The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

Roy was cordial, but could not forget Inez’s dying words, which had betrayed so much, and every time he looked at Jeff he recalled the scene of the hold up which he had heard described so vividly that he sometimes felt that he had been an actor in it. Fanny was unfeignedly glad to see Jeff and kept him by her a long time while she questioned him of her father’s sickness and death and burial. Helen, who sat near, made no comments, but she did not lose a word, and occasionally, when Fanny cried the hardest, her bit of linen and lace which passed for a handkerchief, went up to her eyes and came away with several wet spots upon it. With his friends around him, treating him as if he had always been an honest man, Jeff began to feel like one. He was glad Alice did not refer to the pickpocket business, for he could not tell her that he had kept his promise to the letter. He had followed no one on the street, or in a crowd, but he could recall pockets in which his hands had been while the owners were pale as death and almost as still. That was buried in the Yosemite and here in Ridgefield, where every one was pleased to see him, the dreadful past was slipping away from him, and with a rebound his old life was returning. Nero, too, came in for a share of notice and petting. Craig, who was fond of dogs, offered to buy him, but Jeff said, “No, he is the only relative I have left in the world. I have brought him from beyond the Rockies and if Mr. Taylor does not object, I shall keep him.”

“Object to the critter! Of course not. He was Mark’s, and Dotty isn’t here to care about his feet. They are pretty big. Shoo, shoo, doggie; not quite so friendly,” Uncle Zach replied, shaking his fingers at the dog, who had taken a great fancy to him and persisted in laying his head in his lap and occasionally putting his paws on the wheel of his chair.

The next day Craig and Alice and Helen went home, but Roy and Fanny staid on to see to the new cottage. The ground for it had been broken a little distance from the old ruin, “but not so far away that ’Tina can’t come across the grass to visit us if she wants to,” Roy said to Fanny, who had no fear of ’Tina so long as Roy was with her. They staid in Ridgefield the rest of the summer with an occasional trip to New York, where Helen kept herself secluded until it was time for the fashionable world to come home and open their doors. Then she gradually made her way again into the society which she enjoyed. Sometime in September Roy and Fanny returned to Boston, leaving the cottage so nearly completed that it would be ready for them in June of the next summer, if they wished to occupy it so early.

CHAPTER XIX.
ODDS AND ENDS.

Six years later and it is summer again in Ridgefield. Uncle Zach has celebrated his ninetieth birthday, and except for his lameness is nearly as hale and hearty as he was when he first welcomed the Masons and the Tracys to his home. Jeff’s presence has worked wonders in him and in the house as well. In a quiet way he assumed the role of master while nominally acting under Mr. Taylor’s orders. The servants, who had become lax and worthless, have been dismissed, and others more competent hired in their place. The house has been thoroughly renovated and refurnished. Many of the former boarders, who had gone to the Tremont, have come back, and a few people from Boston spend the summers there.

“If Dot was only here, and I had my laigs it would seem like old times,” Uncle Zach often says to Jeff, who is his right hand and left hand and feet and brains.

If kindness to an old man can atone for the past Jeff is atoning for it. He puts his master to bed at night as if he were a child and dresses him in the morning. Every pleasant day he takes him for what he calls a drive through the town, stopping wherever the querulous old man wishes to stop and wheeling him so carefully that his rheumatic limbs seldom receive a jolt. Nero is always in attendance and is as much a part of the turnout as Jeff himself. Uncle Zach no longer shoos him when he puts his head on his knees, but he sometimes has pricks of conscience as to what Dotty would say if she could see the big dog stretched on the floor of the piazza or wherever he chose to lie. Dotty’s habits are deferred to by both Uncle Zach and Jeff, except the quarterly house cleanings. At these Jeff has drawn the line. Twice a year was sufficient, he said, for any house, and Uncle Zach agreed with him. Every three months, however, a dress coat and vest and little yellow blanket are brought out to air, the blanket so tender with age that Jeff scarcely dares touch it. “Johnny’s blanket,” Uncle Zach always says, with a tone very different from that in which he speaks of his swallow tail.

“Fool and his money soon parted,” he said when telling Jeff what it had cost. “I never wore it but once and never shall again. The missionaries don’t want it, nor the heathen. If you had any use for it I’d give it to you. It seems a pity for it to lay there year in and year out smellin’ like fury with that moth stuff you put in it.”

Jeff laughed and thanked him as he folded up the garments and laid them away with Taylor’s Tavern in the hair trunk. Once he brought the sign down for Uncle Zach to see.

“I can’t git up them stairs and I’d like to look at it agin,” he said, and when Jeff brought it and stood it before him tears ran down his cheeks like rain. “It makes me think of the time when I was young, and Dotty, too. The lalocks in the garden was blowin’ and the apple trees was blossomin’ the day it was sot up. I can smell the lalocks yet, though the bush has been dead many a year just as Dotty is. Take it away, Jeff, and you needn’t bring it agin. I’m done with Taylor’s Tarvern, and with everything else but you!”