The House of a Thousand Candles - Meredith Nicholson (top 50 books to read txt) 📗

you to understand”—I smote the table with my

clenched hand—“that if these women, or your employer,

Mr. Pickering, or that damned hound, Morgan, or you—

damn you, I don’t know who or what you are!—think

you can scare me away from here, you’ve waked up the

wrong man, and I’ll tell you another thing—and you

may repeat it to your school-teachers and to Mr. Pickering,

who pays you, and to Morgan, whom somebody has

hired to kill me—that I’m going to keep faith with my

dead grandfather, and that when I’ve spent my year

here and done what that old man wished me to do, I’ll

give them this house and every acre of ground and every

damned dollar the estate carries with it. And now one

other thing! I suppose there’s a sheriff or some kind of

a constable with jurisdiction over this place, and I could

have the whole lot of you put into jail for conspiracy,

but I’m going to stand out against you alone—do you

understand me, you hypocrite, you stupid, slinking spy?

Answer me, quick, before I throw you out of the room!”

 

I had worked myself into a great passion and fairly

roared my challenge, pounding the table in my rage.

 

“Yes, sir; I quite understand you, sir. But I’m

afraid, sir—”

 

“Of course you’re afraid!” I shouted, enraged anew

by his halting speech. “You have every reason in the

world to be afraid. You’ve probably heard that I’m a

bad lot and a worthless adventurer; but you can tell

Sister Theresa or Pickering or anybody you please that

I’m ten times as bad as I’ve ever been painted. Now

clear out of here!”

 

He left the room without looking at me again. During

the morning I strolled through the house several

times to make sure he had not left it to communicate

with some of his fellow plotters, but I was, I admit, disappointed

to find him in every instance busy at some

wholly proper task. Once, indeed, I found him cleaning

my storm boots! To find him thus humbly devoted

to my service after the raking I had given him dulled

the edge of my anger. I went back to the library and

planned a cathedral in seven styles of architecture, all

unrelated and impossible, and when this began to bore

me I designed a crypt in which the wicked should be

buried standing on their heads and only the very good

might lie and sleep in peace. These diversions and several

black cigars won me to a more amiable mood. I

felt better, on the whole, for having announced myself

to the delectable Bates, who gave me for luncheon a

brace of quails, done in a manner that stripped criticism

of all weapons.

 

We did not exchange a word, and after knocking

about in the library for several hours I went out for a

tramp. Winter had indeed come and possessed the

earth, and it had given me a new landscape. The snow

continued to fall in great, heavy flakes, and the ground

was whitening fast.

 

A rabbit’s track caught my eye and I followed it,

hardly conscious that I did so. Then the clear print of

two small shoes mingled with the rabbit’s trail. A few

moments later I picked up an overshoe, evidently lost

in the chase by one of Sister Theresa’s girls, I reflected.

I remembered that while at Tech I had collected diverse

memorabilia from school-girl acquaintances, and here I

was beginning a new series with a string of beads and an

overshoe!

 

A rabbit is always an attractive quarry. Few things

besides riches are so elusive, and the little fellows have,

I am sure, a shrewd humor peculiar to themselves. I

rather envied the school-girl who had ventured forth for

a run in the first snow-storm of the season. I recalled

Aldrich’s turn on Gautier’s lines as I followed the

double trail:

 

“Howe’er you tread, a tiny mould

Betrays that light foot all the same;

Upon this glistening, snowy fold

At every step it signs your name.”

 

A pretty autograph, indeed! The snow fell steadily

and I tramped on over the joint signature of the girl

and the rabbit. Near the lake they parted company, the

rabbit leading off at a tangent, on a line parallel with

the lake, while his pursuer’s steps pointed toward the

boat-house.

 

There was, so far as I knew, only one student of adventurous

blood at St. Agatha’s, and I was not in the

least surprised to see, on the little sheltered balcony of

the boat-house, the red tam-o’-shanter. She wore, too,

the covert coat I remembered from the day I saw her

first from the wall. Her back was toward me as I drew

near; her hands were thrust into her pockets. She was

evidently enjoying the soft mingling of the snow with

the still, blue waters of the lake, and a girl and a snow-storm

are, if you ask my opinion, a pretty combination.

The fact of a girl’s facing a winter storm argues

mightily in her favor—testifies, if you will allow me,

to a serene and dauntless spirit, for one thing, and a

sound constitution, for another.

 

I ran up the steps, my cap in one hand, her overshoe

in the other. She drew back a trifle, just enough to

bring my conscience to its knees.

 

“I didn’t mean to listen that day. I just happened

to be on the wall and it was a thoroughly underbred

trick—my twitting you about it—and I should have told

you before if I’d known how to see you—”

 

“May I trouble you for that shoe?” she said with a

great deal of dignity.

 

They taught that cold disdain of man, I supposed, as

a required study at St. Agatha’s.

 

“Oh, certainly! Won’t you allow me?”

 

“Thank you, no!”

 

I was relieved, to tell the truth, for I had been out of

the world for most of that period in which a youngster

perfects himself in such graces as the putting on of a

girl’s overshoes. She took the damp bit of rubber—a

wet overshoe, even if small and hallowed by associations,

isn’t pretty—as Venus might have received a soft-shell

crab from the hand of a fresh young merman. I was

between her and the steps to which her eyes turned longingly.

 

“Of course, if you won’t accept my apology I can’t

do anything about it; but I hope you understand that

I’m sincere and humble, and anxious to be forgiven.”

 

“You seem to be making a good deal of a small matter—”

 

“I wasn’t referring to the overshoe!” I said.

 

She did not relent.

 

“If you’ll only go away—”

 

She rested one hand against the corner of the boat-house

while she put on the overshoe. She wore, I noticed,

brown gloves with cuffs.

 

“How can I go away! You children are always leaving

things about for me to pick up. I’m perfectly worn

out carrying some girl’s beads about with me; and I

spoiled a good glove on your overshoe.”

 

“I’ll relieve you of the beads, too, if you please.”

And her tone measurably reduced my stature.

 

She thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and

shook the tam-o’-shanter slightly, to establish it in a

more comfortable spot on her head. The beads had been

in my corduroy coat since I found them. I drew them

out and gave them to her.

 

“Thank you; thank you very much.”

 

“Of course they are yours, Miss—”

 

She thrust them into her pocket.

 

“Of course they’re mine,” she said indignantly, and

turned to go.

 

“We’ll waive proof of property and that sort of thing,”

I remarked, with, I fear, the hope of detaining her.

“I’m sorry not to establish a more neighborly feeling

with St. Agatha’s. The stone wall may seem formidable,

but it’s not of my building. I must open the gate.

That wall’s a trifle steep for climbing.”

 

I was amusing myself with the idea that my identity

was a dark mystery to her. I had read English novels

in which the young lord of the manor is always mistaken

for the game-keeper’s son by the pretty daughter

of the curate who has come home from school to be the

belle of the county. But my lady of the red tam-o’-shanter

was not a creature of illusions.

 

“It serves a very good purpose—the wall, I mean—

Mr. Glenarm.”

 

She was walking down the steps and I followed. I

am not a man to suffer a lost school-girl to cross my

lands unattended in a snow-storm; and the piazza of a

boat-house is not, I submit, a pleasant loafing-place on

a winter day. She marched before me, her hands in her

pockets—I liked her particularly that way—with an

easy swing and a light and certain step. Her remark

about the wall did not encourage further conversation

and I fell back upon the poets.

 

“Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage,”

 

I quoted. Quoting poetry in a snow-storm while you

stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows

no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its

embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a

trifle hard from the swift pace your auditor is leading

you.

 

“I have heard that before,” she said, half-turning her

face, then laughing as she hastened on.

 

Her brilliant cheeks were a delight to the eye. The

snow swirled about her, whitened the crown of her red

cap and clung to her shoulders. Have you ever seen

snow-crystals gleam, break, dissolve in fair, soft, storm-blown

hair? Do you know how a man will pledge his

soul that a particular flake will never fade, never cease

to rest upon a certain flying strand over a girlish temple?

And he loses—his heart and his wager—in a

breath! If you fail to understand these things, and are

furthermore unfamiliar with the fact that the color in

the cheeks of a girl who walks abroad in a driving snow-storm

marks the favor of Heaven itself, then I waste

time, and you will do well to rap at the door of another

inn.

 

“I’d rather missed you,” I said; “and, really, I should

have been over to apologize if I hadn’t been afraid.”

 

“Sister Theresa is rather fierce,” she declared. “And

we’re not allowed to receive gentlemen callers—it says

so in the catalogue.”

 

“So I imagined. I trust Sister Theresa is improving.”

 

[Illustration: She marched before me, her hands in her pockets.]

 

“Yes; thank you.”

 

“And Miss Devereux—she is quite well, I hope?”

 

She turned her head as though to listen more carefully,

and her step slackened for a moment; then she

hurried blithely forward.

 

“Oh, she’s always well, I believe.”

 

“You know her, of course.”

 

“Oh, rather! She gives us music lessons.”

 

“So Miss Devereux is the music-teacher, is she?

Should you call her a popular teacher?”

 

“The girls call her”—she seemed moved to mirth by

the recollection—“Miss Prim and Prosy.”

 

“Ugh!” I exclaimed sympathetically. “Tall and hungry-looking,

with long talons that pound the keys with

grim delight. I know the sort.”

 

“She’s a sight!”—and my guide laughed approvingly.

“But we have to take her; she’s part of the treatment.”

 

“You speak of St. Agatha’s as though it were a sanatorium.”

 

“Oh, it’s not so bad! I’ve seen worse.”

 

“Where do most of the students come from—all what

you call Hoosiers?”

 

“Oh, no! They’re from all over—Cincinnati, Chicago,

Cleveland, Indianapolis.”

 

“What the magazines call the Middle West.”

 

“I believe that is so. The bishop addressed us once

as the flower of the Middle West, and made