Singular as it was that Pearson should return without being summoned, when she turned and found that he mysteriously stood inside the threshold again, as if she had called him, she felt a great sense of relief.
“Pearson,” she faltered, “I am rather upset by certain things which Captain Palliser has said. I am afraid I do not understand.”
She looked at him helplessly, not knowing what more to say. She wished extremely that she could think of something definite.
The masterly finish of Pearson's reply lay in its neatly restrained hint of unobtrusively perceptive sympathy.
“Yes, Miss. I was afraid so. Which is why I took the liberty of stepping into the room again. I myself do not understand, but of course I do not expect to. If I may be so bold as to say it, Miss, whatever we don't understand, we both understand Mr. Temple Barholm. My instructions were to remind you, Miss, that everything would be all right.”
Miss Alicia took up her letter from the table where she had laid it down.
“Thank you, Pearson,” she said, her forehead beginning to clear itself a little. “Of course, of course. I ought not to—He told me not to—get rattled,” she added with plaintive ingenuousness, “and I ought not to, above all things.”
“Yes, Miss. It is most important that you should not.”
The story of the adventures, experiences, and journeyings of Mr. Joseph Hutchinson, his daughter, and the invention, if related in detail, would prove reading of interest; but as this is merely a study of the manner in which the untrained characteristics and varied limitations of one man adjusted or failed to adjust themselves to incongruous surroundings and totally unprepared-for circumstances, such details, whatsoever their potential picturesqueness, can be touched upon but lightly. No new idea of value to the world of practical requirements is presented to the public at large without the waking of many sleeping dogs, and the stirring of many snapping fish, floating with open ears and eyes in many pools. An uneducated, blustering, obstinate man of one idea, having resentfully borne discouragement and wounded egotism for years, and suddenly confronting immense promise of success, is not unlikely to be prey easily harpooned. Joseph Hutchinson's rebound from despair to high and well-founded hope made of him exactly what such a man is always made by such rebound. The testimony to his genius and judgment which acknowledgment of the value of his work implied was naturally, in his opinion, only a proper tribute which the public had been a bull-headed fool not to lay at his feet years before. So much time lost, and so much money for it, as well as for him, and served 'em all damned well right, he said. If Temple Barholm hadn't come into his money, and hadn't had more sense than the rest of them, where would they all have been? Perhaps they'd never have had the benefit of the thing he'd been telling them about for years. He prided himself immensely on the possession of a business shrewdness which was an absolute defense against any desire on the part of the iniquitous to overreach him. He believed it to be a peculiarly Lancashire characteristic, and kept it in view constantly.
“Lancashire's not easy to do,” he would say hilariously, “Them that can do a Lancashire chap has got to look out that they get up early in the morning and don't go to bed till late.”
Smooth-mannered and astute men of business who knew how to make a man talk were given diffuse and loud-voiced explanations of his methods and long-acknowledged merits and characteristics. His life, his morals, and his training, or rather lack of it, were laid before them as examples of what a man might work himself up to if “he had it in him.” Education didn't do it. He had never been to naught but a village school, where he'd picked up precious little but the three R's. It had to be born in a man. Look at him! His invention promised to bring him in a fortune like a duke's, if he managed it right and kept his eyes open for sharpers. This company and that company were after him, but Lancashire didn't snap up things without going into 'em, and under 'em, and through 'em, for the matter of that.
The well-mannered gentlemen of business stimulated him greatly by their appreciative attention. He sometimes lost his head a trifle and almost bullied them, but they did not seem to mind it. Their apparently old-time knowledge of and respect for Lancashire business sagacity seemed invariably a marked thing. Men of genius and powerful character combined with practical shrewdness of outlook they intimated, were of enormous value to the business world. They were to be counted upon as important factors. They could see and deal with both sides of a proposal as those of weaker mind could not.
“That they can,” Hutchinson would admit, rolling about in his chair and thrusting his hands in his pockets. “They've got some bottom to stand on.” And he would feel amenable to reason.
Little Ann found her duties and responsibilities increasing daily. Many persons seemed to think it necessary to come and talk business, and father had so much to think of and reason out, so that he could be sure that he didn't make any mistakes. In a quiet, remote, and darkened corner of her mind, in which were stored all such things as it was well to say little or nothing about, there was discreetly kept for reference the secretly acquired knowledge that father did not know so much about business ways and business people as he thought he did. Mother had learned this somewhat important fact, and had secluded it in her own private mental store-room with much affectionate delicacy.
“Father's a great man and a good man, Ann love,” she had confided to her, choosing an occasion when her husband was a hundred miles away, “and he IS right-down Lancashire in his clever way of seeing through people that think themselves sharp; but when a man is a genius and noble-minded he sometimes can't see the right people's faults and wickedness. He thinks they mean as honest as he does. And there's times when he may get taken in if some one, perhaps not half as clever as he is, doesn't look after him. When the invention's taken up, and everybody's running after him to try to cheat him out of his rights, if I'm not there, Ann, you must just keep with him and watch every minute. I've seen these sharp, tricky ones right-down flinch and quail when there was a nice, quiet-behaved woman in the room, and she just fixed her eye steady and clear-like on them and showed she'd took in every word and was like to remember. You know what I mean, Ann; you've got that look in your own eye.”
She had. The various persons who interviewed Mr. Hutchinson became familiar with the fact that he had an unusual intimacy with and affection for his daughter. She was present on all occasions. If she had not been such a quiet and entirely unobtrusive little thing, she might have been an obstacle to freedom of expression. But she seemed a childish, unsophisticated creature, who always had a book with her when she waited in an office, and a trifle of sewing to occupy herself with when she was at home. At first she so obliterated herself that she was scarcely noticed; but in course of time it became observed by some that she was curiously pretty. The face usually bent over her book or work was tinted like a flower, and she had quite magnificent red hair. A stout old financier first remarked her eyes. He found one day that she had quietly laid her book on her lap, and that they were resting upon him like unflinching crystals as he talked to her father. Their serenity made him feel annoyed and uncomfortable. It was a sort of recording serenity. He felt as though she would so clearly remember every word he had said that she would be able to write it down when she went home; and he did not care to have it written down. So he began to wander somewhat in his argument, and did not reach his conclusions.
“I was glad, Father, to see how you managed that gentleman this afternoon,” Little Ann said that night when Hutchinson had settled himself with his pipe after an excellent dinner.
“Eh?” he exclaimed. “Eh?”
“The one,” she exclaimed, “that thought he was so sure he was going to persuade you to sign that paper. I do wonder he could think you'd listen to such a poor offer, and tie up so much. Why, even I could see he was trying to take advantage, and I know nothing in the world about business.”
The financier in question had been a brilliant and laudatory conversationalist, and had so soothed and exhilarated Mr. Hutchinson that such perils had beset him as his most lurid imaginings could never have conceived in his darkest moments of believing that the entire universe had ceased all other occupation to engage in that of defrauding him of his rights and dues. He had been so uplifted by the admiration of his genius so properly exhibited, and the fluency with which his future fortunes had been described, that he had been huffed when the arguments seemed to dwindle away. Little Ann startled him, but it was not he who would show signs of dismay at the totally unexpected expression of adverse opinion. He had got into the habit of always listening, though inadvertently, as it were, to Ann as he had inadvertently listened to her mother.
“Rosenthal?” he said. “Are you talking about him?”
“Yes, I am,” Little Ann answeered, smiling approvingly over her bit of sewing. “Father, I wish you'd try and teach me some of the things you know about business. I've learned a little by just listening to you talk; but I should so like to feel as if I could follow you when you argue. I do so enjoy hearing you argue. It's just an education.”
“Women are not up to much at business,” reflected Hutchinson. “If you'd been a boy, I'd have trained you same as I've trained myself. You're a sharp little thing, Ann, but you're a woman. Not but what a woman's the best thing on earth,” he added almost severely in his conviction—“the best thing on earth in her place. I don't know what I'd ever have done without you, Ann, in the bad times.”
He loved her, blundering old egotist, just as he had loved her mother. Ann always knew it, and her own love for him warmed all the world about them both. She got up and went to him to kiss him, and pat him, and stuff a cushion behind his stout back.
“And now the good times have come,” she said, bestowing on him two or three special little pats which were caresses of her own invention, “and people see what you are and always have been, as they ought to have seen long ago, I don't want to feel as if I couldn't keep up with you and understand your plans. Perhaps I've got a little bit of your cleverness, and you might teach me to use it in small ways. I've got a good memory you know, Father love, and I might recollect things people say and make bits of notes of them to save you trouble. And I can calculate. I once got a copy of Bunyan's `Pilgrim's Progress' for a prize at the village school just for sums.”
The bald but unacknowledged fact that Mr. Hutchinson had never exhibited gifts likely to entitle him to receive a prize for “sums” caused this suggestion to be one of some practical value. When business men talked to him of per cents., and tenth shares or net receipts, and expected him to comprehend their proportions upon the spot without recourse to pencil and paper, he felt himself grow hot and nervous and red, and was secretly terrified lest the party of the second part should detect that he was tossed upon seas of horrible uncertainty. T. Tembarom in the same situation would probably have said, “This is the place where T. T. sits down a while to take breath and count things up on his fingers. I am not a sharp on arithmetic, and I need time—lots of it.”
Mr. Hutchinson's way was to bluster irritatedly.
“Aye, aye, I see that, of course, plain enough. I see that.” And feel himself breaking into a cold perspiration. “Eh, this English climate is a damp un,” he would add when it became necessary to mop his red forehead somewhat with his big clean handkerchief.
Therefore he found it easy to receive Little Ann's proposition with favor.
“There's summat i' that,” he acknowledged graciously, dropping into Lancashire. “That's one of the little things a woman can do if she's sharp at figures. Your mother taught me that much. She always said women ought to look after the bits of things as was too small for a man to bother with.”
“Men have the big things to look after. That's enough for anybody,” said Little Ann. “And they ought to leave something for women to do. If you'll just let me keep notes for you and remember things and answer your letters, and just make calculations you're too busy to attend to, I should feel right-down happy, Father.”
“Eh!” he said relievedly, “tha art like thy mother.”
“That would make me happy if there was nothing else to do it,” said Ann, smoothing his shoulder.
“You're her girl,” he said, warmed and supported.
“Yes, I'm her girl, and I'm yours. Now, isn't there some little thing I could begin with? Would you mind telling me if I was right in what I thought you thought about Mr. Rosenthal's offer?”
“What did you think I thought about it?” He was able to put affectionate condescension into the question.
She went to her work-basket and took out a sheet of paper. She came back and sat cozily on the arm of his chair.
“I had to put it all down when I came home,” she said. “I wanted to make sure I hadn't forgotten. I do hope I didn't make mistakes.”
She gave it to him to look at, and as he settled himself down to its careful examination, she kept her blue eyes upon him. She herself did not know that it was a wonderful little document in its neatly jotted down notes of the exact detail most important to his interests.
There were figures, there were calculations of profits, there were records of the gist of his replies, there were things Hutchinson himself could not possibly have fished out of the jumbled rag-bag of his uncertain recollections.
“Did I say that?” he exclaimed once.
“Yes, Father love, and I could see it upset him. I was watching his face because it wasn't a face I took to.”
Joseph Hutchinson began to chuckle—the chuckle of a relieved and gratified stout man.
“Tha kept thy eyes open, Little Ann,” he said. “And the way tha's put it down is a credit to thee. And I'll lay a sovereign that tha made no mistakes in what tha thought I was thinking.”
He was a little anxious to hear what it had been. The memorandum had brought him up with a slight shock, because it showed him that he had not remembered certain points, and had passed over others which were of dangerous importance. Ann slipped her warm arm about his neck, as she nearly always did when she sat on the arm of his chair and talked things over with him. She had never thought, in fact she was not even aware, that her soft little instincts made her treat him as the big, good, conceited, blundering child nature had created him.
“What I was seeing all the time was the way you were taking in his trick of putting whole lots of things in that didn't really matter, and leaving out things that did,” she explained. “He kept talking about what the invention would make in England, and how it would make it, and adding up figures and per cents. and royalties until my head was buzzing inside. And when he thought he'd got your mind fixed on England so that you'd almost forget there was any other country to think of, he read out the agreement that said `All rights,' and he was silly enough to think he could get you to sign it without reading it over and over yourself, and showing it to a clever lawyer that would know that as many tricks can be played by things being left out of a paper as by things being put in.”
Small beads of moisture broke out on the bald part of Joseph Hutchinson's head. He had been first so flattered and exhilarated by the quoting of large figures, and then so flustrated and embarrassed by his inability to calculate and follow argument, and again so soothed and elated and thrilled by his own importance in the scheme and the honors which his position in certain companies would heap upon him, that an abyss had yawned before him of which he had been wholly unaware. He was not unaware of it now. He was a vainglorious, ignorant man, whose life had been spent in common work done under the supervision of those who knew what he did not know. He had fed himself upon the comforting belief that he had learned all the tricks of any trade. He had been openly boastful of his astuteness and experience, and yet, as Ann's soft little voice went on, and she praised his cleverness in seeing one point after another, he began to quake within himself before the dawning realization that he had seen none of them, that he had been carried along exactly as Rosenthal had intended that he should be, and that if luck had not intervened, he had been on the brink of signing his name to an agreement that would have implied a score of concessions he would have bellowed like a bull at the thought of making if he had known what he was doing.
“Aye, lass,” he gulped out when he could speak—“aye, lass, tha wert right enow. I'm glad tha wert there and heard it, and saw what I was thinking. I didn't say much. I let the chap have rope enow to hang himself with. When he comes back I'll give him a bit o' my mind as'll startle him. It was right-down clever of thee to see just what I had i' my head about all that there gab about things as didn't matter, an' the leavin' out them as did—thinking I wouldn't notice. Many's the time I've said, `It is na so much what's put into a contract as what's left out.' I'll warrant tha'st heard me say it thysen.”
“I dare say I have,” answered Ann, “and I dare say that was why it came into my mind.”
“That was it,” he answered. “Thy mother was always tellin' me of things I'd said that I'd clean forgot myself.”
He was beginning to recover his balance and self-respect. It would have been so like a Lancashire chap to have seen and dealt shrewdly with a business schemer who tried to outwit him that he was gradually convinced that he had thought all that had been suggested, and had comported himself with triumphant though silent astuteness. He even began to rub his hands.
“I'll show him,” he said, “I'll send him off with a flea in his ear.”
“If you'll help me, I'll study out the things I've written down on this paper,” Ann said, “and then I'll write down for you just the things you make up your mind to say. It will be such a good lesson for me, if you don't mind, Father. It won't be much to write it out the way you'll say it. You know how you always feel that in business the fewer words the better, and that, however much a person deserves it, calling names and showing you're angry is only wasting time. One of the cleverest things you ever thought was that a thief doesn't mind being called one if he's got what he wanted out of you; he'll only laugh to see you in a rage when you can't help yourself. And if he hasn't got what he wanted, it's only waste of strength to work yourself up. It's you being what you are that makes you know that temper isn't business.”
“Well,” said Hutchinson, drawing a long and deep breath, “I was almost hot enough to have forgot that, and I'm glad you've reminded me. We'll go over that paper now, Ann. I'd like to give you your lesson while we've got a bit o' time to ourselves and what I've said is fresh in your mind. The trick is always to get at things while they're fresh in your mind.”
The little daughter with the red hair was present during Rosenthal's next interview with the owner of the invention. The fellow, he told himself, had been thinking matters over, had perhaps consulted a lawyer; and having had time for reflection, he did not present a mass of mere inflated and blundering vanity as a target for adroit aim. He seemed a trifle sulky, but he did not talk about himself diffusely, and lose his head when he was smoothed the right way. He had a set of curiously concise notes to which he referred, and he stuck to his points with a bulldog obstinacy which was not to be shaken. Something had set him on a new tack. The tricks which could be used only with a totally ignorant and readily flattered and influenced business amateur were no longer in order. This was baffling and irritating.
The worst feature of the situation was that the daughter did not read a book, as had seemed her habit at other times. She sat with a tablet and pencil on her knee, and, still as unobtrusively as ever, jotted down notes.
“Put that down, Ann,” her father said to her more than once. “There's no objections to having things written down, I suppose?” he put it bluntly to Rosenthal. “I've got to have notes made when I'm doing business. Memory's all well enough, but black and white's better. No one can go back of black and white. Notes save time.”
There was but one attitude possible. No man of business could resent the recording of his considered words, but the tablet and pencil and the quietly bent red head were extraordinary obstacles to the fluidity of eloquence. Rosenthal found his arguments less ready and his methods modifying themselves. The outlook narrowed itself. When he returned to his office and talked the situation over with his partner, he sat and bit his nails in restless irritation.
“Ridiculous as it seems, outrageously ridiculous, I've an idea,” he said, “I've more than an idea that we have to count with the girl.”
“Girl? What girl?”
“Daughter. Well-behaved, quiet bit of a thing, who sits in a corner and listens while she pretends to sew or read. I'm certain of it. She's taken to making notes now, and Hutchinson's turned stubborn. You need not laugh, Lewis. She's in it. We've got to count with that girl, little female mouse as she looks.”
This view, which was first taken by Rosenthal and passed on to his partner, was in course of time passed on to others and gradually accepted, sometimes reluctantly and with much private protest, sometimes with amusement. The well-behaved daughter went with Hutchinson wheresoever his affairs called him. She was changeless in the unobtrusiveness of her demeanor, which was always that of a dutiful and obedient young person who attended her parent because he might desire her humble little assistance in small matters.
“She's my secretary,” Hutchinson began to explain, with a touch of swagger. “I've got to have a secretary, and I'd rather trust my private business to my own daughter than to any one else. It's safe with her.”
It was so safe with her steady demureness that Hutchinson found himself becoming steady himself. The “lessons” he gave to Little Ann, and the notes made as a result, always ostensibly for her own security and instruction, began to form a singularly firm foundation for statement and argument. He began to tell himself that his memory was improving. Facts were no longer jumbled together in his mind. He could better follow a line of logical reasoning. He less often grew red and hot and flustered.
“That's the thing I've said so often—that temper's got naught to do wi' business, and only upsets a man when he wants all his wits about him. It's the truest thing I ever worked out,” he not infrequently congratulated himself. “If a chap can keep his temper, he'll be like to keep his head and drive his bargain. I see it plainer every day o' my life.”
It was in the course of the “lessons” that he realized that he had always argued that the best way to do business was to do it face to face with people. To stay in England, and let another chap make your bargains for you in France or Germany or some other outlandish place, where frog-eating foreigners ran loose, was a fool's trick. He'd said it often enough. “Get your eye on 'em, and let them know you've got it on them, and they'd soon find out they were dealing with Lancashire, and not with foreign knaves and nincompoops.” So, when it became necessary to deal with France, Little Ann packed him up neatly, so to speak, and in the role of obedient secretarial companion took him to that country, having for weeks beforehand mentally confronted the endless complications attending the step. She knew, in the first place, what the effect of the French language would be upon his temper: that it would present itself to him as a wall deliberately built by the entire nation as a means of concealing a deep duplicity the sole object of which was the baffling, thwarting, and undoing of Englishmen, from whom it wished to wrest their honest rights. Apoplexy becoming imminent, as a result of his impotent rage during their first few days in Paris, she paid a private visit to a traveler's agency, and after careful inquiry discovered that it was not impossible to secure the attendance and service of a well-mannered young man who spoke most of the languages employed by most of the inhabitants of the globe. She even found that she might choose from a number of such persons, and she therefore selected with great care.
“One that's got a good temper, and isn't easy irritated,” she said to herself, in summing up the aspirants, “but not one that's easy-tempered because he's silly. He must have plenty of common sense as well as be willing to do what he's told.”
When her father discovered that he himself had been considering the desirability of engaging the services of such a person, and had, indeed already, in a way, expressed his intention of sending her to “the agency chap” to look him up, she was greatly relieved.
“I can try to teach him what you've taught me, Father,” she said, “and of course he'll learn just by being with you.”
The assistant engaged was a hungry young student who had for weeks, through ill luck, been endeavoring to return with some courage the gaze of starvation, which had been staring him in the face.
His name was Dudevant, and with desperate struggles he had educated himself highly, having cherished literary ambitions from his infancy. At this juncture it had become imperative that he should, for a few months at least, obtain food. Ann had chosen well by instinct. His speech had told her that he was intelligent, his eyes had told her that he would do anything on earth to earn his living.
From the time of his advent, Joseph Hutchinson had become calmer and had ceased to be in peril of apoplectic seizure. Foreign nations became less iniquitous and dangerous, foreign languages were less of a barrier, easier to understand. A pleasing impression that through great facility he had gained a fair practical knowledge of French, German, and Italian, supported and exhilarated him immensely.
“It's right-down wonderful how a chap gets to understand these fellows' lingo after he's listened to it a bit,” he announced to Ann. “I wouldn't have believed it of myself that I could see into it as quick as I have. I couldn't say as I understand everything they say just when they're saying it; but I understand it right enough when I've had time to translate like. If foreigners didn't talk so fast and run their words one into another, and jabber as if their mouths was full of puddin', it'd be easier for them as is English. Now, there's `wee' and `nong.' I know 'em whenever I hear 'em, and that's a good bit of help.”
“Yes,” answered Ann, “of course that's the chief thing you want to know in business, whether a person is going to say `yes' or `no.'”
He began to say “wee” and “nong” at meals, and once broke forth “Passy mor le burr” in a tone so casually Parisian that Ann was frightened, because she did not understand immediately, and also because she saw looming up before her a future made perilous by the sudden interjection of unexpected foreign phrases it would be incumbent upon her and Dudevant to comprehend instantaneously without invidious hesitation.
“Don't you understand? Pass the butter. Don't you understand a bit o' French like that?” he exclaimed irritatedly. “Buy yourself one o' these books full of easy sentences and learn some of 'em, lass. You oughtn't to be travelin' about with your father in foreign countries and learnin' nothin'. It's not every lass that's gettin' your advantages.”
Ann had not mentioned the fact that she spent most of her rare leisure moments in profound study of phrase-books and grammars, which she kept in her trunk and gave her attention to before she got up in the morning, after she went to her room at night, and usually while she was dressing. You can keep a book open before you when you are brushing your hair. Dudevant gave her a lesson or so whenever time allowed. She was as quick to learn as her father thought he was, and she was desperately determined. It was really not long before she understood much more than “wee and nong” when she was present at a business interview.
“You are a wonderful young lady,” Dudevant said, with that well-known yearning in his eyes. “You are most wonderful.”
“She's just a wonder,” Mrs. Bowse and her boarders had said. And the respectful yearning in the young Frenchman's eyes and voice were well known to her because she had seen it often before, and remembered it, in Jem Bowles and Julius Steinberger. That this young man had without an hour of delay fallen abjectly in love with her was a circumstance with which she dealt after her own inimitably kind and undeleterious method, which in itself was an education to any amorous youth.
“I can understand all you tell me,” she said when he reached the point of confiding his hard past to her. “I can understand it because I knew some one who had to fight for himself just that way, only perhaps it was harder because he wasn't educated as you are.”
“Did he—confide in you?” Dudevant ventured, with delicate hesitation. “You are so kind I am sure he did, Mademoiselle.”
“He told me about it because he knew I wanted to hear,” she answered. “I was very fond of him,” she added, and her kind gravity was quite unshaded by any embarrassment. “I was right-down fond of him.”
His emotion rendered him for a moment indiscreet, to her immediate realization and regret, as was evident by his breaking off in the midst of his question.
“And now—are you?”
“Yes, I always shall be, Mr. Dudevant.”
His adoration naturally only deepened itself as all hope at once receded, as it could not but recede before the absolute pellucid truth of her.
“However much he likes me, he will get over it in time. People do, when they know how things stand,” she was thinking, with maternal sympathy.
It did him no bitter harm to help her with her efforts at learning what she most needed, and he found her intelligence and modest power of concentration remarkable. A singularly clear knowledge of her own specialized requirements was a practical background to them both. She had no desire to shine; she was merely steadily bent on acquiring as immediately as possible a comprehension of nouns, verbs, and phrases that would be useful to her father. The manner in which she applied herself, and assimilated what it was her quietly fixed intention to assimilate, bespoke her possession of a brain the powers of which being concentrated on large affairs might have accomplished almost startling results. There was, however, nothing startling in her intentions, and ambition did not touch her. Yet, as she went with Hutchinson from one country to another, more than one man of affairs had it borne in upon him that her young slimness and her silence represented an unanticipated knowledge of points under discussion which might wisely be considered as a factor in all decisions for or against. To realize that a soft-cheeked, child-eyed girl was an element to regard privately in discussions connected with the sale of, or the royalties paid on, a valuable patent appeared in some minds to be a situation not without flavor. She was the kind of little person a man naturally made love to, and a girl who was made love to in a clever manner frequently became amenable to reason, and might be persuaded to use her influence in the direction most desired. But such male financiers as began with this idea discovered that they had been led into errors of judgment through lack of familiarity with the variations of type. One personable young man of title, who had just been disappointed in a desirable marriage with a fortune, being made aware that the invention was likely to arrive at amazing results, was sufficiently rash to approach Mr. Hutchinson with formal proposals. Having a truly British respect for the lofty in place, and not being sufficiently familiar with titled personages to discriminate swiftly between the large and the small, Joseph Hutchinson was somewhat unduly elated.
“The chap's a count, lass,” he said. “Tha'u'd go back to Manchester a countess.”
“I've heard they're nearly all counts in these countries,” commented Ann. “And there's countesses that have to do their own washing, in a manner of speaking. You send him to me, Father.”
When the young man came, and compared the fine little nose of Miss Hutchinson with the large and bony structure dominating the countenance of the German heiress he had lost, also when he gazed into the clearness of the infantile blue eyes, his spirits rose. He felt himself en veine; he was equal to attacking the situation. He felt that he approached it with alluring and chivalric delicacy. He almost believed all that he said.
But the pellucid blueness of the gaze that met his was confusingly unstirred by any shade of suitable timidity or emotion. There was something in the lovely, sedate little creature, something so undisturbed and matter of fact, that it frightened him, because he suddenly felt like a fool whose folly had been found out.
“That's downright silly,” remarked Little Ann, not allowing him to escape from her glance, which unhesitatingly summed up him and his situation. “And you know it is. You don't know anything about me, and you wouldn't like me if you did. And I shouldn't like you. We're too different. Please go away, and don't say anything more about it. I shouldn't have patience to talk it over.”
“Father,” she said that night, “if ever I get married at all, there's only one person I'm going to marry. You know that.” And she would say no more.
By the time they returned to England, the placing of the invention in divers countries had been arranged in a manner which gave assurance of a fortune for its owners on a foundation not likely to have established itself in more adverse circumstances. Mr. Hutchinson had really driven some admirable bargains, and had secured advantages which to his last hour he would believe could have been achieved only by Lancashire shrewdness and Lancashire ability to “see as far through a mile-stone as most chaps, an' a bit farther.” The way in which he had never allowed himself to be “done” caused him at times to chuckle himself almost purple with self-congratulation.
“They got to know what they was dealing with, them chaps. They was sharp, but Joe was a bit sharper,” he would say.
They found letters waiting for them when they reached London.
“There's one fro' thy grandmother,” Hutchinson said, in dealing out the package. “She's written to thee pretty steady for an old un.”
This was true. Letters from her had followed them from one place to another. This was a thick one in an envelop of good size.
“Aren't tha going to read it?” he asked.
“Not till you've had your dinner, Father. You've had a long day of it with that channel at the end. I want to see you comfortable with your pipe.”
The hotel was a good one, and the dinner was good. Joseph Hutchinson enjoyed it with the appetite of a robust man who has had time to get over a not too pleasant crossing. When he had settled down into a stout easy-chair with the pipe, he drew a long and comfortable breath as he looked about the room.
“Eh, Ann, lass,” he said, “thy mother 'd be fine an' set up if she could see aw this. Us having the best that's to be had, an' knowin' we can have it to the end of our lives, that's what it's come to, tha knows. No more third-class railway-carriages for you and me. No more `commercial' an' `temperance' hotels. Th' first cut's what we can have—th' upper cut. Eh, eh, but it's a good day for a man when he's begun to be appreciated as he should be.”
“It's a good day for those that love him,” said Little Ann. “And I dare say mother knows every bit about it.”
“I dare say she does,” admitted Hutchinson, with tender lenience. “She was one o' them as believed that way. And I never knowed her to be wrong in aught else, so I'm ready to give in as she was reet about that. Good lass she was, good lass.”
He had fallen into a contented and utterly comfortable doze in his chair when Ann sat down to read her grandmother's letter. The old woman always wrote at length, giving many details and recording village events with shrewd realistic touches. Throughout their journeyings, Ann had been followed by a record of the estate and neighborhood of Temple Barholm which had lacked nothing of atmosphere. She had known what the new lord of the manor did, what people said, what the attitude of the gentry had become; that the visit of the Countess of Mallowe and her daughter had extended itself until curiosity and amusement had ceased to comment, and passively awaited results. She had heard of Miss Alicia and her reincarnation, and knew much of the story of the Duke of Stone, whose reputation as a “dommed clever owd chap” had earned for him a sort of awed popularity. There had been many “ladies.” The new Temple Barholm had boldly sought them out and faced them in their strongholds with the manner of one who would confront the worst and who revealed no tendency to flinch. The one at Stone Hover with the “pretty color” and the one with the dimples had appeared frequently upon the scene. Then there had been Lady Joan Fayre, who had lived at his elbow, sitting at his table, driving in his carriages with the air of cold aloofness which the cottagers “could na abide an' had no patience wi'.” She had sometimes sat and wondered and wondered about things, and sometimes had flushed daisy-red instead of daisy-pink; and sometimes she had turned rather pale and closed her soft mouth firmly. But, though she had written twice a week to her grandmother, she had recorded principally the successes and complexities of the invention, and had asked very few questions. Old Mrs. Hutchinson would tell her all she must know, and her choice of revelation would be made with a far-sightedness which needed no stimulus of questioning. The letter she had found awaiting her had been long on its way, having missed her at point after point and followed her at last to London. It looked and felt thick and solid in its envelop. Little Ann opened it, stirred by the suggestion of quickened pulse-beats with which she had become familiar. As she bent over it she looked sweetly flushed and warmed.
Joseph Hutchinson's doze had almost deepened into sleep when he was awakened by the touch of her hand on his shoulder. She was standing by him, holding some sheets of her grandmother's letter, and several other sheets were lying on the table. Something had occurred which had changed her quiet look.
“Has aught happened to your grandmother?” he asked.
“No, Father, but this letter that's been following me from one place to another has got some queer news in it.”
“What's up, lass? Tha looks as if summat was up.”
“The thing that's happened has given me a great deal to think of,” was her answer. “It's about Mr. Temple Barholm and Mr. Strangeways.”
He became wide-awake at once, sitting up and turning in his chair in testy anxiety.
“Now, now,” he exclaimed, “I hope that cracked chap's not gone out an' out mad an' done some mischief. I towd Temple Barholm it was a foolish thing to do, taking all that trouble about him. Has he set fire to th' house or has he knocked th' poor lad on th' head?”
“No, he hasn't, Father. He's disappeared, and Mr. Temple Barholm's disappeared, too.”
“Disappeared?” Hutchinson almost shouted. “What for, i' the Lord's name?”
“Nobody knows for certain, and people are talking wild. The village is all upset, and all sorts of silly things are being said.”
“What sort o' things?”
“You know what servants at big houses are—how they hear bits of talk and make much of it,” she explained. “They've been curious and chattering among themselves about Mr. Strangeways from the first. It was Burrill that said he believed he was some relation that was being hid away for some good reason. One night Mr. Temple Barholm and Captain Palliser were having a long talk together, and Burrill was about—”
“Aye, he'd be about if he thought there was a chance of him hearing summat as was none of his business,” jerked out Hutchinson, irately.
“They were talking about Mr. Strangeways, and Burrill heard Captain Palliser getting angry; and as he stepped near the door he heard him say out loud that he could swear in any court of justice that the man he had seen at the west room window—it's a startling thing, Father—was Mr. James Temple Barholm.” For the moment her face was pale.
Hereupon Hutchinson sprang up.
“What!” His second shout was louder than his first. “Th' liar! Th' chap's dead, an' he knows it. Th' dommed mischief-makin' liar!”
Her eyes were clear and speculatively thoughtful, notwithstanding her lack of color.
“There have been people that have been thought dead that have come back to their friends alive. It's happened many a time,” she said. “It wouldn't be so strange for a man that had no friends to be lost in a wild, far-off place where there was neither law nor order, and where every man was fighting for his own life and the gold he was mad after. Particularly a man that was shamed and desperate and wanted to hide himself. And, most of all, it would be easy, if he was like Mr. Strangeways, and couldn't remember, and had lost himself.”
As her father listened, the angry redness of his countenance moderated its hue. His eyes gradually began to question and his under jaw fell slightly.
“Si' thee, lass,” he broke out huskily, “does that mean to say tha believes it?”
“It's not often you can believe what you don't know,” she answered. “I don't know anything about it. There's just one thing I believe, because I know it. I believe what grandmother does. Read that.”
She handed him the final sheet of old Mrs. Hutchinson's letter. It was written with very black ink and in an astonishingly bold and clear hand. It was easy to read the sentences with which she ended.
There's a lot said. There's always more saying than doing. But it's right-down funny to see how the lad has made hard and fast friends just going about in his queer way, and no one knowing how he did it. I like him myself. He's one of those you needn't ask questions about. If there's anything said that isn't to his credit, it's not true. There's no ifs, buts, or ands about that, Ann.
Little Ann herself read the words as her father read them.
“That's the thing I believe, because I know it,” was all she said.
“It's the thing I'd swear to mysel',” her father answered bluffly. “But, by Judd—”
She gave him a little push and spoke to him in homely Lancashire phrasing, and with some soft unsteadiness of voice.
“Sit thee down, Father love,” she said, “and let me sit on thy knee.”
He sat down with emotional readiness, and she sat on his stout knee like a child. It was a thing she did in tender or troubled moments as much in these days as she had done when she was six or seven. Her little lightness and soft young ways made it the most natural thing in the world, as well as the prettiest. She had always sat on his knee in the hours when he had been most discouraged over the invention. She had known it made him feel as though he were taking care of her, and as though she depended utterly on him to steady the foundations of her world. What could such a little bit of a lass do without “a father”?
“It's upset thee, lass,” he said. “It's upset thee.”
He saw her slim hands curl themselves into small, firm fists as they rested on her lap.
“I can't bear to think that ill can be said of him, even by a wastrel like Captain Palliser,” she said. “He's MINE.”
It made him fumble caressingly at her big knot of soft red hair.
“Thine, is he?” he said. “Thine! Eh, but tha did say that just like thy mother would ha' said it; tha brings the heart i' my throat now and again. That chap's i' luck, I can tell him—same as I was once.”
“He's mine now, whatever happens,” she went on, with a firmness which no skeptic would have squandered time in the folly of hoping to shake. “He's done what I told him to do, and it's ME he wants. He's found out for himself, and so have I. He can have me the minute he wants me—the very minute.”
“He can?” said Hutchinson. “That settles it. I believe tha'd rather take him when he was i' trouble than when he was out of it. Same as tha'd rather take him i' a flat in Harlem on fifteen dollar a week than on fifteen hundred.”
“Yes, Father, I would. It'd give me more to do for him.”
“Eh, eh,” he grunted tenderly, “thy mother again. I used to tell her as the only thing she had agen me was that I never got i' jail so she could get me out an' stand up for me after it. There's only one thing worrits me a bit: I wish the lad hadn't gone away.”
“I've thought that out, though I've not had much time to reason about things,” said Little Ann. “If he's gone away, he's gone to get something; and whatever it happens to be, he'll be likely to bring it back with him, Father.”