The Whole Family Part 17

"Billy, my son, I want you to do something for me," he said.

"All right," said I.

"I've got to see Peggy," he went on. "I've got to!" And he looked as fierce as a circus tiger. "I can't sit still and not lift a finger and let this wretched business go on. I won't lose her for any silly scruples."

I didn't know what he was driving at, but I said, "I wouldn't, either,"

in a sympathetic manner.

"I've got to see her!" he fired at me again.

"Yep," I said. "She's up at the house now. Come on." But that didn't suit him. He explained that she wouldn't look at him when the others were around, and that she slid off and wormed out of his way, so he couldn't get at her, anyhow. Just like a girl, wasn't it--not to face the music? Well, anyway, he'd cooked up a plan that he wanted me to do, and I promised I would. He wanted me to get Peggy to go up the river to their former spooning-resort (only he put it differently), and he would be there waiting and make Peggy talk to him, which he seemed to desire more than honey in the honeycomb.

Lovers are a strange animal. I may be foolish, but I prefer toads. With them you can tie a string around the hind leg, and you have got them.

But with lovers it's all this way one day and upside down the next, and wondering what's hurt the feelings of her, and if he's got tired of you, and polyandering around to get interviews up rivers when you could easier sit on the piazza and talk--and all such. It seems to me that things would go a lot simpler if everybody would cut out most of the feelings department, and just eat their meals and look after their animals and play all they get time for, and then go to sleep quietly.

Fussing is such a depravity. But they wouldn't do what I said, not if I told them, so I lie low and think.

Next morning I harnessed the pony in the cart and said, "Peg--take a drive with me--come on," and Peg looked grattyfied, and mother said I was a dear, thoughtful child, and grandma said it would do the girl good, and I was a n.o.ble lad. So I got encombiums all round for once.

Only Aunt Elizabeth--she looked thoughtful.

I rattled Hotspur--that's the pony--out to the happy hunting-ground by the river, till I saw Dr. Denbigh's gray cap behind a bush, and I rightly argued that his manly form was. .h.i.tched onto it, for he arose up in his might as I stopped the cart. Peggy gasped and said, "Oh--oh! We must go home. Oh, Billy, drive on!" Which Billy didn't do, not so you'd notice it. Then the doctor said, in his I-am-the-Ten-Commandments manner, "Get out, Peggy," and held his hand.

And Peggy said, "I won't--I can't," and immediately did, the goose.

Then he looked at me in a funny, fierce way he has, with his eyebrows away down, only you know he's pleasant because his eyes jiggle.

"Billy, my son," he said, "will you kindly deprive us of the light of your presence for one hour by the clock? Here's my timepiece--one hour.

Go!" And he gave Hotspur a slap so he leaped.

Dr. Denbigh is the most different person from Harry Goward I know.

Well, I drove round by the Red Bridge, and was gone an hour and twelve minutes, and I thought they'd be missing me and in a fit to get home, so I just raced Hotspur the last mile.

"I'm awfully sorry I'm so late," said I. "I got looking at some pigs, so I forgot. I'm sorry," said I.

Peg looked up at me as if she couldn't remember who I was, and inquired, wonderingly: "Is it an hour yet?"

And Dr. Denbigh said, "Great Scott! boy, you needn't have hurried!"

That's lovers all over.

And they hadn't finished yet, if you'll believe me. Dr. Denbigh went on talking as they stood up, just as if I wasn't living. "You won't promise me?" he asked her.

And she said: "Oh, Jack, how can I? I don't know what to do--but I'm engaged to him--that's a solemn thing."

"Solemn nonsense," said the doctor. "You don't love him--you never did--you never could. Be a woman, dearest, and end this wretched mess."

"I never would have thought I loved him if I hadn't believed I'd lost you," Peggy ruminated to herself. "But I must think--" As if she hadn't thunk for an hour!

"How long must you think?" the doctor fired at her.

"Don't be cross at me," said she, like a baby, and that big capable man picked up her hand and kissed it--shame on him!

"No, no, dear," he said, as meek as pie. "I'll wait--only you MUST decide the right way, and remember that I'm waiting, and that it's hard."

Then he put her into the cart clingingly--I'd have chucked her--and I leaned over toward him the last thing and threw my head lovingly on one side and rolled my eyes up and murmured at him, "Good-bye, Jack," and started Hotspur before he could hit me.

Now, thank the stars, there's just one or two little items more that I've got to write. One is what I heard mother tell father when they were on the front piazza alone, and I was teaching the puppy to beg, right in sight of them on the gra.s.s. They think I'm an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she'd been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn't marry a man she didn't admire--and wasn't that n.o.ble of her? n.o.ble, your grandmother--to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she's got a real man up her sleeve! I'd have made them sit up and take notice if I hadn't promised not to tell. Which reminds me that I ought to explain how I got Dr. Denbigh to let me write this for Lorraine. I put it to him strongly, you see, about the cookies, and at first he said.

"Not on your life! Not in a thousand years!" And then--

But what's the use of writing that? Lorraine is on to all that. But, my pickles! won't there be a circus when Alice finds out that I've known things she didn't! Won't Alice be hopping--gee!

XI. PEGGY, by Alice Brown

"Remember," said Charles Edward--he had run in for a minute on his way home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, "for good and all," he tells us--"remember, next week will see us out of this land of the free and home of the talkative." He meant our sailing. I shall be glad to be with him and Lorraine. "And whatever you do. Peg, don't talk, except to mother. Talk to her all you want to. Mother has the making of a woman in her. If mother'd been a celibate, she'd have been, also, a peach."

"But I don't want to talk," said I. "I don't want to talk to anybody."

"Good for you," said Charles Edward. "Now I'll run along."

I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he'd been awfully good to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the family advise me--except mother! And I saw him stop, turn round as if he were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart, as he does when the family question him about business. Then I saw somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt Elizabeth. Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and she saw her, too. Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out of the hammock and ran. I thought she was coming into the house to hide from Aunt Elizabeth. That's what we all do the first minute, and then we recover ourselves and go down and meet her. But Alice dropped on her knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.

"Forgive, Peggy," she moaned. "Oh, forgive!"

I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I said, "You can wear it today"; but she only hugged me the tighter and ran on in a rigmarole I didn't understand.

"She's coming, and she'll get it out of Lorraine, and they'll all be down on us."

Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.

"She's trying to come round him," said Alice.

I began to see she was really in earnest now. "He's squirming. Oh, Peggy, maybe she's found it out some way, and she's telling him, and they'll tell you, and you'll think I am false as h.e.l.l!"

I knew she didn't mean anything by that word, because whenever she says such things they're always quotations. She began to cry real tears.

"It was Billy put it into my head," said she, "and Lorraine put it into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn't know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I'd help him write it as it ought to be 'if life were a banquet and beauty were wine'; but I told him we must make him say in it how he'd got to conceal it from me, or they'd think we got it up together. So I wrote it," said Alice, "and Billy copied it."

Perhaps I wasn't nice to the child, for I couldn't listen to her. I was watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself that mother'd want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she came--"like a good girl," as she used to say to me when I was little and begged to get out of hard things. Alice went on talking and gasping.

"Peg," she said, "he's perfectly splendid--Dr. Denbigh is."

"Yes, dear," said I, "he's very nice."

"I've adored him for years," said Alice. "I could trust him with my whole future. I could trust him with yours."