The Heart of Arethusa Part 15

For she was completely unaware that in her excitement she had given Timothy that kiss.

His spirits went clear to zero, but fortune spared him the necessity of a reply, for the conductor called another raucous signal, and the train began to move. Timothy had barely time to save himself from being carried off.

Arethusa stuck her head out of the car window, regardless of one of Miss Eliza's very last and most positive instructions, and waved and waved to the ones she had left behind on the Vandalia platform, and she kept on waving long after they had become mere indistinguishable specks as the train gathered speed.

Then she settled back against the luxury of her dusty red-plush seat with a soft little sigh.

The swift motion of the train was most exhilarating, for every single click of the car-wheels meant a turn which brought her just that much nearer to her father and Elinor and the wonderful Visit.

After a while, when her agitation had begun to subside a trifle, Arethusa began to remember a few of the mult.i.tude of directions Miss Eliza had given that were most important to be carried out without fail. She removed her hat with care and reached down into the ancient travelling bag and brought forth a piece of manila paper in which she wrapped it, to save its newness from flying cinders. She took off her coat and folded it, lining outside, and hung it over the arm of the opposite seat and rolled her white cotton gloves into a neat little ball and put them and her purse down into her bag.

Then she drew "The Dove in the Eagles' Nest" out of that capacious receptacle (Miss Asenath had advised bringing something to read and Arethusa had not read this particular romance for a very long while), propped herself primly way over in the corner of her seat and prepared to do just as she had been told.

But she was far too excited to do much more than just open her book.

The fortunes of Christina and her two sons in the free city of Ulm, as so graphically portrayed by Miss Charlotte Yonge, could generally transport Arethusa far from the everyday events of her own world into the actual Middle Ages that was the scene of their happening; but to-day.... They seemed to have lost a lot of this power; she could hardly keep her eyes on the book.

The flying landscape outside the window fascinated her at first and after awhile her fellow travellers claimed her attention, and proved far more interesting than even that. Miss Eliza could have no possible objection to her niece watching them if she sat very still.

There were not very many pa.s.sengers when Arethusa got on; one or two men in the other end of the car, and several women and babies. But as the tram rushed ever nearer to Lewisburg, the pa.s.sengers increased in number.

A group climbed on at one of the way stations, and took a seat just opposite Arethusa across the aisle, and they particularly attracted her. It was composed of a woman who reminded her very strongly of Miss Let.i.tia in the round chubbiness of her face and her comfortable untidiness, although she was undoubtedly much younger, and her two children. The s.e.x of one of them Arethusa was unable to determine just at first, for it was so small that the cut of its blue raiment might have served for either boy or girl; but the other one was unmistakably of a feminine persuasion. This child had the lightest hair and eyebrows the watcher across the aisle had ever seen, and the very palest of blue eyes. So light were the eyebrows that only a close inspection later on convinced Arethusa that there were any there at all.

These travellers had a great deal of baggage, several boxes and a large telescope, as well as a huge satchel. The handle of the telescope had been broken off at some stage of its career, and this deficiency had been remedied by inserting under the leather straps still remaining, a coat hanger covered with bright red silk ribbon gathered on and tied at the hook with gay little bows.

The children were very restless; they did much moving about, climbing in and out of the seat. The mother seemed to find it necessary to admonish her offspring with frequency, and Arethusa discovered in this way that the little girl's name was "Helen Louise" and the being in the straight up-and-down blue garment was a boy infant who answered to the name of Peter.

At a Junction farther down the line, a Man got on. And as the car was pretty full by this time, he took the seat just opposite Arethusa; that seat which Timothy had gallantly turned over for her.

He buried himself immediately in a paper he carried, but when his neighbor's liquid laugh rang out at some ridiculous antic of Peter's, he dropped his paper and regarded her mobile face with interest.

He was rather a nice looking man, quietly dressed in well cut clothes and he had an air of good living about him that was quite attractive.

To any experienced traveller, the neat looking leather cases with the bra.s.s locks, which he carried, would have been quite sufficient to have immediately told his occupation. He travelled for a notions house, out of Cincinnati, with a territory covering most of the small towns in three states. It was a boring business, and offered very little as diversion on the side; but he hoped before very long to be much better placed. He liked girls, and the one before him was one of the prettiest he had ever seen.

They rode facing one another for about five miles, and he watched Arethusa, without her actually realizing she was being watched. Then she laughed gayly at Peter once more, as his mother all but saved his life when he pitched head first off the seat, and her eager grey eyes caught a glimpse of the brown eyes across from her, smiling in sympathy.

"Isn't he the funniest little boy!" exclaimed Arethusa, involuntarily, to the sympathy.

"He is," replied the Man kindly, then he added, after a bit, "Are you travelling alone, or do you belong with the funny little boy?"

"No, sir,... Yes, sir!" replied Arethusa, suddenly covered with a shy confusion.

"Which is which?" asked the Man, laughing, and he showed attractive white teeth.

The friendliness of his brown eyes and his laugh rea.s.sured Arethusa of her momentary feeling of alarm when he had spoken. Her exclamation had not really expected a reply, and she had been quite startled when the sympathetic eyes to which she had addressed herself had been discovered to have this voice belonging to them.

She blushed, and dropped her head. Then she raised it again, after a moment, and he was still smiling at her in the same friendly fas.h.i.+on, so Arethusa found courage to look at him. To her rose-colored view of the inmates of the best of all possible worlds, he seemed in that look to be a very nice man. It is true that Miss Eliza had warned her with emphasis against strange men, but the Man across from her could not be said to come anywhere near the descriptions of the Ogres against which Arethusa had been so warned. Arethusa had not had her Red-Riding-Hood Experience as yet, and it was her habit to trust.

They rode for a few moments silently, and then Peter did what had been inevitable for some time that he would do, he pitched head first out into the aisle.

"Oh!" exclaimed Arethusa, and she jumped clear out of her seat at the loud and high-pitched wail with which he made known his distress.

"That's too bad," said the Man. "But I've been afraid he was going to do that very thing."

"So have I," answered Arethusa confidentially.

And in a very short while, she was talking away as if she had known her new acquaintance all her life, with all the dimples and excitement and gestures that belonged to Arethusa. But what harm to talk to such a Nice, Kind Man? Miss Eliza had not known that she would meet this sort of Man, she was sure. She could not possibly object to a little Friendly Conversation with someone in the very same seat.

And he listened, truly interested, as Arethusa's enthusiasm began to make up for the while it had been pent, in all she told him of the coming Visit and the magnificent expectations she had of that Visit, and of Ross and Elinor.

But the motherly looking woman across the aisle had been watching Arethusa for some time also. And when Peter's sobs had ceased, and she looked up once more from her family cares to see Arethusa conversing so animatedly with her chance acquaintance, she decided at once to interfere. She had heart enough to--at least--attempt the management of any affairs coming under her notice which did not seem to her to be running just as they should.

She bustled over and loomed above Arethusa and her Friendly Man.

"Know this man, dearie?" she demanded peremptorily.

"Why ... no ... I...."

Arethusa almost added, "Aunt 't.i.tia." For the tone of voice and the little term of endearment and the woman herself were all rather bewilderingly like her aunt.

"Well, I don't reckon you ought to be talking to him then," and she turned to the man, a self-elected champion of a lone maiden, and stared at him as authoritatively as she had spoken to Arethusa. "You're plenty old enough to know better'n this. And you'd better get out of that seat mighty quick, or I'll call the conductor. And you a nice-looking man, too!"

The man turned as red as a well-cooked beet, clear down into his immaculate collar. He wasted no time in expostulation or protest that Arethusa's champion was interfering in something which was none of her immediate business, but he gathered up his neat leather cases and fled to the smoker for safety. He had meant no sort of harm, and he was so embarra.s.sed that he was hours recovering from the experience.

After he had disappeared down the aisle, Arethusa's defender moved her family and most of her baggage across the way, depositing her remarkably decorated telescope in the s.p.a.ce between the two seats which had faced each other for Arethusa's adventure, before the astonished Arethusa was thoroughly aware of just what was happening.

"You sit there, Helen Louise," admonished this subst.i.tute for the Nice Man to her daughter, indicating the end of the telescope, "and if our friend wants to come back, I reckon he'll have to fall over you. That was a horrid man," she added to Arethusa: "it's the likes of him makes it disagreeable for girls to be travelling by themselves."

"Oh, no," protested Arethusa.

"Yes, he were," replied Helen Louise's mother in a positive way that indicated superior wisdom on such matters.

Arethusa bowed to the superior wisdom and the positive tone, through long habit of her experience with Miss Eliza when she used such a tone.

"But he looked like a Nice Man," she said, though feebly.

"It's most always the nicest looking ones is the worst at heart. I'm raising up Helen Louise to steer clear of anything in pants she ain't been introduced to first by somebody she knows. It's safest."

This speech had a somewhat familiar sound, though perhaps couched differently. Arethusa had a moment of terrified remembrance of Certain Instructions. She looked down at the bulwark of Helen Louise and the telescope between her and the aisle, and she suddenly felt grateful to Helen Louise's mother.

"Thank you," she said, with fervent sincerity, "thank you, ma'am, just ever so much. I never do remember anything Aunt 'Liza tells me, she says."

"You ain't got no real call to thank me," was the placid reply. "I'd be doing the same for any girl as good-looking as you be; and I'd be hoping somebody'd do the same for my Helen Louise. It seems like it's always most easiest for young folks to keep right on forgetting just what they ought to be remembering."

"I know," said Arethusa apologetically. "But this is the first time I ever traveled anywhere, and...."

Mrs. Cherry (for such was the name of Arethusa's latest friend) rescued her small son from his repeated attempts to plunge through the gla.s.s in the car window, before she turned around to continue the conversation.

"I should have said you had. You don't look so awfully citified, now I come to think, but I should have certainly said you'd travelled. Who's your Aunt 'Liza, you spoke about awhile back? Ain't you got no Ma?"