Anything Once - Isabel Ostrander (reading tree TXT) 📗

trip,” he said with a rueful laugh. “I thought, when you suggested that we should travel together, I would be the one to take care of you, but it has been the other way around. Oh, Lou, I’ve so much to say to you when we reach our journey’s end!”

They arrived at Pelton before dark and found Mrs. Tooker’s friend, who ran a small boarding-house for store employees, and was glad to take them in at a dollar a head. Lou disappeared after supper, and although Lou waited long for him on the little porch, he did not return until through sheer fatigue she was forced to go to bed.

In the morning, however, when they met before breakfast in the lower hall he jingled a handful of silver in his pocket.

“However did you git it?” she demanded.

“Garage,” he responded succinctly. “Didn’t know I was a chauffeur, did you, Lou?”

129A peculiar little smile hovered for a moment about her lips, but she merely remarked:

“I thought you wouldn’t only take a quarter─”

“For each job,” he interrupted her. “A lot of cars came in that needed tinkering with after the storm, and they were short of hands. I made more than two dollars, and we’ll ride in state into Hunnikers!”

Lou made no reply, but after breakfast she drew him out on the little porch.

“Jim, I–I’m not goin’ on.”

“What!” he exclaimed.

“The woman that runs this place, she–she wants a girl to help her, an’ I guess I’ll stay.” Lou’s tones were none too steady, and she did not meet his eyes. “I–I don’t believe I’d like New York.”

“You, a servant here?” He took one of her hands very gently in his. “I didn’t mean to tell you until we were nearly there, and as it is, there is a lot that I can’t tell you even now, but this much I want you to know. You’re not going to work any more, Lou. You’re going to a lovely old lady who lives in a big 130house all by herself, and there you are going to study and play until you are really grown up, and know as much as anybody.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“This is the sort of place for me, Jim. I wasn’t meant for anythin’ else, an’ if I should live to be a hundred I could never know as much as that lady at the circus who called you ‘Jimmie Abbott.’”

“What–” Jim exploded for the second time.

“At least, she said you looked like him, and if she didn’t know you were in Canada─”

“Good Lord! What was she doing there?”

“She was with another lady an’ two gentlemen, an’ I guess they come in an ottermobile,” Lou explained. “They was in one the next day, anyway–the one that slammed into the egg-wagon.”

She described in detail the two occurrences, and added miserably:

“I didn’t mean to tell you, Jim, but as long as I’m not goin’ on with you I might as well. It was me that walked on your note-book back there on Mrs. Bemis’s porch. It had fallen 131open on the floor, an’ when I picked it up I couldn’t help seein’ the name that was written across the page. It was your own business, of course, if you didn’t want to give your real name to anybody─”

“Listen, Lou.” He had caught her other hand now and was holding them both very tightly. “You are going on with me! I can’t explain now about my name, but it doesn’t matter; nothing matters except that you are not going to be a quitter! You said that you would go on to New York with me, and you’re going to keep your word.”

“I know better now,” she replied quietly. “It’s–it’s been a wonderful time, but I’ve got to work an’ earn my keep an’ try to learn as I go along. It isn’t just exactly breakin’ my word; I didn’t realize─”

“Realize what?” he demanded as she hesitated.

“I thought at first that you were kinder like me; it wasn’t until I saw that lady an’ found you were a friend of hers, that I knew you were different.”

Her eyes were still downcast, and now a 132tinge of color mounted in her cheeks. “I couldn’t bear to have you take me to that other lady in the city and be a-ashamed of me─”

“Ashamed of you!” he repeated, and something in his tone deepened the color in her cheeks into a crimson tide. “Lou, look at me!”

Obediently she raised her eyes for an instant; then lowered them again quickly, and after a pause she said in a very small voice:

“All right, Jim. I–I’ll go. I guess I wouldn’t just want to be a–a quitter, after all.”

It was mid-afternoon when they walked into Hunnikers and although they had come ten long miles with only a stop for a picnic lunch between, they bore no traces of fatigue. Rather they appeared to have been treading on air, and although Jim had scrupulously avoided any further reference to the future, there was a certain buoyant assurance about him which indicated that in his own mind, at least, there remained no room for doubt.

He needed all the assurance he could 133muster as, after ensconcing Lou at the soda counter in the drug-store, he approached the telephone booth farthest from her ears and closed the door carefully behind him. Lou consumed her soda to its last delectable drop, glanced down anxiously at the worn, but spotless, little silk gown to see if she had spilled any upon it, and then wandered over to the showcase.

Jim’s voice came to her indistinguishably once or twice, but it was a full half-hour before he emerged from the booth. He looked wilted but triumphant, and he beamed blissfully as he came toward her, mopping his brow. He suspected that at the other end of the wire a certain gray-haired, aristocratic old lady was having violent hysterics to the immediate concern of three maids and an asthmatic Pekinese, but it did not disturb his equanimity.

“It’s all right,” he announced. “Aunt Emmy expects you; I didn’t tell you, did I, that the lady I’m taking you to is my aunt? No matter. She’s awfully easy if you get on the right side of her; I’ve always managed 134her beautifully ever since I was a kid, and you’ll have her rolling over and playing dead in no time. Fifteen miles more to go, Lou, and we’ll be─”

“Hello, there, Jim.” An oil-soaked and greasy glove clapped his shoulder and as he turned, the same voice, suddenly altered, stammered: “Oh, I beg your pardon─”

“’Lo, Harry!” Jim turned to greet a tall, lean individual more tanned than himself, with little, fine, weather lines about his eyes and an abrupt quickness of gesture which denoted his hair-triggered nerves. “What are you doing in this man’s town?”

“Motoring down from the Hilton’s,” the other responded. “Pete was coming with me, but at the last minute he decided to stay over the week-end. I’m off to Washington to-night to see about my passport; sailing next Wednesday for Labrador, you know.”

“Then you’re alone?” Jim turned. “Miss Lacey, let me present Mr. Van Ness; he spends his time trailing all over the earth to find something to kill. Miss Lacey is a young 135friend of my aunt’s; I’m taking her down to her for a visit.”

The explanation sounded somewhat involved, but Mr. Van Ness seemed to grasp it, and bowed.

“You’re motoring, too?” he asked.

“No. I–The fact is–” Jim stammered in his turn. “We were thinking of taking the train─”

“Why not let me take you both down in the car?” The other rose to the occasion with evident alacrity. “Miss Lacy will like it better than the train, I’m sure, and I haven’t seen you for an age, old man.”

Jim accepted with a promptitude which proclaimed a mind relieved of its final burden, and he turned to Lou. Mr. Van Ness had gone out to see to his car, and they were alone at a far corner of the counter.

“How about it, Lou? The last lap! The last fifteen miles. It’s been a long pull sometimes, and we’ve had some rough going, but it was worth it, wasn’t it?”

Her eyes all unconsciously gave him answer even before she repeated softly:

136“‘The last lap.’ Oh, Jim, shall I see you some time, at this lady’s house where you are takin’ me?”

“Every day,” he promised, adding with cheerful mendacity: “I dine with her nearly all the time; have for years. Come on, Lou. Harry’s waving at us.”

Through the village and the pleasant rolling country beyond; past huge, wide-spreading estates and tiny cottages, and clusters of small shops with the trolley winding like a thread between, the big maroon car sped, while the two men talked together of many things, and the girl sat back in her corner of the roomy tonneau and gave herself up to vague dreams.

Then the cottages gave place to sporadic growths of brick and mortar with more open lots between, but even these gaps finally closed, and Lou found herself being borne swiftly through street after street of towering houses out upon a broad avenue with palaces such as she had never dreamed of on one side, and on the other the seared, drooping green of a city park in late summer.

137It was still light when the big car swept into an exclusive street of brownstone houses of an earlier and still more exclusive period, and stopped before the proudest of these.

Jim alighted and held out his hand.

“Come, Lou,” he said. “Journey’s end.”

138CHAPTER IX
The Long, Long Trail

Three hours later, in that same proudly exclusive house, an elderly lady with gray hair and an aristocratically high, thin nose paced the floor of her drawing-room with a vigor which denoted some strong emotion.

“I must say, John, that I think the whole affair, whatever it may be, is highly reprehensible. I supposed James to be up in Canada on a fishing trip when he telephoned me this morning from somewhere near town with a–a most extraordinary message─”

She broke off, glancing cautiously toward a room across the hall, and added: “He said he had something to tell me, and he would be here this evening. Now you come, and you appear to know something about it, but I cannot get a word out of you!”

139“All I can tell you, Mrs. Abbott, is that if Jimmie does come to-night, I’ve got to pay him a thousand bones–dollars, I mean. It was a sort of a wager, and that must be what he wants to tell you about.”

It was an exceedingly stout young man with a round, cherubic countenance standing by the mantel who replied to her, and the old lady glanced at him sharply.

“A wager? H-m! Possibly.” She paused suddenly. “There’s the bell.”

A moment later James Tarrisford Abbott, in the most immaculate of dinner clothes, entered and greeted his aunt, halting with a slight frown as he encountered the beaming face of the young man who fell upon him.

“Good boy, Jimmie! You made it, after all!”

“With a few hours to spare.” Jim darted a questioning glance at his aunt, and seemed relieved at her emphatic shake of the head.

“I knew we’d lost when Mrs. Abbott told me that you had telephoned to her from just a little way out of town to-day,” Jack Trimble responded. “I ran over on my way to the 140club to give her a message from my mother. Did you have a hard time of it, old man?”

“Hard?” Jim smiled. “I’ve been a rough-rider in a circus─”

Mrs. Abbott groaned, but Jack Trimble’s eyes opened as roundly and wide as his mouth.

“Thundering–So it was you after all!”

“Me?” Jim demanded with ungrammatical haste.

“You–rough-rider–circus!” Jack exclaimed. “Vera said the chap looked like you, but it never occurred to me that it could