Rebecca's Promise Part 26

"Of course, I'll go," she said at once. "It's too great a strain to be under the same roof with old Peter Simmons. I'm crazy to see him, Rebecca Mary, but I don't dare. Perhaps if I run away again he'll know that I don't want to be teased. I simply can't discuss a golden wedding present now. We've done it too often. But I don't know what I'll do, Rebecca Mary, if he doesn't remember what we planned. If I weren't so proud I should tell him that it begins with an H. But I can't even do that, Rebecca Mary. It's funny I should feel this way after fifty years, but I do. I can't help it even if I do know how silly it is."

So in the early morning Granny and Rebecca Mary and a very sleepy Joan left the house as stealthily as if they had been robbing Riverside and made their way from one clump of shrubbery to another to the gate. It thrilled Rebecca Mary, whose teeth fairly chattered. It even thrilled old Granny a bit, but it only puzzled Joan, who could not understand why she had been wakened so early nor why she was being taken from Riverside without saying good-by to her father although Granny told her that they had left a note for her father and one for old Peter Simmons. How Rebecca Mary did blush when Count Ernach de Befort was mentioned!

Before they reached the gate Richard came down the driveway in the car which had brought Granny and Rebecca Mary and Joan to Riverside. He stopped to speak to the guard, who was on the other side of the car so that the three prisoners were able to slip by it and hide themselves in the bushes which were most conveniently placed just outside the gate.

"Pooh!" exclaimed Granny as she settled herself in the tonneau with Joan, "if I had known how easy it would be I shouldn't have stayed twenty-four hours. Oh, well, I don't know as I care so long as I shall get home before old Peter Simmons. We have had a rest and a change. I don't often find fault with an experience after it is over. I did want to go to Seven Pines before the golden wedding, but perhaps it is just as well. You haven't anything to complain of, have you, Rebecca Mary?

Riverside was more interesting for you than Seven Pines would have been.

Wasn't it?"

"Much more interesting!" Rebecca Mary had never seen a foot of Seven Pines and so should not have been so quick to decide that Riverside was more interesting. "I'm glad that Major Martingale made prisoners of us."

And then she remembered what had happened the last day she had been a prisoner, and she flushed and stammered. "At least I was glad." She looked at Richard to see if he remembered the secret that they shared, and he nodded and smiled. Rebecca Mary did not like to think of that last night. It made her hot all over, from the top of her head to her very heels, to remember what she had done. She hoped that no one but Richard would ever know.

"We're going home, we're going home," sang Joan to an air of her own composition. "I'm the only one who has what we came for," she announced jubilantly. "I came for my father and I found him right away. But you haven't your young heart, have you, Granny? And dear Miss Wyman hasn't found the payment for her insurance, have you, Miss Wyman?" How disappointed Granny and Rebecca Mary must be!

"Perhaps I didn't find the real young heart I wanted, Joan, but then I knew that an old body isn't just the place for a real young heart,"

Granny confessed honestly. "But my old heart is a lot younger than it was. It makes an old heart young in just the right way to match an old body to be with young people, you know." She gave the prescription gravely to Joan, and Joan received it as gravely.

"That makes two of us who have what we came for." Joan was even more jubilant. "I'm sorry you haven't, Miss Wyman." Miss Wyman couldn't know how sorry she was.

But Rebecca Mary didn't want sympathy from any one, and she said so at once. "Indeed I did make a payment on my memory insurance policy, Joan.

I made a lot of payments. Why, at the rate I've been paying I shan't be able to collect all the payments on that memory insurance policy, not if I live to be a hundred!"

Joan bounced up and down on the seat beside Granny. "Then it's time to go home," she said with funny solemnity. "When you get what you want it is always time to go home."

They stopped at a farmhouse to telephone to Pierson to have breakfast ready for them, and when they reached the house a most delicious breakfast was waiting in the dining room.

"I'm glad you're back, Mrs. Simmons," Pierson said. "Young Mrs. Simmons and I don't agree about the arrangements for your golden wedding."

"Don't you, Pierson?" smiled Granny. "I wonder if you and I will agree about them. If we don't you must remember that the golden wedding is mine. Gracious, but I am glad to be home again where I can look after things myself! I declare, Rebecca Mary, I can't think now why we ever went away. I must have been in a panic."

"Mr. Simmons came about fifteen minutes after you left, ma'am,"

explained Pierson, who stood beside Granny, eager to tell her what had happened. "He was quite put out, I can tell you, when I told him you had gone on a motor trip. He wanted to know where----"

"You couldn't tell him that, could you, Pierson?" Granny seemed quite pleased to think that Pierson couldn't. "You didn't know where we were.

We haven't been near Seven Pines."

"No, ma'am, I know. Mrs. Swenson called me up to ask where you were. But when Mr. Simmons asked me the way he did he got me all fl.u.s.tered and before I knew it I told him you had gone to the Cabot country place. You often go there, you know, Mrs. Simmons, so it wasn't strange I told him you were probably at Riverside."

Granny put down her knife and fork and stared at her. "You never told him that, Pierson?" She hid her face in her napkin, and her shoulders shook. "What did he say? What did Mr. Simmons say, Pierson?"

"He didn't say anything for a minute, ma'am, and then he laughed in a funny sort of a way. 'At Riverside?' he said, ma'am. 'Well, I'll be darned! The devil she is!' That's exactly what he said. But you often go there as Mr. Simmons knows, and yet he seemed surprised as anything to hear you might have gone there now. But I had to tell him something, Mrs. Simmons, when he asked me like he did."

Granny was laughing so that she almost choked. "Pierson," she said when she could control her voice, "I shall raise your wages. I never suspected that you had an imagination. No wonder Mr. Simmons wasn't surprised to find us at Riverside. I dare say Major Martingale told him, too, and young Peter, in spite of their promise to me. Dear, dear! Mr.

Simmons always seems to get the best of me." She shook her head ruefully. "I wonder what he said when he found that we had run away from Riverside."

"He probably said 'Well, I'll be darned' again," laughed Richard as he repeated a phrase which was often on old Peter Simmons' lips when he was surprised. "You mustn't be too hard on him, Granny. You know this experiment is frightfully important and--you know him," he finished rather lamely.

"I do," nodded Granny. "If I didn't know him I should never have done a lot of things that I have. You must put off fireworks to make old Peter Simmons see anything besides his business. If men weren't so queer women wouldn't have to be so peculiar," she sighed. "You might remind old Peter Simmons that he was married at noon. It would be just like him to come in at night," she prophesied gloomily.

"Mr. Simmons won't be late," Richard promised somewhat rashly. "I'll see myself that he is here by noon."

"You always were a good dependable boy. I can trust you. It is a great thing, Rebecca Mary, to have a man about whom you can trust." There was something so significant in the way she spoke that Rebecca Mary turned pink until she matched the sweet peas in the center of the table.

She looked so pretty in her self-conscious confusion that Richard had to stop eating omelet and m.u.f.fins and look at her.

Granny went to telephone to young Mrs. Simmons about the golden wedding, and Joan ran after Pierson to tell her all that they had found at Riverside. Rebecca Mary pushed back her chair and rose, too. She just couldn't sit there and let Richard stare at her as he was doing. It made her feel--she could scarcely tell you how it did make her feel when she remembered the way Richard had comforted her the night before. She could still feel the pressure of his arm about her when he had told her that she was a goose. She slipped out on the porch where Richard found her in the swing beside the rambler rose.

She looked up with a smile. "It doesn't seem as if it could be true that we are free again. I think it was wonderful the way you got us out of Riverside."

He smiled, too. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked impulsively.

"I can!" She turned a curious face toward him. "I'm a perfect wonder at keeping secrets. I love 'em so I just can't give them away. Do tell me one!"

"I hate to be told how wonderful I am when I haven't been wonderful at all," he said honestly. "So I'll confess that Mr. Simmons asked me to bring you and Granny and Joan home."

"He did?" Rebecca Mary couldn't believe it. She visualized the caution with which Granny had slipped from bush to bush, how stealthily she had crept to the gate. And there had been no need of caution. How old Peter Simmons could tease Granny now! By running away from his teasing she had only given him more material with which to tease her. "She'll be furious," she said, not sure but she was a little furious herself.

"She must never know." Richard reminded her that what he had given her was a secret. "Mr. Simmons said if Granny could slip out of Riverside and get home before he did she would think she was getting the better of him and be a lot happier."

"The dear old man," breathed Rebecca Mary, forming a new opinion of old Peter Simmons instantly. "What next?"

"And he asked me to bring her to Waloo. That's all, but you see you can't pin any cross on me. I was just obeying orders. I thought you would enjoy the joke, but we won't tell Granny. Let her think that she did get ahead of Mr. Simmons."

"I should say so. That dear old Peter Simmons to let Granny retreat with honor! He's not such a bad sort if he does forget his anniversaries and presents and things. Dear me, how long ago it seems since we ran away from here! Otillie Swenson must be an old married woman by now."

"I don't suppose you thought of me once while you were at Riverside,"

Richard said jealously.

"Well," a perverse imp appeared in Rebecca Mary's cheek just above the corner of her lip, and there was a perverse imp in her voice, also, "I was rather busy you know. I was the only girl there and four, no, five, men, for old Major Martingale had to have a word now and then, five men in the hand didn't leave much time for one in----"

"The heart," suggested Richard quickly and eagerly, and he dropped into the swing beside her. "If you tell me you kept me in your heart, Rebecca Mary, I shan't mind how many men there were in your hand?"

But Rebecca Mary wouldn't tell him that although the question sent her into the strangest flutter she had ever been in in her life, and Richard frowned. He remembered how the men at Riverside had hung about Rebecca Mary.

"You girls are all alike," he said bitterly, and he jumped up from the swing. "I thought that day at the Waloo you would be different----"

"At the Waloo!" interrupted Rebecca Mary. "I should say I was different that day! Why, nothing had ever happened to me then; every day was just like every other day, gray and stupid, but now----" she stopped, appalled at all that had happened since that day at the Waloo, at the few gray stupid days there had been and the many many rosy interesting ones. "Just suppose Cousin Susan had bought kitchen curtains!" she exclaimed with what Richard considered irritating irrelevance.

"Never mind about curtains." Richard wasn't interested in anything connected with the kitchen just then. "They aren't important----"

"Oh, but they were! Frightfully important. Why, there was a moment when my whole future was wrapped up in ten yards of cheap swiss?" She looked almost frightened as she thought of her future in a neat parcel with ten yards of cheap swiss. "You know I was a very selfish self-centered disagreeable person,--yes, I was!--before I went to the Waloo with Cousin Susan that day. But there must have been magic in the tea or--or in the favors," she laughed tremulously as she remembered the favor she had received. "I haven't been the same since," she confessed in a way which told him that she was very glad that she hadn't been the same.

"If you would only be the same for two minutes in succession," begged Richard helplessly. He never felt helpless before a man at the bank, no matter who he was, but he felt absolutely helpless as he stood before Rebecca Mary and looked into her rosy face. There was so much he wanted to tell her, and yet he didn't seem able to form an intelligent sentence. He could only stand there like a silly fool and look at the rosy face in which two gray eyes sparkled so adorably. His own face reddened, and his heart seemed to miss a beat.

"Better change your mind and stay for luncheon, Richard." Granny came out with a cordial invitation. "My, Rebecca Mary, but it does seem good to be at home again!" And she said, as she had said so many times in the past few days; "I don't understand now why I ever ran away. But if you won't stay, Richard, you must be sure and tell Mr. Simmons that he should be here by twelve o'clock at the latest. If he isn't here--if he isn't here----" she stopped aghast at the possibility she had voiced.

"If he isn't here I don't know what I shall do," she finished truthfully if weakly.