Excuse Me! Part 14

Never was a young soldier so stumped by a problem in tactics as Lieutenant Harry Mallory, safely aboard his train, and not daring to leave it, yet hopelessly unaware of how he was to dispose of his lovely but unlabelled baggage.

Hudson and Shaw had erected a white satin temple to Hymen in berth number one, had created such commotion, and departed in such confusion, that there had been no opportunity to proclaim that he and Marjorie were "not married--just friends."

And now the pa.s.sengers had accepted them as that enormous fund of amus.e.m.e.nt to any train, a newly wedded pair. To explain the mistake would have been difficult, even among friends. But among strangers--well, perhaps a wiser and a colder brain than Harry Mallory's could have stood there and delivered a brief oration restoring truth to her pedestal. But Mallory was in no condition for such a stoic delivery.

He mopped his brow in agony, lost in a blizzard of bewilderments. He drifted back toward Marjorie, half to protect and half for companions.h.i.+p. He found Mrs. Temple cuddling her close and mothering her as if she were a baby instead of a bride.

"Did the poor child run away and get married?"

Marjorie's frantic "Boo-hoo-hoo" might have meant anything. Mrs.

Temple took it for a.s.sent, and murmured with glowing reminiscence:

"Just the way Doctor Temple and I did."

She could not see the leaping flash of wild hope that lighted up Mallory's face. She only heard his voice across her shoulder:

"Doctor? Doctor Temple? Is your husband a reverend doctor?"

"A reverend doctor?" the little old lady repeated weakly.

"Yes--a--a preacher?"

The poor old congregation-weary soul was abruptly confronted with the ruination of all the delight in her little escapade with her pulpit-f.a.gged husband. If she had ever dreamed that the girl who was weeping in her arms was weeping from any other fright than the usual fright of young brides, fresh from the preacher's benediction, she would have cast every other consideration aside, and told the truth.

But her husband's last behest before he left her had been to keep their precious pretend-secret. She felt--just then--that a woman's first duty is to obey her husband. Besides, what business was it of this young husband's what her old husband's business was? Before she had fairly begun to debate her duty, almost automatically, with the instantaneous instinct of self-protection, her lips had uttered the denial:

"Oh--he's--just a--plain doctor. There he is now."

Mallory cast one miserable glance down the aisle at Dr. Temple coming back from the smoking room. As the old man paused to stare at the bridal berth, whose preparation he had not seen, he was just enough befuddled by his first cigar for thirty years to look a trifle tipsy.

The motion of the train and the rakish tilt of his unwonted crimson tie confirmed the suspicion and annihilated Mallory's new-born hope, that perhaps repentant fate had dropped a parson at their very feet.

He sank into the seat opposite Marjorie, who gave him one terrified glance, and burst into fresh sobs:

"Oh--oh--boo-hoo--I'm so unhap--hap--py."

Perhaps Mrs. Temple was a little miffed at the couple that had led her astray and opened her own honeymoon with a wanton fib. In any case, the best consolation she could offer Marjorie was a perfunctory pat, and a cynicism:

"There, there, dear! You don't know what real unhappiness is yet. Wait till you've been married a while."

And then she noted a startling lack of completeness in the bride's hand.

"Why--my dear!--where's your wedding ring?"

With what he considered great presence of mind, Mallory explained: "It--it slipped off--I--I picked it up. I have it here." And he took the little gold band from his waistcoat and tried to jam it on Marjorie's right thumb.

"Not on the thumb!" Mrs. Temple cried. "Don't you know?"

"You see, it's my first marriage."

"You poor boy--this finger!" And Mrs. Temple, raising Marjorie's limp hand, selected the proper digit, and held it forward, while Mallory pressed the fatal circlet home.

And then Mrs. Temple, having completed their installation as man and wife, utterly confounded their confusion by her final effort at comfort: "Well, my dears, I'll go back to my seat, and leave you alone with your dear husband."

"My dear what?" Marjorie mumbled inanely, and began to sniffle again.

Whereupon Mrs. Temple resigned her to Mallory, and consigned her to fate with a consoling plat.i.tude:

"Cheer up, my dear, you'll be all right in the morning."

Marjorie and Mallory's eyes met in one wild clash, and then both stared into the window, and did not notice that the shades were down.

CHAPTER XI

A CHANCE RENCOUNTER

While Mrs. Temple was confiding to her husband that the agitated couple in the next seat had just come from a wedding-factory, and had got on while he was lost in tobacco land, the people in the seat on the other side of them were engaged in a little drama of their own.

Ira Lathrop, known to all who knew him as a woman-hating snapping-turtle, was so busily engaged trying to drag the farthest invading rice grains out of the back of his neck, that he was late in realizing his whereabouts. When he raised his head, he found that he had crowded into a seat with an uncomfortable looking woman, who crowded against the window with old-maidenly timidity.

He felt some apology to be necessary, and he snarled: "Disgusting things, these weddings!" After he heard this, it did not sound entirely felicitous, so he grudgingly ventured: "Excuse me--you married?"

She denied the soft impeachment so heartily that he softened a little:

"You're a sensible woman. I guess you and I are the only sensible people on this train."

"It--seems--so," she giggled. It was the first time her spinsters.h.i.+p had been taken as material for a compliment. Something in the girlish giggle and the strangely young smile that swept twenty years from her face and belied the silver lines in her hair, seemed to catch the old bachelor's attention. He stared at her so fiercely that she looked about for a way of escape. Then a curiously anxious, almost a hungry, look softened his leonine jowls into a boyish eagerness, and his growl became a sort of gruff purr:

"Say, you look something like an old sweetheart--er--friend--of mine.

Were you ever in Brattleboro, Vermont?"

A flush warmed her cheek, and a sense of home warmed her prim speech, as she confessed:

"I came from there originally."

"So did I," said Ira Lathrop, leaning closer, and beaming like a big sun: "I don't suppose you remember Ira Lathrop?"

The old maid stared at the bachelor as if she were trying to see the boy she had known, through the mask that time had modeled on his face.

And then she was a girl again, and her voice chimed as she cried:

"Why, Ira!--Mr. Lathrop!--is it you?"

She gave him her hand--both her hands, and he smothered them in one big paw and laid the other on for extra warmth, as he nodded his savage head and roared as gentle as a sucking dove:

"Well, well! Annie--Anne--Miss Gattle! What do you think of that?"