given up to such matters, an item regarding the soon-to-be-announced
engagement of a certain charming and beautiful girl, only recently a
resident of the city, and a young man of wealth and social position.
It brought Miss Bentley up short. She disliked newspaper gossip
extremely, and an allusion so faintly veiled that everyone must
understand, was under the circumstances most embarrassing, for the truth
was she had not been asked. Her cheeks burned. Yet it was thanks only to
some clever fencing on her part, and perhaps some words of caution to
Augustus from his mentor, that she had not been, and she knew in her
heart it must come soon.
Just when you were having a good time and did not wish to be bothered,
it was tiresome to have to decide momentous questions, she told herself
almost fretfully, as she was borne swiftly and smoothly downtown one
afternoon. There was the usual detention at the Y.M.C.A. corner, and
Margaret Elizabeth looked out and almost into the Candy Wagon before she
knew it. But there was no cause for alarm. Beneath the white cap of the
Candy Man shone the round Irish countenance of Tim Malone.
Was it Tim after all who had viewed her triumphal walk down the avenue?
The question brought not a hint of a smile to Miss Bentley's lips; and
this was a very grave symptom.
If Uncle Bob had been within reach! But he wasn't. He had run down to
Florida to look after his orange grove, and Dr. Prue was up to her eyes
in grip cases. There was every reason why Margaret Elizabeth should stay
on at Pennington Park.
So the Little Red Chimney had no chance to get in its work. In vain
Virginia looked from the dining-room window for its curling smoke. In
vain did the invalid sister of Miss Kitty, the dressmaker, dream of the
beautiful young lady who brought her roses. In vain did the postman and
the market-man inquire of Nancy when Miss Bentley was coming back. To
the Miser alone, who from his study window had also noted the deadness
of the Little Red Chimney, was the privilege of a word with the
enchantress accorded. It came about through Mrs. Gerrard Pennington's
interest in the furnishing of the new quarters of the Colonial Dames.
Hearing of a desirable print owned by Mr. Knight, which it was
understood he might be induced to part with, she drove thither to
canvass the matter, accompanied by her niece. On the way they picked
up Augustus, who knew nothing of prints, but was pleased to join the
expedition.
The Miser, beneath his grave courtesy, seemed taken aback by this
invasion of his solitude. Mrs. Pennington's conventional suavity plainly
embarrassed him. He smiled indeed at Margaret Elizabeth, remarking as he
spread out his engravings that it had been long since he last saw her.
The impulse was strong upon her to follow him to his desk and ask if he
had any news of the Candy Man. There were moments when she thought it
strange she had had no word. These were but fleeting moments, however;
for the most part she succeeded, or thought she succeeded, in dismissing
him to the limbo of the past. So now she resisted the impulse to ask
news of him.
When it came to negotiations Margaret Elizabeth and Augustus, leaving
Mrs. Pennington to conduct them, moved about the room, viewing the
Miser's curios.
"Do you care for mezzotints?" she asked him.
"I don't know the first thing about them," Augustus owned. "In fact
never saw one."
She laughed. "Oh, yes, you have. Ever so many of the Reynolds and Romney
portraits were reproduced in mezzotint. If I am not mistaken there is
one hanging in your own hall."
Augustus gazed at her in undisguised admiration. "I don't see how you
learn so much, Miss Bentley. I have no doubt I have a lot of things you
could help me to appreciate."
From this dangerous ground she moved hastily, calling attention to the
portrait above the mantel. Mr. McAllister was more at home here.
"A rattling good picture. General Waite, by the way," he informed her,
"was own cousin to my grandmother on my mother's side. My great
grandfather and his father were brothers, don't you know."
"Indeed!" said Margaret Elizabeth, politely. The relationship did
not interest her, but she wondered, in annoyance, why the cousin of
Augustus, on his mother's side, should look down on her with the eyes of
the Candy Man. Stern eyes they were, with a sparkle of humour behind the
sternness.
On the way home Mrs. Pennington was stirred to reminiscence. "One of
the first parties I ever attended was in that old house," she said.
"It must have been thirty-five years ago. I was a very young girl--barely
seventeen. General Waite was a most courtly man, and his wife was quite
famous for her beauty. It was there I met Mr. Pennington. He and the
general's nephew, Robert Waite, were great friends. They went to college
together. He disappeared strangely. I remember Gerrard was dread fully
upset about it at the time. It was just before our marriage."
To all this Margaret Elizabeth only half listened. The eyes of the
general lingered reproachfully with her, and perhaps were at the bottom
of that policy of postponement with which Augustus was met when the
inevitable moment came.
Just a little time was all she asked. Mr. McAllister was talking of a
trip to Panama; let him go, and on his return he should have his answer.
Miss Bentley was very sweet as she spoke thus; eminently worth waiting
for. So Augustus went to Panama, and she was left to argue matters with
herself.
During the process she grew pale. Mixed up with her arguments was that
foolish idea that she ought to have heard something from the Candy Man.
Had he seen that item in the _Evening Record_?
Mrs. Pennington noticed the pallor, but treated it lightly. Margaret
Elizabeth was tired out, but now Lent was here she would rest. She was
worn to death herself, but she would recuperate, and surely her niece,
who was years younger, could do the same. She failed to take into
consideration the complications lacking in her own case. In fact, having
brought matters to the present status, Mrs. Pennington allowed herself
to relax.
Mr. Gerrard Pennington looked at Margaret Elizabeth from beneath his
bushy brows. Confound them, what were they doing to her? She had a way
of joining him in the library, and sitting with a book in her lap, which
she seldom read.
One day, laying down his paper, and after a cautious glance over his
shoulder, he remarked: "Did it ever occur to you, Margaret Elizabeth,
that you don't have to marry anybody?"
She stared at him with surprised eyes, in which a smile slowly dawned.
"Why, Uncle Gerry, what do you mean? Of course I don't have to."
"There is a great deal in suggestion," continued Mr. Pennington. "Keep
telling people a certain thing, confront them with it on all occasions,
and they will be influenced in spite of themselves; and it has occurred
to me----"
"Yes?" said Margaret Elizabeth.
"Well, that it applies in your case." Mr. Pennington cleared his throat.
"A certain person whom we know has behaved very well of late; better
than I thought was in him, but--unless you are pretty sure you can't
live without him--Now this is rank treason on my part, but don't be too
soft-hearted, Margaret Elizabeth."
Mr. Pennington returned to his stock-market reports, and silence
reigned, but presently two hands rested on his shoulders, and a velvet
cheek touched his for a moment. "Thank you, Uncle Gerry," said Margaret
Elizabeth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
_Which shows Miss Bentley recovering from a fit of what Uncle Bob
calls Cantankerousness; in which a shipwrecked letter is brought to
light, and Dr. Prue is called again to visit the child of the Park
Superintendent._
"And he turned into a splendid prince (he had been one all the time
really, you know), and he laid all his riches at Violetta's feet, and
made her a princess, because she had been true to him through thick and
thin."
Virginia's voice rose in triumphant climax.
"That's all very fine in a fairy-tale, Virginia, and it is an extremely
good one for a little girl like you to make up out of her own head. But
you know in real life it is different." Margaret Elizabeth gazed
pensively into the fire.
Virginia, prone upon the hearth-rug, was disposed to argue what she did
not understand. "How different?"
"Well, in a fairy-tale you can have things as you want them, but in
real life you get tangled up in what other people want, and with duty
and common sense; and when you determine to follow your--" Margaret
Elizabeth was going to say "heart," but changed to "intuitions," "you
are left high and dry on a desert island."
Virginia was to be excused if she failed to make head or tail of this.
"I wish the Candy Man would come back," she remarked irrelevantly. "He
was much nicer than Tim. He liked fairy-tales. He said he was coming
some time."
"Oh, did he?" said Miss Bentley.
The reference to a desert island, and a disposition to quarrel with
fairy-tales, go to show that while she was decidedly more like herself
than in the last chapter, her recovery was not yet complete. In fact
Margaret Elizabeth was suffering from the irritability that so often
accompanies convalescence. Cantankerousness was Uncle Bob's word for it,
and he defended it with all the eloquence of which he was master, his
finger on the page in the dictionary where it was to be found in good
and regular standing.
It really did not matter what you called it; the point was, that in an
argument with her aunt, Margaret Elizabeth had gone further than she
intended; had said what had better have been left unsaid. This she
confessed to Dr. Prue.
"Let me see your tongue," commanded that professional lady, regarding
her searchingly.
Margaret Elizabeth displayed the unruly member, laughing as she did so.
"What did you say to Mrs. Pennington?"
"We were speaking," Margaret Elizabeth answered meekly, "of gratitude,
and Aunt Eleanor said, as you are always hearing people say, that there
is little or none of it in the world. You see, in some matter which came
up in the Colonial Dames, Nancy Lane sided against her. 'And after all
I've done for her!' cried Aunt Eleanor. I said I thought gratitude was
an overrated virtue anyway, and that to expect a person to vote your way
because you had been good to her, was a kind of graft."
"Humph!" said Dr. Prue.
"I know it was a dreadful, dreadful thing to say." Tears were in
Margaret Elizabeth's eyes. "When she has been loveliness itself to me.
There it is, you see. I have thought about it, and thought about it,
until I'm all mixed up."
"What did your aunt say?"
"She was very dignified. She had not expected to hear such a thing from
me. Then she walked away."
"I hope you asked her pardon."
"I had no chance. She has gone to Chicago--was on her way to the station
then. I will, of course."
"For a young thing your ideas are not bad, though your problem is
entangled in foolish convention, personal pride and so on. But neither
you nor I was born to set the world right. Now cheer up and think no
more about it for the present. Be ready at two o'clock to go to the park
with me. The superintendent's child is ill again."
Having delivered her prescription, Dr. Prue left, and her patient
returned to her hearth-stone and an endeavour to be honest with
herself. Virginia had interrupted this most difficult process with her
fairy-tale. While it could not be said to bear upon the situation, after
she had left Margaret Elizabeth was conscious of a faint lightening of
the fog.
As they sped smoothly toward the park, in the new electric, Margaret
Elizabeth driving, Dr. Prue exclaimed, "There, I'm forgetting that
letter again." Unfastening her bag she held it open while she continued,
"I hope you'll forgive whoever is to blame, but when the hall was being
cleaned yesterday, James fished this out of the umbrella jar. Dear knows
how it got there or when; it looks as if it had been in a shipwreck."
She produced a stained and sorry-looking missive from her bag. "You can
just make out the address, the postmark is quite gone," she added,
laying it in her companion's lap. "You haven't missed an important
letter, have you?"
"Not that I know of," Margaret Elizabeth replied with a laugh that was
a bit unsteady. "It is probably nothing of value." She kept her gaze on
the road ahead. "Just slip it in my pocket, please."
All the rest of the way to the park her heart thumped uncomfortably.
Could it be? Of course not, it was an advertisement. Why get excited?
Meanwhile she chatted pleasantly with Dr. Prue.
"All you need is fresh air and a simple life for a while. Your colour
has come back wonderfully," the doctor remarked as they drew up at the
cottage gate. "Will you wait for me here?"
"If you don't mind, I think I'll go into the park, and if I'm not back
by the time you are ready, don't wait. I can take the street car."
Turning in at the entrance to the park, Margaret Elizabeth was for a
fleeting moment aware of a Candy Wagon standing at the curb a few yards
away. There was nothing unusual in this except the odd way in which it
fitted into the situation, and the next moment she had forgotten
everything but the letter in her hand.
She walked slowly down the path. The April sunshine sifted through a
faint and feathery greenness overhead, the air was clear and fresh. She
was thinking that she had seen just one little scrap of the Candy Man's
writing--on the card accompanying the Christmas basket; and this on the
letter was blurred and stained, yet she was sure of it. He had written.
She had been sure he would. She was glad. She would be honest with
herself. She wanted him for a friend. In many ways she liked him better
than any one she had met this winter. She wanted to know more about him.
She tried to tear the letter open, but for all it was so damaged the
paper had remained tough. She would wait to read it till she reached the
summer house. That little vine-hung arbour had been in her thought ever
since Dr. Prue proposed to bring her down to the park. She had a foolish
desire to sit there and look at the river, and go on being honest with
herself.
Margaret Elizabeth, mounting the steps and looking at her letter as she
did so, was confronted by somebody who started up in surprise from the
bench where she had sat with her flowers that autumn day.
For one surprised moment she and the stranger faced each other, then
Miss Bentley exclaimed, "I saw the wagon at the gate, but I didn't know
it was yours." And then the mischief faded into simple honest gladness
as she held out her hand. "I certainly did not expect to see you," she
added, "but you are an unexpected sort of person."
"Nothing so wonderful as the chance of meeting you occurred to me for a
moment," the Candy Man assured her. "In fact I was not certain you cared
to see me." Those same pleasant eyes, so emphatically not the eyes of
Augustus, looked into hers questioningly.
Margaret Elizabeth held up the letter. "It was shipwrecked," she said.
"I got it only a few minutes ago. I haven't read it. I thought it was
you who didn't care to be friends."
The Candy Man did not exactly understand how a letter could be
shipwrecked in an overland journey of ten hours, but he dismissed it as
of no importance. "It isn't worth reading now," he said. "It was just
to make my adieus and ask if some time when I had lived down my past,"
here he smiled, "I might come back and tell you my strange story. I was
counting on your willingness to be friends. You remember you said it
would do no harm to hope."
"Oh, did I? And when you did not hear from me, what did you think?
Honestly," asked Margaret Elizabeth.
"I thought of course there must be a reason. A shipwreck did not occur
to me."
"Do you mean a reason for not being friends? But you came."
"The suspense was too much for me. I haven't many friends; and besides,
this is on the way to Texas."
"So you are going to Texas this time?"
It seemed the Candy Man had heard of an opening there.
Margaret Elizabeth wanted to ask why he had come to the park, but
something told her not to; instead she said, looking away to the shining
river, "I know of no reason why we should not be friends. So I am ready
to hear the story you speak of. Is it more strange than the adventures
of a Candy Wagon?" Her eyes came back and met his as they had done the
day when the conversation turned upon fairy godmothers. Margaret
Elizabeth was not spoiled.
"It is more serious," was his reply. "In fact, it is very serious.
The Candy Wagon was a mere episode. What I wish to tell you now goes
deeper."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
_In which the Candy Man relates his story, and the Miser comes upon
Volume I of the shabby book with the funny name._
"I want you to know all about me," began the Candy Man, taking from his
pocket the shabby little book Virginia had once remarked on, "so there
may be no more wrong impressions."
They sat in the sunshine on the top step of the little pavilion, facing
the river. Margaret Elizabeth, supporting her chin in her hand, regarded
him gravely. The west wind was cool on their faces.
"I have often imagined myself telling you," he went on. "Not that there
is much to it, besides its strangeness. In fact, to be brief, I don't
know who I am."
The surprise in Miss Bentley's eyes caused him to add quickly: "Not that
I am a foundling. But my father and mother were lost at sea when I was
three years old. We were coming from Victoria to San Francisco, when the
steamer went down. Only a few of the passengers were saved, I among
them."
"How sad and terrible!" cried Margaret Elizabeth. "Can you remember it?
How lost and lonely you must have been! Poor little child!"
"I recall it only in a vague way," he answered, "confused with what has
since been told me. When it was known that my parents were lost, a man
and his wife, fellow passengers, offered to adopt me. Beyond the name
'Robert Deane, Wife and Child,' on the list at the ship's office, they
were unable to learn anything about me, and I was too young and
bewildered to give any clue."
"That is very strange," said Margaret Elizabeth. "Your new father and
mother were kind to you?"
"So kind I soon forgot the terror and loneliness, and grew happy and
content. Everything was done to make me forget, and I think while they
made every effort to find out something about me, they were glad when
they failed. I wish now that my childish memories might have been
fostered, for I find myself reaching back into a mist full of vague
shapes.
"My new father was a civil engineer, whose work took him here, there and
everywhere throughout the broad West. I never knew a permanent home. My
adopted mother died when I was twelve. After that came boarding school
and college. About the time I left college my father's health failed,
and for several years he was helpless and very dependent upon me, so
I gave up my plan of entering a mining school.
"It was during his illness that he began to speak to me of my own
parents. He had talked to them on several occasions during the voyage,
and he described them as young people of refinement and education. My
mother, he thought from her speech, was English. They rather held aloof,
he said, and seemed disinclined to mention their own affairs. While he
was ill the news came to us of the finding in a storage warehouse in San
Francisco of an old trunk which it seemed probable had belonged to my
parents. Without going into detail, I may say it was through an old
acquaintance of my adopted father's, who knew the circumstances of my
adoption, that we heard of it. He had some interest in the warehouse,
which was about to be torn down and rebuilt. This trunk was found in
some forgotten corner where it had lain for twenty-five years."
"And did it throw any light?" asked Margaret Elizabeth.
"Not much, it rather deepened the mystery. There was little of
significance in it, but this book and a package of letters. From them I
learned nothing definite, but gathered the unwelcome probability that my
father was under some sort of cloud, and was not using his real name.
This was a matter of inference--of deduction, largely, but it was plain
he had left his home in some sort of trouble.
"It is not easy to piece together scattered allusions, when you have no
clue. The letters were most of them written by my father to my mother,
just before and soon after their marriage, with one or two from her to
him. One of these, which I found between the leaves of this little book,
I want you to read. It concludes my story, and to my mind lightens it a
little."
The letter the Candy Man held out to Margaret Elizabeth was written on
thin paper, in a delicate angular hand.
"Ought I to read it?" she demurred. "Are you sure she would like it?"
"Somehow I am very sure," he answered. "And I feel that it will be a
grip on our friendship. I have told you the worst, I wish you to know
the best of me."
She acquiesced, and, an elbow on her knee, shading her eyes with her
hand, she read the letter, whose date was thirty years ago. Far back
in the past this seemed to Margaret Elizabeth, yet it was a girl like
herself who wrote.
The first sentences were almost meaningless, so strong was the feeling
that she had no right to be reading it at all, but as she went on she
forgot her scruples. It was evidently a reply to a letter from her lover
in which he had spoken of the cloud that hung over his name, and it was
a confession of her faith in him, girlish, sweet and tender. "I trust
you, Robert," it said. "It is in you to do heedless things, to be
reckless, if only because you are young and eager and strong; but it
is not in you to be dishonourable; of this I am as certain as I am of
anything in life. Some day the truth will be known and you will be
cleared, but whether it is or no, I choose to walk beside you. I choose
it gladly, happily. I write the words again, gladly, happily, Robert.
Yours, Mary."
"Oh!" cried Margaret Elizabeth, lifting a glowing face, "I love Mary."
"She was brave and unselfish," said the Candy Man.
Margaret Elizabeth nodded. "Yes, that is one side of it. Still, you see,
she was sure, and it was, as she says, a joy to cast in her lot with
him. 'Gladly, happily.'" Her eyes shone. She gazed far away down the
river. The wind blew little tendrils of bright hair across her cheek.
"It must be so when you care very much," she went on.
"But," argued the Candy Man, "under the stress of very noble feeling
people sometimes do foolish things, do they not?"
"But this was not. Do you think for a moment Mary ever regretted it?
I see what you mean by the best of you. It is something to have such
credentials." Margaret Elizabeth's gaze met the Candy Man's, and her
eyes were deep as they had been on Christmas Eve, in the firelight.
Oh, Margaret Elizabeth, it is your own fault, for being so dear, so
unworldly! Could you, can you, cast in your lot with an unknown Candy
Man? He has no business to ask you. He did not mean to, but only to
prepare the way. He knows he is no great catch, even from the point of
view of a Little Red Chimney. These are not the precise words of the
Candy Man, but something like them....
So absorbed was Margaret Elizabeth in the thought of Mary, she was a bit
slow in taking in their meaning. She gave him one startled glance, and
then looked down, as it happened, upon the shabby little book which lay
on the step between them. Absently she drew it toward her, and with
fingers that trembled, opened it, as if to find her answer in its pages.
Then a smile began faintly to curl about her lips, and she read aloud
from the book:
_"What we find then to accord with love and reason, that we may
safely pronounce right and good."_
"Judged at the bar of reason I fear my case is hopeless," protested the
Candy Man, putting out his hand to close the book.
But Margaret Elizabeth clasped it to her breast. "I see nothing
unreasonable in it," she declared stoutly. As she spoke a faded crimson
flower fell in her lap.
Somewhat later in the afternoon, Miss Bentley and the Candy Man,
walking together along the river path, had they not been so engrossed
in their own affairs, might have recognised the tall, stooping figure
of the Miser strolling slowly ahead of them. It was for a minute only,
for near a turn in the path he bent forward and disappeared in a thicket
of althea bushes. At this season it was not a dense thicket, and Mr.
Knight, poking in the soft mould with his cane in search of a certain
tiny plant, had no thought of hiding, but, as it chanced, was unobserved
by his friends.
"Oh, Margaret Elizabeth," her companion was saying as they passed, "you
are so dear! I have no business to be telling you so, but indeed I can't
help it."