The Little Colonel's House Party Part 10

The others could not hear what pa.s.sed between the two. Eugenia coaxed and wheedled and sneered by turns, and finally Lloyd yielded, and they all started in. All but Betty. She waited in the lane alone, riding up and down, up and down, for ages it seemed to her, waiting for them to come back.

In reality it was not quite an hour that she kept her solitary vigil in the lane. As she rode back and forth she could catch glimpses of Eugenia's pink dress inside the tent, where they were all gathered around the old fortune-teller. Now and then she heard voices and laughter, and it gave her such a lonely, left-out feeling that she could scarcely keep back the tears. She knew that the others thought she was fussy and overparticular, and that helped to make her thoroughly uncomfortable.

The fretful wail of a sick baby sounded at intervals from the tent. The banjo-playing had stopped on their arrival. It was nearly noon when the six children came straggling out of the tent.

"I wouldn't have missed it for anything!" said Eugenia, triumphantly.

"Betty was a goose not to go, wasn't she? Why, Betty, she told me my whole past, and even described the three girls I go with at school. I am to have a long life and lots of money, and to be married twice. And she told me to beware of a fleshy, dark person with black eyes, who is jealous of me and will try to do me harm."

"What did she tell you, Joyce?" asked Betty, eagerly, feeling that she had missed the great opportunity of her life for lifting the veil that hid her future.

"She said that I had been across a big body of water and was going again, but the rest was a lot of stuff that I didn't believe and can't remember."

"She didn't give me a dollar's worth of fortune," complained Rob. "Not by a long shot." He had paid his own way and now thought regretfully of the two circuses to which the squandered dollar might have admitted him.

"Let's not tell anybody we've been here," suggested Eugenia as they started homeward. "It will make it so much more romantic, to keep it a secret. We can wait and see what comes true, and tell each other years afterward."

"But I always tell mothah everything," cried the Little Colonel, in surprise. "She would enjoy hearing the funny fortunes the old woman told us, and I'm suah if she knew how sick that poah baby is she'd send it something. She is always helpin' poah people."

"But I have a special reason for keeping it a secret," urged Eugenia.

"Promise not to say anything about it for awhile anyhow. Wait till I am ready to go home."

"Why?" asked Lloyd, with a puzzled expression.

"She's afraid for G.o.dmother to know," said Betty, unable to control her tongue any longer, and still smarting with the recollection of some of the things with which Eugenia had answered her refusal to go into the camp with them.

"It is no such a thing!" cried Eugenia. "It was all right for us to go, and I've a private reason of my own for not saying anything about it for awhile. It is a very little thing to ask, and I'm sure that, as a guest of Lloyd's, it is a very little thing for her to do, to respect my wishes that much."

"Oh, of course, if you put it that way," said Lloyd, "I'll not say anything about it till you tell me that I can."

"You boys don't mind promising, either, do you?" asked Eugenia, flas.h.i.+ng a smile of her black eyes at each one in turn.

"Cross your hearts," she cried, laughing, as they gave their promise, "and swear 'Really truly, blackly, bluely, lay me down and cut me in twoly,' that you won't tell."

Joyce laughingly followed the boys' example, and Eugenia gave a significant smile toward Betty, riding on alone in dignified silence.

"Then it is all right," she exclaimed, loud enough for her to hear, "that is, if Miss Goody-goody doesn't feel it her duty to run and tell."

Betty was too angry to make any answer. She rode on with her cheeks burning and her head held high. Mrs. Sherman was sitting in the wide, cool hall when the little party stopped at the steps. The boys had ridden down the avenue, too, and dismounted to speak to her.

"I have left invitations for you all to come to dinner to-night," she said, as Malcolm and Keith came up to shake hands. "Your Aunt Allison has consented to play fortune-teller for us. Have you ever had your fortune told, Rob? You are to come, too."

"Yes, once," answered Rob, cautiously, catching a warning look from Eugenia. "It wasn't very satisfactory, though, and I'll be glad to try it again."

Such a flush had spread over the Little Colonel's face that Mrs. Sherman noticed it. "I am afraid you have ridden too far in this noonday heat, little daughter," she said. "You'd better go up-stairs and bathe your face."

The boys took their leave, and Lloyd escaped from her mother's watchful eyes to follow her advice. When she came down to lunch, the flush was gone from her cheeks, but there was an uncomfortable p.r.i.c.king of her conscience that stayed with her all that afternoon, and deepened steadily after Miss Allison's arrival.

CHAPTER IX.

HER SACRED PROMISE.

The fortune-telling began immediately after dinner. Miss Allison sat one side of a screen, and one by one the palms were thrust through a narrow opening for her to examine. Mrs. Sherman sat beside her, so neither of them saw the amused glances the children exchanged behind the screen, whenever her prophecies contradicted what the old gypsy had told them.

"I can judge of your chief characteristics by your hands," she said, "and it is wonderful how much palmistry reveals in that way; but I shall have to draw on my imagination for your future fortunes." This she did in such a bright amusing way that screams of laughter went up from behind the screen, and the hands she held often shook with merriment.

Not having had the experience of the gypsy tent, Betty awaited her turn with more interest than the others, and thrust her little brown hand through the opening, half afraid. She wondered what secrets it would tell Miss Allison, who, in addition to all the pleasant, complimentary things she had told, had added some very plain truths. Eugenia's hand, she said, showed its owner to be extravagant and wilful; Malcolm's, vain and overbearing; Keith's, disorderly; and Rob's, lacking in judgment.

Miss Allison held Betty's hand a moment, not certain to whom it belonged, although she might have guessed, considering how brown and hardened by work it was. "Too sensitive and too imaginative by far," she said. "But I like this little hand. It will always be faithful in little things as well as big, and will keep its promises to the utmost. It is a hand that can be trusted."

Betty's face shone. What Miss Allison had said pleased her more than the fortune which followed, although it foretold a long life full of as many interesting happenings as if she had Aladdin's wonderful lamp to use as she chose. She looked at her hand with a new interest after she had withdrawn it from the screen, and Keith found her studying it again after the fortune-telling was done, and the others had gone into the drawing-room.

Eugenia sat at the piano, Lloyd tw.a.n.ged on the harp, while Joyce tuned her mandolin and Malcolm his banjo. Rob lolled in an open window, listening, and beating time with both feet. Mrs. Sherman and Miss Allison were down at the far end of the wide porch, where the moonlight was stealing through the vines and s.h.i.+mmering on the floor.

It was on the porch steps that Keith found Betty looking at her hands again, as they lay spread out on her lap, and studying their lines by moonlight. He sat down beside her.

"How does your Aunt Allison know?" she asked, without looking up. "It seems like some sort of witches' work to me, the way she guessed things about the rest of you; and I suppose it's just as true what she said about me,--at least the part about being too sensitive and imaginative is true, I know. Cousin Hetty says I go about with my head in the clouds half the time. I would love to think that the other part is true, too.

She said it in such a sweet solemn sort of a way, as if she laid some kind of a spell on my hand that was not to be broken. 'It will keep its promises to the utmost,' she said, and I feel that it will have to do it now, just because she said so."

"That is Aunt Allison's way," answered Keith. "n.o.body knows how much she has helped Malcolm and me by giving us these, and expecting us to live up to them." He touched a little badge on the lapel of his coat, as he spoke. It was a tiny flower of white enamel, with a little diamond in the centre, like a drop of dew.

"What is that for?" asked Betty, curiously. "I have been wondering why you and your brother both wear them."

"Aunt Allison gave them to us. She calls us her two little knights, and this is the badge of our knighthood, 'wearing the white flower of a blameless life,' It began one time when we were out at grandmother's all winter. We gave a benefit for a little tramp, who came very near being burned to death in a cabin on the place. We had tableaux, you know, and Malcolm and I were knights in one of them."

"Oh, I know," interrupted Betty, eagerly. "I've seen your picture taken in that costume, and it is lovely."

"And then Aunt Allison explained all about King Arthur and his Round Table, and gave us the motto: 'Live pure, speak truth, right the wrong, honour the king, else wherefore born?'"

Betty repeated it softly. "How lovely!" she exclaimed, in a low tone.

All the instruments were going now in the drawing-room,--harp, mandolin, piano, and banjo, and the music floated out sweetly on the night air to the earnest little couple on the steps. And the music, and the moonlight, and Betty's sympathetic little face, made it easy for Keith to grow confidential just then, and speak of things that usually make boys shy. He told her of his ambition to live up to his knightly motto, and of some of his boyish efforts to right the wrong in the big world about him, and all that he hoped to do when he was grown, and was free to use the money his grandfather had left him.

"I wish I could be a knight," sighed Betty to herself, moved to large ambitions by the boy's words, and discontented with her own small sphere. How manly he looked in the moonlight, his handsome face aglow with the thought of his n.o.ble purposes!

"It's funny," said Keith, looking down at her, "you're the only person that I ever talked to about such things, but Aunt Allison. You seem to understand in the same way that she does. I believe you'd have made a good knight yourself if you had lived in those days, because that is one of the things they had to vow, to keep a promise to the utmost."

Betty smiled happily, but made no answer. Rob joined them just then, and they fell to talking of childish things again,--games and pets, and things they had done, and places they had been. Next morning in her "Good times" book, Betty carefully wrote every word she could remember that Keith had said the evening before, about knights and knightly deeds. It was a half-hour that she loved to think about.

Miss Allison had invited them all to a picnic at the old mill on the following day. They were to go in the afternoon and come back by moonlight. It was not quite four o'clock when Mrs. Sherman stepped into the carriage at the door, followed by Eliot with an armful of wraps, which might be needed later in the evening. Every spare inch of the carriage was packed with things for the picnic. A huge lunch hamper stood on the front seat beside the coachman, and he could scarcely find room for his feet for the big freezer of ice-cream that took up so much s.p.a.ce. Rugs, cus.h.i.+ons, and camp-stools were tucked in at every corner, and Mrs. Sherman held Joyce's mandolin in her lap.

"Oh, girls!" she called, leaning out of the carriage and looking up at the second story windows. "Can I trust one of you to post the letter that I have left on the hall table?"

Two bright faces appeared at the same instant at different windows, and two voices called in the same breath, one answering, "Yes, G.o.dmother,"

and the other, "Yes, Cousin Elizabeth."

"I would take it myself," said Mrs. Sherman, "if I were going past the post-office, but I have to drive a roundabout way to the Ross place, to get some berries I engaged for the picnic. It is very important that the letter should go on to-night's mail train, and if one of you will drop it in the box as you go by, I'll be so much obliged."