"Oh, tuck me in anywhere, just so there"s a bath handy."
"All the bedrooms have baths," said Mrs. Sequin absently, with her eye on the befuddled butler who was trying to uncork a bottle with a screwdriver, "Let Flathers--I mean Benson--do that, John, and you take these bags. So sorry I can"t go up with you myself, Don, but the cotillion is just beginning, and I have to see to the favors."
"That"s right, don"t bother about me, I"ll get into some decent togs and be down again in a little while."
Mrs. Sequin paused with her hand on the banister, then she leaned forward solicitously:
"I wouldn"t take the trouble to dress and come down again, Don. It"s late and you must be dead tired. You go to bed. I"ll understand."
Donald, standing a few steps above her, shot a questioning glance at her, then he, too, understood.
"Oh, all right," he said, biting his lip; "I believe I won"t come down.
You might send Marge up, after the people leave, just to say "h.e.l.lo.""
"Of course, we"ll both be up. Nothing could hold her if she knew you were here. But it is better that n.o.body should know. I was careful not to mention your name before the servants. You can have a nice little visit with us, and get away again without any one being the wiser. It is so lovely you got here in time for Christmas! _Good_ night." She came up two steps and presented her other cheek for a kiss.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Mrs. Sequin paused with her hand on the bannister.]
The delinquent John, meanwhile, was performing acrobatic feats with the bags, getting them so mixed up with his own legs and the stair steps that Donald s.n.a.t.c.hed them from him, and, eliciting a vague direction concerning the room he was to occupy, went up to find it alone.
He felt something of the hot rebellion and resentment that he had experienced on another Christmas night in the long ago, when the cross-eyed French nurse had put him to bed at five o"clock and left him alone in the big hotel in Paris. Then he had cried himself to sleep because there wasn"t any Santa Claus and because he didn"t have a sweetheart. But the consolations of six are denied to twenty-five.
On the second floor he followed directions and turned to the right. The dressing-rooms were deserted, the maids having taken their seats on the steps to peep at the dancers below. He, too, paused, and looked down at the gaily whirling throng. There was his old familiar world, the fellows he had been through college with, the girls he had flirted with, the very music he had danced to, times without numbers. And he was as much out of it all as if he had died of the fever in that gray old hospital in Singapore? Ah, if he only had!
He turned abruptly and started up the second flight of stairs, and as he did so something rose precipitately from the steps, and fluttered ahead of him.
He looked up and as he did so chaos broke loose within him. There at the top, in the subdued light from the upper hall, startled, uncertain, off her guard stood Miss Lady, not the pretty, harum-scarum girl of his dreams, but a beautiful, wistful woman with trembling lips and startled eyes, who held out her hands to him in involuntary welcome.
He lost his head completely. All the blood in his body rushed to his throat. Something sang through every fiber of him.
"Miss Lady!" he cried, catching the hands she extended in both of his, then as she drew back from his too ardent look, he remembered. "I beg your pardon of course it"s Mrs. Queerington, now."
"Not to you, Don. When did you come? Are you well again? Didn"t any one know you were coming? Have the others seen you?"
She poured forth her questions eagerly, as if she feared another pause.
She was making a desperate effort to appear easy, but her eagerness betrayed her. She repeated that she had no idea he was in America, and took refuge in a general a.s.surance that everybody would be so glad to have him home again.
Donald, lean and tanned, stood silent, watching her searchingly. His deep-set eyes were clearer and steadier than of old, but they were no longer the eyes of a boy. He was like a mariner whose ship has been wrecked. He had nothing worse to dread and nothing to hope for. He simply desired to see the rock on which his life craft had smashed.
Miss Lady continued to ask questions, but she evidently did not always heed the answers as she asked some of them twice over. It was not until Donald"s trouble was touched upon that her mood steadied and she lost her self-consciousness.
"Of course you must stand the trial," she said, and her voice rang with the old a.s.surance; "you must fight the whole matter out once for all, and prove your innocence."
"Oh, the Court will prove that all right, but what does it matter? If people were willing to d.a.m.n me without hearing, to believe that I had shot a man"s eye out, then run away to escape the punishment--Bah! it"s sickening."
"But everybody doesn"t believe it. The Doctor doesn"t, nor Margery, nor Cropsie Decker, nor I. Hundreds of your friends are ready to stand by you. Don"t listen to what anybody else says, but stay and fight it out."
He looked up suddenly. "Did you ever get that letter I wrote you before I sailed from "Frisco?"
He hadn"t meant to blurt it out like that, the question that had tortured him so long, but her sympathy and friendliness had unnerved him.
Leaning forward with all his soul in his eyes, he watched the color mount steadily from her throat to her cheeks, then to her brow. He heard her draw a sharp, quivering breath as one who walks on a precipice, then she faced him steadily.
"Yes, Donald," she said, meeting his gaze unflinchingly, "I got it."
He dropped his head on his hand where it rested on the banister, and they stood for a moment in silence save for the strains of music that came up from below. Then he straightened his shoulders.
"That"s all. I had to make sure, you know. And you didn"t believe in me?"
Across her face quivered the desire for speech, and the necessity for silence.
"I do believe in you, Don," she said earnestly. "I believe in you with all my heart and soul. And we are going to be your friends; you"ll let us, the Doctor and me?"
He took the hand she offered, but he said nothing, and after she was gone he went into his room, and flinging himself across the bed, buried his face in the pillows.
CHAPTER XIX
The new year began inauspiciously at the Queerington"s. In the first place Bertie woke up with the chickenpox and was banished to the nursery. Then the Doctor followed his annual custom of going over his business affairs, with the usual result that he found his accounts greatly overdrawn. This fact was solemnly communicated to each member of the family in turn together with admonitions in regard to the future. By lunch time Hattie had been sent to her room for impertinently suggesting that her father spent more on his books than she did on her clothes, and Connie was sulking over a reduced allowance.
"Of course," the Doctor explained to Miss Lady as he sank exhausted into his invalid chair which had been pressed into service again during the past few weeks, "I have no doubt but that Basil Sequin can arrange things for me. He always has in the past, but he seems very pressed of late, very hara.s.sed. I hardly like to approach him so soon again for a loan."
"Couldn"t we rent a smaller house, and have less company?" suggested Miss Lady.
The Doctor shook his head. "It would be very difficult for me to adjust myself to new surroundings. The conditions here for my work are fairly satisfactory. The Ivy"s piano, to be sure, is a constant annoyance, but by using cotton in my ears I obviate that nuisance. It is particularly unfortunate that this complication about money should come just at the most critical point of my work. Unless Basil Sequin can make some arrangement, I shall be seriously embarra.s.sed."
"I"ll tell you what we can do," cried Miss Lady brightly, just as if she had not been trying to get herself up to the point of making the offer for a week. "We can sell off another bit of Thornwood. Since the Sequins built out there ever so many people have asked about ground."
"No," said the Doctor, the lines of care deepening in his fine, grave face. "There is little left now but the house and farm. Your sentiment regarding the place is such that I cannot permit the sacrifice. The matter will doubtless adjust itself. I shall take some private pupils at the university and perhaps arrange an extra course of lectures. The exigencies of the past two years have been exceptional."
"But you are already working yourself to death," protested Miss Lady.
"Doctor Wyeth said last week that you could not stand the strain. The rest of us ought to do something; we must do something!"
"You are doing something, my dear. You are relieving me of innumerable burdens in regard to the house and the children. You are proving of great a.s.sistance to me in my work, not only by your reading aloud, but by the unfailing sympathy and understanding you give me. Whatever success shall crown my life work will be in a measure due to you."
She was sitting on a ha.s.sock at his feet, and she looked up at him with strange, dumb eyes. His frail body and towering ambition, his loveless life that knew not what it missed, roused in her a pity almost maternal.
A fierce resentment rose within her against herself, for not loving him as she knew a husband should be loved. If he had only won her with his heart instead of his head!
The door bell rang and Miss Lady glanced up apprehensively.
"It was the pickle woman," announced Myrtella, coming in a moment later from the hall. "I sent her about her business."
"Not Miss Ferney!" cried Miss Lady, springing up and rushing out to call her.
Miss Ferney Foster with much difficulty was persuaded to return and sit on the edge of a hall chair. On New Year"s in the past she had always made a formal call at Thornwood and presented the Colonel with a sample of her best wares. The Colonel in turn had invariably sent down cellar for one of the cobwebbiest bottles on the swinging shelf and bestowed it upon her with great gallantry. The indignity of having been refused admittance at the house of the Colonel"s daughter was almost more than she could bear.