The Cottage of Delight Part 28

"'Sh! for G.o.d's sake!" he cried, angrily, and then he turned his impatience off with an apologetic laugh. "Never mind, kid. Make all the noise you want. It won't do any harm. Are you ready? Give me that doll."

She handed it to him roughly wrapped in a newspaper. "Don't mash her!"

she pleaded. "Her face is soft as putty in warm weather."

"There, there!" he laughed, "she will be all right. As snug as a bug in a rug. Now, let's go."

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

He locked the front door after them, put the key into its old place under the door-step, where Cavanaugh could find it, and then they pa.s.sed out at the gate and trudged toward the station. They had ample time, and so he took the best way to avoid meeting any one who might comment on their odd departure.

The station was finally reached. No one was there but a watchman with a lantern in his hand, and he did not know either of them.

"Ticket-office isn't open at this hour," John explained to Dora. "We'll have to pay on the train. We change cars at Bristol. I'll pay that far and we may stop there and rest. This night traveling may go hard with a little thing like you. I've got to attend to you, Sis--eh? Did you catch that? It slipped out as natural as you please, and Sis it is, from now on. Yes, I've got to see that you are fed properly and have a tonic to get your blood right."

When the train came they got aboard. The car was about half full of pa.s.sengers, nearly all of whom were asleep. John led his wide-eyed charge to a seat, put a valise down for a pillow, and made her take off her hat and lie down. "Close your peepers and take a nap," he jested.

"I'm going into the smoker and light my pipe."

A half-hour later he came back. She was asleep. Her hat had fallen to the floor, and he carefully placed it in the rack overhead. Her features in repose appeared almost angelic, despite the fact that the cinders had drifted in at the window and lay on the young cheeks beneath the fallen lashes.

"Poor little rat!" he said to himself. "You are in bad hands, Sis, but maybe no worse off than you were." He recalled Eperson's studied courtesy and attention to Martha Jane and wondered if, after all, Eperson were becoming his absent instructor.

He sat down in the seat across the aisle from Dora and looked out at the window. The coming dawn was lighting the fields through which the train was scurrying like a monster of fire and smoke. The eastern sky was slowly filling with liquid gold. Dora slept till the sun was well up.

Then she stirred and waked. He saw her glance around the car in amazement and then she saw him, smiled sheepishly, and flushed a little.

"I was dreaming," she said. "I thought I was flying away up in the air and that I never would light."

"We are going to have some breakfast in a little while," he informed her. "There is a dining-car on this train, and I'll order something brought to us here. A little table fits in here under the window. Come on, I'll show you where to wash your hands and face."

He led her to the ladies' lavatory, taught her how to supply the basin with water. He got a towel from an overhead rack, showed her a brush and comb that were for the use of pa.s.sengers, and left her to make her toilet.

She came back to him presently, looking brighter and better, and they sat side by side till a negro porter in a white uniform came with the table and their breakfast. It had an inviting look--the fruit, the fried eggs, the thin-sliced bacon, the hot, brown cakes, dainty toast, and aromatic coffee, and the child partook of them with unusual relish.

John watched her with strange, new interest. It was a sudden reversal of a habitual situation. She had waited on him. He was now doing the same for her, and the performance seemed to hold in abeyance a full realization of the tragedy in his life. It may have been autosuggestion, induced by the child's great need of him, but whatever it was was vaguely soothing. He found himself with his young back to a wall of miserable fact, valiantly fighting off constantly increeping and maddening memories which threatened to unman him.

Later that afternoon they reached Bristol, and, as Dora looked weary, John decided to go to a hotel for the night. There was one near the station, and to it they went and secured adjoining rooms. While he was making the arrangements in the office Dora waited for him in the great, barren-looking parlor, the scant furniture of which was upholstered in dark-green plush, and when he came for her she was standing at a window, looking out. The sight of her worried him, for she seemed homesick and drooped like a storm-tossed bird.

"Now for our supper," he said, cheerfully. But she shook her head. She was not a bit hungry, she declared. The motion of the car had sickened her at the stomach.

"Then I'll put you to bed," he said, "and leave you there till I get my supper."

She acquiesced, and he led her to her room up-stairs. "Tumble in," he said, still cheerily, and she began slowly to undress, sitting in a big arm-chair which all but swallowed her diminutive form. She was having trouble with the knots of her shoe-strings, which, in her haste, she had tied too carelessly, and he knelt down and unfastened them. "What a baby you are, after all!" he said, tenderly, a thrill that was almost parental going through him as he drew off the shoes, observed the thick coating of dust that was on them and the holes in the heels and toes of her stockings. "I'll leave your shoes outside the door, and a porter will clean them before morning and put them back," he said, smiling. He opened a valise, took out a clean though tattered nightgown she had brought, and spread it on the bed. Again he thought of Joel Eperson and wondered if Joel had done all such things for Martha Jane when she was a tiny tot. It was likely, for there were several years between their ages, and Joel seemed to be that sort of man.

When Dora was ready to retire he left her. "Are you afraid?" he asked from the door.

She shook her head. "What is there to be afraid of?" she asked, with a wan smile.

He returned in about an hour. He entered his room and peered cautiously in at the connecting door. The light from his gas-jet fell on her bed.

She was awake.

"What is this?" he chided her. "Not asleep yet, and you all f.a.gged out!

Ah, I see! No wonder. Your window is shut. It is as close in here as a corked flask." He went in and opened her window. He thought the covering over her was too heavy for such a warm night and drew the white coverlet down below her feet. "There, there, that's better," he said. Her tangled hair lay unbecomingly across her brow, and he wanted to brush it back, but, conscious of a queer timidity, he refrained from doing so.

"I can't sleep for thinking," she suddenly said, with a touch of her old bluntness. "You haven't said where we are going."

"Oh, that is it!" He laughed and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Well, the truth is, little sister, I hadn't made up my mind fully. I thought it might be Philadelphia, but I was looking over a newspaper down-stairs and saw some notes about new developments in New York, and I decided to go there."

"Oh, New York!" the child cried. "That is the biggest city in the country. Old Roly-poly says the lid is always off up there, and--"

"Stop!" Not since leaving Ridgeville had John's tone been so sharp and commanding. "Don't mention that man's name ever again, Sis. And another thing! Let's agree between us never to speak of any of it again--not to each other or to anybody else. Do you understand? I want all of it buried forever in a grave as deep as from here to the middle of the earth."

"Not your ma, nor Aunt Jane--?"

"No, no!" he said, fiercely.

"Nor Tilly?"

"No, never--under any circ.u.mstances. If people want to know about us, send them to me--or simply say we are orphans, father and mother both dead. John and Dora Trott. You understand now, don't you?"

The little tousled head moved wearily on the big pillow. She did not understand his far-seeing policy, but it didn't matter. He knew best.

There was a rap on the door. Opening it, he admitted a waiter with a tray containing some steaming milk-toast. "I forgot ordering it," John said to Dora, as the man moved a small table up to her bedside and rested the tray on it. "You must not go to bed on an empty stomach, and this is just light enough to make you sleep soundly."

The sight of the food, which was attractively served, appealed to the child, and when the man had left the room, John propped her up with the pillow and put the tray into her lap. She ate heartily, and when she had finished he set the tray aside.

"Now go to sleep," he enjoined her. "We leave at eight thirty in the morning and scoot straight through Virginia to New York."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

One morning, two days after this, Tilly, half ill from worry, was in her room. She heard the sound of wheels below, and, looking from her window, she descried Joel Eperson in his buggy under the spreading branches of a big beech in front of the gate. Her mother and father were at a lawyer's office in the village, where they had gone to conclude the arrangements for the immediate annulment of her marriage. She hastened down the stairs, and went out to the grim, sentinel-like visitor, noting, as she approached him, the tense, wasted expression of his sallow face and the dark splotches about his honest eyes.

"Oh, Joel," she all but sobbed, "I'm so glad you came! Did Martha Jane tell you I wanted to see you?"

"Yes, and I hurried over at once." He had bared his brow, held his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, and had descended to the ground. He took her hand and pressed it reverently and with a sort of shrinking timidity. "I want you to know, Tilly, that if there is anything on earth that I can do I'll willingly do it, if it costs my life. G.o.d only knows how I long to help you."

"Oh, Joel, it is awful--awful!" she began, and stopped abruptly.

"Oh, I know-- I've heard everything!" he responded, "and it is a beastly outrage. I feel like killing some one. Your father must be insane, and the whole hot-headed ma.s.s of hoodlums who are making such a row over nothing at all. I knew about your husband's unfortunate mother and about his religious views, but those were things he could not help, and I could not hold them against him."

"You knew about his mother?" Tilly cried, surprised. "You knew before our marriage?"