“Jefferson Wilkes.
“Postscript. I forgot to tell you that Miss Hilton is handsome as ever and dresses right up to the handle. Went to the opera the other night with nothin’ on her neck and arms but a little puff at the shoulder. We were in a box and everybody looked at us. As we were comin’ out I heard somebody say ‘That beautiful woman with the big diamonds is Miss Hilton, who ran away with a—’ I couldn’t understand what, but thought they said ‘barber.’ I told Miss Hilton, and she looked mad as fury, and Mr. Hilton,—I have to call him that now,—said ‘Never repeat anything of that kind, and whatever you know keep to yourself.’ He looked mad, too. Strange, how things get from Ridgefield to Chicago, but they do. The servants have heard something about the runaway and things and have pumped me, but I’m tighter than a drum. Mr. and Miss Hilton are very happy and lovin’ like right before me. How are Paul and Virginny? You or’to see the horses we drive, and Miss Hilton’s coopay. All lined with satin. Good-bye.”
This glimpse of the domestic life of Mark and Helen was all that was known at the Prospect House for a long time, and as the winter wore away, the elopement, if it could be called that, ceased to be talked about as other interests occupied the public mind.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CRAIG’S VISIT.
March was nearly gone when Craig Mason arrived at the Prospect House unexpectedly on the noon train, and Mrs. Taylor was greatly upset and flurried in her wish to do him honor. Her silver forks and best china were brought out and Uncle Zach offered him “Miss Tracy’s saloon” to sit in, if he wanted it. Craig declined the saloon, saying he was only going to spend the night and preferred to sit with his host and hostess, if they would allow it. He was looking in excellent health, and told them he weighed twenty pounds more than when he came to Ridgefield in the summer. He talked freely of Mark and Helen, and laughed heartily over Jeff’s novel way of deciding between Chicago and Ridgefield.
“There is a good deal in that boy to be made or marred, and I am curious to know which it will be.”
“Made, I think, for he had good envyrimen’ here,” Uncle Zach replied, and then branched off into hereditary as exemplified by Mark, if he did run off with an heiress. “None of it there, I tell you. No, sir,” he said. “A pretty woman will make a man do a lot of things. Adam had no idea of eatin’ that apple till Eve tempted him. He hadn’t any hereditary. No more has Mark. No, sir! That gal tetered up to him and purred round him like a kitten. I can remember now findin’ her time and agin in the office when she’d no call to be there, and she was so all fired handsome he couldn’t help it. Why, I liked her myself. Yes, sir, I did!”
He said the last rather low, with a furtive look at Dot, who was picking up the ball of yarn from which she was knitting and with which her kitten had been playing. Uncle Zach had never told her, nor any one, of the kiss Helen had given him the day she went away. But he had not forgotten it, and he stroked the place on his hand as he wandered on about hereditary and envyrimen’, till Craig was tired, and seizing the opportunity of a pause, said abruptly, “Can you tell me where Miss Alice Tracy lives. I know it is among the mountains, but have forgotten the place. I am going to Albany, and thought a——, I told mother, perhaps I’d call. Do you remember the town?”
“Why, yes,—Rocky Point,” Uncle Zach replied, without the slightest suspicion. “Goin’ to call on her, are you? Wall, I’m glad on’t. A nice little girl,—not so handsome as t’other one, but mighty pretty, with takin’ ways. She’s keepin’ school up there, and Christmas she sent Dot and me a drawin’ made by herself of the north piazza. Did you know she could draw?”
Craig did not, and Uncle Zach continued: “Wall, she can,—nateral, too, as life. It’s a picter of that afternoon when we sot on the piazza and you read from that man Brown. We are all there, some plainer than others, and I’ll be dumbed if she didn’t draw me a noddin’, as Dot says I was, but I’d know myself in the dark, though I didn’t know I was quite so dumpy. I’ll get it and show it to you. We’ve had it framed and keep it hung up with Dot’s ancestors and the Boston tea party; seems appropriate seein’ ’twas a kind of party we was havin’. Here ’tis.”