Treasured Brides Collection (2 page)

“That’s true, too,” said Mary Amber cheerily. “And nothing will be hurt by waiting. I’ve fixed those mashed potatoes so they won’t get soggy by being too hot, and I’m sure they’ll keep hot enough.”

“You’re a good, dear girl, Mary Amber,” said Miss Marilla, giving her a sudden impulsive kiss. “I only wish I could do something great and beautiful for you.”

Miss Marilla caught up her shawl and hurried toward the door.

“I’m going out to the gate to meet him,” she said with a smile. “It’s time he was coming in a minute now, and I want to be out there without hurrying.”

She clambered down the steps, her knees trembling with excitement. She hoped Mary Amber had not looked out the window. A boy was coming on a bicycle; and if he should be a boy with a telegram or a special-delivery letter, she wanted to read it before Mary Amber saw her. Oh, how awful if anything had happened that he couldn’t come today! Of course, he might come later tonight, or tomorrow. And a turkey would keep, though it was never so good as the minute it was taken out of the oven.

The boy was almost to the gate now and—yes, he was going to stop. He was swinging one leg out with that long movement that meant slowing up. She panted forward with a furtive glance back at the house. She hoped Mary Amber was looking at the turkey and not out of the window.

It seemed that her fingers had suddenly gone tired while she was writing her name in that boy’s book, and they almost refused to tear open the envelope as the boy swung on his wheel again and vanished down the road. She had presence of mind enough to keep her back to the house and the telegram in front of her as she opened it covertly, trying to keep the attitude of still looking eagerly down the road, while the typewritten, brief message got itself across to her tumultuous mind.

Miss Marilla tore the yellow paper hastily and crumpled it into a ball in her hands as she stared down the road through brimming tears. She managed an upright position, but her knees were shaking under her, and an empty feeling came in her stomach. Across the sunset skies in letters of accusing size, there seemed to blaze the paragraphs from
The Springhaven Chronicle
, copied afterward in the country
Gazette
, about Miss Marilla Chadwick’s nephew, Lieutenant Richard H. Chadwick, who was expected at his aunt’s home as soon as he landed in this country after a long and glorious career in other lands, and who would spend the weekend with his aunt, and “doubtless be heard from at the Springhaven Club House before he left.” Her throat caught with a strange little sound like a groan. Still, with her hand grasping the front gate convulsively, Miss Marilla stood and stared down the road, trying to think what to do, how to word a paragraph explaining why he did not come, how to explain to Mary Amber so that look of sweet incredulousness should not come into her eyes.

Then suddenly, as she stared through her blur of tears, there appeared a straggling figure, coming around the bend of the road by the Hazard house. And Miss Marilla, with nothing at all in her mind but to escape from the watchful, loving eyes of Mary Amber for a moment longer till she could think what to say to her, staggered out the gate and down the road toward the person, whoever it was, that was coming slowly up the road.

On stumbled Miss Marilla, nearer and nearer to the oncoming man, till suddenly through a blur of tears she noticed that he wore a uniform. Her heart gave a leap, and for a moment she thought it must be Dick; that he had been playing her a joke by the telegram and was coming on immediately to surprise her before she had a chance to be disappointed. It was wonderful how the years had done their halo work for Dick with Miss Marilla.

She stopped short, trembling, one hand to her throat. Then, as the man drew nearer and she saw his halting gait, saw, too, his downcast eyes and whole dejected attitude, she somehow knew it wasn’t Dick. Never would he have walked to her home in that way. There had been a swagger about little Dick that could not be forgotten. The older Dick, crowned now with many honors, would not have forgotten to hold his head high.

Unconscious of her attitude of intense interest, she stood, with hand still fluttering at her throat and eyes brightly on the man as he advanced.

When he was almost opposite her, he looked up. He had fine eyes and good features; but his expression was bitter for one so young, and in the eyes, there was a look of pain.

“Oh! Excuse me,” said Miss Marilla, looking around furtively to be sure Mary Amber could not see them so far away. “Are you in a very great hurry?”

The young man looked surprised, amused, and slightly bored, but paused politely.

“Not ‘specially,” he said, and there was a tone of dry sarcasm in his voice. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

He lifted the limp little trench cap and paused to rest his lame knee.

“Why, I was wondering if you would mind coming in and eating dinner with me,” spoke Miss Marilla eagerly, from a dry throat of embarrassment. “You see, my nephew’s a returned soldier, and I’ve just got word he can’t come. The dinner’s all ready to be dished up, and it needn’t take long.”

“Dinner sounds good to me,” said the young man, with a grim glimmer of a smile. “I guess I can accommodate you, madam. I haven’t had anything to eat since I left camp last night.”

“Oh! You poor child!” said Miss Marilla, beaming on him with a welcoming smile. “Now isn’t it fortunate I should have asked
you
?” As if there had been a throng of passing soldiers from which she might have chosen. “But are you sure I’m not keeping you from someone else who is waiting for you?”

“If there’s anyone else waiting anywhere along the road for me, it’s all news to me, madam. And anyhow, you got here first, and I guess you have first rights.”

He had swung into the easy, familiar vernacular of the soldier now, and for the moment, his bitterness was held in abeyance, and the really nice look in his eyes shone forth.

“Well then, we’ll just go along in,” said Miss Marilla, casting another quick glance toward the house. “And I think I’m most fortunate to have found you. It’s so disappointing to get dinner ready for company and then not have any.”

“Must be almost as disappointing as to get all ready for dinner and then not have any,” said the soldier affably.

Miss Marilla smiled wistfully.

“I suppose your name doesn’t happen to be Richard, does it?” she asked, with that childish appeal in her eyes that had always kept her a young woman and good company for Mary Amber, even though her hair had long been gray.

“Might just as well be that as anything else,” he responded affably, willing to step into whatever role was set for him in this most unexpected play.

“And you wouldn’t mind if I should call you Dick?” she asked, with a wistful look in her blue eyes.

“Like nothing better,” he assented glibly, and found his own heart warming to this confiding, strange lady.

“That’s beautiful of you.” She put out a shy hand and laid it lightly on the edge of his cuff. “You don’t know how much obliged I am. You see, Mary Amber hasn’t ever quite believed he was coming—Dick, I mean—and she’s been so kind and helped me get the dinner and all. I just couldn’t bear to tell her he wasn’t coming.”

The young soldier stopped short in the middle of the road and whistled.

“Horrors!” he exclaimed in dismay. “Are there other guests? Who is Mary Amber?”

“Why, she’s just my neighbor, who played with you—I mean with Dick, when he was here visiting as a child a good many years ago. I’m afraid he wasn’t always as polite to her then as a boy ought to be to a little girl. And—well, she’s never liked him very well. I was afraid she would say ‘I told you so,’ if she thought he didn’t come. It won’t be necessary for me to tell any lies, you know. I’ll just say, ‘Dick, this is Mary Amber. I suppose you don’t remember her,’ and that’ll be all. You don’t mind, do you? It won’t take long to eat dinner.”

“But I’m a terrible mess to meet a girl!” he exclaimed uneasily, looking down deprecatingly at himself. “I thought it was just you. This uniform’s three sizes too large and needs a drink. Besides”—he passed a speculative hand over his smoothly shaven chin—“I—hate girls!” There was a deep frown between his eyes, and the bitter look had come back on his face. Miss Marilla thought he looked as if he might be going to run away.

“Oh, that’s all right!” said Miss Marilla anxiously. “Mary Amber hates men. She says they’re all a selfish, conceited lot. You needn’t have much to do with her. Just eat your dinner and tell anything you want to about the war. We won’t bother you to talk much. Come, this is the house, and the turkey must be on the table getting cold by now.”

She swung open the gate and laid a persuasive hand on the shabby sleeve, and the young man reluctantly followed her up the path to the front door.

W
hen Lyman Gage set sail for France three years before, he left behind him a modest interest in a promising business enterprise, a girl who seemed to love him dearly, and a debt of several thousand dollars to her father, who had advised him to go into the enterprise and furnished the funds for his share in the capital.

When he had returned from France three days before, he had been met with news that the business enterprise had gone to smash during the war, the girl had become engaged to a dashing young captain with a well-feathered nest, and the debt had become a galling yoke.

“Father says tell you, you need not worry about the money you owe him,” wrote the girl sweetly, concluding her revelations. “You can pay it at your leisure when you get started again.”

Lyman Gage lost no time in gathering together every cent he could scrape up. This was more than he had at first hoped, because he owned two houses in the big city in which he had landed and these houses, though old and small, happened to be located near a great industrial plant that’d sprung up since the end of the war, and houses were going at soaring prices. They were snapped up at once at a fabulous sum in comparison with their real value. This, with what he had brought home and the bonus he received on landing, exactly covered his indebtedness to the man who was to have been his father-in-law. When he turned away from the service window, where he had been telegraphing the money to his lawyer in a far state, with instructions to pay the loan at once, he had just forty-six cents left in his pocket.

Suddenly, as he reflected that he had done the last thing left he now cared to do on earth, the noises of the great city got hold upon his nerve and tore and racked it.

He was filled with a great desire to get out and away from it, he cared not where, only so that the piercing sounds and rumbling grind of the city traffic should not press upon the raw nerves and torture them.

With no thought of getting anything to eat or providing for a shelterless night that was fast coming on, he wandered out into the train area of the great station and idly read the names up over the train gates. One caught his fancy, Purling Brook. It seemed as if it might be quiet there and a fellow could think. He followed the impulse and strode through the gates just as they were about to be closed. Dropping into the last seat in the car as the train was about to start, he flung his head back and closed his eyes wearily. He did not care whether he ever got anywhere or not. He was weary in heart and spirit. He wished that he might just sink away into nothingness. He was too tired to think, to bemoan his fate, to touch with torturing finger of memory all the little beautiful hopes he had woven about the girl he thought he loved better than anyone else on earth. Just passingly, he had a wish that he had a living mother to whom he could go with his sick heart for healing. But she had been gone long years, and his father even longer. There was really no one to whom he cared to show his face, now that all he had counted dear on earth had been suddenly taken from him.

The conductor roused him from a profound sleep, demanding a ticket, and he had the good fortune to remember the name he had seen over the gate: “Purling Brook. How much?”

“Fifty-six cents.”

Gage reached into his pocket and displayed the coins on his palm with a wry smile.

“Guess you better put me off here, and I’ll walk,” he said, stumbling wearily to his feet.

“That’s all right, son. Sit down,” said the conductor half roughly. “You pay me when you come back sometime. I’ll make it good.” And he glanced at the uniform kindly.

Gage looked down at his shabby self helplessly. Yes, he was still a soldier, and people had not got over the habit of being kind to the uniform. He thanked the conductor and sank into sleep again, to be roused by the same kindly hand a few minutes later at Purling Brook. He stumbled off and stood, looking dazedly about him at the orderly little village. The sleep was not yet gone from his eyes, nor the ache from his nerves, but the clear quiet of the little town seemed to wrap him about soothingly like salve, and the crisp air entered into his lungs and gave him heart. He realized that he was hungry.

It seemed to have been a popular afternoon train that he had travelled upon. He looked beyond the groups of happy homecomers to where it hurried away gustily down the track, even then preparing to stop at the next near suburban station to deposit a few more homecomers. There, on that train, went the only friend he felt he had in the world at present, that grizzly conductor with his kindly eyes looking through great bifocals like a pleasant old grasshopper.

Well, he could not remain here any longer. The air was biting, and the sun was going down. Across the road, the little drugstore even then was twinkling out with lights behind its blue and green glass urns. Two boys and a girl were drinking something at the soda fountain through straws and laughing a great deal. It somehow turned him sick; he could not tell why. He had done things like that many a time himself.