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Read books online » Fiction » A College Girl by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey (reading in the dark .TXT) 📖

Book online «A College Girl by Mrs George de Horne Vaizey (reading in the dark .TXT) 📖». Author Mrs George de Horne Vaizey



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hate a family crowd!” he pronounced tersely. “If there were only one or two, it wouldn’t be so bad. Usual programme, I suppose—pick flowers and eat biscuits? Not much in my line—thank you all the same. Hope you’ll have a good time!”

“We’re going to have a real lunch—chickens and all sorts of good things, and walk to Oxholm across the fields. It will be much more exciting than the old picnics have been.”

“It might easily be that! No, thank you, I’m off. Some other day—”

“But we want you, Dan! I want you to come.”

“But I don’t, you see. There’s the difference. Sorry to disoblige.”

Darsie regarded him silently, considered the point whether wrath or pathos would be the most powerful weapon, decided rapidly in favour of pathos, and sank with a sigh on to an opposite chair.

“Very well. I quite understand. We wanted you especially because this may be the last, the very last time that one of us girls has any fun this summer, so of course it feels important. But you are so much older—it’s natural that you shouldn’t care. I think you’ve been very nice to be as much with us as you have been... Dan!”

“Yes!”

“Hannah says it will be me! That Aunt Maria is sure to choose me when she comes. Do you think she will?”

“Ten to one, I should say.”

“Oh, but why? Why? How can you be so sure?”

Dan’s dark eyes surveyed the alert little head, poised on the stem of the graceful throat, his thin lips lengthened in the long, straight line which showed that he was trying not to smile.

“Because—er, you appear to me the sort of girl that an erratic old fossil would naturally prefer!”

“Ah–h!”—Darsie’s dejection was deep—“Daniel, how cruel!” It was a comforting retaliation to address her tormentor by the name he so cordially disliked, but she remembered her rôle, and looked dejected rather than irate. “I suppose that’s true. I need discipline, and she would naturally choose the worst of the three. No one wants to be disciplined instead of having a good time, but it may be good for me in the end. All the time you are at sea, happy and free, I shall be being disciplined for my good... Wednesday may be my last, my very last, glad day...”

“Bah! Rubbish!” snapped Dan, but he looked at the curly head, and felt a pang of distaste. The idea of Darsie Garnett sobered and disciplined out of recognition was distinctly unpleasant. He wriggled in his chair, and said tentatively: “It will take more than one old lady to tame you, young woman! You’ll have lots of fun yet—perhaps more than if you’d stayed at home.”

Darsie smiled with angelic resignation.

“Perhaps so, but it won’t be the same kind of fun. New friends can never be like old. If she chooses me, I must go, because of my duty to father and the rest, but it’s going to hurt! I feel,”—she waved her arms dramatically in the air—“like a flower that is being torn out by the roots! I shall not live long in a strange soil... Well, goodbye, Dan; I won’t bother you any more! Thank you very much for all you’ve done for me in the past.”

Done! Dan searched his memory, found therein inscribed a number of snubs, rebuffs, and teasings, but nothing worthy of the thanks so sweetly offered.

He felt a stirring of reproach. Darsie was a decent kid—an amusing kid; if she went away she would leave behind her a decided blank. Looking back over the years, Darsie seemed to have played the leading part in the historic exploits of the family. She was growing into quite a big kid now. He glanced at her again quickly, furtively, and drummed with his fingers on the desk—hardly a kid at all, almost grown up!

“Oh, that’s all right; don’t worry about that,” he mumbled vaguely. “What a grandiloquent kid you are! I hope you’ll have a better time than you think, if you do go to visit your aunt.”

“Thanks so much; I hope I may; and if at any time—any time—I can do anything to help you, or give you the least—the very least—pleasure, please let me know, Dan! I can understand now how one feels when one leaves home and faces the world!” said Darsie poignantly. “G–goodbye!”

“Bye,” said Dan coolly. He leaned back in his chair, still thudding with his fingers on the desk. Darsie had reached the door and held it open in her hands before he spoke again. “What time did you say that blessed old picnic is to start?”

“Wednesday. Ten o’clock,” said Darsie, and, like a true daughter of Eve, spoke not one more word, but shut the door and left him to his thoughts.

“Dan’s coming! You’re not to say a word till the time, but he is!” she announced to her sisters that evening; but when they questioned and cross-questioned concerning the means whereby the miracle had been wrought, she steadfastly refused to satisfy their curiosity. That was not their concern. An inherent loyalty to Dan forbade that she should make public the wiles by which he had been beguiled.

Chapter Five. Left Behind!

Wednesday dawned bright and fair; it had not seemed possible that it could be wet, and the party of twelve, with their baskets and hampers, drove economically and gaily to the ferry in a three-horse omnibus, so ostentatiously treating it as their own vehicle that the few alien passengers sat abashed, and plainly felt themselves de trop. Darsie’s prophecy had been fulfilled, for Dan appeared at the starting-point, somewhat grim and sulky of demeanour, but obviously on picnic bent. He was the only member of the party whose hands were free of basket or bundle, and when the omnibus trundled into sight he walked forward to meet it and swung himself up to a place on top as though anxious to convince beholders that he had no connection with the noisy crowd at the corner, whereupon the two mothers smiled at each other in amused reminiscent fashion.

The girls were dressed in white; the boys wore flannel trousers with school blazers and caps. Clemence had put on a veil to protect her complexion; plain Hannah’s sailor hat left yards of forehead bleakly exposed. Darsie wore her little Kodak swung across her shoulder in jaunty military fashion. She invariably carried a camera on such occasions, and never by any chance used it to take any photographs; the programme was so unalterable that it had ceased to attract any attention among her companions.

The omnibus conveyed the party to the ferry, from whence an hourly boat puffed several miles up the river to where the village of Earley stood on the opposite bank. It was an ancient and by no means luxurious barque, impregnated from bow to stern with a hot, oily, funnelly smell from which it was impossible to escape, and as travellers to Earley were almost invariably on pleasure bent, the usual satellites were in attendance. There was an old man in a long coat who had played the same ballads on the same old concertina with the same incredibly dirty fingers for as long as memory could recall; there was an old woman with a clean apron and a tray of gingerbread biscuits slung pendant from her shoulders, who presented them to you for three a penny, and exclaimed, “Bless yer little ’art!” when you paid for them yourself, because mother said it was a pity to spoil your lunch. Deary me! one would have to be old to have one’s appetite—and a picnic appetite at that!—spoiled by three gingerbread biscuits! The sail to Earley would have been shorn of one of its chief joys without these sticky sweets. The absence of the clean, smiling old woman would have been resented as a positive crime.

The ferry at Earley was an old-fashioned affair, sloping over the muddy shore to a little white pay-house with a clanky turnpike on either side. Once past these turnpikes, the visitor found himself in the midst of things with delightful suddenness. A wide green stretch of grass lay along the river bank, bordered by shady trees. To the right stood a stone hotel with gardens of brilliant flower-beds, and an array of white-covered tables dotted down the length of the veranda. Grand and luxurious visitors took their meals in the hotel, but such a possibility of splendour had never dawned upon the minds of the Garnetts or their friends—as well might a wayfarer in Hyde Park think of asking for a cup of tea at Buckingham Palace! To-day a young girl stood in the porch of the hotel and gazed at the procession as it passed. She was arrayed in a white serge coat and skirt, and wore a white sailor hat with a blue band. “Exactly like yours!” said Lavender easily, but Clemence shook her head in sad denial. Her coat and skirt had been bought ready-made at a sale, was an inch too short in the waist, and cockled at the seams; her hat was last year’s shape, while the girl in the porch had just—the—very—latest and most perfect specimen of both.

“Horrid thing, lunching in hotels in clothes like that! Some people have all the luck!” said Clemence grudgingly, as she moved the heavy basket from one hand to the other to screen it from the gaze of the aristocratic eyes; and the girl in the porch spied it all the same, and sighed to herself wistfully: “They are going picnicking—all those boys and girls! Oh, how lovely to be them. How I wish I were a big family...” after the manner of the ungrateful people of this world, who are so much occupied in envying the possessions of others that they have no time left in which to be thankful for their own!

The woods lay not a hundred yards from the ferry itself—real, natural, untrammelled woods, with grand old trunks standing up tall and straight like the columns of a cathedral, and dear old gnarled roots which ran along the ground, covered with lichens and soft green moss. To young people who spent their lives in one red-brick terrace looking out on another red-brick terrace across the road, it was like a voyage into fairyland to step within the cool, green shadow of the woods, to smell the sweet, sharp smell of the earth, and watch the dapplings of sunlight through the leaves overhead. Even the boys succumbed to the spell, and for the first half-hour asked nothing better than to roll about on the grass, poke in the roots of trees, and speculate concerning rabbit-holes and nests; but the half-hour over, one and all were convinced that watches were wrong and they were right in deciding that it was beyond all manner of doubt full time for lunch; so the cloth was spread on a level piece of turf, and the good things were consumed with the lingering enjoyment which they deserved.

Every one felt that, as lunch marked what was perhaps the most enjoyable epoch of the whole day, it was his or her bounden duty to eat slowly and to go on demanding helpings so long as the supply endured; and a certain feeling of blankness descended when there was no longer any excuse for lingering, inasmuch as nothing remained to be eaten but a dozen jam puffs, which, as mother said, had been meant to be very nice, but had somehow failed to achieve success! The paste, hard enough on top, was inside of a damp and doughy consistence, and cook had used gooseberry jam for the filling, thereby taking a mean advantage of absence from home, when she knew that the family detested gooseberry in tarts, and steadily plumped for apricot instead.

“We’ll give them to the little boy at the ferry. He won’t be so particular!” Mrs Garnett said as she laid the rejected dainties on one side and proceeded to pack the oddments which had been required for the

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