The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor Part 18

"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 friends.h.i.+p.

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 friends.h.i.+p 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!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 s.e.x, 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 friends.h.i.+p?"

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 tete-a-tete 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 b.u.t.terflies 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 ap.r.o.n-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 c.o.o.n 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Ra.n.a.ld, 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 pa.s.sed 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."

Ra.n.a.ld 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 a.s.saulting you for poaching on her preserves. You must keep out of her bailiwick if you want to keep her friends.h.i.+p. 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' friends.h.i.+ps 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 cl.u.s.tered around the colored church.

Ra.n.a.ld 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 flouris.h.i.+ng. A varied string of fiery dragons, winged fish, and heathen hobgoblins danced along beside them, for Kitty was putting candles in a row of j.a.panese 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 cl.u.s.ter of tuberoses in his b.u.t.tonhole 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 a.s.sembling 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 subst.i.tuted 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.