"It"s just like a story in a book!" exclaimed Hinpoha, furtively drying her eyes, which had overflowed during the reading of the last page. "The beautiful lady, and the rival lovers, and the disappointed one never marrying. Oh, it"s too romantic for anything! Oh, _please_ hurry and read what comes next."
Nyoda turned the page and read the brief entry:
"I have taken up the study of ancient history as a serious pursuit. In it I hope to find forgetfulness."
The eyes of the Winnebagos traveled to the bookcase, and now they knew why there was nothing there but dull old books in heavy bindings, and why Uncle Jasper Carver hated love stories.
The next entry had them all sitting up again.
"I have had Hercules fasten an iron shutter over the window in my study-the one through which I can see Tad"s house when I sit at my desk. I cannot bear to look at anything that reminds me of him."
"There!" shouted all the Winnebagos at once. "_That_ was the reason for putting up the iron shutter! The mystery is solved!"
"Poor Uncle Jasper!" said Nyoda pityingly. "What a Spartan he was! How thoroughly he set about removing every memory of Tad from his mind! Think of covering up that beautiful pane of gla.s.s because he couldn"t bear to look through it at the house of his friend!" She finished reading the entry:
"Hercules demurred at covering up the window-he admired it more than anything else in the house-so to give him a satisfactory reason for doing so I told him the devil would come in through that gateway some day and I was putting up the shutter to keep him out. There"s one thing sure; Hercules will never take that shutter down as long as he lives-he"s scared nearly into a Chinaman."
"So that"s why Hercules threw such a fit when we took the shutter off!"
said Sherry. "He thought that now the devil would come in and get him.
Poor, superst.i.tious old n.i.g.g.e.r!"
"I wonder if Tad and Sylvia went to live in the house on Harrisburg Hill," said Sahwah curiously. "He doesn"t say whether they did or not."
"Oh, I wonder if they did!" cried Sylvia, with eager interest. "To think I"ve been living in the same house they lived in-if they _did_ live there," she added. "But how strange it seems to hear them call that place Harrisburg Hill. It is called Main Street Hill now."
"I wonder what Tad and Sylvia did after they were married," said Hinpoha, with romantic curiosity. "Did they stay in Oakwood, or did they go away?
Is there any more, Nyoda?"
Nyoda was already glancing down the next page, which was written over with lines in blacker ink, and broader and heavier strokes of the pen, which seemed somehow to express grim satisfaction on the part of Uncle Jasper. Grim satisfaction Uncle Jasper must indeed have felt when he wrote those lines, for misfortune had overtaken the one who had caused his own anguish of heart. The entry told how Tad had become staff physician at one of the large army posts in the west. There was an epidemic of typhoid and quite a few of the men were ill at once, all requiring the same kind of medicine. Through carelessness in making up a certain medicine he put in a deadly poison instead of the harmless ingredient he intended to put in, and a dozen men died of the dose. There was a tremendous stir about the matter, and the newspapers all over the country were full of it. He was court-martialed, and though he was acquitted, the mistake being entirely accidental, the matter had gained such publicity that his career as a doctor was ruined. He left the army and fled out of the country, taking Sylvia with him. Some months later the papers brought the announcement of both their deaths from yellow fever in Cuba. Again the handwriting began to waver on the last sentence.
"She is dead." In those three little words the Winnebagos seemed to hear the echo of the breaking of a strong man"s heart. There were no more entries.
"Isn"t it perfectly _thrilling_!" gulped Hinpoha, with eyes overflowing again. "It"s better than any book I ever read! And to think we never suspected there was anything like that connected with your Uncle Jasper!
There, now, Katherine Adams, what did I tell you? You said he was a born bachelor, and just look at the romance he had!"
"He certainly did," said Katherine, in a tone of surrender.
"That must be why the house we lived in was shut up so long," said Sylvia musingly. "The man that said we could live in it said that old Mrs.
Phillips had moved away many years ago and had never come back, and although people knew she was dead, no one had ever come to live in the house, and n.o.body in Oakwood knew who owned it. The man said he had heard from older people in the town that Mrs. Phillips had had a son who was away from home all the time after he was grown up and who had gotten into some kind of trouble-he couldn"t remember what it was. This must have been it! How queer it is, that I should first come to live in Tad"s house, and then stay in the house of his friend! I never dreamed, when I heard that man telling Aunt Aggie about the almost forgotten people that used to live in the old house, that I should ever hear of them again.
Things have turned out to be _so_ interesting since I came to stay in the Winter Palace!" she finished up with sparkling eyes.
Darkness had fallen by the time Nyoda had finished reading Uncle Jasper"s Diary, and she jumped up with a little exclamation as the clock on the mantel-piece chimed six. The other hours had struck unnoticed. "Mercy!"
she cried, "it"s time dinner was on the table, and here we haven"t even begun to get it! I forgot all about dinner, thinking about poor Uncle Jasper."
All the rest had forgotten about dinner, too, and the Winnebagos could not get their minds off the tale they had just heard read. "Poor Uncle Jasper!" they all said, looking up at his picture, and to their pitying eyes his face was no longer grim and stern, but only pathetic.
CHAPTER VII SYLVIA"S STORY
"Katherine Adams, whatever has happened to you?" asked Gladys suddenly, meeting her under the bright light in the hall that evening after dinner.
"Why?" asked Katherine, looking startled. "Is there any soot on my face?"
"No," replied Gladys with a peal of laughter, "I didn"t mean anything like that. I meant that you look different from the way you used to look, that"s all. You"ve changed since the days when I first knew you. What have you done to yourself in the last year? You"re the same old Katherine, of course, but you"re different, somehow. I noticed it when you first came to Brownell last fall, but I"ve been too busy to give it much thought. But since we"ve been here I"ve been watching you and I can"t help noticing the difference. Now stand right there under that light and let me look at you."
Katherine laughed good humoredly and stood still dutifully while Gladys inspected her with appraising eyes that took in all the little improvements in Katherine"s appearance. She was heavier than she used to be; some of her angles were softened into curves. She now stood erect, with her head up and her shoulders thrown back, which made her look several inches taller. Her hair no longer hung about her face in stringy wisps; the loose ends were curled becomingly around her temples and ears and held in place with invisible hairpins. She wore a trim worsted dress of an odd shade of blue, which was just the right shade to go with her dull blonde hair and with the dark brown of her neat shoes. Her knuckles were no longer red and rough; her fingernails were manicured; the sagging spectacles of the old days had given way to intellectual looking nose gla.s.ses with narrow tortoise sh.e.l.l rims.
"Well, what"s the verdict?" asked Katherine, smiling broadly at Gladys.
"You"re wonderful!" said Gladys enthusiastically. "You"re actually stunning! Whoever told you to get that particular shade of blue to bring out the color of your hair?"
"n.o.body told me," answered Katherine. "I bought it because it was a bargain." But there was a knowing twinkle in her eyes which gave her dead away, and Gladys, seeing it, knew that Katherine had at last achieved that pride of appearance which she had struggled so long to instill into her.
"However did you do it?" she murmured.
"It was your eleven Rules of Neatness that did it," replied Katherine, laughing, "or was it seven? I forget. But I did do just the things you told me to do, and it worked. There is no longer any danger of my coming apart in public! What a trial I used to be to you, though!" she said, flushing a little at the recollection. "How you ever put up with me I don"t know. How _did_ you stand it, anyway?"
"Because we loved you, sweet child," replied Gladys fondly, "and because we all believed the motto, "While there"s life, there"s hope." We knew you would be a paragon of neatness some day as soon as you got around to it. You never _could_ think of more than one thing at a time, Katherine dear!"
"O my, O my, look at them hugging each other!" exclaimed a teasing voice from above. Looking up they saw Justice Dalrymple leaning over the banisters at the head of the stairs. "You never do that to me," he continued in a plaintive tone.
Katherine and Gladys merely laughed at him and walked on, arm in arm, and Justice came down the stairs wringing mock tears out of his handkerchief and singing mournfully,
"Forsaken, forsa-ken, Forsa-a-a-ken a-m I, Like the bones at a banquet All men pa.s.s me-e-e by!"
"Do behave yourself, Justice," said Katherine with mock severity. "If you disgrace me I"ll never get you invited anywhere again. Why can"t you be good like the other two boys?"
""Cause I"m a Junebug," warbled Justice, to the tune of "I"m a Pilgrim,"
""Cause I"m a Junebug, And I"m a beetul, And I can"t be no Rhinoscerairus, "Cause I"m a Junebug, And I"m a beetul, I can"t be no, Rhinoscerairus!"
He advanced into the drawing room, where Katherine now stood alone, and drew out the last syllable of his absurd song into a long bleating wail that sent her into convulsions of laughter till the tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Tears, idle tears--"
began Justice, picking up a vase from the table and holding it under her eyes, and then he stopped, as if struck by a sudden recollection. "I said that to you once before," he said, "don"t you remember? The first time we really got acquainted with each other. You were standing by the stove, weeping into the apple sauce."
"It was pudding," Katherine corrected him, with a little shamefaced laugh at the remembrance, "huckleberry pudding. And I streaked it all over my face and you nearly died laughing."
"Well, you laughed too," Justice defended himself, "and that"s how we got to be friends."
"That seems ages ago," said Katherine, "and yet it"s only a little over a year. What a year that was!"
Both stopped their bantering and looked at each other with sober eyes, each thinking of what the trying year at Spencer had been to them.
Justice"s eyes traveled over Katherine, and he, too, noticed that she was much better looking than when he first knew her. Katherine noticed the admiration dawning in his eyes and divined his thoughts. After Gladys"s spontaneous outburst of approval she knew beyond any doubt that her appearance no longer offended the artistic eye. The knowledge gave her a new confidence in herself, and a thrill of pleasure that she had never experienced before went through her like an electric shock. At last people had ceased to look upon her as a cross between a circus and a lunatic asylum, she told herself exultingly.