The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation Part 12

When they all knelt in the closing prayer, she fervently echoed the bishop's pet.i.tion: "Grant that we make of this Christmastide a White Feast, and that all our days may be worthy of thy acceptance, unstained by selfishness and full of deeds to show our love and loyalty."

The white-robed choir filed slowly out, their music sounding fainter and fainter until it died away across the campus, and the white-robed audience was left kneeling in silence. There were tears in Gay's eyes when she arose. Such music always stirred her to the depths. Kitty went back to her room humming one of the carols, and Betty stole away to write the bishop's sermon in her little white record, while the memory of it was still warm in her heart.

At Miss Gilmer's request, Lloyd waited a moment in the vestibule. At first she wished that Miss Gilmer had not detained her. She wanted to go on with Allison, who had her by the arm. Afterward, however, she was glad of the waiting. It gave her an opportunity to meet the venerable bishop.

"So you are going home to-morrow for the holidays," he said, genially, as he held out his hand. "G.o.dspeed, daughter. May you keep the White Feast with joy."

It seemed to Lloyd that that "G.o.dspeed" followed her like a benediction.

CHAPTER VII.

HOMEWARD BOUND

"O Warwick Hall, dear Warwick Hall, Thy happy hours we'll oft recall!

No time or change can break thy tie, Though for awhile we say good-bye-- Good-bye! Good-bye!"

AMID a flutter of handkerchiefs and a babel of parting cries, each 'bus-load of girls departed from the Hall to the station singing the farewell song of the school.

A dozen times on the way home Allison, humming it unconsciously, found the rest of the party joining in. It was an uneventful journey, but a merry one to the five girls, travelling for the first time without a chaperon. For the first few hours they had the observation car to themselves. Even the porter mysteriously disappeared.

"He's curled up asleep somewhere, rest his soul," said Gay, when she had rung for him several times.

"All the better," answered Kitty. "We don't really need the table, and it's nice to have him out of the way. This is as good as travelling in a private car. We can 'stand on our head in our little trundle-bed, and n.o.body nigh to hinder.' Oh, girls, I'm so crazy glad that we're on our way home that I'm positively obliged to do something to let off steam.

I've exhausted my vocabulary trying to express my delight, so there's nothing left but to howl."

"Or to wriggle," suggested Gay. "Why not try facial expression? How is this for transcendent joy?"

The grotesque smile which she turned upon them was so ridiculous that they screamed with laughter.

"Oh, Gay, do stop!" begged Betty. "You're as bad as a comic valentine."

"I'd like to see you do any better," retorted Gay.

"Let's all try," suggested Kitty. "Line up in front of this mirror, girls. Now all look pleasant, please. Now let your smiles express rapture. Now, frenzied delight!"

Fascinated by their own ugliness, the five girls stood in a row distorting their pretty faces with hideous grins and grimaces until they were weak from laughing. The banging of the car door sent them scuttling into their seats. A portly old gentleman pa.s.sed through the car to the rear platform, and, slamming the door behind him, stood looking down the rapidly vanis.h.i.+ng track. Evidently it was too breezy a view-point for the old gentleman, even with his coat-collar turned up and hat pulled down to meet his ears, for in a moment he came in and pa.s.sed back to his seat in a forward car. The girls sat demurely looking out of the windows until he was gone, then they faced each other, giggling.

"Suppose he had caught us making those idiotic faces," exclaimed Allison. "He would have taken us for a lot of escaped lunatics."

"No, he wouldn't," insisted Gay. "He was a real benevolent-looking old fellow, the kind that understands young people, and he'd know that it was just that Christmas has gone to our heads, and made us a little flighty. I'm sure that his name is James, and that he has six old maid daughters. He lives out West, and he's taking home a trunk full of presents for them."

"Let's guess what he has for them," said Kitty. "I'll say that the oldest one is named Emmaline, and he is taking her a squirrel fur m.u.f.f."

"And the next one is Agnes Dorothea," said Betty, taking her turn, as if it were a game. "She's the delicate one of the family, and a sort of invalid. So he bought her a lavender shoulder shawl that caught his fatherly eye in a show window, because it was so soft and fluffy. But it will shrink and fade the first time it is washed till Agnes Dorothea will look like a homeless cat if she wears it. Still she will persist in putting it on because dear father brought it to her from Was.h.i.+ngton."

"He'd certainly think you all were crazy if he could heah yoah remah'ks," laughed Lloyd.

"Speaking of shawls," cried Gay, "that reminds me of that rainbow shawl in my bag. I haven't taken a st.i.tch in it since we started, and I intended to knit all the way home. I simply have to, if I'm to get it done in time."

Taking out the square of linen in which the fleecy zephyr was wrapped, she settled herself by the rear window in a big arm-chair, with her feet drawn up under her, and fell to work with all her might.

"It's so nice and cosy to have the car all to ourselves," sighed Allison, stretching out luxuriously on the sofa. Betty, bending over her embroidery, smiled tenderly at a picture that her memory showed her just then. She was comparing this journey with the first one she had ever taken. And she saw in her thoughts a little brown-eyed girl of eleven, setting forth on her first venture into the wide world, with a sunbonnet tied over her curls, and an old-fas.h.i.+oned covered basket on her arm. What a dread undertaking that journey had been from the Cuckoo's Nest to the House Beautiful. She remembered how frightened she was, and how she had studied the picture of Red Ridinghood, printed in colours on the border of her handkerchief, until she was afraid to speak even to the conductor. She saw a possible wolf in every stranger.

Somehow her thoughts kept going back to that time, even in the midst of Gay's most amusing nonsense, and Kitty's brightest repartee. Even when Allison began to sing "O Warwick Hall," and she chimed in with the others, "Dear Warwick Hall," she was not thinking of school, but of the Cuckoo's Nest, and Davy, and the old weather-beaten meeting-house, in whose window she had pa.s.sed so many summer afternoons, reading the musty dog-eared books she found in the little red bookcase.

"What are you smiling about, Betty, all to yoahself?" asked Lloyd. "You look as if you are a thousand miles away."

Betty glanced up with a little start. "Oh, I was just thinking about the Cuckoo's Nest, and wis.h.i.+ng that I could see Davy's face when they open the Christmas box I sent. There are only trifles in it, but the box will mean a lot to them, for Cousin Hetty never has time to make anything of Christmas."

Lloyd sat up with a sudden exclamation. "Oh, Betty, I _beg_ yoah pah'don. There's a lettah for you in my bag from some of them that I forgot to give you. Hawkins came up with it just as we drove off, and there was so much excitement and confusion I nevah thought of it again till this minute. I'm mighty sorry I forgot."

"It doesn't make any difference," Betty a.s.sured her. "Good news can afford to wait, and, if it's bad news, it would have spoiled all the first part of this trip."

She tore open the envelope and glanced down the page. Lloyd, looking up, saw a distressed expression cross her face and the brown eyes fill with tears.

"Oh, it's poor little Davy that's in trouble," said Betty, answering Lloyd's anxious question. "He had his leg badly hurt last week, broken in two places. He was riding one of those heavy old farm horses, hurrying home to get out of a storm. Going down a steep, slippery hill, it stumbled and fell on him. He'll have to lie in bed for weeks, with his knee in plaster, and he's so tired of it already, and _so_ lonesome.

n.o.body has any time to sit with him. I know how it is. I was sick myself once at the Cuckoo's Nest. Oh, I'd give anything if I could spend my vacation there with him."

"And give up all your good times at home?" cried Kitty. "He surely couldn't expect such a sacrifice as that."

"But it wouldn't be any sacrifice. Not a mite! I haven't seen him for such a long time, and I'd love to go. He used to be the dearest little fellow, never out of my sight a moment during the day. They used to call him 'Betty's shadow.'"

"Why don't you go if you wish it so much?" was on the tip of Gay's tongue, but she stopped the question just before it slipped off, remembering Betty's dependence on her G.o.dmother. Kitty had told her all about it one time. Naturally she wouldn't want to ask for the money, even for such a short journey, when so much was being spent to keep her at school with Lloyd; and naturally she would not want to ask to leave Locust at Christmas, when that was the time of all the year when she could be of service, and in many ways add greatly to the pleasure of the entire household.

The nonsense stopped for a few minutes. No one knew what to say to comfort Betty, although they were genuinely sorry, and glanced from time to time at the brown head turned away from them toward the window. She was looking at the flying landscape through a blur of tears, recalling the way little Davy's dimpled fingers had clung to hers, his chubby feet followed her. Of course he was much larger and older, she told herself, not at all like the little fellow she had left so long ago. He was big enough to stand pain now, and probably the worst of his suffering was over. Still, she saw only a solemn baby face when she pictured him, and heard only the lisping voice, saying as he used to say when stumped toe or bruised finger brought the tears: "It hurth your Davy boy. Tie a wag on it, Betty." How he had loved her stories! What a pleasure they would be to him now in the long days he would be forced to spend in bed.

Suddenly conscious of the silence around her, Betty turned, realizing that her depression had cast a shadow on the spirits of all the rest.

"Don't think about my bad news any more," she said, brightly. "It probably isn't half as bad as I have been picturing it. My imagination always runs away with me. It isn't Davy the baby that's had such an awful accident. It was that thought that hurt me so at first. I keep forgetting that it's five years since I left there. I'm going to drop him a postal card at the next station. I can write to him every day, and make a sort of game of the letters with riddles and suggestions of things for him to do, and that will help the time pa.s.s."

"First call to dinnah in the dinah," called a coloured waiter, pa.s.sing through the car in white jacket and ap.r.o.n.

"Now we'll have to stop all our foolishness," said Allison, sedately, as she rose to lead the way to the dining-car. They followed as decorously as grandmothers, each realizing the responsibility that devolved on her, since they were travelling without a chaperon.

To be sure, Gay choked on an olive when Kitty made some wicked remark about the fussy old woman across the aisle, who wouldn't be pleased with anything the waiter brought her; and it was too much for their gravity when an excessively dignified man at the next table, who had been staring at the wall like a wooden Indian, suddenly sneezed so violently that his eye-gla.s.ses dropped into his soup with a splash.

Otherwise they were models of propriety, and more than one head turned to look at the bright girlish faces, and smile at the keen, unspoiled enjoyment which they evidently found in life and in each other.

They did not stay long in the observation-car when they went back to it after dinner. Other people had come in, and it was not so attractive as when they occupied it alone. The lamps had been lighted so early that short December day that it seemed much later than it really was, and they were all tired. At nine o'clock, when they went to their berths in the forward end of the car, they found several sections already made up for the night, and the porter was moving on down toward theirs.

The fussy old woman, who had been so hard to please at the table, came squeezing her way through the valises that blocked the aisle, and took possession of the section opposite Betty and Lloyd.

"Oh, my country!" whispered Lloyd. "I wondah if she's going to keep up that grumbling and scolding all night. I'm glad that I am not that poah henpecked maid of hers. She certainly makes life misahable for her."