CHAPTER XVIII
Thejourney back to New York seemed all too brief for the two whose lives had just been blended so unexpectedly, and every mile was filled with a new and sweet discovery of delight in one another; and then, when they reached the city they rushed in on Mrs. Hathaway and the eager young Jeff like two children who had so much to tell they did not know where to begin.
Mrs. Hathaway settled the matter by insisting on their going to dinner immediately and leaving all explanations until afterward; and with the servants present of course there was little that could be said about the matter that each one had most at heart. But there was a spirit of deep happiness in the atmosphere and one couldn’t possibly entertain any fears under the influence of the radiant smiles that passed between mother and daughter, husband and wife, brother and sister.
As soon as the meal was concluded the mother led them up to her private sitting room, and closing the door she stood facing them all as half breathless with the excitement of the moment they stood in a row before her:
“My three dear children!” she murmured.Gordon’s eyes lit with joy and his heart thrilled with the wonder of it all. Then the mother stepped up to him and placing her hand on his arm led him over to the couch and made him sit beside her, while the brother and sister sat down together close by.
“Now, Cyril, my new son,” said she, deliberately, her eyes resting approvingly upon his face, “you may tell me your story. I see my girl has lost both head and heart to you and I doubt if she could tell it connectedly.”
And while Celia and Jeff were laughing at this Gordon set about his task of winning a mother, and incidentally an eager-eyed young brother who was more than half committed to his cause already.
Celia watched proudly as her handsome husband took out his credentials, and began his explanation.
“First, I must tell you who I am, and these papers will do it better than I could. Will you look at them, please?”
He handed her a few letters and papers.
“These papers on the top show the rank and position that my father and my grandfather held with the government and in the army. This is a letter from the president to my father congratulating him on his approaching marriage with my mother. That paper contains my mother’s family tree, and the letters with it will give you an idea ofthe honor in which my mother’s family was held in Washington and in Virginia, her old home. I know these matters are not of much moment, and say nothing whatever about what I am myself, but they are things you would have been likely to know about my family if you had known me all my life; and at least they will tell you that my family was respectable.”
Mrs. Hathaway was examining the papers, and suddenly looked up exclaiming: “My dear! My father knew your grandfather. I think I saw him once when he came to our home in New York. It was years ago and I was a young girl, but I remember he was a fine looking man with keen dark eyes, and a heavy head of iron gray hair.”
She looked at Gordon keenly.
“I wonder if your eyes are not like his. It was long ago of course.”
“They used to say I looked like him. I do not remember him. He died when I was very young.”
The mother looked up with a pleasant smile.
“Now tell me about yourself,” she said and laid a gentle hand on his.
Gordon looked down, an embarrassed flush spreading over his face.
“There’s nothing great to tell,” he said. “I’ve always tried to live a straight true life, and I’venever been in love with any girl before—” he flashed a wonderful, blinding smile upon Celia.
“I was left alone in the world when quite young and have lived around in boarding-schools and college. I’m a graduate of Harvard and I’ve travelled a little. There was some money left from my father’s estate, not much. I’m not rich. I’m a Secret Service man, and I love my work. I get a good salary and was this morning promoted to the position next in rank to my chief, so that now I shall have still more money. I shall be able to make your daughter comfortable and give her some of the luxuries, if not all, to which she has been accustomed.”
“My dear boy, that part is not what I am anxious about—” interrupted the mother.
“I know,” said Gordon, “but it is a detail you have a right to be told. I understand that you care far more what I am than how much money I can make, and I promise you I am going to try to be all that you would want your daughter’s husband to be. Perhaps the best thing I can say for myself is that I love her better than my life, and I mean to make her happiness the dearest thing in life to me.”
The mother’s look of deep understanding answered him more eloquently than words could have done, and after a moment she spoke again.
“But I do not understand how you could have known one another and I never have heard of you. Celia is not good at keeping things from her mother, though the last three months she has had a sadness that I could not fathom, and was forced to lay to her natural dread of leaving home. She seemed so insistent upon having this marriage just as George planned it—and I was so afraid she would regret not waiting. How could you have known one another all this time and she never talked to me about it, and why did George Hayne have any part whatever in it if you two loved one another? Just how long have you known each other anyway? Did it begin when you visited in Washington last spring, Celia?”
With dancing eyes Celia shook her head.
“No, Mamma. If I had met him then I’m sure George Hayne would never have had anything to do with the matter, for Cyril would have known how to help me out of my difficulty.”
“I shall have to tell you the whole story from my standpoint, and from the beginning,” said Gordon, dreading now that the crisis was upon him, what the outcome would be. “I have wanted you to know who and what I was before you knew the story, that you might judge me as kindly as possible, and know that however I may have been toblame in the matter it was through no intention of mine. My story may sound rather impossible. I know it will seem improbable, but it is nevertheless true, everything that I have to tell. May I hope to be believed?”
“I think you may,” answered the mother searching his face anxiously. “Those eyes of yours are not lying eyes.”
“Thank you,” he said simply, and then gathering all his courage he plunged into his story.
Mrs. Hathaway was watching him with searching interest. Jeff had drawn his chair up close and could scarcely restrain his excitement, and when Gordon told of his commission he burst forth explosively:
“Gee! But that was a great stunt! I’d have liked to have been along with you! You must be simply great to be trusted with a thing like that!”
But his mother gently reproved him:
“Hush, my son, let us hear the story.”
Celia sat quietly watching her husband with pride, two bright spots of color on her cheeks, and her hands clasping each other tightly. She was hearing many details now that were new to her. Once more, when Gordon mentioned the dinner at Holman’s Jeff interrupted with:
“Holman! Holman! Not J. P.? Why ofcourse—we know him! Celia was one of his daughter’s bridesmaids last spring! The old lynx! I always thought he was crooked! People hint a lot of things about him—”
“Jeff, dear, let us hear the story,” again insisted his mother, and the story continued.
Gordon had been looking down as he talked. He dreaded to see their faces as the truth should dawn upon them, but when he had told all he lifted honest eyes to the white-faced mother and pleaded with her:
“Indeed, indeed, I hope you will believe me, that not until they laid your daughter’s hand in mine did I know that I was supposed to be the bridegroom. I thought all the time her brother was the bridegroom. If I had not been so distraught, and trying so hard to think how to escape, I suppose I would have noticed that I was standing next to her, and that everything was peculiar about the whole matter, but I didn’t. And then when I suddenly knew that she and I were being married, what should I have done? Do you think I ought to have stopped the ceremony then and there and made a scene before all those people? What was the right thing to do? Suppose my commission had been entirely out of the question, and I had had no duty toward the government to keep entirely quiet about myself, do you think I ought to have made a scene? Would youhave wanted me to for your daughter’s sake? Tell me please,” he insisted, gently.
And while she hesitated he added:
“I did some pretty hard thinking during that first quarter of a second that I realized what was happening, and I tell you honestly I didn’t know what was the right thing to do. It seemed awful for her sake to make a scene, and to tell you the truth I worshipped her from the moment my eyes rested upon her. There was something sad and appealing as she looked at me that seemed to pledge my very life to save her from trouble. Tell me, do you think I ought to have stopped the ceremony then at the first moment of my realization that I was being married?”
The mother’s face had softened as she watched him and listened to his tender words about Celia and now she answered gently:
“I am not sure—perhaps not! It was a very grave question to face. I don’t know that I can blame you for doing nothing. It would have been terrible for her and us and everybody and have made it all so public. Oh, I think you did right not to do anything publicly—perhaps—and yet—it is terrible to me to think you have been forced to marry my daughter in that way.”
“Please do not say forced,—Mother—” saidGordon laying both hands earnestly upon hers and looking into her eyes, “I tell you one thing that held me back from doing anything was that I so earnestly desired that what I was passing through might be real and lasting. I have never seen one like her before. I know that if the mistake had been righted and she had passed out of my life I should never have felt the same again. I am glad, glad with all my heart that she is mine, and—Mother!—I think she is glad too!”
The mother turned toward her daughter, and Celia with starry eyes came and knelt before them, and laid her hands in the hands of her husband, saying with ringing voice:
“Yes, dear little Mother, I am gladder than I ever was before in my life.”
And kneeling thus, with her husband’s arm about her, her face against his shoulder, and both her hands clasped in his, she told her mother about the tortures that George Hayne had put her through, until the mother turned white with horror at what her beloved and cherished child had been enduring, and the brother got up and stormed across the floor, vowing vengeance on the luckless head of poor George Hayne.
Then after the mother had given her blessing to the two, and Jeff had added an original one of hisown, there was the whole story of the eventful wedding trip to tell, which they both told by solos and choruses until the hour grew alarmingly late and the mother suddenly sent them all off to bed.
The next few days were both busy and happy ones for the two. They went to the hospital and gladdened the life of the little newsboy with fruit and toys and many promises; and they brought home a happy white dog from his boarding place whom Jeff adopted as his own. Gordon had a trying hour or two at court with his one-time host, the scoundrel who had stolen the cipher message; and the thick-set man glared at him from a cell window as he passed along the corridor of the prison whither he had gone in search of George Hayne.
Gordon in his search for the lost bridegroom, whom for many reasons he desired to find as soon as possible, had asked the help of one of the men at work on the Holman case, in searching for a certain George Hayne who needed very much to be brought to justice.
“Oh, you won’t have to search for him,” declared the man with a smile. “He’s safely landed in prison three days ago. He was caught as neatly as rolling off a log by the son of the man whose name he forged several years ago. It was trust money of a big corporation and the man died in hisplace in a prison cell, but the son means to see the real culprit punished.”
And so Gordon, in the capacity of Celia’s lawyer, went to the prison to talk with George Hayne, and that miserable man found no excuse for his sins when the searching talk was over. Gordon did not let the man know who he was, and merely made it understood that Celia was married, and that if he attempted to make her any further trouble the whole thing would be exposed and he would have to answer a grave charge of blackmail.
The days passed rapidly, and at last the New York matter for which Gordon’s presence was needed was finished, and he was free to sail away with his bride. On the morning of their departure Gordon’s voice rang out over the miles of telephone wires to his old chief in Washington: “I am married and am just starting on my wedding trip. Don’t you want to congratulate me?” And the old chief’s gruff voice sounded back:
“Good work, old man! Congratulations for you both. She may or may not be the best girl in all the world; I haven’t had a chance to see yet; but she’s a lucky girl, for she’s gotthe best man I know. Tell her that for me! Bless you both! I’m glad she’s going with you. It won’t be so lonesome.”
Gordon gave her the message that afternoon asthey sailed straight into the sunshine of a new and beautiful life together.
“Dear,” he said, as he arranged her steamer rug more comfortably about her, “has it occurred to you that you are probably the only bride who ever married the best man at her wedding?”
Celia smiled appreciatively and after a minute replied mischievously:
“I suppose every bridethinksher husband is the best man.”