The House of a Thousand Candles by Meredith Nicholson (good ebook reader .TXT) đź“–
- Author: Meredith Nicholson
- Performer: -
Book online «The House of a Thousand Candles by Meredith Nicholson (good ebook reader .TXT) 📖». Author Meredith Nicholson
clenched hand—“that if these women, or your employer,
Mr. Pickering, or that damned hound, Morgan, or you—
damn you, I don’t know who or what you are!—think
you can scare me away from here, you’ve waked up the
wrong man, and I’ll tell you another thing—and you
may repeat it to your school-teachers and to Mr. Pickering,
who pays you, and to Morgan, whom somebody has
hired to kill me—that I’m going to keep faith with my
dead grandfather, and that when I’ve spent my year
here and done what that old man wished me to do, I’ll
give them this house and every acre of ground and every
damned dollar the estate carries with it. And now one
other thing! I suppose there’s a sheriff or some kind of
a constable with jurisdiction over this place, and I could
have the whole lot of you put into jail for conspiracy,
but I’m going to stand out against you alone—do you
understand me, you hypocrite, you stupid, slinking spy?
Answer me, quick, before I throw you out of the room!”
I had worked myself into a great passion and fairly
roared my challenge, pounding the table in my rage.
“Yes, sir; I quite understand you, sir. But I’m
afraid, sir—”
“Of course you’re afraid!” I shouted, enraged anew
by his halting speech. “You have every reason in the
world to be afraid. You’ve probably heard that I’m a
bad lot and a worthless adventurer; but you can tell
Sister Theresa or Pickering or anybody you please that
I’m ten times as bad as I’ve ever been painted. Now
clear out of here!”
He left the room without looking at me again. During
the morning I strolled through the house several
times to make sure he had not left it to communicate
with some of his fellow plotters, but I was, I admit, disappointed
to find him in every instance busy at some
wholly proper task. Once, indeed, I found him cleaning
my storm boots! To find him thus humbly devoted
to my service after the raking I had given him dulled
the edge of my anger. I went back to the library and
planned a cathedral in seven styles of architecture, all
unrelated and impossible, and when this began to bore
me I designed a crypt in which the wicked should be
buried standing on their heads and only the very good
might lie and sleep in peace. These diversions and several
black cigars won me to a more amiable mood. I
felt better, on the whole, for having announced myself
to the delectable Bates, who gave me for luncheon a
brace of quails, done in a manner that stripped criticism
of all weapons.
We did not exchange a word, and after knocking
about in the library for several hours I went out for a
tramp. Winter had indeed come and possessed the
earth, and it had given me a new landscape. The snow
continued to fall in great, heavy flakes, and the ground
was whitening fast.
A rabbit’s track caught my eye and I followed it,
hardly conscious that I did so. Then the clear print of
two small shoes mingled with the rabbit’s trail. A few
moments later I picked up an overshoe, evidently lost
in the chase by one of Sister Theresa’s girls, I reflected.
I remembered that while at Tech I had collected diverse
memorabilia from school-girl acquaintances, and here I
was beginning a new series with a string of beads and an
overshoe!
A rabbit is always an attractive quarry. Few things
besides riches are so elusive, and the little fellows have,
I am sure, a shrewd humor peculiar to themselves. I
rather envied the school-girl who had ventured forth for
a run in the first snow-storm of the season. I recalled
Aldrich’s turn on Gautier’s lines as I followed the
double trail:
“Howe’er you tread, a tiny mould
Betrays that light foot all the same;
Upon this glistening, snowy fold
At every step it signs your name.”
A pretty autograph, indeed! The snow fell steadily
and I tramped on over the joint signature of the girl
and the rabbit. Near the lake they parted company, the
rabbit leading off at a tangent, on a line parallel with
the lake, while his pursuer’s steps pointed toward the
boat-house.
There was, so far as I knew, only one student of adventurous
blood at St. Agatha’s, and I was not in the
least surprised to see, on the little sheltered balcony of
the boat-house, the red tam-o’-shanter. She wore, too,
the covert coat I remembered from the day I saw her
first from the wall. Her back was toward me as I drew
near; her hands were thrust into her pockets. She was
evidently enjoying the soft mingling of the snow with
the still, blue waters of the lake, and a girl and a snow-storm
are, if you ask my opinion, a pretty combination.
The fact of a girl’s facing a winter storm argues
mightily in her favor—testifies, if you will allow me,
to a serene and dauntless spirit, for one thing, and a
sound constitution, for another.
I ran up the steps, my cap in one hand, her overshoe
in the other. She drew back a trifle, just enough to
bring my conscience to its knees.
“I didn’t mean to listen that day. I just happened
to be on the wall and it was a thoroughly underbred
trick—my twitting you about it—and I should have told
you before if I’d known how to see you—”
“May I trouble you for that shoe?” she said with a
great deal of dignity.
They taught that cold disdain of man, I supposed, as
a required study at St. Agatha’s.
“Oh, certainly! Won’t you allow me?”
“Thank you, no!”
I was relieved, to tell the truth, for I had been out of
the world for most of that period in which a youngster
perfects himself in such graces as the putting on of a
girl’s overshoes. She took the damp bit of rubber—a
wet overshoe, even if small and hallowed by associations,
isn’t pretty—as Venus might have received a soft-shell
crab from the hand of a fresh young merman. I was
between her and the steps to which her eyes turned longingly.
“Of course, if you won’t accept my apology I can’t
do anything about it; but I hope you understand that
I’m sincere and humble, and anxious to be forgiven.”
“You seem to be making a good deal of a small matter—”
“I wasn’t referring to the overshoe!” I said.
She did not relent.
“If you’ll only go away—”
She rested one hand against the corner of the boat-house
while she put on the overshoe. She wore, I noticed,
brown gloves with cuffs.
“How can I go away! You children are always leaving
things about for me to pick up. I’m perfectly worn
out carrying some girl’s beads about with me; and I
spoiled a good glove on your overshoe.”
“I’ll relieve you of the beads, too, if you please.”
And her tone measurably reduced my stature.
She thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and
shook the tam-o’-shanter slightly, to establish it in a
more comfortable spot on her head. The beads had been
in my corduroy coat since I found them. I drew them
out and gave them to her.
“Thank you; thank you very much.”
“Of course they are yours, Miss—”
She thrust them into her pocket.
“Of course they’re mine,” she said indignantly, and
turned to go.
“We’ll waive proof of property and that sort of thing,”
I remarked, with, I fear, the hope of detaining her.
“I’m sorry not to establish a more neighborly feeling
with St. Agatha’s. The stone wall may seem formidable,
but it’s not of my building. I must open the gate.
That wall’s a trifle steep for climbing.”
I was amusing myself with the idea that my identity
was a dark mystery to her. I had read English novels
in which the young lord of the manor is always mistaken
for the game-keeper’s son by the pretty daughter
of the curate who has come home from school to be the
belle of the county. But my lady of the red tam-o’-shanter
was not a creature of illusions.
“It serves a very good purpose—the wall, I mean—
Mr. Glenarm.”
She was walking down the steps and I followed. I
am not a man to suffer a lost school-girl to cross my
lands unattended in a snow-storm; and the piazza of a
boat-house is not, I submit, a pleasant loafing-place on
a winter day. She marched before me, her hands in her
pockets—I liked her particularly that way—with an
easy swing and a light and certain step. Her remark
about the wall did not encourage further conversation
and I fell back upon the poets.
“Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,”
I quoted. Quoting poetry in a snow-storm while you
stumble through a woodland behind a girl who shows
no interest in either your prose or your rhymes has its
embarrassments, particularly when you are breathing a
trifle hard from the swift pace your auditor is leading
you.
“I have heard that before,” she said, half-turning her
face, then laughing as she hastened on.
Her brilliant cheeks were a delight to the eye. The
snow swirled about her, whitened the crown of her red
cap and clung to her shoulders. Have you ever seen
snow-crystals gleam, break, dissolve in fair, soft, storm-blown
hair? Do you know how a man will pledge his
soul that a particular flake will never fade, never cease
to rest upon a certain flying strand over a girlish temple?
And he loses—his heart and his wager—in a
breath! If you fail to understand these things, and are
furthermore unfamiliar with the fact that the color in
the cheeks of a girl who walks abroad in a driving snow-storm
marks the favor of Heaven itself, then I waste
time, and you will do well to rap at the door of another
inn.
“I’d rather missed you,” I said; “and, really, I should
have been over to apologize if I hadn’t been afraid.”
“Sister Theresa is rather fierce,” she declared. “And
we’re not allowed to receive gentlemen callers—it says
so in the catalogue.”
“So I imagined. I trust Sister Theresa is improving.”
[Illustration: She marched before me, her hands in her pockets.]
“Yes; thank you.”
“And Miss Devereux—she is quite well, I hope?”
She turned her head as though to listen more carefully,
and her step slackened for a moment; then she
hurried blithely forward.
“Oh, she’s always well, I believe.”
“You know her, of course.”
“Oh, rather! She gives us music lessons.”
“So Miss Devereux is the music-teacher, is she?
Should you call her a popular teacher?”
“The girls call her”—she seemed moved to mirth by
the recollection—“Miss Prim and Prosy.”
“Ugh!” I exclaimed sympathetically. “Tall and hungry-looking,
with long talons that pound the keys with
grim delight. I know the sort.”
“She’s a sight!”—and my guide laughed approvingly.
“But we have to take her; she’s part of the treatment.”
“You speak of St. Agatha’s as though it were a sanatorium.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad! I’ve seen worse.”
“Where do most of the students come from—all what
you call Hoosiers?”
“Oh, no! They’re from all over—Cincinnati, Chicago,
Cleveland, Indianapolis.”
“What the magazines call the Middle West.”
“I believe that is so. The bishop addressed us once
as the flower of the Middle West, and made
Comments (0)