The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding Part 15

She felt a dull throb of grat.i.tude that the family left her alone.

A long time after she heard the closing and locking of doors, and then steps again on the stairs. Some one stopped outside her door.

"Good-night, Betty deah."

"Good-night," she answered in a voice which she tried to keep steady, but there was a sob in it, and divining that the kindest thing would be not to notice it, Lloyd choked back the word of sympathy she longed to speak, and went on to her room.

Nearly an hour after Betty got up, and lighting her lamp, sat down at the desk where the rejected ma.n.u.script lay. Turning it over listlessly, she read a paragraph here and there, trying to see it through the eyes of the publisher who had returned it. If he had sent merely a printed notice of refusal, such as she had been told was customary, stating impersonally that it was returned with regret because unavailable, she would have started it off again at daybreak to another place, knowing that what does not fill the special need of one firm may be seized with alacrity by another. But this man had taken the trouble to explain why it was unavailable.

Now, in the light of that explanation, she wondered with burning cheeks how she could have thought for one instant that it was good. She could see, herself, that it was crude and childish and ineffectual; not the style in which it was written. Betty was sure of her ability there. She was as conscious that her diction and composition measured up to the best standards, as an athlete is conscious of his strength. It was her view-point of life that had amused the great publisher. He hadn't ridiculed it in words, but she felt his covert smile at her schoolgirl attempt to deal with the world's big problems, and the knowledge that he had been amused cut her like a knife.

Pus.h.i.+ng the package aside, she took out the last volume of her diary, and from force of habit made an entry, the record of the return of her ma.n.u.script. "It has come back to me, the little bark that the girls launched so gaily, with ceremony and good wishes. It has come back a s.h.i.+pwreck! It was almost easier to face blindness than it is to face this failure. How can I give up this hope that has grown with my growth till it means more than everything else in the world to me? How can I live all the rest of my life without it? Somehow for years I have felt that the Lord wanted me to write. The feeling was like the King's call to Edryn, and I have gone on answering it as he did:

"'Oh list!

Thou heart and hand of mine, keep tryst, Keep tryst or die!'

"Of course it would be folly for me to go on now, when it has been proved beyond all doubt that I am not able to keep the great tryst worthily, and yet--life seems so empty with this one high hope and purpose taken out of it, that I am not brave enough to face it cheerfully."

It had long been a habit of Betty's, formed in the early days at the Cuckoo's Nest, to comfort herself when things went wrong by imagining how much worse they might have been. Now there was a drop of consolation in the fact that she had never displayed her pride in her book to any but the girls. It had been a temptation to show it to her G.o.dmother and Papa Jack and the Colonel, especially after the girls had applauded it so enthusiastically; but the wish for them to see it at its best had made her withhold it in its ma.n.u.script form. The climax of her triumph was to be when she placed in their hands a real, full-fledged book.

Their criticism might have spared her the humiliation of a rejected ma.n.u.script, but she acknowledged to herself that it was easier to have the sentence pa.s.sed on it by a stranger than by the three whose opinion she valued most.

Tiptoeing noiselessly around the room in order not to disturb any one at that late hour, she undressed slowly, and creeping into bed sobbed herself to sleep. Betty had always been a sensible little soul, taking her small troubles like a philosopher, and next morning, when she was awakened by the first bird-calls and lay watching the light creep up the wall, the old childish habit of thought a.s.serted itself, bringing an unexpected balm to her sore heart. She had always loved allegories. At the Cuckoo's Nest she had helped herself over all the rough places in her road by imagining that she was Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress,"

and that no matter how hard a time she was having then, the House Beautiful and the Delectable Mountains and the City of the s.h.i.+ning Ones lay just ahead.

Now in her greater trouble it was the allegory of Edryn that brought comfort, because he, too, had heard the King's call and striven to keep tryst, and she remembered that when he knelt to receive his knighthood, something else besides pearls and diamonds flashed on his vestment above his heart, to form the letters "semper fidelis."

"_An amethyst glowed on his breast in purple splendour to mark his patient meeting with Defeat!_"

"Maybe without that amethyst he couldn't have spelled all the motto perfectly," thought Betty. She sat up in bed, her face alight with the inspiration of the thought. She had met defeat and she had fallen into a grievous Dungeon of Disappointment, but she needn't stay in it. She sprang out of bed echoing Edryn's words: "Full well I know that Heaven always finds a way to help the man who helps himself, and even dungeon walls must harbour help for him who boldly grasps the first thing that he sees and makes it serve him!"

It was a brave way to begin the day, and it carried her over the first part of it so cheerfully that Mrs. Sherman began to think that she had overestimated Betty's disappointment. It surely could not have been as overwhelming as she imagined. She did not know how many times that day Betty's courage failed her. Edryn's high-sounding words seemed like a hollow mockery and she brooded over the failure till she began to grow morbid and ultra-sensitive.

Late that afternoon Mrs. Sherman met her in the back hall with the ma.n.u.script in her hands. She was on her way to put it in the kitchen stove. Promptly rescuing it, Mrs. Sherman finally obtained her reluctant consent to let her read it.

"It is your right," said Betty bitterly, "no matter how much it humiliates me. You have done everything for me, lavished everything on me as if I were really your daughter, and I have disappointed you at every turn. I couldn't be the brilliant social success you hoped for, it was useless to try. And I couldn't be the success in literature you had a right to expect, though I did try that with all my soul, mind and strength. I've been thinking about it all day, and I made up my mind at last, that I'd burn up that miserable story that I wasted so many months on, and then I'd go to you and tell you that under the circ.u.mstances it would be better for me to go away, and not be an expense to you any longer. As long as there was a prospect of my amounting to something some day that would make you proud of me, that would repay you in part for all you've done, I didn't mind deepening my obligation to you, but _now_--"

She turned to the window to hide her face, but the next instant she found herself sitting on the top stair with her head on her G.o.dmother's shoulder, listening to such loving remonstrances that they should have driven away the last vestige of her bitter self-condemnation. It did help wonderfully to hear that her G.o.dmother and Papa Jack were not disappointed in _her_ though grieved for her disappointment; that they loved her for her own dear little self alone, and not for the things they hoped she would achieve, and that they couldn't let her go away, for n.o.body could ever fill the place of their dear little daughter Betty.

She wiped her eyes after awhile and smiled like an April day, but she still persisted that she must go away somewhere and teach if only to prove that she was good for something.

Much troubled by her evident distress, Mrs. Sherman finally went to talk the matter over with the old Colonel. Mr. Sherman was away from home.

Several days after she called Betty into her room.

"Papa has read your ma.n.u.script," she said, "and he thinks it would be a good thing to let you have your own way, and go off somewhere for awhile. He says that in his opinion your writing shows unusual promise, and that its only lack is the lack of nearly all young writers, your ignorance of life. You must know more of the world before you can have a message for it that it will stop to listen to. You must live and grow and gain experience, and he thinks the best way for you to do all that, is to depend on your own resources for awhile, and that the kindest thing we can do is to open the cage and give the little bird a chance to try its own wings. It will never learn to fly as long as we keep it hedged about so carefully.

"He finally convinced me by quoting that legend of 'Camelback Mountain'

to me. He says you are like Shapur now, a vendor of salt who as yet can only follow in the train of others--write what has already been written.

You haven't _the wares_ with which to gain a royal entrance to the City of your Desire. You need some desert of waiting in which to learn the secret of Omar's alchemy."

"I know," said Betty. "I know now what my writing lacks--the attar that gained him his royal entrance." She quoted softly, "'And no man fills his crystal vase with it until he has first been p.r.i.c.ked by the world's disappointments and bowed by its tasks.'"

"Oh, Betty, my dear little girl," said Mrs. Sherman taking the earnest face between her hands and looking down fondly into the trusting brown eyes raised to hers. "I suppose it's true, but I can't help wanting to save you from the p.r.i.c.ks and the burdens. Still I won't stand in your way. Go ahead, little Shapur, and may the golden gates swing wide for you, for I know you'll force them open some day, with the filling of your crystal vase."

A quarter of an hour later Betty was hurrying down the road in happy haste, a telegram in her hand for Warwick Hall. It was to Madam Chartley asking if she knew of any vacant position for teachers, in any of the schools of her acquaintance.

CHAPTER X

BY THE SILVER YARD-STICK

WITH her days shadowed by anxiety over Ida's illness, the care and responsibility of Wardo and her sympathy for Betty's disappointment, Lloyd still found one bright spot, untouched by other people's troubles.

If, like the old sun-dial at Warwick Hall, she had taken for her motto: "I only mark the hours that s.h.i.+ne," those hours when Leland Harcourt came to teach her Spanish were the ones that would have been numbered.

If she had felt that he regarded it as a bore, or that it cost him the slightest effort, she would have dropped the study immediately; but when he made it plain that it was the chief interest of his days, and the one thing that made his summer in the Valley endurable, she could not help being flattered by his a.s.sertions, and exerted herself all the more to make the hour a pleasant one.

It was an agreeable sensation to know that she could interest a man who had known so many interests; that it was she who held him in Lloydsboro; that every turn of her head, every inflection of her voice, every phase of her varying moods had a charm for him. It made her tingle with satisfaction when she realized that she had justified Gay's confidence in her power, but sometimes after he had gone she felt that she was not exerting it to the extent she had promised. She wasn't "keying him up to any higher pitch." She wasn't inspiring him with the ambition which his family seemed to think was all that was necessary to make him capable of any achievement. The idea of her influencing him did not seem as preposterous and ridiculous as it had the first few weeks of their acquaintance, but somehow it did not seem so necessary. Sometimes she wondered if the "sweet doing nothing" that Gay said was in his blood had not affected her also. Maybe that was why she liked his very indolence, and forgave in him what she would have condemned in any other chronic idler. Maybe he was influencing _her_.

"But he sha'n't!" she declared to herself when the thought first startled her, and to prove that he hadn't she seized the first opportunity which came in her way to take him to task. His signet ring bore the same crest that was on the silver ladle, and he used it one morning to seal a note for her. With a significant glance in its direction she asked saucily, "Senor Tarrypin, when are you going to put your family motto into actual use? When are you going to begin striving till you ovahcome--till you do something really worth while in the world?"

With the question came the quick remembrance of a winter day by the churchyard stile, and Malcolm's boyish voice protesting earnestly--"I'll be anything you want me to be, Lloyd." And then like a flash came that other scene and Phil's pleading voice, "I say it in all humility, Lloyd, this little bit of turquoise kept me 'true blue.'"

If she had expected any such earnestness in Leland's reply she was soon disillusioned, for with an amused side-glance at her, as if he found this serious mood the most diverting of all, he said indifferently:

"Oh--_manana_."

"To-morrow!" she translated quickly. "But to-morrow never comes."

"Then neither need the effort."

"But without the effort--the striving," she persisted, looking down at the imprint of the tiny dagger on the seal, "there never will be any crown."

He shrugged his shoulders carelessly. "What's the odds, when one doesn't care for a crown?"

"You're just plain lazy!" she cried, provoked that her effort to inspire him had met with such a reception.

He smiled as if she had paid him the greatest of compliments, then sat up with an air of interest.

"This is a topic we've never struck before," he said lightly. "It's like coming across an inviting bypath we've never travelled over. Now suppose you tell me just what is your ideal way for a man to spend his life in order to get the most out of it."

Lloyd stole a quick glance at him to see if he were in earnest. The light tone seemed almost mocking, but the half-closed eyes gazing out across the lawn were serious enough, and she studied her reply a moment, feeling that maybe her opportunity had come at last.

"I think," she began timidly, "that the man who gets the most out of life is the one who makes most of himself--who starts out as they did in the old days to win his spurs and his accolade. Maybe you know the story of Edryn, the one that gave Warwick Hall its motto."

He nodded, with that slightly amused smile which always disconcerted her. "Yes, I know. That's Gay's pet war-cry--'Keep tryst.' But go on, I'd like to hear your version of it."

In the face of such an invitation she found it very hard to proceed, but after a moment's hesitation she said almost defiantly: