The Flying Mercury Part 13

"You'll have to look into her differential, Anderson," he was p.r.o.nouncing, when the young girl came beside him.

"Come, please," she urged breathlessly.

"Come?" repeated Bailey, wheeling, with his slow benevolent smile.

"Sure, Miss Emily; where?"

She shook her head, not replying until they were safely outside; then:

"To Mr. Lestrange; he is in the pavilion. He wants to see you."

"To Lestrange!" he almost shouted, halting. "Lestrange, here?"

"Yes. There is time; he says there is time. He is going back as soon as he sees you."

"But what's he doing here? What does he mean by risking his neck without any practice?"

"He came to see me," she whispered, and stood confessed.

"G.o.d!" said Bailey, quite reverently, after a moment of speechless stupefaction. "You, and him!"

She lifted confiding eyes to him, moving nearer.

"It is a secret, but I wanted you to know because you like us both.

d.i.c.k said you loved Mr. Lestrange."

"Yes," was the dazed a.s.sent.

"Well, then--But come, he is waiting."

She was sufficiently unlike the usual Miss Ffrench to bewilder any one. Bailey dumbly followed her back across the park, carrying his hat in his hand.

A short distance from the pavilion Emily stopped abruptly, turning a startled face to her companion.

"Some one is there," she said. "Some one is speaking. I forgot that Uncle Ethan had gone out."

She heard Bailey catch his breath oddly. Her own pulses began to beat with heavy irregularity, as a few steps farther brought the two opposite the open arcade. There they halted, frozen.

In the place Emily had left, where all her feminine toys still lay, Mr. Ffrench was seated as one exhausted by the force of overmastering emotion; his hands clenched on the arms of the chair, his face drawn with pa.s.sion. Opposite him stood Lestrange, colorless and still as Emily had never conceived him, listening in absolute silence to the bitter address pouring from the other's lips with a low-toned violence indescribable.

"I told you then, never again to come here," first fell upon Emily's conscious hearing. "I supposed you were at least Ffrench enough to take a dismissal. What do you want here, money? I warned you to live upon the allowance sent every month to your bankers, for I would pay no more even to escape the intolerable disgrace of your presence here.

Did you imagine me so deserted that I would accept even you as a successor? Wrong; you are not missed. My nephew Richard takes your place, and is fit to take it. Go back to Europe and your low-born wife; there is no lack in my household."

The voice broke in an excess of savage triumph, and Lestrange took the pause without movement or gesture.

"I am going, sir, and I shall never come back," he answered, never more quietly. "I can take a dismissal, yes. If ever I have wished peace or hoped for an accord that never existed between us, I go cured of such folly. But hear this much, since I am arraigned at your bar: I have never yet disgraced your name or mine unless by the boy's mischief which sent me from college. The money you speak of, I have never used; ask Bailey of it, if you will." He hesitated, and in the empty moment there came across the mile of June air the roaring noon whistle of the factory. Involuntarily he turned his head toward the call, but as instantly recovered himself from the self-betrayal.

"There is another matter to be arranged, but there is no time now. Nor even in concluding it will I come here again, sir."

There was that in his bearing, in the dignified carefulness of courtesy with which he saluted the other before turning to go, that checked even Ethan Ffrench. But as Lestrange crossed the threshold of the little building, Emily ran from the thicket to meet him, her eyes a dark splendor in her white face, her hands outstretched.

"Not like this!" she panted. "Not without seeing me! Oh, I might have guessed--"

His vivid color and animation returned as he caught her to him, heedless of witnesses.

"You dare? My dear, my dear, not even a question? There is no one like you. Say, shall I take you now, or send d.i.c.k for you after the race?"

Mr. Ffrench exclaimed some inarticulate words, but neither heard him.

"Send d.i.c.k," Emily answered, her eyes on the gray eyes above her.

"Send d.i.c.k--I understand, I will come."

He kissed her once, then she drew back and he went down the terraces toward the gates. As Emily sank down on the bench by the pavilion door, Bailey brushed past her, running after the straight, lithe figure that went steadily on out of sight among the huge trees planted and tended by five generations of Ffrenches.

When the vistas of the park were empty, Emily slowly turned to face her uncle.

"You love David Ffrench?" he asked, his voice thin and harsh.

"Yes," she answered. She had no need to ask if Lestrange were meant.

"He is married to some woman of the music-halls."

"No."

"How do you know? He has told you?"

She lifted to him the superb confidence of her glance, although nervous tremors shook her in wavelike succession.

"If he had been married, he would not have made me care for him. He has asked me to be his wife."

They were equally strange to each other in these new characters, and equally spent by emotion. Neither moving, they sat opposite each other in silence. So Bailey found them when he came back later, to take his ma.s.sive stand in the doorway, his hands in his pockets and his strong jaw set.

"I think that things are kind of mixed up here, Mr. Ffrench," he stated grimly. "I guess I'm the one to straighten them out a bit; I've loved Mr. David from the time he was a kid and never saw him get a square deal yet. You asked him what he was doing here--I'll tell you; he is Lestrange."

There is a degree of amazement which precludes speech; Mr. Ffrench looked back at his partner, mute.

"He is Lestrange. He never meant you to know; he'd have left without your ever knowing, but for Miss Emily. I guess I don't need to remind you of what he's done; if it hadn't been for him we might have closed our doors some day. He understands the business as none of us back-number, old-fashioned ones do; he took hold and shook some life into it. We can make cars, but he can make people buy them.

Advertising! Why, just that fool picture he drew on the back of a pad, one day, of a row of thermometers up to one hundred forty, with the sign 'Mercuries are at the top,' made more people notice."

Bailey cleared his throat. "He was always making people notice, and laughing while he did it. He's risked his neck on every course going, to bring our cars in first, he's lent his fame as a racing driver to help us along. And now everything is fixed the way we want, he's thrown out. What did he do it for? He thought he needed to square accounts with you, for being born, I suppose; so when he heard how things were going with us he came to me and offered his help. At least, that's what he said. I believe he came because he couldn't bear to see the place go under."

There was a skein of blue silk swinging over the edge of the table.

Mr. Ffrench picked it up and replaced it in Emily's work-basket before replying.

"If this remarkable story is true," he began, accurately precise in accent.

"You don't need me to tell you it is," retorted Bailey. "You know what my new manager's been doing; why, you disliked him without seeing him, but you had to admit his good work. And I heard you talking about his allowance, Mr. Ffrench. He never touched it, not from the first; it piled up for six years. Last April, when we needed cash in a hurry, he drew it out and gave it to me to buy aluminum. When he left here first he drove a taxicab in New York City until he got into racing work and made Darling Lestrange famous all over the continent. I guess it went pretty hard for a while; if he'd been the things you called him, he'd have gone to the devil alone in New York. But, he didn't."

An oriole darted in one arcade and out again with a musical whir of wings. The clink of gla.s.s and silver sounded from the house windows with a pleasant cheeriness and suggestion of comfort and plenty.

"He made good," Bailey concluded thoughtfully. "But it sounded queer to me to hear you tell him you didn't want him around because Mr. d.i.c.k took his place. I know, and Miss Emily knows, that d.i.c.k Ffrench was no use on earth for any place until Mr. David took him in hand and made him fit to live. That's all, I guess, that I had to say; I'll get back to work." He turned, but paused to glance around. "It's going to be pretty dull at the factory for me. And between us we've sent Lestrange to the track with a nice set of nerves."