The Portygee Part 33

Madeline colored becomingly and was, as Jane described it, "awfully fussed."

"Nonsense!" she exclaimed, with much indignation, "I haven't any such thing. You know I haven't, Jane."

"Yes, you have, my dear. You have a photograph of him standing in front of the drug store and looking dreamily in at--at the strawberry sundaes.

It is a most romantic pose, really."

Albert laughed. He remembered the photograph. It was one of a series of snapshots taken with Miss Kelsey's camera one Sat.u.r.day afternoon when a party of young people had met in front of the sundae dispensary. Jane had insisted on "snapping" everyone.

"That reminds me that I have never seen the rest of those photographs,"

he said.

"Haven't you?" exclaimed Jane. "Well, you ought to see them. I have Madeline's with me. It is a dream, if I do say it as I took it."

She produced the snapshot, which showed her friend standing beside the silver-leaf tree before the druggist's window and smiling at the camera.

It was a good likeness and, consequently, a very pretty picture.

"Isn't it a dream, just as I said?" demanded the artist. "Honest now, isn't it?"

Albert of course declared it to be beyond praise.

"May I have this one?" he asked, on the impulse of the moment.

"Don't ask me, stupid," commanded Jane, mischievously. "It isn't my funeral--or my portrait, either."

"May I?" he repeated, turning to Madeline. She hesitated.

"Why--why yes, you may, if you care for it," she said. "That particular one is Jane's, anyway, and if she chooses to give it away I don't see how I can prevent her. But why you should want the old thing I can't conceive. I look as stiff and wooden as a sign-post."

Jane held up a protesting finger.

"Fibs, fibs, fibs," she observed. "Can't conceive why he should want it!

As if you weren't perfectly aware that he will wear it next his heart and--Oh, don't put it in THAT pocket! I said next your heart, and that isn't on your RIGHT side."

Albert took the photograph home and stuck it between the frame and gla.s.s of his bureau. Then came a sudden remembrance of his parting with Helen and with it a twinge of conscience. He had begged her to have nothing to do with any other fellow. True she had refused to promise and consequently he also was unbound, but that made no difference--should not make any. So he put the photograph at the back of the drawer where he kept his collars and ties, with a resolve never to look at it. He did not look at it--very often.

Then came another long winter. He ground away at the bookkeeping--he was more proficient at it, but he hated it as heartily as ever--and wrote a good deal of verse and some prose. For the first time he sold a prose article, a short story, to a minor magazine. He wrote long letters to Helen and she replied. She was studying hard, she liked her work, and she had been offered the opportunity to tutor in a girls' summer camp in Vermont during July and August and meant to accept provided her father's health continued good. Albert protested violently against her being absent from South Harniss for so long. "You will scarcely be home at all," he wrote. "I shall hardly see you. What am I going to do? As it is now I miss you--" and so on for four closely written pages. Having gotten into the spirit of composition he, so to speak, gloried in his loneliness, so much so that Helen was moved to remonstrate. "Your letter made me almost miserable," she wrote, "until I had read it over twice.

Then I began to suspect that you were enjoying your wretchedness, or enjoying writing about it. I truly don't believe anyone--you especially--could be quite as lonesome as all that. Honestly now, Albert, weren't you exaggerating a little? I rather think you were?"

He had been, of course, but it irritated him to think that she recognized the fact. She had an uncanny faculty of seeing through his every pretense. In his next letter he said nothing whatever about being lonesome.

At home, and at the office, the war was what people talked about most of the time. Since the Lusitania's sinking Captain Zelotes had been a battle charger chafing at the bit. He wanted to fight and to fight at once.

"We've got to do it, Mother," he declared, over and over again. "Sooner or later we've got to fight that Kaiser gang. What are we waitin' for; will somebody tell me that?"

Olive, as usual, was mild and unruffled.

"Probably the President knows as much about it as you and me, Zelotes,"

she suggested. "I presume likely he has his own reasons."

"Humph! When Seth Ba.s.sett got up in the night and took a drink out of the bottle of Paris Green by mistake 'Bial Cahoon asked him what in time he kept Paris Green in his bedroom for, anyhow. All that Seth would say was that he had his own reasons. The rest of the town was left to guess what those reasons was. That's what the President's doin'--keepin' us guessin'. By the everlastin', if I was younger I'd s.h.i.+p aboard a British lime-juicer and go and fight, myself!"

It was Rachel Ellis who caused the Captain to be a bit more restrained in his remarks.

"You hadn't ought to talk that way, Cap'n Lote," she said. "Not when Albert's around, you hadn't."

"Eh? Why not?"

"Because the first thing you know he'll be startin' for Canada to enlist. He's been crazy to do it for 'most a year."

"He has? How do you know he has?"

"Because he's told me so, more'n once."

Her employer looked at her.

"Humph!" he grunted. "He seems to tell you a good many things he doesn't tell the rest of us."

The housekeeper nodded. "Yes," she said gravely, "I shouldn't wonder if he did." A moment later she added, "Cap'n Lote, you will be careful, won't you? You wouldn't want Al to go off and leave Z. Snow and Company when him and you are gettin' on so much better. You ARE gettin' on better, ain't you?"

The captain pulled at his beard.

"Yes," he admitted, "seems as if we was. He ain't any wonder at bookkeepin', but he's better'n he used to be; and he does seem to try hard, I'll say that for him."

Rachael beamed gratification. "He'll be a Robert Penfold yet," she declared; "see if he isn't. So you musn't encourage him into enlistin'

in the Canadian army. You wouldn't want him to do that any more'n the rest of us would."

The captain gazed intently into the bowl of the pipe which he had been cleaning. He made no answer.

"You wouldn't want him to do that, would you?" repeated the housekeeper.

Captain Lote blew through the pipe stem. Then he said, "No, I wouldn't ... but I'm darn glad he's got the s.p.u.n.k to WANT to do it. We may get that Portygee streak out of him, poetry and all, give us time; eh, Rachael?"

It was the first time in months that he had used the word "Portygee" in connection with his grandson. Mrs. Ellis smiled to herself.

In April the arbutus buds began to appear above the leaf mold between the scrub oaks in the woods, and the walls of Fletcher Fosd.i.c.k's new summer home began to rise above the young pines on the hill by the Inlet in the Bay Road. The Item kept its readers informed, by weekly installments, of the progress made by the builders.

The lumber for Mr. Fletcher Fosd.i.c.k's new cottage is beginning to be hauled to his property on Inlet Hill in this town. Our enterprising firm of South Harniss dealers, Z. Snow & Co., are furnis.h.i.+ng said lumber.

Mr. Nehemiah Nickerson is to do the mason work. Mr. Fosd.i.c.k shows good judgment as well as a commendable spirit in engaging local talent in this way. We venture to say he will never regret it.

A week later:

Mr. Fletcher Fosd.i.c.k's new residence is beginning building, the foundation being pretty near laid.

And the following week: