Pollyanna Grows Up - Eleanor H. Porter (read an ebook week .TXT) 📗

with an inarticulate ejaculation, turned and walked away abruptly. He could not trust himself to remain longer. He did not wish to talk any more, just then, to Sadie Dean. So abruptly, indeed, did he turn, that he did not notice that Sadie Dean, too, turned hurriedly, and busied herself looking in the grass at her feet, as if she had lost something. Very evidently, Sadie Dean, also, did not wish to talk any more just then.

Jimmy Pendleton told himself that it was not true at all; that it was all falderal, what Sadie Dean had said. Yet nevertheless, true or not true, he could not forget it. It colored all his thoughts thereafter, and loomed before his eyes like a shadow whenever he saw Pollyanna and Jamie together. He watched their faces covertly. He listened to the tones of their voices. He came then, in time, to think it was, after all, true: that they did worship each other; and his heart, in consequence, grew like lead within him. True to his promise to himself, however, he turned resolutely away. The die was cast, he told himself. Pollyanna was not to be for him.

Restless days for Jimmy followed. To stay away from the Harrington homestead entirely he did not dare, lest his secret be suspected. To be with Pollyanna at all now was torture. Even to be with Sadie Dean was unpleasant, for he could not forget that it was Sadie Dean who had finally opened his eyes. Jamie, certainly, was no haven of refuge, under the circumstances; and that left only Mrs. Carew. Mrs. Carew, however, was a host in herself, and Jimmy found his only comfort these days in her society. Gay or grave, she always seemed to know how to fit his mood exactly; and it was wonderful how much she knew about bridges⁠—the kind of bridges he was going to build. She was so wise, too, and so sympathetic, knowing always just the right word to say. He even one day almost told her about The Packet; but John Pendleton interrupted them at just the wrong moment, so the story was not told. John Pendleton was always interrupting them at just the wrong moment, Jimmy thought vexedly, sometimes. Then, when he remembered what John Pendleton had done for him, he was ashamed.

“The Packet” was a thing that dated back to Jimmy’s boyhood, and had never been mentioned to anyone save to John Pendleton, and that only once, at the time of his adoption. The Packet was nothing but rather a large white envelope, worn with time, and plump with mystery behind a huge red seal. It had been given him by his father, and it bore the following instructions in his father’s hand:

“To my boy, Jimmy. Not to be opened until his thirtieth birthday except in case of his death, when it shall be opened at once.”

There were times when Jimmy speculated a good deal as to the contents of that envelope. There were other times when he forgot its existence. In the old days, at the Orphans’ Home, his chief terror had been that it should be discovered and taken away from him. In those days he wore it always hidden in the lining of his coat. Of late years, at John Pendleton’s suggestion, it had been tucked away in the Pendleton safe.

“For there’s no knowing how valuable it may be,” John Pendleton had said, with a smile. “And, anyway, your father evidently wanted you to have it, and we wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing it.”

“No, I wouldn’t want to lose it, of course,” Jimmy had smiled back, a little soberly. “But I’m not counting on its being real valuable, sir. Poor dad didn’t have anything that was very valuable about him, as I remember.”

It was this Packet that Jimmy came so near mentioning to Mrs. Carew one day⁠—if only John Pendleton had not interrupted them.

“Still, maybe it’s just as well I didn’t tell her about it,” Jimmy reflected afterwards, on his way home. “She might have thought dad had something in his life that wasn’t quite⁠—right. And I wouldn’t have wanted her to think that⁠—of dad.”

XXV The Game and Pollyanna

Before the middle of September the Carews and Sadie Dean said goodbye and went back to Boston. Much as she knew she would miss them, Pollyanna drew an actual sigh of relief as the train bearing them away rolled out of the Beldingsville station. Pollyanna would not have admitted having this feeling of relief to anyone else, and even to herself she apologized in her thoughts.

“It isn’t that I don’t love them dearly, every one of them,” she sighed, watching the train disappear around the curve far down the track. “It’s only that⁠—that I’m so sorry for poor Jamie all the time; and⁠—and⁠—I am tired. I shall be glad, for a while, just to go back to the old quiet days with Jimmy.”

Pollyanna, however, did not go back to the old quiet days with Jimmy. The days that immediately followed the going of the Carews were quiet, certainly, but they were not passed “with Jimmy.” Jimmy rarely came near the house now, and when he did call, he was not the old Jimmy that she used to know. He was moody, restless, and silent, or else very gay and talkative in a nervous fashion that was most puzzling and annoying. Before long, too, he himself went to Boston; and then of course she did not see him at all.

Pollyanna was surprised then to see how much she missed him. Even to know that he was in town, and that there was a chance that he might come over, was better than the dreary emptiness of certain absence; and even his puzzling moods of alternating gloominess and gayety were preferable to this utter silence of nothingness. Then, one day, suddenly she pulled herself up with hot cheeks and shamed eyes.

“Well, Pollyanna Whittier,” she upbraided herself sharply, “one would think