The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation

"Why, mothah will send the carriage for you, Mrs. Perkins, any day you set. She'd be glad to. Alec can drive you ovah early in the mawning, when he is out for the marketing, and go for you befoah dah'k."

"Then you may send to-morrow," said Mrs. Perkins, ungraciously. "I don't want to risk putting it off. Folks usually forget such promises overnight. So I'd best make sure of it."

Lloyd flushed angrily, but the next instant excused the old woman's rudeness on the score of her ill health. She had a plan that she was anxious to carry out, and she hurried home to begin, all a-tingle with her charitable impulses. She was surprised that her mother should treat it so lightly.

"Of course you can have the carriage," said Mrs. Sherman. "But, my good little Samaritan, I must warn you. That old woman is a pauper in spirit. She hasn't a particle of proper pride. People have done too much for her. She'll take all she can get, and grumble because it isn't more. So you mustn't be disappointed if, instead of thanks, you get only criticism."

But Lloyd, full of the zeal of a true reformer, danced down to the servants' quarters to find May Lily, one of the cook's grandchildren. May Lily, a neat-looking coloured girl of seventeen, had been one of Lloyd's most loyal followers since they made mud pies together on the Colonel's white door-steps, and the readiness to serve her now was prompted not so much by the promised dollar as the desire to still follow her lead. So next morning, soon after Mrs. Perkins's departure in the Sherman carriage, a mighty revolution began in the house she left behind her.

May Lily, strong and willing, went to work like a small cyclone. Under Lloyd's direction, she swept and scrubbed and scoured. The bed was aired, the stove was blacked, the windows washed, the tins polished till they shone like new. By four o'clock not a cobweb or a speck of dust was to be seen in either room. Lloyd sat down to wait for Mrs. Perkins's return. She felt that it was safe to breathe now, and she did not have to sit gingerly on the edge of the chair. Every piece of furniture had been washed and rubbed. She could keep her promise about the pie very comfortably now. Everything smelled so clean and wholesome to her that she was sure that Mrs. Perkins would notice the change at once and be pleased.

Mrs. Perkins did notice the change the moment she entered the door, but it was with a displeased face. "Hm! Hm!" she sniffed. "Smells mightily of soft soap in here. What have you been doing? I never could bear the smell of soft soap or lye. Hm! Hm!"

Then she turned accusingly on Lloyd. "Didn't you know better than to put stove-blacking on that stove? When it gets het up, it will smoke to fare-ye-well, and start my asthma to going again full tilt. Some folks are mighty thoughtless, never have no consideration for other people."

Lloyd shrank back, almost overcome by such a reception. It was like a dash of cold water in her face. She was angry and indignant.

"Well," continued Mrs. Perkins, still sniffing around the room, as she put her bonnet and shawl away. "Now you're here I'd like it if you would put on the teakettle and make me a good strong cup of coffee. Jane O'Grady gave me a pound, all parched and ground. I haven't had any before to-day for weeks. I'm plumb tuckered out with the visit."

Lloyd hurried to build up the fire, thankful that May Lily had spent much time scouring the old coffee-pot. Otherwise she could not have brought herself to touch it. It shone like new now. As she poured the water into it, three tiny streams spurted out of the side, hissing and sputtering over the stove.

"Now just see what you done!" scolded Mrs. Perkins. "You hadn't ought to have scoured that coffee-pot so. You'd ought to have let well enough be, for you might have known you'd rub holes in it and make it leak."

"I'll get you a new one in place of it at once," said Lloyd, stiffly, her indignation rising till she could hardly speak calmly. "I'll go this minute."

There was a small grocery store farther up the hill, where a little of everything was kept in stock, and Lloyd dashed out bareheaded, glad of an excuse to cool her temper. By the time she had made the coffee in the new pot, Alec drove up to the door for her.

"You'll come again to-morrow to make that lemon pie, won't you?" asked Mrs. Perkins, anxiously.

"No, I can't come till the day aftah."

"What? Thursday?" was the impatient answer. "Time drags awful slow for a body that can only sit and wait."

"I have an engagement to-morrow," said Lloyd, stiffly, remembering it was the day for Agnes Waring's music lesson. "But you can depend on me Thursday."

Mrs. Sherman only laughed when Lloyd repeated her day's adventure at home, but the old Colonel fairly snorted with indignation.

"Poor white trash!" he exclaimed. "Don't go near her again!"

"But I promised," answered Lloyd, dolefully. "I must keep my promise."

"Then tell Cindy to make a pie, and let Alec take it down," he suggested.

"No, she said she wanted to smell it cooking, and to eat it hot out of the oven, and I promised her she might."

The Colonel glared savagely at the fire. "Beggars shouldn't be choosers," he muttered, then turned to Mrs. Sherman. "Little daughter, are you going to let that poor child of yours be imposed on by that creature?"

"I can't interfere with her promise, papa," she answered. "It may be a disagreeable experience, but it will not hurt her any more than it hurt the old woman to sweep the cobwebs out of the sky. Hers was a thankless job, too, but no doubt she was better for the exercise, and she must have learned a great deal on such a trip."

It was in the same spirit in which Ederyn cried, "Oh, heart and hand of mine, keep tryst! Keep tryst or die!" that Lloyd gathered up the necessary materials and started off on Thursday to Mrs. Perkins's cottage. This time there was no admiring audience of little towheads tiptoeing around the table, as there had been at Mrs. Crisp's. But everything was clean, and, with her recipe spread out before her, Lloyd followed directions to the letter.

Mrs. Perkins, watching the beating of eggs and stirring of the golden filling, the deft mixing of pastry, grew cheerful and entertaining. She forgot to complain of her neighbours, and was surprised into the telling of some of her girlish experiences that actually brought an amused twinkle to her sharp old eyes. Lloyd was vastly entertained. She had, too, a virtuous feeling that in keeping her promise she had given pleasure to one who rarely met kindness. It gave her a warm inward glow of satisfaction.

To her mortification, when she finally drew the pie from the oven, the meringue, which had been like a snowdrift a moment before, and which should have come out with just a golden glow on it from its short contact with the heat, was all shrivelled and brown.

"The nasty little oven was too hot!" cried Lloyd, in disgust.

"Just my luck," whined Mrs. Perkins. "I might have known that I'd never get anything I set my heart on. But you can scrape off the meringue, and I'll try and make out with the plain pie."

Although she ate generously, she ate grumblingly, disappointed because of the scorched meringue, and it wasn't as sweet as she liked.

That night, Lloyd, mortified over her failure, stood long with the white rosary in her hand. "Maybe I ought to count the poah pie as I would an imperfect lesson," she thought, hesitating, with a bead in her fingers. Then she said, defiantly: "But I did my best, and the day has certainly been disagreeable enough to deserve two pearls."

After another moment of conscientious weighing of the matter, she slipped the bead slowly down the string. "There!" she exclaimed. "I suahly went through the black watahs of Kilgore to get that one."

Next day when she stopped in Rollington to pay for the coffee-pot, and drove by the Crisps' to ask about the baby, Minnie Crisp told her several things. Mrs. Perkins was sick all night, and had told her ma that it was the lemon pie that was the cause of the trouble; that it would have made a dog sick. "Them was her words," said Minnie, solemnly.

"I don't wondah!" cried Lloyd. "The greedy old thing! There was enough for foah people, and it was very rich, and she ate it all."

"And she didn't like it because you had May Lily scrub and clean while she was gone," added Minnie, with childlike lack of tact. "She talked about you dreadful after you went away. Didn't she, ma?"

"Shoo, Minnie!" answered Mrs. Crisp, with a wave of her apron. "Don't tell all you know."

"I didn't," answered the child. "I didn't say a word about the names she called her, – meddlesome Matty, and all that."

Lloyd took her leave presently, with a flushed face and a sore heart. On the way home she stopped at The Beeches, and Mrs. Walton, who saw at a glance that something was wrong, soon drew out the story of her grievance.

"Don't pay any attention to that old creature," she said, laughing heartily, "and forgive my laughing. Everybody in the Valley has had a similar experience. The King's Daughters long ago gave her up in disgust. She's one of those people who doesn't want to be reformed and won't stay helped. Her house will be just as dirty next week as when you first went there."

"I didn't suppose there were such people in the world," said Lloyd, in disgust.

"You'll find out all sorts of disagreeable things as you get older," sighed Mrs. Walton. "It is one of the penalties of growing up. But still it is good to have such experiences, for the wiser we grow the better we know how to 'ease the burden of the world,' and that is what we are here for."

Lloyd's eyes widened with surprise. Here was another person quoting from the poem she had learned. She was glad now that she had committed it to memory, since on three occasions it had made people's meaning clearer to her.

"Yes," she answered, the dimples stealing into her smile. "But the next time I'll find out first if they really want their burden eased, and if that burden is dirt, like Mrs. Perkins's, I'll suahly let it alone."

CHAPTER XVI

"SWEET SIXTEEN"

The red coat Lloyd wore that winter was long remembered in the Valley, for wherever it went it carried a bright face above it, a cheery greeting, and some pleasant word that made the day seem better for its passing.

Mrs. Bisbee and the little Crisps were not the only ones who learned to watch for it. As all the lonely town of Hamelin must have felt toward the one child left to it after the Pied Piper had passed through its streets, so all the Valley turned with tender regard to the young girl left in its midst. Mothers, whose daughters were away at school, stopped to talk to her with affectionate interest. The old ladies whom she regularly visited welcomed her as if she were a part of their vanished youth. The young ladies took her under their wing, glad to have her in the choir and the King's Daughters' Circle, for she was bubbling over with girlish enthusiasm and a sincere desire to help.

So she found the cobwebs in the neighbourhood sky, and disagreeable enough they were at times, even more disagreeable than her experience with Mrs. Perkins. But she swept away with praiseworthy energy, till gradually she found that the accumulation of outside interests, like the cobweb strands which Ederyn twisted, made a rope strong enough to lift her out of herself and her dungeon of disappointment.

After the novelty of giving music lessons had worn off, it grew to be a bore. Not the lessons themselves, for Agnes's delight in them never flagged. It was the tied-up feeling it gave her to remember that those afternoons were not her own. It happened so often that the afternoons devoted to Agnes were the ones which of all the week she wanted to have free, and she had to give up many small pleasures on account of them.

It grew to be a bore, also, calling on some of the people who claimed a weekly visit. She never tired of Mrs. Bisbee's lively comments on her neighbours and her interesting tales about them. But there was old Mr. and Mrs. Apwall, who, with nothing to do but sit on opposite sides of the fire and look at each other, were said to quarrel like cat and dog. It mortified Lloyd dreadfully to have them quarrel in her presence, and have them pour out their grievances for her to decide which was in the wrong.

She always rose to go at that juncture, flushed and embarrassed, and vowing inwardly she would never visit them again. But they always managed to extract a promise before she got to the door that she would drop in again the next time she was passing.

"Somehow you seem to get husband's mind off himself," Mrs. Apwall would whisper at parting. "He isn't half so touchy when you've cheered him up a spell."

And Mr. Apwall would follow her out through the chilly hall to open the front door, and say, huskily: "Come again, daughter. Come again. Your visits seem to do the madam a world of good. They give her something to talk about beside my fancied failings."

So inwardly groaning, Lloyd would go again, painfully alert to keep the conversation away from subjects that invariably led to disputes. And inwardly groaning, she went dutifully to the Coburns' at their repeated requests. The first few times the garrulous old couple were interesting, but the most thrilling tale grows tiresome when one has heard it a dozen times. She could scarcely keep from fidgeting in her chair when the inevitable story of their feud with the Cayn family was begun. They never left out a single petty detail.

No one will ever know how often the thought of the little rosary in the sandalwood box helped Lloyd to listen patiently, and to keep tryst with the expectations of those about her, so that at nightfall there might be another pearl to slip on the silken cord, in token of another day unstained by selfishness.

There was rarely time for envying the girls at school now. The days were too full. Almost before it seemed possible, the locusts were in bloom and it was mid-May by the calendar. In that time perfect health had come back to her. There were no more crying spells now, no more hours of nervous exhaustion, of fretful impatience over trifles. She went singing about the house, with a colour in her cheeks that rivalled the pink of the apple blossoms.

"Spring has come indoors as well as out," said Mrs. Sherman one morning. "I think that we may safely count that your Christmas vacation is over, and you may go back to your music lessons whenever you choose."

The night before her birthday, Lloyd sat with her elbows on her dressing-table, peering into the mirror with a very serious face.

"You'll be sixteen yeahs old in the mawning, Lloyd Sherman," she told the girl in the glass. "'Sweet sixteen!' You've come to the end of lots of things, and to-morrow it will be like going through a gate that you've seen ahead of you for a long, long time. A big, wide gate that you have looked forward to for yeahs, and things are bound to be different on the othah side."

Next morning, just in fun, she trailed down to breakfast in one of her mother's white dresses, with her hair piled on the top of her head. It was very becoming so, but it made her look so tall and womanly that she was sure her grandfather would object to it.

"He'll nevah let me grow up if he can help it," she said, half-pouting, as she gave a final glance over her shoulder at the mirror, vastly pleased with her young ladylike appearance. "He'll say, 'Tut, tut! That's not grandpa's Little Colonel.' But I can't stay his Little Colonel always."

She was standing by the window looking down the locust avenue when he came in to breakfast, so she did not see his start of surprise at sight of her. But his half-whispered exclamation, "Amanthis!" told her why he failed to make the speech she expected to hear. With her hair done high, showing the beautiful curve of her head and throat as she stood half-turned toward him, he had caught another glimpse of her startling resemblance to the portrait. He could not regret losing his Little Colonel if that loss were to give him a living reminder of a beloved memory.

After breakfast, when an armful of birthday gifts had been duly admired and the donors thanked, and she had spent nearly an hour enjoying them, she strolled down the avenue, feeling very much grown up with the long dress trailing behind her. She wandered down to the entrance gate, hoping to meet Alec, who had gone for the mail. She was sure there would be a letter from Betty, for Betty never forgot people's birthdays. Then she trailed back again under the white arch of fragrant locust blooms. At the half-way seat she sat down and tucked a spray of the blossoms into her hair and fastened another at her belt. She had not long to wait there, enjoying the freshness of the sweet May morning, for in a few minutes Alec came up the avenue with a handful of letters and papers. She sorted out her own eagerly, six letters and a package.

She opened Betty's first. It was a long one, ending with a birthday greeting in rhyme, and enclosing a handkerchief which she had made herself, sheer and fine and daintily hemstitched, with her initials embroidered in one corner in the smallest letters possible.

The letters from Allison and Kitty were profusely illustrated all around the margins, and by the time Lloyd had read them, and Gay's ridiculous summary of school news, she felt as if she had been on a visit to Warwick Hall, and had seen all the girls. The next letter was from Joyce, a good thick one. But before she read it, curiosity impelled her to open the package, which was a flat one, bearing a foreign postmark and several Italian stamps. There were two photographs inside. She slipped the uppermost one from its envelope.

"Why, it is Eugenia Forbes!" she exclaimed aloud. "But how she has changed!"

The picture was not at all like the Eugenia whom Lloyd remembered, the thin slip of a girl who had raced up and down the avenue five years before at her house-party. She had blossomed into a beautiful young woman.

"A regulah Spanish beauty!" Lloyd thought, as she looked at the picture, long and admiringly, – the picture of a patrician face with great dark eyes and a wealth of dusky hair. The old self-conscious, dissatisfied expression was gone. It was a happy face that smiled back at her. It had been nearly a year since Lloyd had had a letter from Eugenia. She had written from the school near Paris that her father was on his way over from America to join her and take her home immediately after her graduation. Lloyd had sent a reply addressed to her cousin Carl's office, but had heard nothing more.

Thinking that the other photograph was her cousin Carl's, Lloyd unwrapped it, wondering if he had changed as much as Eugenia. To her surprise, it was not a middle-aged man she saw, with gray moustache and kindly tired eyes. It was the handsome boyish face of a stranger, yet so startlingly familiar that she looked at it with a puzzled frown.

"Why should Eugenia be sending me this?" she thought. "And where have I seen that man befoah?" Then, "Phil Tremont!" she exclaimed aloud the next instant. "That's who it reminds me of. It is almost exactly like him, only it is oldah-looking, and the nose isn't quite like his."

She turned the picture over. There on the back was written in Eugenia's hand the word Venice, and a date underneath the name, Stuart Tremont.

"Phil's brother!" gasped Lloyd, in astonishment. "How strange that she should know him!"

Tearing open the envelope lying on the bench beside her, Lloyd unfolded a twenty-page letter from Eugenia, written on thin blue foreign correspondence paper. Before her glance had travelled half-way down the second page, she gave another gasp, and sat staring at an underscored sentence in open-mouthed amazement. Then, never waiting to gather up the other letters which fluttered into the grass at her feet, as she sprang up, she rushed off toward the house as hard as she could go, waving Eugenia's letter in one hand and the photographs in the other.

"Mothah!" she called, as she reached the end of the avenue. She was tripping over her long skirt, and scattering hairpins at every step, as her reckless flight sent her hair tumbling down over her shoulders.

"Mothah!" she shrieked again, as she stumbled up the porch steps.

"Here in my room, dear," came the answer from an upper window. Falling all over herself in her undignified haste, Lloyd tore up the stairs. A final tangling of skirts sent her headlong into her mother's room, where she half-fell in a breathless, laughing heap, and sat at Mrs. Sherman's feet with her hair almost hiding her eager face.

"Guess what's happened!" she demanded, breathlessly. "Eugenia is engaged! And to Phil Tremont's brother Stuart!"

Then she sat enjoying her mother's surprise, which was almost as great as her own. "And she isn't much moah than eighteen," Lloyd exclaimed, rocking back and forth on the floor, with her arms clasped around her knees, while her mother examined the pictures.

"She looks twenty at least in this picture," answered Mrs. Sherman, "even more than that. Eugenia was always old for her years. If you remember, she was wearing long dresses when we left her the summer we were in Europe together."

"Yes, but it doesn't seem possible that Eugenia is old enough to be married," insisted Lloyd. "I can hardly believe it is true."

She sat staring dreamily out of the window until a slight breeze fluttering the sheets of paper still clutched in her fingers reminded her that she had read only two of the twenty pages.

"Heah is what she says about it," began Lloyd, reading slowly, for the closely written sheets were hard to decipher.

"'I know you are going to wonder how it all came about, so I'll begin at the beginning. Last summer papa came on to Paris in time for Commencement. He was so pleased because I took first honours, when he hadn't expected me to take any, that he said he would do as fathers sometimes did in fairy-tales, – grant me three wishes, anything in reason; for he had had an unusually successful year and could well afford it.

"'Well, I thought and thought, but I couldn't think of anything I really wanted, as I just had an entire new outfit in clothes, so I told him finally I'd like to stop in London long enough to have a tailor make me a riding-habit, and I'd think of the other two wishes sometime during the year. So we went to London. Papa is such an old darling, and we've grown to be real chums. After the tailor had taken my measure, we drove to our banker's for the mail, and who should papa meet there but Doctor Tremont, an American physician whom he knew years ago when they were young men. They belonged to the same college fraternity.

"'They forgot all about poor little me, sitting over in the corner of the office, and stood and talked about old times, and asked each other about Tom, Dick, and Harry, until I was thoroughly tired of waiting. But after awhile the handsomest young man came into the room, and Doctor Tremont introduced him to papa as his oldest son, Stuart. Then they remembered my humble existence, and papa brought them both over to me. In about two minutes we all felt as if we had known each other always.

"'Doctor Tremont said he had had a very hard winter in Berlin, making some study of microbes with a noted scientist, – I forget his name. He said Stuart had been closely confined also (he was taking a medical course), and they were off on a hard-earned holiday. They were going coaching up in the lake regions, first in England, then in Scotland, and maybe later would go over to the Isle of Skye.

"'Would you believe it, before we left the bank, Doctor Tremont had persuaded papa that he needed a vacation also, and almost in no time it was arranged that we should join them on their coaching trip. We had a perfectly ideal time, and Stuart and I got to be the best of friends. We corresponded all summer and fall after that. I didn't expect to see him again for two years, because he intended to stay abroad until he had finished his medical course. But along in the winter papa's health broke down, and the doctor told him he must keep away from business for a year, and ordered him to Baden-Baden for the water.

"'He was horribly ill after we got there, and I was so frightened and inexperienced that I thought he was going to die, and I telegraphed for Doctor Tremont. It isn't far from Berlin, you know, as we Americans count distances. But the doctor had gone to Paris for several weeks, and Stuart came at once in his place. Of course he wasn't an experienced physician like his father, but he was such a comfort, for he cheered papa up so much, and assured us that the doctor in charge was doing everything that his father could do. And he helped nurse papa, and boosted up my spirits mightily, and was so dear and thoughtful and considerate that, when he went away, I felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. You can't imagine how kind and lovely he was all that week. Papa fairly swore by him.