The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding

So while Kitty's mornings were filled with her housekeeping duties, Betty's with her writing and Gay's with her music and plans to keep Lucy occupied, it gradually came about that Leland spent more and more of his time at The Locusts. The lessons lasted only an hour, but after that he usually found some excuse to stay: there was a new song that he wanted to hear, or a game of tennis, or a stroll down to the post-office. Sometimes when he had no excuse at all he lingered anyhow, lounging on the shady porch, and talking of anything that happened to come uppermost. Then at night he was often there again, either because The Locusts was the gathering place of the Clan, and a frolic was afoot, or he went to escort Lloyd and Betty to the Cabin or The Beeches to some entertainment the other girls had planned.

"My oh! What a buttahfly I'm getting to be!" laughed Lloyd one evening as she went into her mother's room to have her dress buttoned. "A hawse-back ride this mawning, a picnic this aftahnoon, and now the rustic dance in the Mallards' barn to-night. But nevah mind, little mothah," she added with a hug, as she caught a wistful look on Mrs. Sherman's face. "It'll all be ovah soon. This is the last summah of my teens. When I am old and twenty I'll nevah leave yoah side. 'I'll sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam' and take all the housekeeping cares off yoah shouldahs as a dutiful daughtah should."

Mrs. Sherman gave her shoulder a caressing pat as she fastened the last button. "I'm glad to have you go, dear," she answered, "especially to all the out-door merry-makings. They keep you young and well. Papa Jack and I will walk over after awhile and look on."

"The Mallard barn dances are always so much fun," said Lloyd, lingering to give a final touch to her mother's toilet. "Wait! Yoah side combs are in too high, and yoah collah isn't pinned straight in the back. How did you evah manage to dress yoahself right befoah I grew up to tend to you?"

As she made the changes with all a young girl's particularity about trifles, she went on, "That last one they had three yeahs ago was lovely. Will you evah forget the way Rob cake-walked with Mrs. Bisbee? It makes me laugh to this day, whenevah I think of it."

"I suppose Rob will hardly be there to-night," said Mrs. Sherman, smiling as she recalled the ridiculous appearance he had made. His cake-walk had been the feature of the evening.

"No, indeed," answered Lloyd. "He's no moah likely to be there than the man in the moon. I wish he would though. He used to be the life of everything. We saw him this evening as we drove home from the picnic. He had just come out from town, and he looked so hot and dusty and ti'ahed it made me feel bad. He's like a strangah now, didn't stop to speak, only lifted his hat and turned in at the gate at Oaklea, as if he hadn't gone on a thousand drives with us. He ought to have been interested in what we were doing for old times' sake."

Lloyd had not thought of Rob for days, but she was reminded of him many times that evening, the affair at the Mallards' barn was so much like the one to which he had taken her three years before. The same old negro fiddlers furnished the music. The same flickering lantern light made weird shadows on the rough walls, and the same sweet smell of new hay filled the place. As the music of the Virginia reel began she thought of the way Rob had romped through it that other time, and wished she could see him once more as jolly and care-free as he was then.

"Why can one nevah have two good times exactly alike?" she wondered wistfully. She was standing near the wide double doors, looking out across the fields as she thought about it later, recalling how many things were alike on the two occasions, even the colour of the dress she wore. She remembered that because Rob had said she looked like an apple-blossom, and it was rare indeed for him to make such complimentary speeches. It wasn't best for girls to hear nice things about themselves often, he said. It made them hard to get along with, too uppity.

The music stopped and Leland Harcourt came to find her. She was looking so pensively past the gay scene that he bent over her, humming in a low tone:

"'What's this dull town to me?Robin Adair?What was 't I wished to see?What wished to hear?'"

She started with a little laugh, blushing slightly because he seemed to have read her thoughts. "Robin Adair" was one of Mrs. Moore's old names for Rob, and she had been wishing for him.

Over at Oaklea, Rob sat scowling at a book spread out before him on the library table. He was thinking of Harcourt as he had seen him on the front seat beside Lloyd, in his cool-looking white flannels, the very embodiment of gentlemanly leisure. No doubt she noticed the contrast between them, he all dusty and dishevelled from his day's work and the trip home on the hot car. Not that he would change places, not that he regretted for an instant the part he had to take in the grimy working world. But the chance encounter had suddenly opened his eyes to all that he had had to sacrifice for that work. Until now it had not even left him time to realize how much he had given up. Now to find this stranger enjoying all that was once his, stung him to envy. He smiled grimly as he recognized it as envy. He had thought himself free from such a childish trait. But he could not smile away the feeling. It persisted till it accomplished more than the old Judge's advice and his mother's pleadings, that all work and no play was bad for him. Closing his book he announced his intention of walking over to The Locusts.

As he went up the avenue he heard the distant scraping of fiddles and the rhythmic beating of feet in the Mallard barn. He had forgotten that it was the night of the rustic dance.

He was disappointed at finding no one at home but the old Colonel. But his welcome was so cordial that he stayed even longer than he had intended. The Colonel always had the latest news of every one, but to-night he had to talk first of the wonderful progress Lloyd was making in Spanish, and what a fine fellow that young Harcourt was.

"Didn't like the chap at all at first," he confided. "Thought he was too much of a confounded foreigner; but I'm a big enough man I hope to acknowledge a mistake, and I own up I was prejudiced."

When Rob finally rose to start home, the Colonel would not let him go until he had promised to come again the next night, when Lloyd and Betty should be at home. Afterwards he regretted having made the promise. Although he went early Harcourt was already there, seemingly as much at home as if he were a member of the family. It made Rob feel like a stranger to see this newcomer usurping the place that he had always filled in the Sherman household.

It grated on him also to hear Lloyd saying, "Si, señor" and "gracias" when she addressed Harcourt, and grated still more for Harcourt to turn to her as he did continually with some aside in Spanish. Never more than a phrase or a word, and "just for practice," they laughingly explained, but it seemed to emphasize a tie that had drawn them together, and – Rob's remoteness.

He left early. Walking slowly down the avenue he thought of the hundreds of times he had passed under those old locust-trees on sweet starlighted summer nights like this. What a goodly company of old friends they were! The kind that never change. He looked up, vaguely grateful for the soft lisping of leaves above him. They seemed to understand why he was going, why he could not stay.

Half-way down the avenue he heard the tinkle of Lloyd's harp, and then her voice beginning to sing. The seat beside the measuring tree was just ahead and he made his way to it, quietly, on tip-toe almost, that he might lose no note. But it was an unknown tongue she was singing, a song that Harcourt had taught her, and Rob could not understand a word. It was so symbolical of the change that had come between them that a fierce impulse seized him to rush back to the house and throw the interloper out of the window. Then he smiled bitterly at his own vehemence. What right had he to be so savage over her friendship? He was her big brother only, and even that merely in name, because she had chosen to call him so in those years that they had been such loyal good chums. It was little and mean and selfish of him to begrudge her the slightest thing that would give her pleasure. This man with his fortune, his accomplishments, his rare social gifts had everything to offer, while he, – he had not even time to put at her disposal. Time to find bypaths to happiness for her —

The sweet clear voice sang on, the old locusts rustled softly as the night wind stirred them. Then the song stopped, and for a long time he sat staring ahead of him with unseeing eyes. At last he rose, and taking a step towards the tree beside the bench, passed his hand over the bark, groping for the notches he knew were there but could not see.

He paused at the one a little higher than his shoulder, and then his fingers found the four leaf clover he had carved beside it, the last time Lloyd had stood up to be measured. He could almost see her standing there again like Elaine, the lily-maid, fair-haired and smiling while he repeated the charm of the four leaf clover:

"'Love be true to her —Joy draw near to her —Fortune find what yourGifts can do for her – '"

He had forgotten how the lines went but it made no difference. Anyhow they voiced what had always been his dearest wish for her, and standing there in the dark he vowed savagely that any man who stood in the way of the old charm's coming true, should have him to reckon with.

When he swung off down the path, taking the short cut to Oaklea, his hat was pulled grimly down over his eyes, and his mouth was set in a firm hard line. He did not open his books again that night. Lying on the couch by his open window, he watched the lights at The Locusts shining through the trees, till the last one went out, and he knew that Harcourt had gone.

CHAPTER VIII

"SHADOWS OF THE WORLD APPEAR"

The long July days slipped by, and Lloyd, looking back on them as Hildegarde looked into her magic glass, saw only pleasant scenes mirrored in their memory. The fortunate things, the smiling faces, the pleasant happenings were hers, and for a time even other people's troubles, those shadows of the world that are always with us, left her daily outlook undimmed.

Like Hildegarde, too, she went on with her weaving, but wholly unconscious that the shuttle of her thoughts was shaping her web to fit the shoulders of the dark-eyed knight who came oftenest. Mrs. Sherman saw it and was troubled.

"Jack," she said to her husband one afternoon, when he had come out from town earlier than usual, and they were wandering around the shady grounds together, planning some improvements, "I'm afraid those Spanish lessons are a mistake. Lloyd is seeing entirely too much of Mr. Harcourt. He is here morning, noon and night."

Mr. Sherman gave a quick glance towards the tennis court where the two were finishing a lively game. "Don't you worry, Elizabeth," was his placid answer. "It isn't as if she'd never been used to such devotion. She's never known anything else. Malcolm and Keith used to spend fully as much time with her, and Rob Moore fairly lived over here."

"Yes, but this is different," protested Mrs. Sherman. "They were mere boys, and she dominated them, but Leland Harcourt is a man, and an experienced one socially, and he is dominating her. I can see it in her quick deference to his opinions, and her evident desire to please him. Not evident to him, perhaps, but plain enough to me. I've been thinking that it might be a good thing for us to go to the springs for awhile or to the sea-shore or some place where she'd meet other people. In a quiet little country place like this a man like Leland Harcourt looms up big on a young girl's horizon; a girl just out of school, eager for new interests. It isn't wise in us to allow her to be restricted just to his society, when we could so easily give her the safe-guard of contrasts."

Mr. Sherman looked down at his wife with an indulgent smile.

"Don't you worry," he repeated. "Lloyd will do a lot of romantic day-dreaming probably, but she has my 'yard-stick' and I have her promise."

"But Jack, I verily believe the child thinks he measures up to all your requirements. And really there is nothing one can urge against his character. It's more a matter of temperament. I am sure she couldn't be happy with him. She's just at the romantic age now to be very much impressed with that kind of a man. If she were older she would see his shallowness – his lack of purpose, his intense selfishness. I don't think that we ought to shut our eyes to the possible outcome of this constant companionship we are allowing."

"Well," he answered hesitatingly, slow to acknowledge his wife's distrust of Lloyd's judgment, yet quick to see the wisdom of her point of view. "Maybe you are right. But," he added wistfully, "I had hoped to keep her home this summer. She has been away at school so long – and she'll be in town so much next winter if she makes her début. Wait till I have had a talk with her before you plan any trips."

"But don't you see," urged Mrs. Sherman, "it is something too intangible to discuss. To speak to her about it now, to make any opposition to him at all, may quicken her interest in him and make her champion his cause. That would be fatal, and yet it's just as dangerous to wait. Love at that age is like a fog. It comes creeping up so gradually that you don't realize what is enveloping you, till you're completely lost in it, and all the rest of the world shut out."

"You speak from experience?" he said teasingly.

"You know very well," she confessed laughingly, "what a befogged state I was in. All papa's breathing out of 'threatening and slaughter' didn't make the slightest difference. I was blind and deaf to everything but you. And I'd want Lloyd to be the same," she added hastily, "if you were as unreasonable as papa was then. But the circumstances are too different to be compared. I'm simply warning you that the Little Colonel's name was not lightly given. She has not only all my determination in her makeup, but her grandfather's as well."

Here the gardener met them, and the conversation dropped. The next half hour was spent in consultation over some changes to be made in the conservatory.

When they went back to the house Leland Harcourt had gone, and Lloyd was just stepping into Doctor Shelby's buggy, which was drawn up in front of the house. The old doctor waited for them to come within hearing distance before he leaned out and called:

"I'm just borrowing the Little Colonel for awhile. There's a case over at Rollington that needs the attention of her King's Daughters Circle, and I'm taking her over to investigate it. We'll be home before dark."

"All right," called Mr. Sherman, waving his hat as Lloyd looked back at them with a smile and a flutter of her handkerchief. During the winter that Lloyd had joined the Circle, and in the summer vacations following, it had been a matter of frequent occurrence for the old doctor to take her with him on such errands. Remembering how interested Lloyd had become in many of the cases, Mrs. Sherman breathed a sigh of thankfulness, hoping that this might prove to be one that would enlist her sympathies and occupy so much of her time that it would make a serious break in the Spanish lessons.

It had been a happy afternoon for Lloyd. If she had stopped and tried to recall what made it so, she could not have mentioned any particular thing. To be young and well and filled with the same glow that made the summer day a joy was enough, but to feel that some one whose opinion she valued very much found her charming, and said so with every glance of his dark eyes, was more than enough. It made her cup of happiness complete and brimmed it over.

The doctor was pouring out a tale of somebody's woes, but the trace of a smile lingered on her lips as she made a polite attempt to listen. She could not quite shut out the thought of that last game of tennis, and the trivial pleasantries that had gone to make up the sum of her great content. There was a dreamy, far-away look in her eyes as she listened. The Spanish serenade that Leland Harcourt had sung before he left kept repeating itself over and over, a sort of undercurrent to what the doctor was saying. She beat time to it with her finger-tips on the side of the buggy. Once it rose so insistently that she lost what the doctor was saying, and came to herself with a start when a familiar name arrested her attention.

"Ned Bannon's wife!" she repeated in astonishment. "You suahly can't mean that it's Ida Shane who's sick ovah in that tumbledown cottage of the McCarty's!"

"I surely do," he answered. "She didn't want to come back to this part of the country, goodness knows. She remembers what a commotion it raised when she eloped from the Seminary with Ned, five years ago. But Ned has scarcely drawn a sober breath for the last year. She's sure of getting needlework here, and with little Wardo to consider there was nothing for her to do but put her pride in her pocket and come."

"Little Wardo!" breathed Lloyd wonderingly. The ride seemed full of surprises.

"Yes, she has a little son about four years old, I judge. And it is on his account that I have asked the help of the King's Daughters. He'll have to be taken away from her till she's better, for she is morbidly sensitive about keeping Ned's failings from him. She has never allowed him to find out that his father is a drunkard. She makes a hero of him to the little fellow. Seems to think that he'll blame her for giving him such a father by marrying a man whom she had been warned would bring her nothing but trouble and disgrace. She's desperately ill, and of course in her weak condition she magnifies the matter. It has become a mania with her."

"Poah Violet!" exclaimed Lloyd in distress, her thoughts flying back to the scene in the school orchard five years ago, when watching the glimmer of the pearl on Ida's white hand in the moonlight she had been thrilled by her whisper: "He says that's what my life means to him – a pearl; and that my influence can make him the man I want him to be. Oh, Princess! I'd give my life to keep him straight!"

Not even an echo of the serenade was in her memory now. Her knowledge of Ida's nearness seemed to bring her old school-friend actually before her: the faint odour of violets, the shy glance of her appealing violet eyes under the long lashes, the bewitching dimple at the corner of her mouth, the flash of her rings, the sweep of her long skirts, the soft hair gleaming under the big-plumed picture hat, more than all the air of romance and mystery that surrounded her because of the pearl and the secret engagement to her "Edwardo."

"I hadn't intended for her to see you," said the doctor, when her exclamations and questions revealed to him the intimacy that had once existed between them. "But under the circumstances it will be the best thing I can do. I'll go in first and prepare her for the meeting, however. She thinks she hasn't a friend left on earth, on account of her unhappy marriage. Everybody warned her against it."

The front door stood open, and Lloyd sat down on the broken step to wait. It seemed impossible that she was going to find Ida, the embodiment of daintiness and refinement, in this dilapidated old place. The whitewash had long ago dropped in scales from the rough walls. The window-panes were broken, the shutters sagging, half the pickets off the fence. Not a spear of grass ventured up in the barren yard, where a rank unpruned peach-tree struggled for its life in the baked earth. The house stood so near the road that the thick summer dust rolled in suffocatingly whenever a vehicle passed.

"How can people exist in such an awful desolate, forsaken spot?" she wondered, looking around with a shudder of disgust. That Ida, dainty beauty-loving Ida, who scorned everything that was common and coarse, should be lying inside in that dark room was more than she could believe.

A wagon rattled by, and she put her handkerchief up to her face, stifled by the cloud of dust that rose in its wake. When she ventured to take it down again and draw a long breath, a chubby, barefooted child was standing in the path in front of her, regarding her curiously. The wagon made so much noise that she had not heard his bare feet pattering around the house. She gave a little start of surprise, then smiled at him, for he was an attractive little fellow, despite the fact that his face was smeared with the remains of the bread and jam he had just been enjoying at one of the neighbours, and his gingham apron was in rags. He had caught it on the barb wire fence as he climbed through.

As he smiled back at her shyly from under his long lashes, Lloyd's interest quickened, for there was no mistaking the likeness of those violet eyes and the dimple that came at the corner of his cupid's bow of a mouth. They were so like Ida's that she smiled and said confidently, "You're Wardo. Aren't you!"

He nodded gravely, then after another long silent scrutiny, turned away to pour the sand out of the old tin can he was carrying, in a pile under the peach-tree. If it had not been for the jam and the dirt Lloyd would have caught him up and kissed him, he was such a dear little thing, with a thatch of short golden curls. But her fastidious dislike of touching anything dirty made her draw back. It was well for the furtherance of their acquaintance that she did so. He was not accustomed to caresses from strangers. He accepted her presence on the door-step without question, and presently, as the moments passed and she made no movement towards him, he went up to her with friendly curiosity.

"Is you got a sand-pile to your house?" he asked.

"No," she confessed, feeling that he would consider her lacking on that account and that she must hasten to mention other attractions. "But I have a red and green bird that can talk, and a little black pony named 'Tarbaby.' It's so little that there's nobody at my house now small enough to ride it. So it stays all day long in the field and eats grass."

"I'm little enough to ride it," he began confidently.

Just then the doctor came out, and she sprang up, her heart throbbing. "I'm going now for the nurse," he said in a low tone. "She's due on the next train. Keep her as quiet as possible. Of course you'll have to let her free her mind, but promise her almost anything to soothe her. I'll be back in quarter of an hour."

Frightened at being left alone with such a weight of responsibility thrust upon her, Lloyd tiptoed into the house. In the dim light she almost stumbled over the cot on which Ned Bannon lay in a drunken stupor, and her first glance at the bed beyond made her draw back in dismay. She never would have recognized the white face on the pillow as Ida's, had it not been for the appealing eyes turned towards her.

Five years of poverty and illness and neglect had changed the pretty little school-girl into a faded, care-worn woman. She had been crying ever since she was taken sick, and now was so weak and hysterical that she caught at Lloyd with a cry, and clung to her sobbing.

"Oh, it kills me to have you find me this way!" she gasped, "when I've tried so long to hide what we've come to. But I'm glad you've come, for the baby's sake! Oh, Lloyd, what's going to become of my little Wardo!"

It was several minutes before she could talk coherently, and then she began to sob out the story of her married life, her miserable failure to reform Ned. Lloyd tried to stop her presently, thinking she was becoming delirious, but she might as well have tried to stop a high tide.

"Oh, I have been so proud!" she sobbed. "I couldn't tell anybody. I couldn't tell you now if I wasn't afraid that I might die, like that poor woman across the street last night. She's left five little children. But I can't leave my little Wardo like that!" she broke out desperately. "I know he has inherited Ned's awful appetite. I must stay and help him fight it, for it's all my fault. I gave him such a father. A father that he can never be proud of! A father that will be only a disgrace to him! Oh, why didn't somebody warn me that it was not only a husband I was choosing but my little Wardo's father! Nobody ever told me that, and I was so young I never thought of any one but myself. And now the poor little innocent soul will have to suffer for it all his life long!"