The Little Colonel's House Party Part 4

Mrs. Ware nodded.

"And you?"

Another nod.

"Then there isn't a single word in the dictionary good enough to fit!"

screamed Mary, excitedly, spinning around and around in the kitchen floor until the red ribbons stood out at right angles from her head.

"There isn't a single word, Holland; we'll just have to _squeal_!"

At that she gave a long, ear-piercing shriek that seemed to go through the roof like a fine-pointed needle. Holland and the baby joined in, each trying to make a louder noise than the other. Their eyes were tightly shut, their mouths wide open, and their faces red to bursting.

"There, there, children!" exclaimed Mrs. Ware, laughingly, as they stopped to take breath. "The neighbours will think that the house is on fire. We'll have a policeman after us if you make such a noise."

"The kettle is boiling over!" cried Holland, and Joyce flew to the rescue. Jack went to change his wet clothes, and the three smaller children trotted back and forth, pushing chairs to the table, and helping to carry in the supper.

Many a bedraggled pa.s.ser-by that evening looked out from under his dripping umbrella as he neared the little brown house, cheered by a babel of happy voices. The lamplight streaming across the wet pavement drew his gaze to a window whose blinds had not been closed, and the picture lingered pleasantly in his memory for many a day. It was the Ware family at supper. And afterward, when the dishes had been cleared away, there was another picture to shine out into the wet night: the children unpacking the box that Jack had dragged out of its hiding-place.

Mary paraded jubilantly around the room in her new slippers, the rosebud sash tied around her gingham ap.r.o.n, the pink parasol held high above her head, and her face such a picture of delight that one could not look at her without smiling, too.

[ILl.u.s.tRATION: "SHE SORTED THE RIBBONS AND EXAMINED THE GLOVES."]

Even the baby sat up an hour after his bedtime, to take part in the unusual excitement. The prospect of Joyce's seeing the old valley seemed to have unlocked a door into the little mother's memory. Story after story she brought out to entertain them, of the things that had happened when she was a care-free little schoolgirl, before sorrow and worry and work had come to make her tired and sad.

While she entertained them Joyce brought a bureau drawer from her bedroom, and, propping it on two chairs, began looking over its contents. She sorted the ribbons and examined the gloves, counted the handkerchiefs and inspected the stockings, dividing everything into three piles. One pile was p.r.o.nounced suitable to take on the visit, one good enough to wear at home after another renovating, and one altogether past wearing.

"It's a sort of day of judgment," said Jack, who was watching the performance with interest. "You're separating the sheep from the goats; only there's three divisions here, white sheep, black sheep, and goats."

"I love for such days to come," said Mary, falling upon the third pile and bearing it away as her lawful spoils, "for I always get all the goats. Now my dolls can set up a milliner's shop and dry-goods store with all this stuff that Joyce has thrown away."

"You may take my new umbrella with you, if you want it, Joyce," said Jack. "I haven't used it half a dozen times since I got it Christmas, and you will want to put on style in Kentucky. Your old one is good enough for me to use out here in Plainsville."

"Do you want my blue spotted necktie, sister?" asked Holland, leaning against her and looking up into her face with an anxious little pucker on his forehead. "It's the best one I've got, but you may take it if you want to."

"And maybe--" began Mary, hesitatingly. She stopped an instant, a little struggle evidently going on in her mind. Then she began again, bravely: "Yes, I'll lend it to you if you want it. You may take my new rosebud sash. There!"

A queer little lump came into Joyce's throat as she thanked the children for their generous offers. She accepted the umbrella, but refused the spotted tie and rosebud sash, to the evident relief of their owners, who wanted to be generous, but were glad to be able to Keep the part of their wardrobes they most admired.

"It more than doubles the pleasure, doesn't it, mamma," said Joyce, "to have everybody take so much interest in your having a good time? I wonder if the other girls are having as much fun out of planning for their visit as I am."

"I doubt it," answered Mrs. Ware. "Elizabeth is an orphan, you know, and Eugenia Forbes, with all her wealth, is practically homeless, for there is little home-life in either a boarding-school or a big hotel."

Joyce looked around on the cheerful little group gathered near the lamp, and a sudden mist blurred her sight at thought of leaving them. She would not have exchanged the little brown house and what it held, just then, for a king's palace. Outside in the pitch-darkness of the night the rain beat against the window-panes like some poor beggar imploring to come in; and inside it was so cosy and bright with the warmth and cheer of home-loves and home-lights that Joyce was not sure, after all, that she could leave such a shelter even to be a guest at the Little Colonel's house party.

CHAPTER V.

BETTY REACHES THE "HOUSE BEAUTIFUL."

It was very early in the morning, while the dew was still on the meadows, that Betty fared forth on her pilgrimage. The old farm wagon that was to take her to the railroad station, two miles away, was drawn up to the door before five o'clock. Davy proudly held the reins while his father carried Betty's trunk down-stairs.

Poor, shabby, little, old leather trunk! It was not half full, for there had been small preparation for this visit. Betty had carefully folded the few gingham dresses she possessed, and the new blue and white lawn bought for her to wear to church. There were several st.i.tches to be taken in her plain cotton under-wear, and a b.u.t.ton to be sewed on her only white ruffled ap.r.o.n.

That was all that she could do to make herself ready, except to put her hair-ribbons and handkerchiefs smoothly into a little diamond-shaped box that had once held toilet soap. Betty felt rich in ribbons "to tie up her bonnie brown hair," for there were three bows the colour of her curls, and two of red, and one of delicate robin's-egg blue. The last was to wear with the new lawn, and, in order to keep it fresh and fine, it lay wrapped in tissue-paper all week, between the times of its Sunday wearings.

And the handkerchiefs--well, six of them were plain and white, and two had pictures stamped in the corners. One told the story of Red Ridinghood and the other had scenes from Cinderella outlined in blue.

They had been Davy's present to her the Christmas before, and he had bought them at Squire Jaynes's store with his own precious pennies.

That was all that Betty had intended to put into her trunk, but when they were in, there was still so much room that she decided to take her books and several of her chief treasures. "They will be safer," she said to herself, and she filled a box with cotton in which to pack some of her breakable keepsakes. She had hesitated some time about taking her sc.r.a.p-book, an old ledger on whose blank pages she had written many verses. She hardly dared call them poetry, and yet they were dear to her, because they were the outpourings of her lonely little heart.

All the children knew that she "made up rhymes," but only Davy had any knowledge of the old ledger. He could not understand all the verses she read to him about the wild flowers, and life and death and time, but they jingled pleasantly in his ears, and he made an attentive listener.

"I'll take it," she decided at last, slipping some loose pages in between the covers. "I may want to write something at Locust."

She paused long at the foot of her bed, trying to make up her mind about her G.o.dmother's picture, that hung there in a little frame of pine cones.

"I don't know whether to take it or not," she said to Davy, looking up lovingly at the Madonna of her dreams, whose sweet face had been her last greeting at night, and first welcome on waking, for several years.

"I hate to leave it behind, but I'll have my real G.o.dmother to look at while I'm gone, and it'll seem so nice to have this picture here to smile at me when I get back, as if she was glad I'd come home. I believe I'll leave it."

It was a solemn moment when Betty climbed into the wagon after her trunk had been lifted in at the back, and perched herself on the high spring seat, beside Davy and his father. The other children were drawn up in a line along the porch, to watch her go. She wore one of her every-day dresses of dark blue gingham, and her white sunbonnet, but the familiar little figure had taken on a new interest to them. They regarded her as some sort of a venturesome Columbus, about to launch on a wild voyage of discovery. None of them had ever been beyond Jaynes's Post-office in their journeyings, and the youngest had not seen even that much of the outside world.

Betty herself could not remember having been on a longer trip than to Livermore, a village ten miles away. There was an excited flutter in her throat as the wagon started forward with a jolt, and she realised that now she was looking her last on safe familiar scenes, and breaking loose from all safe familiar landmarks.

"Good-bye!" she cried again, looking back at the little group on the porch with tears in her eyes.

"Good-bye! Good-bye!" they called, in a noisy chorus, repeating the call like a brood of clacking guineas, until the wagon pa.s.sed out of sight down the lane. The road turned at the church. Betty leaned forward for one more look at the window, on whose sill she had pa.s.sed so many happy afternoons reading to Davy. The board was still leaning against the house, where she had propped it.

"Good-bye, dear old church," she said softly to herself.

They drove around the corner of the little neglected graveyard, where the headstones gleamed white in the morning sunshine, above the dark, glossy green of the myrtle vines. How peaceful and quiet it seemed. The dew still shone in tiny beads on the cobwebs, spun across the gra.s.s, a spicy smell of cedar boughs floated across the road to them, and a dove called somewhere in the distant woodlands. As they pa.s.sed, a wild rose hung over the gray pickets of the straggling old fence, and waved a spray of pale pink blossoms to them.

"Good-bye," she whispered, turning for one more look at the familiar headstones. They were like old friends; she had wandered among them so often. One held her gaze an instant, with its well-known marble hand, pointing the place in a marble book in which was carved one text. How often she had spelled the words, pointing out the deeply carven letters to Davy: "_Be ye also ready._"

She had a vague feeling that the headstones knew she was going away and would miss her. "Good-bye," she said to them, too, nodding the white sunbonnet gravely. It seemed a solemn thing to start on such a journey.

After leaving the church there was only one more place to bid good-bye, and that was the schoolhouse sitting through its lonely vacation time in a deserted playground, gone to weeds.

There was no time to spare at the station. Mr. Appleton tied the horses and hurried to have Betty's trunk checked. The shriek of the locomotive coming down the track made Betty turn cold. It was like a great demon thundering toward her. Davy edged closer to her, moved by the strange surroundings to ask a question.

"Say, Betty, ain't you afraid?"

"Yes," she confessed, squeezing the warm little hand in her own, which had suddenly seemed to turn to ice. "My heart is going b.u.mp-b.u.mp-b.u.mp like a scared wild rabbit's; but I keep saying over and over to myself what the python said. Don't you remember in Kaa's hunting? 'A brave heart and a courteous tongue, said he, they shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling.' It can't be such a very big jungle that I'm going into, and G.o.dmother will meet me in a few hours. Don't forget me, Davy, while I'm gone."

She stooped to give the little fellow a hug and a kiss on each dimpled cheek, for the train had stopped, and Mr. Appleton was waiting to shake hands and lift her up the steps. Betty stumbled into the first vacant seat she saw, and sat up primly, afraid to glance behind her. In her lap, tightly clasped by both hands, she held a little old-fashioned basket of brown willow. It had two handles and a lid with double flaps.

She carried it because she had no travelling-bag. Her lunch was in that, her pa.s.s, five nickels, and the Red Ridinghood handkerchief.

"You can let that be a sort of warning to you," said Mrs. Appleton, at parting, "not to get into conversation with strangers. Red Ridinghood never would have got into trouble if she hadn't stopped to tell the Wolf all she knew."