Geraldine straightened her slight body. Terror was in every line of her delicate face, but Mrs. Barry saw her control it. The details of the stories she had heard came back to her vividly. She realized the suffering and the fate from which her boy had delivered the captive. Geraldine was exquisite to look at now as she faced her jailer. That ethereal quality which was hers gave her spirituelle face a wonderful appeal.
"Ben was right," thought Mrs. Barry with a thrill of pride. "She is a thoroughbred."
"Mr. Carder," she said, approaching still nearer, her peremptory tone forcing him to turn his long, twitching face toward her, "Miss Melody is about to marry my son. He will attend to any business you may have with her."
"Huh! That's it, is it? You don't look like the kind of woman who will enjoy having a forger in the family."
The girl's eyes closed under the stab.
"Geraldine, I should like you to go upstairs, dear," said Mrs. Barry gently. The girl moved slowly toward the door, Carder's eyes following her full of a fierce, baffled hunger.
He turned on Mrs. Barry with the ugliest look she had ever beheld in a human countenance.
"Your son has stolen my boy, too, my servant, and I've come after him," he said. "The law'll teach that fellow whether he can take other people's property. That boy was bound to me out o' the asylum and I won't stand such impudence, I warn you. Where is he? Where is Pete? I've got a few things to teach him." The furious man was breathing heavily.
"I understand that you have taught him a few things already," replied Mrs. Barry, her eyes as steady as her voice. "I think, as you say, the law may take a hand in your affairs. My son and Pete have gone to the city now, and I fancy it is on your business."
"What business?" ejaculated Carder, fumbling his hat, his rage appearing to feel a check.
"That I don't know, really. I was not interested; but I seem to remember hearing my son use your name.—Lamson, is that you?" she added in the same tone.
The chauffeur was standing at the door. "Yes, Mrs. Barry, you rang."
"Show this man the way to the station, Lamson."
Rufus Carder gave her one parting, vindictive look, and strode to the door.
"Out of my way!" he said savagely, as he pushed by the chauffeur and proceeded out of doors and down the path like one in haste. Mrs. Barry believed he was, indeed, in haste and driven by fear.
She proceeded upstairs to Geraldine's room and found the girl pacing the floor. She paused and gazed at her hostess, her eyes dry and bright. Mrs. Barry approached and took her in her arms. At the affectionate embrace a sob rose in the girl's throat.
"When he says it, it seems true again," she said brokenly. "Ben says it is probably a lie, but I don't know, I don't know."
"That wretch declaring it makes it likely to be untrue. Ben tells me you have lost your father, and if no proceedings were taken against him in his lifetime, I should not fear now. My son hints at disreputable things committed by this man, and if he can prove them, which he has gone to do, and Pete promises that they can do, then the culprit will not want to draw attention to himself by starting any scandal, not even for the joy of revenge on you. Forget it all, Geraldine." The addition was made so tenderly that the girl's desperate composure gave way and she trembled in the enfolding arms.
Mrs. Barry loved her for struggling not to weep. She kissed her cheek as she gently released her. "You are safe, and beloved, and entering a new world. You are young to have endured so many sorrows, but youth is elastic and the future is bright."
Geraldine's breast heaved, she bit her lip, and no eyes ever expressed more than the speaking orbs into which the queen of Keefe was looking.
"I know all that you are thinking," said Mrs. Barry. "I know all that you would like to say. Don't try now. You have had enough excitement. I have always wanted a daughter. I hope you will love me, too."
She kissed the girl again, on the lips this time, and there was fervor in the return.
The next day Mrs. Barry telephoned to half a dozen of her son's girl friends and invited them to come to a sewing-bee and help with the curtains for her cottage. She said that Miss Melody was visiting her and that she would like them to know her. So they all came, wild with curiosity to see the girl that their own Ben had kidnapped and who was going to make him forget them; and Geraldine won them all by her modesty and naturalness. The fact that Ben's mother had accepted her gave her courage in the face of this bevy who had grown up with her lover from childhood. They were too uncertain of the exact status of affairs between the beautiful stranger and their old friend to speak openly of him to her, but almost every reminiscence or subject of which they talked led up to Ben. Of course, some among the six pairs of eyes leveled at Geraldine had a green tinge, and there were some girlish heartaches; and when the chattering flock had had their tea and cakes and left for home, there were certain ones who discussed the impossibility of there being anything serious in the wind.
Ben was not even at home. Would he have gone away for an indefinite time as his mother said he had done, if he was as engrossed in the girl as gossip had said? Had not that very gossip proceeded from the humble walls of Miss Upton's shop where the stranger had apparently found her level? The Barrys had always held such a fine position, etc., etc., etc.
"Oh, but," said Adele Hastings, "that girl is a lady. Every movement and word proves it."
"Besides," added another maiden, "her being humble wouldn't have anything to do with it. It never has, from the time of King Cophetua on."
"Well," put in the poor little girl with the greenest eyes of all, "I think it is very significant that Ben has gone away. You notice Mrs. Barry didn't invite her to come until he had gone, and that common Mrs. Whipp called her by her first name. I heard her myself."
On the whole, Geraldine had scored, and really, although she was at peace with the whole world, the fact of Mrs. Barry's approval dwarfed every other opinion and event; for it meant that no longer need she set up a mental warning and barrier against thoughts of her lover.
A few days afterward Ben telephoned to have Lamson at the station at a certain hour, and he and Pete returned from their strange quest. Little he dreamed of the stir that telephone message caused in his home.
All the way out to Keefe on the train he was planning interviews with his mother and wondering whether the seed he had dropped into her mind before leaving had borne fruit. He had promised Geraldine not to coerce her, and the girl's pride he knew would not submit to opposing his mother's wish. Therefore, when Mrs. Barry walked out on the piazza to meet him, it was a very serious son that she encountered.
"What is the matter, Benny?" she asked as she kissed him. "Have you failed?"
"No, indeed. I have succeeded triumphantly. I've got Carder in a box, and, believe me, he won't try to lift up the lid and let anybody see him."
"He was here soon after you left," said Mrs. Barry calmly.
Ben looked surprised and alert.
"What did he want?"
"Pete; and he was going to have him or put you in the lock-up. Also he wanted Miss Melody. He's a wretch, Ben. I'm glad you went after him."
"He'll not trouble her any more," said the young fellow, walking into the house with his mother clinging to his arm. "Carder is going to have ample leisure to think over the game he has played. Isn't it a strange satire of fate that should make insignificant little Pete the boomerang to turn back and floor him? Pete's an ideal witness. He sees what he sees and he knows what he knows, and nothing can shake him because he doesn't know anything else. Great Scott! when I located the facts at that hospital and linked them together and brought an accusation against Carder, it was like opening a door to a swarm of hornets. He has made so many people hate him that when the timid ones found it would be safe to loosen up, they were ready to fall upon him and sting him to death. He's safe to get a long sentence, and it will be time enough when he comes out to talk to him about Mr. Melody's debts—if Geraldine wishes it."
Ben looked around suddenly at his mother.
"Have you been to Keefeport to see Geraldine?"
She returned his gaze smiling, and feigned to tremble. "I'm so glad I have, Ben. You look so severe."
"And did you take that magnifying glass?"
"Yes."
"Wasn't I right?" asked Ben with some relief.
"You were. I like the girl. I feel we are going to be friends."
"Well, then, how about her being a clerk for Miss Upton?"
Ben asked the question frowning, and flung himself down beside his mother where she had seated herself on a divan. Why couldn't her blood run as fast as his? Why must she be so cold and deliberate at a crucial time? "Going to be friends!" What an utterly inadequate speech!
"I want to talk to you about that," rejoined his mother. "Will you please go into my study and bring me a letter you'll find on the table?"
Without a word, and still with the dissatisfied line in his forehead, the young man rose and moved away toward the closed door of the sanctum.
He opened it and there was a moment of dead silence. Mrs. Barry could visualize Geraldine as she looked standing there, radiantly expectant, mischievously blissful. The door slammed, and all was silence.
The mother laughed softly over the bit of sewing she had picked up. For a minute she could not see very plainly, but she wiped her eyes and it passed.
Of course Ben wanted to be married at once, and whatever he wanted Geraldine wanted, but Mrs. Barry overruled this.
"I hope you will go back to school, Ben, and get your sheepskin," she said. "I want you to live in the city, too, and leave Geraldine with me. I would like to have some happiness with a daughter before she is engrossed in being your wife. Wait for your wedding until the orchard blooms again."
Ecstatic as Ben was, he could see sense in this; but vacation came first and Geraldine was a belle at Keefeport that summer. Her beauty blossomed, and all the repressed vivacity of her nature came to the surface. Her room at Rockcrest commanded the ocean, and every night before she slept she knelt before her window and gave thanks for a happiness which seemed as illimitable as the waters rolling to the horizon. She yachted, and danced, and canoed, and flew, all that summer. She gained the hearts of the women by her unspoiled modesty and consideration, while Ben was the envy of every bachelor at the resort. Nor did Geraldine forget Miss Upton. Every few days she called at the shop, and the two women there were never tired of admiring and exclaiming over the charming costumes in which Mrs. Barry dressed her child, and many a gift the girl brought to them, never forgetting what she owed to her good fairy.
Pete was a happy general utility man and Miss Upton borrowed him at times; but he liked best working on the yacht, where he was never through polishing and cleaning, keeping it spick and span. He was given a blue suit and a yachting cap and rolled around the deck the jolliest of jolly little tars.
When autumn came, Ben Barry took rooms in the city, coming to Keefe for the week-ends. Geraldine, who had had the usual school-girl fragments of music and languages, studied hard, and Mrs. Barry took her to town for one month instead of the three which she usually spent there. It was best not to divert Ben too much.
So the winter wore away, and the snow melted and the crocuses peeped up again. The robins returned, and Ben understood at last why their insistent, joyous cry was always of Geraldine, Geraldine, Geraldine!
The orchard was under solicitous surveillance this spring, and though it takes the watched pot so long to boil, at last the rosy clouds drifting in the sky seemed to catch in the apple boughs and rest there, and then the wedding day was set.
The spacious rooms of the old house were cleared for dancing, for the ceremony was to take place out under the trees at noon. Miss Upton had a new black silk dress given her by the bridegroom with a note over which she wept, for it acknowledged so affectionately all that he owed to his bride's good fairy from the day when she so effectively waved her umbrella wand in the city. One of her gowns was made over for Mrs. Whipp, who on the great day stood with the maids and watched the wedding party as it filed out over the lawn to the rosy bower of the orchard. The six bridesmaids wore pale-green and white, and, as Miss Upton viewed with satisfaction, "droopy hats." She scanned the half-dozen of Ben's men friends who supported him on the occasion and mentally noted their inferiority to her hero.
Geraldine—but who could describe Geraldine in her beautiful happiness and her happy beauty! Look over your fairy tales and find a princess in clinging, lacy robes, her veil fastened with apple blossoms, and the golden sheen of her hair shining through. Her bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley showered down before her and clung to her filmy gown as she stepped, and the sweet gravity of her eyes never left the face of the good old minister who had baptized Ben in his babyhood, until he came to the words: "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" Mrs. Barry stepped forward, took the hands of her children and placed them together. Mehitable Upton was not the only one in the large gathering who dissolved at the look on those three faces.
In a minute it was over. The two were made one, and a soft, happy confusion of tongues ensued. After the kissing and the congratulations, a breakfast was served on the wide piazzas, and the orchestra behind the screen of palms began its strains of gay music.
After Geraldine had cut the bride's cake and disappeared to put on her going-away gown, one of the waiters brought out the rice.
Mrs. Barry begged the company not to be too generous with it. "Just a pinch apiece," she said. "Don't embarrass them."
Adele Hastings, the maid of honor, laughed with her maids. She had come very close to Geraldine in the last weeks, and she had managed to get both umbrellas of bride and groom and put as much rice into them as the slim fastenings would permit. She believed the bridal pair were going to take a water trip, and she felt that the effect of opening the umbrellas on a sunny deck some day would be exhilarating.
Mrs. Barry, as serene as ever, and very handsome in her lavender satin, disappeared upstairs for a few minutes. When she returned, Lamson was driving the automobile around to the front of the house.
"Now, be merciful to those poor youngsters," she said again, as, armed with rice, they ranged themselves on the piazza and steps, making an aisle for the hero and heroine to pass through. They waited, talking and laughing, when suddenly there was a burst of sound. Over the house-top came an increasing whirr, and an aeroplane suddenly flew over their heads. An excited cry arose from the cheated crowd. Laughter and shrieks burst from every upturned face. Cher Ami circled around the house, flew away and returned, the young people below shouting messages that were never heard. At last down through the laughter-rent air came the bridal bouquet, and scrambling and more shrieks ensued. The little girl with the greenest eyes of all—one of the bridesmaids she was—secured it. We'll hope it was a comfort to her.
Lamson was demurely driving the car back to the garage, and Mrs. Barry, her dignity for once all forgotten, was laughing gayly. The wedding party fell upon her with reproaches while the orchestra gave a spirited rendition of "Going Up," the aviation operetta of the day.
They all watched the flight for a time, but the music invited, and soon the couples were disappearing through the windows into the house and gliding over the floor.
Mrs. Barry and Miss Upton stood together, still following the swiftly receding aeroplane.
Mrs. Barry shook her head and sighed, smiling. "Young America! Young America!" she murmured.
"Yes," said Miss Upton, "what would our grandfathers have thought of it? Talk about fairy tales! Do any of the old stories come up to that?"
"No," returned Mrs. Barry, "but there is one feature of them that is ever new. It is the best part of all and no story is complete without it."
"Yes, I know," said Miss Mehitable, nodding. They were both looking now at a small dark point vanishing into a pearly cloud. "I know," she repeated. "'And they lived happily ever afterward!'"
THE END