The Little Red Chimney Part 13

The Candy Wagon was a mere episode. What I wish to tell you now goes deeper."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

_In which the Candy Man relates his story, and the Miser comes upon Volume I of the shabby book with the funny name._

"I want you to know all about me," began the Candy Man, taking from his pocket the shabby little book Virginia had once remarked on, "so there may be no more wrong impressions."

They sat in the sunshine on the top step of the little pavilion, facing the river. Margaret Elizabeth, supporting her chin in her hand, regarded him gravely. The west wind was cool on their faces.

"I have often imagined myself telling you," he went on. "Not that there is much to it, besides its strangeness. In fact, to be brief, I don't know who I am."

The surprise in Miss Bentley's eyes caused him to add quickly: "Not that I am a foundling. But my father and mother were lost at sea when I was three years old. We were coming from Victoria to San Francisco, when the steamer went down. Only a few of the pa.s.sengers were saved, I among them."

"How sad and terrible!" cried Margaret Elizabeth. "Can you remember it?

How lost and lonely you must have been! Poor little child!"

"I recall it only in a vague way," he answered, "confused with what has since been told me. When it was known that my parents were lost, a man and his wife, fellow pa.s.sengers, offered to adopt me. Beyond the name 'Robert Deane, Wife and Child,' on the list at the ship's office, they were unable to learn anything about me, and I was too young and bewildered to give any clue."

"That is very strange," said Margaret Elizabeth. "Your new father and mother were kind to you?"

"So kind I soon forgot the terror and loneliness, and grew happy and content. Everything was done to make me forget, and I think while they made every effort to find out something about me, they were glad when they failed. I wish now that my childish memories might have been fostered, for I find myself reaching back into a mist full of vague shapes.

"My new father was a civil engineer, whose work took him here, there and everywhere throughout the broad West. I never knew a permanent home. My adopted mother died when I was twelve. After that came boarding school and college. About the time I left college my father's health failed, and for several years he was helpless and very dependent upon me, so I gave up my plan of entering a mining school.

"It was during his illness that he began to speak to me of my own parents. He had talked to them on several occasions during the voyage, and he described them as young people of refinement and education. My mother, he thought from her speech, was English. They rather held aloof, he said, and seemed disinclined to mention their own affairs. While he was ill the news came to us of the finding in a storage warehouse in San Francisco of an old trunk which it seemed probable had belonged to my parents. Without going into detail, I may say it was through an old acquaintance of my adopted father's, who knew the circ.u.mstances of my adoption, that we heard of it. He had some interest in the warehouse, which was about to be torn down and rebuilt. This trunk was found in some forgotten corner where it had lain for twenty-five years."

"And did it throw any light?" asked Margaret Elizabeth.

"Not much, it rather deepened the mystery. There was little of significance in it, but this book and a package of letters. From them I learned nothing definite, but gathered the unwelcome probability that my father was under some sort of cloud, and was not using his real name.

This was a matter of inference--of deduction, largely, but it was plain he had left his home in some sort of trouble.

"It is not easy to piece together scattered allusions, when you have no clue. The letters were most of them written by my father to my mother, just before and soon after their marriage, with one or two from her to him. One of these, which I found between the leaves of this little book, I want you to read. It concludes my story, and to my mind lightens it a little."

The letter the Candy Man held out to Margaret Elizabeth was written on thin paper, in a delicate angular hand.

"Ought I to read it?" she demurred. "Are you sure she would like it?"

"Somehow I am very sure," he answered. "And I feel that it will be a grip on our friendship. I have told you the worst, I wish you to know the best of me."

She acquiesced, and, an elbow on her knee, shading her eyes with her hand, she read the letter, whose date was thirty years ago. Far back in the past this seemed to Margaret Elizabeth, yet it was a girl like herself who wrote.

The first sentences were almost meaningless, so strong was the feeling that she had no right to be reading it at all, but as she went on she forgot her scruples. It was evidently a reply to a letter from her lover in which he had spoken of the cloud that hung over his name, and it was a confession of her faith in him, girlish, sweet and tender. "I trust you, Robert," it said. "It is in you to do heedless things, to be reckless, if only because you are young and eager and strong; but it is not in you to be dishonourable; of this I am as certain as I am of anything in life. Some day the truth will be known and you will be cleared, but whether it is or no, I choose to walk beside you. I choose it gladly, happily. I write the words again, gladly, happily, Robert.

Yours, Mary."

"Oh!" cried Margaret Elizabeth, lifting a glowing face, "I love Mary."

"She was brave and unselfish," said the Candy Man.

Margaret Elizabeth nodded. "Yes, that is one side of it. Still, you see, she was sure, and it was, as she says, a joy to cast in her lot with him. 'Gladly, happily.'" Her eyes shone. She gazed far away down the river. The wind blew little tendrils of bright hair across her cheek.

"It must be so when you care very much," she went on.

"But," argued the Candy Man, "under the stress of very n.o.ble feeling people sometimes do foolish things, do they not?"

"But this was not. Do you think for a moment Mary ever regretted it?

I see what you mean by the best of you. It is something to have such credentials." Margaret Elizabeth's gaze met the Candy Man's, and her eyes were deep as they had been on Christmas Eve, in the firelight.

Oh, Margaret Elizabeth, it is your own fault, for being so dear, so unworldly! Could you, can you, cast in your lot with an unknown Candy Man? He has no business to ask you. He did not mean to, but only to prepare the way. He knows he is no great catch, even from the point of view of a Little Red Chimney. These are not the precise words of the Candy Man, but something like them....

So absorbed was Margaret Elizabeth in the thought of Mary, she was a bit slow in taking in their meaning. She gave him one startled glance, and then looked down, as it happened, upon the shabby little book which lay on the step between them. Absently she drew it toward her, and with fingers that trembled, opened it, as if to find her answer in its pages.

Then a smile began faintly to curl about her lips, and she read aloud from the book:

_"What we find then to accord with love and reason, that we may safely p.r.o.nounce right and good."_

"Judged at the bar of reason I fear my case is hopeless," protested the Candy Man, putting out his hand to close the book.

But Margaret Elizabeth clasped it to her breast. "I see nothing unreasonable in it," she declared stoutly. As she spoke a faded crimson flower fell in her lap.

Somewhat later in the afternoon, Miss Bentley and the Candy Man, walking together along the river path, had they not been so engrossed in their own affairs, might have recognised the tall, stooping figure of the Miser strolling slowly ahead of them. It was for a minute only, for near a turn in the path he bent forward and disappeared in a thicket of althea bushes. At this season it was not a dense thicket, and Mr.

Knight, poking in the soft mould with his cane in search of a certain tiny plant, had no thought of hiding, but, as it chanced, was un.o.bserved by his friends.

"Oh, Margaret Elizabeth," her companion was saying as they pa.s.sed, "you are so dear! I have no business to be telling you so, but indeed I can't help it."

And she with a little laugh replied: "I am glad you can't, Candy Man."

And the next moment they were gone around the turn.

That was all, but it was enough. What rarer flower was likely to come the Miser's way, on this or any day?

He stood and looked after them. These two had brought into his grey life the touch of golden youth. He began to tremble under the force of a wonderful thought. He sought a bench and sank upon it. It would be a solution of his problem. He had come out to-day into the spring sunshine, feeling his burden more than he could bear, for in his pocket was a letter which put an end to the hope he had long cherished of at length righting a great wrong.

There must be a way of doing what he wished. The consent of the Candy Man once gained, that hateful fortune, which through these years had been slowly crushing him, might become a minister of joy and well being, might make possible for others those best things of life that he had missed.

The thought thrilled him. He rose and walked on, back to the pavilion, where he paused again to rest. There on the step lay the shabby book with the funny name and the small oval bit cut from the fly leaf, beneath which was the Candy Man's name, Robert Deane Reynolds.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

_Shows how Mrs. Gerrard Pennington, unhappy and distraught, beseeches Uncle Bob to help her save Margaret Elisabeth; also how Mr. Gerrard Pennington comes to the rescue, and how in the end his wife submits gracefully to the inevitable, which is not so bad after all._

When Mrs. Gerrard Pennington was shown into the room of the Little Red Chimney, there was n.o.body there. A chilly wind outside, which dashed the rain against the windows, only served to call attention to the pleasantness within. It was indeed an aggressively cheerful room, entirely out of keeping with Mrs. Pennington's mood. The open piano, the row of thrifty ferns on the window-sill, the new novel on the table with a foreign letter between its leaves, and the work basket beside it--which, by the way, was of sweet gra.s.s--all sang the same song to the accompaniment of the fire's quiet crackle.

The burden of the song was Margaret Elizabeth. You saw her sitting bolt upright on the sofa, being very intense about something, or lost in thought, elbows on knees, on the ottoman beside the hearth, or occupied with that bit of embroidery, her curling lashes almost on her cheek. Oh, Margaret Elizabeth, how could you? How could you?