Francis looked at her as if she had said something very surprising.
"Thrilling?" he said, apparently considering it the wrong adjective.
She nodded.
"Why, yes. I've read of remittance men all my life, but I never
dreamed I'd meet one. And--I always wanted to know, Francis," said
she, as she opened the door and walked in and settled herself cozily on
the window-seat. "What does he remit? They never say."
"He doesn't remit," explained Francis rather disgustedly, following her
over and sitting down by her at the other corner of the seat. "Other
people do it."
"'Curiouser and Curiouser! I begin to think I'm in Wonderland!'" she
quoted. "I think the easiest way for you to do will be just to tell me
all about remittance men, the way you do a child when it starts to ask
questions. Just what are they, and do they all look like Pennington,
and are they trained to be it, or does it come natural?"
"A remittance man," Francis explained again, "is a term, more or less,
of disgrace. He is a man who has done something in his own country
which makes his relatives wish him out of it. So they remit money to
him as long as he stays away."
If he expected to make Marjorie feel shocked at Pennington by this tale
he was quite disappointed.
"And does Pennington get money for staying away, besides what he helps
you and gets?" she demanded. "What does he do with it all?"
"I don't suppose it's a great deal," said Francis reluctantly.
"Well, all I have to say is, I'm perfectly certain that if anybody's
paying Pennington to stay away from England, they're some horrid kind
of person that just is disagreeable, and doesn't know his real worth.
Why, Francis, he's helped me learn the ways here, and looked after me,
as if he was my mother. He's exactly like somebody's mother."
Francis could not help smiling a little. Marjorie, when she wanted to
be--sometimes when she did not want to be--was irresistible.
"But, Marjorie," he began to explain to her very seriously, "however
much he may seem like a mother, he isn't one. He's a man, though he's
rather an old one. And he did do things in England so he had to leave.
I don't want him to fall in love with you; it would be embarrassing for
several reasons."
"But why should he fall in love with me?" she demanded innocently.
"Lots of people don't."
"But, Marjorie," her husband remonstrated, "they do. Look at Logan,
now. No reason on earth would have brought him up here but being in
love with you. You might as well admit it."
"All I ever did was to listen to him when he talked," said Marjorie,
shrugging one shoulder. She liked what Francis was saying, but she
felt in honor bound to be truthful about such things. "And besides
you, there was only one other man ever asked me to marry him--I mean,
not counting Logan, if you do count him. Oh, yes, and then there was
another one yet, with a guitar. He always said he proposed to me. He
wrote me a letter all mixed up, about everything in the world; and I
was awfully busy just then, selling tickets for a church fair of Cousin
Anna's. I never was any good selling tickets anyhow," explained
Marjorie, settling herself more nestlingly in her corner of the
window-seat; "and so when he said somewhere in the letter that anything
he could ever do for me he would do on the wings of the wind, I wrote
back and said yes, he could buy two tickets for the church fair. And,
oh, but he was furious! He sent the check for the tickets with the
maddest letter you ever saw; and he accused me of refusing him in a
cold and ignoring manner. And I'd torn up the letter, the way I always
do, and so I couldn't prove anything about it to him. But he didn't
come to the fair. Ye-es, I suppose that was a proposal. The man ought
to know, shouldn't he?"
Francis was tired; he had a consciousness of having behaved unkindly
that weighed him down and made for gloom. He had come in with Marjorie
for the purpose of delivering an imposing warning. But he couldn't
help laughing.
"I suppose so," he acknowledged. "Never mind, Marjorie, you didn't
really want him, did you?"
She shook her head.
"Oh, no. Nobody could. Or--wait, somebody must, because I think he's
married. But he wasn't the kind a girl that cared what she got wanted."
But Francis went back to Pennington.
"About Pennington," he began again. "You don't know how easy it is for
you to let a man think you're encouraging him, when you really aren't
saying a word or doing a thing, or think you aren't. I want you to
promise me you'll be very careful where he's concerned, even cold."
"Cold!" she said indignantly. "But I'm married! You seem to forget
that!"
Francis had not forgotten it in the least. He forgot it all too little
for his own comfort, he might have told her. But he was rebuked.
"I didn't know you went on the principle that you had to act exactly
like a regular married woman," he apologized with meekness.
"I do," she said shortly.
He rose and went over to where the banjo lay and brought it back to
her. It was growing dusk now in the little cabin.
"Play for me, and sing, won't you, Marjorie?" he asked abruptly. "I
haven't heard you for a long time."
In Marjorie's mind there arose the memory of that boyish, loving little
note that she had found under the banjo, and for a minute her throat
clutched so that she couldn't answer. She had moments of being so
intolerably sorry for Francis that it hurt; quite irrational moments,
when he seemed to need it not at all. This was one.
"Yes," she said, pulling herself together. "That is, if you will take
my word for it that I have no designs on poor old Mr. Pennington."
"Of course I know you haven't," he said. "It was the other way about
that I was afraid of."
"His having designs on me?"
She laughed aloud as she began tuning her strings. It did seem like
the funniest thing she had ever heard. The picture of Pennington, girt
with a sack for an apron, with that plump, quaint face of his, and
those kindly, fussy ways, drying cups for her and having designs while
he did it--it was enough to make even Logan laugh, and _he_ had never
been known to be amused by anything that wasn't intellectual humor.
"Just a-wearyin' for you,"
she began, in her soft little sympathetic voice, that wasn't much good
for anything but just this sort of thing, but could pull the
heartstrings out of you at it, and sang it through. She went on after
that without being asked, just because she liked it. She knew where
the simple chords were in the dark, and she sang everything she wanted
to, forgetting finally Francis, and the woods, and everything else in
the world except the music and the old things she was singing.
When she had finally done, after an hour or so, and laid the banjo
across her lap and leaned back with a little laugh, saying "There! You
must be tired by this time!" Francis rose with scarcely a thank-you,
and walked out of the door.
"I want a turn in the air before I come to bed," he said.
Marjorie said nothing. She was sleepy, as usual--would she never get
over being sleepy up here?--and she laid the instrument on the floor
and stretched out thoughtlessly on the window-seat, instead of going
off to bed as she had been intending to do. As for her husband, he
walked across the veranda straight into a group of his listening men.
The music had drawn them over, and, regardless of mosquitoes, they were
sitting about on the steps, liking the concert.
"We owe you a vote of thanks for importing that little wife of yours,
Ellison," said Pennington, getting up and stretching himself widely in
the moonlight. "Maybe if I do some more dishes for her, she'll come
and sing for us when she knows it, sometime soon."
Francis had an irrational wish to hit Pennington. But there was no
reason why he should. Pennington's particular kind of flippancy was
merely a result of his having been, in those far days before he was a
remittance man, an Oxford graduate. So was his soft and charmingly
inflected voice. But, quite reasonlessly, it was all Francis could do
to respond with the politeness which is due to your almost
irreplaceable second-in-command on a rush job. His manners once made,
he decided that he didn't want the air, after all. He faced about,
saying good-night to the risen men, who responded jovially or
respectfully, according to their temperaments, and returned to the
cabin where he was, for all they knew, living an idyllic life with the
wife he adored and who adored him.
He went over, drawn in spite of himself, to the window-seat where
Marjorie lay. There was enough moonlight to see her dimly, and he
could tell that she had, all in a minute, fallen asleep. She looked
very young and tired and childish in the shadows, with her lips just
parted, and her hands out and half open at her sides.
"Marjorie! Marjorie, dear!" he said. "Wake up! It's time you were in
bed."
He spoke to her affectionately, scarcely knowing that he said it. She
was very tired, and she did not wake till he put his hand on her
shoulder. Even then she just moved a little, and turned back to her
old position.
He finally bent and lifted her to a sitting position, but she only lay
against him, heavy still with sleep.
"Don't want to get up," she murmured, like a child. So finally he had
to do as he had done the night he brought her home, pick her up bodily
and lay her on her own bed. Her arms fell from his shoulders as he
straightened himself from laying her down. "'Night," she said, still
sleepily and half-affectionately; and Francis did not kiss her
good-night. But he did want to badly. Francis, unlike Marjorie, was
not sleeping well these nights.
But then he was used to his work and she was not used to hers. He
called her quite unemotionally next morning, and she rose and went
through her routine as usual. All the camp watched its mascot
apprehensively, as if she might break--well, not every one, for two of
them were tough old souls who thought that hard work was what women
were "fur." But, aside from these unregenerates, they did more. Fired
by Pennington's example of unremitting help, they did everything for
her that thought could suggest. They brought her in posies for the
table; they swept out the cabin for her; they dried her dishes in
desperate competition; they filled the kerosene stoves so thoroughly
that there was always a dripping trail of oil on the floor, and
Pennington had to lay down the law about it; they ate what she fed them
gladly, and even sometimes forbore to ask for more out of a wish to
seem mannerly.
And Marjorie liked it to the core. The lightening of the work was a
help, and it made things so that she was not more than healthfully
tired, though sometimes she felt that she was more than that; but,
being a woodland queen, as Pennington called it, was pleasantest of
all. She came to feel as the time went on, there alone in the clearing
with them, that they were all her property. She mended their clothes
for them, she settled their disputes, she heard their confidences and
saw the pictures of their sweethearts and wives, or, sometimes,
photographs of movie queens who were the dream-ideals of these simple
souls. Sometimes she went out to the place where they worked, before
the work moved too far away for her to reach it in a short time. And,
curiously enough, she found that she was not lonely, did not miss New
York, and--it seemed to her that it was a rather shocking way to
feel--she did not in the least feel a "lack of woman's nursing, or
dearth of woman's tears."
She got along excellently without Lucille, Cousin Anna, and the girls
in the office. And, thinking it over sometimes at twilight, in those
rare moments when there weren't from one to three of the men grouped
adoringly around her, and Francis wasn't chaperoning her silently in
the background, she felt that the work was a small price to pay for the
pleasantness of the rest of her life there. Always before she had been
a cog in the machinery, wherever she had been. At Cousin Anna's she
was a little girl, loved and dominated. With Lucille she was free, but
Lucille, in compensation, helped herself to the ungrudgingly given
foreground. But here she was lady and mistress, and pet besides. In
short, the punishment Francis had laid out for her was only a
punishment to him. She could see that he felt guilty by spells. She
thought, too, that he had times of being fond of her. How much they
meant she could not tell. But in spite of his warnings she became
better and better friends with Pennington, always exactly, at least as
far as she was concerned, as if he were a maiden aunt of great kindness
and experience. Indeed, Pennington, she thought, was what kept her
from missing girls so.
He never told her anything about himself. He might or might not have
been a remittance man; but he mentioned no remittances, at least. Once
he spoke of his childhood, the kind of childhood she had read sometimes
in English children's books, not like her own prim American suburban
memories of Sunday-school and being sent to school and store, and
sometimes playing in her back yard with other little girls. He had had
a pony, and brothers and sisters to play with, and a governess, she
gathered; and an uncle who was an admiral, and came home once to them
in his full uniform, as a treat, so they could see how he looked in it.
And there had been a nurse, and near by was a park where the tale went
that there were goblins. But it all must have been very long ago, she
thought, because Pennington looked forty and over. And all his stories
stopped short before he was ten. After that he went to Eton, he told
her, and told her no more.
She did not ask. She liked him, but, after all, he was not an
important figure in her life. The goal she never forgot was Francis's
admission that she was an honorable woman; and, underneath that,
Francis's missing her terribly when she was through and left. Still,
when Pennington would come and demand tea from her of a Sunday, and she
would sit in her little living-room, or out on the veranda, with the
quaint yellow tea-set that was a part of the furnishings, and pour it
for him and one or two of the other men, she would like having him
about. He talked as interestingly as Logan, but not as egotistically.
She felt as if she were quite a wonderful person when he sat on the
step below her, and surrounded her with a soft deference that was
almost caressing, but not quite. And in spite of Francis's warnings
she made more and more of a friend of him.
The explosion came one Sunday afternoon in June. She came out on the
veranda, as usual, with her tea-tray, about four, and waited for her
court. Peggy came over once in awhile on Sundays, too. Logan never
came. Peggy had never said any more about him since her one outburst,
but Marjorie knew that he was ill yet, and being nursed by the O'Maras.
This day no Peggy appeared. Indeed, nobody appeared for some time, and
Marjorie began to think of putting away the tea-things and considering
the men's supper. And then, just as she had come to this resolve,
Pennington came through the woods.
He was not sauntering in a seemingly aimless manner, as he usually did.
He was walking straight for her, as if she were something he had been
aiming for for hours. And he did not drop at her feet negligently on
the steps, as he usually did, and call her some fanciful name like
"Queen of the Woodlands," or "Lady Marjorie." He sat erectly on a
chair across from her, and Marjorie bethought herself that he was very
much like a curate making a call. The kindly expression was always on
his face, even when he was most deeply in earnest, and he was
apparently in earnest to-day.
"I stopped the other men from coming," began Pennington with no
preface. "I wanted to have a long talk with you. I want to tell you a
story."
"I wish you would," she said, though she had had so many scenes of late
that, without any idea what was coming, a little tremor of terror crept
around her heart. She leaned back in her rustic rocker, there on the
veranda, and looked at him in her innocent, friendly fashion. He
paused a little before he began.
"Once upon a time," he began abruptly, "there was a man who had a very
fair start in life. His people saw to it that everything was smooth
for him--too smooth, perhaps. He didn't realize that he could ever be
in a position where they wouldn't be able to straighten things out for
him. He was a decent enough chap; weak, perhaps, but kind, at least.
He went to school and college, and finally took orders, and was given a
living in a county near where his people lived. Life went along easily
enough for him, and perhaps a bit stupidly. Too stupidly. He got
bored by it. So after a while he gambled. He played the stock-market.
Presently he used some money that was not his--that had been intrusted
to him by another. He lost that. So he had to give up
everything--home, friends, profession, country--and go and live in a
strange country. His people, good always, straightened things out for
him, at a great sacrifice; but they made it a condition that he should
stay where he was. Time went on, and things were forgotten. And the
people who had made him promise not to return died. They left him, in
dying, some money. Not a great deal, but enough to keep him
comfortably. And he didn't know what to do. He was happy, for the
first time in his life, with a little friend he had found, some one
almost like a daughter, some one who seemed, in humble ways, to need
him to help her in what wasn't a very easy part of her life. So he
stayed yet a little longer. And presently he found that he was in
danger of something happening. He had never been very good at making
himself feel as he wished to feel, or at holding his feelings to what
they should be, let us say. And his feelings for this little daughter
were not quite, he was afraid, like a father's. But he still did not
know what to do, Marjorie. She would never care, and there were
reasons why he did not want or expect her to. It was only that he
wondered which was right--which he ought to do."
Pennington stopped.
Marjorie colored up.
"What--what do you mean? Why--why do you tell me about it?"
"Because," said Pennington, "I would like to know what you think that
man ought to do. Ought he to go back home, against his people's wish,
but where he belongs, and try to pick up the rest of his life there, or
do you think that the need of him over here is enough to counterbalance
the danger he runs? You see, it's rather a problem."
Marjorie was a perfectly intelligent girl. She knew very well that
Pennington was, at last, telling her the outlines of his own pitiful
story. And he was leaving the decision in her hands.
She sat quietly for awhile, and tried to think. It was hard to think,
because there was a queer, hazy feeling in her head, and her hands were
hot. She had felt unusually excited and energetic and gay earlier in
the day, but that was all gone, and only the hazy feeling left. She
did not want to move, or, particularly, to speak. She wondered if a
trip she had made that afternoon before to a little swampy place, where
she had sat and strung berries for an hour, had been bad for her.
But there was Pennington--he looked very large, suddenly, and then
seemed to fade away far off for a minute, and have to be focused with
an effort--and he had to be answered.
"I think," she said hesitatingly, "that he ought to do what seemed to
him right, without thinking of his feelings, or--or any one else's."
"But that's just the trouble. He couldn't see which _was_ right."
Marjorie tried to focus harder than ever. She wanted to be unselfish,
and tell him the thing that was right to do, at any cost--though she
had not realized how much Pennington's help and society had been to
her. She felt a terror at the idea of his going, the more because she
felt ill. But that didn't count--that mustn't count. You have no
right to let a man stay where he may fall in love with you, merely
because you need him for a maiden aunt or something of the sort. And
that was the ultimate and entire extent of her affection for him,
strong though it had come to be.
"I think--I think that man had better go back to the place where he had
really belonged at first," she said in a low voice. "No matter how
much the girl missed him, or needed him, she had no right to want him
to be hurt by staying near her."
"You really think that?" he said.
"Yes," she answered. And then incoherently, "Oh, Mr. Pennington, I do
want to be good!"
She meant that she had done enough wrong, in acting as she had toward
Francis in the first place. She felt now, very strongly, that all the
trouble had come from her cowardice when Francis came home. She should
have shut her teeth and gone through the thing, no matter what her
personal feelings had been at first. It would all have come out right
then. She knew now that she and Francis, the plunge once taken, could
have stood each other. And she would have kept her faith. She had
learned the meaning of honor.
"You are good," said Pennington in a moved tone. "Then--I have my
answer. Yes--I'll go back."
She leaned her heavy head on the chair-back again. He seemed once more
suddenly remote.
"I--I wish you weren't going," she said, only half conscious of what
she said.
He leaned forward, suddenly moved, and caught her hand hard. Still in
that dream, she felt him kiss it. She did not care. And then, still
in the dream, Francis's quick tread up the steps, and his sharp voice--
"And I believed in you!"