Tracy Park Part 25

'Then Nina St. Claire is second cla.s.s and low, for she says "Hallo,"'

was Maude's reply, to which her mother had no answer.

Meanwhile the phaeton was going swiftly on toward the cottage, which it reached a few minutes after the furnace whistle blew for six, and Harold, who had been working there, came up the lane. There were soiled spots on his hands and on his face, and his clothes showed marks of toil, all of which Arthur noted, while he was explaining to Mrs.

Crawford that he had taken Jerry for a drive, and kept her beyond the prescribed hour. Then, turning to Harold, he said:

'And so you work in the furnace?'

'Yes, sir, during vacation, when I can get a job there,' Harold answered, and Mr. Tracy continued:

'How much do you get a day?'

'Fifty cents in dull times,' was the reply, and Arthur went on:

'Fifty cents from seven in the morning to six at night, and board yourself. A magnificent sum truly. Pray, how do you manage to spend so much? You must be getting rich.'

The words were sarcastic, but the tone belied the words, and Harold was about to speak, when his grandmother interrupted him, and said,

'What he does not spend for us he puts aside. He is trying to save enough to go to the High School, but it's slow work. I can do but little myself, and it all falls upon Harold.'

'But I like it, grandma. I like to work for you and Jerry, and I have almost twenty dollars saved,' Harold said, 'and in a year or two I can go away to school, and work somewhere for my board. Lots of boys do that.'

Arthur was. .h.i.tching his pony to the fence, while a new idea was dawning in his mind.

'Fifty cents a day,' he said to himself, 'and he has twenty dollars saved, and thinks himself rich. Why, I've spent more than that on one bottle of wine, and here is this boy, Amy's son, wanting an education, and working to support his grandmother like a common laborer. I believe I _am_ crazy.'

He was in the cottage by this time--in the clean, cool kitchen where the supper table was laid with its plain fair, most unlike the costly viands which daily loaded his board.

'Don't wait for me, Harold must be hungry,' he said, adding quickly: 'Or stay, if you will permit me, I will take a cup of tea with you. The drive has given me an appet.i.te, and your tea smells very inviting.'

It was a great honor to have Arthur Tracy at her table, and Mrs.

Crawford felt it as such, and was very sorry, too, that she had nothing better to offer him than bread and b.u.t.ter and radishes, with milk, and a dish of cold beans, and chopped beets, and a piece of apple pie saved for Harold from dinner. But she made him welcome, and Jerry, delighted to return the hospitality she had received, brought him a clean plate and cup and saucer, and asked if she might get the best sugar-bowl and the white sugar. Then, remembering the beautiful flowers which had adorned the table at Tracy Park, she ran out and gathering a bunch of June pinks, put them in a little gla.s.s by his plate.

When all was ready and they had taken their seats at the table, Mrs.

Crawford closed her eyes reverently and asked the accustomed blessing which in that house preceded every meal. Jerry's amen was a good deal louder and more emphatic than usual, while she nodded her head to Arthur, with an expression which he understood to mean, 'You know now what you ought to say, instead of that long prayer,' and he nodded back that he did so understand it.

Arthur enjoyed the supper immensely, or pretended that he did. He ate three slices of bread and b.u.t.ter; he drank three cups of tea; he even tried the beans and the beets, but declined the radishes, which, he said, would give him the nightmare.

When supper was over and the table cleared away, he still showed no signs of going, but asking Mrs. Crawford to take a seat near him, he plunged at once into the business which had brought him there, and which, since he had seen Harold in his working-dress and heard what he was trying to do, had grown to be of a two-fold nature. He was very lonely, he said, and all the elegance and luxuriousness of his handsome house failed to give him pleasure or to make him forget the past. He wanted some one to love who would love him in return, and the little taste he had had of Jerry's society had made him wish for more, and he must have her with him a part at least of every day.

'In short,' he said, 'I should like to undertake her education myself until she is older, when I shall see that she has the proper finis.h.i.+ng.

She tells me she hates the district school, with Bill Peterkin and his warts--'

'Trying to kiss me,' Jerry interrupted, as open-eyed and open-mouthed, she stood, with her hand on his shoulder, listening to him.

'Yes, trying to kiss you, though I do not blame him much for that,'

Arthur said, with a smile, and then continued: 'She is ambitious enough to want a governess like Ann Eliza Peterkin and my brother's daughter, but I am better than a dozen governesses. I can teach her all the rudiments of an English education, with French and German, and Latin, too, if she likes; and my plan is, that she come to me every day except Sat.u.r.days and Sundays--come at ten in the morning, get her lessons and her lunch with me, and return home at four in the afternoon. Would you like it, Cherry?'

'Oh-h-oh!' was all the answer Jerry could make for a moment, but her cheeks were scarlet, and tears of joy stood in her eyes, until she glanced at Harold; then all the brightness faded from her face, for how could she accept this great good and leave him to drudge and toil alone?

'What is it, Cherry?' Mr. Tracy asked; and, with a half sob, she replied:

'I can't go without Harold. If I get learning, he must get learning, too,' and leaving Arthur, the crossed over to the boy, and putting her arm around him, looked up at him with a look which in after years he would have given half his life to win.

She was a little girl now and did not care if he did know how much she loved him, and that for him she would sacrifice everything. But in this case the sacrifice was not required, for Arthur hastened to say:

'I shall not forget Harold. I have something better in store for him than reciting his lessons to me. When the High School opens in September, he is going there, and if he does well he shall go to Andover in time, and perhaps to Harvard. It will all depend upon himself, and how he improves his opportunities. What! crying? Don't you like it?' Arthur asked, as he saw the great tears gathering in Harold's eyes and rolling down his cheeks.

'Yes, oh, yes; but it don't seem real, and--and--I guess it makes me kind of sick,' Harold gasped, as, freeing himself from Jerry's encircling arm, he hurried from the room, to think over this great and unexpected joy which had come so suddenly to him.

With his naturally refined tastes and instincts the dirty furnace work had not been pleasant to him, and he had shrunk with inexpressible loathing from the swill cart and the other menial duties he had been obliged to perform for the sake of those he loved. How to get an education was the problem he was earnestly trying to solve, and lo! it was now solved for him. For a moment the suddenness of the thing overcame him, and he sat down upon a table in the yard, faint and bewildered, while Arthur made his plan clear to Mrs. Crawford, saying that what he meant to do was partly for Jerry's sake and partly for the sake of the young girl who had been his early love.

'I always intended to take care of you,' he said; 'but things go from my mind, and I forget the past as completely as if it had never been. But this will stay by me, for I shall have Cherry as a reminder, and if I am in danger of forgetting she will jog my memory.'

Fur a moment Mrs. Crawford could not speak, so great was her surprise and joy that the good she had thought unattainable was to be Harold's at last. And yet something in her proud, sensitive nature rebelled against receiving so much from a stranger, even if that stranger were Arthur Tracy. It seemed like charity, she said, when at last she spoke at all.

But Arthur overruled her with that persuasive way he had of converting people to his views; and when at last he left the cottage it was with the understanding that Jerry should commence her lessons with him the first week in September, and that Harold should enter the High School in Shannondale when it opened in the autumn.

CHAPTER XX.

THE WORKING OF ARTHUR'S PLAN.

As Arthur was wholly uncommunicative with regard to his affairs, and as Mrs. Crawford kept her own counsel, and bade Harold and Jerry do the same, the Tracys knew nothing whatever of the plan until the September morning when Jerry presented herself at the park house, and was met in the door-way by Mrs. Frank, who was just going out. Very few could have resisted the bright little face, so full of childish happiness, or the clear, a.s.sured voice, which said so cheerily:

'Good-morning, Mrs. Tracy. I'm come to school.'

But, prejudiced as she was against the girl, Mrs. Tracy could resist any thing, and she answered, haughtily;

'Come to school! What do you mean? This is not a school-house, and if you have any errand here, go round to the other door. Only company come in here.'

'But I'm company. I'm going to get learning; he told me to come,' Jerry answered, flushed and eager, and altogether sure of her right to be there.

Before Mrs. Frank could reply, a voice, distinct and authoritative, and to which she always yielded, called from the top of the stairway inside:

'Mrs. Tracy, if that is Jerry to whom you are talking, send her up at once. I am waiting for her.'

Jerry did not mean the nod she gave the lady as she pa.s.sed her to be disrespectful, but Mrs. Frank felt it as such, and went to her own room in a most perturbed state of mind, for which she could find no vent until her husband came in, when she stated the case to him, and asked if he knew what it meant.

But Frank was as ignorant as herself, and could not enlighten her until that night, after he had seen his brother, and heard from him what he was intending to do.

'G.o.d bless you, Arthur. You don't know how happy you have made me,'

Frank said, feeling on the instant that a great burden was lifted from his mind.

Jerry was to be educated and cared for, and would probably receive all that the world would naturally concede to her if the truth were known.

He believed, or thought he did, that Gretchen had never been his brother's wife, though to believe so seemed an insult to the original of the sweet face which looked at him from the window every time he entered his brother's room. Jerry was a great trouble to him, and he would not have liked to confess to any one how constantly she was in his mind, or how many plans he had devised in order to atone for the wrong he knew he was doing her. And now his brother had taken her off his hands, and she was to be cared for and receive the education which would fit her to earn her own livelihood, and make her future life respectable. No particular harm was done her after all, and he might now enjoy himself, and cast his morbid fancies to the winds, he reflected, as he went whistling to his wife's apartment, and told her what he had heard.

For a moment Dolly was speechless with astonishment, and when at last she opened her lips, her husband silenced her with that voice and manner of which she was beginning to be afraid.