I hurried to the dingy station as a boy hurries to the train that will take him home to the holidays, and the tedious hours were miraculously light, the face of the telegraph operator like the face of my best friend, the rough, damp passage in the blue boat a pleasant incident. Caliban had a friendly, stupid grin for me and rowed his best; the very oars knew how I wanted to get to her!
They stood with a lantern on the landing-steps, in the rough, picturesque clothes I had first seen them in, and we hurried through a thickening drizzle to the warm, light cottage, ridiculously hand-in-hand, the lantern bobbing between us.
Roger had revived his old school accomplishments and had ready a panful of delicious little sausages in a bath of tomatoes and onions and Worcestershire that sent me back to Vevay in the fraction of a second, and we dipped fragments of the crusty French loaf I had brought in the sauce, in the old Vevay fashion, and drank to their voyage in the last Burgundy from the little wine bin. If anything were needed to place Margarita's father in our estimations, that Burgundy would have done it! After the sweet course of jellied pancakes that Roger had taught Caliban, we fell upon the cigars I had brought, and when Margarita, an apt pupil, had sugared my demi-tasse to my liking, I reached into my pocket and drew out the Russia leather case. My fingers trembled like a boy's as I took out the pearl and clasped it around her beautiful neck, above the soft black handkerchief.
"If this is not your first wedding present, Mrs. Bradley, I shall be furiously angry," I said with mock severity, to keep down the lump in my throat, for I was absurdly excited.
"Jerry, you extravagant old donkey, what do you mean by this?" Roger cried huskily, "I never heard of such a thing!" While Margarita, for the first time in our acquaintance a daughter of Eve, ran up to her mirror. She would have been as pleased, I think, with a necklace of iridescent seashells—wherein she differed widely from Miss L——n R——l, as Roger and I agreed.
We talked, of course, of Uncle Winthrop and the old days, of his loving interest in me, the slender little chap with the dead soldier-father, who had taken long walks up and down narrow old Winter Street with him, and mailed his letters, and fenced with his sword, and listened by the hour to his tales of rainy bivouac and last redoubt, of precious drops of brandy to a dying comrade and brave loans of army blankets in the cold dawn. We wondered at the extraordinary chance which had kept the old portfolio, with its worn leather edges that I remembered so well, hidden during the two years that had elapsed since his death, and what secretive instinct had led him to put his last will and testament there. We marvelled at the sagacity which had led him to drop hints as to the existence of such a document so effectively that the family had felt themselves bound to hold the property intact for three years, to give every possible chance of finding it, and had spent many useless dollars in the search for the old servants who were believed (and rightly, as the event proved) to have witnessed it. Our friendship had been more than ordinary in its strength and real sympathy; one of those attractions that laugh at disparity of years and absence of any tie of kinship, and, indeed, up to his death I had been far closer to him than Roger ever was. Dear old Uncle Win! He knew what he would do for me and what it would mean to me, well enough: as a young fellow, he had been tied to his Bank!
I spoke tentatively of Sue Paynter, and Roger flushed and struck the table in his disgusted excitement.
"Good heavens, Jerry—I never once thought——"
Poor Sue! There was nothing more to say.
"The first thing I want you to do for me, Jerry," said Roger, "is to go through the cottage thoroughly and see if you discover any trace of who lived here. I've done it, of course, but I'd like to have some one else do it, too. Go all by yourself, and I won't give you any hint of my idea, and then we'll compare notes."