A Pair of Patient Lovers Part 7

"Well, it's an abominable outrage!" she began. She added: "It's a burning shame! They'll never get over it in the world; and when it comes lagging along after everything's over, she won't care a pin for it! How did it happen?"

Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap, and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.

"Well, it doesn't matter!" she said, with a bitterness that was a great comfort to Gaites. "What are you going to do about it?" she asked him.

"I don't know what _can_ be done about it," he answered, referring himself to the man in the silk cap.

The man said, "No freight out, now, till Monday."

Mrs. Maze burst forth again: "If I had the least confidence in the world in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the expressage myself."

"Oh, I couldn't let you do that, Mrs. Maze," Gaites protested. "Besides, I don't suppose they'd allow us to take it out of the freight, here, unless we had the bill of lading."

"Well," cried Mrs. Maze, pa.s.sionately, "I can't bear to think of that child's suspense. It's perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn't they telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and relieve people's minds. We'll go and make the station-master telegraph!"

But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. "I don't think I've got any right to do that," he said.

"Of coa.r.s.e I'll pay for the telegram," Mrs. Maze interpolated.

"It ain't that exactly," said the station-master. "It might look as if I was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze."

She took fire. "Then _I'll_ meddle myself!" she blazed. "There's nothing to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!"

"_I_ can't hinder you," the station-master admitted.

"Well, then!" She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her, and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:

_Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt, N. H.

Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth, where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday._

"There! How will that do?" she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to him.

"That seems to cover the ground," he said, not so wholly hiding the misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,

"It explains everything, doesn't it?"

"Yes--"

"Very well; sign it, then!"

"I?"

"Certainly. She doesn't know me."

"She doesn't know me, either," said Gaites. He added: "And a man's name--"

"To be sure! Why didn't I think of that?" and she affixed a signature in which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive generation--Elaine W. Maze. "_Now_," she triumphed, as Gaites helped her into her trap--"_now_ I shall have a little peace of my life!"

IV.

Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The argument she used was, "No freight out till Monday, you know." The inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.

That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue with the river and the girl's eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o'clock dinner, with a few other friends.

Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.

His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.

It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time for all he had to do at Craybrooks.

The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, "Oh, she's a Desmond, through and through."

He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of that pale girl's face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp just behind them.

They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again, and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.

"Yes," she said, "they must have had their summer home there nearly twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first cottage there."

The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her childhood romps on her father's lawn somewhat older than he imagined, but not too old for the purposes of his romance.

The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.

"I guess," she continued, "that they pa.s.s most of the year there. After he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I guess they don't much any more; if they don't stay there the whole winter through, I don't believe they get much farther now than Portland, or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the Conservatory, so as to teach; but--"

She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.

V.

In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached her.

It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl's birthday; it was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living.

But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.

He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person apparently not minding his own business, "Lost something?"

"Yes, I have," answered Gaites with just effrontery. "I've lost an upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight ago, and I've found it everywhere I've stopped, and sometimes where I didn't stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?"

The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites's tone, and dropped it from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in answering: "'D ought a come right through in a couple of days. 'D ought a been here a week ago."

"Why isn't it here now, then?"

"Might 'a' got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there till it was looked up. You see," the man continued, resting an elbow on the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more confidential level in his manner, "an upright piano ain't like a pa.s.senger. It don't kick if it's shunted off on the wrong line. As a gene'l rule, freight don't complain of the route it travels by, and it ain't in a hurry to arrive."

"Oh!" said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.