“‘THEY’LL HAVE FLEET STEEDS THAT FOLLOW,’ QUOTH YOUNG LOCHINVAR”
The third floor suddenly became to Jan quite as familiar as the second,
which Gwen had informed her on her arrival was disrespectfully dubbed
by Sydney “the hennery.” Her first visit daily on her return from
school and numerous ones from that time until she went to bed were
made to poor little yellow Drom, her and Sydney’s interesting patient.
“Patient” the little dog certainly was in both senses. It is doubtful
if either of the other denizens of that floor of the house would have
borne affliction so sweetly, and as a reward for the meekness which
submitted to bandages and splints with only grateful kisses for the
hands which reluctantly hurt, and for lying motionless through the long
hours, the broken leg set fast and the obtruding ribs disappeared under
flesh.
More than Drom’s broken bones were knitted during those days. Sydney
never fell back into his disregard of “Miss Lochinvar,” and, united in
their nursing and pride in their patient’s progress, the cousins became
real friends.
At times there were glimpses of something in Sydney which Jan did not
understand, but which vaguely troubled her, but it was never coolness
toward her. On the contrary, she could not help fancying that the
taciturn boy was glad of the affection she gave him, and found girlish
sympathy very acceptable. In her loyal little heart Jan resolved never
to rest until she had brought Gwen into this pleasant comradeship,
feeling quite sure that Sydney would enjoy his clever, big-hearted
sister as much as she would enjoy him, if only they might make each
other’s acquaintance.
In the meantime a wonderful thing happened. Sydney asked Jan to play
with him in the tennis tournament, and “Miss Lochinvar” was not less
frightened than elated over the honor.
Syd had taken her out to the courts to practise, and was delighted with
her swift underhand serve as much as with her sure returns and expert
volleying, in which she seemed to be all over the court at the same
time. It proved to be a “court” in another sense to the pretty girl,
for she instantly became a prime favorite with the players, not only
with the boys, who pronounced her “great,” but with the girls. These
were not pupils of “the Hydra,” but another set and kind. Jan found
them pleasanter, as a whole. They were frank, jolly, natural young
creatures, such as the boys would be likely to choose to play with them
when the choice was left them. They all declared that they had not a
ghost of a chance playing against Jan, and the boys announced that
“Graham had a cinch, with that cousin of his to back him.” But though
the boyish slang made her feel more at home than she had since leaving
her brothers, it could not set Jan’s mind at rest. She found herself
starting up out of her sleep at imaginary calls of “Play!” and once
served a dream ball with such a thump of her hand against the nursery
wall that Jerry awoke screaming, and Hummie hastened in, feeling sure
nothing less than fire was the matter.
There was not much time for practise. Sydney laughed at Jan for wishing
they had longer to get used to each other’s methods, but could not help
realizing that victory would have been more assured if they had played
together more. It would never do, however, to let Jan lose confidence.
At the best, Sydney had little faith in “girls’ nerve.”
On the day before the games, which were to be held on the first Tuesday
after Thanksgiving, Jan played so badly that Sydney was seriously
alarmed. She seemed nothing but a bundle of nervousness, serving weakly
or else beyond the bounds, receiving uncertainly, and acquitting
herself generally as badly as possible. Jan came home profoundly cast
down.
“Don’t be discouraged, Syd,” she said, though she needed cheering more
than her partner. “You know I can play a decent game, and I often go to
pieces beforehand, but pull together again when the time comes. Maybe
I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
“Of course. I know how that is,” said Sydney lightly. “You’re all
right, and I wish I was as sure of everything I wanted as I am of
winning to-morrow. You had your funk out to-day. To-morrow you’ll be
right on deck when the umpire calls time.”
Jan went slowly up-stairs, hoping this was to prove true. Her spirits
rose considerably at the sight that met her eyes when she opened her
chamber door. There on the bed lay a tennis dress of which any one
might be proud. It was beautiful broadcloth, rich, warm red in color,
with tiny bands of black fur around the short skirt and perfectly
defining the fine lines of the short jacket which surmounted the
delicate tucked white-silk shirt-waist. But most bewitching of all was
the cap of the crimson cloth, with its outlining of black fur and its
single black quill bidding defiance to the world in its saucy setting
on the left side. Jan promptly donned the cap, admiring the effect in
her glass, which told her that she had never worn anything so becoming,
and resolving to do or die, to live up to her costume. She would not
be one of those girls whom the Crescendo boys despised, whose skill in
tennis consisted solely in selecting a gorgeous sash and knotting it
gracefully. They had had an axiom at home that the better the sash the
worse the playing.
Jan, concluding that Gwen had been at the bottom of her welcome gift,
went to find and thank her. She learned to her surprise that her aunt
had designed and ordered the costume, wishing that her boy should have
not only the most skilful partner, but the prettiest one, and with
this discovery Jan made another, which was that her busy aunt had
unsuspected pride and affection for her eldest born.
The entire family, with the exception of Mr. Graham and Jerry, went out
to the games on the following day. The sun was warm, but the air cool;
there was not much wind. Altogether it was a day which justified the
wisdom of holding games so late in the season.
Most of the big girls from the Misses Larned’s were in the grand stand,
interested from more or less personal connection with the contestants,
and filling the place with gay colors, lively chatter, and candy odors.
The races preceded the tennis, as did the wrestling. Sydney was not
among the wrestlers, but he ran and jumped, and the Graham party
nearly fell over the rail in its enthusiasm as he came in first in the
foot-races and when he marched up to the judges’ stand later to have
the first medal for the race and the second medal for the standing jump
fastened on the breast of his white sweater.
“Isn’t he gloriously handsome?” whispered Mrs. Graham in Jan’s ready
ear. “There isn’t a boy here to compare with him! I am proud of my
beautiful boy and my clever Gwen, Janet, and I sometimes think I love
them more than all the others put together.”
Jan felt the injustice of these words, although she realized that the
pride of the hour might have made her aunt exaggerate her partiality.
But as she looked at Sydney she felt that they were almost to be
excused. With his face flushed, his head thrown back, his lips proudly
smiling, and his straight young form drawn up to its fullest height,
showing his fine muscles at their best, Sydney Graham was a son to
glory in, and Jan clapped her loudest, feeling that her big cousin was
very dear to her, too, and that she was grateful to Drom for being the
link that had drawn them together.
The time for the tennis had come, and Jan rose in her seat to make
her way through the crowd down to the courts. She heard but faintly
the clapping of hands with which her school friends sped her, but she
heard as distinctly as if a megaphone had shouted the hateful words,
Daisy Hammond’s whisper to Flossie Gilsey: “Look at the Wild West
Show! I suppose she thinks she’ll paint this town red to match her own
war-paint.”
A little righteous indignation often does wonders. Jan had risen with
her heart in her rubber-soled shoes. As she heard Daisy’s ugly, vulgar
speech her nerves suddenly steadied, and with a profound contempt
for the speaker came a resolution to show these girls that she could
excel them in sport as easily as she could not help knowing that she
surpassed them in class.
Sydney met her at the foot of the stairs, and he read the steady light
in her eyes and the firm curl of her lips aright, and with unspeakable
relief saw that Janet could be relied on.
“O Sydney, we are all so proud of you!” cried Jan, saluting her cousin
with a wave of her racket in her left hand and a tight clasp of his
hand with the right one. “No, you mustn’t take my racket. It is part
of my costume! Don’t you see that Aunt Tina had a cover for it made to
match my dress?”
“You certainly are a picture,” said Sydney, “and I’m proud of you!
Shall we let them score a few points?”
“Just a few, to add to the interest,” laughed Jan. “But ‘“they’ll have
fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.’”
Sydney echoed her laugh with a mind at rest, and the cousins stepped
out on the hard clay court.
They found that their opponents were in fine form. Jan and Sydney
fought hard, but do what they would they could not keep them from
getting the winning ten after they had held them tied at “forty all”
some exciting minutes.
But the second game Sydney and Janet won, and took their places ready
to make the third theirs by any heroic effort. Unfortunately the
boy and girl opposing them were of the stuff that soldiers are made
from--or rather fortunately, for Syd and Jan wanted to win gloriously.
But they had hard work to win at all. Once more the game halted at
“forty all,” and the ball was volleyed back and forth without pausing,
each side and both partners of each side playing nobly. Once Sydney
played a back stroke that nearly settled it, but the girl across the
net saved the day, and immediately on the ball’s return her partner
gave a swift cut that made it skim the net and fly out to the right
corner of the service-line. With a bound Jan pursued it. It had been
a clever stroke, for neither she nor Syd was near that spot at the
moment. How she got there Jan did not know, but get there she did, and,
swinging her racket without more than time for instinctive planning,
she smashed the ball, and it crossed the net, barely clearing it, sped
close to the ground out to the outer court of their opponents, and
stopped before either raised racket could get down to its level or
either player on the opposite side could pursue the ball. A ringing
cheer announced the game won and Jan the victor. Sydney shook her
violently by both hands, while cries of: “Well played!” “Splendid!”
“What a stroke!” fell on the ears of happy “Miss Lochinvar.”
[Illustration: A ringing cheer announced Jan the victor.]
“It was the prettiest sight I ever saw,” said Mrs. Graham, kissing
Jan on her return, and more inclined to regard the affair as a
spectacle than a sport. “You are sweet in that crimson, Janet, and
Sydney is delicious! I am so proud of you both!”
Gwen hugged her cousin breathless, Jack and Viva trying vainly to
get at her the while. Even Gladys was swept away by the glory to her
family, to which for the first time Jan had contributed, into something
like cordiality toward “Miss Lochinvar.” All the girls Jan liked at the
Misses Larned’s congratulated her jubilantly, and the other faction was
forced into silence. Altogether Jan enjoyed a little triumph, and came
home blissful, to dream of the theater-party to which Mrs. Graham was
to take her, Gwen, Gladys, Sydney, his most intimate chum, and Dorothy
Schuyler, in celebration of the victory, on the following day.
It was the more shocking that she ran up the stairs later to visit
Drom, full of these anticipations for Jan to find Sydney with his head
bowed on his arms across his table and to meet the tragic face which he
raised as he tried to smile at her.
“Why, Sydney, what has happened?” she cried, standing still on the
threshold and paying no attention to Drom’s cordial greeting.
“Nothing,” said Sydney. “I--perhaps I ran too hard. I don’t feel quite
well. How are you after our victory?” He tried to speak easily, but Jan
was too well versed in boys’ ways to be deceived.
“You’re in a scrape, Syd,” she said decidedly, entering and shutting
the door behind her with a discretion Sydney admired even then. “Won’t
you tell me what it is? Or have you told your mother?”
“My mother! No, I guess not,” said Sydney. “I’d be sorry to tell
her--if I were in a scrape,” he added, realizing his indirect admission.
“Then tell me,” said Jan, sitting down at the other side of the table
with an air that suggested not rising again until she had been told.
“Two heads are better than one, and you can trust me.”
“Well, I’m in debt,” said Sydney, yielding at once, glad, perhaps, to
share a burden that had been oppressive for some time. “And the fellow
writes to say he won’t wait any longer. If I don’t pay up he’ll go to
my father. I can’t pay up, so I suppose there’s no help for it, and
he’ll have to go.”
“In debt!” Jan exclaimed, her voice low and horror-stricken. “O Syd,
that’s awful! What will uncle do if that man goes to him? Who is the
man, anyway? Tell me more.”
“He’ll raise the roof, as to father’s part of it, and very likely send
me off to boarding-school,” said Sydney, flushing. “The man, as you
call him, is a shopkeeper who likes to get the fellows at our school
to buy things on tick from him, if he knows there is some one at home
who will pay in case they don’t. He even offers to lend us money and
put it on the books and not charge any interest. He’s a scamp to do it,
and I know it, but I’ve been fool enough--and scamp enough, too--to get
things charged and to borrow a little now and then, thinking I could
pay up myself. Well, I can’t, and now I’ve got to face the music. It
serves me right, but that doesn’t make me enjoy myself any better.”
“O Syd, how could you?” said Jan, who had been brought up to regard
debt with horror, and whose father might have to deny his children
luxury, but by practise and precept he taught them to live within their
means.
“Now, you needn’t lecture,” said Sydney, who found the pained and
disappointed look in the brown eyes opposite to him hard to meet. “I
know all you can say about its being wrong, but I did it, and there you
are! Five dollars a month isn’t much allowance, and that’s all I get.”
“Five dollars! Every month, and to spend on yourself?” cried Jan, to
whom this seemed a fortune.
“Oh, you little goose!” said Sydney, almost ready to laugh at her
simplicity. “What do you suppose that is among the boys I go with? But
don’t you worry. I’m sorry I told.”
“Do you think it would be right to pay this man and not let Uncle
Howard know?” said conscientious Jan. “You see, Sydney, I think fathers
and mothers ought to be told things.”
“Don’t you think it makes a difference whether it would do harm
or good?” asked Sydney. “Father would be angry and send me off,
and I can’t see what good that would do. He is too busy to try to
understand. And I’ve had enough of it. If I could pay up now I would
keep clear of this sort of thing forever. It has worried me ever since
September.”
Jan was thinking rapidly as Sydney spoke, and it seemed to her loving
heart like sealing the boy’s fate to send him away from home, where it
was her favorite dream to root him more closely. So she said: “I will
lend you money, Syd. I have some that papa gave me to buy Christmas
gifts for the children, but you can pay it back, perhaps, before then.
It’s five dollars. Do you need so much?”
Sydney laughed outright, though it was a melancholy and kindly laugh.
“Five dollars, you blessed innocent!” he said. “It is about a tenth of
what I owe.”
Jan gasped. “Gwen has money saved,” she said with a sudden inspiration.
“Tell her. She’ll be glad to help you out. And it will make you better
friends,” she added in her thoughts.
“Indeed I won’t tell Gwen,” cried Sydney. “I’ll tell you what I will
do. I’ll borrow your five and try to get him to take it on account, and
wait before he tells father.”
“And then, if I were you, I’d try to earn the money to pay up,” cried
Jan, with another inspiration.
“How could I?” asked Sydney.
“Errands after school, work in some store--lots of ways, if you mean
it,” said Jan, springing to her feet in her earnestness.
“Gentlemen don’t do those things, Jan,” said Sydney. “Would you like to
see me an errand-boy?”
“I’d rather see you anything than dishonorable,” said Jan hotly.
“_Gentlemen_ don’t borrow and spend money they can’t pay back.”
“That’s it! Go ahead! Hit a man when he’s down!” said Sydney bitterly.
“That’s the girl of it! I thought you were a square fellow, Janet.”
“Oh, please forgive me, Syd,” cried Jan, repentant. “I didn’t mean to
say anything like that! I know you are honorable and are sorry for
doing wrong, and I’ll do anything in the world to help you. But I hate
to hear you talking like a fop and not seeing where the real disgrace
would be. I’d be prouder of you if you joined the street-cleaning
department than I would to see you getting mixed up in your ideas of
honesty.”
Sydney laughed again. “All right, Miss Lochinvar,” he said
good-naturedly. “You are somewhat mixed up in your speech, it strikes
me. I accept your apology, and I’ll admit you are right in your ideas,
if you want me to. And I’ll accept your five dollars, too, if you’ll
lend it to me. And I won’t forget that you stood by me as well as you
could. Perhaps I’ll pull through with this help.”
Janet could not help seeing that Sydney was too ready to throw off his
burden in the relief of temporary relaxing of the pressure. She wished
with all her heart that she was old enough and wise enough to help her
cousin in the ways in which he needed help most. But it was something
that he trusted her with his secret and accepted aid from her.
“I’ll run and get the money now, Syd,” she said. “I wish I wasn’t poor,
for your sake. But think it over and see if you can’t earn some money.
It would be so much more manly and fine than getting it from Uncle
Howard or counting on presents. And fair, too, because you would be
setting your own wrong-doing right.”
“All right, Miss Lochinvar, I’ll think,” said Sydney. “You’re a pretty
good sort of fellow not to scold me harder and to be ready to hold out
your hand to a sinner. I won’t forget it of you, Jan.”