The Heart of Arethusa Part 16

Mrs. Cherry was genuinely friendly, and she was safely feminine, so Arethusa once more launched into a glowing description of what wonders the future held in store, and to Mrs. Cherry's interested questioning, told what the past had been like, Timothy and all.

"You certainly have got lots of folks to care about you," was the comment, when the narrator finally paused for breath. "And you ain't never seen your Pa? Well! Well! Helen Louise and Peter and me we're going to the city to meet Helen Louise's Pa. He's got work there and we're going to live there now."

Helen Louise smiled all over herself at this mention of her father, a toothless smile, but of unmistakable joy, and Arethusa's heart went out to her immediately. Here, very evidently, was another girl-child whose affections were centered largely in a male parent.

"Helen Louise favors her Pa considerable. And they're the biggest geese together!"

Helen Louise's silvery treble piped up. "Papa and me just play and play!" She gave herself something like an antic.i.p.atory hug. "Gee, but I'm going to be glad to see him! I ain't seen him for a whole year now!"

"Helen Louise, don't you be telling Miss Worth'ton no story now!"

warned her mother. Names had been exchanged. "She ain't seen him for more'n a month reely, but I reckon it does seem 'most a year to her."

Peter now joined his voice to the conversation for the first time, "Ma, I'm hungry."

"Bless us! But it might be dinner time, now, mightn't it. Have you got a watch, Miss Worth'ton?"

Arethusa reached down into her waistband and drew forth Miss Eliza's parting gift. Which was a watch that had seen Miss Eliza faithfully through more than one decade, a large and handsomely chased affair of gold on a long ribbon of black gros-grain.

"The child will need a watch," said Miss Eliza.

Arethusa fully appreciated the parting gift, and she reverenced the old-fashioned timepiece fully as much as had its former owner.

What though it was a trifle heavy in her hand as she held it to read the dial! Was it not an actual watch and gold at that, and did not its tiny hands count off the moments of each one of the twenty-four hours for her to note as they flew by? And was not all of its wonder her very own now?

"A quarter to one," she announced proudly.

"Well, well, you don't say so! No wonder he's hungry! You'll be having some lunch with us, Miss Worth'ton, won't you now?"

But Arethusa refused this cordial invitation. She could not possibly eat a mouthful. Food would have stuck in her throat right on top of the big lump of excitement that was already there. And besides the drawback of this decided inability to swallow, she had not the slightest sensation of hunger that would have tempted her to try to eat.

"I had some lunch of my own," she shyly offered the neatly tied-up box; "Aunt 'Liza makes awfully nice jam and things and Mandy said she was going to fix me some fried chicken. But I don't want a bit of it.

Wouldn't Helen Louise and Peter like to have it?"

Helen Louise's pale blue eyes glistened at this mention of fried chicken. Her own lunch contained no such appetizing delicacy. She had helped to tie it up, and she knew just what was in it. This was far superior in every way. She pulled at her mother's dress in eagerness, and Mrs. Cherry reached down and slapped her.

"Don't you act like you never had nothing in your life to eat," she said sharply.

Then Helen Louise's eyes began to glisten with tears. Arethusa felt very sorry for her. She had seemed so like a kindred spirit in her plainly manifested father worship. So Arethusa opened the dainty little packet of chicken and sandwiches and spread it temptingly on Helen Louise's lap with her own hands.

"Here," she said, "you may have it, Helen Louise. But you'll give Peter some? Do," she added quickly.

For Peter's large round eyes were regarding with a greediness unmistakable the munificence of food that had been so generously bestowed upon his sister.

"Well, I will say this," remarked Mrs. Cherry, as she divided Arethusa's contribution into equal portions between her offspring, after the donor had succeeded in convincing her that she honestly wanted none of it. "I will say this for my children. They might be acting like hoodlums over this here food, but they ain't never seen none just like it before," She bit into one of Mandy's beaten biscuit sandwiches with the pink ham in between, herself, with relish. "Your aunt must have a mighty good cook. She cert'inly must!"

Watching the little Cherry's devour her lunch and the garrulity of their mother consumed so much time for Arethusa, that almost before she knew it the little wave of excitement denoting the nearing of a journey's end swept through the car. The conductor pa.s.sed by and gathered the little slips of stiff paper from the men's hats; every pa.s.senger began his or her peculiar preparations for leaving the train.

Mrs. Cherry began gathering up her boxes and parcels. Helen Louise was sent to the water cooler to wet a handkerchief and then her face and Peter's were vigorously scrubbed. At any other time, Mrs. Cherry would have dragged both children to the cooler, but she was not taking any chances with pretty, unprotected Arethusa. No one else should have that seat of hers.

The baggageman came through the car; calling as he went, "Anybaggageyouwantdeliveredinthe-city, car-ri-age or omnibus."

It gave Arethusa a most delightful little thrill all down her spine to hear him. She was not exactly sure he was the person to give her check to, but decided it would be best to obey the letter of the law this time. Miss Eliza had mentioned no baggageman, but she had been most explicit in her directions to Arethusa that she give that check to no one but her father.

She rescued her hat from its paper protection and put it on her tumbled hair, from which some of the precious hairpins had fallen during the excitement of the journey; unfolded her coat and donned it; drew on the cotton gloves and clutched her purse and satchel once more as when she had started, and with the death grip Miss Eliza had adjured for fear of those pickpockets with which railway stations are always infested, and Arethusa was Ready. And she was ready with a palpitating heart, for the brakeman had accommodatingly called, "Lewisburg," right in her very own ear, as if he wished her to be quite sure this was the right place to leave her seat.

Mrs. Cherry had been very busy with her progeny and her paraphernalia and impedimenta of various sorts--it was marvelous how she managed to gather them all together with only two hands--and she was ready also.

But even in the midst of this sleight of hand performance, she did not forget her self-const.i.tuted guardianship of Arethusa.

"Sure you're going to know your Pa?" she enquired. "Don't you want me to be waiting and help you hunt for him?"

No, Arethusa was very, very sure she would know him. She did not need any help to find him.

And then with one last shrieking grind of the wheels, the train stopped in the shed at Lewisburg, and Arethusa, all injunctions to sit still for a half hour forgotten as if they had never been, immediately began with her fellow pa.s.sengers a movement towards the door. But so slow was this movement that her impatient heart thought she would never, never be out of that car.

Helen Louise's quick eyes spied, through the car window, her father, among the crowd on the platform and she gave a joyful shout. But it was a shout, which although loud and very near, Arethusa never even heard.

Her own eyes, star-like and intent, were busy searching that same crowd for her own father.

CHAPTER XI

Just as the music room was primarily Elinor's retreat, so was the library the place which Ross loved best.

It was a long, narrow room; two square rooms had been thrown together to make it, and it was lined, on the longest walls to about half the distance from the ceiling, with low, deep, ungla.s.sed book-cases full of books on a bewildering variety of subjects, haphazardly arranged; some of them well worn as to bindings as if much read. A brick fireplace of generous proportions with a high, narrow mantel shelf of brownish red marble occupied most of one of the other, and narrower, walls. A log fire burned there fitfully now, throwing little dancing gleams on the bra.s.s andirons and the dark polished floor just in front. All the chairs in the room were broad and deep and enticingly comfortable. An enormous davenport stood at one side of the fireplace, and there was a long, heavy table of carved mahogany directly in front of the hearth.

The few rugs in the room were all in dull, subdued tones that melted into the floor un.o.btrusively.

Here, in the library, Ross spent his days in the arduous labor with which he kept body and soul together; the translation of various bits of the literature of Southern Europe into English. Ross was quite a student in his way and a good deal of a linguist.

But he was not working just at this moment.

At the enormous desk between the two long windows at the end of the room opposite the fireplace, he was reading a detective story and playing with a bronze paper cutter at the same time, banging it up and down on the desk.

Ross loved detective stories as much as any boy who has ever thrilled over them, and Elinor loved to watch him read them. She stood still in the doorway for a moment and watched him now. She could tell by his changing expression just when the story he was reading was sad, just when it was merry, just when the meaning was hard to understand, and just when he began to dislike the way things were working out, almost as well as if he read it aloud to her.

The paper cutter poised in the air for just a second, and his eyebrows drew together in a little puzzled frown. Evidently, things were going badly. Then the paper cutter came down on the desk with a swoop, and his whole face lighted.

Elinor crossed the room with her swift, graceful movement, and kissed him lightly on the tiny bald spot on the very top of his head, which he insisted was being widened by "financial worries."

"Ross, Clay is waiting."

He gave her an absentminded squeezing of the hand nearest him by way of answer without lifting his eyes from his book.

She leaned over and covered the page with one hand.

"Oh, come now," he remonstrated, "that's not a bit fair! That's the most interesting place for pages and pages!"

"That may be, you infant, but you must stop right there. Clay is waiting for you."