"And now that things are more or less settled, wouldn't you like to
know what we are going to do?" inquired Francis.
"Haven't I anything to do with it?" inquired Marjorie, not crossly, but
as one seeking information.
"Almost everything. But you don't know the road to Canada. I thought
we'd take it straight through in the car, but to-night we will be in
more civilized parts--in an hour or so, in fact--and you can get
straightened up a little--not that you look as if you needed to, but
after a night in the open one does feel more or less tossed about, I
imagine."
Marjorie considered. Ordinarily at this hour she would be walking into
the office. She would be speaking with what politeness one can muster
up in the morning to Miss Kaplan, who was quite as exuberant at five as
at seven in the evening; she would be hoping desperately that she
wasn't late, and that if she was she would escape Mr. Wildhack, who
glared terrifyingly at such young women who didn't get down on schedule
time. Marjorie was not much on schedule time, but she always felt that
the occasions when she got there too late really ought to be balanced
by those when she came too early. Instead of all this, she was racing
north with the fresh wind blowing against her face, with no duties and
no responsibilities, and something that, but for the person who shared
it with her, promised to be rather fun. Just then something came to
her. She had an engagement for tea with Bradley Logan.
Suddenly that engagement seemed exceedingly important, and something
that she should on no account have missed. But at least she could
write to him and explain.
"Have you a fountain-pen?" she inquired of Francis, "and can I write
sitting here?"
"If you don't mind writing on a leaf from my notebook. It's all I
have."
She was privately a little doubtful as to the impression that such a
note would make on Mr. Logan, for she remembered one wild tale she had
heard from him about a man who spent his whole life in a secluded room
somewhere in France, experimenting on himself as to what sort of
perfumes and colors and gestures made him happiest. None of them had
made him happy at all, to the best of her remembrance; but the idea Mr.
Logan left her with was that he was that sort of person himself, and
that the wrong kind of letter-paper could make him suffer acutely. She
was amused at it, really, but a bit impressed, too. One doesn't want
to be thought the kind of person who does the wrong thing because of
knowing no better. Still, it was that or nothing.
"Dear Mr. Logan," she began, more illegibly than she knew because of
the car's motion, "I am so sorry that I have not been able to tell you
in advance that I couldn't take tea with you. But Mr. Ellison has
taken me away rather suddenly. He had to go to Canada to take a
position. We hope we will see you when we get back."
She did not know till much later that owing to the thank-you-ma'am
which they reached simultaneously with the word "suddenly" that when
Mr. Logan got that note he thought it was "severely," and that the bad
penmanship and generally disgraceful appearance of the loose-leaf
sheet, the jerky hand, and the rather elderly envelope which was all
Francis could find--it had been living in a pocket with many other
things for some time--gave him a wrong idea. Mr. Logan, to anticipate
a little, by this erroneous means, acquired an idea very near the
truth. He thought that Marjorie Ellison was being kidnapped against
her will, and made it the subject of much meditation. His nervous
ailment prevented him from dashing after her.
Marjorie fortunately knew nothing of all this, for she was proud to the
core, and she would rather have died than let any one but Lucille, of
necessity in on it, know anything but that she was spending the most
delightful and willing of honeymoons.
So when they found a little up-state town with a tavern of exceeding
age and stiffness, and alighted in search of luncheon, the landlord and
landlady thought just what Marjorie wanted them to think; that all was
well and very recent.
She sank into one of the enormous walnut chairs, covered with
immaculate and flaring tidies which reminded her of Cousin Anna and
stuck into the back of her neck, and viewed the prospect with pleasure.
For the moment she almost forgot Francis, and the problem of managing
just the proper distance from him. There was a stuffed fish,
glassy-eyed and with cotton showing from parts of him, over the
counter. There were bills of forgotten railroads framed and hung in
different places. There was a crayon portrait of a graduated row of
children from the seventies hung over the fireplace, four of them, on
the order of another picture, framed and hanging in another part of the
room, and called "A Yard of Kittens." Marjorie wondered with pleasure
why they hadn't added enough children to bring it up to a yard, and
balanced things properly. The fireplace itself was bricked up, all
except a small place where a Franklin stove sat, with immortelles
sticking out of its top as if they aimed at being fuel. Marjorie had
seen immortelles in fireplaces before, but in a Franklin they were new
to her. She made up her mind to find out about it before she was
through.
"Why--why, I'm not worrying about being carried off by Francis!" she
remembered suddenly. She had been quite forgetful of him, and of
anything but the funny, old-fashioned place she was in. She lay back
further in the walnut chair, quite sleepily.
"Would you like to go upstairs now, ma'am?" the landlord said. She
looked around for Francis, but he was nowhere to be seen. She picked
up the handkerchief which had slipped from her lap, cast a regretful
look at the yard of kittens, and followed him.
"Here it is, ma'am," said the landlord, and set the suitcase he had
been carrying down inside the door. She shut the door after her, and
made for the mirror. Then she said "Oh!" in a surprised voice, because
Francis was standing before it, brushing his hair much harder than such
straight black hair needed to be brushed.
He seemed as much surprised as she.
"Good heavens, I beg your pardon, Marjorie!" he said. "This isn't your
room. Yours is the next one."
"I beg _your_ pardon, then," said Marjorie, with a certain iciness.
"You can have this one if you like it better. They're next door to
each other. You know"--Francis colored--"we have to seem more or less
friendly. Really I didn't know----"
He was moving away into the other room as he spoke, having laid down
his brush on her bureau as if he had no business with it at all.
"This isn't my brush," she said, standing at the connecting door and
holding it out at arm's length.
"No," said Francis. "I didn't know I'd left it. Thank you."
He took it from her, and went into his own room. She pushed the door
to between them, and went slowly back and sat down on the bed. A quite
new idea had just come to her.
Francis wasn't a relentless Juggernaut, or a tyrant, or a cave-man, or
anything like that really. That is, he probably did have moments of
being all of them. But besides that--it was a totally new idea--he was
a human being like herself. Sometimes things embarrassed him;
sometimes they were hard for him; he didn't always know what to do next.
She had never had any brothers, and not very much to do with men until
she got old enough for them to make love to her. The result was that
it had never occurred to her particularly that men were people. They
were just--men. That is, they were people you had nothing in common
with except the fact that you did what they said if they were fathers,
or married them when the time came, if they weren't. But she had
actually felt sorry for Francis; not sorry, in a vague, rather pitying
way because she didn't love him--but sorry for him as if he had been
Lucille, when he was so embarrassed that he walked off forgetting his
own brush. She smiled a little at the remembrance. She really began
to feel that he was a friend.
So when he tapped at her outside door presently and told her that
luncheon was ready, and that they had better go down and eat it,
instead of the severity for which Francis had braced himself, she
smiled at him in a very friendly fashion, and they went down together,
admiring the wallpaper intensely on their way, for it consisted of fat
scarlet birds sitting on concentric circles, and except for its age was
almost exactly like some that Lucille and Marjorie hadn't bought
because it was two dollars a yard.
Luncheon proved to be dinner, but they were none the less glad of it
for that. And instead of freezing every time the landlord was
tactlessly emotional, Marjorie found that she could be amused at it,
and that her being amused helped Francis to be amused.
She always looked back tenderly to that yard of kittens, and to those
other many yards of impossible and scarlet birds. They gave her the
first chance at carrying through her wild flight with Francis decently
and without too much discomfort.
The rest of the trip to Canada was easier and easier. Once admitting
that Francis and she were friends--and you can't spend three days
traveling with anybody without being a friend or an enemy--she had a
nice enough time. She kept sternly out of her mind the recollection
that he was in love with her. When she thought of that she couldn't
like him very much. But then she didn't have to think of it.
"Here we are," said Francis superfluously as they stopped at the door
of a big house that was neither a log cabin nor a regular house.
Marjorie gave a sigh of contentment.
"I admit I'm glad to get here," she said.
She slipped out of the car in the sunset, and stood drooping a minute,
waiting for her bag to be lifted down. She was beginning to feel
tired. She was lonely, too. She missed everything acutely and all at
once--New York, the little apartment, Lucille, being free from
Francis--even the black kitten seemed to her something that she could
not live one moment longer without. She turned and looked at Francis,
trim and alert as ever, just steering the car around the side of the
house, and found herself hating him for the moment. He was so at home
here. And she hadn't even carfare to run away if she wanted to!
"Well, now, you poor lamb!" said somebody's rich, motherly voice with a
broad Irish brogue. "You're tired enough to die, and no wonder. Come
along with me, darlin'."
She looked up with a feeling of comfort into the face of a
black-haired, middle-aged Irishwoman, ample and beaming.
"I'm Mrs. O'Mara, an' I know yer husband well. I kep' house for him
an' the other young gintlemen when they were workin' up here before the
fightin' began. So he got me to come an' stay wid the two of ye, me
an' Peggy. An' I don't deny I'm glad to see ye, for there does be a
ghost in this house!"
The ending was so unexpected and matter-of-fact that Marjorie forgot to
feel lost and estranged, and even managed to laugh. Even a ghost
sounded rather pleasant and friendly, and it was good to see a woman's
face. Who or what Peggy might be she did not know or care. Mrs.
O'Mara picked up the suitcase with one strong arm, and, putting the
other round Marjorie in a motherly way, half led her into the house.
"Ye'll excuse me familiarity, but it's plain to see ye're dead,
Miss--ma'am, I mean. Come yer ways in to the fire."
Marjorie had been feeling that life would be too hard to bear if she
had to climb any stairs now; so it was very gladly that she let Mrs.
O'Mara establish her in a rude chaise-longue sort of thing, facing a
huge fire in a roughly built fireplace. The housekeeper bent over her,
loosening knots and taking off wraps in a very comforting way. Then
she surrounded her with pillows--not too many, or too much in her
way--and slipped from the room to return in a moment with tea.
Marjorie drank it eagerly, and was revived by it enough to look around
and see the place where she was to dwell. It looked very attractive,
though it was not in the least like anything she had ever seen.
Where she lay she stared straight into a fire of great logs that
crackled and burned comfortingly. The mantel over it was roughly made
of wood, and its only adornment was a pipe at one side, standing up on
its end in some mysterious manner, and a pile of Government reports at
the other. The walls were plastered and left so. Here and there were
tacked photographs and snapshots, and along one wall--she had to screw
her neck to see it--some one had fastened up countless sheets from a
Sunday supplement--war photographs entirely. She wondered who had done
it, because what she had seen of returned soldiers had shown her that
the last thing they wanted to see or hear about was the war.
There were couches around the walls, the other chairs were lounging
chairs also. There was fishing-tackle in profusion, and a battered
phonograph on a table. It looked as if men had made themselves
comfortable there, without thinking much about looks. The only thing
against this was one small frilled chair. It was a most absurd chair,
rustic to begin with, with a pink cushion covered with white net and
ruffled, and pink ribbons anchoring another pink and net cushion at its
back. Mrs. O'Mara, hovering hospitably, saw Marjorie eying it, and
beamed proudly.
"That's Peggy's chair," she said. "Peggy's me little daughter."
"Oh, that's nice," said Marjorie. "How old is she?"
"Just a young thing," said Mrs. O'Mara. "She'll be in in a minute."
Marjorie leaned back again, her tea consumed, and rested. She was not
particularly interested in Peggy, because she was not very used to
children. She liked special ones sometimes, but as a rule she did not
quite know what to do with them. After a few sentences exchanged, and
an embarrassed embrace in which the children stiffened themselves,
children and Marjorie were apt to melt apart. She hoped Peggy wouldn't
be the kind that climbed on you and kicked you.
A wild clattering of feet aroused her from these half-drowsy
meditations.
"Here's Francis, mother! Here's Francis!" called a joyous young voice,
and Marjorie turned to see Francis, his eyes sparkling and his whole
face lighted up, dashing into the room with an arm around one of the
most beautiful girls she had ever seen, a tall, vivid creature who
might have been any age from seventeen to twenty, and who brought into
the room an atmosphere of excitement and gaiety like a wind.
"And here's Peggy!" said Francis gaily, pausing in his dash only when
he reached Marjorie's side. "She's all grown up since I went away, and
isn't she the dear of the world?"
"Oh, but so's your wife, Francis!" said Peggy naïvely, slipping her arm
from around his shoulder and dropping on her knees beside Marjorie.
"You don't mind if I kiss you, do you, please? And must I call her
Mrs. Ellison, Francis?"
"Peggy, child, where's your manners?" said her mother from the
background reprovingly, but with an obvious note of pride in her voice.
"Where they always were," said Peggy boldly, laughing, and staying
where she was.
She was tall and full-formed, with thick black hair like her mother's,
not fluffy and waving like Marjorie's, but curling tight in rings
wherever it had the chance. Her eyes were black and her cheeks and
lips a deep permanent red. She looked the picture of health and
strength, and Marjorie felt like a toy beside her--fragile to the
breaking-point. She seemed much better educated than her mother, and
evidently on a footing of perfect equality and affection with Francis.
Marjorie was drawn to her, for the girl had vitality and charm; but she
found herself wondering why Francis had never told her about this
Peggy, and why he had never thought of marrying her.
"You wouldn't think this young wretch was only sixteen, would you?"
said Francis, answering her silent question. "Look at her--long
dresses and hair done up, and beaux, I hear, in all directions!"
Of course. If Peggy had been scarcely past fourteen when Francis saw
her last, he couldn't have considered marrying her. Marjorie tried to
think that she wished he had, but found that she did not like to cease
owning anything that she had ever possessed, even such a belonging as
Francis Ellison.
"That's very nice," she said inadequately, smiling at Peggy in as
friendly a manner as so tired a person could manage. "I'm glad I shall
have Peggy to be friends with while I'm up here."
"Oh, me dear, ye'll be up here forever an' the day after, be the looks
of the job Mr. Francis has on his hands," said Mrs. O'Mara.
"No, I won't," she began to say hurriedly, and then stopped herself.
She had no right to tell any one about her bargain with Francis. She
didn't want to, anyway.
"The poor child's tired," said Mrs. O'Mara, whom, in spite of her
relation to Peggy, Marjorie was beginning to regard as a guardian
angel. "Come upstairs to yer room, me dear."
Marjorie rose, with Francis and Peggy hovering about her, carrying
wraps and hats and suitcases; and Mrs. O'Mara led the way to a room on
the floor above, reached by a stair suspiciously like a ladder.
"Here ye'll be comfortable," said Mrs. O'Mara, "and rest a little till
we have supper. Peggy will get you anything you want."
But Marjorie declined Peggy. All she wanted was to rest a little
longer.
She flung herself on the softly mattressed cot in one corner of the
room; and nearly went to sleep.
She was awakened--it must have been quite sleep--by Francis, on the
threshold. His eyes were blazing, and he was evidently angry at her to
the last degree--angrier even than he had been that time in the city
when he nearly threw the telephone at her.
"Is this the sort of person you are?" he demanded furiously. "Look at
this telegram!"
Marjorie, frightened, rose from the couch with her heart beating like a
triphammer.
"Let me see," she asked.
He handed the telegram to her with an effect of wanting to shake her.
"Am coming up to arrange with you about Mrs. Ellison," it said. "Know
all."
It was signed by Logan.
"Good heavens!" said Marjorie helplessly.
"Knows all!" said Francis bitterly. "And that's the sort of girl you
are!"