The Sherwood Ring (22 page)

I gave my brother a quick, suspicious glance, and Dick gazed innocently back at me, looking as solemn as a bishop. But it was a good many years since I had believed every word he said, or had sat on the edge of my chair trying to "smell the misery" at Aunt Susanna's house in New Jerusalem. I knew better than to trust him now. The treasure room had always been our name for a large hidden closet off the study which old Enos Grahame had built as a hiding place for the family valuables. I could think of no reason why Dick should have brought me a present from New York and put it away down there.

"You might at least say thank you," he remarked, in a deeply injured voice. "Why don't you just run along downstairs and see what it is before I begin to imagine that you don't really appreciate me? I've got to wash off this dust and go break the news to Father and Eleanor."

I went downstairs prepared for anything, from a live frog in a bracelet box to the whole family lined up on the hearth rug singing "Haste to the Wedding" in chorus as I entered the study. But the study was quite empty and silent, with a bright fire burning briskly in the grate. The door of the treasure room was not even ajar as it had been on one occasion many years before when Dick had put a cold-water pitcher at the top to catch me as I went in. I pressed the secret spring on the carving and paused cautiously just across the threshold.

A tall and very elegantly dressed young man in a fawn-colored driving cloak was standing with his back to me, apparently absorbed in examining the inlay of the cabinet on the other side of the room.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Grahame," he murmured apologetically, without so much as turning his head. "I'm afraid this is your brother's idea of a joke. But I met him by chance as I was landing from my ship, and he was so kind about bringing me here at once that I couldn't very well refuse to let him do it in his own way. I had thought I might have to fetch you down a ladder in the middle of the night and carry you off on my saddlebow while Dick and your father pursued us over the border with whip and spur like the Grahames and Sherwoods in the Middle Ages. By the by, do you still have that ring of mine that I left with you?"

I held the ring out to him dumbly, quite unable to speak, and he turned around and took first the hand with the ring in it and then the other in both his own.

"We were standing in approximately this position, as I remember it," he went on, "and what was it you were saying to me just before we were interrupted?"

"I was saying that I might talk to you again when the war was over."

" ' — when the war was over, dearest,' " Peaceable corrected me. "Now, suppose we go on from there."

We went on from there so long that it must have been almost an hour before we finally came out and found Dick and Eleanor and my father all drinking sherry around the fire in the study.

"What I don't understand, Richard," my father was saying as I opened the door, "is why Barbara should have taken him off to the treasure room."

"That is a little puzzling, sir," Dick agreed politely, lifting his glass to us across my father's shoulder. "You'll have to ask Barbara. Perhaps she thought he was valuable."

"The treasure room has always been such a secret in the family."

"I expect it's still in the family," said Dick.

Barbara Grahame stopped speaking abruptly, and I saw the knob of the study door turn a little under her hand as if she were about to open it and go back.

"But what happened then?" I demanded eagerly.

"Hush!" said Barbara Grahame. "Listen!"

Somewhere overhead there was a sudden wild rattle of feet over the floor, and then Christopher Seven's voice calling frantically, "Miss Peggy! Miss Peggy! Where is you? Come here, Miss Peggy!"

I never saw what happened to Barbara Grahame. I sprang from the window seat, tumbling poor Abraham Potter off my knee, and went flying up the stairs three steps at a time, with my heart in my throat.

The hall at the head of the stairs was empty, and the door of the room just beyond flung back against the wall. Christopher Seven was over by the four-poster bed.

Uncle Enos was trying to get up. The new sedative had not put him to sleep yet — it had only knocked him off his feet; and he was still semiconscious and talking in a thick, drugged jumble of words. Christopher Seven had him by the shoulders, but he could not seem to hold him. He went on struggling with both of us for another moment; then his strength gave out and he fell back against the pillows, his eyes almost shut and his breath coming in slow, painful gasps.

"I have to — go — downstairs," he panted. "I — have to — get —" He made another desperate effort to rise.

"What is it?" I begged him. "What is it that you want, Uncle Enos? Tell me and I'll bring it to you, and then you can go to sleep."

Uncle Enos's hands went out in a strange groping gesture, as if he thought I was going to put something into them. "Where are they?" he muttered. "I want... I can't. . . Didn't — you — find them?"

"No, not yet, but I will," I answered reassuringly. "I promise you that I will. Truly I will, if you'll just lie quietly and rest a little while."

One of the groping hands caught my wrist and closed hard around it.

"You promise?" Uncle Enos whispered.

"I promise," I repeated gently. "Just tell me what it is that you want, dear."

"I . . . want.. ." but the voice was becoming only an incoherent murmur and I could no longer understand what he was saying. I caught the name "Peggy," and then the words "own" and "paneling" and "book," and then another name that sounded like "Earle," and then — very rapidly and urgently — something about "history" and "papers" and "Earle" again.

"Christopher Seven, who is it that he's talking about?" I demanded.

"I don't know, Miss Peggy," said Christopher Seven helplessly.

Uncle Enos's hand fell away from my wrist and began to move restlessly about once more, trying to find and close over something that was not there.

"Where . . . I . . . must . . . can't . . . any longer," he muttered; and then, in a high, sharp, distinct voice: "Peggy!"

"Yes, dear?"

"Thorne," said Uncle Enos. "Thorne."

"What's that you after now, Mr. Enos?" quavered Christopher Seven.

"Peggy," repeated Uncle Enos. "Thorne."

I bent down over the bed.

"Uncle Enos, is it Pat Thorne you want?" I asked as clearly as I could.

Uncle Enos's eyes opened for an instant and looked up into mine, then they closed again and the hands resumed their feverish wandering over the coverlet. But he seemed to be lying a little more quietly. The desperate jumble of words stopped, and his head turned over on the pillow with a long gasping sigh.

"You stay with him till the doctor gets here," I called over my shoulder to Christopher Seven as I swung around and made for the door as fast as my feet would carry me. "Tell him I've gone to fetch whatever it is if he starts talking again! I'll be back just as soon as I can." And then I was dashing down the stairs and through the hall and out the side porch into the garden.

There was only one telephone at Rest-and-be-thankful — and that was far away across the orchard at the gardener's cottage in Mrs. Macintosh's back pantry, where Uncle Enos was officially supposed to be unaware of its existence. Fortunately, Mrs. Macintosh was a kindhearted woman and had simply set a painted china piggy bank on the pantry shelf along with the memorandum pad and the telephone book, as a gentle reminder to all of us that we were expected to drop in a contribution to the monthly bill.

"No, I don't care, Miss Peggy," she had said the first time I had met her, "though I must say it's a blessing that your dear grandmother managed to get the bathrooms put in at the big house before your Uncle Enos could come along with any more of his quirks and his notions. Yes, you go right ahead and use the phone whenever you like. I don't care a bit. It gives me a chance to see a little company."

She might have added, "—and hear all the gossip," for her ears were as sharp as her heart was kind, and poor Petunia had almost given up trying to have a quiet word of an evening with the new janitor who worked at the Methodist Church. The emergency calls and crises and excitement of a serious illness in the family were exactly the sort of thing Mrs. Macintosh liked best, and she was throbbing at the kitchen door that afternoon before I could even turn in to the path.

"Miss Peggy, oh dear, what's the matter?" she cried as she caught sight of my face. "Why, you must have run all the way from the house! Is he worse?"

"No, but would you mind if I used the telephone? I have to call somebody at New Jerusalem," I panted, fumbling through the directory for Mrs. Dykemann's number and praying frantically that Pat would not be out somewhere in Betsy or over at Goshen for a day in the library. I could have cried with relief when I heard the receiver click and then the voice saying at the other end of the line: "Hullo? I'm sorry; Mrs. Dykemann's not in."

"No, not Mrs. Dykemann, you," I gasped. "Pat, it's Peggy. Can you come over to Rest-and-be-thankful? Yes, that was what I said. Now? Right away? Uncle Enos wants to see you."

"Good heavens! Has he gone out of his mind?"

"Something like that, and — oh, please will you hurry? I'm afraid it's most awfully urgent."

"Hang on, I'm coming," replied Pat briefly, and I heard the receiver go down again.

"Now, you'll just sit right down here at this table and have a good hot cup of tea and a cookie," announced Mrs. Macintosh, bustling about sympathetically somewhere behind me. "I always say there's nothing like a good hot cup of tea when you're feeling a little low. That's the young man who's boarding over at Susan Dykemann's, isn't it?"

"I've got to go up to the gate and meet him, Mrs. Macintosh; thank you anyway."

"He can't possibly be there for another half hour at the very least, not in that Ford of Ted Lowry's," said Mrs. Macintosh cajolingly. "I baked the cookies myself this morning. Just you try one, they're nice and fresh. Did you meet him somewhere abroad? Susan Dykemann doesn't know what to make of him. She says his socks are worn out till you can hardly see them for the holes, but all his hair brushes are real solid silver."

I finally escaped by taking two of the fresh-baked cookies with me and promising faithfully that I would eat them while I waited for Pat by the gate. It was a heavenly summer day, high and warm and blue, and all the trees in the orchard were already crowded thick with little green apples. I stood leaning on the fence and counted the knotholes on one of the posts mechanically over and over again, trying desperately not to cry. I had never in all my life felt quite so cold or miserable or sick.

Then Betsy suddenly charged out of the woods at the edge of the hill, her convertible top pulled grimly over the windshield like a jockey's cap and her wheels sending up showers of pebbles as she tore down the slope and collapsed with a triumphant puff in the long grass at the side of the road. Pat came out of the seat and across the gate in what appeared to be a single swift movement, and caught me as I ran stumbling to meet him.

"My poor lamb, what on earth is the matter?" he demanded, with his arm around me.

I had kept control of myself fairly well up to that point, but the words and the touch made me go completely to pieces. I put my head down on his shoulder without even knowing I had done it, and clung to him weeping helplessly while I tried incoherently to tell him everything between my sobs. Pat listened with a little frown of concentration, one hand smoothing my arm absent-mindedly and his eyes looking over my head at the house in the distance.

"And you're certain I'm the one he wants to see?" he asked, adding in a bracing manner that I had better fish around in the left-hand pocket of his coat for a handkerchief and see if I couldn't stop crying for a bit.

I took the handkerchief, which had apparently been used to dry Betsy's tears too sometime already that day, and mopped my face gratefully with a clean corner. "He said your name over and over again, and then when I asked him he seemed to understand and get a little quieter," I answered shakily. "There's somebody else called Earle that he wants besides, but I don't know who he is. Christopher Seven says he never heard of him."

"That's all right, it isn't important. Don't worry about it any more — Not that handkerchief, you idiot! I've been using it to wipe down the windscreen. This one!"

"But Pat, you don't understand! It must be important. The way he kept talking — "

"It's all right, I tell you. He was probably only trying to say something else about me."

"But your name isn't Earle, or anything like it! And it was 'Earle' he was saying, I'm perfectly sure of that."

"Of course my name isn't Earle!" snapped Pat, looking rather embarrassed and completely exasperated. "It isn't even Thorne, either, if it comes to that. The family name is something quite different. Thorne's only the title."

I pulled myself out of his arm and took a step backwards, staring up dumbfounded into his face.

"Pat, are you an
earl?"
I demanded incredulously.

"Oh heaven give me patience!" moaned Pat. "You've been reading old books again. What do you expect an earl to look like? Want to see me ride up to the gate on my coal-black hunter followed by my pack of hounds and my personal string of faithful retainers? You little know modern England! There hasn't been a whole loaf of bread at Thorne since about the time of the Boer War, and even the death-duty and income-tax people are beginning to get tired of nosing about the place for crumbs. We'll probably have to spend the rest of our lives in some deplorable flat on a dusty street behind a red brick university where I teach history for a pittance; and it will be a serious question whether it's more important to buy Meg her new umbrella or get the blazer for Johnny, because we'll never be able to afford them both at once; and some time if you'd like to see the family estate we'll pack a picnic hamper and go down on the cheap excursion train for the day along with the other tourists; and oh yes, you'd better learn how to make bread sauce, because they tell me it makes the Sunday chicken stretch a little further — and now do you understand what it's really going to be like when we're married?"