"Listen," she said. "Do you know what you have done to me? Do you know that when father knows this he"s going to annul the marriage or have Mr.
Carter arrested for kidnaping or abduction?--whatever it is." Mrs. d.i.c.k puckered her face to cry, and Mr. d.i.c.k took a step forward, but Miss Patty waved him off. "You know father as well as I do, Dolly. You know what he is, and lately he"s been awful. He"s not well--it"s his liver again--and he won"t listen to anything. Why, the Austrian amba.s.sador came up here, all this distance, to talk about the etiquette of the--of my wedding, something about precedence, and he wouldn"t even see him."
"He can"t annul it," said Mr. d.i.c.k angrily. "I"m of age. And I can support my wife, too, or will be able--soon."
"Dolly"s not of age," said Miss Patty wearily. "I"ve sat up all night figuring it out. He"s going to annul the marriage, or he"ll make a scandal anyhow, and that"s just as bad. Dolly,"--she turned to her sister imploringly--"Dolly, I can"t have a scandal now. You know how Oskar"s people have taken this, anyhow; they"ve given in, because he insisted, but they don"t want me, and if there"s a lot of notoriety now the emperor will send him to Africa or some place, and--"
"I wish they would!" Mrs. Carter burst out suddenly. "I hate the whole thing. They only tolerate you--us--for our money. You needn"t look at me like that; Oskar may be all right, but his mother and sisters are hateful--simply hateful!"
"I"ll not be with them."
"No, but they"ll be with you." Mrs. d.i.c.ky walked over to the window and looked out, dabbing her eyes. "You"ve been everything to me, Pat, and I"m so happy now--I"d rather be here on a soap box with d.i.c.k than on a throne or a dais or whatever you"ll have to sit on over there, with Oskar. I want to be happy--and you won"t. Look at Alice Thorne and her duke!"
"If you really want me to be happy," Miss Patty said, going over to her, "you"ll go back to school until the wedding is over."
"I won"t leave d.i.c.ky." She swung around and gave Mr. d.i.c.k an adoring glance, and Miss Patty looked discouraged.
"Take him with you," she said. "Isn"t there some place near where he could stay, and telephone you now and then?"
"Telephone!" said Mrs. d.i.c.k scornfully.
"Can"t leave," Mr. d.i.c.k objected. "Got to be on the property."
Miss Patty shrugged her shoulders and turned to go. "You"re both perfectly hopeless," she said. "I"ll go and tell father, Dorothy, but you know what will happen. You"ll be back in school at Greenwich by to-night, and your--husband will probably be under arrest." She opened the door, but I dropped the toast I was making and ran after her.
"If he is arrested," I said, "they"ll have to keep him on the place. He can"t leave."
She didn"t say anything; she lifted her hand and looked at the ruby ring, and then she glanced back into the room where Mr. d.i.c.k and his wife were whispering together, and turned up her coat collar.
"I"m going," she said, and stepped into the snow. But they called her back in a hurry.
"Look here, Miss--Miss Patricia," Mr. d.i.c.k said, "why can"t we stay here, where we are? It"s very comfortable--that is, it"s livable.
There"s plenty of fresh air, anyhow, and everybody"s shouting for fresh air nowadays. They"ve got somebody to take my place in the house."
"And father needn"t know a thing--you can fix that," broke in Mrs. d.i.c.k.
"And after your wedding he will be in a better humor; he"ll know it"s over and not up to him any more."
Miss Patty came back to the shelter-house again and sat down on the soap box.
"We MIGHT carry it off," she said. "If I could only go back to town!
But father is in one of his tantrums, and he won"t go, or let me go.
The idea!--with Aunt Honoria on the long-distance wire every day, having hysterics, and my clothes waiting to be tried on and everything. I"m desperate."
"And all sorts of things being arranged for you!" put in Mrs. d.i.c.k enviously. "And the family jewels being reset in Vienna for you and all that! It would be great--if you only didn"t have to take Oskar with the jewels!"
Miss Patty frowned.
"You are not going to marry him," she said, with a glance at Mr. d.i.c.k, who, with his coat off, was lying flat on the floor, one arm down in the hole where the things had been hidden, trying to hook up a can of baked beans. "If it doesn"t turn out well, you and father have certainly done your part in the way of warning. It"s just as Aunt Honoria said; the family will make a tremendous row beforehand, but afterward, when it all turns out well, they"ll take the credit."
Mr. d.i.c.k was busy with the beans and I was turning the eggs. Mrs. d.i.c.k went over to her sister and put her arm around her.
"That"s right, Patty," she said, "you"re more like mother than I am.
I"m a Jennings all over--except that, heavens be praised, I"ve got the Sherwood liver. I guess I"m common plebeian, like dad, too. I"m plebeian enough, anyhow, to think there"s been a lot too much about marriage settlements and the consent of the emperor in all this, and not enough about love."
I could have patted Mrs. d.i.c.ky on the back for that, and I almost upset the eggs into the fire. I"m an advocate of marrying for love every time, although a t.i.tle and a bunch of family jewels thrown in wouldn"t worry me.
"Do you want me to protest that the man who has asked me to marry him cares about me?" Miss Patty replied in an angry undertone. "Couldn"t he have married a thousand other girls! Hadn"t a marriage been arranged between him and the cousin--"
"I know all that," Mrs. d.i.c.ky said, and her voice sounded older than Miss Patty"s, and motherly. "But--are you in love with him, Pat?"
"Certainly," Miss Patty said indignantly. "Don"t be silly, Dolly."
At that instant Mr. d.i.c.k found the beans, and got up shouting that we"d have a meal fit for a prince--if princes ate anything so every day as baked beans. I put the eggs on a platter and poured the coffee, and we all sat around the soap box and ate. I wished that Miss Cobb could have seen me there--how they insisted on my having a second egg, and was my coffee cold, and wasn"t I too close to the fire? It was Minnie here and Minnie there, and me next to Miss Patty on the floor, and she, as you may say, right next to royalty. I wished it could have been in the spring-house, with father"s crayon enlargement looking down on us.
Everybody felt better for the meal, and we were sitting there laughing and talking and very cheerful when Mr. Van Alstyne opened the door and looked in. His face was stern, but when he saw us, with Miss Patty on her knees toasting a piece of bread and Mr. d.i.c.ky pa.s.sing the tin basin as a finger-bowl, he stopped scowling and looked amused.
"They"re here, Sallie," he called to his wife, and they both came in, covered with snow, and we had coffee and eggs all over again.
Well, they stayed for an hour, and Mr. Sam talked himself black in the face and couldn"t get anywhere. For the d.i.c.kys refused to be separated, and Mrs. d.i.c.k wouldn"t tell her father, and Miss Patty wouldn"t do it for her, and the minute Mr. Sam made a suggestion that sounded rational Mrs. d.i.c.k would cry and say she didn"t care to live, anyhow, and she wished she had died of ptomaine poisoning the time she ate the bad oysters at school.
So finally Mr. Sam gave up and said he washed his hands of the whole affair, and that he was going to make another start on his wedding journey, and if they wanted to be a pair of fools it wasn"t up to him--only for heaven"s sake not to cry about it. And then he wiped Mrs. d.i.c.ky"s eyes and kissed her, she being, as he explained, his sister-in-law now and much too pretty for him to scold.
And when the d.i.c.kys found they were not going to be separated we had more coffee all around and everybody grew more cheerful.
Oh, we were very cheerful! I look back now and think how cheerful we were, and I shudder. It was strange that we hadn"t been warned by Mr.
Pierce"s square jaw, but we were not. We sat around the fire and ate and laughed, and Mr. d.i.c.k arranged that Mr. Pierce should come out to him every evening for orders about the place if he accepted, and everybody felt he would--and I was to come at the same time and bring a basket of provisions for the next day. Of course, the instant Mr. Jennings left the young couple could go into the sanatorium as guests under another name and be comfortable. And as soon as the time limit was up, and the place was still running smoothly, they could declare the truth, claim the sanatorium, having fulfilled the conditions of the will, and confess to Mr. Jennings--over the long-distance wire.
Well, it promised well, I must say. Mr. St.i.tt left on the ten train that morning, looking lemon-colored and mottled. He insisted that he wasn"t able to go, but Mr. Sam gave him a headache powder and put him on the train, anyhow.
Yes, as I say, it promised well. But we made two mistakes: we didn"t count on Mr. Thoburn, and we didn"t know Mr. Pierce. And who could have imagined that Mike the bath man would do as he did?
CHAPTER X
ANOTHER COMPLICATION
After luncheon, when everybody at Hope Springs takes a nap, we had another meeting at the shelter-house, this time with Mr. Pierce. He had spent the morning tramping over the hills with a gun and keeping out of the way of people, and what with three square meals, a good night"s sleep and the exercise, he was looking a lot better. Seen in daylight, he had very dark hair and blue-gray eyes and a very square chin, although it had a sort of dimple in it. I used to wonder which won out, the dimple or the chin, but I wasn"t long in finding out.
Well, he looked dazed when I took him to the shelter-house and he saw Mr. d.i.c.k and Mrs. d.i.c.k and the Mr. Sams and Miss Patty. They gave him a lawn-mower to sit on, and Mr. Sam explained the situation.
"I know it"s asking a good bit, Mr. Pierce," he said, "and personally I can see only one way out of all this. Carter ought to go in and take charge, and his--er--wife ought to go back to school. But they won"t have it, and--er--there are other reasons." He glanced at Miss Patty.
Mr. Pierce also glanced at Miss Patty. He"d been glancing at her at intervals of two seconds ever since she came in, and being a woman and having a point to gain, Miss Patty seemed to have forgotten the night before, and was very nice to him. Once she smiled directly at him, and whatever he was saying died in his throat of the shock. When she turned her head away he stared at the back of her neck, and when she looked at the fire he gazed at her profile, and always with that puzzled look, as if he hadn"t yet come to believe that she was the newspaper Miss Jennings.
After everything had been explained to him, including Mr. Jennings"
liver and disposition, she turned to him and said: