisbee's.
"It's this way," she began a few moments later, as they rattled down the
road; "Bernice asked Allison if Mister Shelby couldn't be in one of the
tableaux. Allison said yes, that they had intended to ask him before she
spoke of it; that they had decided to ask him to be the boatman in the
tableau of 'Elaine, the Lily Maid of Astolat.' But when Bernice found
that Lloyd had already been asked to be Elaine, she was furious. She
said she was just as good as engaged to him, or something of the sort, I
don't know exactly what. And she knew, if Lloyd had a chance to
monopolize him in that beautiful tableau, what it would lead to. It
wouldn't be the first time that Lloyd had quietly stepped in and taken
possession of her particular friends. She made such a fuss about it,
that Allison finally said she'd change, and make Malcolm take the part
of boatman, and give Alex the part they had intended for Malcolm, even
if they didn't fit as well."
"The hateful thing!" sputtered Mary, indignantly. "I don't see how she
can insinuate such mean things about any one as sweet and beautiful as
Lloyd is."
"I don't either," agreed Elise, "but Allison says it is true that
everybody who has ever started out as a special friend of Bernice, men I
mean, have ended by thinking the most of Lloyd. But everybody knows that
it is simply because she is more attractive than Bernice. As Ranald says
Lloyd isn't a girl to fish for attention, and that Bernice would have
more if she didn't show the fellows that she was after them with a hook.
Don't you tell Lloyd I told you all this," warned Elise.
"Oh, I wouldn't think of doing such a thing!" cried Mary. "It would hurt
her dreadfully to know that anybody talked so mean about her. I wouldn't
be the one to repeat it, for worlds!"
Left to hold the pony while Elise went in at Mrs. Bisbee's, Mary sat
thinking of the snake she had discovered in her Eden. It was a rude
shock to find that every one did not admire and love the "Queen of
Hearts," who to her was without fault or flaw. All the rest of that day
and evening, she could not look in Bernice Howe's direction, without a
savage desire to scratch her. Once, when she heard her address Lloyd as
"dearie," she could hardly keep from crying out, "Oh, you sly, two-faced
creature!"
Lloyd and her guests arrived on the scene while Mary was away in the
pony-cart on another borrowing expedition. All of the tableaux, except
two, were simple in setting, requiring only the costumes that could be
furnished by the chests of the neighborhood attics. But those two kept
everybody busy all morning long. One was the reproduction of a famous
painting called June, in which seven garlanded maidens in Greek costumes
posed in a bewitching rose bower. Quantities of roses were needed for
the background, great masses of them that would not fade and droop; and
since previous experience had proved that artificial flowers may be used
with fine stage effect in the glare of red foot-lights the whole place
was bursting into tissue-paper bloom. The girls cut and folded the
myriad petals needed, the boys wired them, and a couple of little
pickaninnies sent out to gather foliage, piled armfuls of young
oak-leaves on the porch to twine into long conventional garlands, like
the ones in the painting.
Agnes Waring had come over to help with the Greek costumes, and since
the long folds of cheesecloth could be held in place by girdles, basting
threads, and pins, the gowns were rapidly finished.
Down by the tea-house the colored coachman sawed and pounded and planed
under Malcolm's occasional direction. He was building a barge like the
one described in Tennyson's poem of the Lily Maid of Astolat. From time
to time, Lloyd, who was to personate Elaine, was called to stretch
herself out on the black bier in the centre, to see if it was long
enough or high enough or wide enough, before the final nails were driven
into place.
Malcolm, with a pole in his hand, posed as the old dumb servitor who was
to row her up the river. It all looked unpromising enough in the broad
daylight; the boat with its high stiff prow made of dry goods boxes and
covered with black calico, and Lloyd stretched out on the bier in a
modern shirtwaist suit with side-combs in her hair. She giggled as she
meekly crossed her hands on her breast, with a piece of newspaper folded
in one to represent the letter, and a bunch of lilac leaves in the
other, which later was to clasp the lily. From under the long eyelashes
lying on her cheeks, she smiled mischievously at Malcolm, who was vainly
trying to put a decrepit bend into his athletic young back, as he bent
over the pole in the attitude of an old, old man.
"Yes, it does look silly now," admitted Miss Allison in answer to his
protest that he felt like a fool. "But wait till you get on the long
white beard and wig I have for you, and the black robe. You'll look
like Methuselah. And Lloyd will be covered with a cloth of gold, and her
hair will be rippling down all over her shoulders like gold, too. And
we've a real lily for the occasion, a long stalk of them. Oh, this
tableau is to be the gem of the collection."
"But half the people here won't understand it," said Malcolm.
"Yes, they will, for we're to have readings behind the scenes in
explanation of each one. We've engaged an amateur elocutionist for the
occasion. I'll show you just the part she'll read for this scene, so
you'll know how long you have to pose to-night. It begins with those
lines, 'And the dead, oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood. In
her right hand the lily, in her left the letter.' Where did I put that
volume of Tennyson?"
"Here it is," answered Mary Ware, unexpectedly, springing up from her
seat on the grass to hand her the volume. She had been watching the
rehearsal with wide-eyed interest. Deep down in her romance-loving
little soul had long been the desire to see Sir Feal the Faithful face
to face, and hear him address the Princess. The play of the "Rescue of
the Princess Winsome" had become a real thing to her, that she felt that
it must have happened; that Malcolm really was Lloyd's true knight, and
that when they were alone together they talked like the people in books.
She was disappointed when the rehearsal was over because the
conversation she had imagined did not take place.
The coachman's carpenter-work was not of the steadiest, and Lloyd lay
laughing on the shaky bier because she could not rise without fear of
upsetting it.
"Help me up, you ancient mariner," she ordered, and when Malcolm,
instead of springing forward in courtly fashion to her assistance as Sir
Feal should have done, playfully held out his pole for her to pull
herself up by, Mary felt that something was wrong. A playful manner was
not seemly on the part of a Sir Feal. It would have been natural enough
for Phil or Rob to do teasing things, but she resented it when there
seemed a lack of deference on Malcolm's part toward the Princess.
After they had gone back to the porch, Mary sat on the grass a long
time, reading the part of the poem relating to the tableau. She and
Holland had committed to memory several pages of the "Idylls of the
King," and had often run races repeating them, to see which could finish
first. Now Mary found that she still remembered the entire page that
Miss Allison had read. She closed the book, and repeated it to herself.
"So that day there was dole in Astolat.
. . . . . . . . .
Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead,
Oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood--
In her right hand the lily, in her left
The letter--all her bright hair streaming down--
And all the coverlid was cloth of gold--
Drawn to her waist, and she herself in white.
All but her face, and that clear-featured face
Was lovely, for she did not seem as dead,
But fast asleep, and lay as though she smiled."
That was as far as Mary got with her whispered declamation, for two
white-capped maids came out and began spreading small tables under the
beech-tree where she sat. She opened the book and began reading, because
she did not know what else to do. While she had been watching Lloyd in
the boat, Elise had been summoned to the house to try on the dress she
was to wear in the tableau of the gipsy fortune-teller. The people on
the porch had divided into little groups which she did not feel free to
join. She was afraid they would think she was intruding. Even her own
sister seemed out of her reach, for she and Lieutenant Logan had taken
their share of paper roses over to a rustic seat near the croquet
grounds and were talking more busily than they were fashioning tissue
flowers.
Mary was unselfishly glad that Joyce was having attention like the other
girls and that she had been chosen for one of the Greek maidens in the
tableau of June. And she wasn't really jealous of Elise because she was
to be tambourine girl in the gipsy scene, but she did wish, with a
little fluttering sigh, that she could have had some small part in it
all. It was hard to be the only plain one in the midst of so many pretty
girls; so plain that nobody even thought of suggesting her for one of
the characters.
"I know very well," she said to herself, "that a Lily Maid of Astolat
with freckles would be ridiculous, and I'm not slim and graceful enough
to be a tambourine girl, but it would be so nice to have some part in
it. It would be such a comfortable feeling to know that you're pretty
enough always to be counted in."
Her musings were interrupted by the descent of the party upon the picnic
tables, and she looked up to see Elise beckoning her to a seat. To her
delight it was at the table opposite the one where Lloyd and Phil, Anna
Moore and Keith were seated. Malcolm was just across from them, with
Miss Bonham on one side and Betty and Lieutenant Stanley on the other.
Mary looked around inquiringly for her sister. She was with Rob now, and
Lieutenant Logan was placing chairs for Allison and himself on the other
side of the tree. Mr. Shelby and the hateful Miss Bernice Howe were over
there, too, Mary noted, glad that they were at a distance.
Malcolm was still in a teasing mood, it seemed, for as Lloyd helped
herself in picnic fashion from a plate of fried chicken, he said,
laughing, "Look at Elaine now. Tennyson wouldn't know his Lily Maid if
he saw her in this way." He struck an attitude, declaiming dramatically,
"In her right hand the wish-bone, in her left the olive."
"That's all right," answered Lloyd, tossing the olive stone out on the
grass, and helping herself to a beaten biscuit. "I always did think that
Elaine was a dreadful goose to go floating down the rivah to a man who
didn't care two straws about her. She'd much bettah have held on to a
wish-bone and an olive and stayed up in her high towah with her fathah
and brothahs who appreciated her. She would have had a bettah time and
he would have had lots moah respect for her."
"Oh, I don't think so," cooed Miss Bonham, with a coquettish side
glance at Phil. "That always seemed such a beautifully romantic
situation to me. Doesn't it appeal to you, Mr. Tremont?"
Mary listened for Phil's answer with grave attention, for she, too,
considered it a touching situation, and more than once had pictured, in
pleasing day-dream, herself as Elaine, floating down a stream in that
poetic fashion.
"Well, no, Miss Bonham," said Phil, laughingly. "I'm free to confess
that if I had been Sir Lancelot, I'd have liked her a great deal better
if she had been a cheerful sort of body, and had stayed alive. Then if
she had come rowing up in a nice trig little craft, instead of that
spooky old funeral barge, and had offered me a wish-bone and an olive,
I'd have thought them twice as fetching as a lily and that doleful
letter. I'd have joined her picnic in a jiffy, and probably had such a
jolly time that the poem would have ended with wedding bells in the high
tower instead of a funeral dirge in the palace.
"She wasn't game," he continued, smiling across at Mary, who was
listening with absorbing attention. "Now if she had only lived up to the
Vicar of Wakefield's motto--instead of mooning over Lancelot's old
shield, and embroidering things for it, and acting as if it were
something too precious for ordinary mortals to touch--if she'd batted it
into the corner, or made mud pies on it, to show that she was
inflexible, fortune _would_ have changed in her favor. Sir Lancelot
would have had some respect for her common sense."
Mary, who felt that the remark was addressed to her, crimsoned
painfully. Rob took up the question, and his opinion was the same as
Phil's and Malcolm's. Long after the conversation passed to other
topics, Mary puzzled over the fact that the three knightliest-looking
men she knew, the three who, she supposed, would make ideal lovers, had
laughed at one of the most romantic situations in all poesy, and had
agreed that Elaine was silly and sentimental. Maybe, she thought with
burning cheeks, maybe they would think she was just as bad if they knew
how she had admired Elaine and imagined herself in her place, and
actually cried over the poor maiden who loved so fondly and so truly
that she could die of a broken heart.
When she reflected that Lloyd, too, had agreed with them, she began to
think that her own ideals might need reconstructing. She was glad that
Phil's smile had seemed to say that he took it for granted that she
would have been inflexible to the extent of making mud pies on
Lancelot's shield. Unconsciously her reconstruction began then and
there, for although the seeds sown by the laughing discussion at the
picnic table lay dormant in her memory many years, they blossomed into a
saving common sense at last, that enabled her to see the humorous side
of the most sentimental situation, and gave her wisdom to meet it as it
deserved.
The outdoor tableaux that night proved to be one of the most successful
entertainments ever given in the Valley. A heavy wire, stretched from
one beech-tree to another, held the curtains that hid the impromptu
stage. The vine-covered tea-house and a dense clump of shrubbery formed
the background. Rows of Japanese lanterns strung from the gate to the
house, and from pillar to pillar of the wide porches, gave a festive
appearance to the place, but they were not really needed. The full moon
flooded the lawn with a silvery radiance, and as the curtains parted
each time, a flash of red lights illuminated the tableaux.
It was like a glimpse of fairy-land to Mary, and she had the double
enjoyment of watching the arrangement of each group behind the scenes,
and then hurrying back with Elise to their chairs in the front row,
just as Ranald gave the signal to burn the red lights.
There was the usual confusion in the dressing-room, the tea-house having
been taken for that purpose. There was more than usual in some
instances, for while the fête had been planned for some time, the
tableaux were an afterthought, and many details had been overlooked.
Still, with slight delays, they moved along toward a successful finish.
Group by group posed for its particular picture and returned to seats in
the audience to enjoy the remainder of the performance. At last only
three people were left in the tea-house, and Miss Allison sent Keith,
Rob, Phil, and Lieutenant Logan before the curtain, with instructions to
sing one of the longest songs they knew and two encores, while Gibbs
repaired the prow of the funeral barge. Some one had used it for a
step-ladder, and had broken it.
Mary, waiting in the audience till the quartette had finished its first
song, did not appear on the scene behind the curtain until Malcolm was
dressed in his black robe and long white beard and wig, and Lloyd was
laid out on the black bier.
"Stay just as you are," whispered Miss Allison. "It's perfect. I'm
going out into the audience to enjoy the effect as the curtain rises."
As she passed Miss Casey, the elocutionist, she felt some one catch her
sleeve. "I've left that copy of Tennyson at the house," she gasped.
"What shall I do?"
"I'll run and get it," volunteered Elise in a whisper, and promptly
started off. Mary, standing back in the shadow of a tall lilac bush,
clasped her hands in silent admiration of the picture. It was wonderful
how the moonlight transformed everything. Here was the living, breathing
poem itself before her. She forgot it was Lloyd and Malcolm posing in
makeshift costumes on a calico-covered dry goods box. It seemed the
barge itself, draped all in blackest samite, going upward with the
flood, that day that there was dole in Astolat. While she gazed like one
in a dream, Lloyd half-opened her eyes, to peep at the old boatman.
"I wish they'd hurry," she said, in a low tone. "I never felt so foolish
in my whole life."
"And never looked more beautiful," Malcolm answered, trying to get
another glimpse of her without changing his pose.
"Sh," she whispered back, saucily. "You forget that you are dumb. You
mustn't say a word."
"I will," he answered, in a loud whisper. "For even if I were really
dumb I think I should find my voice to tell you that with your hair
rippling down on that cloth of gold in the moonlight, and all in white,
with that lily in your hand, you look like an angel, and I'm in the
seventh heaven to be here with you in this boat."
"And with you in that white hair and beard I feel as if it were Fathah
Time paying me compliments," said Lloyd, her cheeks dimpling with
amusement. "Hush! It's time for me to look dead," she warned, as the
applause followed the last encore. "Don't say anything to make me laugh.
I'm trying to look as if I had died of a broken heart."
Elise darted back just as the prompter's bell rang, and Mary, turning to
follow her to their seats in the audience, saw Miss Casey tragically
throw up her hands, with a horrified exclamation. It was not the copy of
Tennyson Elise had brought her. In her haste she had snatched up a
volume of essays bound in the same blue and gold.
"Go on!" whispered Malcolm, sternly. "Say something. At least go out and
explain the tableau in your own words. There are lots of people who
won't know what we are aiming at."
Miss Casey only wrung her hands. "Oh, I can't! I can't!" she answered,
hoarsely. "I couldn't think of a word before all those people!" As the
curtain drew slowly apart, she covered her face with her hands and sank
back out of sight in the shrubbery.
The curtain-shifter had answered the signal of the prompter's bell,
which at Miss Allison's direction was to be rung immediately after the
last applause. Neither knew of the dilemma.
A long-drawn "O-o-oh" greeted the beautiful tableau, and then there was
a silence that made Miss Allison rise half-way in her seat, to see what
had become of the interpreter. Then she sank back again, for a clear,
strong voice, not Miss Casey's, took up the story.
"And that day there was dole in Astolat.
Then rose the dumb old servitor, and the dead,
Oared by the dumb, went upward with the flood."
[Illustration: "A LONG-DRAWN 'O-O-OH' GREETED THE BEAUTIFUL TABLEAU"]
She did not know who had sprung to the rescue, but Joyce, who recognized
Mary's voice, felt a thrill of pride that she was doing it so well. It
was better than Miss Casey's rendering, for it was without any
professional frills and affectations; just the simple story told in the
simplest way by one who felt to the fullest the beauty of the picture
and the music of the poem.
The red lights flared up, and again the exclamation of pleasure swept
through the audience, for Lloyd, lying on the black bier with her hair
rippling down and the lily in her hand, might indeed have been the dead
Elaine, so ethereal and fair she seemed in that soft glow. Three times
the curtains were parted, and even then the enthusiastic guests kept
applauding.
There was a rush from the seats, and half a dozen admiring friends
pushed between the curtains to offer congratulations. But before they
reached her, Lloyd had rolled off her bier to catch Mary in an impulsive
hug, crying, "You were a perfect darling to save the day that way!
Wasn't she, Malcolm? It was wondahful that you happened to know it!"
The next moment she had turned to Judge Moore and Alex Shelby and the
ladies who were with them, to explain how Mary had had the presence of
mind and the ability to throw herself into Miss Casey's place on the
spur of the moment, and turn a failure into a brilliant success. The
congratulations and compliments which she heard on every side were very
sweet to Mary's ears, and when Phil came up a little later to tell her
that she was a brick and the heroine of the evening, she laughed
happily.
"Where is the fair Elaine?" he asked next. "I see her boat is empty. Can
you tell me where she has drifted?"
"No," answered Mary, so eager to be of service that she was ready to
tell all she knew. "She was here with Sir Feal till just a moment ago."
"Sir Feal!" echoed Phil, in amazement.
"Oh, I forgot that you don't know the Princess play. I meant Mister
Malcolm. While so many people were in here congratulating us and shaking
hands, I heard him say something to her in an undertone, and then he
sang sort of under his breath, you know, so that nobody else but me
heard him, that verse from the play:
"'Go bid the Princess in the tower
Forget all thought of sorrow.
Her true love will return to her
With joy on some glad morrow.'
"Then he bent over her and said still lower, 'By _my_ calendar it's the
glad morrow _now_, Princess.'
"He went on just like he was in the play, you know. I suppose they have
rehearsed it so much that it is sort of second nature for them to talk
in that old-time way, like kings and queens used to do."
"Maybe," answered Phil. "Then what did _she_ say?" he demanded,
frowning.
"I don't know. She walked off toward the house with him, and that's the
last I saw of them. Why, what's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing!" he replied, with a shrug of his shoulders. "Nothing's the
matter, little Vicar. _Let us keep inflexible, and fortune will at last
change in our favor._"
"Now whatever did he mean by that!" exclaimed Mary, as she watched him
walk away. It puzzled her all the rest of the evening that he should
have met her question with the family motto.
CHAPTER IX.
"SOMETHING BLUE"
A rainy day followed the lawn fête, such a steady pour that little
rivers ran down the window-panes, and the porches had to be abandoned.
But nobody lamented the fact that they were driven indoors. Rob and
Joyce began a game of chess in the library. Lloyd and Phil turned over
the music in the cabinet until they found a pile of duets which they
both knew, and began to try them, first to the accompaniment of the
piano, then the harp.
Mary, sitting in the hall where she could see both the chess-players and
the singers, waited in a state of bliss to be summoned to the
sewing-room. Only that morning it had been discovered that there was
enough pink chiffon left, after the bridesmaids' gowns were completed,
to make her a dress, and the seamstress was at work upon it now. So it
was a gay, rose-colored world to Mary this morning, despite the leaden
skies and pouring rain outside. Not only was she to have a dress, the
material for which had actually been brought from Paris, but she was to
have little pink satin slippers like the bridesmaids, and she was to
have a proud place in the wedding itself. When the bridal party came
down the stairs, it was to be her privilege to swing wide the gate of
roses for them to pass through.
Joyce had designed the gate. It was to be a double one, swung in the
arch between the hall and the drawing-room, and it would take hundreds
of roses to make it, the florist said.
In Mary's opinion the office of gate-opener was more to be desired than
that of bridesmaid. As she sat listening to the music, curled up in a
big hall chair like a contented kitten, she decided that there was
nobody in all the world with whom she would change places. There had
been times when she would have exchanged gladly with Joyce, thinking of
the artist career ahead of her, or with Betty, who was sure to be a
famous author some day, or with Lloyd, who seemed to have everything
that heart could wish, or with Eugenia with all her lovely presents and
trousseau and the new home on the Hudson waiting for her. But just now
she was so happy that she wouldn't even have stepped into a fairy-tale.
Presently, through the dripping window-panes, she saw Alec plodding up
the avenue under an umbrella, his pockets bulging with mail packages,
papers, and letters. Betty, at her window up-stairs, saw him also, and
came running down the steps, followed by Eugenia. The old Colonel,
hearing the call, "The mail's here," opened the door of his den, and
joined the group in the hall where Betty proceeded to sort out the
letters. A registered package from Stuart was the first thing that
Eugenia tore open, and the others looked up from their letters at her
pleased exclamation:
"Oh, it's the charms for the bride's cake!"
"Ornaments for the top?" asked Rob, as she lifted the layer of
jeweller's cotton and disclosed a small gold thimble, and a narrow
wedding-ring.
"No! Who ever heard of such a thing!" she laughed. "Haven't you heard of
the traditional charms that must be baked in a bride's cake? It is a
token of the fate one may expect who finds it in his slice of cake.
Eliot taught me the old rhyme:
"'Four tokens must the bridescake hold:
A silver shilling and a ring of gold,
A crystal charm good luck to symbol,
And for the spinster's hand a thimble.'
"Eliot firmly believes that the tokens are a prophecy, for years ago, at
her cousin's wedding in England, she got the spinster's thimble. The
girl who found the ring was married within the year, and the one who
found the shilling shortly came into an inheritance. True, it didn't
amount to much,--about five pounds,--but the coincidence firmly
convinced Eliot of the truth of the superstition. In this country people
usually take a dime instead of a shilling, but I told Stuart that I
wanted to follow the custom strictly to the letter. And look what a dear
he is! Here is a _bona fide_ English shilling, that he took the trouble
to get for me."
Phil took up the bit of silver she had placed beside the thimble and the
ring, and looked it over critically. "Well, I'll declare!" he exclaimed.
"That was Aunt Patricia's old shilling! I'd swear to it. See the way the
hole is punched, just between those two ugly old heads? And I remember
the dent just below the date. Looks as if some one had tried to bite it.
Aunt Patricia used to keep it in her treasure-box with her gold beads
and other keepsakes."
The old Colonel, who had once had a fad for collecting coins, and owned
a large assortment, held out his hand for it. Adjusting his glasses, he
examined it carefully. "Ah! Most interesting," he observed. "Coined in
the reign of 'Bloody Mary,' and bearing the heads of Queen Mary and King
Philip. You remember this shilling is mentioned in Butler's 'Hudibras:'
"'Still amorous and fond and billing,
Like Philip and Mary on a shilling.'
"You couldn't have a more appropriate token for your cake, my dear," he
said to Eugenia with a smile. Then he laid it on the table, and taking
up his papers, passed back into his den.
"That's the first time I ever heard my name in a poem," said Phil. "By
rights I ought to draw that shilling in my share of cake. If I do I
shall take it as a sign that history is going to repeat itself, and
shall look around for a ladye-love named Mary. Now I know a dozen songs
with that name, and such things always come in handy when 'a frog he
would a-wooing go,' There's 'My Highland Mary' and 'Mary of Argyle,'
and 'Mistress Mary, quite contrary,' and 'Mary, call the cattle home,
across the sands of Dee!'"
As he rattled thoughtlessly on, nothing was farther from his thoughts
than the self-conscious little Mary just behind him. Nobody saw her face
grow red, however, for Lloyd's exclamation over the last token made
every one crowd around her to see.
It was a small heart-shaped charm of crystal, probably intended for a
watch-fob. There was a four-leaf clover, somehow mysteriously imbedded
in the centre.
"That ought to be doubly lucky," said Eugenia. "Oh, _what_ a dear Stuart
was to take so much trouble to get the very nicest things. They couldn't
be more suitable."
"Eugenia," asked Betty, "have you thought of that other rhyme that
brides always consider? You know you should wear
"'Something old, something new,
Something borrowed, something blue.'"
"Yes, Eliot insisted on that, too. The whole outfit will, itself, be
something new, the lace that was on my mother's wedding-gown will be the
something old. I thought I'd borrow a hairpin apiece from you girls,
and I haven't decided yet about the something blue."
"No," objected Lloyd. "The borrowed articles ought to be something
really valuable. Let me lend you my little pearl clasps to fasten your
veil, and then for the something blue, there is your turquoise
butterfly. You can slip it on somewhere, undah the folds of lace."
"What a lot of fol-de-rol there is about a wedding," said Rob. "As if it
made a particle of difference whether you wear pink or green! _Why_ must
it be blue?"
There was an indignant protest from all the girls, and Rob made his
escape to the library, calling to Joyce to come and finish the game of
chess.
That evening, Mary, sitting on the floor of the library in front of the
Poets' Corner, took down volume after volume to scan its index. She was
looking for the songs Phil had mentioned, which contained her name. At
the same time she also kept watch for the name of Philip. She remembered
she had read some lines one time about "Philip my King."
As she pored over the poems in the dim light, for only the shaded lamp
on the central table was burning, she heard steps on the porch outside.
The rain had stopped early in the afternoon, and the porches had dried
so that the hammocks and chairs could be put out again. Now voices
sounded just outside the window where she sat, and the creaking of a
screw in the post told that some one was sitting in the hammock.
Evidently it was Lloyd, for Phil's voice sounded nearer the window. He
had seated himself in the armchair that always stood in that niche, and
was tuning a guitar. As soon as it was keyed up to his satisfaction, he
began thrumming on it, a sort of running accompaniment to their
conversation.
It did not occur to Mary that she was eavesdropping, for they were
talking of impersonal things, just the trifles of the hour; and she
caught only a word now and then as she scanned the story of Enoch Arden.
The name Philip, in it, had arrested her attention.
"I think the maid of honor ought to wear something blue as well as the
bride," remarked Phil.
"_Why?_" asked Lloyd.
There was such a long pause that Mary looked up, wondering why he did
not answer.
"_Why?_" asked Lloyd again.
Phil thrummed on a moment longer, and then began playing in a soft minor
key, and his answer, when it finally came, seemed at first to have no
connection with what he had been talking about.
"Do you remember when we were in Arizona, the picnic we had at
Hole-in-the-rock, and the story that that old Norwegian told about
Alaka, the gambling god, who lost his string of precious turquoises and
even his eyes?"
"Yes."
Mary looked up from her book, listening alertly. The mystery of years
was about to be explained.
"Well, do you remember a conversation you had with Joyce about it
afterward, in which you called the turquoise the 'friendship stone,'
because it was true blue? And you said it was a pity that some people
you knew, not a thousand miles away, couldn't go to the School of the
Bees, and learn that line from Watts about Satan finding mischief for
idle hands to do. And Joyce said yes, it was too bad for a fine fellow
to get into trouble just because he was a drone, and had no ambition to
make anything of himself; that if Alaka had gone to the School of the
Bees he wouldn't have lost his eyes. And then you said that if somebody
kept on he would at least lose his turquoises. Do you remember all
that?"
The screw in the post stopped creaking as Lloyd sat straight up in the
hammock to exclaim in astonishment: "Yes, I remembah, but how undah the
sun, Phil Tremont, do _you_ happen to know anything about that
convahsation? You were not there."
"No, but little Mary Ware was. She didn't have the faintest idea that
you meant me, and that Sunday morning when I called at the Wigwam for
the last time to make my apologies and farewells, and you were not
there, she told me all about it like the blessed little chatterbox that
she was. Then, when I saw plainly that I had forfeited my right to your
friendship, I did not wait to say good-by, just left a message for you
with Mary. I knew she would attempt to deliver it, but I have wondered
many times since if she gave it in the words I told her. Of course I
couldn't expect you to remember the exact words after all this time."
"But it happens that I do," answered Lloyd. "She said, 'Alaka has lost
his precious turquoises, but he will win them back again some day.'"
"Did you understand what I meant, Lloyd?"
"Well, I--I guessed at yoah meaning."
"Mary unwittingly did me a good turn that morning. She was an angel
unawares, for she showed me myself as you saw me, a drone in the hive,
with no ambition, and the gambling fever in my veins making a fool of
me. I went away vowing I would win back your respect and make myself
worthy of your friendship, and I can say honestly that I have kept that
vow. Soon after, while I was out on that first surveying trip I came
across some unset stones for a mere song. This little turquoise was
among them." He took the tiny stone from his pocket and held it out on
his palm, so that the light streaming out from the library fell across
it.
"I have carried it ever since. Many a time it has reminded me of you and
your good opinion I was trying to win back. I've had lots of temptations
to buck against, and there have been times when they almost downed me,
but I say it in all humility, Lloyd, this little bit of turquoise kept
me 'true blue,' and I've lived straight enough to ask you to take it
now, in token that you do think me worthy of your friendship. When I
heard Eugenia talking about wearing something blue at the wedding, I had
a fancy that it would be an appropriate thing for the maid of honor to
do, too."
Lloyd took the little stone he offered, and held it up to the light.
"It certainly is true blue," she said, with a smile, "and I'm suah you
are too, now. I didn't need this to tell me how well you've been doing
since you left Arizona. We've heard a great deal about yoah successes
from Cousin Carl."
"Then let me have it set in a ring for you," he added. "There will be
plenty of time before the wedding."
"No," she answered, hastily. "I couldn't do that. Papa Jack wouldn't
like it. He wouldn't allow me to accept anything from a man in the way
of jewelry, you know. I couldn't take it as a ring. Now just this little
unset stone"--she hesitated. "Just this bit of a turquoise that you say
cost only a trifle, I'm suah he wouldn't mind that. I'll tell him it's
just my friendship stone."
"What a particular little maid of honor you are!" he exclaimed. "How
many girls of seventeen do you know who would take the trouble to go to
their fathers with a trifle like that, and make a careful explanation
about it? Besides, you can't tell him that it is _only_ a friendship
stone. I want it to mean more than that to you, Lloyd. I want it to
stand for a great deal more between us. Don't you see how I care--how I
must have cared all this time, to let the thought of you make such a
difference in my life?"
There was no mistaking the deep tenderness of his voice or the
earnestness of his question. Lloyd felt the blood surge up in her face
and her heart throbbed so fast she could hear it beat. But she hastily
thrust back the proffered turquoise, saying, in confusion:
"Then I can't wear it! Take it back, please; I promised Papa Jack--"
"Promised him what?" asked Phil, as she hesitated.
"Well, it's rathah hard to explain," she began in much confusion,
"unless you knew the story of 'The Three Weavahs.' Then you'd
undahstand."
"But I don't know it, and I'd rather like an explanation of some kind. I
think you'll have to make it clear to me why you can't accept it, and
what it was you promised your father."
"Oh, I can't tell it to make it sound like anything," she began,
desperately. "It was like this. No, I can't tell it. Come in the house,
and I'll get the book and let you read it for yoahself!"
"No, I'd rather hear the reason from your own lips. Besides, some one
would interrupt us in there, and I want to understand where I'm 'at'
before that happens."
"Well," she began again, "it is a story Mrs. Walton told us once when
our Shadow Club was in disgrace, because one of the girls eloped, and we
were all in such trouble about it that we vowed we'd be old maids.
Afterward it was the cause of our forming another club that we called
the 'Ordah of Hildegarde.' I'll give you a sawt of an outline now, if
you'll promise to read the entiah thing aftahward."
"I'll promise," agreed Phil.
"Then, this is it. Once there were three maidens, of whom it was written
in the stahs that each was to wed a prince, provided she could weave a
mantle that should fit his royal shouldahs as the falcon's feathahs fit
the falcon. Each had a mirror beside her loom like the Lady of Shalott's
in which the shadows of the world appeahed.
"One maiden wove in secret, and falling in love with a page who daily
passed her mirror, imagined him to be a prince, and wove her web to fit
his unworthy shouldahs. Of co'se when the real prince came it was too
small, and so she missed the happiness that was written for her in the
stahs.
"The second squandahed her warp of gold first on one, then anothah,
weaving mantles for any one who happened to take her fancy--a shepherd
boy and a troubador, a student and a knight. When her prince rode by
she had nothing left to offah him, so she missed _her_ life's happiness.
"But the third had a deah old fathah like Papa Jack, and he gave her a
silvah yahdstick on which was marked the inches and ells that a true
prince ought to be. And he warned her like this:
"'Many youths will come to thee, each begging, "Give _me_ the royal
mantle, Hildegarde. _I_ am the prince the stahs have destined for thee."
And with honeyed words he'll show thee how the mantle in the loom is
just the length to fit his shouldahs. But let him not persuade thee to
cut it loose and give it to him as thy young fingahs will be fain to do.
Weave on anothah yeah and yet anothah, till thou, a woman grown, can
measuah out a perfect web, moah ample than these stripling youths could
carry, but which will fit thy prince in faultlessness, as the falcon's
feathahs fit the falcon.'
"Then Hildegarde took the silvah yahdstick and said, 'You may trust me,
fathah. I will not cut the golden warp from out the loom, until I, a
woman grown, have woven such a web as thou thyself shalt say is worthy
of a prince's wearing.' (That's what I promised Papa Jack.)
"Of co'se it turned out, that one day with her fathah's blessing light
upon her, she rode away beside the prince, and evah aftah all her life
was crowned with happiness, as it had been written for her in the
stahs."
There was a long pause when she finished, so long that the silence began
to grow painful. Then Phil said, slowly:
"I understand now. Would you mind telling me what the measure was your
father gave you that your prince must be?"
"There were three notches. He must be clean and honahable and strong."
There was another long pause before Phil said, "Well, I wouldn't be
measuring up to that second notch if I asked you to break your promise
to your father, and you wouldn't do it even if I did. So there's nothing
more for me to say at present. But I'll ask this much. You'll keep the
turquoise if we count it merely a friendship stone, won't you?"
"Yes, I'll be glad to do that. And I'll weah it at the wedding if you
want me to, as my bit of something blue. I'll slip it down into my
glove."
"Thank you," he answered, then added, after a pause: "And I suppose
there's another thing. That yardstick keeps all the other fellows at a
distance, too. That's something to be cheerful over. But you mark my
words--I'm doing a bit of prophesying now--when your real prince comes
you'll know him by this: he'll come singing this song. Listen."
Picking up his guitar again, he struck one full deep chord and began
singing softly the "Bedouin Love-song," "From the desert I come to
thee." The refrain floated tremulously through the library window.
"Till the stars are old,
And the sun grows cold,
And the leaves of the judgment
Book unfold."
It brought back the whole moonlighted desert to Lloyd, with the odor of
orange-blossoms wafted across it, as it had been on two eventful
occasions they rode over it together. She sat quite still in the
hammock, with the bit of turquoise clasped tight in her hand. It was
hard to listen to such a beautiful voice unmoved. It thrilled her as no
song had ever done before.
As it floated into the library, it thrilled Mary also, but in a
different way; for with a guilty start she realized that she had been
listening to something not meant for her to hear.
"Oh, what have I done! What have I done!" she whispered to herself,
dropping the book and noiselessly wringing her hands. She could hear
voices on the stairs now. Eugenia and Betty were coming down, and Rob's
whistle down the avenue told that he was on his way to join them. Too
ashamed to face any one just then, and afraid that her guilty face would
betray the fact to Phil and Lloyd that she shared their secret, she
hurried out of the library and up to her room, where Joyce was
rearranging her hair. In response to Joyce's question about her coming
up so early in the evening, she said she had thought of something she
wanted to write in her journal. But when Joyce had gone down she did not
begin writing immediately. Turning down the lamp until the room was
almost in darkness, she sat with her elbows on the window-sill staring
out into the night.
"I never _meant_ to do it!" she kept explaining to her conscience. "It
just did itself. It seemed all right to listen at first, when they were
talking about things I had a right to know, and then I got so
interested, it was like reading a story, and I couldn't go away because
I forgot there was such a person living as _me_. But Lloyd mightn't
understand how it was. She'd scorn to be an eavesdropper herself, and
she'd scorn and despise me if she knew that I just sat there like a
graven image and listened to Phil the same as propose to her."
Hitherto Mary had looked upon Malcolm as Lloyd's especial knight, and
had planned to be his valiant champion should need for her services ever
arise. But this put matters in a different light. All her sympathies
were enlisted in Phil's behalf now. She liked Phil the best, and she
wanted him to have whatever he wanted. He had called her his "angel
unawares," and she wished she could do something to further deserve that
title. Then she began supposing things.
Suppose she should come tripping down the stairs some day (this would be
sometime in the future, of course, when Lloyd's promise to her father
was no longer binding) and should find Phil pacing the room with
impatient strides because the maid of honor had gone off with Sir Feal
to the opera or somewhere, in preference to him, on account of some
misunderstanding. "The little rift within the lute" would be making the
best man's music mute, and now would be her time to play angel unawares
again.
She would trip in lightly, humming a song perhaps, and finding him moody
and downcast, would begin the conversation with some appropriate
quotation. In looking through the dictionary the day before, her eye had
caught one from Shakespeare, which she had stored away in her memory to
use on some future occasion. Yes, that one would be very appropriate to
begin the conversation. She would go up to him and say, archly:
"My lord leans wondrously to discontent.
His comfortable temper has forsook him."
With that a smile would flit across his stern features, and presently he
would be moved to confide in her, and she would encourage him. Then, she
didn't know yet exactly in what way it could come about, she would do
something to bring the two together again, and wipe out the bitter
misunderstanding.
It was a very pleasing dream. That and others like it kept her sitting
by the window till nearly bedtime. Then, just before the girls came
up-stairs, she turned up the lamp and made an entry in her journal. With
the fear that some prying eye might some day see that page, she omitted
all names, using only initials. It would have puzzled the Sphinx herself
to have deciphered that entry, unless she had guessed that the initials
stood for titles instead of names. The last paragraph concluded: "It now
lies between Sir F. and the B. M., but I think it will be the B. M. who
will get the mantle, for Sir F. and his brother have gone away on a
yachting trip. The M. of H. does not know that I know, and the secret
weighs heavy on my mind."
She was in bed when the girls came up, but the door into the next room
stood open and she heard Betty say, "Oh, we forgot to give you Alex
Shelby's message, Lloyd. Joyce and I met him on our way to the
post-office. He was walking with Bernice. He sent his greetings to the
fair Elaine. He fairly raved over the way you looked in that moonlight
tableau."
"It was evident that Bernice didn't enjoy his raptures very much," added
Joyce. "Her face showed that she was not only bored, but displeased."
"I can imagine it," said Lloyd. "Really, girls, I think this is a
serious case with Bernice. She seems to think moah of Mistah Shelby than
any one who has evah gone to see her, and she is old enough now to have
it mean something. She's neahly twenty, you know. I do hope he thinks as
much of her as she does of him."
"There!" whispered Mary to herself, nodding wisely in the darkness of
her room, as if to an unseen listener. "I knew it! I told you so! All
the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't make me believe she'd
stoop to such a thing as that nasty Bernice Howe insinuated. She's a
maid of honor in every way!"
CHAPTER X.
"A COON HUNT"
The morning after the arrival of the rest of the bridal party, Betty was
out of bed at the first sound of any one stirring in the servants'
quarters. She and Lloyd had given up their rooms to the new guests, and
moved back into the sewing-room together. Now in order not to awaken
Lloyd she tiptoed out to the little vine-covered balcony, through the
window that opened into it from the sewing-room. She was in her
nightgown, for she could not wait to dress, when she was so eager to
find out what kind of a day Eugenia was to have for her wedding.
Not a cloud was in sight. It was as perfect as only a June morning can
be, in Kentucky. The fresh smell of dewy roses and new-mown grass
mingled with the pungent smoke of the wood fire, just beginning to curl
up in blue rings from the kitchen chimney. Soft twitterings and jubilant
bird-calls followed the flash of wings from tree to tree. She peeped
out between the thick mass of wistaria vines, across the grassy court,
formed by the two rear wings of the house, to another balcony opposite
the one in which she stood. It opened off Eugenia's room, and was almost
hidden by a climbing rose, which made a perfect bride's bower, with its
gorgeous full-blown Gloire Dijon roses.
Stray rhymes and words suggestive of music and color and the morning's
glory began to flit through her mind as she stood there, as if a little
poem were about to start to life with a happy fluttering of wings; a
madrigal of June. But in a few moments she slipped back into the house
through the window, put on her kimono and slippers, and gathering up her
journal in one hand and pen and ink with the other, she stole back to
the balcony again. The seamstress had left her sewing-chair out there
the afternoon she finished Mary's dress, and it still stood there, with
the lap-board beside it. Taking the board on her knees, and opening her
journal upon it, Betty perched her ink-bottle on the balcony railing and
began to write. She knew there would be no time later in the day for her
to bring her record up-to-date, and she did not want to let the
happenings pile up unrecorded. She was afraid she might leave out
something she wanted to include, and she had found that the trivial
conversations and the trifles she noted were often the things which
recalled a scene most vividly, and almost made it seem to live again.
She began her narrative just where she had left off, so that it made a
continuous story.
"We didn't settle down to anything yesterday morning. Phil went to town
with Papa Jack directly after breakfast, and we girls just strolled up
and down the avenue and talked. It was delightfully cool under the
locusts, and we knew it would be our last morning with Eugenia; that
after the arrival of the rest of the bridal party, everything would be
in confusion until after the wedding, and then she would never be
Eugenia Forbes again. She would be Mrs. Stuart Tremont.
"She told us that her being married wouldn't make any difference, that
she'd always be the same to us. But it's bound to make a difference. A
married woman can't be interested in the same things that young girls
are. Her husband is bound to come first in her consideration.
"Joyce asked her if it didn't make her feel queer to know that her
wedding-day was coming closer and closer, and quoted that line from 'The
Siege of Lucknow,'--'_Day by day the Bengal tiger nearer drew and
closer crept_.' She said she'd have a fit if she knew her wedding-day
was creeping up on her that way. Eugenia was horrified to have her talk
that way, and said that it was because she didn't know Stuart, and
didn't know what it meant to care enough for a man to be glad to join
her life to his, forever and ever. There was such a light in her eyes as
she talked about him, that we didn't say anything more for awhile, just
wondered how it must feel to be so supremely happy as she is. There is
no doubt about it, he is certainly the one written for her in the stars,
for he measures up to every ideal of hers, as faultlessly 'as the
falcon's feathers fit the falcon.'
"We had heard so much from her and Phil about Doctor Miles Bradford,
Stuart's friend who is coming with him to be one of the ushers, that we
dreaded meeting him. When she told us that he is from Boston and belongs
to one of its most exclusive families, and is very conventional, and
twenty-five years old, Joyce nicknamed him 'The Pilgrim Father,' and
vowed she wouldn't have him for her attendant; that I had to take him
and let her walk in with Rob. She said she'd shock him with her wild
west slang and uncivilized ways, and that I was the literary lady of
the establishment, and would know how to entertain such a personage.
"I was just as much afraid of him as she was, and wanted Rob myself, so
we squabbled over it all the way up and down the avenue. We were walking
five abreast, swinging hands. When we got to the gate we saw some one
coming up the road, and we all stood in a row, peeping out between the
bars till we saw that it was Rob himself. Then Joyce said that we would
make him decide the matter--that we'd all put our hands through the bars
as if we had something in them, and make him choose which he'd take,
right or left. If he said right, I could have him for my attendant and
she'd take Doctor Bradford, but if he said left I'd have to put up with
the Pilgrim Father, and she'd take Rob.
[Illustration: "'ALL YOU GIRLS STANDING WITH YOUR HANDS STUCK THROUGH
THE BARS'"]
"He came along bareheaded, swinging his hat in his hand, and we were so
busy explaining to him that he was to choose which hand he'd take, right
or left, that we did not notice that he had a kodak hidden behind his
hat. He held it up in front of him, and bowed and scraped and did all
sorts of ridiculous things to keep us from noticing what he was doing,
till all of a sudden we heard the shutter click and he gave a whoop and
said, 'There! That will be one of the best pictures in my collection.
All you girls standing with your hands stuck through the bars, like
monkeys at the Zoo, begging for peanuts. I don't know whether to call it
"Behind the Bars," or "Don't Feed the Animals."'
"Then Lloyd said he shouldn't come in for making such a speech, and he
sat down on the grass and began to sing in a ridiculous way, the old
song that goes:
"'Oh, angel, sweet angel, I pray thee
Set the beautiful gates ajar.'
"He was off the key, as he usually is when he sings without an
accompaniment, and it was so funny, such a howl of a song, that we
laughed till the tears came. Then he said he'd name the picture 'At the
Gate of Paradise,' and make a foot-note to the effect that she was a
Peri, if she'd let him in.
"After awhile she said she'd let him in to Paradise if he could name one
good deed he'd ever done that had benefited human kind. He said
certainly he could, and that he wouldn't have to dig it up from the dead
past. He could give it to her hot from the griddle, for only ten minutes
before he had completed arrangements for the evening's entertainment of
the bridal party.
"Lloyd opened the gate in a hurry then, and fairly begged him to come
in, for we had been wild all week to know what godmother had decided
upon. She only laughed when we teased her to tell us, and said we'd see.
We were sure it would be something very elegant and formal. Maybe a real
grown-up affair, with an orchestra from town and distinguished strangers
to meet the three fathers, Eugenia's, Stuart's and the Pilgrim F.
"We couldn't believe Rob when he told us that we were to go on a _coon
hunt_, and went racing up to the house to ask godmother herself.
"And she said yes, she was sure they would enjoy a glimpse of real
country Southern life, and some of our informal fun, far more than the
functions they could attend any time in the East. Besides she wanted
everybody to keep in mind that we were still little schoolgirls, even if
we were to be bridesmaids, and that was why she was taking us all off to
the woods for an old-time country frolic, instead of having a grand
dinner or a formal dance.
"Then Rob asked us if we didn't want to beg his pardon for doubting his
word, but Lloyd told him no, that
"'The truth itself is not believed
From one who often has deceived.'
"Then we tried to make him choose which he'd have, right or left, and
held out our hands again, but he said he knew that some great question
of choice was being involved, and that he would not assume the
responsibility. That we'd have to draw straws, if we wanted to decide
anything. So Eugenia held two blades of grass between her palms, and
Joyce drew the longest one. I couldn't help groaning, for that meant
that the Pilgrim Father must fall to my lot.
"But it didn't seem so bad after I met him. They all came out on the
three o'clock train with Phil. When the carriage came up from the
station we had a grand jubilee. Cousin Carl seemed so glad to get back
to the Valley, but no gladder than everybody was to see him. Stuart is
so much like Phil that we felt as if we were already acquainted with
him. He is very boyish-looking and young, but there is something so
dignified and gentle in his manner that one feels he is cut out to be a
staid old family physician, and that in time he will grow into the love
and confidence of his patients like Maclaren's Doctor of the Old School.
But dear old Doctor Tremont is the flower of _that_ family. We all fell
in love with him the moment we saw him. It is easy to see what he has
been to his boys. The very tone in which they call him 'Daddy' shows
how they adore him; and he is so sweet and tender with Eugenia.
"Contrasted with him and Cousin Carl, I must say that the Pilgrim Father
is not a suitable name for Doctor Bradford. Really, with his smooth
shaven face, and clear ruddy complexion like an Englishman's, he doesn't
seem much older than Malcolm. Still his dignity is rather awe-full, and
his grave manner and Boston accent make him seem sort of foreign, so
different from the boys whom we have always known. We were afraid at
first that godmother had made a great mistake in planning to take him on
a coon hunt. But it turned out that she was right, as she always is. He
told us afterward he had never enjoyed anything so much in all his life.
"It was just eight o'clock when we set out on the hunt last night. A big
hay-wagon drove up to the door with the party from The Beeches already
stowed away in it, sitting flat on the hay in the bottom. Mrs. Walton
was with them, and Miss Allison and Katie Mallard and her father, and
several others they had picked up on the way.
"While they were laughing and talking and everybody was being
introduced, Alec came driving up from the barn with another big wagon,
and we all piled into it except Lloyd and Rob, Joyce and Phil. They
were on horseback and kept alongside of us as outriders. The moon hadn't
come up, but the starlight was so bright that the road gleamed like a
white ribbon ahead of us, and we sang most of the way to the woods.
"Old Unc' Jefferson led the procession on his white mule, with three
lanky coon dogs following. They struck the trail before we reached our
stopping-place, and went dashing off into the woods. Unc' Jefferson
fairly rolled off his old mule, and threw the rope bridle over the first
fence-post, and went crashing through the underbrush after them. The
wagons kept on a few rods farther and landed us on the creek bank, up by
the black bridge.
"It seemed as if the whole itinerary of the hunt had been planned for
our especial benefit, for just as we reached the creek the moon began to
roll up through the trees like a great golden mill-wheel, and we could
see our way about in the woods. Evidently the coon's home was in some
hollow near our stopping-place, for instead of staying in the dense
beech woods, up where it would have been hard for us to climb, the first
dash of the dogs sent him scurrying toward the row of big sycamores that
overhang the creek.
"It whizzed by us so fast that at first we did not know what had passed
us till the dogs came tumbling after at breakneck speed. They were such
old hands at the game that they gave their quarry a bad time of it for
awhile, turning and doubling on his tracks till we were almost as
excited and bewildered as the poor coon. Little Mary Ware just stood and
wrung her hands, and once when the dogs were almost on him she teetered
up and down on her tiptoes and squealed.
"All of a sudden the coon dodged to one side and disappeared. We thought
he had escaped, but a little later on we heard the dogs baying
frantically farther down the creek, and Rob shouted that they had treed
him, and for everybody to hurry up if they wanted to be in at the death.
So away we went, helter-skelter, in a wild race down the creek bank,
godmother, Papa Jack, Cousin Carl, and everybody. It was a rough
scramble, and as we pitched over rolling stones, and caught at bushes to
pull ourselves up, and swung down holding on to the saplings, I wondered
what Doctor Bradford would think of our tomboy ways.
"Nobody waited to be helped. It was every fellow for himself, we were in
such a hurry to get to the coon. Lloyd kept far in the lead, ahead of
everybody, and Joyce walked straight up a steep bank as if she had been
a fly. When we got to the tree where the dogs were howling and baying we
had to look a long time before we could see the coon. Then all we could
distinguish was the shine of its eyeballs, for it crouched so flat
against the limb that it seemed a part of the bark. It was away out on
the tip-end of one of the highest branches.
"The only way to get it was to shake it down, and to our surprise,
before we knew who had volunteered, we saw Doctor Bradford, in his
immaculate white flannels, throw off his coat and go shinning up the
tree like an acrobat in a circus. He had to shake and shake the limb
before he could dislodge the coon, but at last it let go, and the dogs
had it before it fairly touched the ground. We girls didn't wait to see
what they did with it, but stuck our fingers in our ears and tore back
to the wagons. Rob made fun of Lloyd when she said she didn't see why
they couldn't have coon hunts without coon killings, and that they ought
to have made the dogs let go. They had had the fun of catching it, and
they ought to be satisfied with that.
"Joyce whispered to me that the hunt had had one desirable result. It
had limbered up the Pilgrim Father so thoroughly, that he couldn't be
stiff and dignified again after his acrobatic feat. It really did make
a difference, for after that he was one of the jolliest men in the
party.
"As it was out of season and old Unc' Jefferson didn't care for the
coons, he called off the dogs after they had caught one, to show us what
the sport was like, and then he built us a grand camp-fire on the creek
bank, and we had what Mrs. Walton called the sequel. She and Miss
Allison and godmother made coffee and unpacked the hampers we had
brought with us. There was beaten biscuit and fried chicken and iced
watermelon, and all sorts of good things. As we ate, the moon came up
higher and higher, and silvered the white trunks of the sycamores till
they looked like a row of ghosts standing with outstretched arms along
the creek. It was so lovely there above the water. All the sweet woodsy
smells of fern and mint and fallen leaves seem stronger after nightfall.
Everybody enjoyed the feast so much, and was in such high spirits that
we all felt a shade of regret that it had to come to an end so soon.
[Illustration: "'THEY STEPPED IN AND ROWED OFF DOWN THE SHINING
WATERWAY'"]
"There were two boats down by the bridge which we found that Rob had had
sent over that morning for the occasion. They had brought the oars over
in the wagon. Pretty soon we saw Eugenia and Stuart going down toward
one of them, a little white canvas one, and they stepped in and rowed
off down the shining waterway. It was only a narrow creek, but the
moonlight seemed to glorify it, and we knew that it made them think of
that boat-ride that had been the beginning of their happiness, in
far-away Venice.
"The other boat was larger. Allison and Miss Bonham, Phil and Lieutenant
Stanley went out in that. The music of their singing, as it floated back
to us, was so beautiful, that those of us on the bank stopped talking to
listen. When they came back presently, Kitty and Joyce, Rob and
Lieutenant Logan pushed out in it for awhile. They sang too.
"When the little boat came back, Doctor Bradford asked Lloyd to go out
with him, and she said she would as soon as she had given her chatelaine
watch to her father to keep for her. The clasp kept coming unfastened
and she was afraid she would lose it."
Here Betty laid down her pen a moment and sat peering dreamily out
between the vines. She was about to record a little conversation she had
overheard between Lloyd and her father as they stood a moment in the
bushes behind her, but paused as she reflected that it would be like
betraying a confidence to make an entry of it in her journal. It would
be even worse, since it was no confidence of hers, but a matter lying
between Lloyd and her father alone.
She sat tapping the rim of the ink-bottle with her pen as she recalled
the conversation. "Yes, it's all right for you to go, Lloyd, but wait a
moment. Have you my silver yardstick with you to-night, dear?"
"Why of co'se, Papa Jack. What makes you ask such a question?"
"Well," he answered, "there is so much weaving going on around you
lately, and weddings are apt to put all sorts of notions into a girl's
head. I just wanted to remind you that only village lads and shepherd
boys are in sight, probably not even a knight, and the mantle must be
worthy of a prince's wearing, you know."
Then Lloyd pretended to be hurt, and Betty could tell from her voice
just how she lifted her head with an air of injured dignity.
"Remembah I gave you my promise, suh, the promise of a Lloyd. Isn't that
enough?"
"More than enough, my little Hildegarde." As they stepped out of the
bushes together Betty saw him playfully pinch her cheek. Then Lloyd
went on down the bank. Here Betty took up her pen again.
"When she stepped into the boat the moonlight on her white dress and
shining hair made her look almost as ethereal and fair as she had in the
Elaine tableau. The boats could only go as far as the shallows, just a
little way below the bridge, so they went back and forth a number of
times, making such a pretty picture for those who waited on the bank.
"After Doctor Bradford had brought Lloyd back he asked me to go with
him, and oh, it was so beautiful out there on the water. I'll enjoy the
memory of it as long as I live. At first I couldn't think of anything to
say, and the more I tried to think of something that would interest a
man like him, the more embarrassed I grew. It was the first time I had
ever tried to talk to any but old men or the home boys.
"After we had rowed a little way in silence he turned to me with the
jolliest twinkle in his eyes and asked me why the boat ought to be
called the Mayflower. I was _so_ surprised, I asked him if that was a
riddle, and he said no, but he wondered if I wouldn't feel that it was
the Mayflower because I was adrift in it with the Pilgrim Father.
"I was so embarrassed I didn't know what to say, for I couldn't imagine
how he had found out that we had called him that. I couldn't have talked
to him at all if I had known what Lloyd told me afterward when we had
gone to our room. It seems that by some unlucky chance he was left alone
with Mary Ware for awhile before dinner. Godmother told her to entertain
him, and she proceeded to do so by showing him the collection of all the
kodak pictures Rob had taken of us during the house-party. After he left
us yesterday morning he went straight to work to develop and print the
films he had just taken, and when he brought us the copies that
afternoon, we were busy, and he slipped them into the album with the
others without saying anything about them. So none of us saw them until
Mary came across them in showing them to Doctor Bradford.
"There was the one of us with our hands thrust through the bars, when we
were trying to make Rob choose right or left, and one of Joyce and me
drawing straws. Neither of us had the slightest idea that he had taken
us in that act, and Mary was so surprised that she gave the whole thing
away--blurted out what we were doing, before she thought that he was the
Pilgrim Father. Then in her confusion, to cover up her mistake, she
began to explain as only Mary Ware can, and the more she explained, the
more ridiculous things she told about us. Doctor Bradford must have
found her vastly entertaining from the way he laughed whenever he quoted
her, which he did frequently.
"I wish she wouldn't be so alarmingly outspoken when she sings our
praises to strangers. She gave him to understand that I am a
full-fledged author and playwright, the peer of any poet laureate who
ever held a pen; that Lloyd is a combination of princess and angel and
halo-crowned saint, and Joyce a model big sister and an all-round
genius. How she managed in the short time they were alone to tell him as
much as she did will always remain a mystery.
"He knew all about Joyce raising bees at the Wigwam to earn money for
her art lessons, and my nearly going blind at the first house-party, and
why we all wear Tusitala rings. Only time will reveal what else she
told. Maybe, after all, her confidences made things easier, for it gave
us something to laugh about right in the beginning, and that took away
the stiff feeling, and we were soon talking like old friends. By the
time the boat landed I was glad that he had fallen to my lot as
attendant instead of Rob, for he is so much more entertaining. He told
about a moonlight ride he had on the Nile last winter when he was in
Egypt, and that led us to talking of lotus flowers, and that to
Tennyson's poem of the 'Lotus Eaters.' He quoted a verse from it which
he said was, to him, one of the best comparisons in English verse.
"'There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night dews upon still waters, between walls
Of shadowy granite in a gleaming pass.
_Music that gentlier on the spirit lies_
_Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes._'
"The other boat-load, far down the creek, was singing 'Sweet and low,
wind of the western sea,' and he rested on his oars for us to listen. I
had often repeated that verse to myself when I closed my eyes after a
hard day's study. Nothing falls gentlier than tired eyelids upon tired
eyes, and to have him understand the feeling and admire the poem in the
same way that I did, was such a pleasant sensation, as if I had come
upon a delightful unexplored country, full of pleasant surprises.
"Such thoughts as that about music are the ones I love best, and yet I
never would dream of speaking of such things to Rob or Malcolm, who are
both old and dear friends.
"After all, the coon hunt proved a very small part of the evening's
entertainment, and he must have liked it, for I heard him say to
godmother, as he bade her good night, that if this was a taste of real
Kentucky life, he would like a steady diet of it all the rest of his
days."
CHAPTER XI.
THE FOUR-LEAVED CLOVER
As Betty carefully blotted the last page and placed the stopper in the
ink-bottle, the clock in the hall began to strike, and she realized that
she must have been writing fully an hour. The whole household was astir
now. She would be late to breakfast unless she hurried with her
dressing.
Steps on the gravelled path below the balcony made her peep out between
the vines. Stuart and Doctor Bradford were coming back from an early
stroll about the place. The wistaria clung too closely to the trellis
for them to see her, but, as they crossed the grassy court between the
two wings, they looked up at Eugenia's balcony opposite. Betty looked
too. That bower of golden-hearted roses had drawn her glances more than
once that morning. Now in the midst of it, in a morning dress of pink,
fresh and fair as a blossom herself, stood Eugenia, reaching up for a
half-blown bud above her head. Her sleeves fell back from her graceful
white arms, and as she broke the bud from its stem a shower of
rose-petals fell on her dusky hair and upturned face.
Then Betty saw that Doctor Bradford had passed on into the house,
leaving Stuart standing there with his hat in his hand, smiling up at
the beautiful picture above him.
"Good morrow, Juliet," he called, softly. "Happy is the bride the sun
shines on. Was there ever such a glorious morning?"
"It's perfect," answered Eugenia, leaning out of her rose bower to smile
down at him.
"I wonder if the bride's happiness measures up to the morning," he
asked. "Mine does."
For answer she glanced around, her finger on her lips as if to warn him
that walls have ears, and then with a light little laugh tossed the
rosebud down to him. "Wait! I'll come and tell you," she said.
Betty, gathering up her writing material, saw him catch the rose, touch
it to his lips and fasten it in his coat. Then, conscience-smitten that
she had seen the little by-play not intended for other eyes, she bolted
back into her room through the window, so hurriedly that she struck her
head against the sash with a force which made her see stars for several
minutes.
The first excitement after breakfast was the arrival of the bride's
cake. Aunt Cindy had baked it, the bride herself had stirred the charms
into it, but it had been sent to Louisville to be iced. Lloyd called the
entire family into the butler's pantry to admire it, as it sat
imposingly on a huge silver salver.
"It looks as if it might have come out of the Snow Queen's palace," she
said, "instead of the confectionah's. Wouldn't you like to see the place
where those snow-rose garlands grow?"
"Somebody take Phil away from it! Quick!" said Stuart. "Once I had a
birthday cake iced in pink with garlands of white sugar roses all around
it, and he sneaked into the pantry before the party and picked off so
many of the roses that it looked as if a mouse had nibbled the edges.
Aunt Patricia put him to bed and he missed the party, but we couldn't
punish him that way if he should spoil the wedding cake, because we need
his services as best man. So we'd better remove him from temptation."
"Look here, son," answered Phil, taking Stuart by the shoulders and
pushing him ahead of him. "When it comes to raking up youthful sins
you'd better lie low. 'I could a tale unfold' that would make Eugenia
think that this is 'a fatal wedding morn,' If she knew all she wouldn't
have you."
"Then you sha'n't tell anything," declared Lloyd. "I'm not going to be
cheated out of my share of the wedding, no mattah what a dahk past
eithah of you had. Forget it, and come and help us hunt the foah-leaf
clovahs that Eugenia wants for the dream-cake boxes."
"What are they?" asked Miles Bradford, as he edged out of the pantry
after the others. Mary happened to be the one in front of him, and she
turned to answer, pointing to one of the shelves, where lay a pile of
tiny heart-shaped boxes, tied with white satin ribbons.
"Each guest is to have one of those," she explained. "There'll be a
piece of wedding cake in it, and a four-leaf clover if we can find
enough to go around. Most people don't have the clovers, but Eugenia
heard about them, and she wants to try all the customs that everybody
ever had. You put it under your pillow for three nights, and whatever
you dream will come true. If you dream about the same person all three
nights, that is the one you will marry."
"Horrible!" exclaimed he, laughing. "Suppose one has nightmares. Will
they come true?"
Mary nodded gravely. "Mom Beck says so, and Eliot. So did old Mrs.
Bisbee. She's the one that told Eugenia about the clovers. There was one
with her piece of cake from her sister's wedding, that she dreamed on
nearly fifty years ago. She dreamed of Mr. Bisbee three nights straight
ahead, and she said there never was a more fortunate wedding. They'll
celebrate their golden anniversary soon."
"Miss Mary," asked her listener, solemnly, "do you girls really believe
all these signs and wonders? I have heard more queer superstitions the
few hours I have been in this Valley, than in all my life before."
"Oh, no, we don't really believe in them. Only the darkies do that. But
you can't help feeling more comfortable when they 'point right' for you
than when they don't; like seeing the new moon over your right shoulder,
you know. And it's fun to try all the charms. Eugenia says so many
brides have done it that it seems a part of the performance, like the
veil and the trail and the orange-blossoms."
They passed from the dining-room into the hall, then out on to the front
porch, where they stood waiting for Joyce and Eugenia to get their
hats. While they waited, Rob Moore joined them, and they explained the
quest they were about to start upon.
"Where are you going to take us, Miss Lloyd?" asked Miles Bradford.
"According to the old legend the four-leaved clover is to be found only
in Paradise."
"Oh, do you know a legend about it?" asked Betty, eagerly. "I've always
thought there ought to be one."
"Then you must read the little book, Miss Betty, called 'Abdallah, or
the Four-leaved Shamrock.' Abdallah was a son of the desert who spent
his life in a search for the lucky shamrock. He had been taught that it
was the most beautiful flower of Paradise. One leaf was red like copper,
another white like silver, the third yellow like gold, and the fourth
was a glittering diamond. When Adam and Eve were driven out of the
garden, poor Eve reached out and clutched at a blossom to carry away
with her. In her despair she did not notice what she plucked, but, as
she passed through the portal, curiosity made her open her hand to look
at the flower she had snatched. To her joy it was the shamrock. But
while she looked, a gust of wind caught up the diamond leaf and blew it
back within the gates, just as they closed behind her. The name of that
leaf was Perfect Happiness. That is why men never find it in this world
for all their searching. It is to be found only in Paradise."
"Oh, but I don't believe that!" cried Lloyd. "Lots and lots of times I
have been perfectly happy, and I am suah that everybody must be at some
time or anothah in this world."
"Yes, but you didn't stay happy, did you?" asked Joyce, who had come
back in time to hear part of the legend. "We get glimpses of it now and
then, as poor Eve did when she opened her hand, but part of it always
flies away while we are looking at it. People can be contented all the
time, and happy in a mild way, but nobody can be perfectly, radiantly
happy all the time, day in and day out. The legend is right. It is only
in Paradise that one can find the diamond leaf."
"Joyce talks as if she were a hundred yeahs old," laughed Lloyd, looking
up at Doctor Bradford. "Maybe there is some truth in yoah old Oriental
legend, but I believe times have changed since Abdallah went a-hunting.
Phil and I came across a song the othah day that I want you all to heah.
Maybe it will make you change yoah minds."
Phil protested with many grimaces and much nonsense that he "could not
sing the old songs now." That he would not "be butchered to make a Roman
holiday." But all the time he protested, he was stepping toward the
piano in a fantastic exaggerated cake-walk that set his audience to
laughing. At the first low notes of the accompaniment, he dropped his
foolishness and began to sing in a full, sweet voice that brought the
old Colonel to the door of his den to listen. Eliot, packing trunks in
the upper hall, leaned over the banister:
"I know a place where the sun is like gold,
And the cherry blooms burst with snow.
And down underneath is the loveliest nook
Where the four-leaf clovers grow.
"One leaf is for hope and one is for faith,
And one is for love you know,
And God put another one in for luck.
If you search you will find where they grow.
"And you must have hope and you must have faith.
You must love and be strong, and so
If you work, if you wait, you will find the place
Where the four-leaf clovers grow."
It was a sweet, haunting melody that accompanied the words, and the gay
party of nine, strolling toward the orchard, hummed it all the way.
There in the shade of the big apple-trees, where the clover grew in
thick patches, they began their search; all together at first, then in
little groups of twos and threes, until they had hunted over the entire
orchard. Stuart, who had been doing more talking than hunting, went to
groping industriously around on his hands and knees, when they all came
together again after an hour's search.
"Bradford," he said, emphatically, "I am beginning to think that you and
Miss Joyce are right, and that Paradise has a monopoly on the four-leaf
kind. I haven't caught a glimpse of one. Not even its shadow."
Lloyd held up a handful. "I found them in several places, thick as
hops."
"Which goes to show," he insisted, "that the song, 'If you work, if you
wait, you will find the place,' is all a delusion and a snare. You all
have worked, and Eugenia and I have waited, and only you, who are 'bawn
lucky,' have found any. It's pure luck."
"No," interrupted Miles Bradford, "you can't call strolling around a
shady orchard with a pretty girl work, and the song does correspond with
the legend. Abdallah worked hard for his first leaf, dug a well with
which to bless the thirsty desert for all time. The bit of copper was at
the bottom of it. The effort he made for the second almost cost him his
life. He rescued a poor slave girl in order to be faithful to a trust
imposed in him, and taught her the truths of Allah. The silver leaf was
his reward. He found it in the heathen fetish which she gave him in her
gratitude. It had been her god.
"I am not sure about the golden leaf, but I think it was the reward of
living a wise and honorable life. The day of his birth it was said that
he alone wept, while all around him rejoiced; and he resolved to live so
well that at the day of his death he should have no cause for tears, and
all around him should mourn. No, I'll not have you belittling my hero,
Tremont. There was no luck about it whatsoever. He won the first three
leaves by unselfish service, faithfulness to every trust, and wise,
honorable living, so that he well deserved that Paradise should bring
him perfect happiness."
"Girls!" cried Betty, her face lighting up, "_we_ must be warm on the
trail, with our Tusitala rings, our Warwick Hall motto, and our Order of
Hildegarde. A Road of the Loving Heart is as hard to dig in every one's
memory as a well in the desert. If we keep the tryst in all things,
we're bound to find the silver leaf, and think of the wisdom it takes
to weave with the honor of a Hildegarde!"
Eugenia interrupted her: "Oh, Betty, _please_ write a legend of the
shamrock for girls that will fit modern times. In the old style there
are always three brothers or three maidens who start out to find a
thing, and only the last one or the youngest one is successful. The
others all come to grief. In yours give _everybody_ a chance to be
happy.
"There is no reason why _every_ maiden shouldn't find the leaves
according to the Tusitala rings and Ederyn's motto and Hildegarde's
yardstick. And then, don't you see, they needn't wait till the end of
their lives for the diamond, for _the prince_ will bring it! Don't you
see? It is his coming that _makes_ the perfect happiness!"
Phil laughed. "Stuart's face shows how he appreciates that compliment,"
he said, "and as for me and all the other sons of Adam, oh, fair layde,
I make my bow!" Springing to his feet, he swept her an elaborate
curtsey, holding out his coat as if it were the ball-gown of some
stately dame in a minuet.
Lloyd, sitting on the grass with her hands clasped on her knees, looked
around the circle of smiling faces, and then gave her shoulders a
whimsical shrug.
"That's all right if the prince _comes_," she exclaimed. "But how is one
to get the diamond leaf if he doesn't? Mammy Eastah told my fortune in a
teacup, and she said: 'I see a risin' sun, and a row of lovahs, but I
don't see you a-takin' any of 'em, honey. Yo' ways am ways of
pleasantness, and all yo' paths is peace, but I'se powahful skeered
you'se goin' to be an ole maid. I sholy is, if the teacup signs p'int
right.'"
"It will be your own fault, then," answered Phil. "The row of lovers is
there in the teacup for you. You've only to take your pick."
"But," began Rob, "maybe it is just as well that she shouldn't choose
any of them. The prince's coming doesn't always bring happiness. Look at
old Mr. Deckly. For thirty years he and his fair bride have led a
regular cat and dog life. And there are the Twicketts and the Graysons
and the Blackstones right in this one little valley, to say nothing of
all the troubles one reads of in the papers."
"No!" contradicted Eugenia, emphatically. "You have no right to hold
them up as examples. It is plainly to be seen that Mrs. Deckly and Mrs.
Twickett and Mrs. Grayson and Mrs. Blackstone were not Hildegardes. They
failed to earn their third leaf by doing their weaving wisely. They
didn't use their yardsticks. They looked only at the 'village churls,'
and wove their webs to fit their unworthy shoulders, so that the men
they married were not princes, and they couldn't bring the diamond
leaf."
"The name of the prince need not always be _Man_, need it?" ventured
Joyce. "Couldn't it be Success? It seems to me that if I had struggled
along for years, trying to make the most of my little ability, had
worked just as faithfully and wisely at my art as I could, it would be
perfect happiness to have the world award me the place of a great
artist. It would be as much to me as the diamond leaf that marriage
could bring. I should think you'd feel that way, too, Betty, about your
writing. There are marriages that are failures just as there are
artistic and literary careers that are failures, and there are diamond
leaves to reward the work and waiting of old maids, just as there are
diamond leaves to reward the Hildegardes who use their yardsticks.
Sometimes there are girls who don't marry because they sacrifice their
lives to taking care of their families, or living for those who are
dependent on them. Surely there must be a blessedness and a happiness
for them greater than any diamond leaf a prince could bring."
"There is probably," answered Eugenia, "but it seems as if most people
of that kind have to wait till they get to Paradise to find it."
"I don't think so," said Betty. "I believe all the dear old-maid aunts
and daughters, _who earn the first three leaves_, find the fourth
waiting somewhere in this world. It is only the selfish ones, who slight
their share of the duties life imposes on every one, who are cross and
unlovely and unloved. They probably would not have been happy wives if
they had married."
"Well, but what about _me_!" persisted Lloyd. "I nevah expect to have a
career, so Success in big lettahs will nevah bring me a medal or a
chromo. I am not sacrificing my life for anybody's comfort, and I can
nevah have any little nieces and nephews to whom I can be one of those
deah old aunts Betty talks about, and there is that dreadful teacup!"
She did not hear Doctor Bradford's laughing answer, for Phil, turning
his back on the others, looked down into her upturned face and began to
hum, as if to himself, "_From the desert I come to thee!_" Only Mary
understood the significance of it as Lloyd did, and she knew why Lloyd
suddenly turned away and began passing her hands over the grass around
her, as if resuming her search. She wanted to hide her face, into which
the color was creeping.
A train whistled somewhere far across the orchard, and Rob took out his
watch. The sight of it suggested something in line with the
conversation, for when he had noted the time, he touched the spring that
opened the back of the case.
"Never you mind, Little Colonel," he said, in a patronizing,
big-brotherly tone. "If nobody else will stand between you and that
teacup, _I'll_ come to the rescue. Bobby won't go back on his old chum.
_I'll_ bring you a four-leaf clover. Here's one, all ready and waiting."
Lloyd looked across at the watch he held out to her. "Law, Bobby," she
exclaimed, giving him the old name she had called him when they first
played together, "I supposed you had lost that clovah long ago."
"Not much," he answered. "It's the finest hoodoo ever was. It helped me
through high school. I swear I never could have passed in Latin but for
your good-luck charm. It's certainly to my interest to hang on to it.
"Think of it, Mary," he added, seeing that her eyes were round with
interest, "that was given to me by a princess."
Mary darted a quick look at Lloyd and another one at him to see if he
were teasing.
"Oh, I _see_!" she remarked, in a tone of enlightenment.
"What do you see?" he demanded, laughing.
She would not answer, but, ignoring his further attempts to make her
talk, she, too, turned again to search for clovers, inwardly excited
over the discovery she thought she had made. She would make a note of it
in her journal, she decided, something like this: "The plot thickens.
The B. M. and Sir F. have a rival they little suspect. R. carries the
charm the M. of H. gave him in years gone by, and I can see many reasons
why he should be the one to bring her the diamond leaf."
Only two dozen clovers rewarded their united search, but Eugenia was
satisfied. "We'll put them in the boxes haphazard," she said, "and the
uncertainty of getting one will make it more exciting than if there were
one for every box."
The path back to the house led past the kitchen, where several colored
women were helping Aunt Cindy. Just as they passed, one of them put her
head out of the door to call to a group of children crowded around one
of the windows of the great house. They were watching the decorators at
work inside the drawing-room, hanging the gate of roses in the arch. The
youngest one was perched on a barrel that had been dragged up for that
purpose, so that his older brothers and sisters might be spared the
weariness of holding him up to see. A narrow board laid across the top
made an uneasy and precarious perch for him. He was seated astride, with
his bare black legs dangling down inside the barrel.
"You M'haley Gibbs," called the woman, "don't you let Ca'line Allison
lean agin that bo'd. It'll upset Sweety into the bar'l."
Her warning came too late, for even as she called the slight board was
pushed off its foundations by the weight of the roly-poly Ca'line
Allison, and the pickaninny went down into the barrel as suddenly as a
candle is snuffed out by the wind.
"You M'haley, I'll natcherly lay you out," shrieked the woman, hurrying
up the path to the rescue. But M'haley, made agile by fifteen years of
constant practice, dodged the cuffing as it was about to descend, and
scuttled around the house to wait till Sweety stopped howling.
"They are Sylvia Gibbs's children," said Lloyd, in answer to Doctor
Bradford's astonished comment at seeing so many little negroes in a row.
"They can scent a pahty five miles away, and they hang around like
little black buzzahds waiting for scraps of the feast. I suppose they
feel they have a right to be heah to-day, as Sylvia is helping in the
kitchen. They're the same children, Eugenia," she added, "who were heah
so much when I had my first house-pahty. M'haley is the one who brought
you that awful, skinny, mottled chicken in a bandbox for you to 'take
home on the kyers fo' a pet,' she said."
"So she is!" exclaimed Eugenia, as they passed around the corner of the
house and caught sight of M'haley, who was peeping out to see if the
storm was over, and if it would be safe to return to the sightseeing at
the window. Her teeth and eyeballs were a-shine with pleasure when
Eugenia passed on, after a pleasant greeting and some reference to the
chicken. She felt it a great honor to be remembered by the bride, and
thanked again, after all these years, for her parting gift. She gave a
little giggle when Lloyd came up, and said, with a coy self-conscious
air that was extremely amusing to the Northern man, who had never met
this type of the race before, "I'se a maid of honah, too, Miss Lloyd."
"You are!" was the surprised answer. "How does that happen?"
"Mammy's gwine to git married agin, to Mistah Robinson, and she says
nobody has a bettah right than me to be maid of honah to her own ma's
weddin'. So that's how come she toted us all along to you-all's weddin',
so that Sweety and Ca'line and the boys could learn how to act at her
and Mistah Robinson's."
"When is it to be?" inquired Lloyd.
"To-morrow night. Mammy's done give her fish-fry and ice-cream festible,
and she cleahed enough to pay the weddin' expenses. You-all's suah gwine
to git an invite, Miss Lloyd."
"It is sort of a benefit," Betty explained to Miles Bradford, as they
walked on. "Instead of giving a concert or a recital, the colored people
here give a fish-fry and festival whenever they are in need of money.
They used to have them just to raise funds for the church, but now it is
quite popular for individuals to give them when there is a funeral or a
wedding to be paid for. I am so glad you are going to stay over a few
days. We can show you sights you've never dreamed of in the North."
Eugenia, first to step into the hall, gave a cry of pleasure. The
florist and his assistants had been there in their absence, and were
just leaving. They had turned the entire house into a rose-garden. Hall,
drawing-room, and library, and the dining-room beyond were filled with
such lavishness that it seemed as if June herself had taken possession,
with all her court. Stuart and Eugenia paused before the tall gate of
smilax and American beauties.
"It is the Gate into Paradise, sweetheart," he whispered, looking
through its blossom-covered bars to the altar beyond, that had been
built in the bay-window of the drawing-room, and covered with white
roses.
"Yes," answered Eugenia, smiling up at him. "The legend is right. We
must enter Paradise to find the diamond leaf. But I was right, too. It
is my prince who will bring mine to me."
CHAPTER XII.
THE WEDDING
Lunch was served on the porch, for the tables for the wedding supper
were already spread in the dining-room, and Alec had locked the doors
that nothing might disturb its perfect order.
"I think we are really going to be able to avoid that last wild rush
which usually accompanies home weddings," said Mrs. Sherman, as they sat
leisurely talking over the dessert. "Usually the bridesmaids' gloves are
missing, or the bride's slippers have been packed into one of the trunks
and sent on ahead to the depot. But this time I have tried to have
everything so perfectly arranged that the wedding will come to pass as
quietly and naturally as a flower opens. I want to have everything give
the impression of having _bloomed_ into place."
"Eliot and Mom Beck are certainly doing their part to make such an
impression," said Eugenia. "Eliot has already counted over every
article I am to wear, a dozen times, and they're all laid out in
readiness, even to the 'something blue.'"
"Oh, that reminds me!" began Lloyd, then stopped abruptly. Nobody
noticed the exclamation, however, but Mary, and, with swift intuition,
she guessed what the something blue had suggested to the maid of honor.
It was that bit of turquoise that caused the only scramble in the
preparations, for Lloyd could not remember where she had put it.
"I was suah I dropped it into one of the boxes in my top bureau drawer,"
she said to herself on the way up-stairs. Then, with her finger on her
lip, she stopped on the threshold of the sewing-room to consider. She
remembered that when she gave up her room to the guests, all the boxes
had been taken out of that drawer. Some of them had been put in the
sewing-room closet, and some carried to a room at the end of the back
hall, where trunks and hampers were stored.
Now, while Betty was down-stairs, helping with a few last details, Lloyd
took advantage of her absence to search all the boxes in the closet and
drawers of the sewing-room, but the missing turquoise was not in any of
them.
"I know I ought to be taking a beauty sleep," she thought, "so I'll be
all fresh and fine for the evening, but I must find it, for I promised
Phil I'd wear it."
In the general shifting of furniture to accommodate so many guests,
several articles had found their way back among the trunks. Among them
was an old rocking-chair. It was drawn up to the window now, and, as
Lloyd pushed open the door, to her surprise she found Mary Ware
half-hidden in its roomy depths. She was tilted back in it with a book
in her hands.
Mary was as surprised as Lloyd. She had been so absorbed in the story
that she did not hear the knob turn, and as the hinges suddenly creaked,
she started half out of her chair.
"Oh!" she exclaimed, settling back when she saw it was only Lloyd. "You
frightened me nearly out of my wits. I didn't know that anybody ever
came in here." Then she seemed to feel that some explanation of her
presence was necessary.
"I came in here because our room is full of clothes, spread out ready to
wear. They're all over the room,--mine on one side and Joyce's on the
other. I was so afraid I'd forget and flop down on them, or misplace
something, that I came in here to read awhile. It makes the afternoon go
faster. Seems to me it never will be time to dress."
Lloyd stood looking at the shelves around the room, then said: "If time
hangs so heavy on yoah hands, I believe I'll ask you to help me hunt for
something I have lost. It's just a trifle, and maybe it is foolish for
me to try to find it now, when everything is in such confusion, but it
is something that I want especially."
"I'd love to help hunt," exclaimed Mary, putting down her book and
holding out her arms to take the boxes which Lloyd was reaching down
from the shelves. One by one she piled them on a packing-trunk behind
her, and then climbed up beside them, sitting Turk fashion in their
midst, and leaving the chair by the window for Lloyd.
"It's just a scrap of unset turquoise," explained Lloyd, as she
unwrapped a small package, "no larger than one of the beads on this
fan-chain. I was in a big hurry when I dropped it into my drawer, and I
didn't notice which box I put it in. So we'll have to take out all these
ribbons and laces and handkerchiefs and sachet-bags."
It was the first time during her visit that Mary had been entirely alone
with her adored Princess, and to be with her now in this intimate way,
smoothing her dainty ribbons, peeping into her private boxes, and
handling her pretty belongings, gave her a pleasure that was
indescribable.
"Shall I open this, too?" she asked, presently, picking up a package
wrapped in an old gauze veil.
Lloyd glanced up. "Yes; although I haven't the slightest idea what it
can be."
A faint, delicious odor stole out as Mary unwound the veil, an odor of
sandalwood, that to her was always suggestive of the "Arabian Nights,"
of beautiful Oriental things, and of hidden treasures in secret panels
of old castles.
"I've hunted for that box high and low!" cried Lloyd, reaching forward
to take it. "Mom Beck must have wrapped it so, to keep the dust out of
the carving. I nevah thought of looking inside that old veil for
anything of any account. I think moah of what it holds than any othah
ornament I own."
Mary watched her curiously as she threw back the lid and lifted out a
necklace of little Roman pearls. Lloyd dangled it in front of her,
lifting the shining string its full length, then letting it slip back
into her palm, where it lay a shimmering mass of tiny lustrous spheres.
Regarding it intently, she said, with one of those unaccountable
impulses which sometimes seize people:
"Mary, I've a great mind to tell you something I've nevah yet told a
soul,--how it was I came to make this necklace. I believe I'll weah it
when I stand up at the altah with Eugenia. It seems the most appropriate
kind of a necklace that a maid of honah could weah."
The story of Ederyn and the king's tryst was fresh in Mary's mind, for
Betty had told it at the lunch-table half an hour before, in answer to
Doctor Bradford's question about the motto of Warwick Hall; the motto
which Betty declared was a surer guide-post to the silver leaf of the
magic shamrock than the one Abdallah followed.
"I can't undahstand," began Lloyd, "why I should be telling this to a
little thing like you, when I hid it from Betty as if it were a crime. I
knew she would think it a beautiful idea,--marking each day with a pearl
when its duties had been well done, but I was half-afraid that she would
think it conceited of me--conceited for me to count that any of my days
were perfect enough to be marked with a pearl. But it wasn't that I
thought them so. It was only that I tried my hardest to make the most
of them,--in my classes and every way, you know."
As Lloyd went on, telling of the times she had failed and times she had
succeeded, Mary felt as if she were listening to the confessions of a
white Easter lily. It seemed perfectly justifiable to her that Lloyd
should have had tantrums, and stormed at the doctor when he forbade her
going back to school after the Christmas vacation, and that she should
have cried and moped and made everybody around her miserable for days.
Mary's overweening admiration for the Princess carried her to the point
of feeling that everybody _ought_ to be miserable when she was unhappy.
In Mary's opinion it was positively saintly of her the way she took up
her rosary again after awhile, trying to string it with tokens of days
spent unselfishly at home; days unstained by regrets and tears and idle
repinings for what could not be helped.
Mary laughed over the story of one hard-earned pearl, the day spent in
making pies and cleaning house for the disagreeable old Mrs. Perkins,
who didn't want to be reformed, and who wouldn't stay clean.
"I haven't the faintest idea why I told you all this," said Lloyd at
last, once more lifting the string to watch the light shimmer along its
lustrous length. "But now you see why I prize this little rosary so
highly. It was what lifted me out of my dungeon of disappointment."
Afterward Mary thought of a dozen things she wished she had said to
Lloyd while they were there together in the privacy of the trunk-room.
She wished she had let her know in some way how much she admired her,
and longed to be like her, and how she was going to try all the rest of
her life to be a real maid of honor, worthy in every way of her love and
confidence. But some shy, unusual feeling of constraint crowded the
unspoken words back into her throbbing little throat, and the
opportunity passed.
Clasping the pearls around her neck, Lloyd picked up the sandalwood box
again and shook it. "Heah's a lot of loose beads of all kinds, with as
many colahs as a kaleidoscope. You do bead-work, don't you, Mary? You
may have these if you can use them."
In response to her eager acceptance, Lloyd looked around for something
to pour the beads into. "There's an empty cologne bottle on that shelf
above yoah head. If you will reach it down, I'll poah them into that."
Beads of various sizes and colors, from garnet to amber, poured in a
rainbow stream from the box to the wide-necked bottle. Here and there
was the glint of cut steel and the gleam of crystal, and several times
Mary noticed a little Roman pearl like those on the rosary, and thought
with a thrill of the necklace she intended to begin making that very
day. Suddenly Lloyd gave an exclamation and reversed the gay-colored
stream, pouring it slowly back into the box from the bottle.
"I thought I saw that turquoise," she cried. "I remembah now, it was in
my hand when I took off my necklace, and I must have dropped them in
heah togethah."
She parted the beads with a cautious forefinger, pushing them aside one
at a time. Presently a bit of blue rolled uppermost, and she looked up
triumphantly. "There it is!"
Mary flushed guiltily at sight of the turquoise, wondering what Lloyd
would think if she knew that she had overheard what Phil had said about
that bit of something blue. She went back to her chair and her book by
the window after Lloyd left, but the book lay unopened in her lap. She
had many things to think of while she slowly turned the bottle between
herself and the light and watched its shifting colors. Several times a
black bead appeared among the others.
"I'd have had to use black beads more than once," she reflected, "if _I_
had been making a rosary, for there's the day I was so rude to Girlie
Dinsmore, and the awful time when I got so interested that I
eavesdropped."
* * * * *
The wedding was all that Mrs. Sherman had planned, everything falling
into place as beautifully and naturally as the unfolding of a flower.
The assembled guests seated in the great bower of roses heard a low,
soft trembling of harp-strings deepen into chords. Then to this
accompaniment two violins began the wedding-march, and the great gate of
roses swung wide. As Stuart and his best man entered from a side door
and took their places at the altar in front of the old minister, the
rest of the bridal party came down the stairs: Betty and Miles Bradford
first, Joyce and Rob, then the maid of honor walking alone with her
armful of roses. After her came the bride with her hand on her father's
arm.
Just at that instant some one outside drew back the shutters in the
bay-window, and a flood of late afternoon sunshine streamed across the
room, the last golden rays of the perfect June day making a path of
light from the gate of roses to the white altar. It shone full across
Eugenia's face, down on the long-trained shimmering satin, the little
gleaming slippers, the filmy veil that enveloped her, the pearls that
glimmered white on her white throat.
Eliot, standing in a corner, nervously watching every movement with
twitching lips, relaxed into a smile. "It's a good omen!" she said, half
under her breath, then gave a startled glance around to see if any one
had heard her speak at such an improper time.
The music grew softer now, so faint and low it seemed the mere shadow of
sound. Above the rare sweetness of that undertone of harp and violins
rose the words of the ceremony: "_I, Stuart, take thee, Eugenia, to be
my wedded wife_."
Mary, standing at her post by the rose gate, felt a queer little chill
creep over her. It was so solemn, so very much more solemn than she had
imagined it would be. She wondered how she would feel if the time ever
came for her to stand in Eugenia's place, and plight her faith to some
man in that way--"_for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness and in health, until death us do part_."
Eliot was crying softly in her corner now. Yes, getting married was a
terribly solemn thing. It didn't end with the ceremony and the pretty
clothes and the shower of congratulations. That was only the beginning.
"_For better, for worse_,"--that might mean all sorts of trouble and
heartache. "_Sickness and death_,"--it meant to be bound all one's life
to one person, morning, noon, and night. How very, very careful one
would have to be in choosing,--and then suppose one made a mistake and
thought the man she was marrying was good and honest and true, and he
_wasn't_! It would be all the same, for "_for better, for worse_," ran
the vow, "_until death us do part_."
Then and there, holding fast to the gate of roses, Mary made up her mind
that she could never, never screw her courage up to the point of taking
the vows Eugenia was taking, as she stood with her hand clasped in
Stuart's, and the late sunshine of the sweet June day streaming down on
her like a benediction.
"It's lots safer to be an old maid," thought Mary. "I'll take my chances
getting the diamond leaf some other way than marrying. Anyhow, if I ever
should make a choice, I'll ask somebody else's opinion, like I do when I
go shopping, so I'll be sure I'm getting a real prince, and not an
imitation one."
It was all over in another moment. Harp and violins burst into the
joyful notes of Mendelssohn's march, and Stuart and Eugenia turned from
the altar to pass through the rose gate together. Lloyd and Phil
followed, then the other attendants in the order of their entrance. On
the wide porch, screened and canopied with smilax and roses, a cool
green out-of-doors reception-room had been made. Here they stood to
receive their guests.
Mary, in all the glory of her pink chiffon dress and satin slippers,
stood at the end of the receiving line, feeling that this one experience
was well worth the long journey from Arizona. So thoroughly did she
delight in her part of the affair, and so heartily did she enter into
her duties, that more than one guest passed on, smiling at her evident
enjoyment.
"I wish this wedding could last a week," she confided to Lieutenant
Logan, when he paused beside her. "Don't you know, they did in the
fairy-tales, some of them. There was 'feasting and merrymaking for
seventy days and seventy nights.' This one is going by so fast that it
will soon be train-time. I don't suppose _they_ care," she added, with a
nod toward the bride, "for they're going to spend their honeymoon in a
Gold of Ophir rose-garden, where there are goldfish in the fountains,
and real orange-blossoms. It's out in California, at Mister Stuart's
grandfather's. Elsie, his sister, couldn't come, so they're going out to
see her, and take her a piece of every kind of cake we have to-night,
and a sample of every kind of bonbon. Don't you wonder who'll get the
charms in the bride's cake? That's the only reason I am glad the clock
is going so fast. It will soon be time to cut the cake, and I'm wild to
see who gets the things in it."
The last glow of the sunset was still tinting the sky with a tender pink
when they were summoned to the dining-room, but indoors it had grown so
dim that a hundred rose-colored candles had been lighted. Again the
music of harp and violins floated through the rose-scented rooms. As
Mary glanced around at the festive scene, the tables gleaming with
silver and cut glass, the beautiful costumes, the smiling faces, a line
from her old school reader kept running through her mind: "_And all went
merry as a marriage-bell! And all went merry as a marriage-bell!_"
It repeated itself over and over, through all the gay murmur of voices
as the supper went on, through the flowery speech of the old Colonel
when he stood to propose a toast, through the happy tinkle of laughter
when Stuart responded, through the thrilling moment when at last the
bride rose to cut the mammoth cake. In her nervous excitement, Mary
actually began to chant the line aloud, as the first slice was lifted
from the great silver salver: "All went merry--" Then she clapped her
hand over her mouth, but nobody had noticed, for Allison had drawn the
wedding-ring, and a chorus of laughing congratulations was drowning out
every other sound.
As the cake passed on from guest to guest, Betty cried out that she had
found the thimble. Then Lloyd held up the crystal charm, the one the
bride had said was doubly lucky, because it held imbedded in its centre
a four-leaved clover. Nearly every slice had been crumbled as soon as it
was taken, in search of a hidden token, but Mary, who had not dared to
hope that she might draw one, began leisurely eating her share. Suddenly
her teeth met on something hard and flat, and glancing down, she saw the
edge of a coin protruding from the scrap of cake she held.
"Oh, it's the shilling!" she exclaimed, in such open-mouthed
astonishment that every one laughed, and for the next few moments she
was the centre of the congratulations. Eugenia took a narrow white
ribbon from one of the dream-cake boxes, and passed it through the hole
in the shilling, so that she could hang it around her neck.
"Destined to great wealth!" said Rob, with mock solemnity. "I always did
think I'd like to marry an heiress. I'll wait for you, Mary."
"No," interrupted Phil, laughing, "fate has decreed that I should be the
lucky man. Don't you see that it is Philip's head with Mary's on that
shilling?"
"Whew!" teased Kitty. "Two proposals in one evening, Mary. See what the
charm has done for you already!"
Mary knew that they were joking, but she turned the color of her dress,
and sat twiddling the coin between her thumb and finger, too embarrassed
to look up. They sat so long at the table that it was almost train-time
when Eugenia went up-stairs to put on her travelling-dress. She made a
pretty picture, pausing midway up the stairs in her bridal array, the
veil thrown back, and her happy face looking down on the girls gathered
below. Leaning far over the banister with the bridal bouquet in her
hands, she called:
"Now look, ye pretty maidens, standing all a-row,
The one who catches this, the next bouquet shall throw."
There was a laughing scramble and a dozen hands were outstretched to
receive it. "Oh, Joyce caught it! Joyce caught it!" cried Mary, dancing
up and down on the tips of her toes, and clapping her hands over her
mouth to stifle the squeal of delight that had almost escaped. "Now,
some day I can be maid of honor."
"So that's why you are so happy over your sister's good fortune, is it?"
asked Phil, bent on teasing her every time opportunity offered.
"No," was the indignant answer. "That is some of the reason, but I'm
gladdest because she didn't get left out of everything. She didn't get
one of the cake charms, so I hoped she would catch the bouquet."
When the carriage drove away at last, a row of shiny black faces was
lined up each side of the avenue. All the Gibbs children were there, and
Aunt Cindy's other grandchildren, with their hands full of rice.
"Speed 'em well, chillun!" called old Cindy, waving her apron. The rice
fell in showers on the top of the departing carriage, and two little
white slippers were sent flying along after it, with such force that
they nearly struck Eliot, sitting beside the coachman. Tired as she was,
she turned to smile approval, for the slippers were a good omen, too, in
her opinion, and she was happy to think that everything about her Miss
Eugenia's wedding had been carried out properly, down to this last
propitious detail.
As the slippers struck the ground, quick as a cat, M'haley darted
forward to grab them. "Them slippahs is mates!" she announced,
gleefully, "and I'm goin' to tote 'em home for we-all's wedding. I
kain't squeeze into 'em myself, but Ca'line Allison suah kin."
Once more, and for the last time, Eugenia leaned out of the carriage to
look back at the dear faces she was leaving. But there was no sadness in
the farewell. Her prince was beside her, and the Gold of Ophir
rose-garden lay ahead.
CHAPTER XIII.
DREAMS AND WARNINGS
"It's all ovah now!" exclaimed Lloyd, stifling a yawn and looking around
the deserted drawing-room, where the candles burned low in their
sconces, and the faded roses were dropping their petals on the floor.
Mr. Forbes and Doctor Tremont had just driven away to catch the midnight
express for New York, and the last guest but Rob had departed.
"It's all over with that gown of yours, too, isn't it?" asked Phil,
glancing at the airy pink skirt, down whose entire front breadth ran a
wide, zigzag rent. "It's too bad, for it's the most becoming one I've
seen you wear yet. I'm sorry it must be retired from public life so
early in its career."
Lloyd drew the edges of the largest holes together. "Yes, it's ruined
beyond all hope, for I stepped cleah through it when I tripped on the
stairs, and it pulled apart in at least a dozen places, just as a thin
veil would. But you'll see it again, and on anothah maid of honah.
M'haley nevah waited to see if I was hurt, but pounced on it and began
to beg for it befoah I got my breath again. She said she could fix it
good enough for her to weah to her mammy's wedding. She would 'turn it
hine side befo'' and tie her big blue sash ovah it. Imagine! She'll be
heah at the break of day to get it."
"Do you know it is almost that time now?" asked Betty, coming in from
the dining-room with seven little heart-shaped boxes. "Here's our cake,
and godmother says we'd better take it and go to dreaming on it soon, or
the sun will be up before we get started."
"Now remembah," warned Lloyd, as Rob slipped his box into his pocket and
began looking around for his hat, "we have all promised to tell our
dreams to each othah in the mawning. We'll wait for you, so come ovah
early. Come to breakfast."
"Thanks. I'll be on hand all right. I'll probably have to wake the rest
of you."
"Don't you do it!" exclaimed Phil. "I'll warn you now, if you're waking,
_don't_ call me early, mother, dear. If you do, to-morrow won't be the
happiest day of all _your_ glad New Year. I'll promise you that. How
about you, Bradford?"
"Oh, I'm thinking of sitting up all night," he answered, laughing, "to
escape having any dreams. Miss Mary assures me they will come true, and
one might have a nightmare after such a spread as that wedding-supper. I
can hardly afford to take such risks."
A moment after, Rob's whistle sounded cheerfully down the avenue and
Alec was going around the house, putting out the down-stairs lights.
Late as it was, when they reached their room, Joyce stopped to smooth
every wrinkle out of her bridesmaid dress, and spread it out carefully
in the tray of her trunk.
"It is so beautiful," she said, as she plumped the sleeves into shape
with tissue-paper. "As long as an accident had to happen to one of us it
was lucky that it was Lloyd's dress that was torn. She has so many she
wouldn't wear it often anyhow, and this will be my best evening gown all
summer. I expect to get lots of good out of it at the seashore."
"I'm glad it wasn't mine that was torn," responded Mary, following
Joyce's example and folding hers away also, with many loving pats.
"Probably there'll be a good many times I can wear it here this summer,
but there'll never be a chance on the desert, and I shall have outgrown
it by next summer, so when I go home I'm going to lay it away in
rose-leaves with these darling little satin slippers, because I've had
the best time of my life in them. In the morning Betty and I are going
to pick all the faded roses to pieces and save the petals. Eugenia wants
to fill a rose-jar with part of them. Betty knows how to make that
potpourri that Lloyd's Grandmother Amanthis always kept in the rose-jars
in the drawing-room. She's copied the receipt for me.
"I'm not a bit sleepy," she continued. "I've had such a beautiful time I
could lie awake all the rest of the night thinking about it. Maybe it's
because I drank coffee when I'm not used to it that I'm so wide awake,
and I ate--_oh_, how I ate!"
One by one the up-stairs lights went out, and a deep silence fell on the
old mansion. The ticking of the great clock on the stairs was the only
sound. The serene peace of the starlit night settled over The Locusts
like brooding wings. The clock struck one, then two, and the long hand
was half-way around its face again before any other sound but the
musical chime broke the stillness. Then a succession of strangled moans
began to penetrate the consciousness of even the soundest sleeper.
Whoever it was that was trying to call for help was evidently terrified,
and the terror of the cries sent a cold chill through every one who
heard them.
"It's burglars," shrieked Lloyd, sitting up in bed. "Papa Jack! They're
in Joyce's room! They're trying to strangle her! Papa Jack!"
Lights glimmered in every room, and doors flew open along the hall. A
dishevelled little group in bath-robes and pajamas rushed out, Mr.
Sherman with a revolver, Miles Bradford with a heavy Indian club, and
Phil with his walking-stick with the electric battery in its head. He
flashed it like a search-light up and down the hall.
At the first moan, Joyce had wakened, and realizing that it came from
Mary's corner of the room, began to grope on the table beside her bed
for matches. Her fingers trembled so she could scarcely muster strength
to scratch the match when she found it. Then she glanced across the room
and began to laugh hysterically.
"It's all right!" she called. "Nobody's killed! Mary's just having a
nightmare!"
By this time Mr. Sherman had opened the door, and the blinding glare of
Phil's electric light flashed full in Mary's eyes. At the same instant
Lloyd opened the door on the other side, between the two rooms, and
Betty and Mrs. Sherman followed her in. So when Mary struggled back to
wakefulness far enough to sit up and look around in a dazed way, the
room seemed full of people and lights and voices, and she tried to ask
what had happened. She was still sobbing and trembling.
"What's the matter, Mary?" called Phil from the hall. "Were the Indians
after you again?"
"Oh, it was awfuller than Indians," wailed Mary, in a shrill, excited
voice. "It was the worst nightmare I ever had! I can't shake it off. I'm
scared yet."
"Tell us about it," said Mrs. Sherman, soothingly. "That's the best
remedy, for the terror always evaporates in the telling, and makes one
wonder how anything foolish could have seemed frightful."
"I--was being married," wailed Mary, "to a man I couldn't see. And just
as soon as it was over he turned from the altar and said, '_Now_ we'll
begin to lead a cat and dog life.' And, oh, it was so awful," she
continued, sobbingly, the terror of the dream still holding her, "he--he
_barked_ at me! And he showed his teeth, and I had to spit and mew and
hump my back whether _I_ wanted to or not." Her voice grew higher and
more excited with every sentence. "And I could feel my claws growing
longer and longer, and I knew I'd never have fingers again, only just
paws with fur on 'em! Ugh! It made me sick to feel the fur growing over
me that way. I cried and cried. Now as I tell about it, it begins to
sound silly, but it was awful then,--so dark, and me hanging by my claws
to the edge of the wood-shed roof, ready to drop off. I thought Phil was
in the house, and I tried to call him, but I couldn't remember his name.
I got mixed up with the Philip on the shilling, and I kept yelling,
Shill! Philling! Shilling! and I couldn't make him understand. He
wouldn't come!"
As she picked up the corner of the sheet to wipe her eyes Mrs. Sherman
and the girls burst out laughing, and there was an echoing peal of
amusement in the hall. The affair would not have seemed half so
ridiculous in the daylight, but to be called out of bed at that hour to
listen to such a dream, told only as Mary Ware could tell it, impressed
the entire family as one of the funniest things that had ever happened.
They laughed till the tears came.
"I don't see what ever put such a silly thing into my head," said Mary,
finally, beginning to feel mortified as she realized what an excitement
she had created for nothing.
"It was Rob's talking about people who live a regular cat and dog life,"
said Betty. "Don't you remember how long we talked about it to-day down
in the clover-patch?"
"You mean yesterday," prompted Phil from the hall, "for it's nearly
morning now. And, Mary, I'll tell you why you had it. It's a warning! A
solemn warning! It means that you must never, never marry."
"That's what I thought, too," quavered Mary, so seriously that they all
laughed again.
"I hope everybody will excuse me for waking them up," called Mary, as
they began to disperse to their rooms. "Oh, dear!" she added to Joyce,
as she lay back once more on her pillow. "Why is it that I am always
doing such mortifying things! I am _so_ ashamed of myself."
The lights went out again, and after a few final giggles from Lloyd and
Betty, silence settled once more over the house. But the terror of the
nightmare had taken such hold upon Mary that she could not close her
eyes.
"Joyce," she whispered, "do you mind if I come over into your bed? I'm
nearly paralyzed, I'm so scared again."
Slipping across the floor as soon as Joyce had given a sleepy consent,
Mary crept in beside her sister in the narrow bed, and lay so still she
scarcely breathed, for fear of disturbing her. Presently she reached out
and gently clasped the end of Joyce's long plait of hair. It was
comforting to be so near her. But even that failed to convince her
entirely that the dream was a thing of imagination. It seemed so real,
that several times before she fell asleep she laid her hands against her
face to make sure that her fingers had not developed claws, and that no
fur had started to grow on them.
The dreams told around the breakfast-table next morning seemed tame in
comparison to Mary's recital the night before. Rob had had none at all,
which was interpreted to mean that he would live and die an old
bachelor. Miles Bradford had a dim recollection of being in an
automobile with a girl who seemed to be a sort of a human kaleidoscope,
for her face changed as the dream progressed, until she had looked like
every woman he ever knew. They could think of no interpretation for that
dream. Lloyd's was fully as indefinite.
"I thought I was making a cake," she said, "and there was a big bowl of
eggs on the table. But every time I started to break one Mom Beck would
say, 'Don't do that, honey. Don't you see it is somebody's haid?' And
suah enough, every egg I took up had somebody's face on it, like those
painted Eastah eggs; Rob's, and Phil's, and Malcolm's, and Doctah
Bradford's, and evah so many I'd nevah seen befoah."
"A very appropriate dream for a Queen of Hearts," said Phil, "and
anybody can see it's only a repetition of Mammy Easter's fortune, the
'row of lovahs in the teacup.' Tell us which one you are going to
choose."
"It's Joyce's turn," was the only answer Lloyd would make.
"And my dream was positively brilliant," replied Joyce. "I thought we
were all at The Beeches, and Allison, and Kitty, and all of us were
making Limericks. Kitty began:
"'There was a lieutenant named Logan,
Who found one day a small brogan.'
Then she stuck, and couldn't get any farther, and Allison had to be
smart and pun on my name. She made up a line:
"'So what will Joyce Ware if she meets a great bear?'
Nobody could get the last rhyme for awhile, but after floundering around
a few minutes I had a sudden inspiration and sprang up and struck an
attitude as if I were on the stage, and solemnly thundered out:
"'And how can he shoot him with _no_ gun?'
"In my dream it seemed the most thrilling thing--I was the heroine of
the hour, and Lieutenant Logan took me aside and told me that the
question which I had embodied in that last line was the question of the
ages. It had staggered the philosophers and scientists of all times.
Nobody could answer that question--'how can he shoot him with no gun,'
and he was a better and a happier man, to think that I had rhymed that
ringing query with the proud name of Logan. It's the silliest dream I
ever had, but you can't imagine how real it seemed at the time. I was so
stuck up over his compliments that I began flouncing around with my head
held high, like the picture of 'Oh, fie! you haughty Jane.'"
"Oh, Joyce, what a dream to dream on wedding-cake!" exclaimed Mary, with
a long indrawn breath. There was no mistaking her interpretation of it.
Everybody laughed, and Joyce hastened to explain, "It isn't worth
anything, Mary. It'll never come true, for just before I came
down-stairs to breakfast I discovered my little box of cake lying on the
table under a pile of ribbons. It had been there all night. I had
forgotten to put it under my pillow. And," she added, cutting short
Mary's exclamation of disappointment, "_your_ box lay beside it. We both
were so busy putting away our dresses, and talking over the wedding that
we forgot the most important thing of all."
"Well, I'm certainly glad that mine wasn't under my head when I had that
dreadful nightmare!" exclaimed Mary, in such a relieved tone that every
one laughed again. "I couldn't help taking it as a warning."
"Joyce and I must have changed places in our sleep," said Betty, when
her turn came. "She was making verses, and I was trying to draw. But I
did my drawing with a thimble. I thought some one said, 'Betty always
likes to put her finger in everybody's pie, and now she has a fate
thimble to wear on it, she'll mix up things worse than ever.' And I
said, 'No, I'll be very conservative, and only make a diagram of the way
the animals should go into the ark, and then let them do as they please
about following my diagram.' So I began to draw with the thimble on my
finger, but instead of animals going into the ark they were people going
over Tanglewood stile into the churchyard, and then into the church--a
great procession of people in the funniest combinations. There was old
Doctor Shelby and the minister's great-aunt, Allison and Lieutenant
Stanley, Kitty and Doctor Bradford, Lloyd and Rob, and dozens and dozens
besides."
"Lloyd and Rob," echoed the Little Colonel, her face dimpling. "Think of
that, Bobby! You nevah in yoah wildest dreams thought of that
combination, now did you?"
"No, I never did," confessed Rob, with an amused smile. "Betty has just
put it into my head. She is like the old woman who told her children not
to put beans in their ears while she was gone. They never would have
dreamed of doing such a thing if she hadn't suggested it, but, of
course, they wanted to see how it would feel, and immediately proceeded
to fill their ears with beans as soon as her back was turned."
"You can profit by their example," laughed Lloyd. "They found that it
hurt. It would have been bettah if they had paid no attention to her
suggestion."
"Moral," added Rob, "don't do it. Betty, don't you dare put any more
dangerous notions in my head."
Phil's turn came next. "My dream is soon told," he said. "I had been
sleeping like the dead--a perfectly dreamless sleep--till Mary woke us
up with her cat-fight. That aroused me so thoroughly that I didn't go to
sleep again for more than an hour. Then when I did drop off at nearly
morning, I dreamed that there was a spider on my head, and I gave it a
tremendous whack to kill it. It was no dream whack, I can tell you, but
a real live double-fisted one, that made me see stars. It actually made
a dent in my cranium and got me so wide awake that I couldn't drop off
again. I got up and sat by the window till there were faint streaks of
light in the sky. I did the rest of my dreaming with my eyes open, so I
don't have to tell what it was about."
"I can guess," thought Mary, intercepting the swift glance he stole
across the table at something blue. This time it was the ribbon that
tied Lloyd's hair, a big bow of turquoise taffeta, knotted becomingly at
the back of her neck. Lloyd, unconscious of the glance, had turned to
speak to Miles Bradford, to answer his question about Sylvia Gibbs's
wedding.
"Yes, it really is to take place to-night in the colohed church. M'haley
was heah befoah we were awake, to get the dress and to repeat the
invitation for the whole family to attend. There are evah so many white
folks invited, M'haley says. All the Waltons and MacIntyres, of co'se,
because Miss Allison is their patron saint, and they swear by her, and
all the families for whom Sylvia has washed."
"It is extremely fortunate for those of us who are going away so soon
that she set the date as early as to-night," said Doctor Bradford.
"Twenty-four hours later would have cut us out."
Phil interrupted him. "Don't bring up such disagreeable topics at the
table, Bradford. It takes my appetite to think that we have only one
more day in the Valley--that it has come down to a matter of a few hours
before we must begin our farewells."
"Speaking of farewells," said Rob, "who-all's coming down to the station
with me to wave good-by to Miss Bonham? She goes back to Lexington this
morning."
"We'll all go," answered Lloyd, promptly. "Mothah will be glad to get us
out of the way while the servants give the place a grand 'aftah the
ball' cleaning, and Joyce wants to see the girls once moah befoah she
begins packing, to arrange several things about their journey."
"How does it happen that Logan and Stanley are not going with Miss
Bonham?" asked Rob. "Isn't their time up, too, or can't they tear
themselves away?"
"I thought you knew," answered Joyce. "Miss Allison arranged it all last
night. You know she goes up to Prout's Neck, in Maine, for awhile every
summer, and this year Allison and Kitty are going with her. She has
offered to take me under her wing all the way, and has arranged her
route to go right past the place where the summer art school is, on Cape
Cod coast. Lieutenant Logan and Lieutenant Stanley are staying over a
day longer than they had intended, in order to go part of the way with
us, and Phil and Doctor Bradford are leaving a day earlier to take
advantage of such good company all the way home. Won't it be
jolly,--eight of us! Kitty calls it a regular house-party on wheels."
"I certainly envy you," answered Rob. "Miss Allison is the best
chaperone that can be imagined, just like a girl herself; and Allison
and Kitty are as good as a circus any day. I'll wager it didn't take
much persuading to make Stanley stay over. He hasn't eyes for anything
or anybody but Allison."
"He had eyes for Bernice Howe the night of Katie Mallard's musicale,"
said Betty. "He scarcely left her."
"Do you know why?" asked Rob in an aside. They were rising from the
table now, strolling out to the chairs and hammocks on the shady porch.
He spoke in a low tone as he walked along beside her.
"It is very ungallant for me to say such a thing, but between you and me
and the gate-post, Betty, he was roped into being so attentive. Bernice
Howe beats any girl I ever saw for making dates with fellows, and
handling her cards so as to make it seem she is immensely popular. It is
an old trick of hers, and that night it was very apparent what she was
trying to do. Alex Shelby was there, you remember, and when she saw him
talking to Lloyd every chance he got, she didn't want it to appear that
she was being neglected by the man who had brought her, and with a
little skilful manoeuvring she managed to bag the lieutenant's
attention. I've been wanting to ask you for some time, why is it that
she seems so down on the Little Colonel?"
"She isn't!" declared Betty, much surprised. "You must be letting your
imagination run away with you, Rob. There isn't a girl in the Valley
friendlier and sweeter to Lloyd than Bernice Howe. You watch them next
time they are together, and see. They've been good friends for years."
"Then all I can say is that some girls have a queer idea of friendship.
It's downright _catty_ the way they purr and rub around to your face,
and then show their spiteful little claws when your back is turned.
That's what I've noticed Bernice doing lately. She calls her all the
sugary names in the dictionary when she's with her, but when her back is
turned--well, it's just a shrug of the shoulders or a lift of the
eyebrows or a little twist of the mouth maybe, but they insinuate
volumes. What makes girls do that way, Betty? Boys don't. If they have
any grievance they fight it out and then let each other alone."
"I'm sure I don't know why," answered Betty. "I'll be honest with you
and confess that you are right. Half the girls at school were that way.
They might be fair and high-minded about everything else, but when it
came to that one thing they were--well, as you say, regular cats. They
didn't have the faintest conception of what a David and Jonathan
friendship could be like. Even the ordinary kind didn't seem to bind
them in any way, or impose any obligation on them when their own
interests were concerned."
"Deliver me from such friends!" ejaculated Rob. "I'd rather have a sworn
enemy. He wouldn't do me half the harm." Then after a pause, "I suppose,
if you haven't noticed it, then Lloyd hasn't either, that Bernice is
bitterly jealous of her."
"No, I am sure she has not."
"Then I wish you'd drop her a hint. I couldn't mention the subject to
her, because it is an old fight of ours. You know how we've squabbled
for hours over it--the difference between the codes of honor in a girl's
friendships and boys'. No matter how carefully I made the distinction
that I meant the average girl, and not all of them, she always flared
into a temper, and in order to be loyal to her entire sex, took up arms
against me in a regular pitched battle. She's ordered me off the place
more than once, and yet in her soul I believe she agrees with me."
"But, Rob, if that is a pet theory of yours that you go around applying
in a wholesale way, isn't it barely possible that you've made a mistake
this time and imagined that Bernice is two-faced in her friendship?"
Rob shook his head. "She'll be at the station this morning. You can see
for yourself, if you keep your eyes open."
"Now, to be explicit, just what is it I shall see?" retorted Betty. But
Phil interrupted their tête-à-tête at that point, and when they started
to the station an hour later, her question was still unanswered. Bernice
Howe was there, as Rob had predicted, and Katie Mallard and several
other of the Valley girls who had enjoyed the hospitality of The Beeches
during Miss Bonham's visit.
"It looks quite like a garden-party," said Miles Bradford to Miss
Allison, watching the pretty girls, in their light summer costumes,
flutter around the waiting-room. "I don't know whether to compare them
to a flock of butterflies or a bouquet of sweet peas. I am glad we are
going to take some of them with us to-morrow, and wish--"
Betty, who had turned to listen, because his smiling glance seemed to
include her in the conversation, failed to hear what it was he wished.
Bernice Howe, who was standing with her back to her, took occasion just
then to draw Miss Bonham aside, and her voice, although pitched in a low
key, was unusually penetrating. At the same moment the entire party
shifted positions to make room for some new arrivals in the
waiting-room, and Betty was jostled so that she was obliged to dodge a
corpulent woman with a carpet-bag and a lunch-basket. When she recovered
her balance she found herself out of range of Doctor Bradford's voice,
but almost touching elbows with Bernice. She was saying:
"We're going to miss you dreadfully, Miss Bonham. I always do miss
Allison's guests and Kitty's nearly as much as my own. They're so dear
about sharing them with me. Now some girls are so stingy, they fairly
keep their visitors under lock and key--that is, if they are men. They
wouldn't dream of taking them to call on another girl. Afraid to, I
suppose. Afraid of losing their own laurels. There's one of the kind."
Betty saw her nod with a meaning smile toward Lloyd, and caught another
sentence or two in which the words, "Queen of Hearts, tied to her
apron-string," gave her the drift of the remarks.
"She's plainly trying to give Miss Bonham an unpleasant impression of
Lloyd to carry away with her," thought Betty. "She's hurt because she
wasn't invited to the coon hunt, and the other little affairs we had for
the bridal party. She never took it into consideration that what would
have been perfectly convenient at another time was out of the question
when the house was so full of guests and all torn up with preparations
for the wedding. Lloyd had all she could do then to think of the guests
in the house, without considering those outside. It certainly is a
flimsy sort of a friendship that can't overlook a seeming neglect like
that or make due allowances. Besides, if she feels slighted, why doesn't
she keep it to herself, and not try to get even by giving Miss Bonham a
false impression of her? Rob is right. Boys don't stoop to such mean
little things. In the first place they don't magnify trifles into big
grievances, and go around feeling slighted and hurt over nothing."
"Here comes the train!" called Ranald, seizing Miss Bonham's suit-case
and leading the way to the door. There was a moment of hurried
good-byes, a fluttering of handkerchiefs, a waving of hats. Then the
train passed on, leaving the group gazing after it.
"What are we going to do now?" asked Rob. "Will you all come over to the
store and have some peanuts?"
"No, you're all coming up home with me," said Lloyd, "Miss Allison and
everybody. I saw Alec carrying some watahmelons into the ice-house, and
they'll be good and cold by this time. We'll cut them out on the lawn."
Ranald excused himself, saying he had promised to take his Aunt Allison
to the dressmaker's in the pony-cart, but Allison and Kitty promptly
accepted the invitation for themselves and the two lieutenants. Katie
Mallard walked on with one and Joyce the other, Rob and Betty bringing
up the rear. Lloyd still waited.
"Come on, Bernice," she urged. "The watahmelons are mighty fine, and
we'd love to have you come."
"No, dearie," was the reply. "I've a lot of things to do to-day, but
I'll see you to-night at the darky wedding."
"I'm mighty sorry you can't come," called Lloyd, then hurried on to
catch up with the others. As she joined Rob and Betty she felt
intuitively they had changed their subject of conversation at her
approach. She had caught the question, "Then are you going to warn her?"
and Betty's reply, "What's the use? It would only make her feel bad."
"What's that about warnings?" asked Lloyd, catching Betty's hand and
swinging it as she walked along beside her.
"Something that Betty doesn't believe in," began Rob, "just as I don't
believe in dreams. Why wouldn't Bernice come with you?"
"She said she had so much to do. Mistah Shelby is coming out latah. He
is going to take her to Sylvia's wedding to-night."
"Speaking of warnings," burst out Rob, impulsively, "I'm going to give
you one, Lloyd, whether you like it or not. Don't be too smiling and
gracious when you meet Alex Shelby, or Bernice will be assaulting you
for poaching on her preserves. You must keep out of her bailiwick if you
want to keep her friendship. It's the kind that won't stand much of a
strain."
"What do you mean, Rob Moore?" demanded Lloyd, hesitating between a
laugh and the old feeling of anger that always flashed up when he
referred to girls' friendships in that superior tone.
"I am devoted to Bernice and she is to me. If you are trying to pick a
quarrel you may as well go along home, for I'm positively not going to
fuss with you about anything whatsoevah until aftah all the company is
gone."
"No'm! I don't want to quarrel," responded Rob, with exaggerated
meekness. "I was merely giving you a warning--sort of playing Banshee
for your benefit, but you don't seem to appreciate my efforts. Let's
talk about watermelons."
CHAPTER XIV.
A SECOND MAID OF HONOR
It was a new experience to Miles Bradford, this trudging through the
dense beech woods on a summer night behind a row of flickering lanterns.
The path they followed was a wide one, and well worn by the feet of
churchgoing negroes, for it was the shortest cut between the Valley and
Stumptown, a little group of cabins clustered around the colored church.
Ranald led the way with a brakeman's lantern, and Rob occasionally
illuminated the scene by electric flashes from the head of the
walking-stick he was flourishing. A varied string of fiery dragons,
winged fish, and heathen hobgoblins danced along beside them, for Kitty
was putting candles in a row of Japanese lanterns when they arrived at
The Beeches, and nearly everybody in the party accepted her invitation
to take one. Mary chose a sea-serpent with a grinning face, and Elise a
pretty oval one with birds and cherry blossoms on each side. Lloyd did
not take any. Her hands were already filled with a huge bouquet of red
roses.
"Sylvia asked me to carry these," she explained to Miles Bradford, "and
to weah a white dress and this hat with the red roses on it. Because I
was maid of honah at Eugenia's wedding she seems to think I can reflect
some sawt of glory on hers. She said she wanted all her young ladies to
weah white."
"Who are her young ladies, and why?" he asked.
"Allison, Kitty, Betty, and I. You see, Sylvia's grandfathah was the
MacIntyre's coachman befoah the wah, and her mothah is our old Aunt
Cindy. She considahs that she belongs to us and we belong to her."
Farther down the line they could hear Katie Mallard's cheerful giggle as
she tripped over a beech root, then Bernice Howe's laugh as they all
went slipping and sliding down a steep place in the path which led to
the hollow crossed by the dry creek bed.
"Sing!" called Miss Allison, who was chaperoning the party, and picking
her way behind the others with Mary and Elise each clinging to an arm.
"There's such a pretty echo down in this hollow. Listen!" The tune that
she started was one of the popular songs of the summer. It was caught up
by every one in the procession except Miles Bradford, and he kept silent
in order to enjoy this novel pilgrimage to the fullest. The dark woods
rang with the sweet chorus, and the long line of fantastic lanterns sent
weird shadows bobbing up in their wake.
The bare, unpainted little church had just been lighted when they
arrived, and a strong smell of coal-oil and smoking wicks greeted them.
"It's too bad we are so early," said Miss Allison. "Sylvia would have
preferred us to come in with grand effect at the last moment, but I'm
too tired to wait for the bridal party. Let's put our lanterns in the
vestibule and go in and find seats."
A pompous mulatto man in white cotton gloves and with a cluster of
tuberoses in his buttonhole ushered the party down the aisle to the
seats of honor reserved for the white folks. There were seventeen in the
party, too many to sit comfortably on the two benches, so a chair was
brought for Miss Allison. After the grown people were seated, each of
the little girls managed to squeeze in at the end of the seats nearest
the aisle. Lloyd found herself seated between Mary Ware and Alex
Shelby. Leaning forward to look along the bench, she found that Bernice
came next in order to Alex, then Lieutenant Stanley and Allison, Doctor
Bradford and Betty.
She had merely said good evening to Alex Shelby when they met at The
Beeches, and, although positions in the procession through the woods had
shifted constantly, it had happened she had not been near enough to talk
with him. Now, with only Mary Ware to claim her attention, they
naturally fell into conversation. It was only in whispers, for the
audience was assembling rapidly, and the usher had opened the organ in
token that the service was about to begin.
There had been an attempt to decorate for the occasion. Friends of the
bride had resurrected both the Christmas and Easter mottoes, so that the
wall behind the pulpit bore in tall, white cotton letters, on a
background of cedar, the words, "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men."
Fresh cedar had been substituted for the yellowed branches left over
from the previous Christmas, and fresh diamond dust sprinkled over the
grimy cotton to give it its pristine sparkle of Yule-tide frost.
"An appropriate motto for a wedding," whispered Alex Shelby to Lloyd.
Only his eyes laughed. His face was as solemn as the usher's own as he
turned to gaze at the word "Welcome" over the door, and the fringe of
paper Easter lilies draping the top of each uncurtained window.
Bernice claimed his attention several moments, then he turned to Lloyd
again. "Do tell me, Miss Lloyd," he begged, "what is that wonderfully
and fearfully made thing in the front of the pulpit? Is it a doorway or
a giant picture-frame? And what part is it to play in the ceremony?"
Lloyd's face dimpled, and an amused smile flashed up at him from the
corner of her eye. Then she lowered her long lashes demurely, and seemed
to be engrossed with her bunch of roses as she answered him.
"The coquettish thing!" thought Bernice, seeing the glance but not
hearing the whisper which followed it.
"Sh! Don't make me laugh! Everybody is watching to see if the white
folks are making fun of things, and I'm actually afraid to look up again
for feah I'll giggle. Maybe it's a copy of Eugenia's gate of roses. It
looks like the frame of a doahway. Just the casing, you know. Maybe it's
a doah of mawning-glories they're going to pass through. I recognize
those flowahs twined all around it. We made them a long time ago for the
lamp-shades when the King's Daughtahs had an oystah suppah at the manse.
I made all those purple mawning-glories and Betty made the yellow ones."
Glancing over his shoulder, he happened to spy a familiar face behind
him, the kindly old black face of his uncle's cook.
"Howdy, Aunt Jane!" he exclaimed, with a friendly smile. Then, in a
stage whisper, he asked, "Aunt Jane, can you tell me? Are those
morning-glories artificial?"
The old woman wrinkled her face into a knot as she peered in the
direction of the pulpit, toward which he nodded. One of the words in his
question puzzled her. It was a stranger to her. But, after an instant,
the wrinkles cleared and her face broadened into a smile.
"No'm, Mistah Alex. Them ain't artificial flowahs, honey. They's made of
papah."
Again an amused smile stole out of the corner of Lloyd's eye to answer
the gleam of mischief in Alex's. Not for anything would she have Aunt
Jane think that she was laughing, so her eyes were bent demurely on her
roses again. Again Bernice, leaning forward, intercepted the glance and
misinterpreted it. When Alex turned to her to repeat Aunt Jane's
explanation, she barely smiled, then relapsed into sulky silence.
Finding several other attempts at conversation received with only
monosyllables, he concluded that she was not in a mood to talk, and
naturally turned again to Lloyd.
He had not been out in the Valley for years, he told her. The last visit
he had made to his uncle, old Doctor Shelby, had been the summer that
the Shermans had come back to Lloydsboro from New York. He remembered
passing her one day on the road. She had squeezed through a hole in the
fence between two broken palings, and was trying to pull a little dog
through after her; a shaggy Scotch and Skye terrier.
"That was my deah old Fritz," she answered, "and I was probably running
away. I did it every chance I had."
"The next time I saw you," he continued, "I was driving along with
uncle. I was standing between his knees, I remember, proud as a peacock
because he was letting me hold the reins. I was just out of kilts, so it
was a great honor to be trusted with the lines. When we passed your
grandfather on his horse, he had you up in front of his saddle, and
uncle called out, 'Good morning, little Colonel.'"
These reminiscences pleased Lloyd. It flattered her to think he
remembered these early meetings so many years ago. His relationship to
the old doctor whom she loved as her own uncle put him on a very
friendly footing.
The church filled rapidly, and by the time the seats were crowded and
people were jostling each other to find standing-room around the door, a
young colored girl in a ruffled yellow dress seated herself at the
organ. First she pulled out all the stops, then adjusting a pair of
eyeglasses, opened a book of organ exercises. Then she felt her sash in
the back, settled her side-combs, and raising herself from the organ
bench, smoothed her skirts into proper folds under her. After these
preliminaries she leaned back, raised both hands with a grand flourish,
and swooped down on the keys.
"Bang on the low notes and twiddle on the high!" laughed Lloyd, under
her breath. "Listen, Mistah Shelby. She's playing the same chord in the
bass straight through."
"Is that what makes the fearsome discord?" he asked. "It makes me think
of an epitaph I once saw carved on a pretentious headstone in a little
village cemetery:
"'Here lies one
Who never let her left hand know
What her right hand done.'"
"Neithah of Laura's hands will evah find out what the othah one is
trying to do," whispered Lloyd. "She is supposed to be playing the
wedding-march. Hark! There is a familiah note: '_Heah comes the bride_.'
They must be at the doah. Well, I wish you'd look!"
Every head was turned, for the bridal party was advancing. Slowly down
the aisle came M'haley, in the pink chiffon gown from Paris. Mom Beck's
quick needle had altered it considerably, for in some unaccountable way
the slim bodice fashioned to fit Lloyd's slender figure, now fastened
around M'haley's waist without undue strain. The skirt, though turned
"hine side befo'," fell as skirts should fall, for the fulness had been
shifted to the proper places, and the broad sky-blue sash covered the
mended holes in the breadth Lloyd had torn on the stairs.
With her head high, and her armful of flowers held in precisely the same
position in which Lloyd had carried hers, she swept down the aisle in
such exact imitation of the other maid of honor, that every one who had
seen the first wedding was convulsed, and Kitty's whisper about "Lloyd's
understudy" was passed with stifled giggles from one to another down
both benches.
Ca'line Allison came next, in a white dress and the white slippers that
had been thrown after Eugenia's carriage with the rice.
She was flower girl, and carried an elaborate fancy basket filled with
field daisies. A wreath of the same snowy blossoms crowned her woolly
pate, and an expression of anxiety drew her little black face into a
distressed pucker. She had been told that at every third step she must
throw a handful of daisies in the path of the on-coming bride, and her
effort to keep count and at the same time keep her balance on the high
French heels was almost too much for her.
During her many rehearsals M'haley had counted her steps for her: "One,
two, three--_throw_! One, two, three--_throw_!" She had gone through her
part every time without mistake, for her feet were untrammelled then,
and her flat yellow soles struck the ground in safety and with rhythmic
precision. She could give her entire mind to the graceful scattering of
her posies. But now she walked as if she were mounted on stilts, and her
way led over thin ice. The knowledge that she must keep her own count
was disconcerting, for she could not "count in her haid," as M'haley had
ordered her to do. She was obliged to whisper the numbers loud enough
for herself to hear. So with her forehead drawn into an anxious pucker,
and her lips moving, she started down the aisle whispering, "One, two,
three--_throw_! One, two, three--_throw_!" Each time, as she reached the
word "throw" and grasped a handful of daisies to suit the action to the
word, she tilted forward on the high French heels and almost came to a
full stop in her effort to regain her balance.
But Ca'line Allison was a plucky little body, accustomed to walking the
tops of fences and cooning out on the limbs of high trees, so she
reached the altar without mishap. Then with a loud sigh of relief she
settled her crown of daisies and rolled her big eyes around to watch the
majestic approach of her mother.
No matron of the four hundred could have swept down the aisle with a
grander air than Sylvia. The handsome lavender satin skirt she wore had
once trailed its way through one of the most elegant receptions ever
given in New York, and afterward had graced several Louisville
functions. Its owner had given Sylvia the bodice also, but no amount of
stretching could make it meet around Sylvia's ample figure, so the
proceeds of the fish-fry and ice-cream festival had been invested in a
ready-made silk waist. It was not the same shade of lavender as the
skirt, but a gorgeous silver tissue belt blinded one to such
differences. The long kid gloves, almost dazzling in their whiteness,
were new, the fan borrowed, and the touch of something blue was
furnished by a broad back-comb of blue enamel surmounted by rhinestones.
One white glove rested airily on "Mistah Robinson's" coat-sleeve, the
other carried a half-furled fan edged with white feathers.
M'haley and Ca'line Allison waited at the altar, but the bridal couple,
turning to the right, circled around it and mounted the steps leading up
into the pulpit. The mystery of the wooden frame was explained now. It
was not a symbolical doorway through which they were to pass, but a huge
flower-draped picture-frame in which they took their places, facing the
congregation like two life-sized portraits in charcoal.
[Illustration: "'ONE, TWO, THREE--_THROW_!'"]
The minister, standing meekly below them between M'haley and Ca'line
Allison, with his back to the congregation, prefaced the ceremony by
a long and flowery discourse on matrimony, so that there was ample time
for the spectators to feast their eyes on every detail of the picture
before them. Except for a slight stir now and then as some neck was
craned in a different position for a better view, the silence was
profound, until the benediction was pronounced.
At the signal of a blast from the wheezy organ the couple, slowly
turning, descended the steps. Ca'line Allison, in her haste to reach the
aisle ahead of them to begin her posy-throwing again, nearly tilted
forward on her nose. But with a little crow-hop she righted herself and
began her spasmodic whispering, "One, two, three--_throw_!"
After the couple came M'haley and the pompous young minister. Then
Lloyd, who had caught the bride's smile of gratification as her eyes
rested on the white dress and red roses of this guest of honor, and who
read the appealing glance that seemed to beckon her, rose and stepped
into line. The rest of Sylvia's young ladies immediately followed, and
the congregation waited until all the rest of the white folks passed
out, before crowding to the carriage to congratulate "Brothah and Sistah
Robinson."
Lloyd went on to the carriage to speak to Sylvia and give her the
armful of roses to decorate the wedding-feast, before joining the
others, who were lighting the lanterns for their homeward walk.
"You'd better come in the light of ours, Miss Lloyd," said Alex Shelby,
coming up to her with Bernice beside him. "We might as well take the
lead. Ranald seems to be having trouble with his wick."
Lloyd hesitated, remembering Rob's warning, but glancing behind her, she
saw Phil hurrying toward her, and abruptly decided to accept his
invitation. She knew that Phil was trying to arrange to walk home with
her. This would be his last opportunity to walk with her, and while she
knew that he would respect her promise to her father enough not to
infringe on it by talking openly of his regard for her, his constant
hints and allusions would keep her uncomfortable. He seemed to take it
for granted that she was bound to come around to this point of view some
day, and regard him as the one the stars had destined for her.
So it was merely to escape a tête-à-tête with Phil which made her walk
along beside Alex, and put out a hand to draw Mary Ware to the other
side. She linked arms with her as they pushed through the crowd, and
started down the road four abreast. But the fences were lined with
buggies and wagons, and the scraping wheels and backing horses kept them
constantly separating and dodging back and forth across the road, more
often singly than in pairs.
By the time they reached the gap in the fence where the path through the
woods began, the others had caught up with them, and they all scrambled
through in a bunch. Lloyd looked around, and, with a sensation of
relief, saw that Kitty had Phil safely in tow. She would be free as far
as The Beeches, at any rate. At a call from Elise, Mary ran back to join
her. Positions were being constantly shifted on the homeward way, just
as they had been before, and, looking around, Lloyd decided that she
would slip back presently with some of the others, who would not think
that two is company and three a crowd, as Bernice might be doing. The
backward glance nearly caused her a fall, for a big root in the path
made her ankle turn, and Alex Shelby's quick grasp of her elbow was all
that saved her.
"It was my fault, Miss Lloyd," he insisted. "I should have held the
lantern differently. There, I'll go slightly ahead and light the path
better. Can you see all right, Bernice?"
"Yes," she answered, shortly, out of humor that he should be as careful
of Lloyd's comfort as her own. She trudged along, taking no part in the
conversation. It was a general one, extending all along the line, for
Rob at the tail and Ranald at the head shouted jokes and questions back
and forth like end-men at a minstrel show. Laughing allusions to the
maid of honor and Ca'line Allison were bandied back and forth, and when
the line grew unusually straggling, Kitty would bring them into step
with her, "One, two, three--_throw_!"
Neither Lloyd nor Alex noticed the determined silence in which Bernice
stalked along, and when she presently slipped back with the excuse that
she wanted to speak to Katie, they scarcely missed her. There was
nothing unusual in the action, as all the others were changing company
at intervals. At the entrance-gate to The Beeches she joined them again,
for her nearest road home led through the Walton place, and they were to
part company here with Lloyd and her guests.
For a few minutes there was a babel of good-nights and parting sallies,
in the midst of which Alex Shelby managed to say to Lloyd in a low tone,
"Miss Lloyd, I am coming out to the Valley again a week from to-day. If
you haven't any engagement for the afternoon will you go
horseback-riding with me?"
The consciousness that Bernice had heard the invitation and was
displeased, confused her so that for a moment she lost her usual ease of
manner. She wanted to go, and there was no reason why she should not
accept, but all she could manage to stammer was an embarrassed, "Why,
yes--I suppose so." But the next instant recovering herself, she added,
graciously, "Yes, Mistah Shelby, I'll be glad to go."
"Come on, Lloyd," urged Betty, swinging her hand to pull her into the
group now drawn up on the side of the road ready to start. They had made
their adieux.
"All right," she answered, locking arms with Betty. "Good night, Mistah
Shelby. Good night, Bernice."
He acknowledged her nod with a courteous lifting of his hat, and
repeated her salutation. But Bernice, standing stiff and angry in the
starlight, turned on her heel without a response.
"What on earth do you suppose is the mattah with Bernice?" exclaimed
Lloyd, in amazement, as they turned into the white road leading toward
home.
CHAPTER XV.
THE END OF THE HOUSE-PARTY
With the desire to make this last walk together as pleasant as possible,
Lloyd immediately put Bernice out of her mind as far as she was able.
But she could not rid herself entirely of the recollection that
something disagreeable had happened. The impression bore down on her
like a heavy cloud, and was a damper on her high spirits. Outwardly she
was as gay as ever, and when the walk was over, led the party on a
foraging expedition to the pantry.
Rob and Phil were almost uproarious in their merriment now, and, as they
devoured cold baked ham, pickles, cheese, beaten biscuit, and cake, they
had a fencing-match with carving-knives, and gave a ridiculous parody of
the balcony scene in "Romeo and Juliet." Mary, looking on with a
sandwich in each hand, almost choked with laughter, although she, too,
was borne down by the same feeling that depressed Lloyd, of something
very disagreeable having happened.
She had been so ruffled in spirit all the way home that she had lagged
behind the others, and it was only when Rob and Phil began their
irresistible foolishness that she had forgotten her grievance long
enough to laugh. No sooner had they all gone up-stairs, and she was
alone with Joyce, than her indignation waxed red-hot again, and she
sputtered out the whole story to her sister.
"And," she said, in conclusion, "that hateful Bernice Howe said the
meanest things to Katie. Elise and I were walking just behind, and we
couldn't help hearing. She said that Lloyd had deliberately set to work
to flirt with Mr. Shelby, and get him to pay her attention, and that, if
Katie would watch, she'd soon see how it would be. He'd be going to see
Lloyd all the time instead of her."
"Sh!" warned Joyce. "They'll hear you all over the house. Your voice is
getting higher and higher."
Her warning came too late. Already several sentences had penetrated into
the next room, and a quick knock at the door was followed by the
entrance of Lloyd, looking as red and excited as Mary.
"Tell me what it was, Mary," she demanded. "What made Bernice act so? I
was sure you knew from the way you looked when you joined us."
Mary was almost in tears as she repeated what she had told Joyce, for
she could see that the Little Colonel's temper was rising to white heat.
"And Bernice said it wasn't the first time you had treated her so. She
said that Malcolm MacIntyre was so attentive to her last summer while
you were away at the Springs; that he sent her flowers and candy and
took her driving, and was like her very shadow until you came home. Then
he dropped her like a hot potato, and you monopolized him so that you
succeeded in keeping him away from her altogether."
"Malcolm!" gasped Lloyd. "Malcolm was my especial friend long befoah I
evah heard of Bernice Howe! Why, at the very first Valentine pahty I
evah went to, he gave me the little silvah arrow he won in the archery
contest, for me to remembah him by. I've got it on this very minute."
She put her hand up to the little silver pin that fastened the lace of
her surplice collar. "Malcolm _always has_ called himself my devoted
knight, and he--"
She paused. There were some things she could not repeat; that scene on
the churchyard stile the winter day they went for Christmas greens, when
he had begged her for a talisman, and his low-spoken reply, "I'll be
whatever you want me to be, Lloyd." There were other times, too, of
which she could not speak. The night of the tableaux was the last one,
when she had strolled down the moonlighted paths with him at The
Beeches, and he had insisted that it was the "glad morrow" by his
calendar, and time for her Sir Feal to tell her many things, especially
as he was going away for the rest of the summer on a long yachting trip,
and somebody else might tell her the same things in his absence. So many
years she had taken his devotion as a matter of course, that it provoked
her beyond measure to have Bernice insinuate that she had angled for it.
Lloyd knew girls who did such things; who delighted in proving that they
had a superior power of attraction, and who would not scruple to use all
sorts of mean little underhand ways to lessen a man's admiration for
some other girl, and appropriate it for themselves. She had even heard
some of the girls at school boast of such things.
"For pity's sake, Lloyd!" one of them had said, "don't look at me that
way. 'All's fair in love and war,' and a girl's title to popularity is
based on the number of scalp-locks she takes."
Lloyd had despised her for that speech, and now to have Bernice openly
say that she was capable of such an action was more than she could
endure calmly. She set her teeth together hard, and gripped the little
fan she still happened to be carrying, as if it were some live thing she
was trying to strangle.
"And she said," Mary added, slowly, reluctant to add fuel to the flame,
yet unable to withstand the impelling force of Lloyd's eyes, which
demanded the whole truth, "she said that she had been sure for some time
that Mr. Shelby was just on the verge of proposing to her, and that, if
you succeeded in playing the same game with him that you did with
Malcolm, she'd get even with you if it took her till her dying day.
Then, right on top of that, you know, she heard him ask if you'd go
horseback riding with him. So that's why she was so angry she wouldn't
bid you good night."
Lloyd's clenched hand tightened its grasp on the fan till the delicate
sticks crunched against each other. She was breathing so hard that the
little arrow on her dress rose and fell rapidly. The silence was so
intense that Mary was frightened. She did not know what kind of an
outburst to expect. All of a sudden, taking the fan in both hands, Lloyd
snapped it in two, and then breaking the pieces into a hundred
splinters, threw them across the room into the open fireplace. She stood
with her back to the girls a moment, then, to Mary's unspeakable
astonishment, forced herself to speak as calmly as if nothing had
happened, asking Joyce some commonplace question about her packing.
There was a book she wanted her to slip into her trunk to read at the
seashore. She was afraid it would be forgotten if left till next day, so
she went to her room to get it.
As the door closed behind her, Mary turned to Joyce in amazement. "I
don't see how it was possible for her to get over her temper so
quickly," she exclaimed. "The change almost took my breath."
"She isn't over it," answered Joyce. "She simply got it under control,
and it will smoulder a long time before it's finally burnt out. She's
dreadfully hurt, for she and Bernice have been friends so long that she
is really fond of her. Nothing hurts like being misunderstood and
misconstrued in that way. It is the last thing in the world that _Lloyd_
would do--suspect a friend of mean motives. From what I've seen of
Bernice, she is an uncomfortable sort of a friend to have; one of the
sensitive, suspicious kind that's always going around with her feelings
stuck out for somebody to tread on. She's always looking for slights,
and when she doesn't get real ones, she imagines them, which is just as
bad."
If Lloyd's anger burned next morning, there was no trace of it either in
face or manner, and she made that last day one long to be remembered by
her departing guests.
"How lonesome it's going to be aftah you all leave," she said to Joyce.
"The rest of the summah will be a stupid anticlimax. The house-pahty and
the wedding should have come at the last end of vacation instead of the
first, then we would have had something to look forward to all summah,
and could have plunged into school directly aftah it."
"This July and August will be the quietest we have ever known at The
Locusts," chimed in Betty. "Allison and Kitty leave to-night with you
all, Malcolm and Keith are already gone, and Rob will be here only a few
days longer. That's the last straw, to have Rob go."
"What's that about yours truly?" asked Rob, coming out of the house and
beginning to fan himself with his hat as he dropped down on the porch
step.
"I was just saying that we shall miss you so much this summer. That
you're always our stand-by. It's Rob who gets up the rides and picnics,
and comes over and stirs us out of our laziness by making us go fishing
and walking and tennis-playing. I'm afraid we'll simply go into our
shells and stay there after you go."
"Ah, ha! You do me proud," he answered, with a mocking sweep of his hat.
"'Tis sweet to be valued at one's true worth. Don't think for a moment
that I would leave you to pine on the stem if I could have my own way.
But I'm my mother's angel baby-boy. She and daddy think that
grandfather's health demands a change of air, and they are loath to
leave me behind. So, unwilling to deprive them of the apple of their
several eyes, I have generously consented to accompany them. But you
needn't pine for company," he added, with a mischievous glance at Lloyd.
"Alex Shelby expects to spend most of the summer with the old doctor,
and he'll be a brother to you all, if you'll allow it."
Lloyd made no answer, so he proceeded to make several more teasing
remarks about Alex, not knowing what had taken place before. He even
ventured to repeat the warning about her keeping within her own
bailiwick, as Bernice's friendship was not the kind that could stand
much strain.
To his surprise Lloyd made no answer, but, setting her lips together
angrily, rose and went into the house, her head high and her cheeks
flushed.
"Whew!" he exclaimed, with a soft whistle. "What hornet's nest have I
stirred up now?"
Joyce and Betty exchanged glances, each waiting for the other to make
the explanation. Then Joyce asked: "Didn't you see the way Bernice
snubbed her last night at the gate, when we left The Beeches?"
"Nary a snub did I see. It must have happened when I was groping around
in the path for something that I had flipped out of my pocket with my
handkerchief. It rang on the ground like a piece of money, and I feared
me I had lost one of me ducats. What did she do?"
"I can't tell you now," said Joyce, hurriedly, lowering her voice. "Here
come Phil and Doctor Bradford."
"No matter," he answered, airily. "I have no curiosity whatsoever. It's
a trait of character entirely lacking in my make-up." Then he motioned
toward Mary, who was sitting in a hammock, cutting the pages of a new
magazine. "Does _she_ know?"
Joyce nodded, and feeling that they meant her, Mary looked up
inquiringly. Rob beckoned to her ingratiatingly.
"Come into the garden, Maud," he said in a low tone. "I would have
speech with thee."
Laughing at his foolishness, but in a flutter of pleasure, Mary sprang
up to follow him to the rustic seat midway down the avenue. As Joyce's
parting glance had not forbidden it, she was soon answering his
questions to the best of her ability.
"You see," he explained, "it's not out of curiosity that I ask all this.
It's simply as a means of precaution. I can't keep myself out of hot
water unless I know how the land lies."
That last day of the house-party seemed the shortest of all. Betty and
Miles Bradford strolled over to Tanglewood and sat for more than an hour
on the shady stile leading into the churchyard. Lloyd and Phil went for
a last horseback ride, and Mary, watching them canter off together down
the avenue, wondered curiously if he would have anything more to say
about the bit of turquoise and all it stood for.
As she followed Joyce up-stairs to help her pack her trunk, a little
wave of homesickness swept over her. Not that she wanted to go back to
the Wigwam, but to have Joyce go away without her was like parting with
the last anchor which held her to her family. It gave her a lonely
set-adrift feeling to be left behind. She took her sister's parting
injunctions and advice with a meekness that verged so nearly on tears
that Joyce hastened to change the subject.
"Think of all the things I'll have to tell you about when I get back
from the seashore. Only two short months,--just eight little weeks,--but
I'm going to crowd them so full of glorious hard work that I'll
accomplish wonders. There'll be no end of good times, too: clambakes and
fishing and bathing to fill up the chinks in the days, and the
story-telling in the evenings around the driftwood fires. It will be
over before we know it, and I'll be back here ready to take you home
before you have time to really miss me."
Cheered by Joyce's view of the subject, Mary turned her back a moment
till she had winked away the tears that had begun to gather, then
straightway started out to make the most of the eight little weeks left
to her at The Locusts. When she went with the others to the station "to
give the house-party on wheels a grand send-off," as Kitty expressed it,
her bright little face was so happy that it brought a smiling response
from every departing guest.
"Good-by, Miss Mary," Miles Bradford said, cordially, coming up to her
in the waiting-room. "The Pilgrim Father has much to thank you for. You
have helped him to store up some very pleasant memories of this happy
Valley."
"Good-by, little Vicar," said Phil next, seizing both her hands. "Think
of the Best Man whenever you look at the Philip on your shilling, and
think of his parting words. _Do_ profit by that dreadful dream, and
don't take any rash steps that would lead to another cat-fight. We'll
take care of your sister," he added, as Mary turned to Joyce and threw
her arms around her neck for one last kiss.
"Lieutenant Logan will watch out for her as far as he goes, and I'll
keep my eagle eye on her the rest of the way."
"Who'll keep an eagle eye on you?" retorted Mary, following them out to
the platform.
He made a laughing grimace over his shoulder, as he turned to help Joyce
up the steps.
"What a good time they are going to have together," thought Mary,
watching the group as they stood on the rear platform of the last car,
waving good-by. "And what a different parting this is from that other
one on the desert when he went away with such a sorry look in his eyes."
He was facing the future eagerly this time, strong in hope and purpose,
and she answered the last wave of his hat with a flap of her
handkerchief, which seemed to carry with it all the loyal good wishes
that shone in her beaming little face.
Miles Bradford had made a hurried trip to the city that morning, to
attend to a matter of business, going in on the ten o'clock trolley and
coming back in time for lunch. On his return, he laid a package in
Mary's lap, and handed one to each of the other girls. Joyce's was a
pile of new July magazines to read on the train. Lloyd's was a copy of
"Abdallah, or the Four-leaved Shamrock," which had led to so much
discussion the morning of the wedding, when they hunted clovers for the
dream-cake boxes.
Mary's eyes grew round with surprise and delight when she opened her
package and found inside the white paper and gilt cord a big box of
Huyler's candies. "With the compliments of the Pilgrim Father," was
pencilled on the engraved card stuck under the string.
There was layer after layer of chocolate creams and caramels,
marshmallows and candied violets, burnt almonds and nougat, besides a
score of other things--specimens of the confectioner's art for which she
knew no name. She had seen the outside of such boxes in the show-cases
in Phoenix, but never before had such a tempting display met her eyes
as these delicious sweets in their trimmings of lace paper and tinfoil
and ribbons, crowned by a pair of little gilt tongs, with which one
might make dainty choice.
Betty's gift was not so sightly. It looked like an old dried sponge, for
it was only a ball of matted roots. But she held it up with an
exclamation of pleasure. "Oh, it is one of those fern-balls we were
talking about this morning! I've been wanting one all year. You see,"
she explained to Mary, when she had finished thanking Doctor Bradford,
"you hang it up in a window and keep it wet, and it turns into a perfect
little hanging garden, so fine and green and feathery it's fit for
fairy-land. It will grow as long as you remember to water it. Gay
Melville had one last year in her window at school, and I envied her
every time I saw it."
"Now what does that make me think of?" said Mary, screwing up her
forehead into a network of wrinkles and squinting her eyes half-shut in
her effort to remember. "Oh, I know! It's something I read in a paper a
few days ago. It's in China or Japan, I don't know which, but in one of
those heathen countries. When a young man wants to find out if a girl
really likes him, he goes to her house early in the dawn, and leaves a
growing plant on the balcony for her. If she spurns him, she tears it up
by the roots and throws it out in the street to wither, and I believe
breaks the pot; but if she likes him, she takes it in and keeps it
green, to show that he lives in her memory."
A shout of laughter from Rob and Phil had made her turn to stare at them
uneasily. "What are you laughing at?" she asked, innocently. "I _did_
read it. I can show you the paper it is in, and I thought it was a right
bright way for a person to find out what he wanted to know without
asking."
It was very evident that she hadn't the remotest idea she had said
anything personal, and her ignorance of the cause of their mirth made
her speech all the funnier. Doctor Bradford laughed, too, as he said
with a formal bow: "I hope you will take the suggestion to heart, Miss
Betty, and let my memory and the fern-ball grow green together."
Then, Mary, realizing what she had said when it was too late to unsay
it, clapped her hands over her mouth and groaned. Apologies could only
make the matter worse, so she tried to hide her confusion by passing
around the box of candy. It passed around so many times during the
course of the afternoon that the box was almost empty by train-time.
Mary returned to it with unabated interest after the guests were gone.
It was the first box of candy she had ever owned, and she wondered if
she would ever have another.
"I believe I'll save it for a keepsake box," she thought, gathering it
up in her arms to follow Betty up-stairs. Rob had come back with them
from the station, and, taking the story of "Abdallah," he and Lloyd had
gone to the library to read it together.
Betty was going to her room to put the fern-ball to soak, according to
directions. Feeling just a trifle lonely since her parting from Joyce,
Mary wandered off to the room that seemed to miss her, too, now that
all her personal belongings had disappeared from wardrobe and
dressing-table. But she was soon absorbed in arranging her keepsake box.
Emptying the few remaining scraps of candy into a paper bag, she
smoothed out the lace paper, the ribbons, and the tinfoil to save to
show to Hazel Lee. These she put in her trunk, but the gilt tongs seemed
worthy of a place in the box. The Pilgrim Father's card was dropped in
beside it, then the heart-shaped dream-cake box, holding one of the
white icing roses that had ornamented the bride's cake. Last and most
precious was the silver shilling, which she polished carefully with her
chamois-skin pen-wiper before putting away.
"I don't need to look at _you_ to make me think of the Best Man," she
said to the Philip on the coin. "There's more things than you that
remind me of him. I certainly would like to know what sort of a fate you
are going to bring me. There's about as much chance of my being an
heiress as there is of that nightmare coming true."
CHAPTER XVI.
THE GOLDEN LEAF OF HONOR
It was a compliment that changed the entire course of Mary's summer; a
compliment which Betty gleefully repeated to her, imitating the old
Colonel's very tone, as he gesticulated emphatically to Mr. Sherman:
"I tell you, Jack, she's the most remarkable child of her age I ever
met. It is wonderful the information she has managed to pick up in that
God-forsaken desert country. I say to you, sir, she can tell you as much
now about scientific bee-culture as any naturalist you ever knew.
Actually quoted Huber to me the other day, and Maeterlinck's 'Life of
the Bee!' Think of a fourteen-year-old girl quoting Maeterlinck! With
the proper direction in her reading, she need never see the inside of a
college, for her gift of observation amounts to a talent, and she has it
in her to make herself not only an honor to her sex, but one of the most
interesting women of her generation."
Mary looked up in blank amazement when Betty danced into the library,
hat in hand, and repeated what the old Colonel had just said in her
hearing. Compliments were rare in Mary's experience, and this one,
coming from the scholarly old gentleman of whom she stood in awe,
agitated her so much that three successive times she ran her needle into
her finger, instead of through the bead she was trying to impale on its
point. The last time it pricked so sharply that she gave a nervous jerk
and upset the entire box of beads on the floor.
"See how stuck-up that made me," she said, with an embarrassed laugh,
shaking a tiny drop of blood from her finger before dropping on her
knees to grope for the beads, which were rolling all over the polished
floor. "It's so seldom I hear a compliment that I haven't learned to
take them gracefully."
"Godmother is waiting in the carriage for me," said Betty, pinning on
her hat as she spoke, "or I'd help you pick them up. I just hurried in
to tell you while it was fresh in my mind, and I could remember the
exact words. I had no idea it would upset you so," she added,
mischievously.
Left to herself, Mary soon gathered the beads back into the box and
resumed her task. She was making a pair of moccasins for Girlie
Dinsmore's doll. Her conscience still troubled her for playing stork,
and she had resolved to spend some of her abundant leisure in making
amends in this way. But only her fingers took up the same work that had
occupied her before Betty's interruption. Her thoughts started off in an
entirely different direction.
A most romantic little day-dream had been keeping pace with her
bead-stringing. A day-dream through which walked a prince with eyes like
Rob's and a voice like Phil's, and the wealth of a Croesus in his
pockets. And he wrote sonnets to her and called her his ladye fair, and
gave her not only one turquoise, but a bracelet-ful.
Now every vestige of sentiment was gone, and she was sitting up straight
and eager, repeating the old Colonel's words. They were making her
unspeakably happy. "She has it in her to make herself not only an honor
to her sex, but one of the most interesting women of her generation."
"To make herself an honor,"--why, that would be winning the third leaf
of the magic shamrock--the _golden_ one! Betty had said that she
believed that every one who earned those first three leaves was sure to
find the fourth one waiting somewhere in the world. It wouldn't make
any difference then whether she was an old maid or not. She need not be
dependent on any prince to bring her the diamond leaf, and that was a
good thing, for down in her heart she had her doubts about one ever
coming to her. She loved to make up foolish little day-dreams about
them, but it would be too late for him to come when she was a
grandmother, and she wouldn't be beautiful till then, so she really had
no reason to expect one. It would be much safer for her to depend on
herself, and earn the first three in plain, practical ways.
"To make herself an honor." The words repeated themselves again and
again, as she rapidly outlined an arrow-head on the tiny moccasin in
amber and blue. Suddenly she threw down the needle and the bit of kid
and sprang to her feet. "_I'll do it!_" she said aloud.
As she took a step forward, all a-tingle with a new ambition and a firm
resolve, she came face to face with her reflection in one of the
polished glass doors of the bookcase. The intent eagerness of its gaze
seemed to challenge her. She lifted her head as if the victory were
already won, and confronted the reflection squarely. "I'll do it!" she
said, solemnly to the resolute eyes in the glass door. "You see if I
don't!"
Only that morning she had given a complacent glance to the long shelves
of fiction, with which she expected to while away the rest of the
summer. There would be other pleasant things, she knew, drives with Mrs.
Sherman, long tramps with the girls, and many good times with Elise
Walton; but there would still be left hours and hours for her to spend
in the library, going from one to another of the famous novelists, like
a bee in a flower garden.
"With the proper direction in her reading," the old Colonel had said,
and Mary knew without telling that she would not find the proper
beginning among the books of fiction. Instinctively she felt she must
turn to the volumes telling of real people and real achievements.
Biographies, journals, lives, and letters of women who had been, as the
Colonel said, an honor to their sex and the most interesting of their
generation. She wished that she dared ask him to choose the first book
for her, but she hadn't the courage to venture that far. So she chose at
random.
"Lives of Famous Women" was the volume that happened to attract her
first, a collection of short sketches. She took it from the shelf and
glanced through it, scanning a page here and there, for she was a rapid
reader. Then, finding that it bade fair to be entertaining, down she
dropped on the rug, and began at the preface. Lunch stopped her for
awhile, but, thoroughly interested, she carried the book up to her room
and immediately began to read again.
When she went down to the porch before dinner that evening, she did not
say to herself in so many words that maybe the Colonel would notice what
she was reading, but it was with the hope that he would that she carried
the book with her. He did notice, and commended her for it, but threw
her into a flutter of confusion by asking her what similarity she had
noticed in the lives of those women she was reading about.
It mortified her to be obliged to confess that she had not discovered
any, and she thought, as she nervously fingered the pages and looked
down at her toes, "That's what I got for trying to appear smarter than I
really am."
"This is what I meant," he began, in his didactic way. "Each of them
made a specialty of some one thing, and devoted all her energies to
accomplishing that purpose, whether it was the establishing of a salon,
the discovery of a star, or the founding of a college. They hit the
bull's-eye, because they aimed at no other spot on the target. I have no
patience with this modern way of a girl's taking up a dozen fads at a
time. It makes her a jack-at-all-trades and a master of none."
The Colonel was growing eloquent on one of his favorite topics now, and
presently Mary found him giving her the very guidance she had longed
for. He was helping her to a choice. By the time dinner was announced,
he had awakened two ambitions within her, although he was not conscious
of the fact himself. One was to study the strange insect life of the
desert, in which she was already deeply interested, to unlock its
treasures, unearth its secrets, and add to the knowledge the world had
already amassed, until she should become a recognized authority on the
subject. The other was to prove by her own achievements the truth of
something which the Colonel quoted from Emerson. It flattered her that
he should quote Emerson to her, a mere child, as if she were one of his
peers, and she wished that Joyce could have been there to hear it.
This was the sentence: "_If a man can write a better book, preach a
better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, though he
build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten track to his
door_."
Mary did not yet know whether the desert would yield her the material
for a book or a mouse-trap, but she determined that no matter what she
undertook, she would force the world to "make a beaten track to her
door." The first step was to find out how much had already been
discovered by the great naturalists who had gone before her, in order
that she might take a step beyond them. With that in view, she plunged
into the course of study that the Colonel outlined for her with the same
energy and dogged determination which made her a successful killer of
snakes.
Lloyd came upon her the third morning after the breaking up of the
house-party, sitting in the middle of the library floor, surrounded by
encyclopædias and natural histories. She was verifying in the books all
that she had learned by herself in the desert of the habits of trap-door
spiders, and she was so absorbed in her task that she did not look up.
Lloyd slipped out of the room without disturbing her, wishing she could
plunge into some study as absorbing,--something that would take her
mind from the thoughts which had nagged her like a persistent mosquito
for the last few days. She knew that she had done nothing to give
Bernice just cause for taking offence, and it hurt her to be
misunderstood.
"If it were anything else," she mused, as she strolled up and down under
the locusts, "I could go to her and explain. But explanation is
impossible in a case of this kind. It would sound too conceited for
anything for me to tell her what I know to be the truth about Malcolm's
attentions to her, and as for the othah--" she shrugged her shoulders.
"It would be hopeless to try that. Oh, if I could only talk it ovah with
mothah or Papa Jack!" she sighed.
But they had gone away immediately after the house-party, for a week's
outing in the Tennessee mountains. She could have gone to her
grandfather for advice on most questions, but this was too intangible
for her to explain to him. Betty, too, was as much puzzled as herself.
"I declare," she said, when appealed to, "I don't know what to tell you,
Lloyd. It's going to be such a dull summer with everybody gone, and Alex
Shelby is so nice in every way, it does seem unfair for you to have to
put such a desirable companionship from you just on account of another
girl's jealousy. On the other hand, Bernice is an old playmate, and you
can't very well ignore the claims of such a long-time friendship. She
has misjudged and misrepresented you, and the opportunity is yours, if
you will take it, to show her how mistaken she is in your character."
Now, as Lloyd reached the end of the avenue and stopped in front of the
gate, her face brightened. Katie Mallard was hurrying down the railroad
track, waving her parasol to attract her attention.
"I can't come in," she called, as she came within speaking distance.
"I'm out delivering the most informal of invitations to the most
informal of garden-parties to-morrow afternoon. I want you and Betty to
help receive."
"Who else is going to help?" asked Lloyd, when she had cordially
accepted the invitation for herself and Betty.
"Nobody. I had intended to have Bernice Howe, and went up there awhile
ago to ask her. She said maybe she'd come, but she certainly wouldn't
help receive if you were going to. She's dreadfully down on you, Lloyd."
"Yes, I know it. I've heard some of the catty things she said about my
breaking up the friendship between her and Malcolm. It's simply absurd,
and it makes me so boiling mad every time I think about it that I feel
like a smouldering volcano. There aren't any words strong enough to
relieve my mind. I'd like to thundah and lighten at her."
"Yes, it is absurd," agreed Katie. "I told her so too. I told her that
Malcolm always had thought more of you than any girl in the Valley, and
always would. And she said, well, you had no 'auld lang syne' claim on
Alex, and that if he once got started to going to Locust you'd soon have
him under your thumb as you do every one else, and that would be the end
of the affair for her."
"As if I were an old spidah, weaving webs for everybody that comes
along!" cried Lloyd, indignantly. "She's no right to talk that way."
"I think it's because she really cares so much, and not that she does it
to be spiteful," said Katie. "She hasn't a bit of pride about hiding her
feeling for him. She openly cried about it while she was talking to me."
"What do you think I ought to do?" asked Lloyd, with a troubled face. "I
like Mistah Shelby evah so much, and I'd like to be nice to him for the
old doctah's sake if for no othah reason, for I'm devoted to _him_. And
I really would enjoy seeing him often, especially now when everybody
else is gone or going for the rest of the summah. Besides, he'd think it
mighty queah for me to write to him not to come next Thursday. But I'd
hate to really interfere with Bernice's happiness, if it has grown to be
such a serious affair with her that she can cry about it. I'd hate to
have her going through the rest of her life thinking that I had
deliberately wronged her, and if she's breaking her heart ovah it"--she
stopped abruptly.
"Oh, I don't see that you have any call to do the grand renouncing act!"
exclaimed Katie. "Why should you cut yourself off from a good time and a
good friend by snubbing him? It will put you in a very unpleasant light,
for you couldn't explain without making Bernice appear a perfect ninny.
And if you don't explain, what will he think of you? Let me tell you, it
is more than she would do for you if you were in her place. Somehow,
with us girls, life seems like a game of 'Hold fast all I give you.'
What falls into your hands is yours by right of the game, and you've no
call to hand it over to the next girl because she whimpers that she
wants to be 'it.' Don't you worry. Go on and have a good time."
With that parting advice Katie hurried away, and Lloyd was left to pace
up and down the avenue more undecided than before. It was late in the
afternoon of the next day when she finally found the answer to her
question. She had been wandering around the drawing-room, glancing into
a book here, rearranging a vase of flowers there, turning over the pile
of music on the piano, striking aimless chords on the harp-strings.
Presently she paused in front of the mantel to lift the lid from the
rose-jar and let its prisoned sweetness escape into the room. As she did
so she glanced up into the eyes of the portrait above her. With a
whimsical smile she thought of the times before when she had come to it
for counsel, and the question half-formed itself on her lips: "What
would _you_ do, you beautiful Grandmother Amanthis?"
Instantly there came into her mind the memory of a winter day when she
had stood there in the firelight before it, stirred to the depths by the
music this one of "the choir invisible" had made of her life, by her
purpose to "ease the burden of the world"--"to live in scorn of
miserable aims that end with self."
Now like an audible reply to her question the eyes of the portrait
seemed to repeat that last sentence to her: "_To live in scorn of
miserable aims that end with self!_"
For a moment she stood irresolute, then dropping the lid on the rose-jar
again, she crossed over into the next room and sat down beside the
library table. It was no easy task to write the note she had decided to
send. Five different times she got half-way through, tore the page in
two and tossed it into the waste-basket. Each attempt seemed so stiff
and formal that she was disgusted with it. Nearly an hour passed in the
effort. She could not write the real reason for breaking her engagement
for the ride, and she could not express too much regret, or he would
make other occasions she would have to refuse, if she followed out the
course she had decided upon, to give Bernice no further occasion for
jealousy. It was the most difficult piece of composition she had ever
attempted, and she was far from pleased with the stiff little note which
she finally slipped into its envelope.
"It will have to do," she sighed, wearily, "but I know he will think I
am snippy and rude, and I can't beah for him to have that opinion of
me."
In the very act of sealing the envelope she hesitated again with Katie's
words repeating themselves in her ears: "It's more than she would do
for you, if you were in her place."
While she hesitated there came a familiar whistle from somewhere in the
back of the house. She gave the old call in answer, and the next moment
Rob came through the dining-room into the hall, and paused in the
library door.
"I've made my farewells to the rest of the family," he announced,
abruptly. "I met Betty and Mary down in the orchard as I cut across lots
from home. Now I've got about five minutes to devote to the last sad
rites with you."
"Yes, we're going on the next train," he answered, when her amazed
question stopped him. "The family sprung the surprise on me just a
little while ago. It seems the doctor thought grandfather ought to go at
once, so they've hurried up arrangements, and we'll be off in a few
hours, two days ahead of the date they first set."
Startled by the abruptness of his announcement, Lloyd almost dropped the
hot sealing-wax on her fingers instead of the envelope. His haste seemed
to communicate itself to her, for, springing up, she stood with one hand
pressing her little signet ring into the wax, while the other reached
for the stamp-box.
"I'll be through in half a second," she said. "This lettah should have
gone off yestahday. If you will post it on the train for me it will save
time and get there soonah."
"All right," he answered. "Come on and walk down to the gate with me,
and we'll stop at the measuring-tree. We can't let the old custom go by
when we've kept it up so many years, and I won't be back again this
vacation."
Swinging the letter back and forth to make sure that the ink was dry,
she walked along beside him. "Oh, I wish you weren't going away!" she
exclaimed, forlornly. "It's going to be dreadfully stupid the rest of
the summah."
They reached the measuring-tree, and taking out his knife and
pocket-rule, Rob passed his fingers over the notches which stood for the
many years they had measured their heights against the old locust. Then
he held out the rule and waited for her to take her place under it, with
her back against the tree.
"What a long way you've stretched up between six and seventeen," he
said. "This'll be about the last time we'll need to go through this
ceremony, for I've reached my top notch, and probably you have too."
"Wait!" she exclaimed, stooping to pick something out of the grass at
her feet. "Heah's anothah foah-leaved clovah. I find one neahly every
time I come down this side of the avenue. I'm making a collection of
them. When I get enough, maybe I'll make a photograph-frame of them."
"Then you ought to put your own picture in it, for you're certainly the
luckiest person for finding them I ever heard of. I'm going to carve one
on the tree, here by this last notch under the date. It will be quite
neat and symbolical, don't you think? A sort of 'when this you see
remember me' hieroglyphic. It will remind you of the long discussions
we've had on the subject since we read 'Abdallah' together."
He dug away in silence for a moment, then said, "It's queer how you
happened to find that just now, for last night I came across a verse
about one, that made me think of you, and I learned it on purpose to say
to you--sort of a farewell wish, you know."
"Spouting poetry is a new accomplishment for you, Bobby," said Lloyd,
teasingly. "I certainly want to hear it. Go on."
She looked down to thrust the stem of the clover through the silver
arrow that fastened her belt, and waited with an expectant smile to
hear what Limerick or nonsense jingle he had found that made him think
of her. It was neither. With eyes fixed on the little symbol he was
outlining on the bark of the tree, he recited as if he were reading the
words from it:
"Love, be true to her;
Life, be dear to her;
Health, stay close to her;
Joy, draw near to her;
Fortune, find what your gifts
Can do for her.
Search your treasure-house
Through and through for her.
Follow her steps
The wide world over;
You must! for here is
The four-leaved clover."
"Why, Rob, that is _lovely_!" she exclaimed, looking up at him,
surprised and pleased. "I'm glad you put that clovah on the tree, for
every time I look at it, it will remind me of yoah wish, and--"
The letter she had been carrying fluttered to the ground. He stooped to
pick it up and return it to her.
"That's the lettah you are to mail for me," she said, giving it back to
him. "Don't forget it, for it's impawtant."
The address was uppermost, in her clear, plain hand, and she held it
toward him, so that he saw she intended him to read it.
"Hm! Writing to Alex Shelby, are you?" he said, with his usual brotherly
frankness, and a sniff that plainly showed his disapproval.
"It's just a note to tell him that I can't ride with him Thursday," she
answered, turning away.
"Did you tell him the reason?" he demanded, continuing to dig into the
tree.
"Of co'se not! How could I without making Bernice appeah ridiculous?"
"But what will he think of you, if you don't?"
"Oh, I don't know! I've worried ovah it until I'm neahly gray."
Then she looked up, wondering at his silence and the grave intentness
with which he was regarding her.
"Oh, Rob, don't tell me, aftah all, that you think it was silly of me! I
thought you'd like it! It was only the friendly thing to do, wasn't it?"
He gave a final dig with his knife, then turned to look down into her
wistful eyes. "Lloyd Sherman," he said, slowly, "you're one girl whose
friendship means something. You don't measure up very high on this old
locust, but when it comes to doing the square thing--when it's a
question of _honor_, you measure up like a man!"
Somehow the unwonted tenderness of his tone, the grave approval of his
smile, touched her in a way she had not believed possible. The tears
sprang to her eyes. There was a little tremor in her voice that she
tried to hide with a laugh.
"Oh, Rob! I'm so glad! Nothing could make me happier than to have you
think that!"
They started on down to the gate together. The only sound in all the
late afternoon sunshine was the soft rustling of the leaves overhead.
How many times the old locusts had watched their yearly partings! As
they reached the gate, Rob balanced the letter on his palm an instant.
Evidently he had been thinking of it all the way. "Yes," he said, as if
to himself, "that proves a right to the third leaf." Then he dropped the
letter in his pocket.
Lloyd looked up, almost shyly. "Rob, I want to tell you something. Even
after that letter was written I was tempted not to send it. I was
sitting with it in my hand, hesitating, when I heard yoah whistle in the
hall, and then it came ovah me like a flash, all you'd said, both in
jest and earnest, about friendship and what it should count for. Well,
it was the old test, like jumping off the roof and climbing the
chimney. I used to say 'Bobby expects it of me, so I'll do it or die.'
It was that way this time. So if I have found the third leaf, Rob, it
was _you_ who showed me where to look for it."
Then it was that the old locusts, watching and nodding overhead, sent a
long whispering sigh from one to another. They knew now that the two
children who had romped and raced in their shadows, who had laughed and
sung around their feet through so many summers, were outgrowing that
childhood at last. For the boy, instead of answering "Oh, pshaw!" in
bluff, boyish fashion, as he would have done in other summers gone,
impulsively thrust out his hands to clasp both of hers.
That was their good-by. Then the Little Colonel, tall and slender like
Elaine, the Lily Maid, turned and walked back toward the house. She was
so happy in the thought that she had found the golden leaf, that she did
not think to look behind her, so she did not see what the locusts
saw--Rob standing there watching her, till she passed out of sight
between the white pillars. But the grim old family sentinels, who were
always watching, nodded knowingly and went on whispering together.
THE END.
BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
* * * * *
THE LITTLE COLONEL BOOKS
(Trade Mark)
_By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_
_Each 1 vol., large 12mo, cloth, illustrated, per vol._, $1.50
THE LITTLE COLONEL STORIES
(Trade Mark)
Being three "Little Colonel" stories in the Cosy Corner Series, "The
Little Colonel," "Two Little Knights of Kentucky," and "The Giant
Scissors," put into a single volume.
=THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOUSE PARTY=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HOLIDAYS=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL'S HERO=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL AT BOARDING SCHOOL=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL IN ARIZONA=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHRISTMAS VACATION=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL, MAID OF HONOUR=
(Trade Mark)
=THE LITTLE COLONEL'S KNIGHT COMES RIDING=
(Trade Mark)
=MARY WARE: THE LITTLE COLONEL'S CHUM=
(Trade Mark)
_These ten volumes, boxed as a ten-volume set_, $15.00
=THE LITTLE COLONEL=
(Trade Mark)
=TWO LITTLE KNIGHTS OF KENTUCKY=
=THE GIANT SCISSORS=
=BIG BROTHER=
Special Holiday Editions
Each one volume, cloth decorative, small quarto, $1.25
New plates, handsomely illustrated with eight full-page drawings in
color, and many marginal sketches.
=IN THE DESERT OF WAITING=: THE LEGEND OF CAMELBACK MOUNTAIN.
=THE THREE WEAVERS=: A FAIRY TALE FOR FATHERS AND MOTHERS AS WELL AS FOR
THEIR DAUGHTERS.
=KEEPING TRYST=
=THE LEGEND OF THE BLEEDING HEART=
=THE RESCUE OF PRINCESS WINSOME=: A FAIRY PLAY FOR OLD AND YOUNG.
=THE JESTER'S SWORD=
Each one volume, tall 16mo, cloth decorative, $0.50
Paper boards, .35
There has been a constant demand for publication in separate form of
these six stories, which were originally included in six of the "Little
Colonel" books.
=JOEL: A BOY OF GALILEE=: By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON. Illustrated by L.
J. Bridgman.
New illustrated edition, uniform with the Little Colonel Books, 1 vol.,
large 12mo, cloth decorative, $1.50
A story of the time of Christ, which is one of the author's best-known
books.
=THE LITTLE COLONEL GOOD TIMES BOOK=
Uniform in size with the Little Colonel Series, $1.50
Bound in white kid (morocco) and gold, 3.00
Cover design and decorations by Amy Carol Rand.
The publishers have had many inquiries from readers of the Little
Colonel books as to where they could obtain a "Good Times Book" such as
Betty kept. Mrs. Johnston, who has for years kept such a book herself,
has gone enthusiastically into the matter of the material and format for
a similar book for her young readers. Every girl will want to possess a
"Good Times Book."
=ASA HOLMES=: OR, AT THE CROSS-ROADS. A sketch of Country Life and
Country Humor. By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON.
With a frontispiece by Ernest Fosbery.
Large 16mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.00
"'Asa Holmes; or, At the Cross-Roads' is the most delightful, most
sympathetic and wholesome book that has been published in a long
while."--_Boston Times._
=THE RIVAL CAMPERS=: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY BURNS. By RUEL PERLEY
SMITH.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
A story of a party of typical American lads, courageous, alert, and
athletic, who spend a summer camping on an island off the Maine coast.
=THE RIVAL CAMPERS AFLOAT=: OR, THE PRIZE YACHT VIKING. By RUEL PERLEY
SMITH.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
This book is a continuation of the adventures of "The Rival Campers" on
their prize yacht Viking.
=THE RIVAL CAMPERS ASHORE= By RUEL PERLEY SMITH.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"As interesting ashore as when afloat."--_The Interior._
=JACK HARVEY'S ADVENTURES=: OR, THE RIVAL CAMPERS AMONG THE OYSTER
PIRATES. By RUEL PERLEY SMITH. Illustrated, $1.50
"Just the type of book which is most popular with lads who are in their
early teens."--_The Philadelphia Item._
=PRISONERS OF FORTUNE=: A Tale of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By RUEL
PERLEY SMITH.
Cloth decorative, with a colored frontispiece, $1.50
"There is an atmosphere of old New England in the book, the
humor of the born raconteur about the hero, who tells his story
with the gravity of a preacher, but with a solemn humor that is
irresistible."--_Courier-Journal._
=FAMOUS CAVALRY LEADERS.= By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON.
Large 12mo. With 24 illustrations, $1.50
Biographical sketches, with interesting anecdotes and reminiscences of
the heroes of history who were leaders of cavalry.
"More of such books should be written, books that acquaint young readers
with historical personages in a pleasant informal way."--_N. Y. Sun._
=FAMOUS INDIAN CHIEFS.= By CHARLES H. L. JOHNSTON.
Large 12mo, illustrated, $1.50
In this book Mr. Johnston gives interesting sketches of the Indian
braves who have figured with prominence in the history of our own land,
including Powhatan, the Indian Cæsar; Massasoit, the friend of the
Puritans; Pontiac, the red Napoleon; Tecumseh, the famous war chief of
the Shawnees; Sitting Bull, the famous war chief of the Sioux; Geronimo,
the renowned Apache Chief, etc., etc.
=BILLY'S PRINCESS.= By HELEN EGGLESTON HASKELL.
Cloth decorative, illustrated by Helen McCormick Kennedy, $1.25
Billy Lewis was a small boy of energy and ambition, so when he was left
alone and unprotected, he simply started out to take care of himself.
=TENANTS OF THE TREES.= By CLARENCE HAWKES.
Cloth decorative, illustrated in colors, $1.50
"A book which will appeal to all who care for the hearty, healthy,
outdoor life of the country. The illustrations are particularly
attractive."--_Boston Herald._
=BEAUTIFUL JOE'S PARADISE=: OR, THE ISLAND OF BROTHERLY LOVE. A sequel
to "Beautiful Joe." By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful Joe."
One vol., library 12mo, cloth, illustrated, $1.50
"This book revives the spirit of 'Beautiful Joe' capitally. It is fairly
riotous with fun, and is about as unusual as anything in the animal book
line that has seen the light."--_Philadelphia Item._
='TILDA JANE.= By MARSHALL SAUNDERS.
One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative, $1.50
"I cannot think of any better book for children than this. I commend it
unreservedly."--_Cyrus Townsend Brady._
='TILDA JANE'S ORPHANS.= A sequel to 'Tilda Jane. By MARSHALL SAUNDERS.
One vol., 12mo, fully illustrated, cloth decorative, $1.50
'Tilda Jane is the same original, delightful girl, and as fond of her
animal pets as ever.
=THE STORY OF THE GRAVELEYS.= By MARSHALL SAUNDERS, author of "Beautiful
Joe's Paradise," "'Tilda Jane," etc.
Library 12mo, cloth decorative. Illustrated by E. B. Barry, $1.50
Here we have the haps and mishaps, the trials and triumphs, of a
delightful New England family, of whose devotion and sturdiness it will
do the reader good to hear.
=BORN TO THE BLUE.= By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.25
The atmosphere of army life on the plains breathes on every page of this
delightful tale. The boy is the son of a captain of U. S. cavalry
stationed at a frontier post in the days when our regulars earned the
gratitude of a nation.
=IN WEST POINT GRAY=
By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"Singularly enough one of the best books of the year for boys is written
by a woman and deals with life at West Point. The presentment of life in
the famous military academy whence so many heroes have graduated is
realistic and enjoyable."--_New York Sun._
=FROM CHEVRONS TO SHOULDER STRAPS=
By FLORENCE KIMBALL RUSSEL.
12mo, cloth, illustrated, decorative, $1.50
West Point again forms the background of a new volume in this popular
series, and relates the experience of Jack Stirling during his junior
and senior years.
=THE SANDMAN: HIS FARM STORIES=
By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS. With fifty illustrations by Ada Clendenin
Williamson.
Large 12mo, decorative cover, $1.50
"An amusing, original book, written for the benefit of very small
children. It should be one of the most popular of the year's books for
reading to small children."--_Buffalo Express._
=THE SANDMAN: MORE FARM STORIES=
By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS.
Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated, $1.50
Mr. Hopkins's first essay at bedtime stories met with such approval that
this second book of "Sandman" tales was issued for scores of eager
children. Life on the farm, and out-of-doors, is portrayed in his
inimitable manner.
=THE SANDMAN: HIS SHIP STORIES=
By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS, author of "The Sandman: His Farm Stories," etc.
Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated, $1.50
"Children call for these stories over and over again."--_Chicago Evening
Post._
=THE SANDMAN, HIS SEA STORIES=
By WILLIAM J. HOPKINS.
Large 12mo, decorative cover, fully illustrated, $1.50
Each year adds to the popularity of this unique series of stories to be
read to the little ones at bed time and at other times.
=THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL=
By MARION AMES TAGGART, author of "Pussy-Cat Town," etc.
One vol., library 12mo, illustrated, $1.50
A thoroughly enjoyable tale of a little girl and her comrade father,
written in a delightful vein of sympathetic comprehension of the child's
point of view.
=SWEET NANCY=
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE DOCTOR'S LITTLE GIRL. By MARION AMES
TAGGART.
One vol., library, 12mo, illustrated, $1.50
In the new book, the author tells how Nancy becomes in fact "the
doctor's assistant," and continues to shed happiness around her.
=THE CHRISTMAS-MAKERS' CLUB=
By EDITH A. SAWYER.
12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
A delightful story for girls, full of the real spirit of Christmas. It
abounds in merrymaking and the right kind of fun.
=CARLOTA=
A STORY OF THE SAN GABRIEL MISSION. By FRANCES MARGARET FOX.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in
colors by Ethelind Ridgway, $1.00
"It is a pleasure to recommend this little story as an entertaining
contribution to juvenile literature."--_The New York Sun._
=THE SEVEN CHRISTMAS CANDLES=
By FRANCES MARGARET FOX.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated in
colors by Ethelind Ridgway, $1.00
Miss Fox's new book deals with the fortunes of the delightful Mulvaney
children.
=PUSSY-CAT TOWN=
By MARION AMES TAGGART.
Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
in colors, $1.00
"Anything more interesting than the doings of the cats in this story,
their humor, their wisdom, their patriotism, would be hard to
imagine."--_Chicago Post._
=THE ROSES OF SAINT ELIZABETH=
By JANE SCOTT WOODRUFF.
Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
in colors by Adelaide Everhart, $1.00
This is a charming little story of a child whose father was caretaker of
the great castle of the Wartburg, where Saint Elizabeth once had her
home.
=GABRIEL AND THE HOUR BOOK=
By EVALEEN STEIN.
Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
in colors by Adelaide Everhart, $1.00
Gabriel was a loving, patient, little French lad, who assisted the monks
in the long ago days, when all the books were written and illuminated by
hand, in the monasteries.
=THE ENCHANTED AUTOMOBILE=
Translated from the French by MARY J. SAFFORD
Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
in colors by Edna M. Sawyer, $1.00
"An up-to-date French fairy-tale which fairly radiates the spirit of the
hour,--unceasing diligence."--_Chicago Record-Herald._
=O-HEART-SAN=
THE STORY OF A JAPANESE GIRL. By HELEN EGGLESTON HASKELL.
Small quarto, cloth decorative, illustrated and decorated
in colors by Frank P. Fairbanks, $1.00
"The story comes straight from the heart of Japan. The shadow of
Fujiyama lies across it and from every page breathes the fragrance of
tea leaves, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums."--_The Chicago
Inter-Ocean._
=THE YOUNG SECTION-HAND=: OR, THE ADVENTURES OF ALLAN WEST. By BURTON E.
STEVENSON.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
Mr. Stevenson's hero is a manly lad of sixteen, who is given a chance as
a section-hand on a big Western railroad, and whose experiences are as
real as they are thrilling.
=THE YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER.= By BURTON E. STEVENSON.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"A better book for boys has never left an American press."--_Springfield
Union._
=THE YOUNG TRAIN MASTER.= By BURTON E. STEVENSON.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"Nothing better in the way of a book of adventure for boys in which the
actualities of life are set forth in a practical way could be devised or
written."--_Boston Herald._
=CAPTAIN JACK LORIMER.= By WINN STANDISH.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
Jack is a fine example of the all-around American high-school boy.
=JACK LORIMER'S CHAMPIONS=: OR, SPORTS ON LAND AND LAKE. By WINN
STANDISH.
Square 12mo, cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"It is exactly the sort of book to give a boy interested in athletics,
for it shows him what it means to always 'play fair.'"--_Chicago
Tribune._
=JACK LORIMER'S HOLIDAYS=: OR, MILLVALE HIGH IN CAMP. By WINN STANDISH.
Illustrated, $1.50
Full of just the kind of fun, sports and adventure to excite the healthy
minded youngster to emulation.
=JACK LORIMER'S SUBSTITUTE=: OR, THE ACTING CAPTAIN OF THE TEAM. By WINN
STANDISH.
Illustrated, $1.50
On the sporting side, this book takes up football, wrestling,
tobogganing, but it is more of a school story perhaps than any of its
predecessors.
=CAPTAIN JINKS=: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A SHETLAND PONY. By FRANCES HODGES
WHITE.
Cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
The story of Captain Jinks and his faithful dog friend Billy, their
quaint conversations and their exciting adventures, will be eagerly read
by thousands of boys and girls. The story is beautifully written and
will take its place alongside of "Black Beauty" and "Beautiful Joe."
=THE RED FEATHERS.= By THEODORE ROBERTS.
Cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"The Red Feathers" tells of the remarkable adventures of an Indian boy
who lived in the Stone Age, many years ago, when the world was young.
=FLYING PLOVER.= By THEODORE ROBERTS.
Cloth decorative. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull, $1.00
Squat-By-The-Fire is a very old and wise Indian who lives alone with her
grandson, "Flying Plover," to whom she tells the stories each evening.
=THE WRECK OF THE OCEAN QUEEN.= By JAMES OTIS, author of "Larry Hudson's
Ambition," etc.
Cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
"A stirring story of wreck and mutiny, which boys will find especially
absorbing. The many young admirers of James Otis will not let this book
escape them, for it fully equals its many predecessors in excitement and
sustained interest."--_Chicago Evening Post._
=LITTLE WHITE INDIANS.= By FANNIE E. OSTRANDER.
Cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.25
"A bright, interesting story which will appeal strongly to the
'make-believe' instinct in children, and will give them a healthy,
active interest in 'the simple life.'"
=MARCHING WITH MORGAN.= HOW DONALD LOVELL BECAME A SOLDIER OF THE
REVOLUTION. By JOHN L. VEASY.
Cloth decorative, illustrated, $1.50
This is a splendid boy's story of the expedition of Montgomery and
Arnold against Quebec.
COSY CORNER SERIES
It is the intention of the publishers that this series shall contain
only the very highest and purest literature,--stories that shall not
only appeal to the children themselves, but be appreciated by all those
who feel with them in their joys and sorrows.
The numerous illustrations in each book are by well-known artists, and
each volume has a separate attractive cover design.
Each 1 vol., 16mo, cloth, $0.50
_By ANNIE FELLOWS JOHNSTON_
=THE LITTLE COLONEL (Trade Mark.)=
The scene of this story is laid in Kentucky. Its heroine is a small
girl, who is known as the Little Colonel, on account of her fancied
resemblance to an old-school Southern gentleman, whose fine estate and
old family are famous in the region.
=THE GIANT SCISSORS=
This is the story of Joyce and of her adventures in France. Joyce is a
great friend of the Little Colonel, and in later volumes shares with her
the delightful experiences of the "House Party" and the "Holidays."
=TWO LITTLE KNIGHTS OF KENTUCKY=
WHO WERE THE LITTLE COLONEL'S NEIGHBORS.
In this volume the Little Colonel returns to us like an old friend, but
with added grace and charm. She is not, however, the central figure of
the story, that place being taken by the "two little knights."
=MILDRED'S INHERITANCE=
A delightful little story of a lonely English girl who comes to America
and is befriended by a sympathetic American family who are attracted by
her beautiful speaking voice. By means of this one gift she is enabled
to help a school-girl who has temporarily lost the use of her eyes, and
thus finally her life becomes a busy, happy one.
=CICELY AND OTHER STORIES FOR GIRLS=
The readers of Mrs. Johnston's charming juveniles will be glad to learn
of the issue of this volume for young people.
=AUNT 'LIZA'S HERO AND OTHER STORIES=
A collection of six bright little stories, which will appeal to all boys
and most girls.
=BIG BROTHER=
A story of two boys. The devotion and care of Stephen, himself a small
boy, for his baby brother, is the theme of the simple tale.
=OLE MAMMY'S TORMENT=
"Ole Mammy's Torment" has been fitly called "a classic of Southern
life." It relates the haps and mishaps of a small negro lad, and tells
how he was led by love and kindness to a knowledge of the right.
=THE STORY OF DAGO=
In this story Mrs. Johnston relates the story of Dago, a pet monkey,
owned jointly by two brothers. Dago tells his own story, and the account
of his haps and mishaps is both interesting and amusing.
=THE QUILT THAT JACK BUILT=
A pleasant little story of a boy's labor of love, and how it changed the
course of his life many years after it was accomplished.
=FLIP'S ISLANDS OF PROVIDENCE=
A story of a boy's life battle, his early defeat, and his final triumph,
well worth the reading.
_By EDITH ROBINSON_
=A LITTLE PURITAN'S FIRST CHRISTMAS=
A story of Colonial times in Boston, telling how Christmas was invented
by Betty Sewall, a typical child of the Puritans, aided by her brother
Sam.
=A LITTLE DAUGHTER OF LIBERTY=
The author introduces this story as follows:
"One ride is memorable in the early history of the American Revolution,
the well-known ride of Paul Revere. Equally deserving of commendation is
another ride,--the ride of Anthony Severn,--which was no less historic
in its action or memorable in its consequences."
=A LOYAL LITTLE MAID=
A delightful and interesting story of Revolutionary days, in which the
child heroine, Betsey Schuyler, renders important services to George
Washington.
=A LITTLE PURITAN REBEL=
This is an historical tale of a real girl, during the time when the
gallant Sir Harry Vane was governor of Massachusetts.
=A LITTLE PURITAN PIONEER=
The scene of this story is laid in the Puritan settlement at
Charlestown.
=A LITTLE PURITAN BOUND GIRL=
A story of Boston in Puritan days, which is of great interest to
youthful readers.
=A LITTLE PURITAN CAVALIER=
The story of a "Little Puritan Cavalier" who tried with all his boyish
enthusiasm to emulate the spirit and ideals of the dead Crusaders.
=A PURITAN KNIGHT ERRANT=
The story tells of a young lad in Colonial times who endeavored to carry
out the high ideals of the knights of olden days.
_By OUIDA_ (_Louise de la Ramee_)
=A DOG OF FLANDERS=
A CHRISTMAS STORY
Too well and favorably known to require description.
=THE NURNBERG STOVE=
This beautiful story has never before been published at a popular price.
_By FRANCES MARGARET FOX_
=THE LITTLE GIANT'S NEIGHBOURS=
A charming nature story of a "little giant" whose neighbors were the
creatures of the field and garden.
=FARMER BROWN AND THE BIRDS=
A little story which teaches children that the birds are man's best
friends.
=BETTY OF OLD MACKINAW=
A charming story of child life.
=BROTHER BILLY=
The story of Betty's brother, and some further adventures of Betty
herself.
=MOTHER NATURE'S LITTLE ONES=
Curious little sketches describing the early lifetime, or "childhood,"
of the little creatures out-of-doors.
=HOW CHRISTMAS CAME TO THE MULVANEYS=
A bright, lifelike little story of a family of poor children with an
unlimited capacity for fun and mischief.
=THE COUNTRY CHRISTMAS=
Miss Fox has vividly described the happy surprises that made the
occasion so memorable to the Mulvaneys, and the funny things the
children did in their new environment.
_By MISS MULOCK_
=THE LITTLE LAME PRINCE=
A delightful story of a little boy who has many adventures by means of
the magic gifts of his fairy godmother.
=ADVENTURES OF A BROWNIE=
The story of a household elf who torments the cook and gardener, but is
a constant joy and delight to the children who love and trust him.
=HIS LITTLE MOTHER=
Miss Mulock's short stories for children are a constant source of
delight to them, and "His Little Mother," in this new and attractive
dress, will be welcomed by hosts of youthful readers.
=LITTLE SUNSHINE'S HOLIDAY=
An attractive story of a summer outing. "Little Sunshine" is another of
those beautiful child-characters for which Miss Mulock is so justly
famous.
_By MARSHALL SAUNDERS_
=FOR HIS COUNTRY=
A sweet and graceful story of a little boy who loved his country;
written with that charm which has endeared Miss Saunders to hosts of
readers.
=NITA, THE STORY OF AN IRISH SETTER = In this touching little book, Miss
Saunders shows how dear to her heart are all of God's dumb creatures.
=ALPATOK, THE STORY OF AN ESKIMO DOG=
Alpatok, an Eskimo dog from the far north, was stolen from his master
and left to starve in a strange city, but was befriended and cared for,
until he was able to return to his owner.
_By WILL ALLEN DROMGOOLE_
=THE FARRIER'S DOG AND HIS FELLOW=
This story, written by the gifted young Southern woman, will appeal to
all that is best in the natures of the many admirers of her graceful and
piquant style.
=THE FORTUNES OF THE FELLOW=
Those who read and enjoyed the pathos and charm of "The Farrier's Dog
and His Fellow" will welcome the further account of the adventures of
Baydaw and the Fellow at the home of the kindly smith.
=THE BEST OF FRIENDS=
This continues the experiences of the Farrier's dog and his Fellow,
written in Mr. Dromgoole's well-known charming style.
=DOWN IN DIXIE=
A fascinating story for boys and girls, of a family of Alabama children
who move to Florida and grow up in the South.
_By MARIAN W. WILDMAN_
=LOYALTY ISLAND=
An account of the adventures of four children and their pet dog on an
island, and how they cleared their brother from the suspicion of
dishonesty.
=THEODORE AND THEODORA=
This is a story of the exploits and mishaps of two mischievous twins,
and continues the adventures of the interesting group of children in
"Loyalty Island."
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.
Page 46, unclear wording "int n" changed to "interest in" (such friendly
interest in)
Page 161, "woudn't" changed to "wouldn't" (vowed she wouldn't)
Page 244, "conversaton" changed to "conversation" (fell into
conversation)
Page 260, "unroarious" changed to "uproarious" (were almost uproarious)
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor" ***
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