The Battle Ground Part 10

"Yes, I remember," said the Governor. "Emmeline Lightfoot is as famous as Diana," then his quick eyes caught Betty's drooping head, "and what of this little lady?" he asked, patting her shoulder. "There's not a brighter smile in Virginia than hers, eh, Major?"

But the Major was not to be outdone when there were compliments to be exchanged.

"Her hair is like the sunshine," he began, and checked himself, for at the first mention of her hair Betty had fled.

It was on this afternoon that she brewed a dye of walnut juice and carried it in secret to her room. She had loosened her braids and was about to plunge her head into the basin when Mrs. Ambler came in upon her. "Why, Betty! Betty!" she cried in horror.

Betty turned with a start, wrapped in her shining hair. "It is the only thing left to do, mamma," she said desperately. "I am going to dye it. It isn't ladylike, I know, but red hair isn't ladylike either. I have tried conjuring, and it won't conjure, so I'm going to dye it."

"Betty! Betty!" was all Mrs. Ambler could say, though she seized the basin and threw it from the window as if it held poison. "If you ever let that stuff touch your hair, I--I'll shave your head for you," she declared as she left the room; but a moment afterward she looked in again to add, "Your grandmamma had red hair, and she was the beauty of her day--there, now, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!"

So Betty smiled again, and when Virginia came in to dress for supper, she found her parading about in Aunt Lydia's best bombazine gown.

"This is how I'll look when I'm grown up," she said, the corner of her eye on her sister.

"You'll look just lovely," returned Virginia, promptly, for she always said the sweetest thing at the sweetest time.

"And I'm going to look like this when Dan comes home next summer," resumed Betty, sedately.

"Not in Aunt Lydia's dress?"

"You goose! Of course not. I'm going to get Mammy to make me a Swiss muslin down to the ground, and I'm going to wear six starched petticoats because I haven't any hoops. I'm just wild to wear hoops, aren't you, Virginia?"

"I reckon so," responded Virginia, doubtfully; "but it will be hard to sit down, don't you think?"

"Oh, but I know how," said Betty. "Aunt Lydia showed me how to do it gracefully. You give a little kick--ever so little and n.o.body sees it--and then you just sink into your seat. I can do it well."

"You were always clever," exclaimed Virginia, as sweetly as before. She was parting her satiny hair over her forehead, and the gla.s.s gave back a youthful likeness of Mrs. Ambler. She was the beauty of the family, and she knew it, which made her all the lovelier to Betty.

"I declare, your freckles are all gone," she said, as her sister's head looked over her shoulder. "I wonder if it is the b.u.t.termilk that has made you so white?"

"It must be that," admitted Betty, who had used it faithfully for the sixty nights. "Aunt Lydia says it works wonders." Then, as she looked at herself, her eyes narrowed and she laughed aloud. "Why, Dan won't know me," she cried merrily.

But whatever hopes she had of Dan withered in the summer. When he came home for the holidays, he brought with him an unmistakable swagger and a supply of coloured neckerchiefs. On his first visit to Uplands he called Virginia "my pretty child," and said "Good day, little lady," to Betty. He carried himself like an Indian, as the Governor put it, and he was very lithe and muscular, though he did not measure up to Champe by half a head. It was the Montjoy blood in him, people thought, for the Lightfoots were all of great height, and he had, too, a shock of his father's coa.r.s.e black hair, which flared stiffly above the brilliant Lightfoot eyes. As he galloped along the turnpike on Prince Rupert, the travelling countrymen turned to look after him, and muttered that "dare-devil Jack Montjoy had risen from his grave--if he had a grave."

Once he met Betty at the gate, and catching her up before him, dashed with her as far as Aunt Ailsey's cabin and back again. "You are as light as a fly," he said with a laugh, "and not much bigger. There, take your hair out of my eyes, or I'll ride amuck."

Betty caught her hair in one hand and drew it across her breast. "This is like--" she began gayly, and checked herself. She was thinking of "that devil Jack Montjoy and Jane Lightfoot."

"I must take my chance now," said Dan, in his easy, masterful way. "You will be too old for this by next year. Why, you will be in long dresses then, and Virginia--have you noticed, by the way, what a beauty Virginia is going to be?"

"She is just lovely," heartily agreed Betty. "She's prettier than your Great-aunt Emmeline, isn't she?"

"By George, she is. And I've been in love with Great-aunt Emmeline for ten years because I couldn't find her match. I say, don't let anybody go off with Virginia while I'm at college, will you?"

"All right," said Betty, and though she smiled at him through her hair, her smile was not so bright as it had been. It was all very well to hear Virginia praised, she told herself, but she should have liked it better had Dan been a little less emphatic. "I don't think any one is going to run off with her," she added gravely, and let the subject of her sister's beauty pa.s.s.

But at the end of the week, when Dan went back to college, her loyal heart reproached her, and she confided to Virginia that "he thought her a great deal lovelier than Great-aunt Emmeline."

"Really?" asked Virginia, and determined to be very nice to him when he came home for the holidays.

"But what does he say about you?" she inquired after a moment.

"About me?" returned Betty. "Oh, he doesn't say anything about me, except that I am kind."

Virginia stooped and kissed her. "You are kind, dear," she said in her sweetest voice.

And "kind," after all, was the word for Betty, unless Big Abel had found one when he said, "She is des all heart." It was Betty who had tramped three miles through the snow last Christmas to carry her gifts to the free negro Levi, who was "laid up" and could not come to claim his share; and it was Betty who had asked as a present for herself the lame boy Micah, that belonged to old Rainy-day Jones. She had met Micah in the road, and from that day the Governor's life was a burden until he sent the negro up to her door on Christmas morning. There was never a sick slave or a homeless dog that she would not fly out to welcome, bareheaded and a little breathless, with the kindness br.i.m.m.i.n.g over from her eyes. "She has her father's head and her mother's heart," said the Major to his wife, when he saw the girl going by with the dogs leaping round her and a young fox in her arms. "What a wife she would make for Dan when she grows up! I wish he'd fancy her.

They'd be well suited, eh, Molly?"

"If he fancies the thing that is suited to him, he is less of a man than I take him to be," retorted Mrs. Lightfoot, with a cynicism which confounded the Major. "He will lose his head over her doll baby of a sister, I suppose--not that she isn't a good girl," she added briskly. "Julia Ambler couldn't have had a bad child if she had tried, though I confess I am surprised that she could have helped having a silly one; but Betty, why, there hasn't been a girl since I grew up with so much sense in her head as Betty Ambler has in her little finger."

"When I think of you fifty years ago, I must admit that you put a high standard, Molly," interposed the Major, who was always polite when he was not angry.

"She spent a week with me while you were away," Mrs. Lightfoot went on in an unchanged voice, though with a softened face, "and, I declare, she kept house as well as I could have done it myself, and Cupid says she washed the pink teaset every morning with her own hands, and she actually cured Rhody's lameness with a liniment she made out of Jimson weed. I tell you now, Mr. Lightfoot, that, if I get sick, Betty Ambler is the only girl I'm going to have inside the house."

"Very well, my dear," said the Major, meekly, "I'll try to remember; and, in that case, I reckon we'd as well drop a hint to Dan, eh, Molly?"

Mrs. Lightfoot looked at him a moment in silence. Then she said "Humph!"

beneath her breath, and took up her knitting from the little table at her side.

But Dan was living fast at college, and the Major's hints were thrown away.

He read of "the Ambler girls who are growing into real beauties," and he skipped the part that said, "Your grandmother has taken a great fancy to Betty and enjoys having her about."

"Here's something for you, Champe," he remarked with a laugh, as he tossed the letter upon the table. "Gather your beauties while you may, for I prefer bull pups. Did Batt Horsford tell you I'd offered him twenty-five dollars for that one of his?"

Champe picked up the letter and unfolded it slowly. He was a tall, slender young fellow, with curling pale brown hair and fine straight features. His face, in the strong light of the window by which he stood, showed a tracery of blue veins across the high forehead.

"Oh, shut up about bull pups," he said irritably. "You are as bad as a breeder, and yet you couldn't tell that thoroughbred of John Morson's from a cross with a terrier."

"You bet I couldn't," cried Dan, firing up; but Champe was reading the letter, and a faint flush had risen to his face. "The girl is like a spray of golden-rod in the sunshine," wrote the Major, with his old-fashioned rhetoric.

"What is it he says, eh?" asked Dan, noting the flush and drawing his conclusions.

"He says that Aunt Molly and himself will meet us at the White Sulphur next summer."

"Oh, I don't mean that. What is it he says about the girls; they are real beauties aren't they? By the way, Champe, why don't you marry one of them and settle down?"

"Why don't you?" retorted Champe, as Dan got up and called to Big Abel to bring his riding clothes. "Oh, I'm not a lady's man," he said lightly.

"I've too moody a face for them," and he began to dress himself with the elaborate care which had won for him the t.i.tle of "Beau" Montjoy.

By the next summer, Betty and Virginia had shot up as if in a night, but neither Champe nor Dan came home. After weeks of excited preparation, the Major and Mrs. Lightfoot started, with Congo and Mitty, for the White Sulphur, where the boys were awaiting them. As the months went on, vague rumours reached the Governor's ears--rumours which the Major did not quite disprove when he came back in the autumn. "Yes, the boy is sowing his wild oats," he said; "but what can you expect, Governor? Why, he is not yet twenty, and young blood is hot blood, sir."

"I am sorry to hear that he has been losing at cards," returned the Governor; "but take my advice, and let him pick himself up when he falls to hurt. Don't back him up, Major."

"Pooh! pooh!" exclaimed the Major, testily. "You're like Molly, Governor, and, bless my soul, one old woman is as much as I can manage. Why, she wants me to let the boy starve."

The Governor sighed, but he did not protest. He liked Dan, with all his youthful errors, and he wanted to put out a hand to hold him back from destruction; but he feared to bring the terrible flush to the Major's face.