“The Hendersons’ sleigh! I’m up there for Sunday simply because you haven’t asked me here yet!”
“Oh, Lucy, everything has been so unsettled and uncertain I really didn’t even think of it.”
“Of course not; now don’t begin to worry, it’s only my brutal way of letting you know that I simply had to see you, and have not in the least increased my admiration for the country in the winter, or the Hendersons in particular!”
“You will stay to dinner, surely? Or are they waiting outside?” cried Brooke, in a sudden panic at the thought of being brought thus face to face with some of their ultrafashionable friends.
“No, my lamb, they have gone over for luncheon to the Parkses’ at Gordon (you don’t know, of course, that the frisky Senator has just bought the Smythers’ big estate,—furniture, servants, and all,—in order to carry still farther the success of the New York housewarming). I begged off for the day, and, as the party was one man shy, they gratefully gave me my liberty, and will pick me up about four.
“Now show me your property, live stock and all, and tell me of its advantages and otherwise, that I may have the right background to keep in my mind’s eye when I go home. But bless me! where is your mother? and your father—perhaps he may know me!”
Lucy clung to Mrs. Lawton as she always had, with a wealth of the untutored daughterly affection that had missed its own outlet motherward, so Brooke left the two alone together for a few moments in the library while she went in to see how her father was faring. Tatters, as usual, was by his chair, not lying down but sitting erect and close. Adam Lawton was looking intently at a picture paper that Stead had brought which was propped on the rack before him. Seeing that her father had not yet noticed her, Brooke stood quite still, watching the pair. Once in a while the left hand would pat the dog’s head, that was constantly turned toward him, but Tatters’ attention seemed fixed upon the useless hand that rested, a dead weight, upon the knee. Nosing it gently, as a mother dog does her sleeping pups to make sure that they are alive, Tatters moved it perhaps an inch, his eyes open wide and ears moving questioningly.
Meeting with no response, no sign of life, his dog mind evidently argued that the poor human paw was ill, and bringing the universal medicine of his race in play, he began to lick the hand with slow regular strokes of his strong, clean tongue, first going over the entire surface, then separating each finger with a clinging circular motion.
Amazement seized Brooke as the thought came to her that, after all, had not nature antedated man in this, as in many things, and endowed the tongues of the dumb beasts with the vital principles of massage? Did the dog know, with that wisdom that only the confessed materialist is willing to call mere instinct, the impotence of that right hand; and why might there not be healing in his imparted vitality? Why might not the natural magnetism be as good as the electricity from the little machine that her mother gave her father each day?
As she thought all this, she again heard that hoarse whisper. Straining every nerve, she listened; the sound came once more—a single word, “Tatters,” repeated again and again, and lingered over as if it were a magic clew to the loosening of a tangled skein of memory.