Peter Part 28

"But I haven't misunderstood you." He saw the lips quiver, but it was anger, he thought, that caused it.

"Yes, you have!"--a great lump had risen in her throat. "You have done a brave, n.o.ble act,--everybody says so; you carried my dear father out on your back when there was not but one chance in a thousand you would ever get out alive; you lay in a faint for hours and once they gave you up for dead; then you thought enough of Uncle Peter and all of us to get that telegram sent so we wouldn't be terrified to death and then at the risk of your life you met us at the station and have been in bed ever since, and yet I am to sit still and not say a word!" It was all she could do to control herself. "I do feel grateful to you and I always shall feel grateful to you as long as I live. And now will you take my hand and tell me you are sorry, and let me say it all over again, and with my whole heart? for that's the way I mean it."

She was facing him now, her hand held out, her head thrown back, her dark eyes flas.h.i.+ng, her bosom heaving. Slowly and reverently, as a devotee would kiss the robe of a pa.s.sing priest, Jack bent his head and touched her fingers with his lips.

Then, raising his eyes to hers, he asked, "And is that all, Miss Ruth? Isn't there something more?" Not once had she mentioned his own safety--not once had she been glad over him--"Something more?" he repeated, an ineffable tenderness in his tones--"something--it isn't all, is it?"

"Why, how can I say anything more?" she murmured in a lowered voice, withdrawing her hand as the sound of a step in the hall reached her ear.

The door swung wide: "Well, what are you two young people quarrelling about?" came a soft, purring voice.

"We weren't quarrelling, Aunty. Mr. Breen is so modest he doesn't want anybody to thank him, and I just would."

Miss Felicia felt that she had entered just in time. Scarred and penniless heroes fresh from battle-fields of glory and desirable young women whose fathers have been carried bodily out of burning death pits must never be left too long together.

CHAPTER XVIII

As the weeks rolled by, two questions constantly rose in Ruth's mind: Why had he not wanted her to thank him?--and what had he meant by--"And is that all?"

Her other admirers--and there had been many in her Maryland home--had never behaved like this. Was it because they liked her better than she liked them? The fact was--and she might as well admit it once for all--that Jack did not like her at all, he really DISliked her, and only his loyalty to her father and that inborn courtesy which made him polite to every woman he met--young or old--prevented his betraying himself.

She tried to suggest something like this to Miss Felicia, but that good woman had only said: "Men are queer, my dear, and these Southerners are the queerest of them all. They are so chivalrous that at times they get tiresome. Breen is no better than the rest of them." This had ended it with Miss Felicia. Nor would she ever mention his name to her again.

Jack was not tiresome; on the contrary, he was the soul of honor and as brave as he could be--a conclusion quite as illogical as that of her would-be adviser.

If she could only have seen Peter, the poor child thought,--Peter understood--just as some women not as old as her aunt would have understood. Dear Uncle Peter! He had told her once what Jack had said about her--how beautiful he thought her and how he loved her devotion to her father. Jack MUST have said it, for Uncle Peter never spoke anything but the exact truth. Then why had Jack, and everything else, changed so cruelly? she would say--talking to herself, sometimes aloud. For the ring had gone from his voice and the tenderness from his touch. Not that he ever was tender, not that she wanted him to be, for that matter; and then she would shut her door and throw herself on her bed in an agony of tears--pleading a headache or fatigue that she might escape her father's inquiry, and often his anxious glance.

The only ray of light that had pierced her troubled heart--and this only flashed for a brief moment--was the glimpse she had had of Jack's mind when he and her father first met. The boy had called to inquire after his Chief's health and for any instructions he might wish to give, when MacFarlane, hearing the young hero's voice in the hall below, hurried down to greet him. Ruth was leaning over the banister at the time and saw all that pa.s.sed. Once within reach MacFarlane strode up to Jack, and with the look on his face of a man who had at last found the son he had been hunting for all his life, laid his hand on the lad's shoulder.

"I think we understand each other, Breen,--don't we?" he said simply, his voice breaking.

"I think so, sir," answered Jack, his own eyes aglow, as their hands met.

Nothing else had followed. There was no outburst. Both were men; in the broadest and strongest sense each had weighed the other. The eyes and the quivering lips and the lingering hand-clasp told the rest. A sudden light broke in on Ruth. Her father's quiet words, and his rescuer's direct answer came as a revelation. Jack, then, did want to be thanked!

Yes, but not by her! Why was it? Why had he not understood? And why had he made her suffer, and what had she done to deserve it?

If Jack suspected any of these heartaches and misgivings, no one would have surmised it. He came and went as usual, pa.s.sing an hour in the morning and an hour at night with his Chief, until he had entirely recovered his strength--bringing with him the records of the work; the number of feet drilled in a day; cost of maintenance; cubic contents of dump; extent and slope and angles of "fill"--all the matters which since his promotion (Jack now had Bolton's place) came under his immediate supervision. Nor had any word pa.s.sed between himself and Ruth, other than the merest commonplace. He was cheery, buoyant, always ready to help,--always at her service if she took the train for New York or stayed after dark at a neighbor's house, when he would insist on bringing her home, no matter how late he had been up the night before.

If the truth were known, he neither suspected nor could he be made to believe that Ruth had any troubles. The facts were that he had given her all his heart and had been ready to lay himself at her feet, that being the accepted term in his mental vocabulary--and she would have none of him. She had let him understand so--rebuffed him--not once, but every time he had tried to broach the subject of his devotion;--once in the Geneseo arbor, and again on that morning when he had really crawled to her side because he could no longer live without seeing her. The manly thing to do now was to accept the situation: to do his work; look after his employer's interests, read, study, run over whenever he could to see Peter--and these were never-to-be-forgotten oases in the desert of his despair--and above all never to forget that he owed a duty to Miss Ruth in which no personal wish of his own could ever find a place. She was alone and without an escort except her father, who was often so absorbed in his work, or so tired at night, as to be of little help to her.

Moreover, his Chief had, in a way, added his daughter's care to his other duties. "Can't you take Ruth to-night--" or "I wish you'd meet her at the ferry," or "if you are going to that dinner in New York, at so-and-so's, would you mind calling for her--" etc., etc. Don't start, dear reader. These two came of a breed where the night key and the daughter go together and where a chaperon would be as useless as a policeman locked inside a bank vault.

And so the boy struggled on, growing in bodily strength and mental experience, still the hero among the men for his heroic rescue of the "Boss"--a reputation which he never lost; making friends every day both in the village and in New York and keeping them; absorbed in his slender library, and living within his means, which small as they were, now gave him two rooms at Mrs. Hicks's,--one of which he had fitted up as a little sitting-room and in which Ruth had poured the first cup of tea, her father and some of the village people being guests.

His one secret--and it was his only one--he kept locked up in his heart, even from Peter. Why worry the dear old fellow, he had said to himself a dozen times, since nothing would ever come of it.

While all this had been going on in the house of MacFarlane, much more astonis.h.i.+ng things had been developing in the house of Breen.

The second Mukton Lode scoop,--the one so deftly handled the night of Arthur Breen's dinner to the directors,--had somehow struck a snag in the scooping with the result that most of the "scoopings" had been spilled over the edge there to be gathered up by the gamins of the Street, instead of being hived in the strong boxes of the scoopers. Some of the habitues in the orchestra chairs in Breen's office had cursed loud and deep when they saw their margins melt away; and one or two of the directors had broken out into open revolt, charging Breen with the fiasco, but most of the others had held their peace. It was better to crawl away into the tall gra.s.s there to nurse their wounds than to give the enemy a list of the killed and wounded. Now and then an outsider--one who had watched the battle from afar--saw more of the fight than the contestants themselves. Among these was Garry Minott.

"You heard how Mason, the Chicago man, euchred the Mukton gang, didn't you?" he had shouted to a friend one night at the Magnolia--"Oh, listen!

boys. They set up a job on him,--he's a countryman, you know a poor little countryman--from a small village called Chicago--he's got three millions, remember, all in hard cash. Nice, quiet motherly old gentleman is Mr. Mason--b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Went into Mukton with every dollar he had--so kind of Mr. Breen to let him in--yes, put him down for 2,000 shares more. Then Breen & Co. began to hoist her up--five points--ten points--twenty points. At the end of the week they had, without knowing it, bought every share of Mason's stock." Here Garry roared, as did the others within hearing. "And they've got it yet. Next day the bottom dropped out. Some of them heard Mason laugh all the way to the bank. He's cleaned up half a million and gone back home--'so afraid his mother would spank him for being out late o' nights without his nurse,'" and again Garry's laugh rang out with such force and earnestness that the gla.s.ses on Biffy's table c.h.i.n.ked in response.

This financial set-back, while it had injured, for the time, Arthur Breen's reputation for being "up and dressed," had not, to any appreciable extent, curtailed his expenditures or narrowed the area of his social domain. Mrs. Breen's dinners and entertainments had been as frequent and as exclusive, and Miss Corinne had continued to run the gamut of the gayest and best patronized functions without, the Scribe is pained to admit, bringing home with her for good and all both her cotillion favors and the gentleman who had bestowed them. Her little wren-like head had moved from side to side, and she had sung her sweetest and prettiest, but somehow, when the song was over and the crumbs all eaten (and there were often two dinners a week and at least one dance), off went the male birds to other and more captivating roosts.

Mrs. Breen, of course, raved when Corinne at last opened the door of her cage for Garry,--went to bed, in fact, for the day, to accentuate her despair and mark her near approach to death because of it--a piece of inconsistency she could well have spared herself, knowing Corinne as she had, from the day of her birth, and remembering as she must have done, her own escapade with the almost penniless young army officer who afterward became Corinne's father.

Breen did not rave; Breen rather liked it. Garry had no money, it is true, except what he could earn,--neither had Corinne. Garry seemed to do as he darned pleased,--so did Corinne;--Garry had no mother,--neither had Corinne so far as yielding to any authority was concerned.

"Yes,--let 'em marry,--good thing--begin at the bottom round and work up--" all of which meant that the honorable banker was delighted over the prospect of considerable more freedom for himself and considerable less expense in the household.

And so the wedding had taken place with all the necessary tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs: awning over the carpeted sidewalk; four policemen on the curb; detectives in the hall and up the staircase and in the front bedroom where the jewels were exposed (all the directors of the Mukton Lode were represented); crowds lining the sidewalk; mob outside the church door--mob inside the church door and clear up to the altar; flowers, palms, special choir, with little bank-notes to the boys and a big bank-note to the leader; checks for the ranking clergyman and the two a.s.sistant clergymen, not forgetting crisp bills for the s.e.xton and the janitor and the policemen and the detectives and everybody else who could hold out a hand and not be locked up in jail for highway robbery.

Yes, a most fas.h.i.+onable and a most distinguished and a most exclusive wedding--there was no mistake about that.

No one had ever seen anything like it before; some hoped they never would again, so great was the crush in the drawing-room. And not only in the drawing-room, but over every square inch of the house for that matter, from the front door where Parkins's a.s.sistant (an extra man from Delmonico's) shouted out--"Third floor back for the gentlemen and second floor front for the ladies"--to the innermost recesses of the library made over into a banquet hall, where that great functionary himself was pouring champagne into batteries of tumblers as if it were so much water, and distributing cuts of cold salmon and portions of terrapin with the prodigality of a charity committee serving a picnic.

And then the heartaches over the cards that never came; and the presents that were never sent, and the wrath of the relations who got below the ribbon in the church and the airs of the strangers who got above it; and the tears over the costly dresses that did not arrive in time and the chagrin over those they had to wear or stay at home--and the heat and the jam and tear and squeeze--and the aftermath of wet gla.s.ses on inlaid tables and fine-spun table-cloths burnt into holes with careless cigarettes; and the little puddles of ice cream on the Turkish rugs and silk divans and the broken gla.s.s and smashed china!--No--there never had been such a wedding!

This over, Corinne and Garry had gone to housekeeping in a dear little flat, to which we may be sure Jack was rarely ever invited (he had only received "cards" to the church, an invitation which he had religiously accepted, standing at the door so he could bow to them both as they pa.s.sed)--the two, I say, had gone to a dear little flat--so dear, in fact, that before the year was out Garry's finances were in such a deplorable condition that the lease could not be renewed, and another and a cheaper nest had to be sought for.

It was at this time that the new church to be built at Corklesville needed an architect--a fact which Jack communicated to Garry. Then it happened that with the aid of MacFarlane and Holker Morris the commission was finally awarded to that "rising young genius who had so justly distinguished himself in the atelier of America's greatest architect--Holker Morris--" all of which Garry wrote himself and had inserted in the county paper, he having called upon the editor for that very purpose. This service--and it came at a most critical time in the young man's affairs--the Scribe is glad to say, Garry, with his old-time generous spirit suddenly revived, graciously acknowledged thanking Jack heartily and with meaning in his voice, as well as MacFarlane--not forgetting Ruth, to whom he sent a ma.s.s of roses as big as a bandbox.

The gaining of this church building--the largest and most important given the young architect since he had left Morris's protection and guidance--decided Garry to give up at once his expensive quarters in New York and move to Corklesville. So far as any help from the house of Breen was concerned, all hope had ended with the expensive and much-advertised wedding (a shrewd financial move, really, for a firm selling shady securities). Corinne had cooed, wept, and then succ.u.mbed into an illness, but Breen had only replied: "No, let 'em paddle their own canoe."

This is why the sign "To Let," on one of the new houses built by the Elm Crest Land and Improvement Company--old Tom Corkle who owned the market garden farms that gave the village of Corklesville its name, would have laughed himself sore had he been alive--was ripped off and various teams loaded with all sorts of furniture, some very expensive and showy and some quite the contrary--especially that belonging to the servants'

rooms--were backed up to the newly finished porch with its second coat of paint still wet, and their contents duly distributed upstairs and downstairs and in my lady Corinne's chamber.

"Got to put on the brakes, old man," Garry had said one day to Jack. The boy had heard of the expected change in the architect's finances before the villa was rented, and so Garry's confidential communication was not news to him.

"Been up to look at one of those new houses. Regular bird cage, but we can get along. Besides, this town is going to grow and I'm going to help it along. They are all dead out here--embalmed, some of them--but dead."

Here he opened the pamphlet of the company--"See this house--an hour from New York; high ground; view of the harbor--(all a lie, Jack, but it goes all the same); sewers, running water, gas (lot of the last,--most of it in the prospectus) It's called Elm Crest--beautiful, isn't it,--and not a stump within half a mile."

Jack always remembered the interview. That Garry should help along anything that he took an interest in was quite in the line of his ambition and ability. Minott was as "smart as a steel trap," Holker Morris had always said of him, "and a wonderful fellow among the men.

He can get anything out of them; he would really make a good politician.

His handling of the Corn Exchange showed that."

And so it was not surprising,--not to Jack,--that when a new village councilman was to be elected, Garry should have secured votes enough to be included among their number. Nor was it at all wonderful that after taking his seat he should have been placed in charge of the village funds so far as the expenditures for contract work went. The prestige of Morris's office settled all doubts as to his fitness in construction; and the splendor of the wedding--there could still be seen posted in the houses of the workmen the newspaper cuts showing the bride and groom leaving the church--silenced all opposition to "our fellow townsman's"

financial responsibility, even when that opposition was led by so prominent a ward heeler as Mr. Patrick McGowan, who had planned to get the position himself--and who became Garry's arch enemy thereafter.

In these financial and political advancements Corinne helped but little.

None of the village people interested her, nor did she put herself out in the least to be polite to them. Ruth had called and had brought her hands full of roses--and so had her father. Garry had continued to thank them both for their good word to the church wardens--and he himself now and then spent an evening at MacFarlane's house without Corinne, who generally pleaded illness; but the little flame of friends.h.i.+p which had flashed after their arrival in Corklesville had died down again.

This had gone on until the acquaintance had practically ended, except when they met on the trains or in crossing the ferry. Then again, Ruth and her father lived at one end of the village known as Corklesville, and Garry and Corinne lived at the other end, known as Elm Crest, the connecting link being the railroad, a fact which Jack told Garry with a suggestive laugh, made them always turn their backs on each other when they parted to go to their respective homes, to which Garry would reply that it was an outrage and that he was coming up that very night--all of which he failed to do when the proposed visit was talked over with Corinne.

None of this affected Jack. He would greet Corinne as affectionately and cordially as he had ever done. He had taken her measure years before, but that made no difference to him, he never forgetting that she was his uncle's nominal daughter; that they had been sheltered by the same roof and that she therefore in a way belonged to his people. Moreover, he realized, that like himself, she had been compelled to give up many of the luxuries and surroundings to which she had been accustomed and which she loved,--worthless now to Jack in his freedom, but still precious to her. This in itself was enough to bespeak his sympathy. Not that she valued it;--she rather sniffed at it.

"I wish Jack wouldn't stand with his hat off until I get aboard the train," she had told Garry one day shortly after their arrival--"he makes me so conspicuous. And he wears such queer clothes. He was in his slouch hat and rough flannel s.h.i.+rt and high boots the other day and looked like a tramp."