CHAPTER X
ANOTHER COMPLICATION
After luncheon, when everybody at Hope Springs takes a nap, we hadanother meeting at the shelter-house, this time with Mr. Pierce. He hadspent the morning tramping over the hills with a gun and keeping outof the way of people, and what with three square meals, a good night'ssleep and the exercise, he was looking a lot better. Seen in daylight,he had very dark hair and blue-gray eyes and a very square chin,although it had a sort of dimple in it. I used to wonder which won out,the dimple or the chin, but I wasn't long in finding out.
Well, he looked dazed when I took him to the shelter-house and he sawMr. Dick and Mrs. Dick and the Mr. Sams and Miss Patty. They gave him alawn-mower to sit on, and Mr. Sam explained the situation.
"I know it's asking a good bit, Mr. Pierce," he said, "and personallyI can see only one way out of all this. Carter ought to go in and takecharge, and his--er--wife ought to go back to school. But they won'thave it, and--er--there are other reasons." He glanced at Miss Patty.
Mr. Pierce also glanced at Miss Patty. He'd been glancing at her atintervals of two seconds ever since she came in, and being a woman andhaving a point to gain, Miss Patty seemed to have forgotten the nightbefore, and was very nice to him. Once she smiled directly at him, andwhatever he was saying died in his throat of the shock. When she turnedher head away he stared at the back of her neck, and when she looked atthe fire he gazed at her profile, and always with that puzzled look,as if he hadn't yet come to believe that she was the newspaper MissJennings.
After everything had been explained to him, including Mr. Jennings'liver and disposition, she turned to him and said:
"We are in your hands, you see, Mr. Pierce. Are you going to help us?"And when she asked him that, it was plain to me that he was only sorryhe couldn't die helping.
"If everybody agrees to it," he said, looking at her, "and you all thinkit's feasible and I can carry it off, I'm perfectly willing to try."
"Oh, it's feasible," Mr. Dick said in a relieved voice, getting up andbeginning to strut up and down the room. "It isn't as though I'm beyondcall. You can come out here and consult me if you get stuck. And thenthere's Minnie; she knows a good bit about the old place."
Mr. Sam looked at me and winked.
"Of course," said Mr. Dick, "I expect to retain control, you understandthat, I suppose, Pierce? You can come out every day for instructions. Idare say sanatoriums are hardly your line."
Mr. Pierce was looking at Miss Patty and she knew it. When a woman looksas unconscious as she did it isn't natural.
"Eh--oh, well no, hardly," he said, coming to himself; "I've triedeverything else, I believe. It can't be worse than carrying a bunch ofsweet peas from garden to garden."
Mr. Dick stopped walking and turned suddenly to stare at Mr. Pierce.
"Sweet--what?" he said.
Everybody else was talking, and I was the only one who saw him changecolor.
"Sweet peas," said Mr. Pierce. "And that reminds me--I'd like to makeone condition, Mr. Carter. I feel in a measure responsible for thecompany; most of them have gone back to New York, but the leading womanis sick at the hotel in Finleyville. I'd like to bring her here for twoweeks to recuperate. I assure you, I have no interest in her, but I'msorry for her; she's had the mumps."
"Mumps!" everybody said together, and Mr. Sam looked at hisbrother-in-law.
"Kid in the play got 'em, and they spread around," Mr. Pierce explained."Nasty disease."
"Why, you've just had them, too, Dicky!" said his wife. They all turnedto look at him, and I must say his expression was curious.
Luckily, I had the wit to knock over the breakfast basket, which wasstill there, and when we'd gathered up the broken china, Mr. Dick hadgot himself in hand.
"I'm sorry, old man," he said to Mr. Pierce, "but I'm not in favor ofbringing Miss--the person you speak of--up to the sanatorium just now.Mumps, you know--very contagious, and all that."
"She's over that part," Mr. Pierce said; "she only needs to rest."
"Certainly--let her come," said Mrs. Dicky. "If they're as contagious asall that, you haven't been afraid of MY getting them."
"I--I'm not in favor of it," Mr. Dick insisted, looking obstinate."The minute you bring an actress here you've got the whole place by theears."
"Fiddlesticks!" said his sister. "Because any actress could set YOU bythe ears--"
Mrs. Dick sat up suddenly.
"Certainly, if she isn't well bring her up," said Miss Patty."Only--won't she know your name is not Carter?"
"She's discretion itself," Mr. Pierce said. "Her salary hasn't beenpaid for a month, and as I'm responsible, I'd be glad to see her lookedafter."
"I don't want her here. I'll--I'll pay her board at the hotel," Mr. Dickbegan, "only for heaven's sake, don't--"
He stopped, for every one was staring.
"Why in the world would you do that?" Miss Patty asked. "Don't beridiculous. That's the only condition Mr. Pierce has made."
Mr. Dick stalked to the window and looked out, his hands in his pockets.I couldn't help being reminded of the time he had run away from school,when his grandfather found him in the shelter-house and gave him hischoice of going back at once or reading medicine with him.
"Oh, bring her up! Bring her up!" he said without looking around. "IfPierce won't stay unless he can play the friend in need, all right. Butdon't come after me if the whole blamed sanatorium swells up with mumpsand faints at the sight of a pickle."
That was Wednesday.
Things at the sanatorium were about the same on the surface. The womencrocheted and wondered what the next house doctor would be like, and themen gambled at the slot-machines and played billiards and grumbled atthe food and the management, and when they weren't drinking spring waterthey were in the bar washing away the taste of it. They took twentyminutes on the verandas every day for exercise and kept the housetemperature at eighty. Senator Biggs was still fasting and Mrs. Biggstook to spending all day in the spring-house and turning pale every timeshe heard his voice. It was that day, I think, that I found the magazinewith Upton Sinclair's article on fasting stuck fast in a snow-drift, asif it had been thrown violently.
Wednesday afternoon Miss Julia Summers came with three lap robes, awhite lace veil and a French poodle in a sleigh and went to bed in oneof the best rooms, and that night we started to move out furniture tothe shelter-house.
By working almost all night we got the shelter-house fairly furnished,although we made a trail through the snow that looked like a feverchart. Toward daylight Mr. Sam dropped a wash-bowl on my toe and I wentto bed with an arnica compress.
I limped out in time to be on hand before Miss Cobb got there, but whatwith a chilblain on my heel and hardly any sleep for two nights--not tomention my toe--I wasn't any too pleasant.
"It's my opinion you're overeating, Minnie," Miss Cobb said. "You'reskin's a sight!"
"You needn't look at it," I retorted.
She burned the back of her neck just then and it was three minutesbefore she could speak. When she could she was considerably milder.
"Just give it a twist or two, Minnie, won't you?" she said, holding outthe curler. "I haven't been able to sleep on the back of my head forthree weeks."
Well, I curled her hair for her and she told me about Miss Summers beingstill shut in her room, and how she'd offered Mike an extra dollar togive the white poodle a Turkish bath--it being under the weather as tohealth--and how Mike had soaked the little beast for an hour in a tubof water, forgetting the sulphur, and it had come out a sort of mustardcolor, and how Miss Summers had had hysterics when she saw it.
"Mike dipped him in bluing to bleach him again, or rather 'her'--it'sname is Arabella--" Miss Cobb said, "but all it did was to make itmottled like an Easter egg. Everybody is charmed. There were no dogsallowed while the old doctor lived. Things were different."
"Yes, things were different," I assented, limping over to heat thecurler. "How--how does Mr. Carter get along?"
/> Miss Cobb put down her hand-mirror and sniffed.
"Well," she said, "goodness knows I'm no trouble maker, but somebodyought to tell that young man a few things. He's forever looking atthe thermometer and opening windows. I declare, if I hadn't brought mywoolen tights along I'd have frozen to death at breakfast. Everybody'scomplaining."
I put that away in my mind to speak about. It was only by nailing thewindows shut and putting strips of cotton batting around the cracks thatwe'd ever been able to keep people there in the winter. I had my firstmisgiving then. Heaven knows I didn't realize what it was going to be.
Well, by the evening of that day things were going fairly well. Tilliebrought out a basket every morning to me at the spring-house,fairly bursting with curiosity, and Mr. Sam got some canned stuff inFinleyville and took it after dark to the shelter-house. But after thesecond day Mrs. Dicky got tired holding a frying-pan over the fire and Ihad to carry out at least one hot meal a day.
They got their own breakfast in a chafing-dish, or rather he got it andcarried it to her. And she'd sit on the edge of her cot, with her feeton the soap box--the floor was drafty--wrapped in a pink satin negligeewith bands of brown fur on it, looking sweet and perfectly happy, andlet him feed her boiled egg with a spoon. I took them some books--myGray's Anatomy, and Jane Eyre and Molly Bawn, by The Duchess, and thenewspapers, of course. They were full of talk about the wedding, and thesuite the prince was bringing over with him, and every now and then anotice would say that Miss Dorothy Jennings, the bride's young sister,who was still in school and was not coming out until next year, would beher sister's maid of honor. And when they came to that, they would hugeach other--or me, if I happened to be close--and act like a pair ofchildren, which they were. Generally it would end up by his askingher if she wasn't sorry she wasn't back at Greenwich studying Frenchconjugations and having a dance without any men on Friday nights, andshe would say "Wretch!" and kiss him, and I'd go out and slam the door.
But there was something on Mr. Dick's mind. I hadn't known him forfourteen years for nothing. And the night Mr. Sam and I carried out thecanned salmon and corn and tomatoes he walked back with me to the edgeof the deer park, Mr. Sam having gone ahead.
"Now," I said, when we were out of ear-shot, "spit it out. I've beenexpecting it."
"Listen, Minnie," he answered, "is Ju--is Miss Summers still confined toher room?"
"No," I replied coldly. "Ju--Miss Summers was down to-night to dinner."
"Then she's seen Pierce," he said, "and he's told her the whole storyand by to-morrow--"
"What?" I demanded, clutching his arm. "You wretched boy, don't tell meafter all I've done."
"Oh, confound it, Minnie," he exclaimed, "it's as much your fault asmine. Couldn't you have found somebody else, instead of getting, of allthings on earth, somebody from the Sweet Peas Company?"
"I see," I said slowly. "Then it WASN'T coincidence about the mumps!"
"Confounded kid had them," he said with bitterness. "Minnie,something's got to be done, and done soon. If you want the plain truth,Miss--er--Summers and I used to be friends--and--well, she's suingme for breach of promise. Now for heaven's sake, Minnie, don't make afuss--"
But my knees wouldn't hold me. I dropped down in a snow-drift andcovered my face.