CHAPTER XIII
THE MIRACLE OF BLOSSOMING
THE beginning of Lent was the end of all the social gaieties and most ofthe girls who had flittered through the season with Lloyd fluttered awaylike a bevy of scattered butterflies to various resorts on the Floridacoast. Kitty departed to make her long-talked-of visit to Gay in SanAntonio, Katie Mallard went with an invalid aunt to Biloxi, and Lloydcame back to the country. She was almost as much alone as she had beenthat winter when she had not been allowed to return to Warwick Hallafter the Christmas vacation.
True, Allison was at home after her interesting trip abroad, with theMacIntyres, and Lloyd spent many hours at The Beeches. But RaleighClaiborne's sister from Washington was there on a visit part of thetime, and Raleigh himself made several flying trips, and althoughAllison's engagement made her doubly interesting to the younger girls,it seemed to rise up as a sort of wall between them and their oldintimacy. She had so many new interests now that she did not enter quiteso heartily into the old ones.
So it came about that Lloyd fell quite naturally into her former habitof dropping in to see Mrs. Bisbee and Mrs. Apwell and all the other oldladies, who welcomed her with open arms. One blowy afternoon in Marchshe took her embroidery and went to sit with Mrs. Bisbee awhile, besidethe window that Mrs. Walton had laughingly dubbed the "window inThrums." The old lady, growing chatty and confidential over herquilt-piecing, seemed so unusually companionable, that Lloyd remarked:
"It really seems as if I'm catching up to you all, Mrs. Bisbee. As I getoldah everybody else gets youngah. Why, this wintah mothah has been justlike a sistah. I had no idea she could be so much fun. We do everythingtogethah now. I help with the housekeeping so that she can hurry throughwith it early in the mawning and then we practise, piano and harp, orshe plays the accompaniments for my songs. And then we read Frenchawhile and we go for long walks and we discuss every subject undah thesun, just as Betty and I used to do. And we plan things to do in thedeliciously long cosy evenings--surprises, you know, for grandfathahand Papa Jack. I believe I'm enjoying this pah't of my yeah bettah thanthe first."
Mrs. Bisbee looked out of the window wistfully at nothing.
"That's the way that it used to be here when daughter was at home," shesighed. "Sometimes I think if I'd had the planning of the universe I'dhave fixed it differently. Just when your little girl is grown up to bea comfort and a joy, and the best company in the world, some man stepsin and takes her away from you. I had daughter to myself only one shortyear after she got through school. Then she married. Of course it wouldhave been selfish to have stood in the way of her happiness, yet--"
She shook her head with another sigh, and left the sentence unfinished."I have often wondered how I could have stood it if her marriage hadbeen an unhappy one, like poor Amy Cadwell's. You know her."
"Only slightly," answered Lloyd, recalling a face that always arousedher interest; a face with thin compressed lips and watchful defianteyes, that seemed to have grown so from the long guarding of a familyskeleton.
It was not gossip the way Mrs. Bisbee told the story, only the plainrecital of a sad bit of human history that had fallen under herobservation. The cloud of it rested on Lloyd's face as she listened.
"That's the worst thing about growing up," she exclaimed bitterly whenMrs. Bisbee paused, "the finding out that everybody isn't good and happyas I used to think they were. Lately, just these last few months thatI've been out in society I've heard so much of people's jealousies andrivalries and meannesses and insincerity, that I'd sometimes be temptedto doubt everybody, if it were not for my own family and some of thepeople out in this little old Valley that I've trusted all my life.
"There's Minnie Wayland, whose engagement was announced last month toMistah Maybrick. I don't see how she dares marry when her own fathah andmothah made such a failure of it, that they can't live togethah, andMistah Maybrick's wife got a divorce from him on account of somedreadful scandal the papahs were full of. I couldn't go up and wish herjoy when the othah girls did. She talked about it in such a flippantmattah of business way, as if millions atoned for everything. One of thegirls laughed at me for taking it so seriously, and said that matchesaren't made in heaven nowadays, and that I'd have to get ovah myold-fashioned Puritanical notions and ideals if I expected to keep upwith the sma'ht set. I thought for awhile that maybe it was only thesma'ht set who are that way, but what you've just told me about Mrs.Cadwell, and what I've heard lately about several families right in ourown little neighbahhood, shows that it's _all_ a bad old world, andthese yeahs I've been thinking it so good I've been blind and ignorant.I suppose it's for the best, but I'm sorry sometimes that my eyes havebeen opened."
Mrs. Bisbee sighed again at her vehemence, and then quite unexpectedlypiped up in a thin tremulous voice, with one of the songs of her youth.In a high minor key and full of quavers, it was so ridiculous that theyboth laughed.
"'I sat beneath a hollow tree, The blast it hollow blew. I thought upon the hollow world, And all its hollow crew. Ambition and its hollow schemes, The hollow hopes we follow, The world and all its hollow dreams-- All hollow, hollow, hollow!'"
"That's the way it seems to you now," she said. "It's the reaction. Butyou mustn't let it make you pessimistic. When you get to feeling likethat you'll have to do like old Abraham did, quit looking at all thesinners in Sodom, and hunt around for the ten good men."
A whole row of Sunday-school lessons rose up in Mrs. Bisbee's mind. Shehad taught a class for thirty years in the vine-covered stone churchwhose spire she could see from her window, and Lloyd was used to herstartling and unexpected application of Scripture texts.
"Or better still," she continued, "turn your back on entire Sodom, andlook away to the plains where the faithful pitched their tents. Theworld is full of that kind of people to-day as it was then, the faithfulwho never join themselves to the idols of the heathen, but who tendtheir flocks and live good peaceful lives, and in all their journeyings,wherever they go, _raise an altar to the Lord_.
"It's the marriages that are founded on _that_ rock that never fall,"she added reverently, her mind skipping from the tent-dwellers ofGenesis to the wise builder in the parables with the ease of longpractice. "'_And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the windsblew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upona rock._'"
"Sometimes just the wife's part is built on it. She's the only one thatraises the altar. Sometimes the man is the one. Of course that's betterthan all being on the sand, and saves many a marriage from being thewreck it would have been if they'd left God out of it altogether. There!I never did think it all out in words quite as straight and clear andconvincing to myself before. But I've often had the idea come to me whenI'd be sitting in church looking at old Judge Moore's white head in thefront pew, and thinking of the trouble _he'd_ had--the sorrow andaccidents and misfortune that have beat on _his_ house--and his faithstanding up bigger and stronger than ever. Even his wife's deathcouldn't shake it."
Here she paused to lean nearer the window and nod and smile at some onedriving past the house.
"It's Agnes Waring," she explained, as Lloyd looked up too late. "OrAgnes Bond, I should say. I never can remember to call her that,although she's been married over two years. Now _there's_ a happymarriage if ever there was one. The good old-fashioned sort like theJudge's, for they're both of the faithful. And do you know, my dear,"she continued lightly, "I shall always hold you responsible for that. Itwas your making such a picture out of Agnes at that Martha Washingtonaffair that brought her out of her shell and gave John Bond a chance todiscover her. Miss Sarah thinks so too. By the way, she was hereyesterday, and she told me that she has about consented to break uphousekeeping and go to live with Agnes. It's so lonely for her sincepoor Miss Marietta died."
"Yes, I know," said Lloyd softly, thinking of the happy release that hadcome to Miss Marietta only the week before.
"Now, there was another case," resumed Mrs. Bisb
ee. "Nobody who saw herlying there in that beautiful dress that was to have been her weddinggown, and with that wonderful smile lighting up her face, could doubtwhat sort of a foundation she and Murray Cathright built on. That was alove that outlasted time and reached past even death into eternityitself. So don't you go to doubting that it doesn't exist any more, mydear."
Lloyd made one more call on the way home, stopping in at the Apwalls'with a magazine which Mrs. Bisbee had asked her to leave. Oddly enoughthe conversation turned to the same subject that she and Mrs. Bisbee hadbeen discussing, but she went away in a very different mood from the onein which she left the first place. Old Mr. Apwall irritated her. He wasin one of his sprightly facetious humours, when he delighted in makingpersonal remarks in a teasing way.
"Well, my little lady," he began. "I hear you've had a whole string ofadmirers dangling in your wake this last year. Oh, you needn't deny it!"he added, shaking a finger at her in a way he considered playful. "We'veheard the gossip about that young Texas fellow and that man from theNorth who nearly wore out his private car coming down to see you everywhip-stitch and that old duck from Cincinnati that you refused. Refusedthem all! Oh, yes, you did, though. We heard about it. But you mustremember the story of the lass who went through the forest looking for astraight stick. She kept throwing them away and throwing them away,getting harder to please at every step, until she'd gone through thewhole forest, and had to pick up a crooked one at the last."
He laughed childishly at his own tale. "Look out that you don't get acrooked stick!"
Mrs. Apwall broke in sourly. "That's about all there is left lyingaround to choose from these days, to _my_ notion. But land sakes,Alexander, quit teasing the child. You talk as if all her chances aregone by and that she's doomed to be an old maid. The happiest lot ofall, _I_ say, for there's no man living but has some crook in him, andmost of 'em are all crookedness." She darted a warlike glance in hisdirection.
Lloyd left as soon as she could get away politely, wondering how theyhad heard so much of her affairs. She had refused both proposals, butshe didn't know that any one outside the family knew anything about it.She wondered now if she had been over particular, for the crook thatMrs. Apwall insisted was in every man was only a slight one in the caseof the owner of the private car, principally a matter of littlerefinements of speech and appearance which one had a right to expect ofa man in his position and whose lack argued to a dainty girl like Lloydsome corresponding coarseness of nature. She had seen the other manslightly intoxicated one night at a theatre party, and could never quiteforget the maudlin smile with which he poured out complimentary speechesby the wholesale.
The conversation at the Apwalls' brought back two very disagreeableoccasions that she did not care to remember, and she made up her mind asshe walked rapidly along towards home that it would be many a day beforeshe went back there. They always gave her a gloomy impression of life.
The roads were so muddy that she had to take to the railroad track,stepping from one cross-tie to another to avoid the sharp cindersbetween. Presently she found herself walking along the rail as she andBetty used to do on the way to school, balancing themselves withoutstretched arms and counting how many steps they could take withoutslipping off. That was the way she and Rob had taken their walk the weekbefore. It had been too muddy to go anywhere save along the track andthey had walked the cross-ties for two miles in the face of a keen Marchwind. It was soft and balmy to-day, fluttering her hair and skirts in aplayful way wholly unlike the boisterous flapping with which it hadushered in the month.
As she went along she peered into fence corners and up at the buddingbranches, happy over every sign of spring. If the roads were dry enoughby the end of the week she and Rob intended to take a long tramp throughTanglewood in search of wild flowers. Anemones, harebells andspiderwort, foxgloves and dog-tooth violets, she knew them all, and thehaunts where they came the earliest. She rarely gathered them, but wentfrom one hiding-place to another for a glimpse of their shy faces,welcoming them as she would old friends. Lloyd loved the woods like anIndian, and one of the most satisfactory things about Rob'scompanionship was that he enjoyed them in the same way. Often theytramped along, scarcely saying a word a mile, finding the vibrantsilences of the wood better than speech, and their mutual pleasure inthem sufficient. After the winter in town, which had been an unusuallycold and severe one, Lloyd longed for the beginning of spring, and fromthe call of the first robin and the budding of the first pussy-willow,spent as much time as possible out of doors.
April came in with a week of sunny days which hurried everything intoluxuriant leafage and bud. When Rob came over one warm day for his usualSunday afternoon walk, the whole world seemed so near the verge ofbursting into full bloom that the very air was aquiver with itshalf-whispered secrets. Faint delicious odours stole up from the moistearth and the green growing things that crowded up out of it. Even theold locusts, conscious of a hidden wealth of sweetness which was soon tomake a glory of their gnarled branches, nodded in sympathy with all thatwas young and riotous.
There were so many things to discover near at hand that Lloyd and Robsauntered about the place first, before starting farther afield. Therewere spring beauties covering the little knolls in the pasture, like afall of rosy snow. There were violets down by the ice-house, and earlycolumbines starting out from the crevices of the rockery, holding upslender stems, whereon by and bye their airy blossoms would poise like aflock of light-winged butterflies. Lloyd, happy over every tiny frondshe found unfolding itself in the fern bed, and every yellow dandelionthat added its mite of gold to the young year's coffers, was so absorbedin her quest that she did not notice any difference in Rob's manner.
He walked along beside her, saying little, but with the same air ofrepressed eagerness that the whole April day seemed to share, as if likethe locusts, he too was conscious of some inner wealth of bloom, somesecret happiness whose time for sharing with the spring had not yetcome. Once when he answered her enthusiastic discovery of a snowdropwith only an absent-minded monosyllable, she glanced up at himcuriously. There was such a light in his eyes and such an unwontedtenderness in his expression that she wondered what he could be thinkingabout.
Across the pasture they went, down through the orchard where thepeach-trees were turning pink and the clusters of tiny white plum budswere already calling the bees, and around again to the beech-grove atthe back of the house. It was a sweet flower-starred way, and Lloyd,bubbling over with the spirit of the hour, began to hum a happy littletune. Suddenly she stopped short in the path, turning her head slightlywith the alert motion of a young fawn.
"What is it that smells so delicious?" she demanded. "It's almostheavenly, it's so sweet." Then after another long indrawn breath, "I'dthink it was lilies-of-the-valley if it were any place but out heah onthe edge of the wood-lot. They _couldn't_ be way out heah. It must besome rare kind of wild flowah we've nevah discovered."
Leaving the path, they both began searching through the underbrush,pushing aside the dead leaves, and stooping now and then to examine someplant that did not seem entirely familiar.
"I'm positive it's a _white_ flowah," declared Lloyd, closing her eyesand drawing in another breath of the faint, elusive fragrance. "Only awhite flowah could have such an ethereal odah. It makes you think ofwhite things, doesn't it? Snow crystals and angel wings! Oh, they _are_lilies-of-the-valley!" she cried the next instant, stooping over a bedof green from which Rob was raking the dead leaves with a stick.
"And don't you remembah now," she cried, her eyes like eager stars asshe recalled the incident, "_we_ planted them heah ourselves, yeahs ago.I remembah digging up a whole apronful of some thrifty green things outof the flowah bed undah yoah mothah's window and lugging them ovah homeall the way from Oaklea. You planted them in this place for me, becausewe thought we'd build a play-house heah, but aftahwards we changed ourminds and built it by the grape-vine swing."
"It seems to me I do have a faint recollection of something of thatsort,"
Rob answered. "I know I had a row with Unc' Andy once for diggingup some of his pet borders and transplanting them over here, but Ididn't know they were lilies."
"I suppose we didn't know because we nevah happened to wandah this wayaftahward when they were in bloom," she continued, seating herselfbeside them and parting the thickest sheaths of green to reveal theperfect white flowers hidden away among them. Throwing aside her hat,she bent over to thrust her face into their midst, revelling in thepurity and exquisite fragrance.
"There's nothing like them!" she exclaimed, so intent on the beauty ofthe tiny white bells that she did not see the expression with which Robwas looking down on her. There was a likeness between the two, he wasthinking, the white-gowned girl and the white, white blossoms. Theyseemed spiritually akin. She touched one of the racemes softly.
"It's a miracle, isn't it!" she said in a low, reverent tone.
"A miracle that anything so sweet and white and perfect can suddenlycome into being like this. It must have made those old lily bulbs wondahat themselves the first time they unfolded and woke up to find that sucha heavenly thing had happened to them,--their hearts filled with thisunearthly beauty and sweetness. Don't you suppose it made the wholeworld seem different, that they're not yet done wondering ovah thesurprise and joy of it?"
She said it with a shy side-glance as if half-afraid he would laugh atsuch a childish fancy. Then she looked up startled, at the unexpectedintensity of his answer.
"I _know_ it made the whole world different," he said in such a strangeexultant voice that she hardly knew it for Rob's. Dropping to one kneebeside her he singled out one of the lilies just beginning to burstfrom its sheath, and folded it close shut again in its green leaves.
"Look!" he said in the same exultant voice. "That's the way I've beenfor years, with something hidden away in my heart, unrecognized atfirst, then its sweetness only half-guessed at. And I kept it hid, and Ithought never to tell you. But this morning in church it happened to_me_, this miracle of blossoming. I was sitting looking at you as I'vedone a thousand times before, and all of a sudden it came over me, justas sweet and unexpected as the bursting of these lilies, the knowledgethat life is dear and the world beautiful because _you_ are in it. Ithink I've always held the thought of you in my heart, Lloyd, but it hascome to such full flower now, dear, I couldn't hide it from you long,even if I tried. It seems to me now that all of my life must have been agradual growing up for this one thing--to love you!"
Then his face, glowing with an eager gladness that almost transfiguredit, paled a little before the mute misery in hers.
"Oh, Rob!" she stammered, finding it hard to believe that she had heardaright. "_Don't_ tell me that! I've always loved you deahly, but not_that_ way." Then as she saw all the light fade out of his eyes and hisface settle into grim stern lines, she reached out both hands crying,"Oh, you deah old Bobby! I wouldn't have had it happen for the world! Ican't _beah_ to hurt you this way!"
Her eyes filled and two big tears splashed down on the hands she hadthrust impulsively into his. With a gentleness that stirred her evenmore than his words had done, he bent and touched them with his lips.
"Never mind, dear," he said with a great tenderness that brought a sobup into her throat. "Don't think of it any more if it makes you unhappy.If you could have loved me it would have been heaven, but as you can'twe won't talk about it any more. And--I still have my miracle. Nothingcan change that."
She could not answer, the tears came crowding so fast, and as theywalked back towards the house together all the brightness seemed to havedropped out of the April day. The sweetness of the lilies still followedthem, however, and when she glanced around, wondering why, she saw thatRob still held the one he had knelt to pick for her. He twirled itabsently in his fingers, but as they parted at the steps he held it outto her with a smile so tender and full of understanding, that anothersob came up in her throat and she took it without a word.
The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding Page 16