CHAPTER XIX.
Oneby one the cousins who could do so passed out of the room, leaving Melville, who could not go had he wished, as sole witness of the interview between Ruth and Octave.
The sight of the merry Octave in tears was one so unusual and so depressing that little Fritz set up a dismal wail, which Christina checked her own more silent grief to soothe.
“Never mind, little brother; Aunt Ruthy loves Octave ever so! She’ll not scold her very hard for running away and being a heroine.”
“But she will! And Octave cried! I never, no never, all my life long, saw my Octave a-cryin’. I—I wish the old thing had staid to home; so there!”
“But this is her home, Fritz; and it is you and I who have put her out of it. That’s what Luke said. He said we ‘kerried on so like possessed’ that we ‘jest clean druv’ grandmother and Aunt Ruth away.”
“It’s no sech a thing! An’ I’ll tell Luke Tewksbury so to his old face!” retorted Fritz, indignantly, and forgetting to cry. “He’s a mean boy. He hitched my mare up to the harvest-wagon and said she had got to draw a—’bout twenty tons of stuff. He did, so.”
Christina did not dispute the assertion, and the picture of the tiny pony hitched before a lumber wagon was one that elicited her keenest sympathy.
“Well, never mind, dear; he didn’t really do it, and you can ask Aunt Ruth to make Luke stop teasing you. I am glad she has come home, though it did seem so sort of upsetting at first. She’ll straighten out all the crooked things, I fancy, she’s a ‘powerful hand to manage,’ Rosetta says.”
Don’s bray coming to his ears at that moment diverted the thoughts of Fritz from anything unpleasant, and he rushed out of doors to try a bare-back ride. This was a feat he had never yet accomplished, but which he daily attempted with an enthusiasm and courage worthy of a better cause. “Fritzy, he never gins up licked,”was Abraham’s as daily comment; and this was uttered in an indescribable tone, which seemed to put the child to a greater determination than ever.
“Take care, Fritzy,” called Christina; “don’t go and hurt yourself just as Aunt Ruth has come home”; which suggested that it would not be so much of a matter if he did so at other times.
Paula and Content slipped arms about each other’s waists and wandered off between the box-bordered flower-beds in the old garden. Of late, they had found many things in common, of likes and dislikes; and it had grown to be “the girls,” whenever they were spoken of in the household. Slowly ripening friendships are safest; and that of the elder cousins had grown gradually enough; but now it promised to equal that of names famous in history.
“What can I have done to vex Aunt Ruth!” cried Paula, wistfully. “I never thought so much about doing just right in my life as I have done since grandmother went away; but the harder I try the worse things appear to go.”
“You have done right, dear Paula; and AuntRuth will be the first to see she was mistaken in laying any blame to you. She is so honest she will tell you so, or else I am very much mistaken. But what in the world Octave ever went away like that for, and why she went, is just as much a puzzle to me as ever. Aunt Ruth will get the truth out of her, though, if it is possible.”
“What do you mean? Octave would not tell a lie to save herself any amount of blame.”
“Of course, I know that; but what the ‘Mystery’ is, and why there should be any ‘Mystery,’ is more than I see. Aunt Ruth will find out what it is.”
“It’s between Melville and Octave. One is as deep in it as the other. And I have a suspicion, but I don’t know what gave it to me, either.”
“A suspicion of what?”
“I think that he has thought of something, or invented something that she went away to see about. And that old gentleman who came home with her is in the plot, too. I wonder who he was! Not much of anybody, though, I fancy; he was so very plain and quiet.”
Meanwhile, behind the closed door of Melville’sroom, Octave was undergoing a cross-examination which tried her ardent soul to the uttermost. Time and time again she was on the point of giving out and divulging the “Mystery”; but as often was she restrained by the thought of the brilliant climax she hoped to achieve. She had promptly dried her tears, and looked up bravely into the kind, questioning face above her, and Aunt Ruth thought she had never seen anything sweeter than the frank young countenance into which she looked back.
“You see, Aunt Ruthy, it’s just this way. People can hold their tongues even if they do want to tell things, if they think that some good is to be gained by it. Some great good is to be gained by my keeping still.”
“Good to whom, Octave?” The aunt had found a deeper perplexity, even, than she had imagined.
“For Melville first, and afterward for all of us. Wouldn’t you be proud of him, if you should suddenly find him the most famous boy of his age, of this age, I mean?”
“Thee knows very well that I should be proudof him or of any one who does a noble thing. Fame is not always nobility; nor is notoriety fame. I should not want either thee or him to do anything for the mere sake of making peoples’ tongues wag.”
“Aunt Ruth, we’re all in a ‘mix-up,’ as Fritzy says. In the first place, I am going to tell tales for once, so as to clear up that about the ‘tantrum.’ Or, will you, Melville? It isn’t fair that you should think it was Paula.”
“But it was Paula, to begin with,” answered Melville, angrily. “She has such a terrible weight of care on her shoulders, that she must needs come in here and go to upsetting my things ‘to straighten them,’ she says. She hasn’t the least idea of what value they are; and she turned out some of my papers that will cost me hours to do over again; and they must be done, because I promised the professor—”
“Melville, take care!” warned Octave.
Ruth’s ear had caught the word. As she knew but one professor with whom Melville had any acquaintance, and as he was thousands of miles away when last she had heard of him, her interest was freshly aroused.
“The professor? Has thee heard from him?”
“Yes, I have had three letters from him,” proudly replied the invalid, quite thrown off his guard. “I have put them away in the most careful place, now; but it was one of those that I thought Paula had destroyed, as well as my ‘calculations.’ Think of my having, really having them written tome, too, three letters from a man so famous!”
“Humph! I did not know that the professor was so great. He seemed to me a dreamer and a rather insignificant person altogether. What is he doing now?” asked Miss Kinsolving, with her mind quite upon the wrong person.
“Why, Aunt Ruth! You cannot read the papers much! What is he not doing for science and the world? Think of all the wonderful helps to suffering people he has thought of in that one brain of his! Oh, it’s grand, grand! And to think that Mel—”
“Octave, take care!” warned the boy in his turn, but with eyes shining from the enthusiasm her words had aroused.
Ruth looked from one to the other, and withan expression so dismayed that Octave could not refrain from laughing.
“Excuse me, Aunt Ruthy; but you do look so bothered, and it is all so splendid, if you only knew! Won’t you just step out into the other room, and let me talk the thing over with Melville for a minute? Then I can know just how much to tell, and what I should not.”
This was certainly a novel proposition from a girl to her guardian; but Octave’s earnestness disarmed it of offence. All that Ruth did ejaculate was a characteristic “Humph!” but the tone in which it was uttered said volumes.
“I know, Aunt Ruthy, it does seem dreadful saucy, and all that; but I don’t see how I am to help it. I am so sorry you came home; no—I mean I’m glad, of course, for I love you; but if you hadn’t come, it—”
“It would have been more convenient for thee,” finished Miss Kinsolving, smiling in spite of her determination to be stern; also, in spite of her determination not to do anything of the kind, obediently walking out into the hall and standing there like a child in a game, while her companionsbehind the door deliberate as to her further mystification.
Certainly, the truth that earnestness bears its own force was never more fully exemplified. After a very brief consultation, the door was opened and the lady invited to reënter.
“Well, Aunt Ruth, there is nothing we can tell you, except that which Rosetta tried to write. I think that she meant this: Ten days ago I went to New York.”
“Octave! Alone?”
“Why, yes, ma’am; who was there to go with me?”
“But why?”
“On the happiest errand of my life. I am the proudest girl you ever saw; though I am, even in this case, ‘only Octave.’ Did you ever hear of Professor Edric von Holsneck?”
“All the world has heard of him. What has he to do with thee and me?”
“Everything. I went to New York to see him.”
“Octave Pickel!” cried Aunt Ruth, in her amazement; and could say no more.
“Yes, and just as soon as he heard that my namewasOctave Pickel he welcomed me with both hands, literally and figuratively.”
Ruth sank back in her chair and fanned herself with a palm-leaf she had picked up from the carpet. Her astonishment certainly made her speechless, till she reflected that after all it was not so strange. She had heard that the firm of “Pickel & Pickel” were Professor von Holsneck’s German publishers.
“Ah! thee knew him, then; that was different; but I hope thee did not go uninvited, and that thee will intrude thyself upon no one without first consulting older persons.”
“No, aunt; I did not know him at all. I had only heard of him, as you or anybody else has. But I had to see him on business. It was a sort of case of ‘Mahomet and the mountain.’ The mountain—that’s Melville—couldn’t go to Mahomet, so I went down and commanded the prophet to come to the mountain, and he came.”
“Madcap! Does thee mean to tell me that that great man has been beneath this roof,—been here in The Snuggery?”
“Beneath this very roof, here in this very Snuggery; sitting in that very chair where you sit now.”
“Oh! Oh!” gasped Miss Kinsolving; and in such dismay as to send them all off again into a fit of laughter, which on her part arose from nervousness, but on the young folks’s from pure delight.
“But, Aunt Ruth, you are the only person privileged to know that. In this benighted household my blessed professor is known only as—He!Heis a part of a splendid Mystery, which even you cannot be told, till the time is ripe. We have told you already more than we intended, and more than any one else is to know, perhaps for several weeks. When it is all accomplished”—here Octave smiled most encouragingly upon Melville, who suddenly appeared to turn pale—“everybody will congratulate everybody, and everything will be so beautiful! Please, Aunt Ruth, don’t tell Paula Pickel nor any of the others what we have told you. Let them just live on and wonder whoHeis, and whatHeis or was doing here. And won’t youjust be real nice to Paula? That girl has made a martyr of herself to ‘duty’ ever since you have been away; and I should have been here to look after my boy when she came in, then there wouldn’t have been any ‘tantrum.’ But ‘tantrums’ aren’t anything. They’re only a symptom of—genius. That is what the great man—He—called your Melville. Oh, I tell you, Ruth Kinsolving, this family is bound to be known to fame; and all on account of this young snapping-turtle here, that is as rightly named Capers as I am Pickel. Content we call the ‘lamb,’ and when the capers are a little too spicy we send her in to get the sauce spread over a mild surface. See?”
The day following, when Ruth entered her mother’s room again, that observant person remarked that “the change has done thee a great deal of good. I never saw thee looking brighter in thy life, my daughter. That tells me without asking that thee found everything as it should be at home.”
“I certainly have had a thorough ‘change,’ Mother Amy; and I have been considerably‘stirred up.’ But whether everything is as it should be, that I am not prepared to say. I was never so puzzled in my life; and I never heard of such children.”
“Theyaregood children, only a bit more sprightly than common”; returned the grandmother, fondly. “I shall be glad when thee thinks it is best for me to go back to them.”
Ruth sighed profoundly. She was conscious already of a sort of homesick feeling to be living again amidst all that overflowing life which had taken possession of The Snuggery and practically driven her out of it.
Mother Amy looked up from her knitting once more. “Thy brow is frowning, and thee looks even more perplexed than when thee went away, Ruth; but brighter and gayer.”
“Yes, mother, it did do me good, I think; but—”
“I hope the children have not been doing anything rash.”
“Doing! Rash! Mother Amy, think of the most unlikely thing in the world, and then make up thy mind that those children have done it. Even then thee will be far short of the mark.”