Just as the music room was primarily Elinor's retreat, so was the
library the place which Ross loved best.
It was a long, narrow room; two square rooms had been thrown together
to make it, and it was lined, on the longest walls to about half the
distance from the ceiling, with low, deep, unglassed book-cases full of
books on a bewildering variety of subjects, haphazardly arranged; some
of them well worn as to bindings as if much read. A brick fireplace of
generous proportions with a high, narrow mantel shelf of brownish red
marble occupied most of one of the other, and narrower, walls. A log
fire burned there fitfully now, throwing little dancing gleams on the
brass andirons and the dark polished floor just in front. All the
chairs in the room were broad and deep and enticingly comfortable. An
enormous davenport stood at one side of the fireplace, and there was a
long, heavy table of carved mahogany directly in front of the hearth.
The few rugs in the room were all in dull, subdued tones that melted
into the floor unobtrusively.
Here, in the library, Ross spent his days in the arduous labor with
which he kept body and soul together; the translation of various bits
of the literature of Southern Europe into English. Ross was quite a
student in his way and a good deal of a linguist.
But he was not working just at this moment.
At the enormous desk between the two long windows at the end of the
room opposite the fireplace, he was reading a detective story and
playing with a bronze paper cutter at the same time, banging it up and
down on the desk.
Ross loved detective stories as much as any boy who has ever thrilled
over them, and Elinor loved to watch him read them. She stood still in
the doorway for a moment and watched him now. She could tell by his
changing expression just when the story he was reading was sad, just
when it was merry, just when the meaning was hard to understand, and
just when he began to dislike the way things were working out, almost
as well as if he read it aloud to her.
The paper cutter poised in the air for just a second, and his eyebrows
drew together in a little puzzled frown. Evidently, things were going
badly. Then the paper cutter came down on the desk with a swoop, and
his whole face lighted.
Elinor crossed the room with her swift, graceful movement, and kissed
him lightly on the tiny bald spot on the very top of his head, which he
insisted was being widened by "financial worries."
"Ross, Clay is waiting."
He gave her an absentminded squeezing of the hand nearest him by way of
answer without lifting his eyes from his book.
She leaned over and covered the page with one hand.
"Oh, come now," he remonstrated, "that's not a bit fair! That's the
most interesting place for pages and pages!"
"That may be, you infant, but you must stop right there. Clay is
waiting for you."
"What for, please? I don't remember telling him I wanted him!"
"Ross Worthington! Have you actually forgotten Arethusa is coming this
afternoon!"
Ross returned, with the most commendable suddenness, from the Long
Island country place, scene of his sojourn for the last few hours where
a most fearful and intricately involved crime had been committed, to
things which were happening in Lewisburg.
"Ye gods! And I had!"
"You ought to be ashamed to admit it!"
"I don't see why you say that," his air was one of mild protest. "You
remembered her, didn't you? And that's what a wife's for, anyway, one
of the things, to remember what her husband ought to. What's the use of
having one if...."
But Elinor hurried him into the hall without allowing him to finish
this speech, thrust his coat and hat forcibly upon him, and propelled
him on toward the open front door, and then on down the steps.
"Wait a minute here," Ross came back from halfway to the automobile,
"Aren't you going?" For it had penetrated his consciousness that she
had not come any farther than the top step.
"No."
"Why not?"
She blushed a trifle. "I ... I thought I wouldn't."
All her shyness was up in arms.
It was very probably going to be hard enough at best, this first
meeting with Arethusa, without staging it before a crowd of prying eyes
in a railroad station. In spite of all her longing to see and know the
girl, and her loving preparation, now that the moment was actually
come, Elinor's shyness intruded and kept her at home.
Ross understood (it was one of the very nicest things about him, his
understanding) but as he was feeling a bit the same way himself, he
would have liked the bulwark of her presence. Two shy folk to back each
other up are in not nearly so bad a fix as the one who goes it alone.
So he stood hesitatingly in the middle of the front walk, slowly
drawing on his gloves. Perhaps Elinor would change her mind.
"You'll be late," she warned.
But still he hesitated. "How in the dickens am I going to know the
child? I haven't the remotest idea what she's like. I may miss her
altogether. I think I need you."
His statement of not knowing what Arethusa was like was perfectly true,
for in none of her letters had Miss Eliza once mentioned Arethusa's
personal appearance and Elinor had never thought to ask about it.
"You should have told her," he continued, almost reproachfully, "to
wear a red carnation or something. I am quite sure I shan't be able to
find her. And you're so much smarter than I am. Your woman's intuition
is a great thing to have in a search, You better come go 'long."
Elinor came down the walk to where he was and gave him a push. "Do go
on, Ross. You really will miss her altogether, if you don't. And I
haven't time to dress now, so I can't possibly go. She probably looks
like her mother or some member of the family."
"Now, I don't know about that," he answered, still lingering. "She may
not at all. I don't look like my mother, and you...."
"Oh, please go on and stop fooling!" Though she laughed, his wife's
patience was ebbing. It would be dreadful for Arethusa to come and find
no one to meet her. "You always hurry so, Ross, when there's no real
necessity for it and won't when there is!"
Ross decided that the moment for actual departure was certainly at
hand, so he made haste to the automobile.
Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse
still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the
shed, toward the iron gates she had to pass through to reach the
station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among
those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental
picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still
watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in
this comparatively small space than she had ever seen in one company
before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so
many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers
of travelling daughters they had come to meet.
She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as
she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all
these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along,
unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware
she had passed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against
one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one
side of the station.
From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings
about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various
other relationships (there were some she was quite positive were
fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy;
for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had
been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to
see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed
to have been met by somebody.
Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose....
she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!
But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right
in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and
they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.
The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her.
And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation,
directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts'
weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort
of protection.
Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!
The Cherry family had been so long in their greetings that they were
among the last to pass by the unmet traveller and her pillar. Mrs.
Cherry, seeing that the girl was alone, crossed the platform to her,
the whole collection of Cherrys trailing in her rear.
"Found your Pa yet, dearie?" she asked cheerfully.
"This is the pretty Miss Worth'ton I was telling you about we saw on
the train, Cherry," to her husband, and "This is Helen Louise's Pa," to
Arethusa.
Arethusa managed to acknowledge this introduction, but being in such a
state of mind as she was, she could not make her acknowledgment very
cordial.
Helen Louise was dancing up and down and hanging on to one hand of a
man who could have been nothing else but a close relation to the little
girl, pale blue eyes and pale eyebrows and all. The daughter certainly
favored "her Pa considerable" as her mother had said.
"My Papa," Helen Louise announced happily.
Mrs. Cherry sensed something wrong. She looked at Arethusa more
closely. "You ain't found him? Here, Cherry, you take the children and
the bundles and put them in the waitin'-room and then come straight
back here and we'll help Miss Worth'ton hunt her father."
"I don't want to be put in the waitin'-room!" wailed Helen Louise in
protest, "I want to stay with Papa!"
Mrs. Cherry was reproving her and starting her off in the direction of
the designated depository, when Arethusa interrupted the proceedings.
She did not want Mrs. Cherry, kind as she had been and kind as her
intentions still were to continue being, with her just now. If this was
a fiasco to her Beautiful Dream she needed a few moments to face it
alone. A funny sort of little pride gave her this feeling. She had
talked to Mrs. Cherry so glowingly and at such length about her father
and her Visit.
But Mr. Cherry, till just now silent, had a suggestion to make.
"S'pose," he drawled, "if Miss Worth'ton wants to wait by herself here,
Maria, me and you set inside awhile, and then if she finds she reely
has missed him somehow, I might help her to look him up, mebbe."
Arethusa considered this a decidedly brilliant idea. It relieved her of
present society, which though friendly was irksome, and promised future
comfort.
She rewarded the tall, thin father of Helen Louise with a misty smile.
Mrs. Cherry thought it very good, also. Miss Worth'ton wasn't to worry
a mite now, not a mite. If her father didn't come for her, the Cherry
family would escort her right up to his front door.
So the little procession trailed away and left Arethusa once more
alone, and most disconsolate, against her kindly iron pillar.
The station had gradually become deserted, until there were only a few
employees pottering about here and there, and one lone man standing
talking to the blue-capped man at the gate.
Arethusa's mental picture of her father had been very clear. All this
while she had been looking for the handsome youth of the wavy dark
hair, eccentrically long, and the graceful Italian military cape. And
she had been looking for him without adding a single year to his age,
perfectly confident she would know him anywhere.
Ross had really been on time, despite his "fooling." He had arrived
before the first passenger left Arethusa's train. And he had waited
until every human being had gone before starting to leave himself, so
he was the lone man Arethusa saw questioning the gatekeeper.
Elinor's last suggestion that the daughter might resemble her mother
had been taken literally, and all these moments Ross's search had been
for a tiny, dainty bit of a girl with cornflower eyes. When the crowd
had somewhat thinned, he had noticed Arethusa and her prettiness and
her height, standing so forlornly by herself, had mentally labeled Miss
Letitia's costuming, "a Godey's Ladies' Book relic," and had turned
away again to his search for the Dresden china daughter, who did not
seem to be anywhere about. Ross was vexed to have been snatched from
his book for this fruitless trip to the station. If Miss Eliza had
postponed Arethusa's coming once more, she should have written them
about it, or telegraphed; for they should surely have been notified.
As he passed Arethusa on his way out he saw that her grey eyes under
their long black lashes (he noticed them first because they were such
unusually beautiful eyes) were full of shining tears, some of which
were beginning to roll, unashamed, down the girl's cheek. A damsel in
distress always appealed to Ross, for no knight of the time of
tournaments had no more real chivalry in his composition, and so he
stopped.
"Could I help you in any way?" he asked courteously. "Are you in
trouble?"
Arethusa was just on the point of seeking Mr. Cherry and his promised
assistance, when out of the bleak expanse of that awful and lonely
platform Providence had sent this other help: a Man with reassuring
grey hairs and a smile which she could not possibly mistake for
anything but kindness. She seized it gratefully: and there would be no
embarrassment of a Mrs. Cherry connected with it. This new Man knew
nothing of any Dream that had been shattered. And if he lived in
Lewisburg, he most probably knew her father. Her experience with
municipalities was that everybody in a town knew everybody else and all
their affairs into the bargain. And she was far past remembering
Certain Instructions in such a Crisis.
She turned to Ross, a tear-stained face on which her gratitude at his
offer struggled with her woes and the Horror of the Situation.
"My ... my fa-ther...." she began brokenly, and then gulped, and
stopped.
It sounded very much like a greeting of the man before her, but it was
only that her unruly voice refused entirely to respond to her efforts
to use it.
Ross's look searched her quickly, up and down. She was as unlike the
child he had expected to find as he could have found in a day's long
journey; but there could hardly be two sets of fathers and daughters in
so similar a predicament in the same station.
"I think you've found him, right here," he said lightly, to down a
curious little feeling that suddenly surged through his heart, "if
you're Miss Arethusa Worthington, that is. I'm...."
Arethusa waited not for him to finish with a definite announcement of
his identity; she needed no further words to convince her of just who
he was. And although this was far, far from being what she had always
visioned the wonder of their Meeting, she put her whole soul into her
side of it.
She flung both arms tight around his neck as if she never intended to
let him go; and sobbed violently, salty tears that soaked clear through
the expensive tweed of his new suit. But these were not the tears of
unhappiness which he had noticed and which had caused him to stop and
make his offer of help; they were tears of joy for the sheer relief
that his bodily presence gave to his volatile daughter. With the
impulsive suddenness of her embrace her hat had flown clear off, but
Arethusa recked not, in such a moment, of hats with precious and
beautiful turkey feathers, and she lost, of necessity, her careful grip
of her purse and satchel.
Ross, for a moment or two, was entirely bereft of coherent thought by
the suddenness of her movement. He was nearly strangled by the clinging
arms, and a trifle embarrassed besides; for it was not every day that a
strange young lady precipitated herself into his arms and sobbed so
violently. That it was a daughter whose acquaintance he was making for
the very first time, did not altogether deprive the situation of its
strangeness.
"Here," he said, when he began to recover somewhat, "here, buck up,
child! Buck up. This won't do at all, you know. Let's go home and
finish this!"
Arethusa "bucked up."
She drew away from him as suddenly as she had grabbed him and blushed
hotly all over with a most unusual accession of sudden shyness. And
Ross made straight for the waiting automobile without further parley.
She followed behind him in silence, but about halfway she stopped and
clapped her hand to her head.
"Oh, my hat!" she exclaimed. "And I've lost my purse and satchel!"
Ross turned around and went back to find them.
But the purse was gone beyond any power of their finding it, though hat
and satchel were safely retrieved and progress once more resumed.