I had never liked the girl; latterly, I had despised her and regarded her as my enemy. I did not a.n.a.lyze the revulsion of feeling that made me hesitate while one could have counted ten, before saying in a low, constrained voice,--"Ceylon!"
The deposed pupil sank to the middle of the cla.s.s before the recitation was over, much to the bewilderment of the single-minded teacher. By the morrow she was at the bottom of the line and so far across the outer confines of Coventry that she never got back. That was our way of looking at "cribs" half a century ago.
It is not ten years since I met the banished scholar in a metropolitan reception-room, and a few minutes afterward, another old schoolfellow, who said in one and the same breath, "Do you know that Mary Morgan is here?" and, "I suppose it is uncharitable, but I can never forget that she used to cheat in her recitations at Mrs. Nunham"s."
We went home "for Christmas." My father sent the carriage for us. The roomy family coach he never allowed to get shabby. The "squabs," _i.e._ padded inner curtains to exclude the cold in winter, were in, and there were thick shawls and a pillow apiece and two footstoves for our comfort in the thirty-mile drive, and upon the front seat, gorgeous in a new shawl of many and daring colors, her snowy turban wound about head and ears, was Mam" Chloe, the comfortablest thing there. Hamilcar, the carriage-driver, (we did not say "coachman") had on his Christmas suit, including a s.h.a.ggy overcoat for which his master had given him an order upon a Richmond tailor, and was spruce exceedingly. To ensure our perfect safety and respectability we had an outrider in the shape of Mr. James Ireton, a young fellow-countryman, who was returning from a business trip to town.
The boxes under the seats--an old-fashioned convenience, capable of containing a gentleman"s entire wardrobe and half of a lady"s--were brimful of Christmas gifts and "goodies," and parcels stuffed with the same wedged Mam" Chloe in the exact middle of the front seat. A big hair-trunk was strapped upon the rack behind, and a box packed by Cousin Molly Belle was between Hamilcar"s feet.
It began to snow before we had left the city a mile behind us, but that made things all the merrier. How we chuckled with laughter as the fast flakes stuck upon Mr. Ireton"s hat and overcoat and leggings, until he looked like a polar bear but for his face that got redder as the rest of his body whitened, until, with his shining teeth and powdered hair, he made us think of Santa Claus. When we let down the carriage-window to tell him so, he drew a pipe from his pocket, got behind the carriage to screen it from the wind while he was lighting it, and rode up again alongside of us, puffing away at it to carry out the likeness.
We set out at nine o"clock, and at one o"clock stopped at Flat Rock, a well-known house of entertainment, for an early dinner and a generous feed for the horses. The roads were heavy with winter mud, red and sticky. It looked like strawberry ice-cream as the wheels and hoofs churned it up with the snow. Mam" Chloe laughed until her fat sides quaked when I said that. How good she was to us that day! how good everybody was! and how good it was to be just what I was, and where I was--off on a royal spree in the splendidest snowstorm I had ever seen, and Home and Christmas at the end of the journey.
Darkness fell by four o"clock, and, but for the whiteness of the earth, we would not have been able to see the trees on the side of the road when we came in sight of the house. Not a shutter had been closed, and every window was aglow with fire and lamplight, golden and pink through the snowy veil shifting and swaying between them and our happy eyes.
When, for me, Life"s little day--full, rich, and blessed, for all that storm and wreck and blight have, once and again, befallen me, as was G.o.d"s will, and therefore, for my eternal good--when, for me, Life"s little day darkens to its outgoing, may the lights of the Home that changes not, save from glory to glory, shine out for me through night and chill with such loving welcome as gleamed in those ruddy windows!