“She’s dead now, and there ain’t nothing to say. She went quick and we don’t need to say anything—you or me. I guess you got to go up to Burlington, and I’ll meet you there. I reckon the Colonel ain’t likely to go—he’d better stay here with his business. It’s our trouble—yours and mine.”
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me!” she cried. “I’ve needed you—I’ve needed you so all these years!”
“I never expected to tell you. It was all too black, too ugly; and I was no good; but knowing how things were going here and seeing you weren’t very happy, I thought I’d better tell you; I thought it might help. I’ve made all the arrangements up there by wire. Don’t you worry about anything.”
He had risen and was lumbering toward the door before she realized that he had finished; but he paused half way, and rubbed his bald head. Then he walked back to her, and said in a low tone, so that she hardly caught the words:
“You don’t need to tell anybody, Adelaide, that I’m your father. It wouldn’t do you any good; I’m just old Tom Walsh and most of the folks around here don’t like me. Better not tell the Colonel, or Wayne or any of ’em; it wouldn’t help you any to have ’em know you’re my daughter.”
“Oh!—oh!” she sobbed; and her arms were about him, holding him fast.
He had said truly that the past held nothing that was not better left to silence; but she knew that her life, which had been the sport of winds, had at last found anchorage. He touched her hair clumsily with his heavy hands.
“You’re a good woman, Addie; you’re a good woman,” he kept repeating, and this seemed all that he could say.
CHAPTER XL
THE BELATED APPEARANCE OF JOHN McCANDLESS BLAIR
THE calendar swings us almost into contemporaneous history. It is September of the Year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Nine. Mrs. John McCandless Blair’s excuse for returning to town so early was the dilatoriness of the workmen who were making over her house. It had been remodelled, so often that only her own ingenuity could have devised further changes, and her long-suffering architect shuddered when he heard her voice on the telephone. She was a terror to contractors, and even plumbers were humble before her. Her husband, John Blair—who has had no chance at all in this chronicle for the simple reason that he was, in all matters that engaged his wife’s attention, a negligible quantity—had thought her safe at York Harbour until the first of October. As one motive was never enough to assign for any of Mrs. Blair’s actions, her husband waited patiently for the disclosure of the real cause of her coming. He was a philosopher, and her appearance did not interrupt his work on the brief he was writing; but he was sorry for the architect, who was a friend of his.