CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
"Yes dear, Uncle Billy was almost drowned, in trying to get you out of the water."
"Drowned dead, mamma?"
"Yes, Mac."
For a minute, Mac silently contemplated the possibility of his uncle's dying. Then his face dimpled into a smile once more, as he said,—
"If he was dead, mamma, I should get a little warm 'pirit and put in his stomach, and ven he would be all well again."
It seemed strange to Hope to be laughing once more. All the night through, a heavy cloud of anxiety had rested upon Valhalla where one hero at least was lying. It had been no easy feat which Billy Farrington had attempted, and no one was more keenly aware of the fact than he, himself. Well and strong enough for all practical purposes, his physique in reality was no match for men whose boyhood had been sound, and no match at all for the fury of Quantuck surf in a gale. He had realized all that, yet he had not hesitated for an instant as to what was the one thing for him to do. Billy's code of honor was a simple one and a straight-forward. It even included the possibility of laying down one's life for a little child.
All that night, the doctor worked over him. For a long time, it seemed to him a losing fight; but he prolonged it to the end, and in the end he was victorious. Phebe had succeeded in bringing Mac to consciousness, and she was superintending Hope's putting him to bed; the doctor had ordered the others out of the room, and he and Theodora were alone with Billy when at last the blue eyes opened.
"Billy! My dear old William!"
That was all the doctor heard. Then he brushed his hand across his eyes and stole away out of the room. Alone in the kitchen, he wiped his eyes again and blew his nose violently.
"That tells the story," he muttered to himself. "I wish there were more such marriages. But I thought for one while that there wasn't much chance for him." Then he shrugged his shoulders and put on his most professional manner, as he went back to his patient.
"Stop your lovering, Ted, and give him another drink of this. Lie where you are, for half an hour, Billy; then let Teddy tuck you up warm in bed and sleep it off. You did a fine thing, a mighty fine thing, and Hope will have something to say to you in the morning."
"All right, thank you, only rather stiff in the joints, so the doctor advised me to keep still, to-day," Billy said to Gifford Barrett, the next night.
The young man had met Hubert on the beach, that morning; but apparently he could be satisfied by no second-hand report from the Lodge. In the late twilight, he came strolling up to the seaward porch where he found Billy stretched out at his ease on a bamboo couch, and the others grouped around him, in full tide of family gossip.
"Then you are really none the worse for your ducking?" Mr. Barrett asked, as he took the chair that Theodora offered him.
"Rather stiff, and a bruise or two, nothing to count at all."
"And the boy?"
"Lively as a sand flea."
"How did he happen to get into the water, in the first place?" Mr.
Barrett inquired.
"Chiefly because his Aunt Phebe advised him to be careful, or he would get his feet wet," Hope answered. "There is no use in my trying to excuse my naughty boy, Mr. Barrett. Mac was so eager to assure my sister that she didn't own him that, in his defiance, he backed straight into the water."
"Oh, Hope, what is the use of telling, now it is all over?" Phebe's remonstrant tones came from inside the house.
Gifford Barrett rose and went towards the door.
"Are you there, Miss McAlister? I hoped I should see you."
"I'll be out in a minute."
The minute was a long one. Then Phebe stepped through the open doorway into the stronger light outside. Her face flushed a little, as she reluctantly touched the young man's outstretched hand; but that was all there was to show that she recalled the last words they had exchanged, the day before.
"I wanted to see you," he went on, as he seated himself once more. "I am going away, to-morrow night, and before I went, I had something I wished to tell—to explain, that is, to you all."
A sudden tension seemed to make itself felt throughout the group. No one of them had the remotest idea of what he was about to say, yet even Dr. McAlister drew his chair a few inches nearer, while Cicely, in her corner, fairly bounced in her excitement.
"Well, let her go," Billy remarked, after a moment when the guest seemed to find it hard to open the subject.
"Why, you see, I may seem very silly and egotistic to speak of it; but—The fact is, didn't any of you think it was strange that I didn't try to go into the surf for Mac, yesterday?"
Three of the women before him made a polite murmur of dissent. The fourth was silent; but Dr. McAlister said frankly,—
"Yes. It wasn't at all like my idea of you, Mr. Barrett."
The young man looked pleased.
"Thank you, doctor," he said heartily. "I value that sort of compliment. But I didn't want to go away from here and leave you to think me an arrant coward. The truth is, I shouldn't have been of much use to Mac or to myself. I'm not swimming, this summer, for I was unlucky enough to break my arm, last June, and it's not at all strong yet."
Quickly Billy put out his hand.
"I'm glad to know this, Barrett," he said. "I haven't been quite fair to you."
"I wish you had told us before," Theodora added laughingly. "We haven't had time to compare notes yet; but there is no telling what some of us may have thought about it. But isn't it very bad for your music, Mr. Barrett?"
"It came at an inconvenient time," he admitted; "for I was in the middle of some work, and I have had to let it all go."
"How did it happen?" Hope asked sympathetically. "I hope it wasn't a bad break."
"A compound fracture of the right arm," he replied. "It wasn't a pleasing break; but it was a good deal more pleasing than the way it happened."
"How was that?" Billy looked up expectantly, for the young man's tone was suggestive of a story yet untold.
Gifford Barrett laughed.
"It was very absurd, very ignominious; but the fact is, I was run into by a woman, one day in a pelting shower, and knocked heels over head off my bicycle."
Sitting in the doorway, Phebe had been holding a book in her hands. Now it fell to the floor with a crash.
"Drop something, Babe?" Hubert asked amicably.
"Yes, my book," she answered shortly.
"I shall never forget my emotions at the time," Gifford Barrett was saying to Billy. "I had been off for a long ride, one day, and was caught, on the way home, in this heavy shower. The road was all up and down hill, and just as I came down one hill, the damsel came down the other. She had lost both her pedals, and you've no idea how she looked, bouncing and bumping along, with her soaked skirt flopping in the wind. She hadn't even the grace to be pretty, so there wasn't an atom of romance in the affair from first to last. She was a great, overgrown country girl, and tied on the front of her wheel she had a bundle that I took for some sort of marketing stuff; but, just as she met me, it popped open and out tumbled a whole assortment of bones, human bones, legs and arms and a skull. What do you suppose she could have been doing with them? She was too young and fair to have been an undertaker."
"They might have belonged to her ancestors, and she have been taking them home for burial," Hubert suggested.
Mr. Barrett chuckled in a manner which suggested the composer in him had not entirely ousted the boy.
"Anyway, she is short a skull. I sent out, the next day, and had it brought to me. I have it yet."
"Did she hit you?" Theodora asked.
"Hit me! I should think she did. She was large, and she came at me with a good deal of force. The last I remember, I felt the crash, and I knew I had had the worst of it." He rubbed his arm sympathetically at the recollection.
"What became of you?" Mrs. McAlister inquired. "Did she pick you up and carry you home?"
"Not she. She was an Amazon, not a Valkyrie within hailing distance of
Valhalla."
"Who was she?" Theodora asked. "The story ought to have a sequel."
"It hasn't. It ended in mystery. The girl vanished into thin air, and a man, driving by, found me lying in the mud, with a skull on one side of me and a white sailor hat on the other, neither of them my property."
"Just rode away and left you with a compound fracture?" The doctor's tone was incredulous.
"Apparently, for she was never heard of again; at least, I never found out who she was. It was very funny and very unromantic; but it laid me up for a few weeks, and my arm doesn't grow strong as fast as it should, so I have to be careful of it. No swimming or golf for me, this year. Meanwhile, I am waiting to hear of a buxom damsel who lacks one skull and one white straw Knox hat, size six and one-eighth. Then, when I meet her, I shall take my vengeance."
"I hope you will find her," the doctor said vindictively. "If one of my daughters had done such a thing, I would disown her. Babe, it is growing chilly. I wish you'd bring out some rugs."
But Phebe had vanished from her seat in the doorway.
The full moon was laying a silvery path across the restless waves, when Gifford Barrett finally rose to go. There was a cordial exchange of farewells, of good wishes for the coming winter, of hopes of another meeting, yet Mr. Barrett was not quite content, as he slowly walked away to his hotel Mrs. Farrington's cordiality and Cicely's evident woe at his departure could not quite atone for the lack of a word and a glance of friendly good-bye from Phebe. One's liking is not altogether a matter of free will. In spite of himself, Gifford Barrett liked the blunt, outspoken, pugnacious Phebe far better than the girls whose honeyed words and ways he had found so cloying.
Farewell parties are all the fashion at Qantuck station and few people are allowed to depart, unattended. However, Mr. Barrett's fame, and his manifest wish to hold himself aloof from the people about him had had their effect, and he went trudging down to the station the next afternoon quite by himself. On the platform, to his surprise, he found Mrs. Holden and Mac waiting for him.
"Mac insisted upon saying good-bye," Hope said half apologetically; "and I really hadn't the heart to refuse him. Besides, I wanted to thank you again for your many kindnesses to my small boy. Mothers appreciate such things, I assure you, Mr. Barrett."
The young man's face lighted. He liked Hope, and, from the first, he had dropped his professional manner and met her with the simplicity of an overgrown boy.
"We've had great times together; haven't we, Mac?" he inquired.
"Yes, lots; but now I'm going to see my truly papa," Mac observed.
"Are you going soon?" Mr. Barrett asked Hope.
"Next week, I think. Mr. Holden has written so appealingly that I dare not keep him waiting any longer. The others will stay down for September; but Hubert will go off island with me, next week, and start Mac and me on our way to Helena."
"And may I ask my sister to call on you?"
"Please do. Mac's mother doesn't have time to make many calls; but I should like to know your sister, and then I shall be sure to hear when you are in Helena again."
"Perhaps you'll let me write to you, now and then," he suggested, with a shyness that was new to him. In his past life, he had never met a woman quite like Mrs. Holden and he was anxious to win her liking and to hold it, once won.
"I wish you would," she said cordially. "But your train is waiting.
Ought you to get on board?"
He took a hurried leave of her. Then he turned to Mac.
"Good-bye, Mac."
"Good-bye," Mac answered cheerily. "Aren't you glad you ever knew me?"
"Yes, Mac," he replied sincerely, for he felt that his meeting with Mac had been foreordained, that, child as he was, Mac had served his turn in knotting together some of the broken strands of his life.
As the train slowly jogged away across the moorland he felt a sharp regret while he watched the disappearing of the little grey village and the tall white lighthouse beyond. He had enjoyed his solitary month there; he had enjoyed Hope, and the sweet, womanly frankness with which she had taken him quite on his own personal merits. Incense was good; it was far better to be liked as Gifford Barrett than as the composer of the Alan Breck Overture, however, and he had a vague consciousness that he had never been more of a man than when he was walking and talking with quiet Hope Holden.
The train rounded the curve at Kidd's Treasure, and Mr. Barrett looked backward to catch one last glimpse of the sea. As he did so, he forgot Hope, and went back to the memory of his last hour on the beach. Strolling along the sand, that noon, with his eyes fixed on the ground, he had caught sight of an approaching shadow and he looked up to see Phebe standing before him.
"Mr. Barrett," she said abruptly; "I'm sorry I called you a coward."
He rallied from his surprise and raised his cap.
"Oh, that's all right," he said lightly.
"No; it wasn't right. I don't want to abuse people to their faces and behind their backs, when they don't deserve it. That isn't my way."
"But you couldn't be expected to know."
"I ought to have known."
"How?"
Phebe's cheeks grew scarlet. In her contrition, she had walked straight into the trap which she had meant to avoid. She was silent.
"How could you know?" he urged. "I don't think I look in the least like an invalid."
There was another silence, a long one, while he stood looking down at her curiously. Then she raised her eyes with an effort.
"I was the girl that ran into you," she said bluntly.
The young man's face suddenly became somewhat less expressive than the skull which he had kept as a souvenir of the experience they were discussing. That at least expressed a cheery unconcern; his face expressed nothing.
"Oh, I-I-I'm sorry," he remarked blankly.
"So am I. I didn't mean to."
"Have you known it, all the time? Was that what made you so down on me?"
"I wasn't down on you. I didn't think much about you, either way," Phebe said, with unflattering directness.
"But did you know it?"
"Not till last night, when you told the story. Your beard changes you a good deal." She paused. Then she went on, "I didn't mean to let you know it; but I think it is better that I have, for now I can set you right on one point. I didn't go off to leave you. I did what I could, and then went for help. When I came back, you were gone."
"How came you there, anyway?"
"I live there."
"Oh! And the skull?"
"I don't want it."
"No; but where did you get it?"
"I bought it."
"Miss McAlister! Might I ask what for?"
"To study. I'm going to be a doctor."
"Oh, I wouldn't," he urged dispassionately. "You'll find it very messy."
"But I like it. I worked with my father, all the spring, and now I am going to Philadelphia to study there. Didn't you know I set your arm?"
"No." He looked at her, with frank admiration shining in his eyes. "Did you, honestly? Dr. Starr said it was a wonder that it hadn't slipped out of place any more."
"I'm glad if I did any good," she said with sudden humility. "I must go now, for it is past dinner time." She turned to go away. Then she came back again and held out her strong, ringless hand. "I'm so sorry," she said hurriedly; "sorry for all I have made you ache, and sorry for all the hateful things I have said to you."
"Don't think about that any more," he said heartily, as he took her hand. "Have you told your father, Miss McAlister?"
"Not yet."
"Please don't. There's no use in saying anything more about it, And now promise me that you will forget it,—as a favor to me, please." As he spoke, he looked steadily into Phebe's eyes, and her eyes drooped. For the first time in her life, Phebe McAlister had become self-conscious in the presence of a young man. He dropped her hand and raised his cap once more.
"Good-by, doctor," he said; and, turning, he walked away and left her alone.