CHAPTER XIX.
Thorndyke had left the store just as Mr. Willoughby picked Tom up; he never stayed in the evening and it was six o’clock now. But he had an errand to do that took him past the little cottage with the bay window, and there stood Jet and the doctor’s chaise. And the doctor himself came out of the door, just as he came in sight again on his way back.
“Stand still, Jet!” said the doctor, and Jet pawed the ground till Thorndyke came up. The doctor reached him a hand, he climbed in, and Jet’s hoofs struck sparks again as he carried them towards home. The doctor scarcely spoke, but there was a shining in his eyes that made Thorndyke feel he could say a good deal if he chose; indeed he had seen it there every day of late; he wondered if anything had happened!
But when he came into the office, he was sitting as quietly over a medical review as if nothing had ever happened, or would ever happen, and Thorndyke took his own book and his own seat in the window. But it did not last long; Thorndyke heard a flutter and a fall, and the doctor had sent the magazine flying.
“Come over here, Thorndyke,” he said; “I want to say something to you.”
Thorndyke started, but before he had got halfway, the doctor met him, and stood there with his hands on his shoulders, and looking full into his eyes with the shining out of his own brighter than ever.
“Little man,” he said, “if I told you you had been the means of bringing to me the greatest gift of my life, what would you say?”
For an instant Thorndyke stood as much astonished as on the day when the doctor first talked to him about fishing and going to school.
“I never gave you anything,” he said; “you give me everything, and it makes me feel happy and strong even to know that you are near; but I never gave you anything. What do I ever have to give?”
“Tut,” said the doctor stooping a little and looking closer into his face with the old smile, “don’t you know you are all I have in the world; all I have had, rather. Did you ever see my chaise standing where it did to-night, before?”
“Yes,” said Thorndyke, “and I supposed something was the matter, but I did not ask of course.”
The doctor laughed, and letting go his hold of Thorndyke, walked back and forth across the room.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he asked, after a while, “did it ever occur to you that you and I had lived here like two miserable old bachelors, almost long enough? And if there was any one on the face of the earth that could come here and take this old world of ours and make a new one of it that would seem a good deal like Paradise, who should you say it would be?”
A sudden thought swept over Thorndyke’s mind, though it seemed only a dream.
“The princess!” he exclaimed; “but—”
“Ah, you think that would be like plucking the morning star down from over our own heads? And so it is, more like that than anything I ever thought I should dare try, much less have success granted me, if I did; but she is coming, little man! The King has given her to me! But I should never have seen her, much less known her, a thousand times less asked for her, if you had not found her for me!”
“Well, if this isn’t about the most magnificent thing that ever happened!” said Aleck the next day, when a sharp look into Thorndyke’s face told him he knew all; “The doctor is the only man I know in the world fit to loosen the latchet of Nellie’s shoe, but I don’t believe there’s another woman fit to do the same for him, and I shall be the proudest fellow in the city when I can call him brother. Except you, Thorndyke! He is a heap more yours than he ever will be mine, no matter what he calls me, and I always thought you were the luckiest fellow in the world to have a claim on him; but I never thought I should ever come in for any share! But what will become of me, when I’m left alone in my glory?”
This was a question that came into Nellie’s mind also, and she had her own plans to meet it. When October was turning all the world to garnet and gold once more, then came the wedding, and Thorndyke was there with the rest. No pain of any kind could have kept him away; the old throbbing at his heart rose up, until he could hardly breathe, and when the bride, with all her beauty and her loveliness, her orange blossoms and the veil that seemed to Thorndyke like a halo around her golden hair, stooped and gave him his kiss, he didn’t know whether he were in the world or not! Only let him get out of sight once more! He slipped away into a sheltered spot and Uncle Ralph stepped into his place.
“Uncle Ralph,” said Nelly, when almost all the guests were gone. “I know you cannot find it in your heart to refuse me anything on my wedding-day. I want to leave the house just as it is for Aleck, but of course he cannot stay in it alone. Wont you say goodby to your hotel room, and come and fill my place here until either you or he follow in my footsteps?”
Uncle Ralph pooh-poohed for a while, but he couldn’t find it in his heart, as Nelly said, to refuse her; and before the wedding journey was over, bachelor’s hall was thoroughly established behind the conservatory window.