I have never reproached Miss Patty, but if she had only given me the letter to read or had told me the whole truth instead of a part of it, I would have understood, and things would all have been different. It is all very well for her to say that I looked worried enough already, and that anyhow it was a family affair. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN TOLD.
All she did was to come up to me as I stood in the spring, with her face perfectly white, and ask me if my Dicky Carter was the Richard Carter who stayed at the Grosvenor in town.
"He doesn't stay anywhere," I said, with my feet getting cold, "but that's where he has apartments. What has he been doing now?"
"You're expecting him on the evening train, aren't you?" she asked. "Don't stare like that: my father's watching."
"He ought to be on the evening train," I said. I wasn't going to say I expected him. I didn't.
"Listen, Minnie," she said, "you'll have to send him away again the moment he comes. He must not go into the house."
I stood looking at her, with my mouth open.
"Not go into the house," I repeated, "with everybody waiting for him for the last six days, and Mr. Stitt here to turn things over to him!"
She stood tapping her foot, with her pretty brows knitted.
"The wretch!" she cried, "the hateful creature as if things weren't bad enough! I suppose he'll have to come, Minnie, but I must see him before he sees any one else."
Just then the bishop brought his glass over to the spring.
"Hot this time, Minnie," he said. "Do you know, I'm getting the mineral-water habit, Patty! I'm afraid plain water will have no attraction for me after this."
He put his hand over hers on the rail. They were old friends, the bishop and the Jenningses.
"Well, how goes it to-day with the father?" he said in a low tone, and smiling.
Miss Patty shrugged her shoulders. "Worse, if possible."
"I thought so," he said cheerfully. "If state of mind is any criterion I should think he has had a relapse. A little salt, Minnie." Miss Patty stood watching him while he tasted it.
"Bishop," she said suddenly, "will you do something for me?"
"I always have, Patty." He was very fond of Miss Patty, was the bishop.
"Then—to-night, not later than eight o'clock, get father to play cribbage, will you? And keep him in the card-room until nine."
"Another escapade!" he said, pretending to be very serious. "Patty, Patty, you'll be the death of me yet. Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"
"Certainly NOT," said Miss Patty. "Just a dear, slightly bald, but still very distinguished slave!"
The bishop picked up her left hand and looked at the ring and from that to her face.
"There will be plenty of slaves to kiss this little hand, where you are going, my child," he said. "Sometimes I wish that some nice red-blooded boy here at home—but I dare say it will turn out surprisingly well as it is."
"Bishop, Bishop!" Mrs. Moody called. "How naughty of you, and with your bridge hand waiting to be held!"
He carried his glass back to the table, stopping for a moment beside Mr. Jennings.
"If Patty becomes any more beautiful," he said, "I shall be in favor of having her wear a mask. How are we young men to protect ourselves?"
"Pretty is as pretty does!" declared Mr. Jennings from behind his newspaper, and Miss Patty went out with her chin up.
Well, I knew Mr. Dick had been up to some mischief; I had suspected it all along. But Miss Patty went to bed, and old Mrs. Hutchins, who's a sort of lady's-maid-companion of hers, said she mustn't be disturbed. I was pretty nearly sick myself. And when Mr. Sam came out at five o'clock and said he'd been in the long-distance telephone booth for an hour and had called everybody who had ever known Mr. Dick, and that he had dropped right off the earth, I just about gave up. He had got some detectives, he said, and there was some sort of a story about his having kept right on the train to Salem, Ohio, but if he had they'd lost the trail there, and anyhow, with the railroad service tied up by the storm there wasn't much chance of his getting to Finleyville in time.
Luckily Mr. Stitt was in bed with a mustard leaf over his stomach and ice on his head, and didn't know whether it was night or morning. But Thoburn was going around with a watch in his hand, and Mr. Sam was for killing him and burying the body in the snow.
At half past five I just about gave up. I was sitting in front of the fire wondering why I'd taken influenza the spring before from getting my feet wet in a shower, when I had been standing in a mineral spring for so many years that it's a wonder I'm not web-footed. It was when I had influenza that the old doctor made the will, you remember. Maybe I was crying, I don't recall.
It was dark outside, and nothing inside but firelight. Suddenly I seemed to feel somebody looking at the back of my neck and I turned around. There was a man standing outside one of the windows, staring in.
My first thought, of course, was that it was Mr. Dick, but just as the face vanished I saw that it wasn't. It was older by three or four years than Mr. Dick's and a bit fuller.
I'm not nervous. I've had to hold my own against chronic grouches too long to have nerves, so I went to the door and looked out. The man came around the corner just then and I could see him plainly in the firelight. He was covered with snow, and he wore a sweater and no overcoat, but he looked like a gentleman.
"I beg your pardon for spying," he said, "but the fire looked so snug! I've been trying to get to the hotel over there, but in the dark I've lost the path."
"That's not a hotel," I snapped, for that touched me on the raw. "That's Hope Springs Sanatorium, and this is one of the Springs."
"Oh, Hope Springs, internal instead of eternal!" he said. "That's awfully bad, isn't it? To tell you the truth, I think I'd better come in and get some; I'm short on hope just now."
I thought that was likely enough, for although his voice was cheerful and his eyes smiled, there was a drawn look around his mouth, and he hadn't shaved that day. I wish I had had as much experience in learning what's right with folks as I have had in learning what's wrong with them.
"You'd better come in and get warm, anyhow," I told him, "only don't spring any more gags. I've been 'Hebe' for fourteen years and I've served all the fancy drinks you can name over the brass railing of that spring. Nowadays, when a fellow gets smart and asks for a Mamie Taylor, I charge him a Mamie Taylor price."
He shut the door behind him and came over to the fire.
"I'm pretty well frozen," he said. "Don't be astonished if I melt before your eyes; I've been walking for hours."
Now that I had a better chance to see him I'd sized up that drawn look around his mouth.
"Missed your luncheon, I suppose," I said, poking the fire log. He grinned rather sheepishly.
"Well, I haven't had any, and I've certainly missed it," he said.
"Fasting's healthy, you know."
I thought of Senator Biggs, who carried enough fat to nourish him for months, and then I looked at my visitor, who hadn't an ounce of extra flesh on him.
"Nothing's healthy that isn't natural," I declared. "If you'd care for a dish of buttered and salted pop-corn, there's some on the mantel. It's pretty salty; the idea is to make folks thirsty so they'll enjoy the mineral water."
"Think of raising a real thirst only to drown it with spring water!" he said. But he got the pop corn and he ate it all. If he hadn't had any luncheon he hadn't had much breakfast. The queer part was—he was a gentleman; his clothes were the right sort, but he had on patent leather shoes in all that snow and an automobile cap.
I put away the glasses while he ate. Pretty soon he looked up and the drawn lines were gone. He wasn't like Mr. Dick, but he was the same type, only taller and heavier built.
"And so it isn't a hotel," he remarked. "Well, I'm sorry. The caravansary in the village is not to my liking, and I had thought of engaging a suite up here. My secretary usually attends to these things, but—don't take away all the glasses, Heb—I beg your pardon—but the thirst is coming."
He filled the glass himself and then he came up and stood in front of me, with the glass held up in the air.
"To the best woman I have met in many days," he said, not mocking but serious. "I was about to lie down and let the little birds cover me with leaves." Then he glanced at the empty dish and smiled. "To buttered pop-corn! Long may it wave!" he said, and emptied the glass.
Well, I found a couple of apples in my pantry and brought them out, and after he ate them he told me what had happened to him. He had been a little of everything since he left college he was about twenty-five had crossed the Atlantic in a catboat and gone with somebody or other into some part of Africa—they got lost and had to eat each other or lizards, or something like that—and then he went to the Philippines, and got stuck there and had to sell books to get home. He had a little money, "enough for a grub-stake," he said, and all his folks were dead. Then a college friend of his wrote a rural play called Sweet Peas—"Great title, don't you think?" he asked—and he put up all the money. It would have been a hit, he said, but the kid in the play—the one that unites its parents in the last act just before he dies of tuberculosis—the kid took the mumps and looked as if, instead of fading away, he was going to blow up. Everybody was so afraid of him that they let him die alone for three nights in the middle of the stage. Then the leading woman took the mumps, and the sheriff took everything else.
"You city folks seem to know so much," I said, "and yet you bring a country play to the country! Why don't you bring out a play with women in low-necked gowns, and champagne suppers, and a scandal or two? They packed Pike's Opera-House three years ago with a play called Why Women Sin."
Well, of course, the thing failed, and he lost every dollar he'd put into it, which was all he had, including what he had in his pockets.
"They seized my trunks," he explained, "and I sold my fur-lined overcoat for eight dollars, which took one of the girls back home. It's hard for the women. A fellow can always get some sort of a job—I was coming up here to see if they needed an extra clerk or a waiter, or chauffeur, or anything that meant a roof and something to eat—but I suppose they don't need a jack-of-all-trades."
"No," I answered, "but I'll tell you what I think they're going to need. And that's an owner!"
I'm not making any excuses. I did it for the best. In any sort of crisis there are always folks who stand around and wring their hands and say, "What shall we do?" And then if it's a fire and somebody has had enough sense to send for the engines, they say: "Just look at what the water did!" Although as far as I can see I'm the only one that suffered any damage.
If Mr. Thoburn had not been there, sitting by to see the old sanatorium die so it could sprout wings and fly as a summer hotel, I'd never have thought of it. But I was in despair.
I got up and opened the door, but the Snow came in in a cloud, and the path was half a foot deep again. It shows on what little threads big things hang, for when I saw the storm I gave up the idea of bringing Mr. Sam down to see the young man, and the breath of fresh air in my face brought me to my senses.
But the angel of providence appeared in the shape of Mike, the bath man, coming down through the snow in a tearing rage. The instant I saw Mike I knew it was settled.
"Am I or am I not to give Mr. Moody a needle shower?" he shouted, almost beside himself. And I saw he had his overcoat over his bath costume, which is a Turkish towel.
"A needle shower followed by a salt rub," said I. "He's been having them for eleven years. What's the matter?"
"That fool of a young doctor," shouted Mike, "he told him before he left that if he'd been taking them for eleven years and wasn't any better it was time to stop. Ain't business bad enough—only four people in the house takin' baths regular—without his buttin' in!"
"Where's Mr. Moody?"
"In the bath. I've locked up his clothes."
"You give him a needle shower and a salt rub," I ordered, "and if he makes a fuss just send for me. And, Mike," I said, as he started out, "ask Mr. Van Alstyne to come out here immediately."
That's the way it was all the time. Everybody brought their troubles to me, and I guess I thought I was a little tin god on wheels and the place couldn't get along without me. But it did; it does. We all think we'll leave a big hole behind us when we go, but it's just like taking your thumb out of a bowl of soup. There isn't even a dent.
Mr. Van Alstyne came out on the run, and when he saw Mr. Pierce by the fire—that was his name, Alan Pierce—he stopped and stared. Then he said:
"You infernal young scamp!" And with that Mr. Pierce jumped up, surprised and pretty mad, and Mr. Van Alstyne saw his mistake.
"I'm sure I beg your pardon!" he said. "The fact is, I was expecting somebody else, and in the firelight—"
"You surprised me, that's all," said Mr. Pierce. "Under the circumstances, I'm glad I'm not the other chap."
"You may be," assured Mr. Sam grimly. "You're not unlike him, by the way. A little taller and heavier, but—"
Now it's all very well for Mr. Sam to say I originated the idea and all that, but as truly as I am writing this, as I watched his face I saw the same thought come into it. He looked Mr. Pierce up and down, and then he stared into the fire and puckered his mouth to whistle, but he didn't. And finally he glanced at me, but I was looking into the fire, too.
"Just come, haven't you?" he asked. "How did you get up the hill?"
"Walked," said Mr. Pierce, smiling. "It took some digging, too. But I didn't come for my health, unless you think three meals a day are necessary for health."
Mr. Sam turned and stared at him. "By Jove! you don't mean it!"
"I wish I didn't," Mr. Pierce replied. "One of the hardest things I've had to remember for the last ten hours was that for two years I voluntarily ate only two meals a day. A man's a fool to do a thing like that! It's reckless."
Mr. Sam got up and began to walk the floor, his hands in his pockets. He tried to get my eye, but still I looked in the fire.
"All traffic's held up, Minnie," he said. "The eight o'clock train is stalled beyond the junction, in a drift. I've wired the conductor, and Carter isn't on it."
"Well?" said I.
"If we could only get past to-day," Mr. Sam went on; "if Thoburn would only choke to death, or—if there was somebody around who looked like Dick. I dare say, by to-morrow—" He looked at Mr. Pierce, who smiled and looked at him.
"And I resemble Dick!" said Mr. Pierce. "Well, if he's a moral and upright young man—"
"He isn't!" Mr. Sam broke in savagely. And then and there he sat down and told Mr. Pierce the trouble we were in, and what sort of cheerful idiot Dicky Carter was, and how everybody liked him, but wished he would grow up before the family good name was gone, and that now he had a chance to make good and be self-supporting, and he wasn't around, and if Mr. Sam ever got his hands on him he'd choke a little sense down his throat.
And then Mr. Pierce told about the play and the mumps, and how he was stranded. When Mr. Sam asked him outright if he'd take Mr. Dick's place overnight he agreed at once.
"I haven't anything to lose," he said, "and anyhow I've been on a diet of Sweet Peas so long that a sanatorium is about what I need."
"It's like this," explained Mr. Sam, "Old Stitt is pretty thoroughly jingled—excuse me, Minnie, but it's the fact. I'll take you to his room, with the lights low, and all you'll need to do is to shake hands with him. He's going on the early train to-morrow. Then you needn't mix around much with the guests until to-morrow, and by that time I hope to have Dick within thrashing distance."
Just as they'd got it arranged that Mr. Pierce was to put on Mr. Sam's overcoat and walk down to the village so that he could come up in a sleigh, as if he had driven over from Yorkton—he was only to walk across the hall in front of the office, with his collar up, just enough to show himself and then go to his room with a chill—just as it was all arranged, Mr. Sam thought of something.
"The house people are waiting for Dick," he said to me, "and about forty women are crocheting in the lobby, so they'll be sure to see him. Won't some of them know it isn't Dick?"
I thought pretty fast.
"He hasn't been around much lately," I said. "Nobody would know except Mrs. Wiggins. She'll never forget him; the last time he was here he put on her false front like a beard and wore it down to dinner."
"Then it's all off," he groaned. "She's got as many eyes as a potato."
"And about as much sense," said I. "Fiddlesticks! She's not so good we can't replace her, and what's the use of swallowing a camel and then sticking at a housekeeper?"
"You can't get her out of the house in an hour," he objected, but in a weak voice.
"I can!" I said firmly.
(I did. Inside of an hour she went to the clerk, Mr. Slocum, and handed in her resignation. She was a touchy person, but I did NOT say all that was quoted. I did NOT say the kitchen was filthy; I only said it took away my appetite to look in at the door. But she left, which is the point.)
Well, I stood in the doorway and watched them disappear in the darkness, and I felt better than I had all day. It's great to be able to DO something, even if that something is wrong. But as I put on my shawl and turned out the lights, I suddenly remembered. Miss Patty would be waiting in the lobby for Mr. Dick, and she would not be crocheting!
Whoever has charge of the spring-house at Hope Springs takes the news stand in the evening. That's an old rule. The news stand includes tobacco and a circulating library, and is close to the office, and if I missed any human nature at the spring I got it there. If you can't tell all about a man by the way he asks for mineral water and drinks it, by the time you've supplied his literature and his tobacco and heard him grumbling over his bill at the office, you've got a line on him and a hook in it.
After I ate my supper I relieved Amanda King, who runs the news stand in the daytime, when she isn't laid off with the toothache.
Mr. Sam was right. All the women had on their puffs, and they were sitting in a half-circle on each side of the door. Mrs. Sam was there, looking frightened and anxious, and standing near the card-room door was Miss Patty. She was all in white, with two red spots on her cheeks, and I thought if her prince could have seen her then he would pretty nearly have eaten her up. Mr. Thoburn was there, of course, pretending to read the paper, but every now and then he looked at his watch, and once he got up and paced off the lobby, putting down the length in his note-book. I didn't need a mind-reader to tell me he was figuring the cost of a new hardwood floor and four new rugs.
Mr. Sam came to the news stand, and he was so nervous he could hardly light a cigarette.
"I've had a message from one of the detectives," he said. "They've traced him to Salem, Ohio, but they lost him there. If we can only hold on this evening—! Look at that first-night audience!"
"Mr. Pierce is due in three minutes," I told him. "I hope you told him to kiss his sister."
"Nothing of the sort," he objected. "Why should he kiss her? Mrs. Van Alstyne is afraid of the whole thing: she won't stand for that."
"I guess she could endure it," I remarked dryly.
"It's astonishing how much of that sort of thing a woman can bear."
He looked at me and grinned.
"By gad," he said, "I wouldn't be as sophisticated as you are for a good deal. Isn't that the sleigh?"
Everybody had heard it. The women sat up and craned forward to look at the door: Mrs. Sam was sitting forward clutching the arms of her chair. She was in white, having laid off her black for that evening, with a red rose pinned on her so Mr. Pierce would know her. Miss Patty heard the sleigh-bells also, and she turned and came toward the door. Her mouth was set hard, and she was twisting the ruby ring as she always did when she was nervous. And at the same moment Mr. Sam and I both saw it; she was in white, too, and she had a red rose tucked in her belt!
Mr. Sam muttered something and rushed at her, but he was too late. Just as he got to her the door opened and in came Mr. Pierce, with Mr. Sam's fur coat turned up around his ears and Mr. Sam's fur cap drawn well down on his head. He stood for an instant blinking in the light, and Mrs. Van Alstyne got up nervously. He never even saw her. His eyes lighted on Miss Patty's face and stayed there. Mr. Sam was there, but what could he do? Mr. Pierce walked over to Miss Patty, took her hand, said, "Hello there!" and KISSED HER. It was awful.
Most women will do anything to save a scene, and that helped us, for she never turned a hair. But when Mr. Sam got him by the arm and led him toward the stairs, she turned so that the old cats sitting around could not see her and her face was scarlet. She went over to the wood fire—our lobby is a sort of big room with chairs and tables and palms, and an open fire in winter—and sat down. I don't think she knew herself whether she was most astonished or angry.
Mrs. Biggs gave a nasty little laugh.
"Your brother didn't see you," she said to Mrs. Van Alstyne. "I dare say a sister doesn't count much when a future princess is around!"
Mrs. Van Alstyne was still staring up the staircase, but she came to herself at that. She had some grit in her, if she did look like a French doll.
"My brother and Miss Jennings are very old friends," she remarked quietly. I believe that was what she thought, too. I don't think she had seen the other red rose, and what was she to think but that Mr. Pierce had known Miss Jennings somewhere? She was dazed, Mrs. Sam was. But she carried off the situation anyhow, and gave us time to breathe. We needed it.
"If I were his highness," said Miss Cobb, spreading the Irish lace collar she was making over her knee and squinting at it, "I should wish my fiancee to be more er—dignified. Those old Austrian families are very haughty. They would not understand our American habit of osculation."
I was pretty mad at that, for anybody could have seen Miss Patty didn't kiss him.
"If by osculation you mean kissing, Miss Cobb," I said, going over to her, "I guess you don't remember the Austrian count who was a head waiter here. If there was anything in the way of osculation that that member of an old Austrian family didn't know, I've got to find it out. He could kiss all around any American I ever saw!"
I went back to my news stand. I was shaking so my knees would hardly hold me. All I could think of was that they had swallowed Mr. Pierce, bait and hook, and that for a time we were saved, although in the electric light Mr. Pierce was a good bit less like Dicky Carter than he had seemed to be in the spring-house by the fire.
Well, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."
Everybody went to bed early. Mr. Thoburn came over and bought a cigar on his way up-stairs, and he was as gloomy as he had been cheerful before.
"Well," I said, "I guess you won't put a dancing floor in the dining-room just yet, Mr. Thoburn."
"I'm not in a hurry," he snapped. "It's only January, and I don't want the place until May. I'll get it when I'm ready for it. I had a good look at young Carter, and he's got too square a jaw to run a successful neurasthenics' home."
I went to the pantry myself at ten o'clock and fixed a tray of supper for Mr. Pierce. He would need all his strength the next day, and a man can't travel far on buttered pop-corn. I found some chicken and got a bottle of the old doctor's wine—I had kept the key of his wine-cellar since he died—and carried the tray up to Mr. Pierce's sitting-room. He had the old doctor's suite.
The door was open an inch or so, and as I was about to knock I heard a girl's voice. It was Miss Patty!
"How can you deny it?" she was saying angrily. "I dare say you will even deny that you ever saw this letter before!"
There was a minute's pause while I suppose he looked at the letter.
"I never did!" he said solemnly.
There had been a queer sound all along, but now I made it out. Some one else was in the room, sniveling and crying.
"My poor lamb!" it whimpered. And I knew it was Mrs. Hutchins, Miss Patty's old nurse.
"Perhaps," said Miss Patty, "you also deny that you were in Ohio the day before yesterday."
"I was in Ohio, but I positively assert—"
"I'll send for the police, that's what I'll do!" Mrs. Hutchins said, with a burst of rage, and her chair creaked. "How can I ever tell your father?"
"You'll do nothing of the sort," said Miss Patty. "Do you want the whole story in the papers? Isn't it awful enough as it is? Mr. Carter, I have asked my question twice now and I am waiting for an answer."
"But I don't know the answer!" he said miserably. "I—I assure you, I'm absolutely in the dark. I don't know what's in the letter. I—I haven't always done what I should, I dare say, but my conduct in the state of Ohio during the last few weeks has been without stain—unless I've forgotten—but if it had been anything very heinous, I'd remember, don't you think?"
Somebody crossed the room, and a paper rustled.
"Read that!" said Miss Patty's voice. And then silence for a minute.
"Good lord!" exclaimed Mr. Pierce.
"Do you deny that?"
"Absolutely!" he said firmly. "I—I have never even heard of the Reverend Dwight Johnstone—"
There was a scream from Mrs. Hutchins, and a creak as she fell into her chair again.
"Your father!" she said, over and over. "What can we say to your father?"
"And that is all you will say?" demanded Miss Patty scornfully. "'You don't know;' 'there's a mistake;' 'you never saw the letter before!' Oh, if I were only a man!"
"I'll tell you what we'll do," Mr. Pierce said, with something like hope in his voice. "We'll send for Mr. Van Alstyne! That's the thing, of course. I'll send for—er—Jim."
Mr. Van Alstyne's name is Sam, but nobody noticed.
"Mr. Van Alstyne!" repeated Miss Patty in a dazed way.
I guessed it was about time to make a diversion, so I knocked and walked in with the tray, and they all glared at me. Mrs. Hutchins was collapsed in a chair, holding a wet handkerchief to her eyes, and one side of her cap was loose and hanging down. Miss Patty was standing by a table, white and angry, and Mr. Pierce was about a yard from her, with the letter in his hands. But he was looking at her.
"I've brought your supper, Mr. Carter," I began. Then I stopped and stared at Miss Patty and Mrs. Hutchins. "Oh," I said.
"Thank you," said Mr. Pierce, very uncomfortable. "Just put it down anywhere."
I stalked across the room and put it on the table. Then I turned and looked at Mrs. Hutchins.
"I'm sorry," I said, "but it's one of the rules of this house that guests don't come to these rooms. They're strictly private. It isn't MY rule, ladies, but if you will step down to the parlor—"
Mrs. Hutchins' face turned purple. She got up in a hurry.
"I'm here with Miss Jennings on a purely personal matter," she said furiously. "How dare you turn us out?"
"Nonsense, Minnie!" said Miss Patty. "I'll go when I'm ready."
"Rule of the house," I remarked, and going over to the door I stood holding it open. There wasn't any such rule, but I had to get them out; they had Mr. Pierce driven into a corner and yelling for help.
"There is no such rule and you know it, Minnie!" Miss Patty said angrily. "Come, Nana! We're not learning anything, and there's nothing to be done until morning, anyhow. My head's whirling."
Mrs. Hutchins went out first.
"The first thing I'D do if I owned this place, I'd get rid of that red-haired girl," she snapped to Mr. Pierce. "If you want to know why there are fewer guests here every year, I'll tell you. SHE'S the reason!" Then she flounced out with her head up.
(That was pure piffle. The real reason, as every thinking person knows, is Christian Science. It's cheaper and more handy. And now that it isn't heresy to say it, the spring being floored over, I reckon that most mineral springs cure by suggestion. Also, of course, if a man's drinking four gallons of lithia water a day, he's so saturated that if he does throw in anything alcoholic or indigestible, it's too busy swimming for its life to do any harm.)
Mr. Pierce took a quick step toward Miss Patty and looked down at her.
"About—what happened down-stairs to-night," he stammered, with the unhappiest face I ever saw on a man, "I—I've been ready to knock my fool head off ever since. It was a mistake—a—"
"My letter, please," said Miss Patty coolly, looking back at him without a blink.
"Please don't look like that!" he begged. "I came in suddenly out of the darkness, and you—"
"My letter, please!" she said again, raising her eyebrows.
He gave up trying then. He held out the letter and she took it and went out with her head up and scorn in the very way she trailed her skirt over the door-sill. But I'm no fool; it didn't need the way he touched the door-knob where she had been holding it, when he closed the door after her, to tell me what ailed him.
He was crazy about her from the minute he saw her, and he hadn't a change of linen or a cent to his name. And she, as you might say, on the ragged edge of royalty, with queens and princes sending her stomachers and tiaras until she'd hardly need clothes! Well, a cat may look at a king.
He went over to the fireplace, where I was putting his coffee to keep it hot, and looked down at me.
"I've a suspicion, Minnie," he said, "that, to use a vulgar expression, I've bitten off more than I can chew in this little undertaking, and that I'm in imminent danger of choking to death. Do you know anybody, a friend of Miss er—Jennings, named Dorothy?"
"She's got a younger sister of that name," I said, with a sort of chill going over me. "She's in boarding-school now."
"Oh, no, she's not!" he remarked, picking up the coffee-pot. "It seems that I met her on the train somewhere or other the day before yesterday, and ran off with her and married her!"
I sat back on the rug speechless.
"You should have warned me, Minnie," he went on, growing more cheerful over his chicken and coffee. "I came up here to-night, the proud possessor of a bunch of keys, a patent folding cork-screw and a pocket, automobile road map. Inside two hours I have a sanatorium and a wife. At this rate, Minnie, before morning I may reasonably hope to have a family."
I sat where I was on the floor and stared into the fire. Don't tell me the way of the wicked is hard; the wicked get all the fun there is out of life, and as far as I can see, it's the respectable "in at ten o'clock and up at seven" part of the wicked's family that has all the trouble and does the worrying.
"If we could only keep it hidden for a few days!" I said. "But, of course, the papers will get it, and just now, with columns every day about Miss Patty's clothes—"
"Her what?"
"And all the princes of the blood sending presents, and the king not favoring it very much—"
"What are you talking about?"
"About Miss Jennings' wedding. Don't you read the newspaper?"
He hadn't really known who she was up to that minute. He put down the tray and got up.
"I—I hadn't connected her with the—the newspaper Miss Jennings," he said, and lighted a cigarette over the lamp. Something in his face startled me, I must say.
"You're not going to give up now?" I asked. I got up and put my hand on his arm, and I think he was shaking. "If you do, I'll—I'll go out and drown myself, head down, in the spring."
He had been going to run away—I saw it then—but he put a hand over mine. Then he looked at the door where Miss Patty had gone out and gave himself a shake.
"I'll stay," he said. "We'll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer, Minnie." He stood looking into the fire, and although I'm not fond of men, knowing, as I have explained, a great deal about their stomachs and livers and very little about their hearts, there was something about Mr. Pierce that made me want to go up and pat him on the head like a little boy. "After all," he said, "what's blue blood to good red blood?"
Which was almost what the bishop had said!
Mr. Moody took indigestion that night—not but that he always had it, but this was worse—and Mrs. Moody came to my room about two o'clock and knocked at the door.
"You'd better come," she said. "There's no doctor, and he's awful bad. Blames you, too; he says you made him take a salt rub."
"My land," I snapped, trying to find my bedroom slippers, "I didn't make him take clam chowder for supper, and that's what's the matter with him. He's going on a strained rice diet, that's what he's going to do. I've got to have my sleep."
She was waiting in the hall in her kimono, and holding a candle. Anybody could see she'd been crying. As she often said to me, of course she was grateful that Mr. Moody didn't drink—no one knew his virtues better than she did. But her sister married a man who went on a terrible bat twice a year, and all the rest of the time he was humble and affable trying to make up for it. And sometimes she thought if Mr. Moody would only take a little whisky when he had these attacks—! I'd rather be the wife of a cheerful drunkard any time than have to live with a cantankerous saint. Miss Cobb and I had had many a fight over it, but at that time there wasn't much likelihood of either of us being called on to choose.
Well, we went down to Mr. Moody's room, and he was sitting up in bed with his knees drawn up to his chin and a hot-water bottle held to him.
"Look at your work, woman," he said to me when I opened the door.
"I'm dying!"
"You look sick," I said, going over to the bed. It never does to cross them when they get to the water-bottle stage. "The pharmacy clerk's gone to a dance over at Trimble's, but I guess I can find you some whisky."
"Do have some whisky, George," begged Mrs. Moody, remembering her brother-in-law.
"I never touch the stuff and you both know it," he snarled. He had a fresh pain just then and stopped, clutching up the bottle. "Besides," he finished, when it was over, "I haven't got any whisky."
Well, to make a long story short, we got him to agree to some whisky from the pharmacy, with a drop of peppermint in it, if he could wash it down with spring water so it wouldn't do him any harm.
"There isn't any spring water in the house," I said, losing my temper a little, "and I'm not going out there in my bedroom slippers, Mr. Moody. I don't see why your eating what you shouldn't needs to give me pneumonia."
Mrs. Moody was standing beside the bed, and I saw her double chin begin to work. If you have ever seen a fat woman, in a short red kimono holding a candle by, a bed, and crying, you know how helpless she looks.
"Don't go, Minnie," she sniffled. "It would be too awful. If you are afraid you could take the poker."
"I'm not going!" I declared firmly. "It's—it's dratted idiocy, that's all. Plain water would do well enough. There's a lot of people think whisky is poison with water, anyhow. Where's the pitcher?"
Oh, yes, I went. I put on some stockings of Mrs. Moody's and a petticoat and a shawl and started. It was when I was in the pharmacy looking for the peppermint that I first noticed my joint again. A joint like that's a blessing or a curse, the way you look at it.
I found the peppermint and some whisky and put them on the stairs. Then I took my pitcher and lantern and started for the spring-house. It was still snowing, and part of the time Mrs. Moody's stockings were up to their knees. The wind was blowing hard, and when I rounded the corner of the house my lantern went out. I stood there in the storm, with the shawl flapping, thanking heaven I was a single woman, and about ready to go back and tell Mr. Moody what I thought of him when I looked toward the spring-house.
At first I thought it was afire, then I saw that the light was coming from the windows. Somebody was inside, with a big fire and all the lights going.
I'd had tramps sleep all night in the spring-house before, and once they left a card by the spring: "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink!" So I started out through the snow on a half run. By the bridge over Hope Springs Creek I slipped and fell, and I heard the pitcher smash to bits on the ice below. But as soon as I could move I went on again. That spring-house had been my home for a good many years, and the tramp didn't live who could spend the night there if I knew it.
I realized then that I should have taken the poker. I went over cautiously to one of the windows, wading in deep snow to get there—and if you have ever done that in a pair of bedroom slippers you can realize the state of my mind—and looked in.
There were three chairs drawn up in a row in front of the fire, with my bearskin hearth-rug on them to make a couch, and my shepherd's plaid shawl folded at one end for a pillow. And stretched on that with her long sealskin coat laid over her was Dorothy Jennings, Miss Patty's younger sister! She was alone, as far as I could see, and she was leaning on her elbow with her cheek in her hand, staring at the fire. Just then the door into the pantry opened and out came Mr. Dick himself.
"Were you calling, honey?" he said, coming over and looking down at her.
"You were such a long time!" says she, glancing up under her lashes at him. "I—I was lonely!"
"Bless you," says Mr. Dick, stooping over her. "What did I ever do without you?"
I could have told her a few things he did, but by that time it was coming over me pretty strong that here was the real Dicky Carter and that I had an extra one on my hands. The minute I looked at this one I knew that nobody but a blind man would mistake one for the other, and Mr. Thoburn wasn't blind. I tell you I stood out in that snow-bank and perspired!
When I looked again Mr. Dick was on his knees by the row of chairs, and Miss Dorothy—Mrs. Dicky, of course—was running her fingers through his hair.
"Minnie used to keep apples and things in the pantry," he said, "but she must be growing stingy in her old age; there's not a bite there."
"I'm not so very hungry when I have you!" cooed Mrs. Dicky.
"But you can't eat me." He brought her hand down from his hair—I may be stingy in my old age, but I've learned a few things, and one is that a man feels like a fool with his hair rumpled, and I can tell the degree of a woman's experience by the way she lets his top hair alone—and pretended to bite it, her hand, of course. "Although I could eat you," he said. "I'd like to take a bite out of your throat right there."
Well, it was no place for me unless they knew I was around. I waded around to the door and walked in, and there was a grand upsetting of the sealskin coat and my shepherd's plaid shawl. Mr. Dick jumped to his feet and Mrs. Dick sat bolt upright and stared at me over the backs of the chairs.
"Minnie!" cried Mr. Dick. "As I'm a married man, it's Minnie herself; Minnie, the guardian angel! The spirit of the place! Dorothy, don't you remember Minnie?"
She came toward me with her hand out. She was a pretty little thing, not so beautiful as Miss Patty, but with a nice way about her.
"I'm awfully glad to see you again," she said. "Of course I remember—why you are hardly dressed at all! You must be frozen!"
I went over to the fire and emptied my bedroom slippers of snow. Then I sat down and looked at them both.
"Frozen!" repeated I; "I'm in a hot sweat. If you two children meant to come, why in creation didn't you come in time?"
"We did," replied Mr. Dick, promptly. "We crawled under the wire fence into the deer park at five minutes to twelve. The will said 'Be on the ground,' and I was—flat on the ground!"
"We've had the police," I said, drearily enough. "I wouldn't live through another day like yesterday for a hundred dollars."
"We were held up by the snow," he explained. "We got a sleigh to come over in, but we walked up the hill and came here. I don't mind saying that my wife's people don't know about this yet, and we're going to lay low until we've cooked up some sort of a scheme to tell them." Then he came over and put his hand on my shoulder.
"Poor old Minnie!" he said; "honest, I'm sorry. I've been a hard child to raise, haven't I? But that's all over, Minnie. I've got an incentive now, and it's 'steady, old boy,' for me from now. You and I will run the place and run it right."
"I don't want to!" I retorted, holding my bedroom slippers to steam before the fire. "I'm going to buy out Timmon's candy store and live a quiet life, Mr. Dick. This place is making me old."
"Nonsense! We're going to work together, and we'll make this the busiest spot in seven counties. Dorothy and I have got it all planned out and we've got some corking good ideas." He put his hands in his pockets and strutted up and down. "It's the day of advertising, you know, Minnie," he said. "You've got to have the goods, and then you've got to let people know you've got the goods. What would you say to a shooting-gallery in the basement, under the reading-room?"
"Fine!" I said, with sarcasm, turning my slippers. "If things got too quiet that would wake them up a bit, and we could have a balloon ascension on Saturdays!"
"Not an ascension," said he, with my bitterness going right over his head. "Nothing sensational, Minnie. That's the way with women; they're always theatrical. But what's the matter with a captive balloon, and letting fresh-air cranks sleep in a big basket bed—say, at five hundred feet? Or a thousand—a thousand would be better. The air's purer."
"With a net below," says I, "in case they should turn over and fall out of bed! It's funny nobody ever thought of it before!"
"Isn't it?" exclaimed Mrs. Dick. "And we've all sorts of ideas. Dick—Mr. Carter has learned of a brand new cocktail for the men—"
"A lulu!" he broke in.
"And I'm going around to read to the old ladies and hold their hands—"
"You'll have to chloroform them first," I put in. "Perhaps it would be better to give the women the cocktail and hold the men's hands."
"Oh, if you're going to be funny!" Mr. Dick said savagely, "we'll not tell you any more. I've been counting on you, Minnie. You've been here so long. You know," he said to his wife, "when I was a little shaver I thought Minnie had webbed-feet—she was always on the bank, like a duck. You ARE a duck, Minnie," he says to me; "a nice red-headed duck! Now don't be quirky and spoil everything."
I couldn't be light-hearted to save my life.
"Your sister's been wild all day," I told Mrs. Dick. "She got your letter to-day—yesterday—but I don't think she's told your father yet."
"What!" she screeched, and caught at the mantelpiece to hold herself. "Not Pat!" she said, horrified, "and father! Here!"
Well, I listened while they told me. They hadn't had the faintest idea that Mr. Jennings and Miss Patty were there at the sanatorium. The girl had been making a round of visits in the Christmas holidays, and instead of going back to school she'd sent a forged excuse and got a month off—she hadn't had any letters, of course. The plan had been not to tell anybody but her sister until Mr. Dick had made good at the sanatorium.
"The idea was this, Minnie," said Mr. Dick. "Old—I mean Mr. Jennings is—is not well; he has a chronic indisposition—"
"Disposition, I call it," put in Mr. Jennings' daughter.
"And he's apt to regard my running away with Dorothy when I haven't a penny as more of an embezzlement than an elopement."
"Fiddle!" exclaimed Mrs. Dick. "I asked you to marry me, and now they're here and have to spoil it all."
The thought of her father and his disposition suddenly overpowered her and she put her yellow head on the back of a chair and began to cry.
"I—I can't tell him!" she sobbed. "I wrote to Pat,—why doesn't Pat tell him? I'm going back to school."
"You'll do nothing of the sort. You're a married woman now, and where I go you go. My country is your country, and my sanatorium is your sanatorium." He was in a great rage.
But she got up and began trying to pull on her fur coat, and her jaw was set. She looked like her father for a minute.
"Where are you going?" he asked, looking scared.
"Anywhere. I'll go down to the station and take the first train, it doesn't matter where to." She picked up her muff, but he went over and stood against the door.
"Not a step without me!" he declared. "I'll go with you, of course; you know that. I'm not afraid of your father: I'd as soon as not go in and wake him now and tell him the whole thing—that you've married a chap who isn't worth the butter on his bread, who can't buy you kid gloves—"
"But you will, as soon as the sanatorium succeeds!" she put in bravely. She put down her muff. "Don't tell him to-night, anyhow. Maybe Pat will think of some way to break it to him. She can do a lot with father."
"I hope she can think of some way to break another Richard Carter to the people in the house," I said tartly.
"Another Richard Carter!" they said together, and then I told them about how we had waited and got desperate, and how we'd brought in Mr. Pierce at the last minute and that he was asleep now at the house. They roared. To save my life I couldn't see that it was funny. But when I came to the part about Thoburn being there, and his having had a good look at Mr. Pierce, and that he was waiting around with his jaws open to snap up the place when it fell under the hammer, Mr. Dick stopped laughing and looked serious.
"Lord deliver us from our friends!" he said. "Between you and Sam, you've got things in a lovely mess, Minnie. What are you going to do about it now?"
"It's possible we can get by Thoburn," I said. "You can slip in to-night, we can get Mr. Pierce out—Lord knows he'll be glad to go—and Miss Dorothy can go back to school. Then, later, when you've got things running and are making good—"
"I'm not going back to school," she declared, "but I'll go away; I'll not stand in your way, Dicky." She took two steps toward the door and waited for him to stop her.
"Nonsense, Minnie," he exclaimed angrily and put his arm around her, "I won't be separated from my wife. You got me into this scrape, and—"
"I didn't marry you!" I retorted. "And I'm not responsible for your father-in-law's disposition."
"You'll have to help us out," he finished.
"What shall I do? Murder Mr. Jennings?" I asked bitterly. "If you expect me to suggest that you both go to the house, and your wife can hide in your rooms—"
"Why not?" asked Mr. Dick.
Well, I sat down again and explained patiently that it would get out among the servants and cause a scandal, and that even if it didn't I wasn't going to have any more deception: I had enough already. And after a while they saw it as I did, and agreed to wait and see Miss Patty before they decided. They wanted to have her wakened at once, but I refused, although I agreed to bring her out first thing in the morning.
"But you can't stay here," I said. "There'll be Miss Cobb at nine o'clock, and the man comes to light the fire at eight."
"We could go to the old shelter-house on the golf links," suggested Mr. Dick, looking me square in the eye. (I took the hint, and Mrs. Dicky never knew he had been hidden there before.)
"Nobody ever goes near it in winter." So I put on my slippers again and we started through the snow across the golf links, Mr. Dick carrying a bundle of firewood, and I leading the way with my lantern. Twice I went into a drift to my waist, and once a rabbit bunted into me head on, and would have scared me into a chill if I hadn't been shaking already. The two behind me were cheerful enough. Mr. Dick pointed out the general direction of the deer park which hides the shelter-house from the sanatorium, and if you'll believe it, with snow so thick I had to scrape it off the lantern every minute or so, those children planned to give something called A Midsummer Night's Dream in the deer park among the trees in the spring, to entertain the patients.
"I wish to heaven I'd wake up and find all THIS a dream," I called back over my shoulder. But they were busy with costumes and getting some folks they knew from town to take the different parts and they never even heard me. The last few yards they snowballed each other and me. I tell you I felt a hundred years old.
We got into the shelter-house by my crawling through a window, and when we had lighted the fire and hung up the lantern, it didn't seem so bad. The place had been closed since summer, and it seemed colder than outside, but those two did the barn dance then and there. There were two rooms, and Mr. Dick had always used the back one to hide in. It's a good thing Mrs. Dick was not a suspicious person. Many a woman would have wondered when she saw him lift a board in the floor and take out a rusty tin basin, a cake of soap, a moldy towel, a can of sardines, a tooth-brush and a rubber carriage robe to lay over the rafters under the hole in the roof. But it's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.
It was about four when I left them, sitting on a soap box in front of the fire toasting sardines on the end of Mr. Dick's walking-stick. Mrs. Dick made me put on her sealskin coat, and I took the lantern, leaving them in the firelight. They'd gone back to the captive balloon idea and were wondering if they couldn't get it copyrighted!
I took a short cut home, crawling through the barbed-wire fence and going through the deer park. I was too tired and cold to think. I stumbled down the hill to the house, and just before I got to the corner I heard voices, and the shuffling of feet through the snow. The next instant a lantern came around the corner of the house. Mr. Thoburn was carrying it, and behind him were the bishop, Mike the bath man, and Mr. Pierce.
"It's like that man Moody," the bishop was saying angrily, "to send the girl—"
"Piffle!" snarled Mr. Thoburn. "If ever a woman was able to take care of herself—" And then they saw me, and they all stopped and stared.
"Good gracious, girl!" said the bishop, with his dressing-gown blowing out straight behind him in the wind. "We thought you'd been buried in a drift!"
"I don't see why!" I retorted defiantly. "Can't I go out to my own spring-house without having a posse after me to bring me back?"
"Ordinarily," said Mr. Thoburn, with his snaky eyes on me, "I think I may say that you might go almost anywhere without my turning out to recover you. But Mrs. Moody is having hysterics."
Mrs. Moody! I'd forgotten the Moodys!
"She is convinced that you have drowned yourself, head down, in the spring," Mr. Pierce said in his pleasant way. "You've been gone two hours, you know."
He took my arm and turned me toward the house. I was dazed.
"In answer to your urgent inquiry," Mr. Thoburn called after me, disagreeably, "Mr. Moody has not died. He is asleep. But, by the way, where's the spring water?"
I didn't answer him; I couldn't. We went into the house; Mrs. Moody and Miss Cobb were sitting on the stairs. Mrs. Moody had been crying, and Miss Cobb was feeding her the whisky I had left, with a teaspoon. She had had a half tumblerful already and was quite maudlin. She ran to me and put her arms around me.
"I thought I was a murderess!" she cried. "Oh, the thought! Blood on my soul! Why, Minnie Waters, wherever did you get that sealskin coat!"