Chapter 7

“By George, we're glad to get here,” was his greeting. “Morson's been cursing our hospitality for the last three miles. Grandpa, this is my friend Morson--Jack Morson, you've heard me speak of him; and this is Bland Diggs, you know of him, too.”

“Why, to be sure, to be sure,” cried the Major, heartily, as he held out both hands. “You're welcome, gentlemen, as welcome as Christmas--what more can I say? But come in, come in to the fire. Cupid, the glasses!”

“Ah, the ladies first,” suggested Dan, lightly; “grace before meat, you know. So here you are, grandma, cap and all. And Virginia;--ye gods!--is this little Virginia?”

His laughing eyes were on her as she stood, tall and lovely, beneath a Christmas garland, and with the laughter still in them, they blazed with approval of her beauty. “Oh, but do you know, how did you do it?” he demanded with his blithe confidence, as if it mattered very little how his words were met.

“It wasn't any trouble, believe me,” responded Virginia, blushing, “not half so much trouble as you took to tie your neckerchief.”

Dan's hand went to his throat. “Then I may presume that it is mere natural genius,” he exclaimed.

“Genius, to grow tall?”

“Well, yes, just that--to grow tall,” then he caught sight of Betty, and held out his hand again. “And you, little comrade, you haven't grown up to the world, I see.”

Betty laughed and looked him over with the smile the Major loved. “I content myself with merely growing up to you,” she returned.

“Up to me? Why, you barely reach my shoulder.”

“Well, up to the greater part of you, at least.”

“Ah, up to my heart,” said Dan, and Betty coloured beneath the twinkle in his eyes.

The colour was still in her face when the Major came out, with Mrs. Ambler on his arm, and led the way to supper.

“All of us are hungry, and some of us have a day's ride behind us,” he remarked, as, after the rector's grace, he stood waving the carving-knife above the roasted turkey. “I'd like to know how often during the last hour you've thought of this turkey, Mr. Morson?”

“It has had a fair share of my thoughts, I'm forced to admit, Major,” responded Jack Morson, readily. He was a hearty, light-haired young fellow, with a girlish complexion and pale blue eyes, as round as marbles. “As fair a share as the apple toddy has had of Diggs's, I'll be bound.”

“Apple toddy!” protested Diggs, turning his serious face, flushed from the long ride, upon the Major. “I was too busy thinking we should never get here; and we were lost once, weren't we, Beau?” he asked of Dan.

“Well, I for one am safely housed for the night, doctor,” declared the rector, with an uneasy glance through the window, “and I trust that Mrs. Blake's reproach will melt before the snow does. But what's that about being lost, Dan?”

“Oh, we got off the road,” replied Dan; “but I gave Prince Rupert the rein and he brought us in. The sense that horse has got makes me fairly ashamed of going to college in his place; and I may as well warn you, Mr. Blake, that when I get ready to go to Heaven, I shan't seek your guidance at all--I'll merely nose Prince Rupert at the Bible and give him his head.”

“It's a comfort to know, at least, that you won't be trusting to your own deserts, my boy,” responded the rector, who dearly loved his joke, as he helped himself to yellow pickle.

“Let us hope that the straight and narrow way is a little clearer than the tavern road to-night,” said Champe. “I'm afraid you'll have trouble getting back, Governor.”

“Afraid!” took up the Major, before the Governor could reply. “Why, where are your manners, my lad? It will be no ill wind that keeps them beneath our roof. We'll make room for you, ladies, never fear; the house will stretch itself to fit the welcome, eh, Molly?”

Mrs. Lightfoot, looking a little anxious, put forward a hearty assent; but the Governor laughed and threw back the Major's hospitality as easily as it was proffered.

“I know that your welcome's big enough to hold us, my dear Major,” he said; “but Hosea's driving us, you see, and he could take us along the turnpike blindfold. Why, he actually discovered in passing just before the storm that somebody had dug up a sugar berry bush from the corner of your old rail fence.”

“And we really must get back,” insisted Mrs. Ambler, “we haven't even fixed the servants' Christmas, and Betty has to fill the stockings for the children in the quarters.”

“Then if you will go, go you shall,” cried the Major, as heartily as he had pressed his invitation. “You shall get back, ma'am, if I have to go before you with a shovel and clear the snow away. So just a bit more of this roast pig, just a bit, Governor. My dear Miss Lydia, I beg you to try that spiced beef--and you, Mr. Bill?--Cupid, Mr. Bill will have a piece of roast pig.”

By the time the Tokay was opened, the Major had grown very jolly, and he began to exchange jokes with the Governor and the rector. Mr. Bill and the doctor, neither of whom could have told a story for his life, listened with a kind of heavy gravity; and the young men, as they rattled off a college tale or two, kept their eyes on Betty and Virginia.

Betty, leaning back in her high mahogany chair, and now and then putting in a word with the bright effusion which belonged to her, gave ear half to the Major's anecdotes, and half to a jest of Jack Morson's. Before her branched a silver candelabrum, and beyond it, with the light in his face, Dan was sitting. She watched him with a frank curiosity from eyes, where the smile, with which she had answered the Major, still lingered in a gleam of merriment. There was a puzzled wonder in her mind that Dan--the Dan of her childhood--should have become for her, of a sudden, but a strong, black-haired stranger from whom she shrank with a swift timidity. She looked at Champe's high blue-veined forehead and curling brown hair; he was still the big boy she had played with; but when she went back to Dan, the wonder returned with a kind of irritation, and she felt that she should like to shake him and have it out between them as she used to do before he went away. What was the meaning of it? Where the difference? As he sat across from her, with his head thrown back and his eyes dark with laughter, her look questioned him half humorously, half in alarm. From his broad brow to his strong hand, playing idly with a little heap of bread crumbs, she knew that she was conscious of his presence--with a consciousness that had quickened into a living thing.

To Dan, himself, her gaze brought but the knowledge that her smile was upon him, and he met her question with lifted eyebrows and perplexed amusement. What he had once called “the Betty look” was in her face,--so kind a look, so earnest yet so humorous, with a sweet sane humour at her own bewilderment, that it held his eyes an instant before they plunged back to Virginia--an instant only, but long enough for him to feel the thrill of an impulse which he did not understand. Dear little Betty, he thought, tenderly, and went back to her sister.

The next moment he was telling himself that “the girl was a tearing beauty.” He liked that modest droop of her head and those bashful soft eyes, as if, by George, as if she were really afraid of him. Or was it Champe or Jack Morson that she bent her bewitching glance upon? Well, Champe, or Morson, or himself, in a week they would all be over head and ears in love with her, and let him win who might. It was mere folly, of course, to break one's heart over a girl, and there was no chance of that so long as he had his horses and the bull pups to fall back upon; but she was deucedly pretty, and if he ever came to the old house to live it would be rather jolly to have her about. He would be twenty-one by this time next year, and a man of twenty-one was old enough to settle down a bit. In the meantime he laughed and met Virginia's eye, and they both blushed and looked away quickly.

But when they left the dining room an hour later, it was not Virginia that Dan sought. He had learned the duties of hospitality in the Major's school, and so he sat down beside Miss Lydia and asked her about her window garden, while Jack Morson made desperate love to his beautiful neighbour. Once, indeed, he drew Betty aside for an instant, but it was only to whisper: “Look here, you'll be real nice to Diggs, won't you? He's bashful, you know, and besides he's awfully poor, and works like the devil. You make him enjoy his holidays, and I--well, yes, I'll let that fox get away next week, I declare I will.”

“All right,” agreed Betty, “it's a bargain. Mr. Diggs shall have a merry Christmas, and the fox shall have his life. You'll keep faith with me?”

“Sworn,” said Dan, and he went back to Miss Lydia, while Betty danced a reel with young Diggs, who fell in love with her before he was an hour older. The terms cost him his heart, perhaps, but there was a life at stake, and Betty, who had not a touch of the coquette in her nature, would have flirted open-eyed with the rector could she have saved a robin from the shot. As for Diggs, he might have been a family portrait or a Christmas garland for all the sentiment she gave him.

When she went upstairs some hours later to put on her wraps, she had forgotten, indeed, that Diggs or his emotion was in existence. She tied on her blue hood with the swan's-down, and noticed, as she did so, that the white rose was gone from her hair. “I hope I lost it after supper,” she thought rather wistfully, for it was becoming; and then she slipped into her long cloak and started down again. It was not until she reached the bend in the staircase, where the tall clock stood, that she looked over the balustrade and saw Dan in the hall below with the white rose in his hand.

She had come so softly that he had not heard her step. The light from the candelabra was full upon him, and she saw the half-tender, half-quizzical look in his face. For an instant he held the white rose beneath his eyes, then he carefully folded it in his handkerchief and hid it in the pocket of his coat. As he did so, he gave a queer little laugh and went quickly back into the panelled parlour, while Betty glowed like a flower in the darkened bend of the staircase.

When they called her and she came down the bright colour was still in her face, and her eyes were shining happily under the swan's-down border of her hood. “This little lady isn't afraid of the cold,” said the Major, as he pinched her cheeks. “Why, she's as warm as a toast, and, bless my soul, if I were thirty years younger, I'd ride twenty miles tonight to catch a glimpse of her in that bonny blue hood. Ah, in my day, men were men, sir.”

Dan, who had come back from escorting Miss Lydia to the carriage, laughed and held out his arms.

“Let me carry you, Betty; I'll show grandpa that there's still a man alive.”

“No, sir, no,” said Betty, as she stood on tiptoe and held her cheek to the Major. “You haven't a chance when your grandfather's by. There, I'll let you carry the sleeping draught for Aunt Pussy; but my flounces, no, never!” and she ran past him and slipped into the carriage beside Mrs. Ambler and Miss Lydia.

In a moment Virginia came out under an umbrella that was held by Jack Morson, and the carriage rolled slowly along the drive, while the young men stood, bareheaded, in the falling snow.

“Keep a brave heart, Morson,” said Champe, with a laugh, as he ran back into the house, where the Major waited to bar the door, “remember, you've known her but three hours, and stand it like a man. Well I'm off to bed,” and he lighted his candle and, with a gay “good night,” went whistling up the stair.

In Dan's bedroom, where he had crowded for the holidays, he found his cousin, upon the hearth-rug, looking abstractedly into the flames.

As Champe entered he turned, with the poker in his hand, and spoke out of the fulness of his heart:--

“She's a beauty, I declare she is.”

Champe broke short his whistling, and threw off his coat.

“Well, I dare say she was fifty years ago,” he rejoined gravely.

“Oh, don't be an utter ass; you know I mean Virginia.”

“My dear boy, I had supposed Miss Lydia to be the object of your attentions. You mustn't be a Don Juan, you know, you really mustn't. Spare the sex, I entreat.”

Dan aimed a blow at him with a boot that was lying on the rug. “Shut up, won't you,” he growled.

“Well, Virginia is a beauty,” was Champe's amiable response. “Jack Morson swears Aunt Emmeline's picture can't touch her. He's writing to his father now, I don't doubt, to say he can't live without her. Go down, and he'll read you the letter.”

Dan's face grew black. “I'll thank him to mind his own business,” he grumbled.

“Oh, he thinks he's doing it.”

“Well, his business isn't either of the Ambler girls, and I'll have him to know it. What right has he got, I'd like to know, to come up here and fall in love with our neighbours.”

“Oh, Beau, Beau! Why, it was only last week you ran him away from Batt Horsford's daughter. Are you going in for a general championship?”

“The devil! Sally Horsford's a handsome girl, and a good girl, too; and I'll fight any man who says she isn't. By George, a woman's a woman, if she is a stableman's daughter!”

“Bravo!” cried Champe, with a whistle, “there spoke the Lightfoot.”

“She's a good girl,” repeated Dan, furiously, as he flung the other boot at his cousin. Champe caught the boot, and carefully set it beside the door. “Well, she's welcome to be, as far as I'm concerned,” he replied calmly. “Turn not your speaking eye upon me. I harbour no dark intent, Sir Galahad.”

“Damn Sir Galahad!” said Dan, and blew out the light.

II

BETTY DREAMS BY THE FIRE

Betty, lying back in the deep old carriage as it rolled through the storm, felt a glow at her heart as if a lamp were burning there, shut in from the night. Above the wind and the groaning of the wheels, she heard Hosea calling to the horses, but the sound reached her through muffled ears.

“Git along dar!” cried Hosea, with sudden spirit, “dar ain' no oats dis side er home, en dar ain' no co'n, nurr. Git along dar! 'Tain' no use a-mincin'. Git along dar!”

The snow beat softly on the windows, and the Governor's profile was relieved, fine and straight, against the frosted glass. “Are you asleep, daughter?” he asked, turning to where the girl lay in her dark corner.

“Asleep!” She came back with a start, and caught his hand above the robe in her demonstrative way. “Why, who can sleep on Christmas Eve? there's too much to do, isn't there, mamma? Twenty stockings to fill and I don't know how many bundles to tie up. Oh, no, I shan't sleep tonight.”

“We might get up early to-morrow and do them,” suggested Virginia, nodding in her pink hood.

“You, at least, must go to bed, dear,” insisted Mrs. Ambler. “Betty and I will fix the things.”

“Indeed, you shall go to bed, mamma,” said Betty, sternly. “Papa and I shall make Christmas this year. You'll help me, won't you, papa?”

“Well, my dear, I don't see how I can help myself,” returned the Governor; “I wasn't born to be the father of a Betty for nothing.”

“Get along dar!” sang out Hosea again. “'Tain' no use a-mincin', gemmun. Dar ain' no fiddlin' roun'. Git along dar!”

Miss Lydia had fallen asleep, with her head on her breast, but the sound aroused her, and she opened her eyes and sat up very straight.

“Why, I declare I'd almost dropped off,” she said. “Are we nearly there, Peyton?”

“I think so,” replied the Governor, “but the snow's so thick I can't see;” he opened the window and put out his head. “Are we nearly there, Hosea?”

“We des done pas' de clump er cedars, suh,” yelled Hosea through the storm. “I'ud a knowd 'em ef dey'd come a-struttin' down de road--dey cyarn fool me. Den we got ter pas' de wil' cher'y and de gap in de fence, en dar we are.”

“Yes, we're nearly there,” said the Governor, as he drew in his head, and Miss Lydia slept again until the carriage turned into the drive and stopped before the portico.

Uncle Shadrach, in the open doorway, was grinning with delight. “Ef'n de snow had er kep' you, dar 'ouldn't a been no Christmas for de res' er us,” he declared.

“Oh, the snow couldn't keep us, Shadrach,” returned the Governor, as he gave him his overcoat, and set himself to unfastening his wife's wraps. “We were too anxious to get home. There, Julia, you go to bed, and leave Betty and myself to manage things. Don't say I can't do it. I tell you I've been Governor of Virginia, and I'll not be daunted by an empty stocking. Now go away, and you, too, Virginia--you're as sleepy as a kitten. Miss Lydia, shall I take Mrs. Lightfoot's mixture to Miss Pussy, or will you?”

Miss Lydia took the pitcher, and Betty put her arm about her mother and led her upstairs, holding her hand and kissing it as she went. She was always lavish with little ways of love, but to-night she felt tenderer than ever--she felt that she should like to take the world in her arms and hold it to her bosom. “Dearest, sweetest,” she said, and her voice was full and tremulous, though still with its crisp brightness of tone. It was as if she caressed with her whole being, with those hidden possibilities of passion which troubled her yet, only as the vibration of strong music, making her joy pensive and her sadness sweet. She felt that she was walking in a pleasant and vivid dream; she was happy, she could not tell why; nor could she tell why she was sorrowful.

In Mrs. Ambler's room they found Mammy Riah, awaiting her mistress's return.

“Put her to bed, Mammy,” she said; “she is all chilled by the drive,” and she gave her mother over to the old negress, and ran down again to the dining room, where the Governor was standing surrounded by the Christmas litter.

“Do you expect to straighten out all these things, daughter?” he asked hopelessly.

“Why, there's hardly anything left to do,” was Betty's cheerful assurance. “You just sit down at the table and put the nuts into the toes of those stockings, and I'll count out these print frocks.”

The Governor obediently sat down and went to work. “I am moved to offer thanks that we are not as the beasts that have four legs,” he remarked thoughtfully. “I shouldn't care to fill stockings for quadrupeds, Betty.”

“Why, you goose, there's only one stocking for each child.”

“Ah, but with four feet our expectations might be doubled,” suggested the Governor. “You can't convince me that it isn't a merciful providence, my dear.”

When the stockings were filled and the packages neatly tied up and separated, Uncle Shadrach came with a hamper, and Betty went out to the kitchen to prepare for the morning gathering of the field hands and their families. Returning after the work was over, she lingered a moment in the path to the house, looking far across the white country. The snow had ceased, and a single star was shining, through a rift in the scudding clouds, straight overhead. From the northwest the wind blew hard, and the fleecy covering on the ground was fast freezing a foot deep in ice. With a shiver she drew her cloak about her and ran indoors and upstairs to where Virginia lay asleep in the high, white bed.

In the great brick fireplace the logs had fallen apart, and she softly pushed them together again as she threw on a knot of resinous pine. The blaze shot up quickly, and blowing out the candle upon the bureau, she undressed by the firelight, crooning gently as she did so in a voice that was lower than the singing flames. With the glow on her bared arms and her hair unbound upon her shoulders, she sat close against the chimney; and while Virginia slept in the tester bed, went dreaming out into the night.

At first her dreams went back into her childhood, and somehow, she knew not why, she could not bring back her childhood but Dan came with it. She fancied herself in all kinds of impossible places, but she had no sooner got safely into them than she looked up and Dan was there before her, standing very still and laughing at her with his eyes. It was the same thing even when she was a baby. Her earliest memory was of a May morning when they took her out into a field of buttercups, and told her that she might pluck her arms full if she could, and then, as she stretched out her little hands and began to gather very fast, she looked across to where the waving yellow buttercups stood up against the blue spring sky. That memory had always been her own before; but now, when she went back to it, she knew that all the time she had been gathering buttercups for Dan. And she had plucked faster and faster only that she might have a bigger bunch for him when the gathering was done. She saw herself working bonnetless in the sunshine, her baby face red, her lips breathless, working so hard, she did not know for whom. Oh, how funny that he should have been somewhere all the time!

And again on the day when they gave her her first doll, and she let it fall and cried her heart out over its broken pink face. She knew, at last, that somewhere in that ugly town Dan had dropped his toy; and it was for that she was crying, not for her own poor doll. Yes, all her life she had had two griefs to weep for, and two joys to be glad over. She had been really a double self from her babyhood up--from her babyhood up! It had been always up, up, up--like a lark that rises to the sun. She had all her life been rising to the sun, and she was warmed at last.

Then she asked herself if it were happiness, after all, this new restlessness of hers. The melancholy of the early spring was there--the roving impulse that comes on April afternoons when the first buds are on the trees and the air is keen with the smell of the newly turned earth. She felt that it was time for the spring to come again; she wanted to walk alone in the woods and to watch the swallows flying from the north. And again she wanted only to lie close upon the hearth and to hear the flames leap up the chimney. One of her selves cried to be up and roaming; the other to turn over on the rug and sleep again.

But gradually her thoughts returned to him, and she went over, bit by bit, what he had said last evening, asking herself if he had meant much at this time, or little at another. It seemed to her that she found new meanings now in things that she had once overlooked. She read words in his eyes which he had never spoken; and, one by one, she brought back each sentence, each look, each gesture, holding it up to her remembrance, and laying it aside to give place to the next. Oh, there were so many, so many!

And then from the past her dreams went groping out into the future, becoming dimmer, and shaping themselves into unreal forms. Scattered visions came drifting through her mind,--of herself in romantic adventures, and of Dan--always of Dan--appearing like the prince in the fairy tale, at the perilous moment. She saw herself on the breast of a great river, borne, while she stretched her hands at a white rose-bush blooming in the clouds, to a cataract which she could not see, though she heard its thunder far ahead. She tried to call, but no sound came, for the water filled her mouth. The river went on and on, and the falling of the cataract was in her ears, when she felt Dan's arm about her, and saw his eyes laughing at her above the waters.

“Betty!” called Virginia, suddenly, rising on her elbow and rubbing her eyes. “Betty, is it morning?”

Betty awoke with a cry, and stood up in the firelight.

“Oh, no, not yet,” she answered.

“What are you doing? Aren't you coming to bed?”

“I--I was just thinking,” stammered Betty, twisting her hair into a rope; “yes, I'm coming now,” and she crossed the room and climbed into the bed beside her sister.

“I believe I fell asleep by the fire,” she said, as she turned over.

III

DAN AND BETTY