With miserable perplexity Stanton wired back. "No, I couldn't exactly
say that I was tired of it."
Cornelia's answer to that was fluttering in his hands within twelve
hours.
"Do you mean that there is someone else?" The words fairly ticked
themselves off the yellow page.
It was twenty-four hours before Stanton made up his mind just what to
reply. Then, "No, I couldn't exactly say there is anybody else," he
confessed wretchedly.
Cornelia's mother answered this time. The telegram fairly rustled with
sarcasm. "You don't seem to be very sure about anything," said
Cornelia's mother.
Somehow these words brought the first cheerful smile to his lips.
"No, you're quite right. I'm not at all sure about anything," he wired
almost gleefully in return, wiping his pen with delicious joy on the
edge of the clean white bed-spread.
Then because it is really very dangerous for over-wrought people to
try to make any noise like laughter, a great choking, bitter sob
caught him up suddenly, and sent his face burrowing down like a
night-scared child into the safe, soft, feathery depths of his
pillow--where, with his knuckles ground so hard into his eyes that all
his tears were turned to stars, there came to him very, very slowly,
so slowly in fact that it did not alarm him at all, the strange,
electrifying vision of the one fact on earth that he _was_ sure of: a
little keen, luminous, brown-eyed face with a look in it, and a look
for him only--so help him God!--such as he had never seen on the face
of any other woman since the world was made. Was it possible?--was it
really possible? Suddenly his whole heart seemed to irradiate light
and color and music and sweet smelling things.
[Illustration: Cornelia's mother answered this time]
"Oh, Molly, Molly, Molly!" he shouted. "I want _you_! I want _you_!"
In the strange, lonesome days that followed, neither burly
flesh-and-blood Doctor nor slim paper sweetheart tramped noisily over
the threshold or slid thuddingly through the letter-slide.
No one apparently was ever coming to see Stanton again unless actually
compelled to do so. Even the laundryman seemed to have skipped his
usual day; and twice in succession the morning paper had most
annoyingly failed to appear. Certainly neither the boldest private
inquiry nor the most delicately worded public advertisement had proved
able to discover the whereabouts of "Molly Make-Believe," much less
succeeded in bringing her back. But the Doctor, at least, could be
summoned by ordinary telephone, and Cornelia and her mother would
surely be moving North eventually, whether Stanton's last message
hastened their movements or not.
In subsequent experience it seemed to take two telephone messages to
produce the Doctor. A trifle coolly, a trifle distantly, more than a
trifle disapprovingly, he appeared at last and stared dully at
Stanton's astonishing booted-and-coated progress towards health.
"Always glad to serve you--professionally," murmured the Doctor with
an undeniably definite accent on the word 'professionally'.
"Oh, cut it out!" quoted Stanton emphatically. "What in creation are
you so stuffy about?"
"Well, really," growled the Doctor, "considering the deception you
practised on me--"
"Considering nothing!" shouted Stanton. "On my word of honor, I tell
you I never consciously, in all my life before, ever--ever--set eyes
upon that wonderful little girl, until that evening! I never knew that
she even existed! I never knew! I tell you I never knew--_anything_!"
As limply as any stout man could sink into a chair, the Doctor sank
into the seat nearest him.
"Tell me instantly all about it," he gasped.
"There are only two things to tell," said Stanton quite blithely. "And
the first thing is what I've already stated, on my honor, that the
evening we speak of was actually and positively the first time I ever
saw the girl; and the second thing is, that equally upon my honor, I
do not intend to let it remain--the last time!"
"But Cornelia?" cried the Doctor. "What about Cornelia?"
Almost half the sparkle faded from Stanton's eyes.
"Cornelia and I have annulled our engagement," he said very quietly.
Then with more vehemence, "Oh, you old dry-bones, don't you worry
about Cornelia! I'll look out for Cornelia. Cornelia isn't going to
get hurt. I tell you I've figured and reasoned it all out very, very
carefully; and I can see now, quite plainly, that Cornelia never
really loved me at all--else she wouldn't have dropped me so
accidentally through her fingers. Why, there never was even the ghost
of a clutch in Cornelia's fingers."
"But you loved _her_," persisted the Doctor scowlingly.
It was hard, just that second, for Stanton to lift his troubled eyes
to the Doctor's face. But he did lift them and he lifted them very
squarely and steadily.
"Yes, I think I did--love Cornelia," he acknowledged frankly. "The
very first time that I saw her I said to myself. 'Here is the end of
my journey,' but I seem to have found out suddenly that the mere fact
of loving a woman does not necessarily prove her that much coveted
'journey's end.' I don't know exactly how to express it, indeed I feel
beastly clumsy about expressing it, but somehow it seems as though it
were Cornelia herself who had proved herself, perfectly amiably, no
'journey's end' after all, but only a way station not equipped to
receive my particular kind of a permanent guest. It isn't that I
wanted any grand fixings. Oh, can't you understand that I'm not
finding any fault with Cornelia. There never was any slightest
pretence about Cornelia. She never, never even in the first place,
made any possible effort to attract me. Can't you see that Cornelia
_looks_ to me to-day exactly the way that she looked to me in the
first place; very, amazingly, beautiful. But a traveler, you know,
cannot dally indefinitely to feed his eyes on even the most wonderful
view while all his precious lifelong companions,--his whims, his
hobbies, his cravings, his yearnings,--are crouching starved and
unwelcome outside the door.
"And I can't even flatter myself," he added wryly; "I can't even
flatter myself that my--going is going to inconvenience Cornelia in
the slightest; because I can't see that my coming has made even the
remotest perceptible difference in her daily routine. Anyway--" he
finished more lightly, "when you come right down to 'mating', or
'homing', or 'belonging', or whatever you choose to call it, it seems
to be written in the stars that plans or no plans, preferences or no
preferences, initiatives or no initiatives, we belong to those--and
to those only, hang it all!--who happen to love _us_ most!"
Fairly jumping from his chair the Doctor snatched hold of Stanton's
shoulder.
"Who happen to love _us_ most?" he repeated wildly. "Love _us_? _us_?
For heaven's sake, who's loving you _now_?"
Utterly irrelevantly, Stanton brushed him aside, and began to rummage
anxiously among the books on his table.
"Do you know much about Vermont?" he asked suddenly. "It's funny, but
almost nobody seems to know anything about Vermont. It's a darned good
state, too, and I can't imagine why all the geographies neglect it
so." Idly his finger seemed to catch in a half open pamphlet, and he
bent down casually to straighten out the page. "Area in square
miles--9,565," he read aloud musingly. "Principal products--hay, oats,
maple-sugar--" Suddenly he threw down the pamphlet and flung
himself into the nearest chair and began to laugh. "Maple-sugar?" he
ejaculated. "Maple-sugar? Oh, glory! And I suppose there are some
people who think that maple-sugar is the sweetest thing that ever came
out of Vermont!"
The Doctor started to give him some fresh advice--but left him a
bromide instead.
X
Though the ensuing interview with Cornelia and her mother began quite
as coolly as the interview with the Doctor, it did not happen to end
even in hysterical laughter.
It was just two days after the Doctor's hurried exit that Stanton
received a formal, starchy little note from Cornelia's mother
notifying him of their return.
Except for an experimental, somewhat wobbly-kneed journey or two to
the edge of the Public Garden he had made no attempts as yet to resume
any outdoor life, yet for sundry personal reasons of his own he did
not feel over-anxious to postpone the necessary meeting. In the
immediate emergency at hand strong courage was infinitely more of an
asset than strong knees. Filling his suitcase at once with all the
explanatory evidence that he could carry, he proceeded on cab-wheels
to Cornelia's grimly dignified residence. The street lamps were just
beginning to be lighted when he arrived.
As the butler ushered him gravely into the beautiful drawing room he
realized with a horrid sinking of the heart that Cornelia and her
mother were already sitting there waiting for him with a dreadful
tight lipped expression on their faces which seemed to suggest that
though he was already fifteen minutes ahead of his appointment they
had been waiting for him there since early dawn.
The drawing room itself was deliciously familiar to him;
crimson-curtained, green carpeted, shining with heavy gilt picture
frames and prismatic chandeliers. Often with posies and candies and
theater-tickets he had strutted across that erstwhile magic threshold
and fairly lolled in the big deep-upholstered chairs while waiting for
the silk-rustling advent of the ladies. But now, with his suitcase
clutched in his hand, no Armenian peddler of laces and ointments could
have felt more grotesquely out of his element.
Indolently Cornelia's mother lifted her lorgnette and gazed at him
skeptically from the spot just behind his left ear where the barber
had clipped him too short, to the edge of his right heel that the
bootblack had neglected to polish. Apparently she did not even see the
suitcase but,
"Oh, are you leaving town?" she asked icily.
Only by the utmost tact on his part did he finally succeed in
establishing tête-à-tête relations with Cornelia herself; and even
then if the house had been a tower ten stories high, Cornelia's
mother, rustling up the stairs, could not have swished her skirts any
more definitely like a hissing snake.
In absolute dumbness Stanton and Cornelia sat listening until the
horrid sound died away. Then, and then only, did Cornelia cross the
room to Stanton's side and proffer him her hand. The hand was very
cold, and the manner of offering it was very cold, but Stanton was
quite man enough to realize that this special temperature was purely a
matter of physical nervousness rather than of mental intention.
Slipping naturally into the most conventional groove either of word or
deed, Cornelia eyed the suitcase inquisitively.
"What are you doing?" she asked thoughtlessly. "Returning my
presents?"
"You never gave me any presents!" said Stanton cheerfully.
"Why, didn't I?" murmured Cornelia slowly. Around her strained mouth a
smile began to flicker faintly. "Is that why you broke it off?" she
asked flippantly.
"Yes, partly," laughed Stanton.
Then Cornelia laughed a little bit, too.
After this Stanton lost no possible time in getting down to facts.
Stooping over from his chair exactly after the manner of peddlers whom
he had seen in other people's houses, he unbuckled the straps of his
suitcase, and turned the cover backward on the floor.
Cornelia followed every movement of his hand with vaguely perplexed
blue eyes.
"Surely," said Stanton, "this is the weirdest combination of
circumstances that ever happened to a man and a girl--or rather, I
should say, to a man and two girls." Quite accustomed as he now was to
the general effect on himself of the whole unique adventure with the
Serial-Letter Co. his heart could not help giving a little extra jump
on this, the verge of the astonishing revelation that he was about to
make to Cornelia. "Here," he stammered, a tiny bit out of breath,
"here is the small, thin, tissue-paper circular that you sent me from
the Serial-Letter Co. with your advice to subscribe, and there--"
pointing earnestly to the teeming suitcase,--"there are the minor
results of--having taken your advice."
In Cornelia's face the well-groomed expression showed sudden signs of
immediate disorganization.
Snatching the circular out of his hand she read it hurriedly, once,
twice, three times. Then kneeling cautiously down on the floor with
all the dignity that characterized every movement of her body, she
began to poke here and there into the contents of the suitcase.
[Illustration: He unbuckled the straps of his suitcase and turned the
cover backward on the floor]
"The 'minor results'?" she asked soberly.
"Why yes," said Stanton. "There were several things I didn't have room
to bring. There was a blanket-wrapper. And there was a--girl, and
there was a--"
Cornelia's blonde eyebrows lifted perceptibly. "A girl--whom you
didn't know at all--sent you a blanket-wrapper?" she whispered.
"Yes!" smiled Stanton. "You see no girl whom I knew--very well--seemed
to care a hang whether I froze to death or not."
"O--h," said Cornelia very, very slowly, "O--h." Her eyes had a
strange, new puzzled expression in them like the expression of a
person who was trying to look outward and think inward at the same
time.
"But you mustn't be so critical and haughty about it all," protested
Stanton, "when I'm really trying so hard to explain everything
perfectly honestly to you--so that you'll understand exactly how it
happened."
"I should like very much to be able to understand exactly how it
happened," mused Cornelia.
Gingerly she approached in succession the roll of sample wall-paper,
the maps, the time-tables, the books, the little silver porringer, the
intimate-looking scrap of unfinished fancy-work. One by one Stanton
explained them to her, visualizing by eager phrase or whimsical
gesture the particularly lonesome and susceptible conditions under
which each gift had happened to arrive.
At the great pile of letters Cornelia's hand faltered a trifle.
"How many did I write you?" she asked with real curiosity.
"Five thin ones, and a postal-card," said Stanton almost
apologetically.
Choosing the fattest looking letter that she could find, Cornelia
toyed with the envelope for a second. "Would it be all right for me to
read one?" she asked doubtfully.
"Why, yes," said Stanton. "I think you might read one."
After a few minutes she laid down the letter without any comment.
"Would it be all right for me to read another?" she questioned.
"Why, yes," cried Stanton. "Let's read them all. Let's read them
together. Only, of course, we must read them in order."
Almost tenderly he picked them up and sorted them out according to
their dates. "Of course," he explained very earnestly, "of course I
wouldn't think of showing these letters to any one ordinarily; but
after all, these particular letters represent only a mere business
proposition, and certainly this particular situation must justify one
in making extraordinary exceptions."
One by one he perused the letters hastily and handed them over to
Cornelia for her more careful inspection. No single associate detail
of time or circumstance seemed to have eluded his astonishing memory.
Letter by letter, page by page he annotated: "That was the week you
didn't write at all," or "This was the stormy, agonizing, God-forsaken
night when I didn't care whether I lived or died," or "It was just
about that time, you know, that you snubbed me for being scared about
your swimming stunt."
Breathless in the midst of her reading Cornelia looked up and faced
him squarely. "How could any girl--write all that nonsense?" she
gasped.
It wasn't so much what Stanton answered, as the expression in his eyes
that really startled Cornelia.
"Nonsense?" he quoted deliberatingly. "But I like it," he said. "It's
exactly what I like."
"But I couldn't possibly have given you anything like--that,"
stammered Cornelia.
"No, I know you couldn't," said Stanton very gently.
For an instant Cornelia turned and stared a bit resentfully into his
face. Then suddenly the very gentleness of his smile ignited a little
answering smile on her lips.
"Oh, you mean," she asked with unmistakable relief; "oh, you mean that
really after all it wasn't your letter that jilted me, but my
temperament that jilted you?"
"Exactly," said Stanton.
Cornelia's whole somber face flamed suddenly into unmistakable
radiance.
"Oh, that puts an entirely different light upon the matter," she
exclaimed. "Oh, now it doesn't hurt at all!"
Rustling to her feet, she began to smooth the scowly-looking wrinkles
out of her skirt with long even strokes of her bright-jeweled hands.
"I think I'm really beginning to understand," she said pleasantly.
"And truly, absurd as it sounds to say it, I honestly believe that I
care more for you this moment than I ever cared before, but--"
glancing with acute dismay at the cluttered suitcase on the floor,
"but I wouldn't marry you now, if we could live in the finest asylum
in the land!"
Shrugging his shoulders with mirthful appreciation Stanton proceeded
then and there to re-pack his treasures and end the interview.
Just at the edge of the threshold Cornelia's voice called him back.
"Carl," she protested, "you are looking rather sick. I hope you are
going straight home."
"No, I'm not going straight home," said Stanton bluntly. "But here's
hoping that the 'longest way round' will prove even yet the very
shortest possible route to the particular home that, as yet, doesn't
even exist. I'm going hunting, Cornelia, hunting for Molly
Make-Believe; and what's more, I'm going to find her if it takes me
all the rest of my natural life!"
XI
Driving downtown again with every thought in his head, every plan,
every purpose, hurtling around and around in absolute chaos, his
roving eyes lit casually upon the huge sign of a detective bureau that
loomed across the street. White as a sheet with the sudden new
determination that came to him, and trembling miserably with the very
strength of the determination warring against the weakness and fatigue
of his body, he dismissed his cab and went climbing up the first
narrow, dingy stairway that seemed most liable to connect with the
brain behind the sign-board.
It was almost bed-time before he came down the stairs again, yet, "I
think her name is Meredith, and I think she's gone to Vermont, and
she has the most wonderful head of mahogany-colored hair that I ever
saw in my life," were the only definite clues that he had been able to
contribute to the cause.
In the slow, lagging week that followed, Stanton did not find himself
at all pleased with the particular steps which he had apparently been
obliged to take in order to ferret out Molly's real name and her real
city address, but the actual audacity of the situation did not
actually reach its climax until the gentle little quarry had been
literally tracked to Vermont with detectives fairly baying on her
trail like the melodramatic bloodhounds that pursue "Eliza" across the
ice.
"Red-headed party found at Woodstock," the valiant sleuth had wired
with unusual delicacy and caution.
"Denies acquaintance, Boston, everything, positively refuses
interview, temper very bad, sure it's the party," the second message
had come.
The very next northward-bound train found Stanton fretting the
interminable hours away between Boston and Woodstock. Across the
sparkling snow-smothered landscape his straining eyes went plowing on to
their unknown destination. Sometimes the engine pounded louder than his
heart. Sometimes he could not even seem to hear the grinding of the
brakes above the dreadful throb-throb of his temples. Sometimes in
horrid, shuddering chills he huddled into his great fur-coat and cursed
the porter for having a disposition like a polar bear. Sometimes almost
gasping for breath he went out and stood on the bleak rear platform of
the last car and watched the pleasant, ice-cold rails go speeding back
to Boston. All along the journey little absolutely unnecessary villages
kept bobbing up to impede the progress of the train. All along the
journey innumerable little empty railroad-stations, barren as bells
robbed of their own tongues, seemed to lie waiting--waiting for the
noisy engine-tongue to clang them into temporary noise and life.
Was his quest really almost at an end? Was it--was it? A thousand
vague apprehensions tortured through his mind.
And then, all of a sudden, in the early, brisk winter twilight,
Woodstock--happened!
Climbing out of the train Stanton stood for a second rubbing his eyes
at the final abruptness and unreality of it all. Woodstock! What was
it going to mean to him? Woodstock!
Everybody else on the platform seemed to be accepting the astonishing
geographical fact with perfect simplicity. Already along the edge of
the platform the quaint, old-fashioned yellow stage-coaches set on
runners were fast filling up with utterly serene passengers.
A jog at his elbow made him turn quickly, and he found himself gazing
into the detective's not ungenial face.
"Say," said the detective, "were you going up to the hotel first? Well
you'd better not. You'd better not lose any time. She's leaving town
in the morning." It was beyond human nature for the detective man not
to nudge Stanton once in the ribs. "Say," he grinned, "you sure had
better go easy, and not send in your name or anything." His grin
broadened suddenly in a laugh. "Say," he confided, "once in a magazine
I read something about a lady's 'piquant animosity'. That's her! And
_cute_? Oh, my!"
Five minutes later, Stanton found himself lolling back in the
quaintest, brightest, most pumpkin-colored coach of all, gliding with
almost magical smoothness through the snow-glazed streets of the
little narrow, valley-town.
"The Meredith homestead?" the driver had queried. "Oh, yes. All right;
but it's quite a journey. Don't get discouraged."
A sense of discouragement regarding long distances was just at that
moment the most remote sensation in Stanton's sensibilities. If the
railroad journey had seemed unhappily drawn out, the sleigh-ride
reversed the emotion to the point of almost telescopic calamity: a
stingy, transient vista of village lights; a brief, narrow,
hill-bordered road that looked for all the world like the aisle of a
toy-shop, flanked on either side by high-reaching shelves where
miniature house-lights twinkled cunningly; a sudden stumble of hoofs
into a less-traveled snow-path, and then, absolutely unavoidable,
absolutely unescapable, an old, white colonial house with its great
solemn elm trees stretching out their long arms protectingly all
around and about it after the blessed habit of a hundred years.
Nervously, and yet almost reverently, Stanton went crunching up the
snowy path to the door, knocked resonantly with a slim, much worn old
brass knocker, and was admitted promptly and hospitably by "Mrs.
Meredith" herself--Molly's grandmother evidently, and such a darling
little grandmother, small, like Molly; quick, like Molly; even young,
like Molly, she appeared to be. Simple, sincere, and oh, so
comfortable--like the fine old mahogany furniture and the dull-shining
pewter, and the flickering firelight, that seemed to be everywhere.
"Good old stuff!" was Stanton's immediate silent comment on everything
in sight.
It was perfectly evident that the little old lady knew nothing
whatsoever about Stanton, but it was equally evident that she
suspected him of being neither a highwayman nor a book agent, and was
really sincerely sorry that Molly had "a headache" and would be unable
to see him.
"But I've come so far," persisted Stanton. "All the way from Boston.
Is she very ill? Has she been ill long?"
The little old lady's mind ignored the questions but clung a trifle
nervously to the word Boston.
"Boston?" her sweet voice quavered. "Boston? Why you look so
nice--surely you're not that mysterious man who has been annoying
Mollie so dreadfully these past few days. I told her no good would
ever come of her going to the city."