“Octave Pickel!” cried Aunt Ruth, in her amazement; and could say no more.
“Yes, and just as soon as he heard that my name was Octave Pickel he welcomed me with both hands, literally and figuratively.”
Ruth sank back in her chair and fanned herself with a palm-leaf she had picked up from the carpet. Her astonishment certainly made her speechless, till she reflected that after all it was not so strange. She had heard that the firm of “Pickel & Pickel” were Professor von Holsneck’s German publishers.
“Ah! thee knew him, then; that was different; but I hope thee did not go uninvited, and that thee will intrude thyself upon no one without first consulting older persons.”
“No, aunt; I did not know him at all. I had only heard of him, as you or anybody else has. But I had to see him on business. It was a sort of case of ‘Mahomet and the mountain.’ The mountain—that’s Melville—couldn’t go to Mahomet, so I went down and commanded the prophet to come to the mountain, and he came.”
“Madcap! Does thee mean to tell me that that great man has been beneath this roof,—been here in The Snuggery?”
“Beneath this very roof, here in this very Snuggery; sitting in that very chair where you sit now.”
“Oh! Oh!” gasped Miss Kinsolving; and in such dismay as to send them all off again into a fit of laughter, which on her part arose from nervousness, but on the young folks’s from pure delight.
“But, Aunt Ruth, you are the only person privileged to know that. In this benighted household my blessed professor is known only as—He! He is a part of a splendid Mystery, which even you cannot be told, till the time is ripe. We have told you already more than we intended, and more than any one else is to know, perhaps for several weeks. When it is all accomplished”—here Octave smiled most encouragingly upon Melville, who suddenly appeared to turn pale—“everybody will congratulate everybody, and everything will be so beautiful! Please, Aunt Ruth, don’t tell Paula Pickel nor any of the others what we have told you. Let them just live on and wonder who He is, and what He is or was doing here. And won’t you just be real nice to Paula? That girl has made a martyr of herself to ‘duty’ ever since you have been away; and I should have been here to look after my boy when she came in, then there wouldn’t have been any ‘tantrum.’ But ‘tantrums’ aren’t anything. They’re only a symptom of—genius. That is what the great man—He—called your Melville. Oh, I tell you, Ruth Kinsolving, this family is bound to be known to fame; and all on account of this young snapping-turtle here, that is as rightly named Capers as I am Pickel. Content we call the ‘lamb,’ and when the capers are a little too spicy we send her in to get the sauce spread over a mild surface. See?”
The day following, when Ruth entered her mother’s room again, that observant person remarked that “the change has done thee a great deal of good. I never saw thee looking brighter in thy life, my daughter. That tells me without asking that thee found everything as it should be at home.”