“Granddaddy, I mean this to be the very happiest Christmas we ever had, because we are together, and your rheumatism is better, and I am going to a dance every night this week, and have a perfectly brand new white muslin gown to wear, and goodness knows what will be left of it after six dances, because I never really begin to enjoy myself until I have torn my gown all to pieces!”
While Betty was saying this, she was standing, delicately poised, on a table, putting a wreath of laurel leaves around the portrait of Colonel Beverley, taken in his youth, when he was a boy officer, with his first epaulets, his hand sternly grasping his sword. Above the portrait hung the same sword, and Betty was wont to decorate the hilt with a sprig of laurel, too. The portrait was a handsome picture, and the Colonel was secretly proud of it. A part of Betty’s outrageous flattery of Colonel Beverley was that to assure the Colonel, solemnly, that nothing would induce her to marry until she could find a man as handsome as he was in his youth. The Colonel, sitting in his great chair, listened to this for the hundredth time with the greatest pleasure. Since that St. Martin’s summer of his youth, there had been a long period of tranquil life at Rosehill. Then had come the great tragedy of the wartime, and Colonel Beverley had put on a gray uniform, and ridden at the head of the regiment the county raised, his stalwart son, Betty’s father, riding by his bridle. The Colonel came back in four years to Rosehill, but the young son lay buried on the Bed of Honor, with a bullet through his brave young heart. Betty was a dark-eyed baby girl in those days. Now, she was a dark-eyed girl of twenty, and was all the Colonel had left in this world. Even Rosehill went with the rest. The back of Colonel Beverley’s chair was against the window which looked toward Rosehill, for the Colonel was sixty-eight, and could not forget wholly the sixty-seven years when Rosehill had been his home, and did not like to look toward the place. To make it worse, Rosehill had been bought by some rich Northern people, who had wickedly and sacrilegiously, as the Colonel considered, put a furnace in the house, electric lights and many other modern and devilish inventions, which harrowed the Colonel’s soul. So, like a wise man, he turned his eyes away.
Within the plain little room were some relics that had survived the universal wreck. There was Betty’s harp, to which she sang the old-fashioned ballads the Colonel loved. Then, there was the Beverley punch-bowl—a great bowl of old Lowestoft porcelain, with three medallions, representing hunting scenes, and an inscription in faded gilt, “For John Beverley, Esq., of Virginia.” It had belonged to many John Beverleys, Esquires, before it came to the Colonel, and was regarded as a sort of fetich in the family. Betty alone had the responsibility of dusting it, and Uncle Cesar would say solemnly:
“I’d heap ruther break my arm than break that thur bowl.”
Beside the bowl, there was some quaint old silver and the 1807 decanters, huge things of pink and white cut glass, that had known good vintages in their day. By Betty’s harp lay her grandfather’s fiddle-case, for the Colonel loved his fiddle, and he and Uncle Cesar, his “boy,” fiddled seriously together, as they had done since they were small boys together, sixty years before, and had got rapped over the head with the same fiddle-bow.
There were a plenty of windows in the little room, and, as muslin curtains are cheap, there were plenty of curtains, and geraniums and verbenas too were abundant, as they cost nothing at all. On the walls was a pretty paper, all roses and green leaves, pasted on by Betty’s own hands, with Uncle Cesar holding the stepladder while Betty had worked, singing while she worked. It was Betty too who had painted the shabby woodwork white, daubing away gaily, and laughing at her blunders. Nevertheless, she had succeeded, for Betty was a very efficient person. The chimney had a wide throat and drew like a windlass. So, on the whole, the sitting-room at Holly Lodge was a cheerful place.
Betty, standing on a little table, was so engrossed in her occupation of getting the laurel wreath straight over the Colonel’s picture, that she did not hear the tramp of a horse’s hoofs outside, nor a knock at the front door, nor Uncle Cesar opening it and a man’s tread in the little hall. In her eagerness, she reached up very far, and although she was a slim creature, the rickety table trembled under her light foot, and the Colonel cried out:
“Mind, Betty, mind!”
But it was too late. The table swayed, and Betty uttered a little shriek and came down with a crash, not upon the floor, but in the arms of a handsome young officer in his cap and military cloak, who appeared to have dropped down the chimney.