X.—On a Threshold
When it was all over Judith Dearborn went upstairs with Juliet to help her dress for her going away. The maid-of-honour looked about the blue-and-white room with thoughtful eyes.
“This is certainly the dearest room I ever saw,” she said. “Oh, Juliet, do you think you really will be happy here?”
“What do you think about it, dear?” asked Juliet.
“Oh—I—well, really—I never imagined that a little old house like this could be made so awfully attractive. But, Juliet—you—you must be very, very fond of Anthony to give up so many things. How well he looked to-day. Seems to me he’s grown gloriously in every way since he—since his family came into so many misfortunes.”
Juliet smiled, but answered nothing.
“And you’re so different, too. Never in my life would I have imagined you havinga wedding like this—and yet it’s been absolutely the prettiest one I ever saw. That’s a sweet gown to go away in—but it’s the simplest thing you ever wore, I’m sure. Juliet, where are you going?”
“We are going to drive through the Berkshires in a cart.”
“Juliet Marcy!”
“‘Robeson,’” corrected Juliet with a little laugh, but in a tone which it was a pity Anthony could not hear. “Don’t forget that. I’m so proud of the name. And I think a drive through the Berkshires will be a perfectly ideal trip.”
Judith Dearborn was not assisting the bride at all. Instead she was sitting in a chair, staring at Juliet with much the same abstraction of manner observable in the best man throughout the day.
“Of course you didn’t need to live this way,” observed Miss Dearborn at length. “You could have afforded to live much more expensively.”
“No, I couldn’t,” said Juliet with a flash in her eyes, though she smiled; “I couldn’t have afforded to do one thing that would hurt Tony’s pride. Why, Judith—he’s a ‘Robeson of Kentucky.’”
“Well, he looks it,” admitted Judith. “And you’re a Marcy of Massachusetts. The two go well together. Juliet, do you know—somehow—I thought it was a fearful sacrifice you were making, even for such a man as Anthony—but—this blue-and-white room——”
“Ah, this blue-and-white room——” repeated Juliet. Then she came over and dropped on her knees by her friend in her impulsive way and put both arms around her. The plain little going-away gown touched folds with the one whose elegance was equalled only by its cost. Anthony Robeson’s wife looked straight up into the eyes of her maid-of-honour and whispered:
“Judith, don’t put Wayne—and—your blue-and-white room off too long. You will not be any happier to wait—if you love him.”
Drawn up close to the door stood the cart. Beside it waited Anthony. Around the cart crowded twenty people. When Juliet came through them to say good-bye the son of the Bishop murmured:
“Er—Mrs. Robeson——”
“Yes, Mr. Farnham——” said Julietpromptly, her delicate flush answering the name, as it had answered it many times that day.
“When are you going to be at home to your friends?”
“The fifteenth day of October,” said Juliet. “And from then on, every day in the week, every week in the year. Come and see us—everybody. But don’t expect any formal invitations.”
“I’ll be down,” declared the Bishop’s son. “I’ll be down once a week.”
“Please don’t stay long after we are gone,” requested Anthony, putting his bride into the cart and springing in beside her. He gathered up the reins. “Good-bye,” he called. “Take this next train home. It goes in an hour. Lock the door, Carey, and hang the key up in plain sight by the window there. We live in the country now, and that’s the way we do. Good-bye—good-bye!”
Then he drove rapidly away down the road.
“And that pair,” said the son of the Bishop gravely, looking after them and speaking to the company in general, “married, so to speak, in a hay-wagon, and goingfor a wedding trip in a wheel-barrow through the Berkshires, is Juliet Marcy and Anthony Robeson.”
“No, my son,” said the Bishop slowly—and everybody always listened when the Bishop spoke: “It is Anthony and Juliet Robeson—and that makes all the difference. I think two happier young people I never married. And may God be with them.”
The best man said that he and the maid-of-honour would walk the half-mile to the station. The son of the Bishop and the sister of the best man had already taken this course without saying anything about it. Nearly everybody murmured something about it being a lovely evening and a glorious sunset and a charming road, and, pairing off advisedly, adopted the same plan. The Bishop and Mrs. Bishop, Mrs. Dingley and Mr. Marcy decided on being driven over to the station in a light surrey provided for this anticipated emergency.
The best man and the maid-of-honour succeeded in dropping behind the rest of the pedestrians. Their friends were used to that, and let them mercifully alone.
“Mighty pretty affair,” observed Carey in a melancholy tone.
“Yes—in its way,” admitted Judith Dearborn with apparent reluctance.
“Cosy house.”
“Very.”
“Tony seemed happy.”
“Ecstatic.” Judith’s inflection was peculiar.
“Nobody would have suspected Juliet of feeling blue about living off here.”
“She doesn’t seem to.”
“What’s made the difference?”
“Anthony Robeson, probably.”
“Must seem pretty good to him to have her care like that.”
“I presume so.”
“It isn’t everybody that could inspire such an—affection—in such a girl.”
“No, indeed.”
Carey looked intensely gloomy. The two walked on in silence, Miss Dearborn studying the sunset, Carey studying Miss Dearborn. Suddenly he spoke again.
“Judith, do all our plans for the future seem as desirable to you as they did this morning?”
“Which ones?”
“Apartment in the locality we’ve picked out—life in the style the locality calls for—andwaitfor it all until I’mgray——” with a burst of tremendous energy. “Good heavens, darling, what’s the use? Why—if I could have you and a little home like that——”
He bit his lip hard. The maid-of-honour walked on, her head turned still farther away than before. They were nearing the station. Just ahead lay a turn in the road—the last turn. The rest of the party, with a shout back at this dilatory pair, disappeared around it. From the distance came the long, shrill whistle of the approaching train.
The maid-of-honour glanced behind: there was not a soul in sight; ahead: and saw nothing to alarm a girl with an impulse in her heart. At a point where great masses of reddening sumac hid a little dip in the road from everything earthly she stopped suddenly, and turning, put out both hands. She looked up into a face which warmed on the instant into a half-incredulous joy and said very gently: “You may.”
The sun had been gone only two hours, and the soft early autumn darkness had butlately settled down upon the silent little house, waiting alone for its owners to come back some October day, when a cart, driven slowly, rolled along the road. In front of the house it stopped.
“Where are we?” asked Juliet’s voice. “This is a private house. I thought we—Why, Tony—do you see?—We’ve come around in a circle instead of going on to that little inn you spoke of. This is—home!”
“Is it?” said Anthony’s voice in a tone of great surprise. “So it is!” He leaped out and came around to Juliet’s side. “What a fluke!” But the happy laugh in his voice betrayed him.
“Anthony Robeson,” cried Juliet softly, “you need not pretend to be surprised. You meant to do it.”
“Did I?” He reached out both arms to take her down. “Perhaps I did. Do you mind—Mrs. Robeson? Shall we go on?”
Juliet looked down at him. “No, I don’t think I mind,” she said.
He swung her down, and they went slowly up the walk. “Somehow,” said Anthony Robeson, looking up at the house, lying as if asleep in the September night, “when I thought of taking you to that littlepublic inn, and then remembered that we might have this instead—We can go on with our wedding journey to-morrow, dear-but—to-night——”
He led her silently upon the porch. He found the key, where in jest he had bade his best man put it, and unlocked the door and threw it open.
He stepped first upon the threshold, and, turning, held out his arms.
“Come,” he said, smiling in the darkness.
XI.—A Bachelor at Dinner
“Hallo there—Anthony Robeson—don’t be in such a hurry you can’t notice a fellow.”
The big figure rushing through the snow paused, wheeled, and thrust out a hand of hearty greeting. “That you, Carey? Hat over your eyes like a train robber—electric lights all behind you—and you expect me to smile at you as I go by! How are you? How’s Judith?”
“Infernally lonely—I mean I am—Judith’s off on a visit to her mother. Say, Tony—take me home with you—will you? I want some decent things to eat, so I’m holding you up on purpose.”
“Good—come on. Train goes in a few minutes. Juliet will be delighted.”
The two hurried on together into the station from which the suburban trains were constantly leaving. As they entered they encountered a mutual friend, at whom both flung themselves enthusiastically with alternate greetings:
“Roger Barnes——”
“Roger—old fellow—glad to see you back!”
“Patient safely landed?”
“Get a big fee?”
“Where you going?”
“Let’s take him home with us, Tony——” The third man looked smiling at Tony. “I’ll challenge you to,” said he.
“That’s easy—come on,” responded Anthony Robeson with cordiality. “I’ll just telephone Mrs. Robeson.”
“That’s it,” said Dr. Roger Barnes. “You don’t dare not to. I understand. Go ahead. But if she’s too much dashed let me know, will you?”
Anthony turned, laughing, into a telephone closet, from which he emerged in time to catch his train with his guests.
“It’s all right,” he assured them. “But it’s only fair to let her know a few minutes ahead. You like to understand, Roger, before you start, don’t you, whether your emergency case is a hip-fracture or a cut lip, so you can tell whether to take your glue or your sewing-silk?”
“By all means,” said the bachelor of the party. “And I suppose you think Mrs. JulietMarcy Robeson is now smiling happily to herself over this little surprise. I’ll lay you anything you please that if I can make her own up she’ll admit that she said ‘Merciful heavens!’ into the telephone when she got your message.”
Anthony shook his head. “Evidently you don’t know what guests in the remote suburbs on a stormy February night mean to a poor girl whose nearest neighbour is five hundred feet away. Your ideas of married life need a little freshening, too. They’re pretty antique.”
It was a half-mile from the station to the house—the “box of a house”—which had been Anthony’s home for five months, and toward which he now led his friends with the air of a man about to show his most treasured possessions. He strode through the deepening snow as if he enjoyed the strenuous tramp, setting a pace which Wayne Carey, with his office life, if not the doctor, more vigorously built and bred, found difficult to maintain.
“Here we are,” called the leader, pointing toward windows glowing with a ruddy light. The doctor looked up with interest. Carey was a frequent visitor, but the busy surgeon,old school-and-college chum of Anthony’s though he was, was about to have his first introduction to a place of which he had heard much, but of whose nearness to Paradise he doubted with the strong skepticism of a man who has seen many a fair beginning end in all unhappiness and desolation.
As they stamped upon the little porch the door flew open, the brilliancy and comfort of a fire-and-lamplit room leaped out at them, a delicious faint odour of cookery assailed their hungry nostrils, and the welcome which makes all worth having met them on the threshold.
“Wayne,” said the rich young voice of the mistress of the house, “I’m so glad. Roger Barnes, this is just downright good of you; it’s so long you’ve promised us this. Tony——”
What she said to Tony must have been whispered in his ear if voiced at all, for the two guests, looking on with laughing, envious eyes, saw their hostess swept unceremoniously into a bearlike embrace, swung into the air as one thrusts up a child, poised there an instant, laughing and protesting, then slowly lowered to bekissed, and set down once more lightly upon the floor.
“It’s all right. I didn’t tumble your hair a bit,” said Anthony coolly. “Excuse me, gentlemen, but Wayne understands—and Roger will some day, I hope—that a man who has been thinking about it all the way home can’t put it off on account of a couple of idiots who stand and stare instead of politely turning their backs. Oh, don’t mention it—it doesn’t disturb me at all; and Mrs. Robeson is becoming reconciled to my impetuosity by degrees. Make yourselves at home, boys. Juliet——”
“Take them upstairs, Tony, please. Of course we can’t let them go back to-night, now we have them. It’s beginning to storm heavily, isn’t it? I thought so. Take them to the guest-room, Tony—and dinner will be served as soon as you are down.”
“By Jupiter, I believe she means it,” declared the doctor, with approval, as the door of the bedroom closed on his host. “I think I can tell when a woman is shamming. She’s improved, hasn’t she, tremendously? Pretty girl always, but—well—bloomednow. Nice little house. Believe I’ll have to stay, though I ought not—just to take observations on Tony. His enthusiasm has all the appearance of reality. In fact, it strikes me he has rather——”
It was on his lips to say “rather more than you have,” but it occurred to him in time that jokes on this ground are dangerous. Wayne Carey had been married in November, was living in a somewhat unpretentious way in a downtown boarding-house, and certainly had to-night so much of a lost-dog air that it made the doctor pause. So he substituted: “—rather more than I should have expected, even of a fellow who has got the girl he has wanted all his life,” and fell to washing and brushing vigorously, eyeing meanwhile the little room with a critical bachelor’s appreciation of beauty and comfort in the quarters he is to occupy. It was very simply furnished, certainly, but it struck him as a place where his dreams were likely to be pleasant for every reason in the world.
Downstairs, Juliet, in the dining-room, was surveying her table with the hostess’s satisfaction. Opposite her stood a talland slender girl, black-haired, black-eyed, with a face of great attractiveness.
“I wish, Mrs. Robeson,” she was saying eagerly, “you would let me serve you as your maid, and not make a guest of me. Really, I should love to do it. I don’t need to meet your friends, and I don’t mind seeming what I really am—your——”
“Rachel Redding,” Juliet interrupted, lifting an affectionate glance across the table, “if you want to seem what you really are—my friend—you will let me do as I like.”
“My shabby clothes——” murmured the girl.
“If I could look as much like a princess as you do in them——”
“Mrs. Robeson, in that lovely dull red you’re a queen——”
“—dowager,” finished Juliet gayly. “Well, I’ll be proud of you, and you can be proud of me, if you like, and together we’ll make those hungry men think there’s nothing like us. The dinner’s the thing. Isn’t it the luckiest chance in the world I sent for those oysters this morning? Doctor Barnes is perfectly fine, but he never wouldbelieve in the happiness of married life if the coffee were poor or the beefsteak too much broiled. Doesn’t the table look pretty? Those red geranium blossoms you brought me give it just the gay touch it needed this winter night.”
Three men, standing about the wide fireplace, warming cold hands at its friendly blaze, turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray. Juliet presented her guests with the air of conferring upon them a favour, and they seemed quite ready to accept it as such.
Anthony looked on with interest to see a person whom he had known hitherto only as a pretty but poor young neighbour whom Juliet had engaged to help her for a certain part of every day, introduced as his wife’s friend, and greeted by Doctor Barnes and Wayne Carey with quite evident admiration and pleasure. He looked hard at her, as Carey seated her, noticing for the first time that she was really worth consideration, and remembering vaguely that Juliet had more than once tried to impress him with the fact. If it had not been forthe other fellows, with whose eyes as their host he was now stimulated to observe her, he might have been still some time longer in coming to the realisation that Juliet had found somebody in whom her genuine interest was not misplaced. But Anthony Robeson had all his life been singularly blind to the fascinations of most other women than Juliet. As he turned his keen gaze from Rachel Redding to the charming figure that sat on the other side of the table the satisfaction in his eyes became so pronounced that it could mean, Dr. Roger Barnes admitted to himself, as he caught it, nothing less than a very real happiness.
It was not an elaborate dinner. It was not by any means the sort of dinner Juliet might have prepared had she known that morning whom she was to entertain. It was merely a dinner planned with affectionate care to please and satisfy one hungry man who liked good things to eat—and amplified as much as possible in quantity after Anthony’s message reached her. And by that admirable collusion between hostess and feminine friend which can sometimes be effected when the situationdemands it, the dinner prepared for three seemed ample for five.
“Three men, standing about the wide fireplace ... turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray.”
“Three men, standing about the wide fireplace ... turned expectantly as their youthful hostess came in, followed by a graceful girl in gray.”
Between them Juliet and Rachel Redding served the various dishes and changed the plates which Anthony handed from his place. It was gracefully done and so simply that the absence of a maid was a thing to be enjoyed rather than regretted. When Juliet, in the softly sweeping dull-red frock which made of her a warm picture for a winter’s night, slipped from her chair and moved about the room, or brought in from the kitchen a steaming dish, she seemed the ideal hostess, herself bestowing what her own hands had prepared. And when Rachel Redding offered a man a cup of fragrant coffee, smiling down in the general direction of his uplifted face without meeting his eyes, there was certainly nothing lost from his enjoyment of the beverage.
“Say, but this dinner has tasted just about right,” was Wayne Carey’s satisfied observation as he leaned back in his chair at last, after draining his third cup of coffee—and the pot itself, if he had but known it.
“Went to the spot?” asked Anthony, leaning back also with the expression ofthe friendly host. He was young to cultivate that expression, but he appeared to find no difficulty about it.
“It did—every last mouthful.”
“Good. Now, if you fellows will come back to the fire and have a pipeful of talk we shall not be missed. In this house on ordinary occasions we reverse the order of after-dinner privileges—the men retire to the atmosphere of the sofa-pillows, and the women—I’m not allowed to tell what they do. But after remaining discreetly out of sight for some little time, during which faint sounds as of the rattle of china penetrate through closed doors, they reappear, pleasantly flushed and full of a sort of relieved joy.”
“I know what I wish,” said Roger Barnes, looking back from the dining-room doorway at young Mrs. Robeson; “I wish that when the dishes are all ready you would let me know. I should like nothing better than to have a dish-towel at them. I know all about it—my mother taught me how.”
He looked so precisely as if he meant it, and the glance he sent past Juliet at Rachel Redding was so suggestive of his dislike to be separated for the coming hour fromthe feminine portion of the household, that his hostess answered promptly: “Of course you may. We never refuse an offer like that. We will try you—on promise of good behaviour.”
XII.—The Bachelor Begs a Dish-Towel
When the door closed on the three Juliet produced from somewhere two aprons—attractive affairs on the pinafore order—one of which she slipped upon Rachel, the other donned herself.
“These are my kitchen party-aprons,” she said gayly, noting how the pretty garment became the girl, “calculated to impress the masculine mind with the charm of domesticity in women. The doctor needs a little illustrated lesson of the sort. Life in boarding-houses isn’t adapted to encourage a man in the belief that real comfort is to be found anywhere outside of a bachelor’s club.”
Before he was called the doctor forsook a half-smoked cigar and the seductive hollows of Anthony’s easiest chair and marched briskly out to the kitchen.
“You see I distrust you,” he announced, putting in his head at the door. “I’m afraid you will get them all done without me.”
“Not a bit of it. Here you are,” and Juliet tied a big white apron about a large-sized waist. “Here’s your towel. No, don’t touch the glass; a man is too unconscious of his strength.”
“A surgeon?” demurred Rachel softly, from over her steaming dishpan.
“Thank you, Miss Redding,” said the doctor, smiling.
“Ah, how stupid of me,” Juliet made amends swiftly. “Miss Redding remembers that when I got my telephone message to-night I told her that the most distinguished young specialist in the city was coming here to dinner. A hand trained to such delicate tasks as those of surgery—here, Dr. Roger Barnes, forgive me, and wipe my most precious goblets.”
“You’ll have my nerves unsteady with such speeches as that,” said he, but he accepted the trust. He held the goblets and the other daintily cut and engraved pieces of glass with evident pleasure in the task.
Meanwhile Juliet and Rachel made rapid work of the greater part of the dishes, handling thin china with the dexterity of housewives who love their work—and their china. Talk and laughter flowed brightlythrough it all, and when the doctor had finished his glass he looked disappointed at seeing not much left to do. At the moment Rachel was scrubbing and scraping a big baking-dish, portions of whose surface strongly resisted her efforts, in spite of previous soaking. The assistant, looking about him for new worlds to conquer, fell upon this dish.
“Here, here,” said he, “let me have it. I’ll use on it some of the unconscious strength Mrs. Robeson credits me with.”
But Rachel clung to the dish. “Proper housekeepers,” she averred, “always say ‘That’s all, thank you,’ as soon as the china is done, and finish the pots and kettles after the guest has gone back to pleasanter things.”
“I see. Did you ever have a man for dish-wiper before?”
“Never a surgeon,” admitted Miss Redding.
“Then you don’t appreciate the fact that a man likes to do big things which make the most show and get the credit for them.”
He took the dish away from her by a dexterous little twist in which consciousstrength certainly asserted itself. Rachel, laughing, with a dash of colour in cheeks which were normally of dark ivory tints, accepted the dish-towel he handed her.
“Hallo, there,” cried Wayne Carey’s voice from the door. “You’re having more fun out here than we are in there, and that’s not fair. The lord of the manor is getting so chesty over the delights of a country home in a February snowbank that he’s becoming heavy company.”
“No room for you here,” returned the doctor, removing with a flourish the last candied sugar lump from the bottom of the big dish, and beginning to swash about vigorously in the hot water. “We do something besides talk out here; we work. Our kitchen is so small we have to waste no time in steps; as we dry the things we chuck them straight into their places.”
Suiting the action to the word he caught up a shining cake-tin and cast it straight at Carey. That gentleman dodged, but Anthony caught it, performed upon it an imitation of the cymbals, then turned about and laid it in a nest of similar tins upon a shelf in an open closet.
“Ah, but I’m well trained,” he boasted.
“If you were you wouldn’t put it away wet,” observed Rachel slyly.
Anthony withdrew the tin, wiped it with much solicitude, and replaced it.
“These little technicalities are beyond me,” he apologised. “Your real athlete in kitchen work is your scientific man. See him dry that bean-pot with the glass-towel. Now, I know better than that.”
“Go away, all of you,” commanded the mistress of the place. “Go back to the fire and we’ll join you. If you are very good we’ll bring you a special treat by-and-by.”
“That settles it,” said the doctor, and led the retreat, but not without a backward glance at the little kitchen.
Juliet had gone into the dining-room with a trayful of glass and silver. Rachel Redding was plunging half a dozen white towels into a pan of steaming water. Barnes stood an instant, staring hard at the slender figure in the white pinafore, the round young arms gleaming in the lamplight—then he turned to follow the others. There are some pictures which linger long in a man’s memory; why, he can hardly tell. Withall his varied experiences Dr. Roger Barnes had never before discovered how attractive a background a well-kept kitchen makes for a beautiful woman, so that she be there mistress of the situation. Long after he had gone back to the fire his absent eyes, while the others talked, were studying the—to him—unaccustomed and singularly charming scene he had just left in the kitchen.
When Juliet and Rachel came in at length they found a plan afoot for their entertainment. Wayne Carey was standing at the window showing cause why the whole party should go out and coast upon the hill near by.
“You admit,” he argued with Anthony, “that you know where we can get a pair of bobs—and if you can’t I’ll bribe some of those youngsters out there to let us have theirs. The storm has stopped; the boys have swept off the whole hill, I should judge, by the way their track shines again under the moonlight. I haven’t had a good coast since I left college.”
He turned to Juliet. “Will you go?” he asked coaxingly.
“Of course we will,” promised Juliet.“Tony wants to go—he’s just enjoying making you tease. As for the doctor——”
“If my right hand has not forgot her cunning,” he agreed.
In ten minutes the party was off. A young matron of five months’ standing is not so materially changed from the girl she used to be that she can fail to be the gayest of company, perhaps with the more zest that the old good times seem a bit far away already and she is glad to bring them back.
As for the real girl of the party, in this case it chanced to be a country lass who had been away to school and half-way through college, had been brought home by love and duty to some elderly people who needed her, and had known many hours of stifled longing for the sort of companionship with which she had grown happily familiar.
Matron and maid—they were a pair for whose sakes the men who were with them gladly made slaves of themselves to give them an evening of glorious outdoor fun—and at small sacrifice.
“What a night!” exulted the doctor, striding up the long hill beside Rachel Redding breathing deep. “I’m thankingall my lucky stars that they led my path across Anthony Robeson’s to-night. I’ve been intending to come out here ever since he was married—and might not have done it for another six months if I hadn’t got started. He’ll have all he wants of me now. It’s the most delightful spot I’ve been in for many moons.”
“It is a dear little home,” agreed Rachel warmly. “Mrs. Robeson would make the most commonplace house in the world one where everybody would want to come.”
“That’s evident. Yet, somehow, knowing her well as a girl, I never should have suspected just those home-making qualities. You didn’t know her then, I suppose? She was a girl other girls liked heartily, and men enthusiastically—one of the ‘I’ll be a good friend, but don’t come too near’ sort, you know. But she was very fond of travel and change, ready for everything in the way of sport—and, well, I certainly never saw her before in anything resembling an apron of any description. What a delightful article of attire an apron is, anyhow. I think I never appreciated it before to-night.”
“That’s because you never saw one ofMrs. Robeson’s aprons. Hers are not like other people’s.”
“She makes hers poetic, does she?”
“She certainly does—even the ones for baking and sweeping. Not ruffled or beribboned, but cut with an eye to attractiveness, and always of becoming colour.”
“I see. She’s an artist—that was noticeable in the oysters—if she made the dish.”
“Of course she did.”
“The coffee was the best I ever drank.”
“Was it?”
“You made that, then,” remarked the doctor astutely.
“I’m glad it was good,” said Rachel demurely.
They had reached the top of the hill. Doctor Barnes insisted that Anthony had been the best steerer of coasting parties known to the juvenile world, and placed him at the helm. Next came Juliet, with both arms clasped as far about her husband’s stalwart frame as they would go. Carey had wanted to be the end man, but Doctor Barnes would have none of it. “You have to take care of Mrs. Robeson,” he said firmly, and placed him next. This brought Miss Redding last, and Dr. RogerBarnes, knowing man, as hanger-on behind upon bobs already fairly full. The last man, as every coaster understands, has to be alert to help out any possible bad steering, and so keeps a watchful head thrust half over the shoulder in front.
The foregoing explanation will show how it came about that all down the long, swift descent, Rachel, breathless with the unaccustomed delight of the flight, felt upon her cheek a warm breath, and was conscious of a most extraordinary nearness of the lips which kept saying merry things into her ear. The ear itself grew warm before the bottom of the track was reached.
“That was a great coast,” cried the doctor as they reached the end of the long slide. “Now for another. I’m a boy again. This beats the best thing I could have had in town if I hadn’t run across Anthony.”
So they had another—and another—and one more. Then Rachel Redding, stopping in front of a small house which lay at the foot of the hill, said good-night to them and slipped away before Barnes had realised what had happened.
“Does she live there?” he questionedJuliet, as the four who were left moved on toward home. Anthony and Wayne were discussing a subject on which they had differed at the top of the hill. “Somehow, I got the impression she lived with you.”
“No—but she comes over a good deal. I couldn’t get on without her.”
“As a friend?”
Juliet looked up at him. “I think it would be better that you should know, Roger,” she said, “and I’m sure Miss Redding herself would prefer it—that I pay her for several hours a day of regular work. You’ve only to see her to understand that she does this simply because it’s the only thing open to her as long as her father and mother can’t spare her to go away. She gave up her college course in the middle because she said they were pining to death for her. They are in very greatly reduced circumstances, after a lifetime of prosperity. She’s a rare creature—I’m learning to appreciate her more every day. She’s never said a word about her loneliness here, but it shows in her eyes. It’s a perfect delight to me to have her with me, and I mean to give her all the fun I can. For all that demure manner and her Madonna face she’sas full of mischief as a kitten when something starts her off.”
“Juliet,” said the doctor soberly, turning to look searchingly down at her in the moonlight, “would you be willing to let me come often?”
Juliet looked up quickly. “So that you may see her?” she asked straightforwardly.
“Yes. I won’t pretend it’s anything else. I can tell you honestly that if there were no other reason I should want to come because of my old friendship for you and Anthony, and because this evening in your little home has given me a rare pleasure. I know of no place like it. But I’ll tell you squarely that I want the chance to meet your friend often and at once. If I don’t you will have other people coming out from town——”
“Yes,” said Juliet, and something in the way she said it made him ask quickly: “Has that already happened? Am I too late?”
“I don’t know whether you’re too late, but I know that we’ve suddenly grown most attractive to another man from town. If you had gone into Rachel’s home the odour of violets would have met you at the door. He sends them every few days.”
“Ah!” said the doctor. It was not much of a comment, but it spoke volumes. He had been keen before—he was determined now. Violets—well, there were rarer flowers than those.
XIII.—Smoke and Talk
At the house there remained for the guests an hour before the fire, where Juliet brought in something hot and sweet and sour and spicy, which tasted delicious and brought her a shower of compliments while they drank a friendly draught to her. When she had left them, standing in an admiring group on the hearth-rug and wishing her happy dreams, they settled into luxurious positions of ease before the fire—a fire in the last stages of red comfort before it dies into a smoulder of torrid ashes.
“Anthony Robeson,” said Wayne Carey, regarding the andirons fixedly over his bed-time pipe, “you’re a happy man.”
Anthony laughed contentedly. He had thrown himself down upon the hearth-rug with his head on a pillow pulled from the settle, and lay flat on his back with his hands clasped behind his neck. It was an attitude deeply expressive of masculine comfort.
“You’re exactly right,” said he. “And you would be the same if you would give up living in that infernal boarding-house. What do you want to fool with your first year of married life like that for? You told me that Judith was bowled over by our wedding, and was ready to go in for this sort of thing with a will.”
“I know it,” admitted Carey, “but”—he spoke hesitatingly—“we couldn’t seem to find this sort of thing. You had corralled all there was.”
“Nonsense.”
“You had. Everything we looked at was so old and mouldy, or so new and inartistic, or so high-priced, or so far away—well, we couldn’t seem to get at it, so we said we’d board a while and wait until we could look around.”
“How does it work?”
“Why, I suppose it works very well,” said Carey cautiously. “Judith seems contented. We have as good meals as the average in such houses, and the people are rather a nice lot. We’re invited around quite a good deal, and Judith likes that. I ought to like it better than I do, somehow. I’m so confoundedly tired when I get homenights I can’t help thinking of you and Juliet here in this jolly room. There’s an abominable blue and yellow wall-paper on our sitting-room—and it has a way of appearing to turn seasick in the evening under the electrics. Sometimes I think it’s that that makes me feel——”
“Seasick, too?” inquired the doctor with his professional air. He was standing with his arm on the chimney-piece, looking alternately down on his friends and around the long, low room. Itwasa jolly room—the very essence of comfort and cosiness. It was a beautiful room, too, in a simple way; one which satisfied his sense of harmony in colours and fabrics—a keen sense with him, as it is apt to be with men of his profession.
“Judith likes this, too, you know,” Carey went on loyally. “She thinks it’s great. But how to get it for ourselves—that’s another matter. Somehow, you were lucky.”
“Did you ever happen to see,” asked Anthony, “a photograph I took, just for fun, of this house as it was when Juliet saw it first? No? Well, just look in that box on the end of the farther bookcase, willyou? It’s near the top—there—that’s it.”
He lay looking up through half-closed lashes at the two men as they studied the photograph, the doctor leaning over Carey’s shoulder.
“On your word, man, did it look like that?” cried Barnes.
“Just like that.”
“Yes, I’ve heard it did,” admitted Carey; “but I never quite believed it could have been as bad as that.”
“Who planned it all?” the doctor asked, getting possession of the photograph as Carey laid it down, and giving it careful scrutiny.
“My little home-maker.”
“Jove—are there any more like her?”
“They’re pretty rare, I understand. Juliet has one in training—one with a good deal of native capacity, I should judge.”
“Let me know when her graduation day approaches,” remarked the doctor.
When he fell asleep that night in the dainty guest-room Barnes was wondering whether Mrs. Robeson got her own breakfasts, and hoping that she certainly did not, at least when guests were in the house. Hewas down half an hour earlier than necessary, and to his great satisfaction found a slender figure brushing up ashes and setting the fireplace in order for the morning fire. As he begged leave to help he noted the satin smoothness of Miss Redding’s heavy black hair and the trim perfection of her attire. She reminded him of his hospital nurses in their immaculate blue and white. When he saw the mistress of the house and found her similarly dressed a certain skepticism grew in his mind.
When he went out to breakfast he murmured in Anthony’s ear: “Just tell me, old fellow—to satisfy the curiosity of a bachelor—do these girls of your household always look like this in the early morning? I know it’s mean—but you will know how to evade me if I’m too impertinent——”
Anthony glanced from Juliet, resembling a pink carnation in her wash frock—February though it was—to Rachel Redding in dark blue and white, and smiled mischievously. “Mrs. Robeson—and Miss Redding—you are challenged,” he announced. “Here’s a fine old chump who has an awful suspicion that maybe when there are noguests you come down in calico wrappers with day-before-yesterday’s aprons on.”
Juliet gave the doctor a glance which made him pretend to shrink behind Carey for protection. “Will you please answer him, Tony?” she said.
“On my word and honour, Roger Barnes, then,” said Anthony proudly, “they always look like this.”
When the doctor left he was weighing carefully in his mind an urgent problem: After waiting six months before making his first visit at the Robesons, how soon could he decently come again?