A good many forebodings crowded into the Colonel's mind as he walked
hurriedly on. He wondered how he would be received. What if Jack Sherman
had died after all? What if Elizabeth should refuse to see him? A dozen
times before he reached the gate he pictured to himself the probable
scene of their meeting.
He was out of breath and decidedly disturbed in mind when he walked up
the path. As he paused on the porch steps, Lloyd came running around the
house carrying her parrot on a broom. Her hair was blowing around her
rosy face under the Napoleon hat she wore, and she was singing.
The last two hours had made a vast change in her feelings. Her father
had only fainted from exhaustion.
When she came running back from Locust, she was afraid to go in the
house, lest what she dreaded most had happened while she was gone. She
opened the door timidly and peeped in. Her father's eyes were open. Then
she heard him speak. She ran into the room, and, burying her head in her
mother's lap, sobbed out the story of her visit to Locust.
To her great surprise her father began to laugh, and laughed so heartily
as she repeated her saucy speech to her grandfather, that it took the
worst sting out of her disappointment.
All the time the Colonel had been fighting his pride among the memories
of the dim old drawing-room, Lloyd had been playing with Fritz and Polly.
Now as she came suddenly face to face with her grandfather, she dropped
the disgusted bird in the snow, and stood staring at him with startled
eyes. If he had fallen out of the sky she could not have been more
astonished.
"Where is your mother, child?" he asked, trying to speak calmly. With
a backward look, as if she could not believe the evidence of her own
sight, she led the way into the hall.
"Mothah! Mothah!" she called, pushing open the parlour door. "Come heah,
quick!"
The Colonel, taking the hat from his white head, and dropping it on the
floor, took an expectant step forward. There was a slight rustle, and
Elizabeth stood in the doorway. For just a moment they looked into each
other's faces. Then the Colonel held out his arm.
"Little daughter," he said, in a tremulous voice. The love of a lifetime
seemed to tremble in those two words.
In an instant her arms were around his neck, and he was "kissing away
the sorry feelin's" as tenderly as the lost Amanthis could have done.
As soon as Lloyd began to realize what was happening, her face grew
radiant. She danced around in such excitement that Fritz barked wildly.
"Come an' see Papa Jack, too," she cried, leading him into the next
room.
Whatever deep-rooted prejudices Jack Sherman may have had, they were
unselfishly put aside after one look into his wife's happy face.
He raised himself on his elbow as the dignified old soldier crossed the
room. The white hair, the empty sleeve, the remembrance of all the old
man had lost, and the thought that after all he was Elizabeth's father,
sent a very tender feeling through the younger man's heart.
"Will you take my hand, sir?" he asked, sitting up and offering it in
his straightforward way.
"Of co'se he will!" exclaimed Lloyd, who still clung to her
grandfather's arm. "Of co'se he will!"
"I have been too near death to harbour ill will any longer," said the
younger man, as their hands met in a strong, forgiving clasp.
The old Colonel smiled grimly.
"I had thought that even death itself could not make me give in," he
said, "but I've had to make a complete surrender to the Little Colonel."
That Christmas there was such a celebration at Locust that May Lilly
and Henry Clay nearly went wild in the general excitement of the
preparation. Walker hung up cedar and holly and mistletoe till the
big house looked like a bower. Maria bustled about, airing rooms and
bringing out stores of linen and silver.
The Colonel himself filled the great punch-bowl that his grandfather had
brought from Virginia.
"I'm glad we're goin' to stay heah to-night," said Lloyd, as she hung up
her stocking Christmas Eve. "It will be so much easiah fo' Santa Claus
to get down these big chimneys."
In the morning when she found four tiny stockings hanging beside her
own, overflowing with candy for Fritz, her happiness was complete.
That night there was a tree in the drawing-room that reached to the
frescoed ceiling. When May Lilly came in to admire it and get her share
from its loaded branches, Lloyd came skipping up to her. "Oh, I'm goin'
to live heah all wintah," she cried. "Mom Beck's goin' to stay heah with
me, too, while mothah an' Papa Jack go down South where the alligatahs
live. Then when they get well an' come back, Papa Jack is goin' to build
a house on the othah side of the lawn. I'm to live in both places at
once; mothah said so."
There were music and light, laughing voices and happy hearts in the old
home that night. It seemed as if the old place had awakened from a long
dream and found itself young again.
The plan the Little Colonel unfolded to May Lilly was carried out in
every detail. It seemed a long winter to the child, but it was a happy
one. There were not so many displays of temper now that she was growing
older, but the letters that went southward every week were full of her
odd speeches and mischievous pranks. The old Colonel found it hard to
refuse her anything. If it had not been for Mom Beck's decided ways, the
child would have been sadly spoiled.
At last the spring came again. The pewees sang in the cedars. The
dandelions sprinkled the roadsides like stars. The locust-trees tossed
up the white spray of their fragrant blossoms with every wave of their
green boughs.
"They'll soon be heah! They'll soon be heah!" chanted the Little Colonel
every day.
The morning they came she had been down the avenue a dozen times to look
for them before the carriage had even started to meet them. "Walkah,"
she called, "cut me a big locus' bough. I want to wave it fo' a flag!"
Just as he dropped a branch down at her feet, she caught the sound of
wheels. "Hurry, gran'fathah," she called; "they's comin'." But the
old Colonel had already started on toward the gate to meet them. The
carriage stopped, and in a moment more Papa Jack was tossing Lloyd up in
his arms, while the old Colonel was helping Elizabeth to alight.
"Isn't this a happy mawnin'?" exclaimed the Little Colonel, as she
leaned from her seat on her father's shoulder to kiss his sunburned
cheek.
"A very happy morning," echoed her grandfather, as he walked on toward
the house with Elizabeth's hand clasped close in his own.
Long after they had passed up the steps the old locusts kept echoing
the Little Colonel's words. Years ago they had showered their fragrant
blossoms in this same path to make a sweet white way for Amanthis's
little feet to tread when the Colonel brought home his bride.
They had dropped their tribute on the coffin-lid when Tom was carried
home under their drooping branches. The soldier-boy had loved them so,
that a little cluster had been laid on the breast of the gray coat he
wore.
Night and day they had guarded this old home like silent sentinels that
loved it well.
Now, as they looked down on the united family, a thrill passed through
them to their remotest bloom-tipped branches.
It sounded only like a faint rustling of leaves, but it was the locusts
whispering together. "The children have come home at last," they
kept repeating. "What a happy morning! Oh, what a happy morning!"
End of Project Gutenberg's The Little Colonel, by Annie Fellows Johnston