"SHADOWS OF THE WORLD APPEAR"
THE long July days slipped by, and Lloyd, looking back on them as
Hildegarde looked into her magic glass, saw only pleasant scenes
mirrored in their memory. The fortunate things, the smiling faces, the
pleasant happenings were hers, and for a time even other people's
troubles, those shadows of the world that are always with us, left her
daily outlook undimmed.
Like Hildegarde, too, she went on with her weaving, but wholly
unconscious that the shuttle of her thoughts was shaping her web to fit
the shoulders of the dark-eyed knight who came oftenest. Mrs. Sherman
saw it and was troubled.
"Jack," she said to her husband one afternoon, when he had come out from
town earlier than usual, and they were wandering around the shady
grounds together, planning some improvements, "I'm afraid those Spanish
lessons are a mistake. Lloyd is seeing entirely too much of Mr.
Harcourt. He is here morning, noon and night."
Mr. Sherman gave a quick glance towards the tennis court where the two
were finishing a lively game. "Don't you worry, Elizabeth," was his
placid answer. "It isn't as if she'd never been used to such devotion.
She's never known anything else. Malcolm and Keith used to spend fully
as much time with her, and Rob Moore fairly lived over here."
"Yes, but this is different," protested Mrs. Sherman. "They were mere
boys, and she dominated them, but Leland Harcourt is a man, and an
experienced one socially, and he is dominating her. I can see it in her
quick deference to his opinions, and her evident desire to please him.
Not evident to him, perhaps, but plain enough to me. I've been thinking
that it might be a good thing for us to go to the springs for awhile or
to the sea-shore or some place where she'd meet other people. In a quiet
little country place like this a man like Leland Harcourt looms up big
on a young girl's horizon; a girl just out of school, eager for new
interests. It isn't wise in us to allow her to be restricted just to his
society, when we could so easily give her the safe-guard of contrasts."
Mr. Sherman looked down at his wife with an indulgent smile.
"Don't you worry," he repeated. "Lloyd will do a lot of romantic
day-dreaming probably, but she has my 'yard-stick' and I have her
promise."
"But Jack, I verily believe the child thinks he measures up to all your
requirements. And really there is nothing one can urge against his
character. It's more a matter of temperament. I am sure she couldn't be
happy with him. She's just at the romantic age now to be very much
impressed with that kind of a man. If she were older she would see his
shallowness--his lack of purpose, his intense selfishness. I don't think
that we ought to shut our eyes to the possible outcome of this constant
companionship we are allowing."
"Well," he answered hesitatingly, slow to acknowledge his wife's
distrust of Lloyd's judgment, yet quick to see the wisdom of her point
of view. "Maybe you are right. But," he added wistfully, "I had hoped to
keep her home this summer. She has been away at school so long--and
she'll be in town so much next winter if she makes her debut. Wait till
I have had a talk with her before you plan any trips."
"But don't you see," urged Mrs. Sherman, "it is something too
intangible to discuss. To speak to her about it now, to make any
opposition to him at all, may quicken her interest in him and make her
champion his cause. That would be fatal, and yet it's just as dangerous
to wait. Love at that age is like a fog. It comes creeping up so
gradually that you don't realize what is enveloping you, till you're
completely lost in it, and all the rest of the world shut out."
"You speak from experience?" he said teasingly.
"You know very well," she confessed laughingly, "what a befogged state
_I_ was in. All papa's breathing out of 'threatening and slaughter'
didn't make the slightest difference. I was blind and deaf to everything
but you. And I'd want Lloyd to be the same," she added hastily, "if you
were as unreasonable as papa was then. But the circumstances are too
different to be compared. I'm simply warning you that the Little
Colonel's name was not lightly given. She has not only all my
determination in her makeup, but her grandfather's as well."
Here the gardener met them, and the conversation dropped. The next half
hour was spent in consultation over some changes to be made in the
conservatory.
When they went back to the house Leland Harcourt had gone, and Lloyd was
just stepping into Doctor Shelby's buggy, which was drawn up in front of
the house. The old doctor waited for them to come within hearing
distance before he leaned out and called:
"I'm just borrowing the Little Colonel for awhile. There's a case over
at Rollington that needs the attention of her King's Daughters Circle,
and I'm taking her over to investigate it. We'll be home before dark."
"All right," called Mr. Sherman, waving his hat as Lloyd looked back at
them with a smile and a flutter of her handkerchief. During the winter
that Lloyd had joined the Circle, and in the summer vacations following,
it had been a matter of frequent occurrence for the old doctor to take
her with him on such errands. Remembering how interested Lloyd had
become in many of the cases, Mrs. Sherman breathed a sigh of
thankfulness, hoping that this might prove to be one that would enlist
her sympathies and occupy so much of her time that it would make a
serious break in the Spanish lessons.
It had been a happy afternoon for Lloyd. If she had stopped and tried to
recall what made it so, she could not have mentioned any particular
thing. To be young and well and filled with the same glow that made the
summer day a joy was enough, but to feel that some one whose opinion she
valued very much found her charming, and said so with every glance of
his dark eyes, was more than enough. It made her cup of happiness
complete and brimmed it over.
The doctor was pouring out a tale of somebody's woes, but the trace of a
smile lingered on her lips as she made a polite attempt to listen. She
could not quite shut out the thought of that last game of tennis, and
the trivial pleasantries that had gone to make up the sum of her great
content. There was a dreamy, far-away look in her eyes as she listened.
The Spanish serenade that Leland Harcourt had sung before he left kept
repeating itself over and over, a sort of undercurrent to what the
doctor was saying. She beat time to it with her finger-tips on the side
of the buggy. Once it rose so insistently that she lost what the doctor
was saying, and came to herself with a start when a familiar name
arrested her attention.
"Ned Bannon's wife!" she repeated in astonishment. "You suahly can't
mean that it's Ida Shane who's sick ovah in that tumbledown cottage of
the McCarty's!"
"I surely do," he answered. "She didn't want to come back to this part
of the country, goodness knows. She remembers what a commotion it raised
when she eloped from the Seminary with Ned, five years ago. But Ned has
scarcely drawn a sober breath for the last year. She's sure of getting
needlework here, and with little Wardo to consider there was nothing for
her to do but put her pride in her pocket and come."
"Little Wardo!" breathed Lloyd wonderingly. The ride seemed full of
surprises.
"Yes, she has a little son about four years old, I judge. And it is on
his account that I have asked the help of the King's Daughters. He'll
have to be taken away from her till she's better, for she is morbidly
sensitive about keeping Ned's failings from him. She has never allowed
him to find out that his father is a drunkard. She makes a hero of him
to the little fellow. Seems to think that he'll blame her for giving him
such a father by marrying a man whom she had been warned would bring her
nothing but trouble and disgrace. She's desperately ill, and of course
in her weak condition she magnifies the matter. It has become a mania
with her."
"Poah Violet!" exclaimed Lloyd in distress, her thoughts flying back to
the scene in the school orchard five years ago, when watching the
glimmer of the pearl on Ida's white hand in the moonlight she had been
thrilled by her whisper: "He says that's what my life means to him--a
pearl; and that my influence can make him the man I want him to be. Oh,
Princess! I'd give my life to keep him straight!"
Not even an echo of the serenade was in her memory now. Her knowledge of
Ida's nearness seemed to bring her old school-friend actually before
her: the faint odour of violets, the shy glance of her appealing violet
eyes under the long lashes, the bewitching dimple at the corner of her
mouth, the flash of her rings, the sweep of her long skirts, the soft
hair gleaming under the big-plumed picture hat, more than all the air of
romance and mystery that surrounded her because of the pearl and the
secret engagement to her "Edwardo."
"I hadn't intended for her to see you," said the doctor, when her
exclamations and questions revealed to him the intimacy that had once
existed between them. "But under the circumstances it will be the best
thing I can do. I'll go in first and prepare her for the meeting,
however. She thinks she hasn't a friend left on earth, on account of her
unhappy marriage. Everybody warned her against it."
The front door stood open, and Lloyd sat down on the broken step to
wait. It seemed impossible that she was going to find Ida, the
embodiment of daintiness and refinement, in this dilapidated old place.
The whitewash had long ago dropped in scales from the rough walls. The
window-panes were broken, the shutters sagging, half the pickets off the
fence. Not a spear of grass ventured up in the barren yard, where a rank
unpruned peach-tree struggled for its life in the baked earth. The house
stood so near the road that the thick summer dust rolled in
suffocatingly whenever a vehicle passed.
"How can people exist in such an awful desolate, forsaken spot?" she
wondered, looking around with a shudder of disgust. That Ida, dainty
beauty-loving Ida, who scorned everything that was common and coarse,
should be lying inside in that dark room was more than she could
believe.
A wagon rattled by, and she put her handkerchief up to her face, stifled
by the cloud of dust that rose in its wake. When she ventured to take
it down again and draw a long breath, a chubby, barefooted child was
standing in the path in front of her, regarding her curiously. The wagon
made so much noise that she had not heard his bare feet pattering around
the house. She gave a little start of surprise, then smiled at him, for
he was an attractive little fellow, despite the fact that his face was
smeared with the remains of the bread and jam he had just been enjoying
at one of the neighbours, and his gingham apron was in rags. He had
caught it on the barb wire fence as he climbed through.
As he smiled back at her shyly from under his long lashes, Lloyd's
interest quickened, for there was no mistaking the likeness of those
violet eyes and the dimple that came at the corner of his cupid's bow of
a mouth. They were so like Ida's that she smiled and said confidently,
"You're Wardo. Aren't you!"
He nodded gravely, then after another long silent scrutiny, turned away
to pour the sand out of the old tin can he was carrying, in a pile under
the peach-tree. If it had not been for the jam and the dirt Lloyd would
have caught him up and kissed him, he was such a dear little thing, with
a thatch of short golden curls. But her fastidious dislike of touching
anything dirty made her draw back. It was well for the furtherance of
their acquaintance that she did so. He was not accustomed to caresses
from strangers. He accepted her presence on the door-step without
question, and presently, as the moments passed and she made no movement
towards him, he went up to her with friendly curiosity.
"Is you got a sand-pile to your house?" he asked.
"No," she confessed, feeling that he would consider her lacking on that
account and that she must hasten to mention other attractions. "But I
have a red and green bird that can talk, and a little black pony named
'Tarbaby.' It's so little that there's nobody at my house now small
enough to ride it. So it stays all day long in the field and eats
grass."
"I'm little enough to ride it," he began confidently.
Just then the doctor came out, and she sprang up, her heart throbbing.
"I'm going now for the nurse," he said in a low tone. "She's due on the
next train. Keep her as quiet as possible. Of course you'll have to let
her free her mind, but promise her almost anything to soothe her. I'll
be back in quarter of an hour."
Frightened at being left alone with such a weight of responsibility
thrust upon her, Lloyd tiptoed into the house. In the dim light she
almost stumbled over the cot on which Ned Bannon lay in a drunken
stupor, and her first glance at the bed beyond made her draw back in
dismay. She never would have recognized the white face on the pillow as
Ida's, had it not been for the appealing eyes turned towards her.
Five years of poverty and illness and neglect had changed the pretty
little school-girl into a faded, care-worn woman. She had been crying
ever since she was taken sick, and now was so weak and hysterical that
she caught at Lloyd with a cry, and clung to her sobbing.
"Oh, it kills me to have you find me this way!" she gasped, "when I've
tried so long to hide what we've come to. But I'm glad you've come, for
the baby's sake! Oh, Lloyd, what's going to become of my little Wardo!"
It was several minutes before she could talk coherently, and then she
began to sob out the story of her married life, her miserable failure to
reform Ned. Lloyd tried to stop her presently, thinking she was
becoming delirious, but she might as well have tried to stop a high
tide.
"Oh, I have been so proud!" she sobbed. "I couldn't tell anybody. I
couldn't tell you now if I wasn't afraid that I might die, like that
poor woman across the street last night. She's left five little
children. But I can't leave my little Wardo like that!" she broke out
desperately. "I _know_ he has inherited Ned's awful appetite. I must
stay and help him fight it, _for it's all my fault_. I gave him such a
father. A father that he can never be proud of! A father that will be
only a disgrace to him! Oh, why didn't somebody warn me that it was not
only a husband I was choosing but my little Wardo's father! Nobody ever
told me _that_, and I was so young I never thought of any one but
myself. And now the poor little innocent soul will have to suffer for it
all his life long!"
She was throwing herself about so wildly that Lloyd was frightened, and
rose from her chair to call one of the neighbours. But she could not
break away. Ida caught at her dress and held her fast in her frenzied
clasp.
"But I tell you I won't let him grow up to be like that!" she cried with
her eyes glaring wildly at the drunken man on the cot across the room.
"I'll kill him with my own hands first, while he is little and good. God
would understand, wouldn't he? He couldn't blame me for trying to save
my baby! But if he did I'd have to do it anyway. I'd have to do it and
take the punishment. I can't have my little Wardo grow up to be like
_that_."
The sound of his name brought the child to the door. He came pattering
in, and climbing up on the bed beside his mother, stroked her face with
his dirty little dimpled hand. The soft touch quieted Ida in an instant,
and with an effort to speak calmly she looked up at Lloyd.
"The doctor said the baby must go away for awhile, for fear of the
fever. But I can't give him up to just anybody, Lloyd. The neighbours
have been good and kind, but I'm afraid he might find out from some of
the children about Ned--you know. But with you--Oh, Lloyd, would it be
asking too much if--"
She stopped with her question half uttered, but the imploring look in
her eyes was a prayer that Lloyd could not resist, and she held out her
arms toward the little figure cuddled up on the bed.
"I'll take him till you're better," she promised impulsively.
The tears welled up in Ida's eyes again. She was so weak the least thing
started them.
"He's never been away from me a single night in his life," she said
brokenly. "I couldn't give him up to anybody but you." Then seeing the
frightened look that crept into the child's face as he listened to the
conversation which he but half understood, she wiped her eyes and smiled
at him tremulously.
"Dear little son, you want to help mother get well, don't you, lamb?
Then go with mother's dearest friend for awhile. She'll take care of you
while the good doctor makes me well. And she'll tell you stories and
make you have such a happy time."
"And let you ride on the black pony," broke in Lloyd eagerly, anxious to
clear away the troubled pucker on the child's face that came at mention
of a separation.
"An' hear the wed and gween bird talk!" he added himself, his face
lighting up at the thought. Then he laid his plump little hand on Ida's
hot cheek to compel her attention. It was a gesture she loved, and she
kissed his fingers passionately as he said with an eager voice, "She has
a bird that can talk, muv'ah. I'll go and hear what it says an' n'en
I'll come back an' tell you."
Evidently his idea of separation was based on the length of the
neighbourhood visits he had made, and he accepted Lloyd's invitation
willingly, expecting a speedy return.
"Let's go wite away, Dea'st Fwend," he exclaimed, wriggling down off the
bed. "I'll get my hat."
If anything had been needed to complete Lloyd's surrender to the little
fellow's charms, it was the sweet way in which he gave her the title
"Dearest Friend." That was what his mother had called her, and he
thought it was her name. She caught him up and kissed him, despite the
jam streaks and the dirt.
"Come on and have yoah face washed and yoah curls brushed, so we'll be
all ready when the buggy comes back," she said, hurrying to make him
presentable before his mood could change.
As she gathered his clothes together and packed them for the short
journey in a dress box which she found under the bed, it made an ache
grip her throat to see how Ida had thrown the shield of her mother-love
around him in every way possible. There was no mark of poverty here.
She had cut up her own clothes, relics of a happier time, to make the
little linen suits that were so pretty and becoming. No child in the
Valley was better clad, or looked so much like a little aristocrat, as
long as she was able to give him her daily attention.
He was so accustomed to being washed and brushed and dressed that he
made no objection to what most children of that age consider an
unnecessary process, and when Lloyd went about it with unpractised
fingers, he gravely corrected her mistakes, and laughed when she made a
play of the buttonholes being hungry mouths, that swallowed the buttons
in a hurry. Never in her life had she exerted herself so much to be
entertaining, for she wanted to take him away without a scene. She
wanted, too, for him to look his best, that he might win his own way at
The Locusts. She thought with a trifle of uneasiness that her impulsive
act might not meet her family's entire approval.
Ida's separation from him was a painful one, for she realized her
condition, and knew that it was possible that this might be her last
sight of him. As Lloyd turned away with her parting cry ringing in her
ears, "Oh, be good to him! Be good to him!" a great tenderness sprang up
in her heart for the child who put his hand in hers so trustingly, and
trotted away beside her obediently at his mother's bidding. At the cot
he stopped to clamber up and kiss the red face, burrowed down in the
pillows in a sodden sleep. "My poor farvah's sick too," he explained
looking up at her, as if bespeaking sympathy for him also.
Once in the buggy, while they waited for the doctor to unfasten the
hitch-rein, he reached up and put his hand on her cheek in his baby
fashion to ask her a question. The touch brought the tears to her eyes,
it was so confiding, and she was still so shaken by the scene she had
just witnessed. In a great throb of tenderness for the helpless little
body given over to her care, she drew him closer, with a hasty kiss on
the top of his curly head.
"Dea'st Fwend," he said, smiling up at her as if he understood the
reason of her sudden caress. Then he cuddled his head against her
shoulder in a satisfied way, saying, "Tell me again what the wed and
gween bird says."
As they drove in at the entrance gate to The Locusts, Lloyd recalled an
experience she had not thought of in years; an autumn day, when only a
baby herself, not yet six, she had been left to make her way alone up
this same avenue. She had never spent a night away from her mother, and
she was to stay a week alone with her grandfather, who did not know how
to sing her to sleep and kiss her eye-lids down so she wouldn't be
afraid of the black shadows in the corners. Here by this very gate she
had stood, assailed by such a great ache of loneliness and homesickness
that she was sure she would die if she had to endure it another moment.
And there was the spot where, rustling around in the dead leaves, Fritz
had found the little gray glove her mother had dropped when she stooped
to kiss her good-bye.
As she remembered how she had carried that glove, all week, rolled up in
a little wad in her pocket, to help her to be good and not to cry, she
resolved that Wardo should not have the same experience if any effort of
hers could prevent it. She would devote her time to him night and day
and keep him so happily employed, there would be no time for "the sorry
feelin's" that had been her childish undoing. There was no care or
accustomed tenderness he should miss.
It was nearly dark when she reached home, and so afraid was she that the
nightfall itself would make Wardo homesick, that she began to provide
for his entertainment even before she made any explanation to her
astonished family.
[Illustration: "FOR ONCE THE RED AND GREEN BIRD WAS ON ITS GOOD
BEHAVIOUR."]
"Oh, Papa Jack," she called. "Please find the parrot right away for
Wardo to see, then I'll explain everything."
For once the red and green bird was on its good behaviour, and began to
show off as soon as it was brought to the front. While Wardo watched it,
wide-eyed and absorbed, Lloyd gave an excited and tearful account of her
visit to Ida. The old Colonel said something about the fever and the
danger of infection, but when she had finished her story nobody else had
the heart to show displeasure at what she had done.
"And I won't let him be a trouble to anybody!" she added. "I'll take
care of him every bit myself, and keep him out of the way."
As Mrs. Sherman watched her leading the child up-stairs, talking to him
at every step to keep his thoughts diverted from home, and then heard
her giving orders to Walker about her old high chair and little white
crib to be brought down from the attic, she turned to Mr. Sherman with a
sigh of relief.
"She's found her own antidote for the Spanish lessons, Jack. We won't
have to go away to the springs or the mountains now, I'm sure."