Rebecca's Promise Part 7

Granny stopped in the very middle of another chuckle. "Perhaps my eyes are as old as my heart," she admitted. "You'll have to come and help me see Peter as you do, help me change my old eyes."

"Can you do that?" Joan wanted to know at once. "Can you change your eyes and your heart if you don't like the ones you have, like Mrs.

Muldoon changed the bread one day? She said it was stale."

"Indeed you can change a stale heart, Joan. It is wrong and foolish to keep such a useless thing as a stale heart. You should change it at once."

"Where?"

Granny looked helplessly at Rebecca Mary. Joan's endless questions were sometimes hard to answer. Rebecca Mary laughed and answered for her.

"Wherever there is anything to love," she suggested.

CHAPTER VI

When Richard heard that Granny was going to take Rebecca Mary and Joan to Mifflin in her limousine he discovered that he had to call on the Mifflin National Bank, and he suggested that they should make the trip together.

"I'll drive you in my big car," he said. "We could stop at the River Club for lunch and come home by way of Spirit Lake for dinner. You'll like the River Club," he told Rebecca Mary. "It's on an island in the Mississippi and the dining room hangs over the river. You can catch your lunch from the window."

"What fun!" dimpled Rebecca Mary. "It sounds like a most beautiful pink plan."

"Pink plan?" Richard didn't understand what she meant, but he thought she looked rather beautiful and pink herself as she stood beside him.

"Whenever I hear of anything that is absolutely all right," Rebecca Mary explained, "I seem to see it as the most lovely rose color. And so I always think of absolutely all right things as pink. How lucky it is for us that you owe the Mifflin Bank a call."

"It's lucky for me," insisted Richard with a smile.

So on Sat.u.r.day Richard brought his big car to Rebecca Mary's door, and Joan and Rebecca Mary ran down from the window where they had been watching for him for hours. Rebecca Mary wore another portion of Aunt Ellen's gift, a new motor coat--to tell the truth it was the only motor coat she had ever had--and a fascinatingly small hat demurely veiled.

She looked just exactly right for a motor trip, and Richard told her so with his eyes while Granny, who was already in the tonneau, admired her with her lips as well as her eyes.

"That's a very smart and becoming coat and hat, Rebecca Mary," she said at once. "Suppose you sit in front with Richard? Riding in an open car always makes me sleepy and if you are back here you will talk to me and keep me awake."

"Won't I talk to you?" Joan didn't know how she was going to keep from talking all the way from Waloo to Mifflin, but she obediently nestled down beside Granny.

"I rather think you will." Granny smiled at her and patted her fat little hand. "But before you begin to talk you must help me plan how we shall persuade Mrs. Wyman to loan us her daughter. That will take a lot of thinking, and you can't talk very well while you are thinking."

On the front seat Rebecca Mary laughed joyously. "It sounds as if this was going to be a very important expedition," she said.

"It is," Richard told her with a flash of his eyes. "All ready? Quite comfortable?"

And when Rebecca Mary had said she was quite ready and comfortable he took the seat beside her and did something to b.u.t.tons and levers and they were off.

Rebecca Mary felt like one of the princesses Joan talked about so intimately as they rolled down the street, through the suburbs and into the real country. Richard called her attention to this old house, a relic of pioneer days, or to that new public library, and to the white sign boards which told them that they were on the Jefferson Highway. The name was between a palmetto and a towering pine to show them that New Orleans was at one end and that Minnesota was at the other end of that ribbon-smooth road. Richard seemed to know the way and there was nothing which Rebecca Mary should have seen which he did not show her.

"Want to go faster?" he asked when she leaned forward to look at the speed indicator. He touched a b.u.t.ton again and they went faster.

"It's like flying!" she exclaimed with s.h.i.+ning eyes. "Oh, I do think there are such wonderful things in the world! Aren't you glad that you are living now!"

He laughed at her enthusiasm. What a jolly little thing she was! And he told her that he most certainly was glad to be living that moment in a way which deepened the vivid color in Rebecca Mary's cheeks.

"Of course it's an old story to you," she went on quickly. "But this is the very first time I ever motored from Waloo to Mifflin. I've always gone in a stuffy day train and had cinders get into my eyes. Once the train was held up four hours by a wash-out on the road and an old Norwegian gave me some cookies. They did taste good," she a.s.sured him for he seemed as interested in the cakes as if he were a baker instead of a banker.

"Norwegian women are good cooks, and Norway is a beautiful country."

"I suppose you've been there? Every country will be beautiful to me unless I am so old when I start on my travels that I can't see. My favorite castle is a railroad ticket. I've never been farther than Waloo in all my life. I don't know why I tell you that for of course you know it. Any one can see that I've never been anywhere nor seen anything."

"Yes." Richard agreed with her so promptly that she felt as if he had pinched her for naturally she had expected that he would say that any one to see her would think she had been everywhere and seen everything.

The sting was taken from the pinch when he went on: "If you had been everywhere you wouldn't be so jolly and enthusiastic as you are. Girls who have been everywhere and seen everything aren't satisfied with anything."

"I wonder," meditated Rebecca Mary. "Then you think it's better not to have and want, than to have and not care for?"

"Much better. Very much better!"

"M-m," murmured Rebecca Mary doubtfully. "I don't believe you know a thing about it," she exclaimed suddenly. "You've had all of your life!"

"Not everything," Richard insisted. "There is at least one thing I've never had." But he did not tell her what that one thing was, and she did not ask him.

The River Club was all that Richard had said it would be. They crossed a bridge to the island at one end of which was the rambling s.h.i.+ngled club house which really did overhang the river. Richard was quite right, and Rebecca Mary could easily have fished from the window of the big dining room, but she preferred to let Richard order her lunch from the club pantries. A dozen or more men were lunching at the little tables, and Rebecca Mary heard sc.r.a.ps of their talk--"fifteen pounds"--"the brute got off with my best fly"--"that darned pike couldn't have weighed less than six pounds." She looked at Richard and laughed.

"I suppose more lies are told in this room than anywhere in the state,"

she whispered.

"I expect you are right," he whispered back.

They had a most delicious luncheon of black ba.s.s fresh from the river, of new potatoes and peas and salad and strawberries from the club garden. Many of the fishermen who had nodded to Richard came over to speak to Granny, and Richard introduced them to Rebecca Mary, and told her in an undertone that this one was a lumber king and that one was an iron king and the other one was a flour king. Rebecca Mary had never been in a room with so many kings in her life, and she looked after them curiously as she said so.

"Yes," Granny murmured. "They call this the millionaires' retreat, don't they, Richard?"

"I prefer the River Club, myself," was all Richard would say.

The club with its royal members seemed to make Richard even more important to Rebecca Mary, and she looked at him a trifle oddly as they left the island and went on to Mifflin. She had known that Richard was very clever and important--Granny had told her that old Mr. Simmons considered Richard Cabot quite the most promising young man in Waloo--but she hadn't thought these elderly kings of lumber and iron and flour would listen to him as they had listened. Richard seemed too young to belong with those bald-headed white-haired pudgy kings and yet they had greeted him as if they were very glad to see him. Rebecca Mary stole a shy glance at Richard. He was looking at her instead of twenty feet in front of his car as a motor driver should look, and he smiled.

"Like it?"

"Love it!" And she smiled, too, and forgot all about kings. How splendid it was to have Richard for a friend. And if he hadn't been a friend he never would have smiled at her like that. It gave her such a warm cozy little feeling to have a man like Richard for a friend. "Oh, isn't this the most wonderful day that was ever made out of blue sky and golden suns.h.i.+ne!" she cried suddenly. "And we're coming to Mifflin. There's Peterson's farm!"

And now it was Rebecca Mary who pointed out the points of interest, the old mill, the spire of the Episcopal church and the new starch factory, which was going to make the fortunes of the farmers, she told Richard with a serious little air which he liked enormously.

"What do you know about starch?" he teased.

"Lots. I know that the farmers have planted loads of potatoes, and they are going to sell them to the starch factory for enormous prices."

"Farmers always expect to sell for enormous prices, but if they have all planted enormous crops some of them will be disappointed. There is a little old law of supply and demand which regulates that sort of thing, you know."

"That's just it," Rebecca Mary exclaimed triumphantly. "The demand for Mifflin starch is going to be so great that there will be a huge demand for potatoes. I have a tiny bit of money that I might invest myself now," she told him a little proudly as she remembered how much was left of Aunt Ellen's gift. "I might become a starch queen," she giggled.