A Girl in Spring-Time

by Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

“She is disappointed! Poor old lady; she looks lonely, standing there. She daren’t come because of her rheumatism; but just look at that sky, and imagine anyone saying that it had been raining; so positive about it, too. She must have been dreaming.”

“Well, for goodness sake don’t begin to be miserable now, Bertha, because she is not coming! Two hours ago you were nearly crying because she was. You said you wouldn’t enjoy yourself at all, and would just as soon stay at home. For goodness sake be cheerful, and don’t grumble any more!”

Mildred’s voice sounded so irritable that her friends stared at her in surprise. She looked exceedingly pretty and charming, but not quite like herself all the same. It was difficult to say wherein the difference lay, yet both Lois and Bertha recognised it at once. The air of exuberant happiness, which was one of her chief characteristics, had disappeared. She looked strained, worried, ill at ease.

All through the earlier part of the day this curious depression seemed to hang over Mildred’s spirits. At every quiet opportunity she whispered an eager “Are you enjoying yourself?” into her friend’s ear; “You are enjoying yourself, aren’t you, Bertha?” but it was not until lunch was laid out upon the grass, and the merry scramble for knives and forks had begun, that she herself seemed able to enter into the fun with a whole heart. From that time onward she was her own merry self, and Bertha had the pleasure of seeing her prophecy fulfilled, for before the afternoon was over, Mildred, in her old blue dress and renovated hat, had become the principal personage in the party. The ladies were charmed with her because she was so pretty, and had such winsome, coaxing little ways; the gentlemen, because she was a thorough school-girl, free from every trace of young-ladyish affectation. It delighted them to see her race up the hillsides, or skip from rock to rock across the river bed, and when the time came for the return drive, there was quite a struggle for the seat by her side in the coach. The gentleman who gained it was, in Mildred’s estimation, the most interesting of the number. He was very tall, and so thin that his clothes hung upon him in baggy folds. His skin was burnt to a dull brown colour, and had a curious dried-up appearance, but his blue eyes shone with a boy-like gleam. Mildred could not make up her mind whether he were old or young, but as he remarked, in the course of conversation, that he had just returned from a fifteen-years sojourn in Ceylon, and that he had left England shortly after his twenty-first birthday, she was able to calculate his age with little difficulty.

“I am interested in Ceylon. Do tell me all about it!” she said. Whereat her companion smiled, and said that was a “large order.” He proceeded, however, in easy, chatty manner to give some interesting accounts of the country, and his own adventures therein. He told, for instance, of how darkness fell suddenly upon the land, and the tiny streams swelled in an hour to the magnitude of a river; how, when returning from a friend’s bungalow one evening, the oil in his lantern had given out, and he had been compelled to crawl on hands and knees along the dangerous road; how, on the borders of a forest, he had seen two snakes standing erect in deadly combat, and could remember a flight of white butterflies, three miles in length and of such density that they obscured the sun as with a cloud. He told stories of his elephants, too; how they had worked for him in building the big tea-factory on which he had been engaged, dragging the heavy stones up the hillsides, and pushing them into their own particular niche, with their ponderous feet. How steadily they worked, and with what persistence, until the bell rang at four o’clock, when they instantly turned tail, ambled off to their lines, and refused to do a stroke of work until the next morning. “Fifteen years!” he sighed; “fifteen years! It is a good slice out of a man’s life. When I went out, I had dreams of making my fortune in a few years and coming home to spend it in England, but the days of rapid fortune making are over, and I shall probably end my life in Ceylon. I wasn’t much older than you are now, Miss Mildred, when my guardian packed me off to an office in the city, and I was obliged to sit copying letters at a desk from morning till night. Bah! how I hated it. I made up my mind to go abroad the moment I was twenty-one, and could claim my money, but when the time came, I felt pretty bad at leaving. I had a special chum, with whom I lived and worked, and played, and shared every joy and sorrow. It was a terrible wrench to part from him—and from someone else—the lady who is now my wife! You have been introduced to her, I think; there she is in the blue dress, sitting in the front of the other coach.”

“With the brown hat? Yes, I know; I like her. She looks awfully sweet.” Mildred nodded her head decisively, and her companion’s eyes twinkled in response.

“Oh, yes! she’s quite satisfactory. Bullies me a little now and then, you know—between ourselves; but one can’t have everything in this wicked world. Well, you see, she came out to me in due time. But before there was any talk of that, another curious thing had happened. I was sitting in front of my bungalow one afternoon, very low and homesick, and tired to death after a long day’s work. I was wondering if I should ever live to get back to the old country, or to see my friends again, when suddenly a man came round the corner of the road, and marched up the garden path. He was an Englishman—that was seen at the first glance; he was tall, and broad, and had a peculiar way of holding his shoulders. I stared at him, not knowing if I were awake or asleep, and when he was within a dozen yards, he raised his head to look at me, and it was my chum!—the very fellow I had been thinking of five minutes before, and despairing of ever seeing again!”

“Good gracious! What did you do? What did you say?”

Mr Muir smiled.

“Do? Say? I called out ‘Halloa!’ and he called out ‘Halloa!’ and we shook hands and went into the bungalow. That seems strange to you, doesn’t it? If you had been in my place, and one of your school-fellows had appeared upon the scene, you would have behaved rather differently, I imagine!”