Rodman the Keeper Part 28

"But Miss Marion is happy," again said Bro, when the suitorless period was now five years old.

"No, she is not," replied the mother this time. "She begins to feel that her life is colorless and blank; I can see she does. She is not an ordinary girl, and needlework and housekeeping do not content her. If she had an orphan asylum to manage, now, or something of that kind--But, dear me! what would suit her best, I do believe, would be drilling a regiment," added Mrs. Manning, her comfortable amplitude heaving with laughter. "She is as straight as a ramrod always, for all her delicate, small bones. What she would like best of all, I suppose, would be keeping accounts; she will do a sum now rather than any kind of embroidery, and a page of figures is fairly meat and drink to her. That Miss Drough has, I fear, done her more harm than good: you can not make life exactly even, like arithmetic, nor balance quant.i.ties, try as you may. And, whatever variety men may succeed in getting, we women have to put up with a pretty steady course of subtraction, I notice."

"I am sorry you do not think she is happy," said Bro thoughtfully.

"There you go!" said Mrs. Manning. "I do not mean that she is exactly _un_happy; but you never understand things, Bro."

"I know it; I have had so little experience," said the other. But Bro's experience, large or small, was a matter of no interest to Mrs.

Manning, who rambled on about her daughter.

"The Mannings were always slow to develop, Edward used to say: I sometimes think Marion is not older now at heart than most girls of eighteen. She has always been more like the best scholar, the clear-headed girl at the top of the cla.s.s, than a woman with a woman's feelings. She will be bitterly miserable if she falls in love at last, and all in vain. An old maid in love is a desperate sight."

"What do you call an old maid?" asked Bro.

"Any unmarried woman over--well, I used to say twenty-five, but Marion is that, and not much faded yet--say twenty-eight," replied Mrs.

Manning, decisively, having to the full the Southern ideas on the subject.

"Then Miss Marion has three years more?"

"Yes; but, dear me! there is no one here she will look at. What I am afraid of is, that, after I am dead and gone, poor Marion, all thin and peaked (for she does not take after me in flesh), with spectacles on her nose, and little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, will be falling in love with some one who will not care for her at all. I should say a clergyman," pursued Mrs. Manning meditatively, "only Marion hates clergymen; a professor, then, or something of the kind. If I only had money enough to take her away and give her a change! She might see somebody then who would not wind his legs around his chair."

"Around his chair?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Manning, beginning on another knitting-needle. "Have you not noticed how all the young men about here twist their feet around the legs of their chairs, especially when telling a long story or at table? Sometimes it is one foot, sometimes the other, and sometimes both, which I acknowledge _is_ awkward. What pleasure they find in it I can not imagine; _I_ should think it would be dislocating. Young Harding, now, poor fellow! had almost no fault but that."

"And Miss Marion dislikes it? I hope _I_ do not do it then," said Bro simply.

"Well, no," replied Mrs. Manning. "You see, your feet are rather long, Bro."

They were; it would have taken a giant's chair to give them s.p.a.ce enough to twist.

So Bro's life went on: the saw-mill to give him bread and clothes, Mrs.

Manning to listen to, the flowers to water, and, at every other leisure moment night and day, his inventions. For there were several, all uncompleted: a valve for a steam-engine, an idea for a self-register, and, incidentally, a screw. He had most confidence in the valve; when completed, it would regenerate the steam-engines of the world. The self-register gave him more trouble; it haunted him, but would not come quite right. He covered pages of paper with calculations concerning it.

He had spent about twenty thousand hours, all told, over that valve and register during his eleven years at the saw-mill, and had not once been tired. He had not yet applied for patents, although the screw was complete. That was a trifle: he would wait for his more important works.

One day old Mr. Vickery, having watched the superintendent roll safely past down the road on his way to Bridge No. 2, left his charge in the care of old Julius for the time being, and walked up the track toward Wilbarger. It was the shortest road to the village--indeed, the only road; but one could go by water. Before the days of the railroad, the Vickerys always went by water, in a wide-cushioned row-boat, with four pairs of arms to row. It was a great day, of course, when the first locomotive came over Vickery Marsh; but old Mr. Vickery was lamentably old-fashioned, and preferred the small days of the past, with the winding, silver channels and the row-boat, and the sense of wide possession and isolation produced by the treeless, green expanse which separated him from the town. To-day, however, he did not stop to think of these things, but hastened on as fast as his short legs could carry him. Mrs. Manning was an old friend of his; to her house he was hurrying.

"You are both--you are both," he gasped, bursting into the sitting-room and sinking into a chair--"you are both--ah, ugh! ugh!"

He choked, gurgled, and turned from red to purple. Mrs. Manning seized a palm-leaf fan, and fanned him vigorously.

"Why _did_ you walk so fast, Mr. Vickery?" she said reproachfully. "You know your short breath can not stand it."

"You would, too, Nannie," articulated the old man, "if--if _your_ boy had come home!"

"What, Lawrence? You do not mean it!" she exclaimed, sinking into a chair in her turn, and fanning herself now. "I congratulate you, Mr.

Vickery; I do, indeed. How long is it since you have seen him?"

"Thirteen years; thir--teen years! He was fifteen when he went away, you know," whispered the old man, still giving out but the husky form of words without any voice to support them. "Under age, but would go. Since then he has been wandering over the ocean and all about, the bold boy!"

"Dear me!" said Mrs. Manning; "how glad I shall be to see him! I was very fond of his mother."

"Yes; Sally was a sweet little woman, and Lawrence takes after his mother more than after his father, I see. My son was a true Vickery; yes, a true Vickery. But what I came to say was, that you and Marion must both come over to-morrow and spend the day. We must kill the fatted calf, Nannie--indeed we must."

Then, with his first free breath, the old man was obliged to go, lest the superintendent should return unexpectedly and find him absent. There was also the fatted calf to be provided: Julius must go across to the mainland and hunt down a wild turkey.

At dinner Mrs. Manning had this great news to tell her listener--two now, since Marion had returned.

"Who do you think has come home?" she said, enjoying her words as she spoke them. "Who but old Mr. Vickery's grandson, Lawrence, his only living grandchild! He went away thirteen years ago, and one of the sweetest boys I ever knew he was then.--You remember him, Marion."

"I remember a boy," answered Marion briefly. "He never would finish any game, no matter what it was, but always wanted to try something new."

"Like his mother," said Mrs. Manning, heaving a reminiscent sigh, and then laughing. "Sally Telfair used to change about the things in her work-basket and on her table every day of her life. Let me see--Lawrence must be twenty-eight now."

"He has come back, I suppose, to take care of his grandfather in his old age," said Bro, who was eating his dinner in large, slow mouthfuls, in a manner which might have been called ruminative if ruminating animals were not generally fat.

"Yes, of course," replied Mrs. Manning, with her comfortable belief in everybody's good motives.

When Marion and her mother returned home the next day at dusk a third person was with them as they walked along the track, their figures outlined clearly against the orange after-glow in the west. Bro, who had come across for his tea, saw them, and supposed it was young Vickery. He supposed correctly. Young Vickery came in, staid to tea, and spent the evening. Bro, as usual, went over to the mill. The next day young Vickery came again, and the next; the third day the Mannings went over to the island. Then it began over again.

"I do hope, Bro, that your dinners have been attended to properly," said Mrs. Manning, during the second week of these visitations.

"Oh, yes, certainly," replied Bro, who would have eaten broiled rhinoceros unnoticingly.

"You see Mr. Vickery has the old-time ideas about company and visiting to celebrate a great occasion, and Lawrence's return is, of course, that. It is a perfect marvel to hear where, or rather where not, that young man has been."

"Where?" said Bro, obediently asking the usual question which connected Mrs. Manning's narratives, and gave them a reason for being.

"Everywhere. All over the wide world, I should say."

"Oh, no, mother; he was in Germany most of the time," said Marion.

"He saw the Alps, Marion."

"The Bavarian Alps."

"And he saw France."

"From the banks of the Moselle."

"And Russia, and Holland, and Bohemia," pursued Mrs. Manning. "You will never make me believe that one can see all _those_ countries from Germany, Marion. Germany was never of so much importance in _my_ day.

And to think, too, that he has lived in Bohemia! I must ask him about it. I have never understood where it was, exactly; but I _have_ heard persons called Bohemians who had not a foreign look at all."

"He did not _live_ in Bohemia, mother."

"Oh, yes, he did, child; I am sure I heard him say so."

"You are thinking of Bavaria."