not told him. She was panting and her hand was on her side.
“Did Doctor Burns get home all right?” she cried under her breath.
“What do you know about Doctor Burns?” was Chester’s quick reply. He was startled by the girl’s appearance here at this hour.
“It doesn’t make any difference what I know. Tell me if he got home. Was he much hurt? Why shouldn’t you tell me that, Mr. Chester?”
“He is home and all right. Do you want him professionally? He can’t go out to-night.”
“I know he can’t. But I had to know he got home. I – “
She sank down on the doorstep, shaken and sobbing. Chester stood looking down at het, wondering what on earth he was to say. What had Rose Seeley to do with Red? What had she to do with his losing control on the Red Bank hill? A quick thought crossed his mind, to be as quickly dismissed. No, whatever Red’s private affairs were, they could have nothing to do with this Rose – too bruised and trampled a rose to take the fancy of a man like him even in his most evil hour.
Suddenly she lifted her head. “He saved my life and ‘most lost his. They’d been making repairs on the hill and, some way, the lanterns wasn’t lit. It’s an awful dark night. He saw what he was comin’ to and turned out sudden into the grass. He had to go into the ditch, then, not to run over me – and somebody else. He ran away!” Plainly that scornful accent did not mean Burns. “I didn’t. I helped him get the car up. I got his engine goin’ for him; he showed me how. His arm was broke. There ain’t no house for a mile out there. I hated to see him try to come home alone. I’ve walked all the way – run some of it – to make sure he got here.”
“He got here,” murmured Chester, thinking to himself that this was the queerest story he’d over heard, but confident he would never have any better version of it and pretty sure that it was the true one.
“I suppose I’m a crazy fool to tell you, Mr. Chester,” said the girl thickly. “But you’re a gentleman. You won’t tell. No more will he. He didn’t tell you how it happened, did he?”
She did not ask the question. She made the assertion, looking to him for confirmation. Chester gave it. “No, he didn’t tell,” he said gravely,
When she had gone he crossed the lawn to his own home, musing. “For a `plain, quiet dinner,'” said he, quoting a phrase of Burns’s used when he gave Chester the invitation, “I think Red’s has been about as spectacular as they make ’em. Bully old boys”
CHAPTER XI.
IN WHICH HE GETS EVEN WITH HIMSELF
R. P. Burns sat at his desk in the inner office, laboriously inscribing a letter with his left hand. It did not get on well. The handwriting in the four lines he had succeeded in fixing upon paper bore not the slightest resemblance to his usual style; instead, it looked like the chirography of a five-year-old attempting for the first time to copy from some older person’s script.
He held up the sheet and gazed at it in disgust. Then he glanced resentfully at his sling-supported right arm, especially at the fingers which protruded from the bandages in unaccustomed limp whiteness. Then he shook his left fist at it. “You’ll do some work the minute you come out of those splints,” he said. “You’ll work your passage back to fitness quicker than an arm ever did before, you pale-faced shirk!”
Then he applied himself to his task, painfully forming a series of pothooks until one more sentence was completed. He read it over, then suddenly crumpled the sheet into a ball and dropped it into the waste basket.
“Lie there!” he whimsically commanded it. “You’re not fit to go to a lady.”
He got up and marched into the outer office where his office nurse sat at a typewriter, making lout bills.
“Miss Mathewson,” he requested gruffly, “please take a dictation. No, not on the bill letterheads – on the regular office sheets. I’ll speak slowly. In fact, I’ll probably speak very slowly.”
“I’m sorry I don’t know shorthand,” said Miss Mathewson, preparing her paper.
“I’m not. Instead, I’d rather you’d be as slow as you can, to give me time to think. I’m not used to transmitting mediums – the battery may be weak – in fact, I’m pretty sure it is. All ready? My dear Mrs. Lessing”
His cheek reddened suddenly as he saw the nurse’s waiting hands poised over the keys when she had written this address. He cleared his throat and plunged in.
“This has been a typical November day, dull and cold. We had fine October weather clear into the second week of this month, but all at once it turned cold and dull. The leaves are all off the trees – Hold on don’t say that. She knows the leaves are all off the trees the middle of November.”
“I have it partly written.”
“Oh! Well, go on, then; I’ll fix it: a fact it may be necessary to remind you of down there in South Carolina, where – Miss Mathewson, do you suppose the leaves are on in South Carolina?”
“I really don’t know, Doctor Burns. I have always lived in the North.”
“So have I – bother it! Well, leave that out.”
“But I’ve written `a fact it may be necessary – “
“Well, finish it: a fact at may be necessary to remind you of, you have been gone so long. Oh, hang it -that sounds flat! How can I tell how a sentence is coming out, this way? Let that paragraph stand by itself – we’ll hasten on to something that will take the reader’s mind off our unfortunate beginning:
“You will be glad to know that Bobby Burns is well, and not only well, but fat and hearty. He had a wrestling bout with Harold Macauley the other day and downed him. He got a black eye, but that didn’t count, though you may not like to hear of it. He is heavier than when you saw him – Oh, I’ve said that! Miss Mathewson, when you see I’m repeating myself, hold me up.”
“I can’t always tell when you’re going to repeat yourself,” Miss Mathewson objected.
“That’s enough about Bob, anyhow. Mrs. Macauley writes her all about him every week, only she probably didn’t mention the black eye. Well, let’s start a new paragraph. When in doubt, always start a new paragraph. It may turn out a gold mine.
“I found my work much crippled by the loss of my arm. Good Heavens, that sounds as if I’d had it amputated! And I suppose she naturally would infer that a man can’t do as much with his arm in a sling as he can when it’s in commission. Well, let it stand. I didn’t realize how much surgery I was doing till I had to cut it all out. `Cut it out,’ that certainly has a surgical ring. It sounds rather bragging, too, I’m afraid. Never mind. The worst of it is to feel the muscles ,atrophying from disuse and the tissues wasting, so that when it comes out of the splints it will still have to be cured of the degeneration the splints have – Oh, hold on, Miss Mathewson – this sounds like a paper for a surgical journal!”
Burns, who had been walking up and down the room, cast himself into an armchair and stared despairingly at his amanuensis. But she reassured him by saying quietly that it was always difficult to dictate when one was not used to it, and that the letter sounded quite right.
“Well, if you think so, we’ll try another paragraph – that’s certainly enough about me. Let me see – ” He ran his left hand through his hair.
Footsteps sounded upon the porch. Arthur Chester opened the door.
“Oh, excuse me, Red. It’s nothing. I was going for a tramp, and I thought “
“I’m with you.” Burns sprang to his feet looking immensely relieved. “Thank you, Miss Mathewson, we’ll finish another time. Or perhaps I can scrawl a finish with my left hand. I’ll take the letter. I’ll look in at Bob and get my hat in a jiffy, Ches.”
He seized the letter, ran into the inner office, looked in at the dimly-lighted room where the boy was sleeping, took up a soft hat and, out of sight of Miss Mathewson, crammed the typewritten sheet into his pocket in a crumpled condition. Pulling the soft hat well down over his eyes he followed Chester out into the fresh November night, drawing a long breath of satisfaction as the chill wind struck him.
“You were just in time to save me from an awful scrape I’d got myself into,” he remarked as they tramped away.
“I thought you looked hot and unhappy. Were you proposing to Miss Mathewson by letter? It’s always best to say those things right out: letters are liable to misinterpretation,” jeered Chester.
“You’re right there. I was riding for a fall fast enough when you reined up alongside. But what’s a fellow to do when he can’t write himself, except in flytracks?”
“I presume the lady would prefer the fly-track to a typewritten document executed by another woman.”
“How do you know the thing was to a lady?” Burns demanded.
“That’s easy. No man looks as upset as you did over a communication to another man. What do you write to her for, anyhow, when she’s as near as Washington?”
“What?”
“Doesn’t she keep you informed? Winifred says Martha says Ellen came back up to Washington yesterday for the wedding of a friend – hastily arranged – to an army officer suddenly ordered somewhere – old friend of Ellen’s – former bridesmaid of hers, I believe. She – “
Burns had stopped short in the middle of the hubbly, half-frozen street they were crossing. “How long does she stay in Washington?”
“I don’t know. Ask Win. Probably not long, since she only came for this wedding. It’s tonight, I think she said. Aren’t you coming?”
Burns walked on at a rapid stride with which Chester, shorter-legged and narrower-chested, found it difficult to keep up. They had their tramp, a four-mile course which they were accustomed to cover frequently together at varying paces. Chester thought they had never covered it quite so quickly nor so silently before. For Burns, from the moment of receiving Chester’s news, appeared to fall into a reverie from which it was impossible to draw him, and the subject of which his companion found it not difficult to guess. After the first half mile, Chester, than whom few men were more adaptable to a friend’s mood, accepted the situation and paced along as silently as Burns, until the round was made and the two were at Burns’s door.
“Good night. Afraid I’ve been dumb as an oyster,” was Burns’s curt farewell, and Chester chuckled as he walked away.
“Something’ll come of the dumbness,” he prophesied to himself.
Something did. It was a telegram, telephoned to the office by a sender who rejoiced that having one’s left arm in a sling did not obstruct one’s capacity to send pregnant messages by wire. He had obtained the address from Martha Macauley, also over the telephone:
“Mrs. E. F. Lessing, Washington, D. C. Am leaving Washington to-night. Hope to have drive with you to-morrow morning in place of letters impossible to write. R. P. BURNS.”
“I suppose that’s a fool telegram,” he admitted to himself as he hung up the receiver, “but after that typing mess I had to express myself somehow except by signs. Now to get off. Luckily, this suit’ll do. No time to change, anyhow.”
He telephoned for a sleeper berth; he called up a village physician and the house surgeon at the city hospital, and made arrangements with each for seeing his patients during the two nights and a day of his absence. He had no serious case on hand and, of course, no surgical work, so that it was easier to get away than it might be again for a year after his arm should be once more to be counted on. Then he interviewed Cynthia on the subject of Bob; after which he packed a small bag, speculating with some amusement, as he did so, on the succession of porters, bell-boys, waiters and hotel valets he should have to fee during the next thirty-six hours to secure their necessary assistance, from the fastening of his shoes to the tying of his scarfs, the cutting up of his food, and the rest of the hundred little services which must be rendered the man with his right arm in a sling.
“I may not look a subject for travel, Miss Mathewson,” he announced with a brilliant smile, appearing once more in the outer office, where the bill-copying was just coming to a finish, “but I’m off, nevertheless. Thank you for your struggle with my schoolboy composition. We won’t need to finish it. I’m – Oh, thunder!”
It was the office bell. Miss Mathewson answered it. Burns, prepared to deny himself to all ordinary petitioners, saw the man’s face and stopped to listen. It was a rough-looking fellow who told him his brief story, but the hearer listened with attention and his face became grave. He turned to Miss Mathewson.
“Call Johnny Caruthers and the Imp, please,” he directed. “Telephone the Pullman ticket office and change my berth reservation from the ten-thirty to the one o’clock train.”
He went out with the man, and Miss Mathewson heard him say: “You walked in, Joe? You can ride back with us on the running-board.”
Ten minutes after he had gone Chester came again. He found Miss Mathewson reading by the office droplight. On the desk stood a travelling bag; beside it lay a light overcoat, not the sort that Red Pepper was accustomed to wear in the car, a dress overcoat with a silk lining. On it reposed a that and a pair of gloves rolled into a ball, man fashion. Chester regarded with interest these unmistakable signs of intended travel.
“Doctor Burns going out of town?” he inquired casually. It must be admitted that he had scented action of some sort on the wind which had taken his friend from his company at the conclusion of the walk. Ordinarily, Burns would have gone into Chester’s den and settled down for an hour of talk before bedtime.
“I believe so,” Miss Mathewson replied in the noncommittal manner of the professional man’s confidential assistant. “But he has gone out for a call now.”
“Back soon?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Chester.”
“Did he go in the Imp?”
“Yes.”
“Country call, probably – they’re the ones that bother a man at night as long as he does country work. I’ve often told Doctor Burns it was time he gave up this no-‘count rural practice. Well, do you know what time his train goes?”
“After midnight, some time.” Miss Mathewson knew that Mr. Chester was Doctor Burns’s close friend, but she was too accustomed to keep, her lips closed over her employers affairs to give information, even to Chester, except under protest.
“Hm! Well, I believe I’ll sit up for him and help him off. A one-armed man needs an attendant. Don’t stay up, Miss Mathewson. I’ll take any message he may leave for you.”
“I’m afraid I ought to wait,” replied the faithful nurse doubtfully.
“I don’t believe it. Go home and go to bed, like a tired girl, as you no doubt are, and trust me. If he wants you I promise to telephone you. I’ll see him off and like to do it. Come!”
There being no real reason for doing otherwise than follow this most sensible advice, Miss Mathewson went away. Chester, settling himself by the drop-light in the chair she had vacated, fancied she looked a trifle disappointed and wondered why. Surely, he reasoned, the girl must get enough of erratic night work without sitting up merely to hand Burns his overcoat and wish him a pleasant journey.
It was a long wait. Chester enlivened it by telephoning Winifred that he wouldn’t be home till morning – or sooner, and elicited a flurry of questioning which he evaded rather clumsily.
It was all right for him to be curious concerning Red’s affairs, he considered, but there was no need for the women to get started on inquisitive questions.
He read himself asleep at last over the office magazines, and was awakened by a hurried step on the porch and a gust of November night air on his warm face.
“What are you doing here?” was the question which assaulted him.
“Sitting up for you,” was Chester’s sleepy reply. He rubbed his eyes. “Thought you might like to have me see you off:”
“I’m not going anywhere except back to the case I’ve just left. Go home and go to bed.”
Chester sat up. He looked at Burns with awakening interest. He had never seen his friend’s face look grimmer than it did now under the gray slouch hat, which he had worn for the tramp, pulled well down over his brows, and which, during all his preparations and his hasty departure in the car, it had not occurred to him to remove or to exchange for the leather cap he usually wore on such trips.
” Back to a country case instead of to Washington?” Incredulity was written large on Chester’s face.
Burns nodded, growing grimmer than before, if that were possible. He sat down on the arm of a chair, glancing over at the desk where his belongings lay. “How did you know I was going to Washington?”
“Inferred it.”
“You’re mighty quick at inference. Maybe I wasn’t. But I was. Now I’m not. That’s all there is to it.”
“But why not? Can’t you turn the case over? I’ll bet my hat it’s a dead-beat case at that!”
Burns nodded again. “It is.”
“You’re an ass, then.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don’t expect – her – to stay in Washington waiting for you, do you, when she only came up for that wedding and is going straight back to keep some other engagements? That’s what Win says she’s to do.”
“No, I don’t expect her to wait.” Burns pulled the slouch hat lower yet. Chester could barely see his eyes. He could only hear the tone of his denial of any such absurd expectation.
Chester rose and stood looking down at his friend, who had folded his left arm over his right in its sling, as he sat on the chair arm, and looked the picture of dogged resignation.
“I suppose there’s some reason at the bottom of what strikes me as pure foolishness,” he admitted. “You won’t do me the honour of mentioning it?”
“Case of infected wound in the foot. Threatened tetanus. Five-year-old child.”
“Nobody competent to treat the case but you?”
Burns looked up. Chester saw his eyes now, gloomy but resolute. “No. It’s up to me alone. I owe it to the woman. It’s the only child she has left: a girl. It was her boy I sent to a better world with maledictions on his mother’s head.”
Comprehension dawned at last on Chester’s face. He saw that, taking into consideration Burns’s feeling in that matter, there was really nothing to be said. “I hope you win out,” he evolved at length from the confusion of ideas in his mind.
“I hope I do.” Burns rose. “I must send a telegram,” he said, and went to the telephone in the inner office.
While he was there Chester heard the honk of the Imp’s horn outside. When Burns came back he opened the outer door and called to Johnny Caruthers, to know if he had obtained the serum for which he had been sent to the druggist. Johnny shouted back that he had. Burns turned to Chester.
“Good night,” he said. “Much obliged for waiting up for me.”
Then, with a certain fighting expression on his lips which Chester had learned to know meant that his whole purpose was set on the attainment of an end for which no price could be too great to pay, Burns went out to Johnny Caruthers and the Green Imp.
CHAPTER XII
IN WHICH HE HAS HIS OWN WAY
Doc” – Joe Tressler followed Burns down the path, leaving his wife standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed, on the retreating figure of the man who had saved to her her one remaining child – “Doc, we ain’t a-goin’ to forget this!”
“Neither am I, Joe, for various reasons,” replied Burns, watching Johnny Caruthers try the Green Imp’s spark. He jumped in beside Johnny and looked back at Joe. “Remember, now, keep things going just as I leave them, and I shall expect to find Letty nearly as well as ever when I see her again. I shall be back in five days. Good-bye.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be around when you get back, with some money.”
Burns looked the man in the eye. “Oh, come, Joe, don’t say anything you don’t mean.”
“I mean it this time, Doe – I sure do. Me and the old woman – we – Letty – ” The fellow choked.
“All right, Joe. I’m as glad as you are Letty’s safe. Take care of her. Take care of your wife. Do a stroke of good, back-breaking work once in a while. It’ll help that tired feeling of yours that’s getting to be dangerously chronic. You’ve no idea, Joe, what a satisfaction it is, now and then, to feel that you’ve accomplished something. Try it. Good-bye.”
He waved his hand at the woman in the door, who responded with a flutter of her dingy apron; which was immediately thereafter applied to her eyes. Within, by the window, a little pale-faced girl hugged a remarkable doll with yellow hair and a red silk frock.
“You’d ought to be pretty proud, Letty Tressler,” said the woman, returning to the small convalescent, “to think Doc kissed you when he left. He’s been awful good to you, Doc has, and him with that arm in a sling a-bothering him all the time. But I didn’t think he’d do that.”
“Maybe it’s ’cause I’m so clean now,” speculated the child weakly. “When he did it he whispered in my ear that he liked clean faces.”
“Letty, you ain’t goin’ to have any kind o’ face but a clean face after this, jest on account o’ Doc Burns,” vowed her mother emotionally, and the child, her doll pressed against her face, nodded.
Far down the road Burns was bidding Johnny Caruthers put on more speed. “We have to make time to-day, Johnny,” he explained. “I’m going to get off on that ten-thirty to-night if I have to break my other arm to do it. I don’t know that I’d be much more helpless than I am now if I did. Curious, Johnny, how many things there are a man can’t do with one hand.”
“I should say you could do more with that left hand of yours than most folks can with both,” declared young Caruthers, honest admiration in his eye.
Burns laughed – a hearty, care-free laugh. He was in wild spirits, Johnny could see that, and wondered why the Doctor should be so happy over pulling a dead-beat family out of their troubles. Everybody knew Joe Tressler. And Johnny understood that the Doctor had given up going away on Joe’s account ten days ago, when he took the case on the eve of his departure. Johnny had seen his employer in all stages of tension since that day, as he had driven him out, at first half-a-dozen times in the twenty-four hours, to this same little old wreck of a house. Johnny had driven him to other houses, also to one especially, in the city, where the lad had sat and speculated much on the extremes of experience in the life of a busy practitioner.
It was to this same house that Johnny took Burns next; a house reached by a long drive through wonderful grounds, to a palace of a home within which the man with his arm in the sling disappeared with precisely the same rather brusque and hurried bearing characteristic of him everywhere. But Johnny could not see within. If he had, his honest eyes might have opened still wider.
On his way upstairs Burns was intercepted by the master of the house.
“You’ve decided to go with us, Doctor Burns, I hope?” The question was put in the fashion of a person who expects but one answer. But the answer proved to be not that one expected.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do it, Mr. Walworth.” Burns’s left hand, in the cordial grip which expresses hearty liking, was retained while William Walworth, who was accustomed to be able to arrange all things to his pleasure by the simple expedient of paying whatever it might cost, stared into the bright hazel eyes which met his with their usual straightforward glance.
“Can’t’! But you must, my dear Doctor, Pardon me, but I feel that no ordinary considerations can be allowed to stand in the way. My daughter needs your care on this journey. Her mother and I have agreed that her wish to have you with us must be fulfilled. It’s an essential factor in her recovery.”
“It’s not essential at all, Mr. Walworth. Miss Evelyn is well started on the road to full health; she has only to keep on. My going with you would be a mere matter of pleasing her, and that’s not in the least necessary.”
His smile softened the words which struck upon the ear of the magnate with an unaccustomed sound. Mr. Walworth released Burns’s hand, his manner stiffening slightly.
“I must differ with you, Doctor. I feel that at this stage Evelyn’s pleasure is a thing to be planned for. She has taken this fancy to have you with us on the Mediterranean cruise. We’ll agree to land you and send you home at the end of a couple of months if you positively feel that you can’t neglect your practice longer. But let me remind you, Doctor, that your fee will be made to cover all possible income from your practice during that time, and – I shall not be contented to measure its size by that.”
It was Burns’s turn to stiffen within, if he did not let it show outwardly. He spoke positively and finally. Even William Walworth saw that it would be of no use to urge a man who said quite quietly:
“I’ve thought it over, as I promised you, and decided against it. I assure you I appreciate the honour you would do me, and I should immensely like the experience. But I know my going is not necessary to Miss Evelyn’s recovery, and that’s the only thing that could make me hesitate. I’ll go up and see her at once, if you will forgive my haste. I have a busy day before me.”
William Walworth looked after him as he ran up the stately staircase, and his thoughts were somewhat as Johnny Caruthers’s had been. “He’s more of a man, crippled like that, than any I know. I wonder why he won’t go. I wonder. But he won’t, that’s settled. Now to appease Evelyn. He’ll not find that so easy.”
Burns did not find it easy. He sat down beside the convalescent, a patient who had everything on her side with which to win her chosen physician’s consent to stay by her till she should be in the possession once more of the blooming beauty which had made her one of the envied of the earth. He told her, in the direct manner he had used with her father, that he could not fall in with their plans.
When he came away he was tingling all over. It had been so plain. She had tried to disguise it, but she was where she could not run to cover, and he had seen it all. It gave him no pleasure: he was not that sort. He was sorry for the girl, but he was not in the least anxious about her. She would get over it; it was not his fault – he was conscience-clear on that. If ever he had been coolly – however kindly – professional in his bearing it had been in this home of great wealth, where it would have gone against his inmost grain to have seemed to court liking. If anything, his orders had been more curt, his concessions fewer, his whole treatment of the case on simpler lines than it might have been in almost any less pretentious home with which he was familiar.
He ran down the stone steps in eager haste to be gone, his vision still engaged with the reproachful look Evelyn’s mother had given him when she heard of his incredible refusal to accompany the Walworths on the luxuriously-equipped expedition in search of recuperation and enjoyment for the idolized only daughter. “This settles me with them to the end of time, I suppose,” he said to himself. As the car ran down the drive, he straightened his shoulders with a sense of thankfulness that his practice was not often in the homes of the comparatively few people who can afford to buy even that most precious of commodities, the time of others, when that time has been consecrated to certain uses.
“Not going to stop for lunch, Doctor?” inquired young Caruthers anxiously, as the round of calls went on and one o’clock passed, with the Imp in a portion of the city remote from the hotel at which
Burns was accustomed to refresh himself and Johnny when home was out of the question.
“We’ll go to the hospital next, and I shall be there a couple of hours. You can go and fill up then. I must be back at the office by four – for engagements.”
So the day went. The busy physician who goes out of town for even a five days’ vacation must plan for it and do much arranging in various ways. In spite of the fact that it would still be many weeks before Burns could attempt surgery again, he was having plenty to do. Only the determination to get away this time without fail made it possible for him to go. But there would be never a time when he could better be spared, and he meant to let nothing hinder his purpose.
“The arm’s coming on well,” was Doctor Buller’s verdict late that afternoon as he gave the healing member its usual manipulation and massage. “It takes patience to wait, though, doesn’t it, Burns? Never tried a broken arm myself, but I should say that hand must be itching to be at work in the operating-room again.”
“Itching! It’s burning, blistering, scarifying! I never knew how I liked that part of my work till I had to come down to an exclusive practice in pills and plasters. Grayson’s doing a stunt to-day that would have driven me mad with envy if I could have stopped to look on. Doing it cleverly, too, by the report I had from Van Horn just now. When Van takes the trouble to praise another man it means something.”
“Means it’s been forced from him,” commented Buller. “Besides, Van enjoys praising Grayson to you. He’s enjoyed your smashed arm, too, the old fraud. Was he ever so decent to you before?”
Burns laughed. “You can’t strike fire that way today,” he declared. “Hold on! You’re not going to put that arm back into the splints?”
“Of course I am. It lacks two days yet off the shortest modern regulation period. Come on here.”
“Leave ’em off. I’ll take the consequences.”
“Don’t be foolish, man. If I had my way I’d keep the thing put up another full week. I’m not an advocate of this hurry business.”
“I am. The arm’s well enough to come out. I’ll wear it in a sling, but I want my coat sleeve on, and I’m going to have it on. Fix me up, will you? I’m in a hurry.”
“You’re going on a journey?”
“Yes. Get busy.”
“That’s the very reason why you should keep that arm out of danger till you get back. Jostling round in a crowd “
“Is this my arm or yours?” thundered Burns.
Buller laughed. “Don’t knock me down with it, Pepper-pot. It may be your arm, but you’re my patient, and I – “
“Don’t you fool yourself. If you won’t fix me up I’ll go out with it hanging, I can judge my own condition. Will you dress me and put any arm in this sling here, or must I send for Grayson? He’s none of your idiotic conservatives.”
“Keep quiet, and I’ll make you look pretty, little boy. I see – these are new clothes just home from the tailor, and they’re an elegant fit. Bully fresh scarf, peach of a pin, brand-new black silk sling – Oh, I say!”
For with his good left arm Burns was threatening his professional friend in a way that looked ominous. But a laugh was in his eye, now that he had got his way, and the altercation ended in a fire of jokes. Then Burns stood up.
“You’re a jewel, Buller boy,” said he. “You’ve brought me through in great shape. It was a nasty fracture, and you’ve given me an arm that’ll be as good as new. I’m grateful – you know that. Now, if you’ll look over that list I gave you of cases here in the city, and go out once to take a look at Letty Tressler, I’ll be ever faithfully yours. Griggs’ll see to my village practice. Now I’m off.”
“Hope you enjoy your trip. Must be a concentrated pleasure, to be crammed into five days and still make you look like a schoolboy just let out,” observed Buller as Burns turned, with his band on the door-knob.
“A dose doesn’t have to be big to be powerful,” rejoined Burns, opening the door.
“Nitro-glycerin, eh?” Buller called after the departing bulk of his friend. “Don’t let it carry you too far up. You might come down with a thud!”
“He’s right enough there,” was what Burns murmured to himself as he caught the elevator in the great building in which Buller’s office was a crowded corner. “I may come down in just that style. But better that than any more of this dead level of suspense. I don’t think I could stand that one more day.”
He and Johnny Caruthers whirled home in the Imp to find Burns’s village office as crowded as Buller’s city one. It was late before he could get his dinner, and after it he was kept busy turning calls over to other men. It was the usual experience to have work pile up during the last hours, as if Fate were against his breaking his chains and meant to tie him hand and foot.
‘I’m going to get out of this right now,” he announced suddenly to Miss Mathewson an hour before train time, as he turned away from a siege over the telephone with one hysterical lady who felt that her life depended upon his remaining to see her through an attack of indigestion. “If I don’t, something will come in that will pull hard to keep me home, and I’m not going to be kept. I’ll trust you not to look me up for the next hour, for I’ll not tell you where I’m going, and you can’t guess, you know. Good-bye. Be a good girl.”
He wrung her hand, looking at her with that warmth of friendliness which he was accustomed, when in the mood, to bestow on her, recognizing how invaluable she was to him, and never once recking what it meant to her to be so closely associated with him. She answered in her usual quiet way, wishing him a safe journey and bidding him be very careful of the arm, no longer protected except by the silken sign that injury had been done.
“In a crowd, you know, they won’t notice the sling,” she warned him.
“Won’t they? Well, if my trusty left can’t protect my battered right I’ve forgotten my boxing tricks. Don’t be anxious about that, little friend. See that Amy Mathewson has a good time in my absence, will you? She’s looking just a bit worn, to me.”
She smiled, but her eyes did not meet his: she dared not let them. With all his kindness to her he did not often speak with the real affection which was in his voice now. She understood that he was, for some reason, keyed high over his prospective journey even higher than he had been ten days before when on the point of leaving. And she knew well enough where he was going, though he had not told her. It would have taken thirty-six hours to go to Washington, spend a brief time there and return. It was going to take five days to go to South Carolina, remain long enough to transact his business – was it business? – and come back. And there had been no more attempts to write letters by way of an amanuensis. The affection for his assistant in his manner to her was genuine, she did not doubt that, but it did not deceive her for a moment. So, she did not let her eyes meet his. They rested, instead, on the scarfpin which Buller had termed a “peach,” but they did not see it. She could not remember when it had been so hard to maintain that quiet control of herself which had long since made her employer cease to reckon with the possibilities of fire beneath.
R. P. Burns stole away with Johnny and the Imp, without so much as letting his neighbours know of his intentions. He had made sure that they were all well; that no incipient scarlet fever or invading measles was threatening them. He smiled to himself as the car went past the Chester house, to think how interested they would be to know where he was going. But he got safely off and nobody opened a door at sound of the Imp to call to him to come in a minute because somebody seemed not quite well.
And then, after all, he ran upon Arthur Chester – and at the city station, to which he had taken the precaution to go, although the ten-thirty stopped for a half-minute at the village. It must be admitted that he tried to dodge his best friend, but he did not succeed. His shoulders were too conspicuous: he could not get away.
“Going to see an out-of-town patient at this hour of night?” queried Chester, coming up warmly interested, as best friends have a trick of being, in spite of all that can be done to avert their curiosity.
“Where else would I be going?”
“I don’t know where else, but I doubt if it’s to see a patient. There’s an air about you that’s not professional. You – er – you can’t be going to Washington? There’s nobody there now.”
“No, only a few Government officials and some odds and ends of hangers-on. To be sure, Congress is in session, but there’s nobody there. My train’s been called, Ches; so long.”
“Let me carry your bag.” Chester reached for it. “I say, this isn’t a tool-kit – this is a stunner of a regulation travelling bag. See here, Red,” he was rushing along on the other’s side, fairly running to keep up with Burns’s strides – “how long are you going to be gone?”
“Long enough to get a change of air. The atmosphere’s heavy here with inquisitive people who call themselves your friends. See here, Ches, you’re not looking well. You need rest and sleep. Go home and go to bed.”
“You’re always telling me to go home and go to bed. Not till I see which train you take,” panted Chester, his eyes sparkling. “Ha! Going to turn in at Number Four gate, are you? Sorry I can’t take your bag inside. Well, possibly I can guess your destination. Got your section clear through to South Carolina? I say, keep your head, old man, keep your head!”
Burns turned about, shook his fist at Arthur Chester, seized his bag, rushed through the gateway and boarded the last of the long string of Pullmans. On the platform he pulled off his hat and waved it at his friend. He could forgive anybody for anything tonight.
CHAPTER XIII
IN WHICH HE MAKES NO EVENING CALL
Burns opened the white gate – it was sagging a little on its hinges -and walked up the moss-grown path between the rows of liveoaks to the tall-columned portico of the still stately, if somewhat timeworn and decayed, mansion among the shrubbery. It was just at dusk, and far away somewhere a whippoorwill was calling. It was the only sound on the quiet air.
The door was opened by an old negro servant, who hesitated over his answer to the question put by this unknown person looming up before him with his arm in a sling. Mrs. Elmore was in, but she was not well and could not see any visitors this evening.
“Is Mrs. Lessing in?”
“Yas, Sah, she is. But she done tole me she couldn’t see nobody herse’f. She tekkin’ cah ob Miss Lucy.”
Burns produced his card and made a persuasive request. The old darky led the way to a long, nearly dark apartment, where the scent of roses mingled with the peculiar odour of old mahogany and ancient rugs and hangings. The servant lit a tall, antique lamp with crystal pendants hanging from its shade, the light from which fell upon a bowlful of crimson roses so that they glowed richly. He left Burns, departing with a shufing step and an air of grudging the strange gentleman the occupancy of the room, although it was to be for only so long as it would take to bring back word that neither of the ladies would see him to-night.
Burns sat still for the space of two minutes then, as no further sound could be heard in the quiet house, he became restless. His pulses beat rather heavily and, to quiet them or the sense of them, he got up and walked about, pausing at one of the long French windows to gaze out into the dusky labyrinth of a garden, where he could just make out paths winding about among the bushes. The night was mild, and the window stood ajar as if some one had lately come in.
Then he turned and saw her. She had almost reached him, but he had not heard her, her footfall upon the old Turkey carpet with its faded roses and lilies had been so light. She was in white, and the light from the old lamp shone on her arms end face and brought out the shadows of her hair and eyes. She put out both hands – then quickly drew back one as her glance fell upon the sling, and gave him her left, smiling. But he drew the arm that had been broken out of its support and held it out.
“Please take this hand, too,” he said. “It will be its first experience and, perhaps, it will put new life into it. It’s pretty limp yet.”
She laid hers in it very gently, looking down at it as his fingers closed slowly over hers.
“That’s doing very well, I should think,” she said. “It’s barely time for it to be independent yet, is it?”
“About time. I had something of a wrestle with Doctor Buller to get him to leave the splints off. How warm and soft your hand is. This one of mine has forgotten how the touch of another hand feels.”
“I’m sure you ought not to use it yet. Please put it back in the sling.” She drew her own hand gently away.
It occurred to him that while he had been absent from her he had not been able to recall half her charm, and that if he had he would never have been able to wait half so long before pursuing her down into this Southern haunt of hers. He drew a full, contented breath.
“At last,” he said, “I am face to face with you. It’s worth the journey.”
In the lamplight it seemed to him the rose cast a reflection on her face which he had not observed at first.
“I’m so sorry Aunt Lucy isn’t able to see you tonight,” she said – “unless she would consent go see you professionally. She really ought “
He held up his hand “Not unless she is in serious straits, please,” he begged. “I’ve fled from patients, only to find them all the way down on the train. I don’t know what there can be about me to suggest to a conductor that I’m the man he’s looking for to attend some emergency case, but he seems to spot me. Only at the station before this did I get released from the last of the series. Let me forget my profession for a bit if I can, just now I’m only a man who’s come a long way to see you. Is it really you?”
He leaned forward, studying her intently. His head, with its coppery thatch of heavy hair, showed powerful lines in the lamplight; beneath his dark throws the hazel eyes glowed black.
“It’s certainly I,” she answered lightly. “And being I, with the mistress of the house prevented from showing you hospitality, I must offer it. She begged me to make you comfortable and to tell you she would see you in the morning. You’ve had a long journey. You must want the comfort of a room and hot water. I’ll ring for Old Sam.”
She crossed the room and pulled an old-fashioned bell-cord, upon which a bell was heard to jangle far away. The old darky reappeared.
“I should have gone to a hotel,” Burns said, “if I could have found one in the place.”
“There is none. And if there had been Aunt Lucy would have been much hurt to have you go there. Where did you leave your bag?”
“At the station. I can stay only for a night and a day, so it’s a small one.”
“I’ll send Young Sam for it. Now let Sam take you to your room, and in a few minutes I’ll give you supper,”
“Don’t bother about supper at this hour. I only want – “
“You want what you are to have, – some of Sue’s delicious Southern cookery.” She smiled at him as he looked back at her, following the old servant. “She’s been in the family for forty years and she loves to have company to appreciate her dishes. Sam, you are to help Doctor Burns. He has had a broken arm.”
When Burns came down, fresh from a bath and comfortable with clean linen, he smelled odours which made him realize that, eager as he was for other things, he was human enough to be intensely hungry with a healthy man’s appetite. So he surrendered himself to the fortunes that now befell him.
Old Sam conducted him to the dining-room, a quaintly attractive apartment where candle-light illumined the bare mahogany of the round table laid with a large square of linen at his place and set with delicate ancient china and silver. Ellen Lessing was already there in a high-backed chair opposite the one set for him, a figure to which his eyes were again drawn irresistibly and upon which they continued to rest as he took his seat.
Sam disappeared toward the kitchen, and Burns spoke in a low voice across the table.
“I feel as if I were in a dream,” said he. “Forty-eight hours ago I was rushing about, hundreds of miles from here, trying to attend to the wants of a lot of people who seemed determined not to let me get away. Now I’m down here in the midst of all this quiet and peace, with you before me to look at, and nobody to demand anything of me for at least twenty-four hours. It’s all too good to be true.”
“It seems rather odd to me, too,” she answered, letting her eyes stray from his and rest upon the bowl of japonicas of a glowing pink, which stood in the centre of the table. The candle-light made little starry points in her dark eyes as she looked at the rich-hued blooms. “The last person in the world I was expecting to see to-night was you.”
“I suppose I was as far from your thoughts as your expectation,” he suggested.
“How should I be thinking of a person who had not written to me for so long I thought he had forgotten me?” she asked, and then as he broke out into a delighted laugh at her expense she grew as, pink as her flowers and seemed to welcome the return of Sam bearing a trayful of Sue’s good things to eat.
Fried chicken and sweet potatoes, beaten biscuit and fragrant coffee, had a flavour all their own to Burns that night. He ate as a hungry man should, yet never forgot his companion for a moment or allowed her to imagine that he forgot her. And by and by the meal was over and the two rose from the table.
“I must go and see that Auntie is comfortable for the night, if you will excuse me for half an hour,” said the person he had come to see. “Will you wait in the drawing-room? I will have Sam bring you some late magazines.”
“I’ll wait, and no magazines, thank you. I can fill the time somehow,” he answered. “But don’t let it be more than the half-hour, will you?”
He watched her until she disappeared from his sight at the turn of the staircase landing, then went in to pace up and down the long room, his left arm folded over his right, after the fashion he had acquired since the right arm became useless. After what seemed an interminable interval she came back. He met her at the door.
“Are the duties all done?” he inquired.
“All done for the present. I must look in on Auntie by and by, but I think she is going to sleep.”
“May she sleep the sleep of the just! And there’s nothing more you feel it incumbent upon you to do for me? No more sending me to my room, no more waiting upon me by Sam, no more feeding me till my capacity is reached? Is there really no notion in your mind as to how you can put off the coming hour?”
His voice had its old, whimsical inflection, but there was a deeper note in it, too. She parried him gently, yet not quite so composedly as was her wont.
“Why should I want to put if off? Aren’t we going to sit down and have a delightful talk? I want to hear all about Bob and Martha and all of them, and about your work since I saw you.”
“You want to hear all about those things, do you? I had the impression that we discussed them quite thoroughly while I was at supper. Still, I can go over them all again if you insist. It may take up another five minutes, and when one is fencing for time, even five minutes counts.”
It was his old way, with a vengeance. There was a saying of Arthur Chester’s current among his and Burns’s friends that it never was of any use to try to evade Red Pepper when once he had begun to fire upon your defenses. With his eyes searching you and his insolent tongue putting point blank questions to you, you might as well capitulate first as last.
There being no conceivable answer to this thrust about fencing for time, even for a woman experienced in replying skilfully to men under all sorts of conditions, Ellen Lessing was forced to look up or play the part of a shy girl. So she looked up, lifting her head bravely. There really was nothing else to do.
It was all in his face. He had not come all those hundreds of miles to pay her an evening call, nor did he mean to be put off longer. His eyes held hers: she could not withdraw them.
“It’s odd,” he said, speaking slowly, “how like a magnet drawing a steel bar you’ve drawn me down here. Pull-pull-pull an irresistible force. I wonder if the magnet feels the attraction, too? Could it pull so hard if it didn’t?”
There was a long minute during which neither stirred – it might have been the counterpart of that minute, months back, when they had first observed each other. Recognition it was, perhaps, at the very first; there could be no question about the recognition now – it went deep.
Suddenly he slipped his right arm out of the sling. Before she could draw breath she was in the circle of his arms, but he had not touched her.
“Am I wrong?” he was saying. “Has it pulled both ways from the first?”
It must be as useless for the magnet to resist as for the bar. And when they, have come within a certain distance of each other –
If Red Pepper’s left arm caught her in the stronger grasp, the right did all, and more than all, that could have been expected of it. It was his right arm which slowly drew her hands up, one after the other, and indicated to them that their place was; locked together, behind his neck.
An old garden in South Carolina is a place to lure the Northerner out-of-doors. Before breakfast next morning Burns was walking down the box-bordered paths, feasting his gaze and his sense of fragrance on the clumps of blue and white violets, the clusters of gay crocuses, the splendid spikes of Roman hyacinths. But he did not fail to keep track of all doorways in sight, and when she appeared at the open French window of the drawing-room he was there in a trice, offering her a bunch of purple violets and feasting his eyes upon her morning freshness.
“I’m still dreaming, I think,” said he when he had drawn her back into the quiet room long enough to satisfy himself with the active demonstration that possession means privilege, and had himself fastened the violets in the front of her crisp white morning dress. “Dreaming that I can stay down here in this wonderful paradise with you and not go back to the slave’s life I lead.”
“You would never be happy away from that slave’s life long, you know,” she reminded him. “The rush of it is the joy of it to you.”
“How will it be to you? I shall be yours, you remember, till Joe Tressler or any other ne’er-do-weel wants me, then I’m his.”
“But you’ll always come back to me,” said she.
“And will you be content with that?”
“So long as you want to come back.”
He looked steadily into her eyes, and his own took fire. “Want to come back! I’ve waited a long time to find the woman I could be sure I should always want to come back to. I thought there would never be such a woman: not for an erratic fellow like me . . . . But now I’m wondering how I shall ever be able to stay away.”
CHAPTER XIV
IN WHICH HE DEFIES SUPERSTITION
Hades of Hymen! Red, are you making calls this morning?”
“Why not? I’m not to be married till noon, am I?”
“I say, take me with you, will you? I want to go along with a man who has the nerve to see patients up to the last minute before his wedding!”
“Takes less nerve than to sit around and wait for the fateful hour, I should say. Come on, if you think you’ll have time to dress when you get back. It may be close work.”
“Haven’t you got to dress yourself?” demanded Arthur Chester, settling himself in the car beside its driver. “Or shall you go to the altar in tweeds with April mud on your boots?”
“Rather than not get there, yes. But I can dress in half the time you can – always could, and necessity has developed the art. Look here, there isn’t any April mud. The roads are fine.”
“Oh, I suppose if I were booked for a wedding journey in the Green Imp before the leaves were fairly out I shouldn’t be able to see any mud myself. As it is, well, I don’t know the colour of the bride’s motoring clothes, but I presume they’ll be adapted to the circumstances. I never saw her look anything but ready for whatever situation she happened to be in. That’s a trick that’ll serve her many a good turn as the wife of R. P. Burns, M.D., eh, Red?”
The Imp whirled about the country all the morning, having made an early start. The car was in fine fettle, like a horse that has been trained for a race. Although it was beginning its second season it had never been in better trim for business. The engine, having been cared for and seldom abused, was running more smoothly than when it had been first put upon the road. The Imp had had a fresh coat of the dark-green which gave it its name, and its brasswork was shining as only Johnny Caruthers by long and untiring labors could make metal shine. It had that morning acquired a luggage-rack attached to its rear, which was soon to receive a leather-covered motor trunk at that moment receiving its final consignments in the Macauley house; and there were several other new fittings about the machine which indicated that it was presently to be put to uses which had never been required of it before.
The Imp drew up in front of the hospital. Chester looked anxiously at his watch for the twenty-seventh time that morning. “For Heaven’s sake, hurry, Red,” he urged. “Women are the dickens about having a wedding late, and it’s ten minutes of eleven now. Noon comes sure and soon, and at noon, allow me to remind you – “
Burns nodded. “Keep cool, boy,” he recommended. “No use getting excited before a critical operation.”
But he disappeared at a pace fast enough to satisfy Chester, who sat back and said to himself that R. P. had come nearer giving the crisis before him its appropriate name than he had ever heard done before.
He became anxious again, however, before Burns returned, and his watch was in his hand when the prospective bridegroom bolted out of the hospital door and ran for his car as if he had not a moment to spare.
“Glad to see you’re losing your head a trifle at last,” commented Chester as the Imp turned a dizzy curve and shot away. “It’s the only proper thing. But we’ve really enough time if you don’t stop anywhere else. What’s the matter? Good Lord, man, you’ll get nabbed if you speed up like this within limits. You – “
“Cut it and don’t talk. I’ve got to make time,” was all the answer or explanation he received; and Chester, with the wisdom of long association with Red Pepper at his pepperest, obeyed.
As they approached the house Burns spoke for the first time since they had left the city. “Go in and tell the bunch I have to do an operation at the hospital as quick as I can get my stuff and drive back there. I’ll be back at – “
“Great Christopher, man! But – “
“I can be back by two. Ellen will understand.”
“The deuce she will! Don’t ask me to explain to her.”
“I won’t. I’ll do it myself. You tell the rest.”
The Imp shot up the driveway. Burns jumped out and ran to his office. Five minutes later, instrument bag in hand, he ran out again, Miss Mathewson following. He bolted in at the Macauleys’ front door. Chester had already broken the incredible news to Martha Macauley and was standing out a storm of expostulations and reproaches, as if by any chance anybody could expect Arthur Chester to be able to stop R. P. Burns when be had started upon any course of action whatsoever. But when Burns himself appeared at the doorway the situation came to a crisis. Towering beside a group of palms which decorated the foot of the staircase Burns demanded to see Ellen.
“Why, Red, you can’t. She’s – besides how can you – “
“Ask her to come where I can speak to her then. Quick, please.”
“But she – “
There was no knowing how long the sparring might have lasted, or what extreme measures might have been taken, had not a figure in a floating lilac-and-white garment, with two long braids of dark hair hanging over its shoulders, appeared upon the staircase landing. Burns looked up, saw it, and was up the stairs to the landing before Chester could flick an eyelash.
“Dear, to save a life I want to delay things just two hours. There’s nobody else to do it. Van Horn was taken ill just as he was getting ready. The only other man who would venture under the conditions – Grayson – is out of town.”
His arms were about her as she stood a step above him. So, her eyes were level with his.
“Do it, of course,” she whispered. “And take my love with you.”
For one minute Burns stayed to tell her that he had known she would send him to his duty, then he was off. The door slammed behind him, and outside the Imp’s horn sent back a parting salute.
>From the bottom stair Martha Macauley, distressed young matron and hostess, gazed up at her sister, who, with arms leaning on the vine-wreathed rail at the landing, was smiling down at her.
“Ellen! Was ever anything so crazy! I did suppose Red would take time enough to be married in. There’s everybody coming.”
“So few you can easily telephone them all to wait.”
“And the breakfast under way – “
“It will keep.”
“Aren’t you superstitious enough not to want to postpone your wedding?” demanded Martha urgently.
The dark braids of hair swung violently as the bride’s head was emphatically shaken. “Martha! Take it back! Let somebody die because I was afraid to wait two hours?”
“I don’t believe anybody would die,” insisted Martha. “Somebody could be found. It’s just Red’s ridiculous craze for surgery. I always said he’d rather operate than eat. Now, it seems he’d rather operate than be – “
But at this moment a large, determined hand came over her mouth from behind, as James Macauley, junior, arriving upon the scene, asserted his authority. He was in bathrobe and slippers, having been excitedly interviewed by Chester through the bathroom door.
“Quit fussing, Marty. The thing can’t be helped, and if Ellen doesn’t mind I don’t know why we should. If we were having a houseful it would be fierce, but with only ourselves and the Chesters and the minister’s family and Red’s people – I’ll go telephone Mr. Harding now.”
As Martha freed herself from the silencing hand the front door opened again. This time it was Mrs. Richard Warburton – Burns’s young sister Anne – also in somewhat informal attire, over which she had thrown an evening coat. She surveyed the group with laughing eyes. She herself had been married within the year.
“It’s absurd, isn’t it?” she cried. “But it’s just like Red. Ellen knows that, don’t you, dear? Ellen’ll not only take him for better and for worse, but for present and for absent – mostly absent! But we’re rather proud of him over at the house. Father’s walking up and down and saying no other fellow would have done it, and Mother’s all tearful and smiling. Dick wanted to go in with him, but of course Miss Mathewson had to go: he seldom operates without her.”
“It’s so uncertain when he’ll get back,” mourned Martha, still unreconciled.
“I made Miss Mathewson promise to telephone, the moment she should know. It’s lucky the wedding guests are all in the family, isn’t it? Ellen, dear” – pretty Anne ran up the stairs to the landing – “I really don’t see how, after he caught sight of you in that fascinating garb, with your hair down, he could ever tear himself away! You’re positively the loveliest thing I ever saw in all my life, and I’m almost out of my senses with joy that you’re to be my sister, even though I never saw you in the world till yesterday! I always said when Red did care for anybody for keeps, she’d be a jewel!”
Red Pepper came back at precisely twenty minutes of three. His patient had given him a bad hour of anxiety immediately after leaving the table, and he could not desert her until she had rallied. But he felt easy about her now, and he had arranged to leave her in Buller’s hands – Buller, who did not do major surgery himself, but was a most competent man when it came to the care of surgical patients after operation. Burns brought Amy Mathewson back with him, though she had begged to be allowed to stay with the case.
“And not be at my wedding?” cried Red Pepper, in exuberant spirits. “Why, I couldn’t be properly married without you to see me through!”
Upon which she had smiled and obeyed him, and taken a tighter grip upon herself as he put her into the Green Imp for the last ride together. That was what it was to her, though she might yet go with him a thousand times to help him in his work. To him it was a quick and joyful journey back to his marriage.
“All right, Mother and Dad!” he exulted, coming in upon them in their festal array. He shook hands with his father and his brother-in-law; he kissed his mother. Then he ran for his own room where Bobby Burns, just being finished off by Anne, herself superbly dressed, shrieked with rapture at the sight of him.
“Red! At last! I’ve laid everything ready; you’ve only to jump into your bath; I turned on the water when Dick saw the Imp down the road. Don’t you dare have a vestige of a surgical odour about you when you come out!”
In precisely seventeen minutes and. three-quarters the bridegroom was ready to the last coppery affair on his head.
“Have I a `surgical odour,’ Anne?” he asked as he came up to her.
She buried her face on his shoulder, both arms about him, regardless of her finery. “You’re the dearest, sweetest old trump of a brother that ever lived, and you smell like sunshine and fresh air!” she cried. Whereat he shook with laughter and patted her back as she clung to him,
“Promise me, Red,” she begged, lifting her head, “that you won’t let anything – anything – keep you from going off with Ellen in the Imp. She’s been so lovely about this horrid delay, but I’m always suspicious of you. Promise!”
“I promise you this,” agreed her brother: “Wherever the Imp and I go, after the minister has said the words, for this two weeks Ellen shall go with me.”
“Chester,” said Dick Warburton as he stood in that gentleman’s company, looking over a stupendous assortment of wedding gifts, which, in spite of the fact that nobody outside the family had been asked to see Redfield Pepper Burns married, overflowed two large rooms into the upper hall and almost over the railing, “will you tell me who in the name of time sent that rat-trap? This is the most extraordinary display of gold, silver, and tinware that I ever saw, and I’m at the end of my astonishment. But that rat-trap, is it a joke?”
“No joke whatever -,” declared Chester. “It comes from one of R, Red’s – devoted friends – his own invention. And the point of the thing is that the making of that rat-trap is going to be the making of the worst dead-beat of a patient Red ever stood by. I really believe Joe Tressler’s going to get a patent on it, which also will be Red’s doing. But this is a special, particular rat-trap made of extra fine materials, suitable for a wedding gift!”
“Well, well,” mused Burns’s brother-in-law. “And what millionaire sent the diamond pendant? By Jove, I haven’t seen finer jewels than those this side of the water.”
“That came from the Walworths, I believe. Take it all together, it’s a great collection, isn’t it? It shows up the odder because Ellen wouldn’t have the freak grateful-patient gifts put to one side – or even thrown into a sort of refining shadow. Fix your eye on that rainbow quilt, will you, Dicky, alongside of the Florentine tapestry? That quilt would put out your eye if you gazed upon it steadily, so let up on it by regarding this match-safe. Wouldn’t that – “
“That came from Johnny Caruthers,” said a richly modulated low voice behind him. “Please set it down carefully, Mr. Arthur Chester.”
The two men wheeled to see the bride come to the defense of her wedding gifts. Behind her loomed her husband, laughing over her head, his eyes none the less tender, like hers, for the queer presents which meant no less of love and gratitude than the costlier gifts, of which there was no mean array.
“I see you’ve married him, patients and all, Ellen Burns,” declared Richard Warburton. “On the whole, it’s your wisest course. The less he knows you mind their devotion to him – “
“Mind it!” She gave him the flash of which the soft black eyes were brilliantly capable. “Dick, I have no gift I like so well as that rat-trap. You don’t know the story, but I do, and it means to me – fidelity to duty. And if there’s one great big thing in the world I think it’s that!”
Over her head, Dick Warburton nodded at his brother-in-law. “I’m glad we’ve got her into the family, Red,” said he. “It’s a mighty rare thing to find a beautiful woman who knows how to dress like a picture, with that ideal at the back of her head! ‘Cherish her, Red. If you don’t I’ll come around and knock you down!”
“I’ll let you do it,” agreed Burns soberly. All his marriage vows were in his face.
It was quite dusk when the Green Imp got away. Johnny Caruthers had the satisfaction of lighting up the car’s lamps – always a joy to him, and particularly so to-night, for even the oil taillight bore witness to his trimming and polishing till its red eye could gleam no brighter. As for the front lamps and the searchlight the Imp’s progress would be as down an avenue of brilliance if its driver allowed them all full play upon the road.
“She’s in great trim, Johnny,” said Burns’s voice in his ear. “I like her looks immensely. I shall hate to get a speck of mud on her.”
“Meaning the lady, Doc?” asked Johnny anxiously. “There’s a wet bit there under the elms, Doc, remember. It would be a pity to splash any mud on her!”
He glanced toward the porch, his freckled face eloquent of his admiration for the figure which was the centre of the group gathered there.
Burns’s eyes followed his. Bob, a picturesque, small person in his wedding attire of white linen, was attempting to tie Ellen’s motor-veil for her, as she stooped, smiling, to the level of his eager little arms. It occurred to both master and man, as they watched the child’s efforts to adjust the floating chiffon, that veils, however useful, were to be regretted when they were allowed even partially to obscure faces like those of Red Pepper’s wife.
“I meant the car, lad,” explained Burns, laughing. “You’ve done a great piece of work an her since I brought her home this afternoon. I’m afraid you’ve done some last polishing with your wedding clothes on, Johnny. Here’s some, thing to take the spots out.”
“Oh, Doc!” breathed the boy. “Not to-night, Let me do it – for you – and her.”
The money went back into Burns’s pocket, and his hand met Johnny’s in a hearty grasp. “That’s better yet,” said he, “and thank you, John. If anybody but you were sending me off I’d ask if everything was surely in the car But I’ll not even ask you.”
“You don’t need to,” vowed the boy proudly. “And there’s some things in you don’t need to know about, just extrys in case of breakdown.”
“Now, that,” said his employer, “is what call proving one’s self a friend.”
The Imp went cautiously through the “wet bit,” for it lay under the corner arc-light, and Johnny Caruthers would be watching. But, once on the open road outside the village, the pace quickened. For late April the roads were not bad, and if they had been sloughs the Imp Could have pulled through them. She had a great power hidden away in those six cylinders of hers, had the Imp.
“You’ll not mind if I stop at the hospital as we go through?” questioned Burns. “Then we’ll be off, out the old west road, out of reach of telephones and summonses of any sort. But I shall be just that much easier “
“Do stop, please. I’m sure you’ll be more satisfied and so shall I”
She sat quietly in the cat while he was gone looking up at the lighted windows and thinking all sorts of sympathetic thoughts concerning those inside -yet with a tiny fear in her heart that he would find some new and unavoidable duty to detain him. If he should
But he was back, and as the Imp’s searchlight fell upon his face, returning, she read there that he was free.
“Doing well, everything satisfactory, and I’ve not a care in the world,” he exulted as he leaped in. “Now we’re off, and never a stop till we’ve put a wide space between us and the rest of them.”
The Green Imp ran at its quietest along the city streets. then through the thinning suburbs, and finally, with the lights all behind them, the open country ahead, the long, low car came out upon the straight highway which leads a hundred miles before it comes again to any but insignificant hamlets and small, rustic inns.
Burns had said little thus far, but as he glanced over his shoulder at the now distant lights of the city he suddenly spoke low, out of the quiet:
“We’re out of reach of everything and everybody; nobody even knows the road we’re taking. We’re all alone in the world together. You can’t think what that means to me. I’ve lived nine years at the call of every soul that wanted me: hardly a vacation except for study. A fortnight seems pretty short allowance for a honeymoon; we’ll take a longer one when we go to Germany in the fall. But – for two weeks “
He looked down at her in the April starlight. He bent to finish the statement, whatever it might have been, upon her lips, for speech failed him. Then, with a happy laugh, he gave the Green Imp her head.