CHAPTER XXI
PUSHING by Alice Lorraine, deaf to her entreaties, the constable and two of the men made their way into the shop and after an hasty glance about the lower room hastened upstairs. Mr. Langley, after a brief word to Mrs. Lorraine, followed. And despite his haste and excitement and perturbation, he noticed the homelike appearance of the place he recollected as a littered work shop.
But of the upper chamber he noted no detail. As his head rose above the railing of the stair, he saw the men start back from the further end of the place. Peering into the shadows, he saw the figure of a man stretched upon an old couch. Approaching, he saw that he was burning with fever and unconscious. The man, who was very tall, was not at all the tramp in appearance, though he seemed to have slept in his clothes. He was well dressed and a superficial view pronounced him of refined presence. He was like a skeleton, however, and his purple face cadaverous to the extreme.
Mr. Langley asked one of the men to go for the doctor, sending Mrs. Lorraine up as he went. The constable said he would wait below. The other mantook a chair in the further end of the room as Mrs. Lorraine joined Mr. Langley by the couch.
“Do you know this man?” he asked.
“I never saw him in my life,” she declared, and going to the stairs, summoned Alice. The girl appeared, white as chalk.
“Alice, do you know this man,” demanded the mother sternly.
“I know him, certainly!” cried the girl defiantly. “He is—he is a gentleman. He has done no one any harm. He came to Farleigh to look for someone he knew once, and I told him he might stay here.”
“But if he is a gentleman, how came you here, Alice Lorraine?” cried her mother.
“I haven’t been here long, and—how could he know it! Look at him, will you!” the girl cried. But her mother continued to look sternly upon her.
“He went away,” the girl forced herself to explain. “He was coming back before he went West where he lives now. He didn’t come and—I was afraid something had—happened. I came down this afternoon to look once more and found him—just so. O Mr. Langley, is he dying, do you think?”
“I shouldn’t judge so. I should say he was in the early stage of a fever. He is terribly emaciated. He looks starved. The doctor will be here shortly. Meantime let me see if I can loosen his clothing a bit.”
As he bent over the couch, Alice’s heart went out to him. He seemed so gentle and tender though he had no idea the man was not a stranger and probably believed him to be a tramp. As he put his arm beneaththe sick man’s shoulders to change his position, the latter opened his eyes wide. Mr. Langley started but finished what he was about.
The doctor came up and Mrs. Lorraine and Alice went below. After some little time Mr. Langley joined them.
“It is probably pneumonia, or will be within a few hours,” he announced. “Dr. Porter will send for the ambulance and have him taken to the hospital at Wenham where he will have the best of care.”
He turned to Alice with a kind look.
“O mother, couldn’t we take him into the cottage and take care of him?” cried the girl beseechingly. “He is good and—O, so unfortunate, and—O if you knew something I know, you couldn’t refuse. And—if Mr. Langley knew—something else, he would beg you to.”
Mr. Langley looked at the girl with an odd expression on his face.
“The man’s eyes are exactly like those of a dear friend of mine who has been dead these six years,” he said keeping his own eyes upon her the while. “For a moment I forgot all and thought he was Dick Cartwright.”
Alice wrung her hands.
“Tell me, Alice Lorraine, who is the man above? Is it indeed Dick Cartwright?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Langley, it is,” the girl owned with a great sense of relief. “He didn’t die. It was another man, but he gave him his name because he wished tobe dead. He only came here to see you and Reuben. Then he was going back again. I—happened upon him one day and—after that I tried to help him. He is really——”
Mr. Langley was half way up the stair. Mrs. Lorraine stopped him. “Tell the doctor we will take him into the cottage,” she bade him. “Alice and I will go right over to get a bed ready.”
They got the bed ready and Mr. Langley and the doctor carried the sick man over, undressed him and got him into it. The doctor secured a nurse and Mr. Langley waited until she should come. Meanwhile Alice Lorraine related to him and to her mother the whole story Dick Cartwright had told her.
Mrs. Lorraine remained at the cottage, while Alice returned to Miss Penny’s. When Mr. Langley took her over he told Miss Penny briefly who the sick man was, and they discussed the situation as it concerned Reuben, who was fortunately out of the house at that moment.
They decided to say nothing to him until after Christmas when Mr. Langley would tell him the whole story. Reuben could then, if he wished, stay at the cottage for the remainder of his holidays.
As a matter of fact, Reuben was to remain there considerably longer than that. When it was time for him to return to college his father was just out of danger and Reuben did not dream of leaving him. He did not, indeed, return to college again until the following autumn. As soon as Dick Cartwright was able to beabout the house, Mrs. Lorraine returned to Miss Penny’s, and Reuben and his father took the cottage as their home. Reuben got a position in the bank at Wenham and went back and forth to his work happily. His father kept house. As he grew stronger, Mr. Langley persuaded him to practice on the church organ. In the late spring, he was back again in his old position of organist at Farleigh church, and in the summer he secured, with Mr. Langley’s help, the position to teach music in the public schools at Wenham. This gave him a sufficient income not only to live comfortably but to pay Reuben’s expenses at college. Reuben, however, still preferred to work his way through, so the money was saved towards the pipe organ.
To return now to Mr. Langley and the day before Christmas—that Christmas which was to be the happiest of his life.
He hadn’t realised that he was tired until he opened his own gate late that afternoon. Then suddenly such a dead weight of fatigue dropped down upon him that he felt as if he couldn’t crawl to his own door. Certainly he could never attain the sanctuary of his study where he could think over the events of the afternoon and realise the joy that had come to him with the return of his friend as it were from the gates of death.
Someone came to the door and peered eagerly upthe street. It was Anna Miller. Forgetting himself, Mr. Langley called to her and hurried up the steps.
“O Anna, is anything wrong?” he asked anxiously, for he would have thought of her as being somewhere with Rusty and Reuben.
“Wrong!” the girl echoed with ringing voice and beaming face. “O Mr. Langley, everything is so beautifully right that it seemed as if you would never, never come. O hurry, please.”
She led him, not as he expected, towards his wife’s door, but into the front room across the passage from the study. It had been the parlour but was seldom used now-a-days.
It looked exceedingly cheerful now, but so would the cellar have looked to Mr. Langley had the potato-bin held the same group that he saw on the brocaded sofa. Mrs. Langley, bright and alert with flushed cheeks and not uncomely, despite Seth Miller’s opinion, sat thereon with Joe, Junior, curled up beside her while Big Bell hung over them, trying now to make herself inconspicuous and really appearing to be twice her natural size.
As the minister paused on the threshold, his wife looked up and smiled. She had actually learned since noon to smile. Or it may be that she had recollected her old smile of twenty-odd years ago, for she looked to Russell Langley at that moment like the bride of his youth, or rather like little Ella May’s mother.
“Russell, what do you think! Anna has offered usthis precious baby as a Christmas gift!” she cried eagerly. “Shall we accept?”
He put Anna into the most comfortable chair in the room and moved it close to the sofa. Then he seated himself the other side of the baby whom he bent to kiss. And little Joe repeated what no doubt seemed to him the pass-word for this household, “baa-baa!”
Mr. Langley turned eagerly to the girl.
“Do you mean it, Anna?” he asked with such a look in his eyes that Anna could not answer. But she nodded, smiling through tears.
He took the baby into his arms and caressed it.
“I can’t—we can’t begin to tell Anna how happy we shall be nor how grateful we are to her, can we Ella?” he said warmly.
“We’ll certainly jump at the chance,” Mrs. Langley rejoined, borrowing Anna’s phraseology with such comical effect that they all laughed merrily. And little Joe smiled confidently into Anna’s eyes.
THE END.