Peter Part 25

A smile overspread Miss Felicia's face. "Uncle Peter, is it? And I suppose you will be calling me Aunt Felicia next?"

Jack turned his eyes: "That was just what I was trying to screw up my courage to do. Please let me, won't you?" Again Miss Felicia lifted her eyebrows, but she did not say she would.

"And Ruth--what do you intend to call that young lady? Of course, without her permission, as that seems to be the fashion." And the old lady's eyes danced in restrained merriment.

The sufferer's face became suddenly grave; for an instant he did not answer, then he said slowly:

"But what can I call her except Miss Ruth?"

Miss Felicia laughed. Nothing was so delicious as a love affair which she could see into. This boy's heart was an open book. Besides, this kind of talk would take his mind from his miseries.

"Oh, but I am not so sure of that," she rejoined, in an encouraging tone.

A light broke out in Jack's eyes: "You mean that she WOULD let me call her--call her Ruth?"

"I don't mean anything of the kind, you foolish fellow. You have got to ask her yourself; but there's no telling what she would not do for you now, she's so grateful to you for saving her father's life."

"But I did not," he exclaimed, an expression as of acute pain crossing his brows. "I only helped him along. But she must not be grateful. I don't like the word. Grat.i.tude hasn't got anything to do with--" he did not finish the sentence.

"But you DID save his life, and you know it, and I just love you for it," she insisted, ignoring his criticism as she again smoothed his hand. "You did a fine, n.o.ble act, and I am proud of you and I came to tell you so." Then she added suddenly: "You received my message last night, didn't you? Now, don't tell me that that good-for-nothing Peter forgot it."

"No, he gave it to me, and it was so kind of you."

"Well, then I forgive him. And now," here she made a little salaam with both her hands--"now you have Ruth's message."

"I have what?" he asked in astonishment.

"Ruth's message." She still kept her face straight although her lips quivered with merriment.

Jack tried to lift his head: "What is her message?" he asked with expectant eyes--perhaps she had sent him a letter!

Miss Felicia tapped her bosom with her forefinger.

"ME!" she cried, "I am her message. She was so worried last night when she found out how ill you were that I promised her to come and comfort you; that is why it is ME. And now, don't you think you ought to get down on your knees and thank her? Why, you don't seem a bit pleased!"

"And she sent you to me--because--because--she was GRATEFUL that I saved her father's life?" he asked in a bewildered tone.

"Of course--why shouldn't she be; is there anything else you can give her she would value as much as her father's life, you conceited young Jackanapes?"

She had the pin through the b.u.t.terfly now and was watching it squirm; not maliciously--she was never malicious. He would get over the p.r.i.c.k, she knew. It might help him in the end, really.

"No, I suppose not," he replied simply, as he sank back on his pillow and turned his bruised face toward the wall.

For some moments he lay in deep thought. The last half-hour in the arbor under the palms came back to him; the tones of Ruth's voice; the casual way in which she returned his devouring glance. She didn't love him; never had loved him; wouldn't ever love him. Anybody could carry another fellow out on his back; was done every day by firemen and life-savers,--everybody, in fact, who happened to be around when their services were most needed. Grateful! Of course the rescued people and their friends were grateful until they forgot all about it, as they were sure to do the next day, or week, or month. Grat.i.tude was not what he wanted. It was love. That was the way he felt; that was the way he would always feel. He who loved every hair on Ruth's beautiful head, loved her wonderful hands, loved her darling feet, loved the very ground on which she walked "Grat.i.tude!" eh! That was the word his uncle had used the day he slammed the door of his private office in his face. "Common grat.i.tude, d.a.m.n you, Jack, ought to put more sense in your head," as though one ought to have been "grateful" for a seat at a gambling table and two rooms in a house supported by its profits. Garry had said "grat.i.tude," too, and so had Corinne, and all the rest of them. Peter had never talked grat.i.tude; dear Peter, who had done more for him than anybody in the world except his own father. Peter wanted his love if he wanted anything, and that was what he was going to give him--big, broad, all-absorbing LOVE. And he did love him. Even his wrinkled hands, so soft and white, and his glistening head, and his dabs of gray whiskers, and his sweet, firm, human mouth were precious to him. Peter--his friend, his father, his comrade! Could he ever insult him by such a mean, cowardly feeling as grat.i.tude? And was the woman he loved as he loved nothing else in life--was she--was Ruth going to belittle their relations with the same subst.i.tute? It was a big pin, that which Miss Felicia had impaled him on, and it is no wonder the poor fluttering wings were nigh exhausted in the struggle!

Relief came at last.

"And now what shall I tell her?" asked Miss Felicia. "She worries more over you than she does over her father; she can get hold of him any minute, but you won't be presentable for a week. Come, what shall I tell her?"

Jack shifted his shoulders so that he could move the easier and with less pain, and raised himself on his well elbow. There was no use of his hoping any more; she had evidently sent Miss Felicia to end the matter with one of her polite phrases,--a weapon which she, of all women, knew so well how to use.

"Give Miss Ruth my kindest regards," he said in a low voice, still husky from the effects of the smoke and the strain of the last half-hour--"and say how thankful I am for her grat.i.tude, and--No,--don't tell her anything of the kind. I don't know what you are to tell her." The words seemed to die in his throat.

"But she will ask me, and I have got to say something. Come,--out with it." Her eyes were still on his face; not a beat of his wings or a squirm of his body had she missed.

"Well just say how glad I am she is at home again and that her father is getting on so well, and tell her I will be up and around in a day or two, and that I am not a bit worse off for going to the station yesterday."

"Anything else?"

"No,--unless you can think of something."

"And if I do shall I add it?"

"Yes."

"Oh,--then I know exactly what to do,--it will be something like this: 'Please, Ruth, take care of your precious self, and don't be worried about me or anything else, and remember that every minute I am away from you is misery, for I love you to distraction and--'"

"Oh, Miss Felicia!"

"No--none of your protests, sir!" she laughed. "That is just what I am going to tell her. And now don't you dare to move till Peter comes back," and with a toss of her aristocratic head the dear lady left the room, closing the door behind her.

And so our poor b.u.t.terfly was left flat against the wall--all his flights ended. No more roaming over honeysuckles, drinking in the honey of Ruth's talk; no more soaring up into the blue, the sunshine of hope dazzling his wings. It made no difference what Miss Felicia might say to Ruth. It was what she had said to HIM which made him realize the absurdity of all his hopes. Everything that he had longed for, worked for, dreamed about, was over now--the long walks in the garden, her dear hand in his, even the song of the choir boys, and the burst of joyous music as they pa.s.sed out of the church door only to enter their own for life. All this was gone--never to return--never had existed, in fact, except in his own wild imagination. And once more the disheartened boy turned his tired pain-racked face toward the bare wall.

Miss Felicia tripped downstairs with an untroubled air, extended two fingers to Mrs. Hicks, and without more ado pa.s.sed out into the morning air. No thought of the torment she had inflicted affected the dear woman. What were pins made for except to curb the ambitious wings of flighty young men who were soaring higher than was good for them. She would let him know that Ruth was a prize not to be too easily won, especially by penniless young gentlemen, however brave and heroic they might be.

Hardly had she crossed the dreary village street enc.u.mbered with piles of half-melted snow and mud, than she espied Peter picking his way toward her, his silk hat brushed to a turn, his gray surtout b.u.t.toned close, showing but the edge of his white silk m.u.f.fler, his carefully rolled umbrella serving as a divining rod the better to detect the water holes. No one who met him and looked into his fresh, rosy face, or caught the merry twinkle of his eyes, would ever have supposed he had been pouring liniment over broken arms and bandaged fingers until two o'clock in the morning of the night before. It had only been when Bolton's sister had discovered an empty "cell," as Jack called the bedroom next to his, that he had abandoned his intention of camping out on Jack's disheartened lounge, and had retired like a gentleman carrying with him all his toilet articles, ready to be set out in the morning.

Long before that time he had captured everybody in the place: from Mrs.

Hicks, who never dreamed that such a well of tenderness over suffering could exist in an old fellow's heart, down to the freckled-faced boy who came for his muddy shoes and who, after a moment's talk with Peter as to how they should be polished, retired later in the firm belief that they belonged to "a gent way up in G," as he expressed it, he never having waited on "the likes of him before." As to Bolton, he thought he was the "best ever," and as to his prim, patient sister who had closed her school to be near her brother--she declared to Mrs. Hicks five minutes after she had laid her eyes on him, that Mr. Breen's uncle was "just too dear for anything,"--to which the lady with the movable hair and mob-cap not only agreed, but added the remark of her own, "that folks like him was a sight better than the kind she was a-gettin'."

All these happenings of the night and early hours of this bright, beautiful morning--and it was bright and sunny overhead despite the old fellow's precautionary umbrella--had helped turn out the spick and span gentleman who was now making his way carefully over the unpaved road which stood for Corklesville's princ.i.p.al street.

Miss Felicia saw him first.

"Oh! there you are!" she cried before he could raise his eyes. "Did you ever see anything so disgraceful as this crossing--not a plank--nothing.

No--get out of my way, Peter; you will just upset me, and I would rather help myself."

In reply Peter, promptly ignoring her protest, stepped in front of her, poked into several fraudulent solidities covering unfathomable depths, found one hard enough to bear the weight of Miss Felicia's dainty shoe--it was about as long as a baby's hand--and holding out his own said, in his most courtly manner:

"Be very careful now, my dear: put your foot on mine; so! now give me your hand and jump. There--that's it." To see Peter help a lady across a muddy street, Holker Morris always said, was a lesson in all the finer virtues. Sir Walter was a bungler beside him. But then Miss Felicia could also have pa.s.sed muster as the gay gallant's companion.

And just here the Scribe remarks, parenthetically, that there is nothing that shows a woman's refinement more clearly than the way she crosses a street.

Miss Felicia, for instance, would no more have soiled the toes of her shoes in a puddle than a milk-white p.u.s.s.y would have dampened its feet in the splash of an overturned bowl: a calm survey up and down; a taking in of the dry and wet spots; a careful gathering up of her skirts, and over skimmed the slender, willowy old lady with a one--two--and three--followed by a stamp of her absurd feet and the shaking out of ruffle and pleat. When a woman strides through mud without a shiver because she has plenty of dry shoes and good ones at home, there are other parts of her make-up, inside and out, that may want a looking after.

Miss Felicia safely landed on the dry and comparatively clean sidewalk, Peter put the question he had been framing in his mind since he first caught sight of that lady picking her way among the puddles.

"Well, how is he now?"