Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and
after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent
Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss
Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has
outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in
plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired
fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more
remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed;
at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards
sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time
to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted
about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for
seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.
There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old
college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a
perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less
simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was
never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he
was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he
had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type
than Gaites himself had on.
The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river
sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the
river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy
to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well
that he told people he was never going away.
He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse
of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay
another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she
alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had
made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot
every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond's piano; and she
had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably
delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning,
however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a
woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her
approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred
themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case
into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with
it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she
declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in
Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared
already with them.
He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not
do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at
once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in
its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young
girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of
anxiety at its retarded progress.
"And, by-the-way," she added, with the logic of her sex, "I'm just going
to the station to see what's become of a trunk myself that I ordered
expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you're not doing anything this
morning--the tide isn't in till noon, and there'll be little or no
bathing to look at before that--you'd better drive down with me. Or
perhaps you're canoeing up the river with somebody?"
Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential
indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.
"Well, anyway," she said, tangentially, "I can get June Alber to go too,
and you can take her canoeing afterwards."
But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged
to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she
pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she
began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more
sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn
anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning
it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as
combining all the searching effects of a Röntgen-ray examination and the
earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which
he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.
He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis
Desmond's piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when
he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been
put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He
passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing
with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.
"Why, look here!" he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased
overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its
cover, "what's that piano doing _here_?"
The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this
demand, and responded mildly, "Well, that's just what I was thinking
myself."
"That piano," Gaites went on with unabated violence, "started from
Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it's been
lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower
Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in
Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent
Harbor Saturday morning!"
The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites's figure warily, as if it might
be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of
dreamy suggestion: "Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers
Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth."
Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the
express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the
passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.
"Just look at this, Mrs. Maze," said Gaites when she drew near enough to
read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked
at Gaites's face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and
then she looked back at the piano-case.
"No!" she exclaimed and questioned in one.
Gaites nodded confirmation.
"Then it won't be there in time for the poor thing's birthday?"
He nodded again.
Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because
there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because
in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.
"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a
burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes
lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How
did it happen?"
Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap,
and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.
"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great
comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.
"I don't know what _can_ be done about it," he answered, referring
himself to the man in the silk cap.