"Yes, I know, dear; but, you see, I"m so--afraid."
"You shouldn"t be--not with a safety-valve," retorted Betty. "But, really," she added, turning back laughingly, "there is one funny thing: he never stays around now when there"s any chance of his seeing me with my hat on again. I"ve noticed it. Every single night since that time he did see me a week ago, he"s bade me his stiff good-afternoon and gone upstairs _before_ I"m ready to leave."
"Betty, really?" cried Helen so eagerly that Betty wheeled and faced her with a mischievous laugh.
"Who"s interested _now_ in Mr. Burke Denby"s love-story?" she challenged. But her mother, her hands to her ears, had fled.
It was the very next afternoon that Betty came home so wildly excited that not for a full five minutes could her startled mother obtain anything like a lucid story of the day. Then it came.
"Yes, yes, I know, dear, of course you can"t make anything out of what I say. But listen. I"ll begin at the beginning. It was like this: This morning he had only a few letters for me. Then, in that tired voice he uses most of the time, he said: "I think perhaps now, we might as well begin on the cataloguing. Everything else is pretty well caught up." I jumped up and down and clapped my hands, and--"
"You did _what_?" demanded her mother aghast.
Betty"s nose wrinkled in a saucy little grimace.
"Oh, I mean _inside of me_. _Outside_ I just said, "Yes, sir," or "Very well, Mr. Denby," or something prim and proper like that.
"Well, then he showed me huge drawers full of notes and clippings in a perfectly hopeless ma.s.s of confusion, and he unlocked one of the cabinets and took out the dearest little squat Buddha with diamond eyes, and showed me a number on the base. "There, Miss Darling," he began again in that tired voice of his, "some of these notes and clippings are numbered in pencil to correspond with numbers like these on the curios; but many of them are not numbered at all. Unfortunately, many of the curios, too, lack numbers. All you can do, of course, is to sort out the papers by number, separating into a single pile all those that bear no number. I shall have to help you about those. You won"t, of course, know where they go. I may have trouble myself to identify some of them.
Later, after the preliminary work is done, each object will be entered on a card, together with a condensed tabulation of when and where I obtained it, its age, history--anything, in short, that we can find pertaining to it. The thing to do first, however, is to go through these drawers and sort out their contents by number."
"Having said this (still in that weary voice of his), he put back the little Buddha,--which my fingers were just tingling to get hold of,--waved his hand toward the drawers and papers, and marched out of the room. Then I set to work."
"But what did you do? How did you do it? What were those papers?"
"They were everything, mumsey: clippings from magazines and papers and sales catalogues of antiques, typewritten notes, and scrawls in long hand telling when and where and how Mr. Burke Denby or his father had found this or that thing. But what a mess they were in! And such a lot of them without the sign of a number!
"First, of course, I took a drawer and sorted the numbers into little piles on the big flat library table. Some of them had ten or a dozen, all one number. That work was very easy--only I did so want to read every last one of those notes and clippings! But of course I couldn"t stop for that then. But I did read some of the unnumbered ones, and pretty quick I found one that I just knew referred to the little diamond-eyed Buddha Mr. Denby had taken out of the cabinet. I couldn"t resist then. I just had to go and get it and find out. And I did--and it was; so I put them together on the library table.
"Then I noticed in the same cabinet a little old worn toby jug--a shepherd plaid--about the oldest and rarest there is, you know; and I knew I had three or four unnumbered notes on toby jugs--and, sure enough! three of them fitted this toby; and I put _them_ together, with the jug on top, on the library table. Of course I was wild then to find some more. In the other cabinets that weren"t unlocked, I could see, through the gla.s.s doors, a lot more things, and some of them, I was sure, fitted some of my unnumbered notes; but of course they didn"t do me any good, as I couldn"t get at them. One perfectly beautiful Oriental lacquered cabinet with diamond-paned doors was full of tablets, big and little, and I was crazy to get at those-- I had a lot of notes about tablets. I did find in my cabinet, though, a little package of Chinese bank-notes, and I was sure I had something on those. And I had. I knew about them, anyway. I had seen some in London. These dated "way back to the Tang dynasty--sixth century, you know--and were just as smooth!
They"re made of a kind of paper that crumples up like silk, but doesn"t show creases. They had little rings printed on them of different sizes for different values, so that even the ignorant people couldn"t be deceived, and--"
"Yes, yes, dear, but go on--go on," interrupted the eager-eyed mother, with a smile. "I want to know what happened _here_--not back in the sixth century!"
"Yes, yes, I know," breathed Betty; "but they were _so_ interesting--those things were! Well, of course I put the bank-notes with their clippings on the table; then I began on another drawer. It got to be one o"clock very soon, and Mr. Denby came home to luncheon. I wish you could have seen his face when he entered the library and saw what I had done. His whole countenance lighted up. Why, he looked actually handsome!--and he"s forty, if he"s a day! And there wasn"t a shred of tiredness in his voice.
"Then when he found the bank-notes and the Buddha and the toby jug with the unnumbered clippings belonging to them, he got almost as excited as I was. And when he saw how interested I was, he unlocked the other cabinets--and how we did talk, both at once! Anyhow, whenever I stopped to get my breath he was always talking; and I never could wait for him to finish, there was so much I wanted to ask.
"Poor old Benton! I don"t know how many times he announced luncheon before it dawned over us that he was there at all; and he looked positively apoplectic when we did turn and see him. I don"t dare to think how long we kept luncheon waiting. But everything had that flat, kept-hot-too-long taste, and Benton and Sarah served it with the air of injured saints. Mrs. Gowing showed meek disapproval, and didn"t make even one remark to a course--but perhaps, after all, that was because she didn"t have a chance. You see, Mr. Denby and I talked all the time ourselves."
"But I thought he--he never talked."
"He hasn"t--before. But you see to-day he had such a lot to tell me about the things--how he came by them, and all that. And every single one of them has got a story. And he has such wonderful things! After luncheon he showed them to me--some of them: such marvelous bronzes and carved ivories and Babylonian tablets. He"s got one with a real thumb-print on it--think of it, a thumb-print five thousand years old!
And he"s got a wonderful Buddha two thousand years old from a Chinese temple, and he knows the officer who got it--during the Boxer Rebellion, you know. And he"s got another, not so old, of Himalayan Indian wood, exquisitely carved, and half covered with jewels.
"Why, mother, he"s traveled all over the world, and everywhere he"s found something wonderful or beautiful to bring home. I couldn"t begin to tell you, if I talked all night. And he seemed so pleased because I was interested, and because I could appreciate to some extent, their value."
"I can--imagine it!" There was a little catch in Helen Denby"s voice, but Betty did not notice it.
"Yes, and that makes me think," she went on blithely. "He said such a funny thing once. It was when I held in my hand the Babylonian tablet with the thumb-mark. I had just been saying how I wished the little tablet had the power to transport the holder of it back to a vision of the man who had made that thumb-print, when he looked at me so queerly, and muttered: "Humph! they _are_ more than potatoes to you, aren"t they?" Potatoes, indeed! What do you suppose made him say that? Oh, and that is when he asked me, too, how I came to know so much about jades and ivories and Egyptian antiques."
"What did you tell him?"
At the startled half terror in her mother"s voice Betty"s eyes widened.
"Why, that I learned in London, of course, with you and Gladys and Miss Hughes, poking around old shops there--and everywhere else that we could find them, wherever we were. _You_ know how we used to go "digging," as Gladys called it."
"Yes, I know," subsided the mother, a little faintly.
"Well, we worked all the afternoon--_together!_--Mr. Denby and I did.
What do you think of that?" resumed Betty, after a moment"s pause. "And not once since this morning have I heard any tiredness in Mr. Burke Denby"s voice, if you please."
"But how--how long is this going to take you?"
"Oh, ages and ages! It can"t help it. Why, mother, there are such a lot of them, and such a whole lot about some of them. Others, that he doesn"t know so much about, we"re going to look up. He has lots of books on such things, and he"s buying more all the time. Then all this stuff has got to be condensed and tabulated and put on cards and filed away.
But I love it--every bit of it; and I"m so excited to think I"ve really begun it. And he"s every whit as excited as I am, mother. Listen! He actually forgot all about running away to-night before I put on my hat.
And I never thought of it till just as I was pinning it on. He had followed me out into the hall to tell me something about the old armor in the corner; then, all of a sudden, he stopped--_off--short_, just like that, and said, "Good-night, Miss Darling," in his old stiff way.
As he turned and went upstairs I caught sight of his face. I knew then.
It was the hat. I had reminded him again of--_her_. But I shan"t mind, now, if he is stern and glum sometimes--not with a Babylonian tablet or a Chinese Buddha for company. Oh, mother, if you could see those wonderful things. But maybe sometime you will. I shouldn"t wonder."
"Maybe sometime--I--will!" faltered the mother, growing a little white.
"Why, Betty, what do you mean?"
"Why, I mean, maybe I can take you sometime-- I"ll ask Mr. Denby by and by, after we get things straightened out, if he won"t let me bring you some day to see them."
"Oh, no, no, Betty, don"t--_please_ don"t! I--I couldn"t think of such a thing!"
Betty laughed merrily.
"Why, mumsey, you needn"t look so frightened. They won"t bite you. There aren"t any of those things _alive_, dear!"
"No, of course not. But I"m--I"m sure I--I wouldn"t be able to appreciate them at all."
"But in London you were _trying_ to learn to be interested in such things," persisted Betty, still earnestly. "Don"t you know? You said you _wanted_ to learn to like them, and to appreciate them."
"Yes, I know. But I"m sure I wouldn"t like to--to trouble Mr.
Denby--here," stammered the mother, her face still very white.
CHAPTER XXIII
"THE PLOT THICKENS"
It was shortly before Christmas that Frank Gleason ran up to Dalton. He went first to see Burke Denby.
Burke greeted him with hearty cordiality.