Katherine was standing in the window, her back to them. Kate knew it was to hide strange tears. “The smell of the syringa did that,” she thought, with her quick understanding where her mother was concerned. “Smells are funny that way.”
Nick spoke to Kate then, with gentle imperativeness.
“Elsie will be coming out here in a minute. Yes, we are running away, if you like. Go to her and tell her to wait. Tell her we will go surely to-night, but she is to wait until your mother comes in. You keep her, Kate—stay with her—until your mother comes in.”
“I don’t think I could. She will be furious with me. She wouldn’t do what I said.”
“I’ll write her a note. She will understand that I want it.”
He pulled an envelope from his pocket and scrawled a sentence, holding the paper against the wall. Katherine had taken off her coat and was now sitting in the deep chair in the window. Her tears had vanished, if there really had been tears, and her eyes were clear as happiness itself.
But Kate was anxious as she hurried with the note to Elsie. If Elsie had hated her before for interfering now she would hate her all the more.
She was sitting on the window seat in her room, dressed in the green silk suit and brown straw hat, a bright green raincoat thrown over a chair back near, and the suitcase of last night at her feet. Had she seen Kate come from the orchard house and return there with her mother? It was obvious that she had, for the face she turned to Kate was wild and strained.
“What have you been doing now?” she asked as Kate came into the room. “Who was that girl you took into the orchard house?”
“That wasn’t a girl. It was my mother.”
“Your mother! Why?”
“Your father wanted to talk to her. He sent you this.”
Elsie took the note and her face lost some of its wildness as she read. When she looked up she was puzzled but almost serene.
“It’s all right. We’re going away just the same,” she said. “Nothing can stop us now. I’m only to wait until your mother comes in.”
Kate nodded. If it was her father Elsie was running away with, she, Kate, had no more responsibility. She didn’t see how it was fair to Aunt Katherine or in any way right for them to do it that way, but she had no doubt that somehow it could be explained. Once understood, there would be no question of its rightness. So she put all that aside.
She said, “Oh, Elsie, why didn’t you tell me your father wrote ‘The King of the Fairies’? Your very own father!”
“So you know now? He told you? Well, now you know, then, that I didn’t lie. Therewassomething of fairy in the orchard house; Father had finished his new book there. It’s all fairies.”
“And you are going away now, for good? Before Aunt Katherine comes back?”
“If you will let me.” Needless to say this was spoken sarcastically.
“But of course. Now that I’ve seen your father! No harm can come to you now, not when you’ve got our talisman, alive, real, to look after you.”
Elsie looked at Kate, puzzled. “What do you mean? Your talisman? You do say the queerest things!”
Then Kate told her about the boy in the silvery, dragony, flowery picture frame. When she had finished, it was a new Elsie that faced her.
“And your mother, too, felt like that?”
“Yes, Mother, too. Why not?”
“Why—because——”
The girls stayed there, sitting on the window seat, for over an hour, watching for Katherine to come from the orchard. It was showering again, sheets of rain silvering the gardens and drawing curtains of silver magic about the orchard, swirling them all about the orchard’s borders. There was plenty of time for the story which Elsie told haphazardly and in broken sentences, led on by Kate’s interest, and her assurances that now she had seen Nick she would never try to interfere with any of their plans again. Kate’s story of the dragony, flowery picture frame had knocked all Elsie’s guards flat, too. Her story, straightened out, was this:
Elsie’s earliest memory was of her father. She had fallen down the house steps and bumped her head. Nick, her father, had appeared as by magic to kiss the hurt away and run back into the house with her in his arms. She remembered him bending over her, washing the bruise with cold water; then came the smell of witch-hazel. And though this was her first conscious memory, still the very memory itself held in it the inevitableness of this comfort from her father; so she was used to his ministrations.
The next memory was convalescence after measles when she was four. She was sitting up in a chair in a window over the street, wrapped in an eiderdown. Her father was reading to her from “The Psalms of David.” The words sang a beautiful song to her, especially when he came to “The Lord is my Shepherd.” And it was very comforting to have her father sitting there so quietly, near her, as though he meant to stay a long time.
“But your mother?” Kate asked her. “Didn’t she read to you after measles, too? Don’t you remember her?”
Yes, Elsie remembered her mother, though she thought it was a later memory, and it was never a memory ofmothering. Gloria had hummed in and out of the house like a humming-bird. Later, when Elsie saw a humming-bird for the first time, she felt as she watched it exactly as she had always felt watching her mother; and the pains that she took not to startle the little spirit away were exactly the pains she had always taken not to startle her mother away, when by chance she hummed near. Gloria looked like a humming-bird, as well as acted like one. Humming-birds fascinated Elsie, and her mother had always entranced her with the same fascination, no more.
But sometimes the humming-bird scolded at her father, pecked at him, hummed all about him pecking. Then Elsie would run away, not fascinated any more. The scolding was always about money. Gloria needed money just as a humming-bird needs honey, and often there wasn’t enough.
They lived in New York near Washington Square. Elsie was cared for by nurses—such a fast-marching procession of nurses in the same chic blue uniforms, provided by the humming-bird, that Elsie remembered them as “nurse,” not as individuals. Her father was the constant human factor in her life, the one person to be counted on. Gloria was merely a dash of colour beyond the nursery door somewhere, a shrill sweet voice at the piano, a swish of silk on the stairs.
At eight, Elsie was sent to boarding school. But the school was in New York, and so her father still saw her almost every day, and on Saturdays he gave her and sometimes her friends “treats.” He took them to the theatre or picture galleries, or for beautiful walks in Central Park. Her mother never came to the school, but had her home once a month on Sundays for dinner. This was a grief to Elsie, not because she felt any need of her mother but simply because she would have been proud to show her schoolmates what a magnificent and fashionable mother she had; also she was humiliated by their curious questionings and pretended doubts as to whether she had a real mother at all. But Elsie was sure that her father was better than twenty mothers. She wouldn’t take a mother as a gift except for show purposes.
Kate writhed at Elsie’s harshness. “Oh, you don’t know, Elsie! Don’t talk so! How can you? It is terrible.”
“That’s what Ermina said when I talked to her about my mother. Ermina was my best friend, but she didn’t stay out her first year at school. Her mother died, and she went home for the funeral and never came back. I knew that she loved her mother just as much as I loved my father. I hid away in my room when they told me her mother had died. I pretended I was sick. It was awful. But when I heard her go downstairs, at the very last minute while they were saying ‘good-bye’ to her at the door, I rushed down in my nightgown. I kissed her and hugged her and we cried terribly. Miss Putnam, the principal of the school, never forgave me for having made Ermina cry when she had been brave and not cried at all before, and for having disgraced the school by standing in the door in my nightgown. But I have been glad ever since. I had to say ‘good-bye’ and that I was sorry. And I don’t think crying out loud was any worse than the cryinginsidethat Ermina must have been doing. Do you?”
Kate agreed with Elsie. She, too, was glad Elsie had gone to her friend in her sorrow, even if she had waited till the last minute for the courage.
Vacations had been spent either at camps or at Aunt Katherine’s. When they were spent at Aunt Katherine’s, her father was usually with her, having a vacation, too. And those were beautiful times.
Then, when she was twelve, came the terrible time. Nick had done badly in business. He confided this to Elsie because Gloria only wanted happy confidences, and besides, she was abroad, travelling with a party of friends. There was enough to pay his debts and leave him clear to start fresh, avoiding bankruptcy. But the debts paid, and his checking account reduced to zero, money must come from somewhere to go on with until business picked up. He knew a way in which two thousand dollars, if he only had it, could overnight be turned into ten thousand. He told Elsie about it, walking in Central Park, and said if he had only waited a little to pay his debts, and not acted so hastily in his fear of bankruptcy, everything would have been made right now. Aunt Katherine would loan him the two thousand, he felt sure, if he could only explain the nature of the speculation to her. But she was travelling somewhere in England, and there would never be time to get into touch with her. But he had the key to her safety vault in her Boston bank. He suddenly told Elsie that he was going to Boston and would not see her again until Sunday. She understood that he was going to borrow, on his own account, two thousand dollars from Aunt Katherine overnight, trusting to her unfailing generosity.
Nick wrote Aunt Katherine all about it on the train as he went. From the vault he took two thousand dollars’ worth of securities which could easily be replaced.
Aunt Katherine sailed for home before Nick’s troubled letter reached her in England, and the second letter, telling how the two thousand instead of blossoming into ten thousand had disappeared altogether, was never sent, because just as Nick was going out of his door to post it, the cablegram came announcing Gloria’s tragic death. That put all thoughts of the letter out of his mind, and when he did remember it he thought he had posted it as he meant to. It was found in the apartment months later by the people who sublet the place furnished, and simply dropped into a post box by them and sent to its address in England. It did not reach Miss Frazier until six months later.
Miss Frazier on her arrival in Boston, and after a visit to her bank, reported the missing securities to the police. Nick’s immediate apprehension followed. Miss Frazier was on a train bound for California when that most amazing bit of news reached her by telegram. She was shocked almost beyond reason, and so horrified that it was impossible for her to find any justification for her adopted nephew. She offered him no help and had no words for him that were not bitter ones, but she did write to offer his “innocent child” a home with her on the condition that she should not speak her father’s name for the term of his imprisonment, or correspond with him while she was in her care. That letter ended, “If I had been one half as level-headed as my niece Katherine or Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith about you, Nicholas, I should have protected you against such temptation, and we might have all been spared this catastrophe.”
In Elsie’s parting from her father he had shown her this letter. (Now Kate knew why Elsie had grown cold always at mention of Katherine!) He had begged her to accept her aunt’s conditions. Indeed there was nothing else she could do, for her mother’s relations were now more estranged from them than ever. They had not written one word, even bitter ones.
“Oh, Elsie! That must have been dreadful, not being allowed even to speak of your father, to act as though he were dead!”
Elsie looked at her, her eyes black with remembered grief. “It was. I was so lonely for him, Kate, I expected todie.”
In time Nick’s two letters about the “overnight loan,” forwarded and reforwarded, had arrived in Oakdale. Then Aunt Katherine began to understand a little how his deed had not been so pitchy black as it had seemed in the first shock. He had done what she had always wanted him to do, counted on her understanding and generosity. It had been a crime—even Nick had accepted that judgment from the very first—and an utterly foolish and desperate deed, but now Aunt Katherine was sorry she had not lifted a hand to keep him from paying the penalty of imprisonment. She looked about to see what could be done, and ultimately was able to set wheels in motion that brought about his release at the end of two years instead of three. But she had not told Elsie. She had not been able to bring herself to speak of Elsie’s father to her at all.
Nick wrote Miss Frazier asking her to meet him at a certain spot on the Common in Boston the day he was to be released. He wanted to discuss Elsie and what they were to do about her. He knew that his appearance in Oakdale would cause Miss Frazier painful embarrassment. He meant to avoid that for her. But when he had waited for hours at the place he had designated and she had not come, he had grown desperate. He was obsessed with a fear that Elsie might be sick. Why, she might be dead, almost, for all he knew. He had not had one word from her in two years. He boarded a train, not stopping to leave his suitcase at a hotel or check it in the South Station, and started for Oakdale.
Elsie was just coming down the steps of Aunt Katherine’s house as her father got out of the taxi he had hired to avoid being seen in Oakdale and to gain speed to his destination. Aunt Katherine was away and most of the servants, for it was Thursday afternoon—a week ago last Thursday. Father and daughter had longed to be alone, unobserved by any curious eyes. The orchard house occurred to them as the best place to talk. They went around the house and managed to reach it, unseen, through the gardens. They had climbed in at a window at the back. Elsie was beside herself with happiness, and Nick was like a boy in his joy and relief about her.
He told Elsie that the first year in prison he had written “The King of the Fairies.”
“There was so much in it that he had told me about the ‘other side of things’ and themorelife that even stones have that we don’t see, that when the book was published and I looked into it at the bookshop I knew right away it must be Father’s. He had always wanted to write. At the very first sentence I knew. It was like a letter from him. I read it and read it and read it. Do you wonder I didn’t want you to snatch it for yourself that very first morning, Kate?”
The second book was almost finished when Nick came out of prison. Only a chapter remained. The publishers had promised an advance on the royalties as soon as the manuscript was sent them. The first book had already made over two thousand dollars. So the two decided, between them, that Nick should live in the orchard house for a week, long enough to finish the book, send it to the publishers and get their check. Then he would leave the two thousand dollars, the earnings from the first book, for Aunt Katherine. That was exactly what he had taken from her vault. With the new check of five hundred dollars, he and Elsie would go away together. He could write in the orchard house undisturbed, and without any one’s knowing he was there. Elsie could bring him some food now and then. But they would not run away together until he could leave the two thousand that really belonged to Aunt Katherine behind them.
Kate interrupted there. “But how can you! How can you treat Aunt Katherine so?”
“It’s this way. I’ve made Father see that she doesn’t like me. She is awfully kind, but that’s not liking. If I vanish, it will be just a relief to her. But she wouldn’t let me go, probably, if I told her. She would argue and try to keep me because it was her duty. Even Father sees that. Well, the new check has come. That was my special delivery yesterday. Father wrote Aunt Katherine a long letter and put the two thousand dollars in checks from his publishers into it. I’ve pinned the letter to her pincushion for her to read when she gets back to-night. Father hopes you’ll stay on here and your mother come back, too, and everything be set right at last. We don’t belong in the Frazier family at all, you know. We are sort of vagabonds, different, Father and I. Father thinks the quarrel between Aunt Katherine and your mother was in some way because of him. When we vanish, it will come right.”
“Oh, but it won’t, and it wasn’t, and you aren’t. Imagine you a vagabond!” Kate exclaimed.
“That’s the beautiful clothes Aunt Katherine gives me. They make me look just like anybody. But really underneath I belong in a tent or something like that. Anyway, I’d rather tramp the country with my father than live in a palace with any one else!”
Kate leaned toward her, taking her hand, not timidly now but with assurance. “So would I,” she agreed, heartily. “So would any one, he’s so splendid and wonderful. And we are friends now, you and I, aren’t we? Will you write to me when you have gone?”
Tears brimmed Elsie’s eyes. “Really? Do you want me to write? Of course I will. Let’s be best friends, chums. Even when I’m in California!”
Kate was embarrassed by the tears, but she was enraptured, too. She was tingling with happiness, for she was face to face with the vanishing comrade at last.
“Why didn’t we feel this way sooner?” she asked with reason.
“That was my fault. I’m sorry now.”
The girls had almost forgotten why they were watching the rain-curtained orchard. But they were recalled sharply to the affairs of the minute by Effie’s voice in the hall not far from their door. She was calling down a stairway to Isadora.
“Tell Julia Miss Frazier’s just come in and will be here for dinner, after all.”
The girls started. Elsie sprang to her feet. Kate still had her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said, quickly. “I will help you to get out without her seeing. You can go later to-night.”
“But Father’s note! Pinned to her pincushion! She will read it now! Oh, why did she come back!”
“I’ll go to her room and try to get the note before she notices it,” Kate offered. “You just wait here. I’ll do my best.”
“It’s on top of the tall bureau against the wall between the windows. Oh, do you suppose youcan, Kate?”
As Kate hurried through the passageways toward Miss Frazier’s bedroom she wondered whether she really could. What excuse should she give for disturbing Aunt Katherine while she was dressing?
There was no time to think that out. Aunt Katherine called “Come,” almost before Kate’s knuckles tapped the door.
Miss Frazier was sitting before her dressing table attired in a blue silk dressing-robe.
“Nothing the matter, Kate?” she asked, the minute that she realized it was Kate and not one of the servants who had entered. “Bertha tells me Elsie is better. I am glad I was able to get back for dinner, after all. Both you and Elsie have been on my mind. Was it a dull day?”
“No, not dull a bit.” If Aunt Katherine only knew how very far from dull!
Aunt Katherine put down the comb with which she had been “fluffing” her hair. She looked at Kate questioningly. Why was her niece here, and looking so discomfited, at the dressing hour?
Kate had already spied the note, across the room, pinned to the pincushion on the bureau’s top. To the corner of her eye it appeared as big as a flag! How had Miss Frazier ever avoided seeing it? It fairly shrieked in the room.
“Well?” Her aunt was expecting something of her. She must say something to make her presence reasonable. But what excuse could she ever make to go ’way across the big room to that bureau? In this plight Kate blurted out the news that her mother was there.
“Your mother!”
Aunt Katherine seemed frozen for an instant in her surprise.
“Not exactly here, but she will be in a few minutes, I think,” Kate stumbled on. “I wired for her to come.”
“Why, Kate! Has anything gone wrong to-day? Elsie——”
“No, nothing. Oh, I can’t tell you now. Will you wait a little while, until she’s here? I can’t explain anything yet.”
“What time is she arriving?”
Kate put her hand into her pocket and pulled out the yellow telegram. “Here, this tells,” she said, vaguely. Now, oh, now while Aunt Katherine was studying out that long message was the time to rescue Elsie’s letter. Kate made a move toward the bureau. But Miss Frazier moved with her! Her lorgnette lay beside the pincushion! Was there ever such luck!
She picked it up, and read, moving the glass along the paper.
She passed over the ambiguity to her of most of the message and fastened her attention upon the time of arrival stated there. “Five-five!” she exclaimed. “The train must be over an hour late. More than that. It’s half-past six now. Ring the bell, please, Kate, and tell Isadora to send Timothy to the station. He knows your mother and will bring her up here in the car when the train does get in. That back-way train is seldom on schedule, but this is unusually late. Tell Isadora to have an extra place laid, too.”
Kate went over to the door and rang the servants’ bell there. Bertha, not Isadora, answered. Kate stepped out into the hall and whispered quickly, “Tell Effie to set another place. My mother will be here for dinner.” The directions for Timothy were, of course, not given. Then Kate went back to her aunt, with how beating a heart!
Aunt Katherine was standing with her face turned away, reading Nick’s letter. Kate never thought of fleeing. She stayed stock still, waiting for the storm, and deciding that even now Aunt Katherine need not know that Elsie had not yet gone. Kate expected something quite scenic from her aunt’s temper. Katherine had warned her that it was rare but devastating.
After ages and æons, to Kate’s tense mind, Aunt Katherine folded the letter, check and all. Then their eyes met. The one thing that the expression in her aunt’s eyes told Kate was that she was surprised, thoughglad, to find her still there. She stretched both her hands to her.
“Kate, Kate,” she said with a rising inflection of happiness in her voice. “I’ve been all wrong, wrong about Elsie’s father, but even more wrong about Elsie! She has proved that by running away with her father. The blessed darling! The poor lamb!”
Kate felt that she was on a merry-go-round of surprises. “You are glad she has run away?”
“How can I be anything but rejoiced!”
Kate turned a little cold at that. “And you won’t try to stop them?” she asked.
“No, no need. Nick says he will give me their address as soon as they have one. Then I shall go to them, wherever it is. I will bring them back. Kate, she mustadoreher father! And all the while, just because she kept the agreement not to speak of him, I thought her indifferent to his sufferings, and unnatural. Why, from this, she must have suffered more than he.” Miss Frazier tapped the folded letter with her lorgnette. “He says that when he looked in at your party and saw Elsie so beautifully gowned, and having such a good time, his heart failed him; he decided that he must not take her away from all this. But Elsie herself made him see that she would never be happy anywhere but with him no matter how poor they were. It was Elsie who insisted on this harebrained scheme of running away! Elsie, who I thought hadn’t a grain of spirit or affection! Why, I’m just turned topsy-turvy by it all! Bless that poor child! And Nick wrote ‘The King of the Fairies.’ I ought to have guessed that instantly. Bless him, I say, too, the poor, abused, misguided poet. Do you remember St. Francis? You know he, too——”
But Miss Frazier broke off in her song of praise.
“You poor child, you,” she cried, meaning Kate. “This must all be a mystery. We’ll wait till your mother is here. Then we can talk it all over.” She hugged Kate as she spoke, much as though she herself were a young girl in the most exuberant of spirits.
“I shall wear my black lace,” she said, pushing Kate laughingly away from her. “We must be gorgeous for your mother. Hurry into your pink organdie. Why, she may be at the door this minute.”
Thus freed, Kate flew to Elsie. Elsie was waiting, almost ill with anxiety. “Did you manage it?” she asked.
“No. And she has read the letter. But she isglad, Elsie. There’s just to be no trouble about your getting away with your father at all.”
“Didn’t I tell you!” Elsie exclaimed. “It’s just as I knew. She is glad to be rid of me.”
“We must plan quickly, though. How will you get out? It’s so dark now you can’t see the orchard well at all. Let’s plan.”
Bertha was there, flushed and nervous. That morning Elsie had found it necessary to confide the secret of her father’s being in the orchard house to Bertha, if he was to have any breakfast or lunch that day at all. They had let the food supply get very low, she and her father, because, until he had looked in at the party, they had expected to fly last night. Bertha was horrified at finding herself part of the intrigue, but there was no help for it since Elsie could always “Wind her around her little finger.” Now, the almost distracted maid promised to stand by Elsie until the end. It would be the end for her as well as Elsie, for she would certainly lose her place to-morrow, and her character with it. For if Miss Frazier did not become aware for herself that Bertha had taken food to Nick in the orchard house this morning, and protected Elsie from the betrayal of her plans, Bertha meant to confess these things to her.
The three in conclave now decided that Elsie should go, after Kate and Miss Frazier were in the drawing-room, to the window seat on the stair landing. There she could conceal herself behind the curtains with her suitcase until Kate came out into the hall below, on some pretext to be found by her, and whistled softly. The whistle would mean that Katherine had come in and that Elsie could slip away to the orchard house unobserved.
All this was rather fun for Kate except for the sorry fact that when it was over she would have lost a comrade. To help stage a real runaway—well, it doesn’t happen every day that one may be so at the centre of exciting events.
With Bertha’s help Kate was dashing into her organdie while Elsie stood in a balcony window watching the orchard. Elsie had come in to be near Kate until the very last minute. But when a knock suddenly sounded on Kate’s door Elsie wisely whisked away into her own room.
“Come,” Kate called in a tremulous voice. Was it her mother? No, it was Aunt Katherine, and very fortunate it was that Elsie had been spry in her whisking.
“I see you are dressed,” Miss Frazier said. “Come down, with me, then, and we will be together in the drawing-room when your mother arrives. I have ordered dinner delayed for her.”
Kate thought quickly. “Just a minute,” she said. “There’s something in Elsie’s room I need. Will you wait?”
Kate closed the door behind her as though by accident. But Elsie was not in the room. Kate looked all around but it was quite empty. The vanishing comrade had vanished, physically this time. There was the closet door. Was she hiding there? Yes, Kate heard a stir and saw dimly through the hanging dresses—expensive dresses given Elsie by Aunt Katherine, which she was not taking with her—Elsie herself squeezed back against the farthest wall. Kate closed the closet door behind her and groped her way across the dark closet. “It’s I, Kate,” she whispered loudly.
The girls touched hands in the dark. They hugged and kissed each other, mostly on noses and ears, but no matter; it was a grief-stricken parting. “Good-bye, good-bye,” they whispered, and Kate said, “Write to me from California.” But she must hurry back before it came into Miss Frazier’s head to follow her in here with the idea of going through Elsie’s door into the hall. She ran back to her own room and in her anxiety created the impression of a small cyclone appearing.
Miss Frazier looked with some surprise on the violence of her return. Then her eyes softened. Kate had not given thought to drying her tears. “You mustn’t take it like this,” Aunt Katherine said, putting her arm through Kate’s as they went down the passageways together toward the big upper hall. “Elsie is happier than she has been in a very long time; she is off with one of the most satisfying companions in the world. Nick will take good care of her, infinitely better care than was ever taken here by me, for heknows her mind. And oh, Kate, we mustn’t let your mother run away with you, too. Then Ishouldbe alone! You won’t be without companionship. There are the Dentons just next door, and plenty of others who will be wanting to know you now.”
“But they aren’t Elsie,” Kate responded, shamelessly using her handkerchief, as the tears would keep flooding.
Miss Frazier was too excitedly nervous to take up a book or knitting when they were in the drawing-room. She wandered about, looking at the pictures on the walls, picking up magazines from tables to stare at them vacantly and replace them again, changing the arrangements of flowers, and all the time she was waiting for the sound of the opening front door and Katherine’s step in the hall. Kate was listening, too, but not in that direction. She expected her mother to come through the gardens and in at one of the French doors, closed now, with the rain beating against them. Kate was so absorbed with the consciousness of Elsie waiting up on the stair landing for her chance to escape that she forgot her mother had no umbrella and that she might be waiting in the orchard house until this particular shower passed. She merely wondered what was keeping her all this time, and what would happen when she and Aunt Katherine met. Aunt Katherine would certainly be surprised when she caught sight of the expected traveller through the glass doors on the terrace. There would be questions and explanations about that. Nick would have warned Katherine, of course, not to give away the secret of his being there; but then whatwouldshe give as her explanation to Aunt Katherine?
Would she be expecting to find Aunt Katherine here at all, though? Wouldn’t Nick have acquainted her with the fact of Aunt Katherine’s supposed absence? In that case Katherine, unprepared, would be hard put to it to give any excuse for entering through the gardens from the back, rather than by the front door, ushered in by Isadora. Kate was on tenter-hooks. She felt that it was she herself who had caused the muddle. But what could she have done differently? If she had told Aunt Katherine, up in her room, that Katherine was here already, only out in the orchard house, Aunt Katherine would certainly have gone straight out there, and then what would have happened to Nick and Elsie?
It was a bad ten minutes for Kate. She sat with a book open before her—what book she never knew—her eyes glued to the page, her ears cocked for a sound beyond the glass doors. Aunt Katherine stopped before her in her wanderings once or twice, about to speak, but she had too much respect for a reader to break into such obvious absorption as was Kate’s.
Now Miss Frazier was standing looking through the glass of one of the doors into the rain-swept garden. Kate was seized with an idea. She must run up to Elsie in the window seat—she must manage it without her aunt’s noticing, now—and send Elsie to the orchard house to warn those two that Miss Frazier had returned. After that, responsibility would be theirs. They might fix up some scheme among them. Kate rose, softly, and took a step toward the hall. But she was halted by an exclamation from Aunt Katherine.
Miss Frazier had not turned; she was still looking out through the glass. Kate, looking, too, saw two figures just at the edge of the orchard. It was her mother and Nick. Well, she could do nothing now. They certainly were counting on Aunt Katherine’s absence, for they were coming toward the house. They were running toward the house, “between the drops,” dashing like school children. They were holding hands, and Nick was always a step ahead, rather dragging Katherine. Oh, why hadn’t Kate thought about an umbrella! They were laughing! Kate heard their laughter through the glass. So did Aunt Katherine. Her face, taken at that moment, would have made a perfect mask to personify Surprise.
She opened the doors, and Katherine and Nick blew through them like two drenched leaves. The rain had blurred the glass, and the running pair had thought it was Kate standing there watching them and letting them in. When they saw that it was Aunt Katherine they stood and simplystared, with almost no expression, still gripping each other’s hands.
Miss Frazier’s first words were unexpected ones. “Where is Elsie?” she asked Nick. That was all, just “Where is Elsie?” as though that, for the instant, was the thing of prime importance to her. It was Kate who could answer, though. Timidly she said, “Elsie’s up on the stair landing.”
“Well, that’s all right, then. I thought she might be in search of a father in the South Station or some place. I thought, Nick, you two, you and Elsie, had run away.”
Nick said, “We were going to. It is Katherine who has stopped us at the very minute.” He still held Katherine’s hand. Now he turned and looked at her. She looked back at him. Both Aunt Katherine and Kate, seeing what passed between their eyes, gasped. But it forewarned them, and Katherine’s words when she spoke were only an echo of what they had seen.
“Nick and I are getting married, Aunt Katherine. We didn’t know you were here, or we wouldn’t have burst in like this. We had come to tell our children. Won’t you get Elsie, Kate?”
“You and Nick marrying? So at last you’ve come to your senses!” That was Aunt Katherine.
“Yes. And oh, Aunt Katherine, she knows everything about me, and still she wants to.”
“Well, of course she knows everything about you. I fancythat’shad publicity enough. But if this is the way you feel, Katherine, why didn’t you write me one word when Nick got himself into trouble? Or since? Your silence has been as cruel as any part of it all. It said plainer than words, ‘Like Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith, I expected this sort of thing.’”
“Why, Aunt Katherine! How can you? If I had known Nick was in prison, that something so terrible had happened, I should have written you right away. No, I should have come. Trouble like that would have brought us all together. But how could I know, when nobody told me?” Katherine’s beautiful eyes were like a grieved, accusing child’s. “And what hard-shelled little creatures we are! Why couldn’t mysoulhave told me?”
“Don’t talk about your soul telling you.” Aunt Katherine was brusque. “What about your eyes? Don’t you ever read the papers?”
Katherine dropped her head. She had probably often dropped it so in the past before her aunt. “You know,” she said, softly apologetic, “I never did read the papers as you do, Aunt Katherine, or keep up with current events.”
Aunt Katherine laughed. It was a nice laugh. Kate visualized their brook in Ashland, when the ice was dissolving under the sun in the spring. (Yes, she did. It may seem a strange time for her mind to wander so far, but the fact remains. She saw the brook that zigzagged through the meadows back of their barn-house, as she had seen it last spring, its edges still frosted with ice, but down the centre the clear, laughing water coursing.)
“Well, the news of Nick would hardly come under ‘current events’,” Aunt Katherine was saying. “But I do remember now that you never did take a proper interest in the papers. It never entered my head, though, that you wouldn’t have learned of this from a dozen sources.”
Kate had been backing away toward the door, meaning to go for Elsie. But there was no need. Elsie had heard her father’s voice the minute he had come into the drawing-room. She had stolen down into the room now, and gripped Kate’s hand. Together the two girls moved back toward the three who were earnestly talking, still standing near the open door with the rain, all unobserved, discolouring the polished floor.
Aunt Katherine was asking Katherine another question. “Why didn’t you take Nick seventeen years ago?” she asked. “You seem sure enough of yourself now. He wasn’t good enough for you then. Is he good enough now after all that has happened?”
Again Katherine cried, “How can you!” But quickly she amended it. “Yes, you have a right. You know yourself, Aunt Katherine, what was the matter with me. It was pride of birth, blindness, love of luxury, Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith’s head-shakings, a jumble of folly. You know perfectly what sort of a girl I was. But now I’m different. Now I’m nearer to being good enough for Nick.”
“Love of luxury!” Miss Frazier picked on that. “You want me to believe your horrid description of yourself? If you loved luxury so much, why have you been living as you have all these years, accepting nothing of the luxuries I longed to give you?”
“But I tell you I changed. At twenty-two I was different from nineteen. I welcomed poverty then. When they told me that Kate and I had actually nothing to live on, I was delighted.”
“So it has been by way of penance, your hard life since?”
“If you want to call it that. It’s been fun, too.”
“But not fun for me.” Aunt Katherine’s eyes filled with tears. For a person of Aunt Katherine’s character to cry openly like that was as extraordinary a happening as though she had suddenly begun walking on her hands. Only Katherine dared speak to her or try to offer comfort. She put her arms around her shoulders, and led her to a chair. There she made her sit down, and knelt by her side, leaning her head against her arm, stroking her hand.
“Dear, dear, Aunt Katherine. Don’t, don’t,” she besought. “We can’t bear it. Oh, what have I done to you! What have we both done to you, Nick and I? Forgive us, Aunt Katherine. Love us again.”
At that, even in the midst of her tears, Aunt Katherine laughed, and as before Kate remembered the brook. “Again!” Aunt Katherine exclaimed. “Did you think I had ever stopped loving either of you mad children?”
Nick nodded. “Ihave forfeited your affection right enough. I understand why you couldn’t meet me, Aunt Katherine, two weeks ago when I asked you to. At least I understand now. I shouldn’t have asked it. But how else were we to decide about Elsie?”
Aunt Katherine looked up at her adopted nephew, remembering. “But of course I did go to meet you,” she said. “Did you think I wouldn’t! I read the day, though, ‘Thursday’ instead of ‘Tuesday.’ It’s not often I blunder so stupidly. Then I made frantic efforts to locate you. But you had vanished. There wasn’t a trace. I set private detectives to work. To-day they took me all the way to Springfield on a wild-goose chase. They were sure they had located you there. Clever, those detectives!”
Aunt Katherine dried her eyes thoroughly as she spoke. She was scornful of her tears. “That excursion has tired me,” she explained. “The disappointment of it. I was so downhearted. Then having you suddenly here again, right here at home, without warning, safe and happy—well, perhaps a sphinx would cry.”
It was Nick’s turn to kneel and rub his cheek against Aunt Katherine’s shoulder. She lifted a hand and stroked his hair. Kate, too, got as close to her aunt as she could. Only Elsie stood aloof, for an instant not in any way part of the group. It was Aunt Katherine who beckoned her, and took her hand.
“Elsie,” she said, “I have been thinking you hard and selfish because you kept my rule not to mention your father. I have wanted to speak with you of him, but every time I led up to it I thought you drew away. It seemed to me that you were suffering, not for him, but for your own wounded vanity. Now I understand better. Perhaps, in time, you will forgive me.”
Then it was Elsie’s turn to cry, and she did it so whole-heartedly that the family devoted its complete attention to calming her.
It was later that Miss Frazier exclaimed as though she had just remembered it: “So you two children are to be married, and Katherine become a Frazier again! I wonder what Oakdale will say to that turn of affairs!”
“If you really care what they say, Aunt Katherine”—Katherine spoke quickly—“need they know at all? Ashland society notes will hardly penetrate here. And you’ve had quite enough to bear.”
“Don’t think you could ever hide such a famous author as Nick has become, with only his first book, under a bushel for long, my dear. And as a matter of fact, quite apart from my joy that you are acting like a sane girl at last, and for once, I shall be proud to death of the marriage. I must call up theGazetteto-morrow, before ten. You remind me, Kate.” As well as pride there was a gleam of battle from Aunt Katherine’s eyes.