YOUNG WHITCOMB sat quite at his ease in Donald Preston’s big arm-chair,
one leg flung carelessly over the other, his handsome head thrown back,
its riotous curls shining in the lamp-light. His blue eyes, full of
laughter, were set upon Barbara.
“So you thought I was dead, did you?” he asked, in a bantering tone;
“but it didn’t appear to bother you much. You’re looking handsomer than
ever, Barbara. I had an idea I’d find you—changed.”
He waited for some sort of reply; but Barbara was trying hard to
reconcile the ruddy, smiling man, who sat so unconcernedly in her dead
father’s place, with the pallid, serious, large-eyed phantom of her
dreams. She had been looking at him in puzzled silence, and now her
glance disengaged itself from his with an effort.
“I’ll wager,” he said, “that you have been thinking of me with ’a crown
upon my forehead, a harp within my hand,’ the way we used to sing in
Sunday school when we were kids. Now own up! And you’re disappointed to
find that I’m such a commonplace, live-looking chap—eh, Barbara?”
“I find you—changed,” she confessed, in a low voice, “greatly changed.”
David Whitcomb laughed triumphantly.
“Yes; I flatter myself that the pious pedagogue has been pretty well
knocked out of me in the last five years. Good Lord! what a solemn,
sentimental ass I must have been in those days. It was a lucky thing
for me that you sent me about my business. Still,—Barbara, I’d give a
gold nugget to know just what you thought when they told you I’d passed
in my checks. Did you picture poor David lying cold and pale under some
frozen cairn along the Yukon trail? That’s the way they dispose of
unlucky prospectors up north; just dig a hole in the snow and drop ’em
in; then pile stones on top to keep off the wolves. Ugh! I can hear ’em
howl, if I stop to to think, now. Did you drop a tear on that imaginary
grave of mine up in the Arctic; did you, Barbara?”
Her eyes evaded his smiling blue gaze.
“Why should you ask?” she hesitated. “It was a great surprise—a great
shock.”
“You refer, of course, to the news of my death,” he said. “But you
survived the shock, as you call it, and—you are far more beautiful than
I remembered you.”
He leaned forward and rested his head on his clasped hands, his eyes
searching her face with smiling boldness.
“There are not many men,” he went on, “who come back from the grave the
way I did to find—everything so unchanged.”
He sprang from his chair and paced the floor excitedly.
“If I’d only come yesterday!” he cried. “I had saved enough—I could
have prevented that absurd fiasco.”
He stopped in front of her.
“Why didn’t you answer my letter, Barbara?”
“I couldn’t read it,” she murmured, a sudden vivid color fluttering in
her cheeks. “Jimmy lost it on the way home from the office, and it lay
out in the rain a week. I knew, though, that you were not—dead.”
“And that I had not forgotten you,” he urged. “You must have wondered,
though, why I had not written before. But I couldn’t. I swore when
I went away that I would get money—somehow. That I would get enough
to save you out of the slavery you were in then. I meant to hire a
caretaker for your father, a nurse for the boy. But I had the devil’s
own luck. Three times I won, only to lose. Then I made a little
pile—not enough; but still I thought—I hoped—— Do you want me to tell
you what I hoped, Barbara?”
“No,” she said faintly. “I—can’t listen.”
“Why?” he urged. “Do you—love someone else?”
She looked at him imploringly.
“You were here, and you know——”
“Yes,” he said sharply. “I know what happened. You must have been out
of your mind with anxiety, Barbara, to have thought of such a thing.
Why did you do it?”
“I wanted to save the farm—for Jimmy.”
He shrugged his shoulders, with a muttered exclamation.
“You got the money?”
“Yes.”
“And so you’re sold into slavery for five years?”
She made no reply.
“Now, see here, Barbara. I won’t stand for anything of the sort. It’s
an outrage. I haven’t enough—quite—to pay the other fellow out; but
I’ll arrange it with him—or her. Is it a man or a woman slave-holder,
Barbara?”
She hesitated.
“I—don’t know,” she said, “not yet.”
“You don’t know?” he echoed. “Why, this is more preposterous than the
other. Of course you’ll have to know.”
“It is quite true,” she said quietly. “I only know that I must be ready
to leave home at a minute’s notice.”
He bent over her with sudden passion.
“Marry me, Barbara,” he begged in a low, shaken voice. “If you only
will, I’ll manage it somehow.”
“I—can’t,” she murmured. “I am in honor bound. Don’t you see? I’ve
accepted the money, and paid a part of it for debts.”
He threw himself down in his chair and pulled it toward hers
impatiently.
“Let me think,” he said quickly. “You’ve paid off your mortgage. How
much was it?”
She told him, and he set down the figures rapidly.
“Who held your mortgage?” he wanted to know.
“Stephen Jarvis,” she said, with a singular reluctance at which she
wondered, even while she perceived it.
“Miserly old crab; I remember him,” said David Whitcomb.
His face brightened suddenly.
“Hurrah!” he cried. “I have it! With what you’ve got left and my little
pile we’ve more than enough to buy you back. Don’t you see? Marry me,
dear, and we’ll call the sale off, pay back the money, and——”
He stopped short at sight of her unresponsive face.
“I’ve signed a contract,” she objected.
“What if you have?” he urged. “The contract can be quashed. You’ll give
me the right to get you out of it, Barbara?”
She hesitated, her eyes averted from his anxious face.
“Do you mean that you don’t—that you can’t—? Barbara, do you prefer
slavery—to me?”
“I mean,” she said slowly, “that I cannot—promise you anything until——”
“But don’t you see, dear, that it would be better, safer that way? As
your husband—even as your promised husband—I could—Good Lord! what a
preposterous situation! You must give me the right to get you out of
it.”
She shook her head.
“I did it voluntarily,” she said, “and I must fulfil my agreement.”
His face reddened with quick anger.
“Then you will go peacefully away with this person—man or woman—and
stay five years, when the matter might easily be arranged by paying
back the money, and by proving a prior claim. My claim is prior,
Barbara. I loved you five years ago. I love you now. Give me the right
to break this absurd bond. Won’t you, Barbara?”
His lips, his eyes, pleaded with his eloquent voice. He dropped to his
knees beside her chair; his arm stole about her waist.
“Barbara!” he murmured, his face close to hers.
She broke from him with a little shuddering cry.
“What is it? What have I done?”
“Do you know—did you hear how my father—died?” she asked, in a
frightened voice.
He sprang to his feet, his face crimson with shame and fury.
“I drank a glass of wine before I came here to-night—a single glass,”
he said. “Is it that you mean?”
His eyes demanded instant answer.
“If you had suffered what I suffered——” she began; then her voice
broke. “I couldn’t help it, David; I—remembered.”
It was the first time she had called him by his name. He looked at her
in silence for a minute.
“I understand,” he said gently. “I won’t offend again. I promise you.”
“To-morrow,” she went on hurriedly, “I shall hear; someone will call
for me. I am all ready—to go. But I will—try, I will explain——”
She put out her hand to forestall his quick protest.
“No; please. I—cannot promise anything—yield anything, until I have
arranged the matter. If I succeed——”
He waited for her to go on.
“I must have time to think,” she murmured. “I—am not sure of myself.”
He went away, bidding her a brief good-night, his eyes hurt and angry.
Barbara watched his straight, lithe figure, as he strode away from the
little circle of her lamp-light into the dripping gloom of the spring
night. So had she sent him away from her long ago into the rain and the
darkness. Then, as now, she was in honor bound to a lonely task.
She turned to find her newly engaged housekeeper standing behind her in
the semi-obscurity of the passage. Martha Cottle was a tall, angular
woman with a pallid, uncertain complexion, a long thin nose, and an air
of perpetual inquiry.
“Was that the party you expect to work for?” she demanded. “I thought,”
she added, with a slightly offended air, “that you’d call me in and
introduce me. I was waiting in the dining-room.”
Barbara wondered if the spinster’s large, flat ears had caught any of
the conversation, carried on unguardedly on the other side of the door.
She shook her head. “That wasn’t the person,” she said. “Perhaps
to-morrow——” She hesitated. “Of course it will be soon.”
Miss Cottle pushed authoritatively into the room where Barbara had been
sitting.
“I haven’t had a real good opportunity to talk things over with you,”
she said. “If you’re expecting to be called away sudden, perhaps this
will be as good a time as any. I want to tell you what I think about
that child.”
Barbara drew a deep breath.
“Well?” she murmured interrogatively.
“I see you’ve spoiled him pretty completely,” pursued Miss Cottle. “But
I’ll soon get him in hand.”
She compressed her thin lips.
“He got into a regular tantrum to-night because I took a book of his to
look at. ‘Vallable Inf’mation,’ he calls it. Nearly every word in it is
spelled wrong. I wonder at you for permitting anything of the sort. I
took the book away from him. Here it is.”
Barbara looked at the woman in a sudden panic of apprehension.
“Oh!” she protested, “you ought not to have done that. The book was a
birthday present. It is one of Jimmy’s dearest treasures.”
“I believe you said you wanted I should look after James’s education,”
intoned the spinster. “If I am to stay here, I shall do it
con-sci-en-tiously.”
She pronounced the last word with due regard to every syllable, it
being a favorite adverb modifying every possible activity.
Barbara was turning over the pages of the book, several of which were
quite covered with Jimmy’s scrawling characters in red ink.
“A Vallable Information ’bout getting mad [she read]. Dont get mad Ezy.
It dont Do enny Good, an sum the tim it gets a fello in Trubble. Peg
says this is portant.”
Barbara smiled as she shut the covers gently together.
“I shall give this book to Jimmy,” she said quietly, “and please, Miss
Cottle, don’t take it away from him again. Jimmy is such a little boy,
and I—he has always been loved. I hope you——”
“I don’t believe in sozzling over a child,” interrupted the woman
severely. “I’ll see that the boy gets plenty of good bread and butter,
and that he goes to school and Sabbath services regularly. By the time
you get back I guess you’ll see quite a change in him. When do you
expect to start, to-morrow?”
Miss Cottle’s tone expressed a growing impatience.
“I supposed you’d get off this afternoon. I see your trunk is packed
and all. There’s no use of hanging back and procrastinating when
there’s work to do. That’s one thing I shall teach James.”
She compressed her lips severely, as if anxious to begin.
“I am ready to go,” Barbara told her, with lips which trembled in spite
of herself. “I hope you won’t be too severe with Jimmy—at first; he
isn’t used to it.”
“Yes,” agreed Miss Cottle, with an acid smile, “it’s easy enough to see
that you’ve spoiled the child completely. But I’ll soon straighten him
out. My method with children has never been known to fail. Their wills
want breaking the first thing; after that they’ll mind, I can tell you.”
“But I don’t want Jimmy’s will broken,” protested Barbara, “please
don’t try to do that.”
Miss Cottle tossed her head majestically.
“I shall use my own judgment,” she said firmly, “and I don’t expect no
interference; and that reminds me, I want to speak about that hired
man of yours. He’s brought more truck into that back bedroom, where
you said he was to sleep, than anybody could keep track of. I told him
I wouldn’t have it, and he answered back in a way I’m not accustomed
to hear. You’ll have to speak to him. Once you’re out the house, I’ll
try to get things regulated. But if I should be sick—and I may as well
tell you that I’m subject to bad spells of malaria—I shall have to send
for my sister from New Hampshire. She’s a widow with one daughter;
of course she’d have to bring Elvira along. I thought I’d tell you,
because once you’re gone you won’t be able to get back. I suppose your
idea is that I’ll do with everything the same as if it was my own for
the five years?”
Miss Cottle’s voice held a rising inflection, and Barbara murmured
something vaguely acquiescent.
“Of course I couldn’t do any other way,” pursued the spinster; “having
left my own nice home to come here and do for you. The butter and egg
money will be mine, I suppose, and the young chickens? I couldn’t think
of doing any other way than what I’ve been used to. There! I hear that
boy calling you. That sort of thing will have to be broken up, right
in the beginning—once you’re out of the house to stay. A great big boy
like that!”
Barbara fled upstairs, the little red book in her hand, to find Jimmy,
in his white night-gown, standing at the top of the stairs. She caught
the child in her strong young arms, cuddling his cold little body
against her breast.
“I wanted you,” grieved the child, half strangling her with his eager
kisses. “Why do we have that woman, Barb’ra? I don’t like her. She took
my Vallable Inf’mation book, ’n’—’n’—I scwatched her, ’n’ she slapped
me. Send her away, Barb’ra; we don’t want her; do we?”
The girl wrapped a blanket warmly about the child and sat down with him
in a chair by the window. The iron of her new chain bade fair to eat
into her very soul as she soothed and rocked into forgetfulness of his
troubles the beloved little cause of all her perplexities. Why, after
all, had she done this thing? Was there not a heavier debt than could
be paid in money? And was she not bankrupt still in love and peace?
In that hour of darkness all the terrifying consequences of her attempt
to break away from Jarvis crowded upon her mind. Unless the person
who had paid four thousand dollars for five years of her life could
be induced to release her, she must indeed pay heavily for Jimmy’s
inheritance. Her baffled thoughts hovered about the unknown personality
of this arbiter of her future.
“To-morrow,” she thought aloud, “I shall know.”