The Wishing Carpet

SHE steadily refused to see him in the fortnight which followed. During the first frightened days of consultations and hourly bulletins Miss Ada telephoned constantly for news, and the girl received her reports gravely and gratefully. He had a fighting chance; he would live, but he would lose an arm: the arm would be saved but the hand must go: he would keep his hand, or the greater portion of it: he wasn’t even going to lose a finger, and there would be only one small scar on his forehead!

All evidence pointed clearly to Black Orlo. He had been known to make threats, audibly, and in the blurred pages of The Torch, and he had never been seen since he handed Pap Tolliver the note for Glen Darrow. The law was utterly unable to pick up a clue.

As soon as he was able to see visitors Peter sent for Glen, imperatively at first, then humbly, and at length wheedlingly, but although he wrote that Babe Jennings and Nancy Carey and Mary-Lou Tenafee had each been granted a royal audience, the doctor’s daughter stayed away.

“I believe,” he told his mother reflectively, “that you’ll have to go and get her for me.”

Mrs. Parker looked up from her letters and considered him. The remark was reminiscent, some way, and she sent her trained memory to the card index of her mind. He looked even younger and fairer than usual with his convalescent pallor and his bandaged head, his pale blue silk pajamas and his blue brocaded dressing gown—endearingly like the little boy of eleven who had— That was it! Peter with a broken leg in a cast, Peter sending a telephone summons and then a beguiling little note and then a maid to bring the small sweetheart of the moment, and all these failing, making the calm statement to his mother—“I believe you’ll have to go and get her for me!”

She had gone, amusedly, and rather annoyed at herself, but the nurse was very particular that he shouldn’t bring his temperature up by fretting.... A pink, thick, unpleasant little girl, she had privately thought her, while she overawed the very ordinary mother and brought the child back in triumph for a half hour’s visit. “You sent me for a girl once before, Peter, do you remember? When you were eleven, and had broken your leg?”

“Did I, Eugenia? Yes, of course I did—the little fat Dorothy Something-or-other—the Sheba of the hour! And you got her, I remember distinctly.”

“I got her, Peter,” she shaded the pronoun. “But this, considering ages and circumstances, is a rather more difficult order!”

“Wouldn’t you like to get Glen Darrow for me, Madame President?”

She straightened the magazines on the table into a trim pile, evening the edges carefully. “Yes, certainly, Peter,” she said pleasantly. “I will be very glad to ask her, of course.”

“Come here!” It was imperious, impertinent, cajoling. “Look me in the eye, Madame President! Wouldn’t you like to get Glen Darrow for me?”

“My son,” said his mother huskily, her keen gaze dimming for an instant, “there’s nothing in the world I’d like so much.”

“’Atta girl, Eugenia,” said her only child cordially. “You’re a good egg. You’n me both.”

She considered him gravely. “You are serious?”

“Heaven helping me, Mrs. Parker, I shall never be serious, but I want Glen Darrow more than I can possibly express to you without becoming unduly lyrical.”

She regarded him in silence. Never, since his tiny childhood, had he given her so much happiness as in the weeks following her arrival at the Bella Vista. He was taking an interest which all his persiflage could not disguise in his mill; he had fallen in love with a fine and worthwhile young woman; and in the crowded hours of glorious life which she had so ardently desired for him he had shown his mettle. He had faced hideous danger blithely and gallantly, risking his life, very nearly giving his life—that happy and heedless life which she had deplored as worthless—for mill workers of whose existence he had been unaware a few weeks earlier.

Peter had changed. Peter had developed. She was not going to delude herself with exaggerations; sudden conversions seldom lasted, but she had evidence, at least, of his potentialities, and that gave her faith and patience. She put on her stern gray felt sport hat and rang for her car, and her chin with the faint, persistent little beard (which she sincerely meant to be rid of whenever—if ever—she had a day to spare!) looked even more salient and determined than usual.

Peter had sent for Henry Clay Bean earlier, and the solemn little boy arrived just as the Federation President was leaving, and she halted for a kindly word with him. (She earnestly hoped that her son’s interest in the child went further than his vow to make him laugh if he had to take a correspondence course in circus clowning to accomplish it.)

“Hello, Jest and Youthful Jollity!” she caught Peter’s greeting as she went out. “Nods and becks and wreathèd smiles. The loud guffaw that speaks the vacant mind, eh, old top?”—and Beany’s puzzled, respectful, “Ye-as, suh!”

In exactly three-quarters of an hour she was back, looking very grave.

“Well, Mrs. Mercury?” Peter hooded the anxious eagerness in his eyes. “At first glance, you appear to be alone.”

“I am alone, my son, and I bring you bad news.” A slight, quickly controlled tremor passed over the slim figure in the blue brocaded dressing gown, but she proceeded with the bracing directness for which she was famous. “Peter, she was very gentle and very kind; she inquired for you with a great deal of interest and was sincerely glad to know of your improvement, but—she is going to marry the superintendent of the mill on the seventeenth of next month—the day she is twenty years old.”

Peter Parker drew a long breath. “I doubt it greatly,” he said. “And now, Eugenia, I have one more chore for you. Will you go to the largest and most complacent bank you can find, demand to see the president (modestly mentioning that you’re a president yourself—all us prexies together!) and ask him to send me the expertest expert accountant and auditor he has in stock?”

“But, Peter, you are hardly well enough, I think—and besides, can’t Mr. Carey tell you anything you wish to know?”

“Mr. Carey can’t tell me anything I don’t know,” her son stated serenely, “with the possible exception of the time in which Cotton Belle won the quarter in ’99. Will you be fleet, Eugenia?”

His mother still hesitated. “I suppose you know, Peter, that your mill is in a very bad way, financially. Poor Mr. Carey seems greatly distressed over it. I understand from him that, owing to the dishonesty of a tried and trusted employee, the Altonia is and has been on the brink of failure.”

“You understand from old Carey that he understands from Luke Manders that such is the mournful fact, Eugenia.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean by that, Peter?”

“I mean, oddly enough, exactly what I say. Carey understands from Manders that the mill is on the rocks.”

“But—isn’t the superintendent in a position to know?”

“I’ll say he is!” admitted her son heartily.

She studied his guileless young face for a long moment of silence. “Peter! Do you mean——”

“I shan’t know for certain what I mean until you bring me the expert above mentioned,” he chided her gently, and the Federation President, with a little gasp, hurried from the room the second time that day to do the imperious bidding of her flippant son.

It was on the following Sunday afternoon that Miss Ada Tenafee came fluttering upstairs to tell her protégée that Mr. Peter Parker was calling.

Glen had been sitting in her primly charming chamber with the purple rosebuds and weeping willows and humming birds on the wall, with her hands folded in her lap, looking out of the window at the magnolia tree where a cardinal was making liquid inquiry—“What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?” She stood up quickly and turned a paling face to her friend. “I can’t see him, Miss Ada. I—can’t!”

“Oh, honey, you must!” the spinster urged emotionally. “The chauffeur had to almost carry him up the steps, and the nurse is waiting in the machine, and he looks—he looks—” she choked over it—“like death on a pale horse riding! He says he asks for only five minutes. Glen! You must go down, dearie!”

He was sitting in the Tenafee chair, and when the girl came into the room he got up promptly, but with some difficulty, and he swayed a little as he faced her.

“You shouldn’t have come,” said Glen very low.

“I had to come. You wouldn’t come to me.”

“I couldn’t.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Miss Ada, peeping down on them from the upper hall, thought how amazingly, appealingly young he looked ... indeed, they both did ... like a pair of anxious, unhappy, desperate children.

“Do you—feel stronger?” Glen managed.

“My head aches most of the time,” he admitted plaintively.

“I’m sorry.”

“Then will you sit down in that chair and let me sit on the Wishing Carpet and put my head in your lap? I have the feeling that it would help a lot.”

She shook her head, scarlet cheeked.

“Did my mother tell you my plans for making over the mill and what I’m doing for Beany since—” he lifted a hand to his bandaged head—“the slight concussion of what we doubted very much was there?”

She nodded, “Yes; she told me. And I want to tell you—I was going to write you—I want to take back—” she came to a standstill, her eyes on the floor.

“I don’t know what you can take back,” said Peter Parker gravely. “You’ve never given me anything except hating and despising and——”

“It’s that I want to take back. I want to tell you that it wasn’t true, what I said about you in The Torch,” the doctor’s daughter told him very low, “and that I know it wasn’t true, and that—I’m sorry.”

“Then it isn’t because you still despise me?”

“No; oh, no!”

He put his hand on the neat bandage again. “I can’t exactly remember which I’ve actually said, and which I’ve only dreamed of saying, and planned to say,” he fretted. “So, even at the risk of repeating myself, of boring you, I think I’d better tell you—do you mind if I sit down?”

“Oh, please!”

“Thank you.” He looked younger than ever, leaning back in Miss Ada’s own dear father’s stately chair. “I just want you to know, you see, in case I have not mentioned it to you before, that I think your hair is like a burnished copper shield ... and a sunset—not a pinky, pale, insipid sunset but a splendid, stormy, gorgeous one, and like a flame, and that flame is searing me and scorching me and devouring me, and I want it to! I love you so much that I’ll do anything you wish—and be anything you wish. I’ll take you over the world, or I’ll let you stay here. You can build model mills—” he frowned, and getting unsteadily to his feet walked to the Persian rug and stood upon it. “I wish somebody would make a good job of blowing up the Altonia or burning it down, so I could start in and prove to you——”

“You don’t have to prove anything to me,” said Glen Darrow very low, “because I believe—everything. Oh, why didn’t your mother make you understand? I am going to marry Luke Manders the day I am twenty years old. I promised my father, when he was dying, and now—” she crimsoned suddenly. “I know what you think—what you must think of him. Of course,” in spite of her, there was a faint curl of the lip, “he said he was only going to get the doors open to get the hands out——”

Peter took a swaying step toward her and shook his head. “Old pins pretty weak and wobbly. Mind coming a little nearer?” When she came close he put his whole hand and his bandaged hand on her shoulders. “I am going to ask you three questions, and you will tell me the truth because you are true.” He drew a long breath. “Do you love him?”

“No,” she answered forlornly.

“Do you love me?”

“Yes.” It was a whisper, but she met his gaze unfalteringly.

Peter put his hands resolutely behind him. “You darling!” He barely breathed it. “Well, then,” he went on briskly, “if I can prove to you that your father wouldn’t want you to marry him, will you marry me?”

“Oh, but you can’t!” she wailed. “Luke was everything to Dad; he adored him. You see, he found him when he was——”

“Answer me!” Peter Parker commanded. “If I can prove it, will you marry me?”

Wide-eyed, drawing in a scared breath, the doctor’s daughter moved her head slowly up and down.

“Thank you,” he said gravely and courteously. “Now, will you ask Hopkins to come and give me an arm to the car? I’m going to be awfully busy for the rest of the day and night!”