The Heart of Arethusa Part 17

"What for, please? I don't remember telling him I wanted him!"

"Ross Worthington! Have you actually forgotten Arethusa is coming this afternoon!"

Ross returned, with the most commendable suddenness, from the Long Island country place, scene of his sojourn for the last few hours where a most fearful and intricately involved crime had been committed, to things which were happening in Lewisburg.

"Ye G.o.ds! And I had!"

"You ought to be ashamed to admit it!"

"I don't see why you say that," his air was one of mild protest. "You remembered her, didn't you? And that's what a wife's for, anyway, one of the things, to remember what her husband ought to. What's the use of having one if...."

But Elinor hurried him into the hall without allowing him to finish this speech, thrust his coat and hat forcibly upon him, and propelled him on toward the open front door, and then on down the steps.

"Wait a minute here," Ross came back from halfway to the automobile, "Aren't you going?" For it had penetrated his consciousness that she had not come any farther than the top step.

"No."

"Why not?"

She blushed a trifle. "I ... I thought I wouldn't."

All her shyness was up in arms.

It was very probably going to be hard enough at best, this first meeting with Arethusa, without staging it before a crowd of prying eyes in a railroad station. In spite of all her longing to see and know the girl, and her loving preparation, now that the moment was actually come, Elinor's shyness intruded and kept her at home.

Ross understood (it was one of the very nicest things about him, his understanding) but as he was feeling a bit the same way himself, he would have liked the bulwark of her presence. Two shy folk to back each other up are in not nearly so bad a fix as the one who goes it alone.

So he stood hesitatingly in the middle of the front walk, slowly drawing on his gloves. Perhaps Elinor would change her mind.

"You'll be late," she warned.

But still he hesitated. "How in the d.i.c.kens am I going to know the child? I haven't the remotest idea what she's like. I may miss her altogether. I think I need you."

His statement of not knowing what Arethusa was like was perfectly true, for in none of her letters had Miss Eliza once mentioned Arethusa's personal appearance and Elinor had never thought to ask about it.

"You should have told her," he continued, almost reproachfully, "to wear a red carnation or something. I am quite sure I shan't be able to find her. And you're so much smarter than I am. Your woman's intuition is a great thing to have in a search, You better come go 'long."

Elinor came down the walk to where he was and gave him a push. "Do go on, Ross. You really will miss her altogether, if you don't. And I haven't time to dress now, so I can't possibly go. She probably looks like her mother or some member of the family."

"Now, I don't know about that," he answered, still lingering. "She may not at all. I don't look like my mother, and you...."

"Oh, please go on and stop fooling!" Though she laughed, his wife's patience was ebbing. It would be dreadful for Arethusa to come and find no one to meet her. "You always hurry so, Ross, when there's no real necessity for it and won't when there is!"

Ross decided that the moment for actual departure was certainly at hand, so he made haste to the automobile.

Arethusa, after descending from the train with her satchel and purse still clutched firmly, followed the crowd across the tracks under the shed, toward the iron gates she had to pa.s.s through to reach the station proper. Her busy grey eyes had failed to find anyone among those menfolks just around the train who at all resembled her mental picture of her father. And as she hurried after the crowd, still watching for him, it seemed to Arethusa that there were more people in this comparatively small s.p.a.ce than she had ever seen in one company before, in all of her life. So many of them were men, she noted; so many of them were men with nice faces who might have been the fathers of travelling daughters they had come to meet.

She felt a sudden and most unexpected bewilderment sweep over her as she looked about. How would she ever find her father here, among all these hundreds and hundreds of people? She was carried along, unresisting in her panic, clear through the gates without being aware she had pa.s.sed them, and pushed aside by the impatient throng against one of the iron pillars that supported the roof of the platform at one side of the station.

From this point, she could not help but watch all the glad meetings about her, of sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, and various other relations.h.i.+ps (there were some she was quite positive were fathers and daughters), and she watched them with something like envy; for so far as she could tell, everyone who had got off the train had been immediately seized by some person who seemed superlatively glad to see him or her. Yes, every human being but Arethusa Worthington seemed to have been met by somebody.

Then a cold little fear clutched at her heart; suppose.... Suppose....

she had made a mistake and this was not Lewisburg, after all!

But it must be! Had not the brakeman accommodatingly told her so right in her very own ear? And the Cherrys had been going to Lewisburg, and they had got off with Arethusa. She was surely in the right station.

The next most natural supposition was that no one had come to meet her.

And then the wildest and most unreasoning terror of this situation, directly grown from some of those travellers' tales of her aunts'

weaving, overwhelmed Arethusa. She stood closer to the pillar as a sort of protection.

Such an Ending to the Joyfully Begun Journey!

The Cherry family had been so long in their greetings that they were among the last to pa.s.s by the unmet traveller and her pillar. Mrs.

Cherry, seeing that the girl was alone, crossed the platform to her, the whole collection of Cherrys trailing in her rear.

"Found your Pa yet, dearie?" she asked cheerfully.

"This is the pretty Miss Worth'ton I was telling you about we saw on the train, Cherry," to her husband, and "This is Helen Louise's Pa," to Arethusa.

Arethusa managed to acknowledge this introduction, but being in such a state of mind as she was, she could not make her acknowledgment very cordial.

Helen Louise was dancing up and down and hanging on to one hand of a man who could have been nothing else but a close relation to the little girl, pale blue eyes and pale eyebrows and all. The daughter certainly favored "her Pa considerable" as her mother had said.

"My Papa," Helen Louise announced happily.

Mrs. Cherry sensed something wrong. She looked at Arethusa more closely. "You ain't found him? Here, Cherry, you take the children and the bundles and put them in the waitin'-room and then come straight back here and we'll help Miss Worth'ton hunt her father."

"I don't want to be put in the waitin'-room!" wailed Helen Louise in protest, "I want to stay with Papa!"

Mrs. Cherry was reproving her and starting her off in the direction of the designated depository, when Arethusa interrupted the proceedings.

She did not want Mrs. Cherry, kind as she had been and kind as her intentions still were to continue being, with her just now. If this was a fiasco to her Beautiful Dream she needed a few moments to face it alone. A funny sort of little pride gave her this feeling. She had talked to Mrs. Cherry so glowingly and at such length about her father and her Visit.

But Mr. Cherry, till just now silent, had a suggestion to make.

"S'pose," he drawled, "if Miss Worth'ton wants to wait by herself here, Maria, me and you set inside awhile, and then if she finds she reely has missed him somehow, I might help her to look him up, mebbe."

Arethusa considered this a decidedly brilliant idea. It relieved her of present society, which though friendly was irksome, and promised future comfort.

She rewarded the tall, thin father of Helen Louise with a misty smile.

Mrs. Cherry thought it very good, also. Miss Worth'ton wasn't to worry a mite now, not a mite. If her father didn't come for her, the Cherry family would escort her right up to his front door.

So the little procession trailed away and left Arethusa once more alone, and most disconsolate, against her kindly iron pillar.

The station had gradually become deserted, until there were only a few employees pottering about here and there, and one lone man standing talking to the blue-capped man at the gate.

Arethusa's mental picture of her father had been very clear. All this while she had been looking for the handsome youth of the wavy dark hair, eccentrically long, and the graceful Italian military cape. And she had been looking for him without adding a single year to his age, perfectly confident she would know him anywhere.

Ross had really been on time, despite his "fooling." He had arrived before the first pa.s.senger left Arethusa's train. And he had waited until every human being had gone before starting to leave himself, so he was the lone man Arethusa saw questioning the gatekeeper.