Blacksheep! Blacksheep! - Meredith Nicholson (freenovel24 .txt) 📗

He was used to a great deal of sympathy and he was convinced that Miss Perry was an utterly unsympathetic person.

"What would you call a good walk?" he asked a little tartly.

"Oh, ten, twenty, thirty! I've done fifteen and gone to a dance at the end of the tramp."

"But you haven't my handicap," he protested defensively. "You can't be very gay about walking when you're warned that excessive fatigue may have disastrous consequences!"

She was not wholly without feeling for her face grew grave for a moment and she met his eyes searchingly, with something of the professional scrutiny to which he had long been accustomed.

"Eyes clear; color very good; voice a trifle weak and suggesting timidity and feeble initiative. Introspective; a little self-conscious, and unimportant nervous symptoms indicated by the rolling of bread crumbs."

"I've paid doctors large fees for telling me the same things," he said, hastily hiding the bread crumbs under the edge of his plate. "I wish you'd write those items down for me. I'm in earnest about that."

"When did you say you were leaving town?"

"Tomorrow evening. If you'll write out your diagnosis and any suggestions you may have as to my habits, diet and general course of life, I promise to put them into practice."

"Your case interests me and I'll consider this matter of advising you."

"I shall expect the document tomorrow afternoon!"

"I should want to be very sure," she laughed, "that you were really leaving town and that I shouldn't see you for a long time—perhaps never again!"

"That has an ominous sound, as though you were going to give me a death sentence! Is my case as bad as that?"

"Not at all; but it calls for that disagreeable frankness we all dislike in our friends and very properly resent in mere acquaintances. I should be enormously embarrassed to meet you until after—"

She paused and surveyed him once more, questioningly. The French lady was telling a story to the whole company, and they were obliged to give heed to it; and as Archie failed to catch the point of it Miss Perry very kindly gave him the clue. The talk was general for a few minutes and then he begged her to finish the sentence that had been left in the air.

"Oh, it doesn't matter! I think I was going to say that it would be embarrassing to see you until after you had given my little hints a trial. I'll say now that just the orderly course of your life, with four miles a day, no more, no less, isn't a bit likely to get you anywhere. My treatment for such a case as yours would be very drastic. I'd set you some real stunts to do if you were my patient. May tells me that they won't have you in the army, the navy, or the flying corps, but I believe I could find some excitement for you," she ended musingly.

"As, for example—?" he asked, finding the French lady conspiring with an attaché of the Italian embassy. "To meet the competition of the nerve specialists, you'll have to be very explicit and tell me exactly what to do."

"Right there is one of your troubles—living by fixed schedules. You've never felt the world's rough hand; you don't know life! Clubs and sanatoriums and week-ends in comfortable houses don't count. You're a tremendously formal person, Mr. Bennett! What you really need is a good hard jar! Every morning you know exactly what you're going to do every hour of the day. It's routine that kills! Now just suppose when you're out on one of your walks you were to overpower the chauffeur of, we will say, the British ambassador, and drive the car bearing his Excellency into some lonely fastness of the Virginia hills, and hold him for a ransom, and collect the money in twenty-dollar gold pieces and escape with it and then come back to Washington and spend it all on a big party with the ambassador as the guest of honor. There would be a real achievement—something that would make you famous in two hemispheres."

"And incidentally lock me up for life if I escaped being shot! Such an escapade would very likely spoil our cordial relations with England and cause no end of trouble."

"There you are!" she exclaimed, "thinking always of the cost, never of the fun! Of course you would never do any such thing. Let me try again! Suppose you were to hold up a bank messenger in Wall Street and skip with a satchelful of negotiable securities and then, after the papers were through ragging the police for their inefficiency, you would drive up to the bank in a taxi, walk in and return the money, saying you had found it in the old family pew at Trinity when you went in to say your prayers! Here would be an opportunity to break the force of habit and awaken your self-confidence."

"Am I to understand that you practice what you preach? I don't mean to be impertinent, but really,—"

"Oh, I'm perfectly capable of doing anything I've suggested. I'm merely biding my time. Parents are pardonably fussy about the sort of person they turn their children over to, so I must have a care. I mean to dig for buried treasure this summer, realizing the dream of a lifetime."

"That appeals to me strongly. Perhaps you'd let me assist in that undertaking?"

"Impossible! I want all the glory and eke the gold if I find the hidden chests. Talk about romance being dead! My grandfather was a planter in Mississippi before the Civil War. In about 1860 he saw trouble ahead, and as he was opposed to secession he turned everything he had into gold, bought several tracts of land in Michigan and New York and secretly planted his money. His wife and children refused to share his lonely exile and he sent them to England but clung to America himself, and died suddenly and alone the second year of the war on the very acres my father inherited in Michigan. That's where I'm opening my camp."

"And the gold hasn't been found?" asked Archie deeply interested.

"Not a coin so far! You see grandfather made his will in war time and only divided the land, being afraid to mention the buried treasure in a document that would become a public record when he died."

"This is most exciting. It's only unfortunate that it's not pirate gold to give zest to your enterprise."

"Oh, the pirate in the story is a cousin of mine, who inherited the land up near the St. Lawrence and has dug all over it without results. My father gave the Michigan scenery to me, but this cousin has been digging on my land, most unwarrantably! He's rather a dashing young person!"

Archie was so enthralled that he forgot the typewritten dietary he always carried in his pocket and ate most of his portion of beef tenderloin before he remembered that red meats were denied him. He laid down his fork so abruptly that she asked him what was the matter.

"Nothing; only you've interested me so much that I've eaten a whole lot of stuff that's positively forbidden. You've already scored a victory over my specialists!"

"Splendid!" she cried. "Eat when you're hungry and never think about your food. Don't let a mere piece of beef know that you're a coward. Have you ever committed murder? You pale at the suggestion and yet a pleasant little murder might be the very thing to set you on your feet again!"

From time to time he caught Mrs. Featherstone's eyes fixed upon him approvingly, and he knew that she was thinking that at last he had met a girl who interested him. The impression that he was an invalid in imminent peril of death caused his friends and acquaintances to talk to him as though he were a sick child, and it was refreshing to find a girl who openly chaffed him about his health and went the length of prescribing a career of riotous crime as a cure for his ills. This was enormously amusing for in prep school and college he had been guiltless of the traditional pranks and in the six years that had elapsed since he emerged into the world he had walked circumspectly in the eyes of all men.

Isabel Perry was not afraid of him and she didn't treat him as girls did who had an idea that if they talked to him very long he might faint or even die on their hands. He noted her fine rounded arms and supple fingers that spoke for strength, reflecting that very likely she could pick him up and pitch him through the window. He had always disliked athletic girls, fancying that they nodded to him patronizingly as they passed him on country club verandas all aglow from golf or tennis. This amiable Isabel was quite capable of making him dance through a set of tennis and with her high spirits and strong will might even bring him out alive. It was obvious that the sudden sweeping away of her father's fortune had not troubled her in the least. He marveled at this, for he had a great deal of money that had been conferred upon him in the cradle and what he should do if he lost it was a depressing possibility that had contributed not a little to his neurasthenia.

When it came time for Isabel to say good-night to her hostess Bennett was hovering near to offer his services in calling her car.

"Nothing like that for me! I brought walking shoes and shall foot it home, thank you. But—" she hesitated and said with mock gravity, "if you're not afraid of the night air or the excessive fatigue, you might take me home. That will add a mile to your prescription but you can ride back!"

The other guests had gone when she reappeared, wrapped in a long cloak and bearing a party-bag containing her slippers. She spoke of her plans for the summer with charming candor as they set off at a brisk pace. Little bits of autobiography she let fall interested him immensely. She was born in Wyoming, where her father had been a ranchman, and she had first known Mrs. Featherstone in college. She was enthusiastic about the summer camp; if it succeeded she meant to conduct an outdoor school for girls, moving it from Michigan to Florida with the changing seasons.

"People have been so kind to me! And I shall have a wonderful lot of girls—just think of it,—one hundred dear young beings from all over the country. It's a big responsibility but that land of my grandfather's is a lovely site for the camp. It's on a bay, where the swimming will be perfectly safe, and there's a wonderful forest, with Indian trails that run back to Marquette's time. We shall have a doctor—a woman, of course—and two trained nurses and some splendid young women to act, as councilors."

There was no question of her making a success of it, he said, marveling at her vitality, her exuberance, the confidence with which she viewed the future.

"I wish you all good luck," he said when they reached the house of the friend she was visiting. "The camp will be a great success,—I'm sure of that."

"Oh, it's a case of sink or swim—I've got to make it go!" she replied with her buoyant laugh. "If I don't succeed I can't emerge from the woods next fall and face my creditors!"

"There's the buried treasure; you mustn't neglect that! I'm greatly your debtor for all the interesting things you've told me. This has been the happiest evening I've spent since——"

"Since you began taking everything so hard? Please quit looking on your life as a burden; try to get some fun out of it!"

The door opened to the key she gave him and the