Paddy The Next Best Thing Part 55

"Oh, ride on the back of the train, of course!" she cried, "and home through the garden, just like we did as children. Oh, Jack, I've had to be so grown-up for two years. I absolutely refuse to be grown-up this Christmas holiday--we will--we _must_ be children."

"Anything you like," he cried, with the utmost readiness. "Come along,"

as the train moved. "Send up Miss Paddy's portmanteau. Good-by, Lawrence!" and they sprang on to the step of the guard's van and rode the short distance of railway to the Parsonage garden, leaving Lawrence to go home in the most unenviable frame of mind imaginable, which he later vented upon the household generally in his cold and cutting fas.h.i.+on, regardless of the fact that he was damping every one's Christmas.

But what cared Jack and Paddy?--least of all Paddy--for whom a joy seemed to have dropped straight from, the skies. What a noise there was, to be sure! and how Jack and Paddy _would_ talk at once, and make it impossible for any single sentence to be coherent.

At last, in desperation, Paddy picked up the little table-bell and rang it l.u.s.tily. "If I can't be heard, you shan't, Jack," she said, and, the moment he opened his mouth, started ringing it again. Jack immediately flew round the table to get the bell, and behold! if the two little ladies weren't collecting the breakables again, and casting agonising glances at the cups and saucers and plates on the breakfast-table--just for all the world as if two long years of separation had not rolled by since the last scrimmage, and these two mad things were not a day older.

If Paddy had not been in such a state of eager excitement, she must certainly have noticed sooner than she did an air of portent that still prevailed, as of some momentous event not yet revealed.

As it was, they all went to the little church as usual, Jack and the aunties sitting one side, and the Adairs on the other side, for the sake of old times; and came home again, and had their Christmas dinner, before Paddy got an inkling that further news was in the air. Up to then the whole conversation nearly had run upon Jack's adventures in the Argentine, and she had plied him with such an endless string of questions that there had really not been much opportunity for any other subject.

After dinner, however, they collected round a big log fire for a cozy afternoon, and a few minutes later a letter and parcel arrived by hand for Paddy. Both were from Doreen Blake, the parcel containing a handsome Christmas present, and the letter a piece of news that made her give a little exclamation of pleased surprise.

"Only fancy!" she cried. "Doreen Blake is engaged. What fun! How I wonder what he is like!"

The others looked up with interest.

"Evidently he has come over for Christmas, and it is only just settled,"

Paddy ran on. "I am pleased. Dear old Dorrie. He is a barrister, and they met last September, in Scotland. Really, engagements seem to be in the air. First Gwen Carew, then Doreen--and now I wonder who will be the third."

A kind of subdued murmur made her look up quickly, and something about Jack and Eileen caught her attention for the first time. In spite of herself, it sent a little chill to her heart. She folded her letter and sat down on the floor, leaning against Aunt Jane's lap.

"Now," she remarked, "I'm ready to be told why Jack has come home in this unexpected manner. You don't any of you seem to have been very communicative so far."

"I like that!" exclaimed Jack, "when you haven't given anybody a chance to get a word in edgeways all day--but there! you always did monopolise the whole conversation."

"You've come back more uppish than ever, Jack," she retorted. "Anybody would think you had come in; for a fortune at least."

This seemed to tickle them all quite unnecessarily, and Jack burst into a hearty laugh.

"You all seem rather easily amused," said Paddy, "or else I am getting very dense. What is the joke?"

"Only that you fired a shot at random and made a bull's-eye," laughed Jack.

Paddy looked more puzzled than ever, but suddenly she leaned forward and exclaimed:

"You don't mean that you have come in for a fortune, Jack?"

"Not exactly," he answered, "only a trifle of 20,000 pounds."

"_You've_ got 20,000 pounds?" incredulously.

"Yes. An obliging relative of my mother's, I had scarcely heard of, died a little while ago and left no other heirs but me."

For a moment Paddy was too astonished to speak, and they all watched her with eager happiness in their eyes. Undoubtedly there was more to come.

At last she looked up with a twinkle.

"My! if you'd only had it a bit sooner, Jack," she said, "we might have bought up all the chocolate in Mrs White's shop, and all the bull's-eyes, and all the licorice. Goodness! what a feast we would have had."

"We'll do lots better than that," he cried. "We'll have new boats, and new rifles, and new fis.h.i.+ng-rods."

"I'm thinking that isn't quite what brought Jack home after all,"

remarked Miss Jane.

"Ask Eileen," said Jack, in a way that made Eileen blush.

"What, more secrets!" cried Paddy. "It seems to me you'd better just start at the beginning, and tell me everything that has been going on behind my back in this barefaced fas.h.i.+on."

"Yes, only unfortunately we don't quite know where the beginning is, do we, Eileen?"

"It's too bad, Paddy, to tease you so," put in Eileen quickly. "The real truth is that last summer, when you didn't happen to be at home to see, letters from the Argentine began to come much oftener, and were not handed round for public perusal as usual. And then--You go on Jack,"

smiling at him.

"And then," said Jack readily enough, "some one wanted desperately to go along with the letters, and for some time could not find a way. At last, some one wrote and asked if he might come if he could find ways and means, and all unbeknown to every one but themselves, letter-writer and recipient arranged a little plan, if they could only manage to bring it off. While still in doubt as to ways and means, distant relative most obligingly dies, and then it is hey presto! and catch the next boat."

Paddy crossed the fireside circle in a flash, and flung herself upon Eileen.

"Oh, Eily, Eily," she cried, "you are engaged?--are you really engaged to Jack?"

"Yes, Paddy," and her voice and eyes spoke all she could not say.

"Oh, I'm so glad, I'm so glad, I feel as if I must just hug you both!

and the aunties too, and every one. What a lovely Christmas present, a new brother."

"But that isn't really all," cried Jack. "We're going to live at The Ghan House. Only think of it! and you and your mother are to have the west wing all to yourselves, and live there with us just as long as ever you will."

After that every one joined in, and the rest of the afternoon was spent in discussing numerous projects, interesting to all alike. Paddy joined in likewise with seeming eagerness, but deep down in her heart, minute by minute, a certain dragging weight made itself more and more apparent.

She would not for worlds have said so yet, for fear she might damp their happiness, but she knew quite well she would not go and live at The Ghan House with Jack and Eileen. An indefinable something, she hardly knew what, made her shrink instinctively and very certainly from such an arrangement. No, she would prefer to go back to her dispensing, and be independent, even if it was London, and she had to go alone.

There were tears on Paddy's eyelashes that night when she fell asleep.

It seemed to her as if a sudden, most unlooked-for weight of loneliness were crus.h.i.+ng her, and her whole soul longed and longed for the father sleeping quietly in the churchyard close beside her. She did not for one moment grudge Jack and Eileen their happiness--only just at first, just until she had got used to the new order and readjusted her own feelings a little--it was not easy to rejoice without one single qualm of painful remembrance.

The following day a lively call from Doreen and her _fiance_ on horseback cheered her considerably and helped her still better to hide everything from the rest; and the day after there was a little teasing and good-humoured raillery about a parcel from South Africa which had been forwarded from England. It contained a beautiful white ostrich-feather boa, and there was a delightful letter with it, begging her to accept it as a Christmas token, all of which told its own tale of constancy and steady persistence on the part of the lonely Englishman exiled there, and still dreaming of her when he had time to dream at all. Jack made most of such an opportunity and gave her little peace, and Paddy took it in excellent part, because she was glad of anything that would help to blind them to a certain circ.u.mstance nearer home.

In the evening they had one of their wild "scrimmage" parties, for the sake of old times, and to every one's astonishment, Lawrence arrived with the Mourne Lodge party. He had, of course, heard the news, and professed to have accepted his invitation for the express purpose of congratulating the happy pair. This certainly was open to doubt, though the genuineness of his congratulations was equally certainly not so.

Paddy fought shy of him from the first moment, and as she was naturally the ringleader of the scrimmage party, whereas he played Bridge in the study, it was perfectly easy to avoid an encounter. Only, as it happened, for that evening at least, Fortune was on Lawrence's side.

The scrimmage party were playing a game in which one of their number had to go out of the room, and it chanced to be Paddy's turn just when Lawrence, being "dummy," strolled into the hall for a smoke.

Before she knew of his presence, he had walked up to her and said: "Paddy, do you know you are sitting under the mistletoe?"

Paddy gave a start, blushed in a way that made her inwardly furious, and moved to the other end of the oak chest upon which she had been seated.

"You needn't be so haughty," he laughed. "You know perfectly well I've kissed you lots of times, only unfortunately it was when I didn't want to. I remember once the master scolding me because I made such a point of kissing Eileen, and ignoring you. I argued that you were such an ugly little brute, and invented the fable that you hated kissing."

"It was no fable."

"Wasn't it?" humorously. "Nature never gave a mouth like that to a woman who hated kissing. Some day I'll remind you of that, Paddy."