Part 36 (2/2)

The girl stared at her and asked: ”Why, Aunt Molly--what is it? I don't understand.”

The woman in pulling her wrap from the chair, tumbled the letters to the floor. She slipped into her cloak and kissed the bewildered girl, and said as she stood in the doorway: ”There they are, my dear--they are yours; do what you please with them.”

She hurried down the stairs, and finding John sitting alone before the fire in the sitting room, would have bidden him good night as she pa.s.sed through the room, but he stopped her.

”There is one thing more, Molly,” he said, as he motioned to a chair.

”Yes,” she answered, ”I wondered if you had forgotten it!”

He worried the fire, and renewed the blaze, before he spoke. ”What about Neal--how does he feel?”

”John,” replied the woman, turning upon him a radiant face, ”it is the most beautiful thing in the world--that boy's love for Jennie! Why, every night after his work is done, sitting there in the office alone, Neal writes her a letter, that he never mails; just takes his heart to her, John. I found a great stack of them in his desk the other day.”

Barclay's face crinkled in a spasm of pain, and he exclaimed, ”Poor little kids--poor, poor children.”

”John--” Molly Brown well hesitated, and then took courage and cried: ”Won't you--won't you for Ellen's sake? It is like that--like you and Ellen. And,” she stammered, ”oh, John, I do want to see one such love affair end happily before I die.”

Barclay's hard jaw trembled, and his eyes were wet as he rose and limped across the great room. At the foot of the stairs he called up, ”Don't bother with the phone, Jeanette, I'm going to use it.” He explained, ”The branch in her room rings when we use this one,” and then asked, ”Do you know where he is--at home or at the office?”

”If the ten o'clock train is in, he's at the office. If not, he's not in town.”

But Barclay went to the hall, and when he returned he said, ”Well, I got him; he'll be right out.”

Molly was standing by the fire. ”What are you going to say, John?” she asked.

”Oh, I don't know. There'll be enough for me to say, I suppose,” he replied, as he looked at the floor.

She gave him her hand, and they stood for a minute looking back into their lives. They walked together toward the door, but at the threshold their eyes met and each saw tears, and they parted without words.

Neal Ward found Barclay prodding the fire, and the gray little man, red-faced from his task, limped toward the tall, handsome youth, and led him to a chair. Barclay stood for a time with his back to the fire, and his head down, and in the silence he seemed to try to speak several times before the right words came. Then he exclaimed:

”Neal, I was wrong--dead wrong--and I've been too proud and mean all this time--to say so.”

Neal stared open-eyed at Barclay and moistened his lips before language came to him. Finally he said: ”Well, Mr. Barclay--that's all right. I never blamed you. You needn't have bothered about--that is, to tell me.”

Barclay gazed at the young man abstractedly for a minute that seemed interminable, and then broke out, ”d.a.m.n it, Neal, I can't propose to you--but that's about what I've got you out here to-night for.”

He laughed nervously, but the young face showed his obtuseness, and John Barclay having broken the ice in his own heart put his hands in his pockets and threw back his head and roared, and then cried merrily: ”All we need now is a chorus in fluffy skirts and an orchestra with me coming down in front singing, 'Will you be my son-in-law?' for it to be real comic opera.”

The young man's heart gave such a bound of joy that it flashed in his face, and the father, seeing it, was thrilled with happiness. So he limped over to Neal's chair and stood beaming down upon the embarra.s.sed young fellow.

”But, Mr. Barclay--” the boy found voice, ”I don't know--the money--it bothers me.”

And John Barclay again threw his head back and roared, and then they talked it all out. He told Neal the story of his year's work. It was midnight when they heard the telephone ringing, and Barclay, curled up like an old gray cat in his chair before the fire, said for old times'

sake, ”Neal, go see who is ringing up at this unholy hour.”

And while Neal Ward steps to the telephone, let us go upstairs on one last journey with our astral bodies and discover what Jeanette is doing. After Molly's departure, Jeanette stooped to pick up what Molly had left. She saw her own name, ”Jeanette Barclay,” and her address written on an envelope. She picked it up. It was dated: ”Written December 28,” and she saw that the package was filled with letters in envelopes similarly addressed in Neal Ward's handwriting. She dropped the letter on her dressing-table and began to undo her hair. In a few minutes she stopped and picked up another, and laid it down unopened.

But in half an hour she was sitting on the floor reading the letters through her tears. The flood of joy that came over her drowned her pride. For an hour she sat reading the letters, and they brought her so near to her lover that it seemed that she must reach out and touch him. She was drawn by an irresistible impulse to her telephone that sat on her desk. It seemed crazy to expect to reach Neal Ward at midnight, but as she rose from the floor with the letters slipping from her lap and with the impulse like a cord drawing her, she saw, or thought she saw, standing by the desk, a part of the fluttering shadows, a girl--a quaint, old-fas.h.i.+oned girl in her teens, with--but then she remembered the dream girl her lover had described in the letter she had just been reading, and she understood the source of her delusion. And yet there the vision moved by the telephone, smiling and beckoning; then it faded, and there came rus.h.i.+ng back to her memory a host of recollections of her childhood, and of some one she could not place, and then a memory of danger,--and then it was all gone and there stood the desk and the telephone and the room as it was.

She shuddered slightly, and then remembered that she had just been through two great nervous experiences--the story of her father's changed life, and the return of her lover. And she was a level-headed, strong-nerved girl. So the joy of love in her heart was not dampened, and the cord drawing her to the desk in the window did not loosen, and she did not resist. With a gulp of nervous fear she rang the telephone bell and called, ”54, please!” She heard a buzzing, and then a faint stir in the receiver, and then she got the answer. She sat a-tremble, afraid to reply. The call was repeated in her ear, and then she said so faintly that she could not believe it would be heard, ”Oh, Neal--Neal--I have come back.”

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