Peter Part 24

Miss Felicia sprang forward and caught her in her arms.

"Come!--none of this, Child. Pull yourself together right away. Get her some water, nurse,--she has stood all she can. There now, dearie--"

Ruth's head was on her breast now. "There--there--Such a poor darling, and so many things coming all at once. There, darling, put your head on my shoulder and cry it all out."

The girl sobbed on, the wrinkled hand patting her cheek.

"Oh, but you don't know, aunty--" she crooned.

"Yes, but I do--you blessed child. I know it all."

"And won't somebody go and help him? He is all alone, he told me so."

"Uncle Peter is with him, dearie.'"

"Yes,--but some one who can--" she straightened up--"I will go, aunty--I will go now."

"You will do nothing of the kind, you little goose; you will stay just where you are."

"Well, won't you go, then? Oh, please--please--aunty." Peter's bald head now rose above the edge of the banisters. Miss Felicia motioned him to go back, but Ruth heard his step and raised her tear-drenched face half hidden in her dishevelled hair.

"Oh, Uncle Peter, is Jack--is Mr. Breen--"

Miss Felicia's warning face behind Ruth's own, for once reached Peter in time.

"In his bed and covered up, and his landlady, Mrs. Hicks, sitting beside him," responded Peter in his cheeriest tones.

"But he fainted from pain--and--"

"Yes, but that's all over now, my dear," broke in Miss Felicia.

"But you will go, anyhow--won't you, aunty?" pleaded Ruth.

"Certainly--just as soon as I put you to bed, and that is just where you have got to go this very minute," and she led the overwrought trembling girl into her room and shut the door.

Peter stood for an instant looking about him, his mind taking in the situation. Ruth was being cared for now, and so was MacFarlane--the white cap and ap.r.o.n of the noiseless nurse pa.s.sing in and out of the room in which he lay, a.s.sured him of that. Bolton, too, in the room next to Jack's, was being looked after by his sister who had just arrived.

He, too, was fairly comfortable, though a couple of his fingers had been shortened. But there was n.o.body to look after Jack--no father, mother, sister--n.o.body. To send for the boy's uncle, or Corinne, or his aunt, was out of the question, none of them having had more than a word with him since his departure. Yet Jack needed attention. The doctor had just pulled him out of one fainting spell only to have him collapse again when his coat was taken off, and the bandages were loosened. He was suffering greatly and was by no means out of danger.

If for the next hour or two there was anything to be done at MacFarlane's, Peter was ready to do it, but this accomplished, he would shoulder his bag and camp out for the night beside the boy's bed. He had come, indeed, to tell Felicia so, and he meant to sleep there whatever her protests. He was preparing himself for her objections, when she reentered the room.

"How is young Breen?" Miss Felicia asked in a whisper, closing the door behind her. She had put Ruth to bed, where she had again given way to an uncontrollable fit of weeping.

"Pretty weak. The doctor is with him now."

"What did the fool get up for?" She did not mean to surrender too quickly about Jack despite his heroism--not to Peter, at any rate. Then, again, she half suspected that Ruth's tears were equally divided between the rescuer and the rescued.

"He couldn't help it, I suppose," answered Peter, with a gleam in his eyes--"he was born that way."

"Born! What stuff, Peter--no man of any common-sense would have--"

"I quite agree with you, my dear--no man except a gentleman. There is no telling what one of that kind might do under such circ.u.mstances." And with a wave of his hand and a twinkle in his merry scotch-terrier eyes, the old fellow disappeared below the handrail.

Miss Felicia leaned over the banisters:

"Peter, PETER," she called after him, "where are you going?"

"To stay all night with Jack."

"Well, that's the most sensible thing I have heard of yet. Will you take him a message from me?"

Peter looked up: "Yes, Felicia, what is it?"

"Give him my love."

CHAPTER XVI

Miss Felicia kept her promise to Ruth. Before that young woman, indeed, tired out with anxiety, had opened her beautiful eyes the next morning and pushed back her beautiful hair from her beautiful face--and it was still beautiful, despite all the storms it had met and weathered, the energetic, old lady had presented herself at the front door of Mrs.

Hicks's Boarding Hotel (it was but a step from MacFarlane's) and had sent her name to the young man in the third floor back.

A stout person, with a head of adjustable hair held in place by a band of black velvet skewered by a gold pin, the whole surmounted by a flaring mob-cap of various hues and dyes, looked Miss Felicia all over and replied in a dubious tone:

"He's had a bad mash-up, and I don't think--"

"I am quite aware of it, my dear madam, or I would not be here. Now, please show me the way to Mr. Breen's room--my brother was here last night and--"

"Oh, the bald-headed gentleman?" exclaimed Mrs. Hicks. "Such a dear, kind man; and it was as much as I could do to get him to bed and he a--"

But Miss Felicia was already inside the sitting-room, her critical eyes noting its bare, forbidding furnishing and appointment--she had not yet let down her skirts, the floor not being inviting. As each article pa.s.sed in review--the unsteady rocking-chairs upholstered in haircloth and protected by stringy tidies, the disconsolate, almost bottomless lounge, fly-specked bra.s.s clock and mantel ornaments, she could not but recall the palatial entrance, drawing-room, and boudoir into which Parkins had ushered her on that memorable afternoon when she had paid a visit to Mrs. Arthur Breen--(her "last visit" the old lady would say with a sly grimace at Holker, who had never forgiven "that pirate, Breen," for robbing Gilbert of his house).

"And this is what this idiot has got in exchange," she said to herself as she peered into the dining-room beyond, with its bespattered table-cloth flanked by cheap china plates and ivory napkin rings--the castors mounting guard at either end.

The entrance of the lady with the transferable hair cut short her revery.

"Mr. Breen says come up, ma'am," she said in a subdued voice. It was astonishing how little time it took for Miss Felicia's personality to have its effect.

Up the uncarpeted stairs marched the great lady, down an equally bare hall lined on either side by bedroom doors, some marked by unblacked shoes others by tin trays holding fragments of late or early breakfasts, the flaring cap obsequiously pointing the way until the two had reached a door at the end of the corridor.

"Now I won't bother you any more," said Miss Felicia. "Thank you very much. Are you in here Mr. Breen?" she called in a cheery voice as she pushed open the door, and advanced to his bedside:--"Oh, you poor fellow! Oh, I AM so sorry!"

The boy lay on a cot-bed pushed close to the wall. His face was like chalk; his eyes deep set in his head; his scalp one criss-cross of bandages, and his right hand and wrist a misshapen lump of cotton wadding and splints.

"No, don't move. Why, you did not look as bad as this yesterday," she added in sympathetic tones, patting his free hand with her own, her glance wandering over the cramped little room with its meagre appointments.

Jack smiled faintly and a light gleamed in his eyes. The memory of yesterday evidently brought no regrets.

"I dared not look any other way," he answered faintly; "I was so afraid of alarming Miss Ruth." Then after a pause in which the smile and the gleam flickered over his pain-tortured face, he added in a more determined voice: "I am glad I went, though the doctor was furious. He says it was the worst thing I could have done--and thought I ought to have had sense enough to--But don't let's talk any more about it, Miss Felicia. It was so good of you to come. Mr. Grayson has just left. You'd think he was a woman, he is so gentle and tender. But I'll be around in a day or two, and as soon as I can get on my feet and look less like a scarecrow than I do, I am coming over to see you and Miss Ruth and--yes, and UNCLE PETER--" Miss Felicia arched her eyebrows: "Oh, you needn't look!--that's what I am going to call him after this; we settled all that last night."