Part 33 (1/2)

'Let me see it,' he continued.

And rather reluctantly Jerry handed him a bulky letter, the direction of which covered nearly the whole of one side of the envelope.

Very nervously Frank scanned the address, which might as well have been in the Fiji language for any idea it conveyed to him.

'To whom is it directed? I cannot read German,' he said

'I don't know,' Jerry replied. 'I have not looked at it, and would rather not.'

'Why, what a little prude you are;' and Frank laughed uneasily. 'What possible harm is there in reading an address? The postmaster has to do it, and any one who took it to the office would do it if he could.'

This sounded reasonable enough, and standing beside him, while he held the letter a little way from her, Jerry read the address in German first, then, as he said to her: 'I don't understand that lingo, put it into English,' she read again:

'To Marguerite Heinrich, if living, and if dead to any of her friends; or to the postmaster at Wiesbaden, Germany. If not delivered within two months, return to Arthur Tracy, Tracy Park, Shannondale, Ma.s.s., U.S.A.'

'Marguerite--Marguerite Heinrich!' Frank repeated, 'That is not Gretchen. The letter is not to her.'

'I guess it is,' Jerry replied. 'He told me once that Gretchen was a pet name for Marguerite.'

'Yes,' Frank returned, with a sigh, as this little crumb of hope was swept away, while to himself he added: 'At all events it is not Marguerite Tracy, and that makes me less a scoundrel than I should otherwise be. If he had written a little more it would have run over to the other side of the envelope. Any one would know he was crazy,' he continued, with a sickly attempt at a smile, while Jerry stood waiting to take the letter from him.

He knew she was waiting, and said to her, as he put it in his pocket:

'Thank you for bringing this to me. It is probably some nonsense which ought not to go, even if the sending it would do no harm, as it certainly would.'

Until then Jerry had not realised that he did not mean the letter to go at all. She had remembered her promise to take it to him, and forgotten that he had said it must not be sent lest it should do harm to Maude.

But it all came back to her now, and her tears fell like rain as she stood for a moment irresolute. But loyalty to Arthur conquered every other feeling. Surely he would not suffer any wrong to come to his own brother and niece. The letter was harmless, and must go.

'Give it to me, please. You do not mean to keep it?' she said, at last, in a tone and manner she might have borrowed from Arthur himself, it was so like him when on his dignity.

And Frank felt it, and knew that he had more than a child to deal with, and must use duplicity if he would succeed. So he said to her quietly and naturally:

'Why, how excited you are! Do you think I intend to keep the letter? It is as safe with me as with you. It is true that when I talked with you in the Tramp House I thought that it must not be sent, but I have changed my mind since then, and do not care. I am going to the office, and will take it myself. John is saddling my horse now, and if I hurry I shall be in time for the western mail. Good-bye, and do not look so worried. Do you take me for a villain?'

He was leaving the room as he talked, and before he had finished he was in the hall and near the outer door, leaving Jerry stupefied, and perplexed, and only half rea.s.sured.

'If I had not sold myself to Satan before, I have now, for sure; and still I did not actually tell her that I would post it, though it amounted to that,' Frank thought, as he galloped through the park toward the highway which led to the town.

Once he took the letter from his pocket and examined it again, wis.h.i.+ng so much that he knew its contents.

'If I could read German, I believe I am bad enough now to open it; but I can't, and I dare not take it to any one who can,' he said, as he put it again in his pocket, half resolving to post it and take the chances of its ever reaching Gretchen's friends, or any one who had known her.

'I'll see how I feel when I get inside,' he thought, as he dismounted from his horse before the door of the post-office.

The mail was just in, and the little room was full of people waiting for it to be distributed; and Frank waited with them, leaning against the wall, with his head bent down, and beating his boot with his riding-whip.

'I must decide soon,' he thought, when a voice not far from him caught his ear, and glancing from under his hat, he saw Peterkin coming in, portly and pompous, and with him a dapper little man, who, in the days of the 'Liza Ann, had been a driver for the boat, but who now, like his former employer, was a millionaire, and wore a thousand-dollar diamond ring. To him Peterkin was saying:

'There, that's him--that's Frank Tracy, the biggest swell in town--lives in that handsome place I was telling you about.'

Strange that words like these from a man like old Peterkin should have inflated Frank's pride; but he was weak in many points; and though he detested Peterkin, it gratified him to be pointed out to strangers as a swell who lived in a fine house, and with the puff of vanity came the reflection that, as Frank Tracy of some other place than Tracy Park, with all its appliances of wealth, he would not be a swell whom strangers cared to see, and Jerry's chance was lost again.