The Judge looked gratified by Berty’s praise of Titus; then, leading the way to the nest boxes, he pointed to some young pigeons to her.
“O, the darling things!” exclaimed Berty, looking in at the downy creatures, “and all in twos. Do they always have two young ones at a time? My pigeons never nested.”
“Usually, sometimes only one. Of course, these pigeons are not allowed to lay during the cold weather. They are just beginning, now that winter is thinking of yielding to spring.”
“Just look at them trying to hiss at me, Judge. Do they know that I am a stranger?”
“Certainly—try these homers.”
Berty put her slim hand in between two young homers, who promptly beat it with their unfledged wings.
“Naughty little squabs,” said Berty, caressingly. “I suppose Titus will fly these homers when they grow up. Are they workers?”
“Yes, the parents have a record of five hundred miles, but they were not bred in this loft, so he can’t let them out. These young ones would come back.”
“Training homing pigeons must be great sport,” said Berty, enthusiastically.
“It is. Even Dallas is interested in that. He has been reading that country doctors use homing pigeons extensively in their practice, and he may have to start in the country. By the way, speaking of doctors, some one said Mafferty is ill; is he?”
“Yes, but only with a cold; nothing serious. His memories of the last few weeks keep him cheerful.”
“I suppose he is as much elated as ever?”
“More so—he is the proudest man in Riverport,” and Berty laid a hand on an elusive fantail and clasped her gently. “No one could be more delighted at the turn affairs took with regard to the kidnapers. His well-laid plans succeeded.”
“No credit was given him by the press,” remarked the Judge. “No reporters interviewed him, but perhaps he does not care for that sort of thing.”
“Not at all. He shuns notoriety. All the people that he cared about gave him the glory. You, in going out to his island, and wringing his hand, conferred a tremendous honor upon him. You and the chief of police are his heroes, and at police headquarters he stands very high, and is correspondingly set up by it.”
“And your good opinion,” said the Judge, pointedly; “he knows he has that.”
Berty smiled. “Amusing to retail, he does not value my praise half as much as he does yours, or any man’s. He is sure of me. I befriended him when he was friendless, and he thinks I would like him no matter what he did. He likes me to approve; but still, nothing I could say or do would come up to that handshake of yours.”
“Remember your promise to let me know if there is anything I can do for him.”
“I will. Just now he is well enough as he is.”
“By the way, are you still going to see those unfortunate women?”
“O, yes, every day I have a dreadful feeling about them. I in one way am responsible for their captivity. I vowed that I would do all I could to mitigate it. The first few days, as I told you when we last met, they would have nothing to say to me. Then they began to thaw slightly. Little by little they seemed to understand that I had their good at heart.”
“Did you say anything to them about the other kidnaping case?”
“Yes, but not until three days ago. I told them that their trial would soon come off; that if they were to give any information about the stolen child it might influence public opinion in their favor. I could get nothing out of them. They flatly denied all knowledge of the missing boy, but at the very first instant of my mentioning the affair I caught a gleam of intelligence in the eye of one of them. She knew something about it. So what do you think I did, dear Judge?”
The Judge pushed away a pouter that was puffing and swelling out on his shoulder. “Well,” he said, mischievously, “your actions are sometimes unexpected.”
She laughed gayly. “To be true to my reputation, they were in this case. I telegraphed to New York to the little widow. I said, ‘Come to me, and possibly I may give you news of your boy.’ The poor little woman actually flew here. I wish you could have seen her, Judge. Such a teary, weary, eerie sort of a widow. All big eyes and veil, and so consumed with sorrow, which one could not wonder at.”
“Did you take her to the jail?”
“I did. I confronted her with those two young women. I had them both brought into the same room. I made no explanation, either to them or to the widow, whose name is Mrs. Tralee. When the two women, or girls—for neither of them is much over twenty—came in I abruptly pointed to them, and said to Mrs. Tralee, ‘Those girls can tell you where to get information about your lost boy.’
“It was pitiful to see that little widow’s face, Judge. Just imagine her—alone in the world, one pet boy, and he snatched from her. She gave me one look, one terrible look, as if to say, ‘Are you deceiving me?’ I shook my head solemnly. Those girls either knew where her boy was or could tell us who did know. I would have staked my life on it.
“Mrs. Tralee wasted no time in preliminaries. She fell right on her knees before them. She, a rich woman, cultured and refined and exquisitely dressed, took those degraded creatures in her outstretched arms, she pleaded with them as for her soul’s salvation.
“It was dreadful, Judge. I never heard anything more affecting in my life. I just stood and cried like a baby, and I heard a sniffing behind the door where the jailer stood, and when we came out I noticed his eyes were all red.
“At first the two girls tried to laugh it off. They looked sheepishly at each other, but it was no laughing matter. Despite themselves, and hardened as they undoubtedly are, something womanly arose in them, something responded to that poor little woman’s cries and groans.
“As I said before, it was terrible. It gave me a kind of exquisite pain to listen to Mrs. Tralee. She assured the girls that she was telling the truth in the sight of her Maker when she stated that the ransom demanded for her son was one she could not pay. The money left to her by her husband was not in her sole control. She would sacrifice every cent she herself owned, but she absolutely could not touch the fortune left in trust for her son.
“The two girls looked at each other. They were getting uneasy and shaky. One whispered something, the other responded, then they tried to withdraw their dresses from Mrs. Tralee’s frantic grasp. At last one of them, with a kind of desperate look, bent over and said, ‘Go to this address in New York—we can’t, and shan’t tell you a word more,’ and she rattled off something in Mrs. Tralee’s ears.
“Then, without waiting for her thanks, they pulled themselves away and ran to the door, and the jailer took them to their cells.
“Mrs. Tralee took my head between her hands. She gave me such a look, Judge—such a look from those big eyes of hers. There was no need of speech. Then she fairly flew to the railway station, and took a special train for New York; and I haven’t heard a word from her since.”
“How long ago did you say that was?”
“Three days. I thought she would telegraph me. I hope that those girls weren’t deceiving her. I spoke to them about it yesterday when I took them some things to eat, and they were utterly unresponsive.”
“I imagine from what you have told me of this affair,” said the Judge, shrewdly, “that they have not misled that bereaved woman. You will hear from her later. She is probably in communication with the child-stealers; quite likely, agreeing upon some concession—very illegal, but very easily understood. But come, these pigeons are getting to be too aggressive. Let us go out and see the rest of the live stock. I know you like horses.”
“Love them,” said Berty, intensely, “and I want to see the cow, too. Brick said you had a new one. By the way, how is the boy getting on?”
“Well, I don’t know that the phrase ‘getting on’ applies to Brick,” observed the Judge, cheerfully. “It is rather a kind of backward and forward motion that keeps him in about the same place. I know I have felt it my duty to raise Roblee’s wages in order to enable him to bear up under this new species of trial.”
“The Lord will reward you, Judge,” said Berty, heartily.
“I take no credit to myself, not a particle,” said the Judge. “I come in contact with him but little. He regards Titus as his special oppressor. Look up there, Mrs. Everest.”
Berty raised her eyes. The Judge was standing in the open door of the stable pointing toward the house. “Can you see two little gray balls of down up at the top of that old elm?”
“No, sir, I can’t.”
“Look again—just where the topmost branches extend under the gutter at the roof’s edge.”
“O, yes, I do see something—those are surely not Dallas’s little owls that Bethany told me about the other day?”
“Yes, they sit there asleep all day. At night they fly about. What did Bethany tell you about them?”
“After I rescued her from those women she seemed greatly relieved, and confided to me a slight misgiving she had had. Suppose they had taken her to New York, and had not been able to find Daddy Grandpa. ‘I tell you, Mrs. Everest, what Bethany would do,’ she said, sweetly, to me. ‘Bethany would open her window at night and call ’Frisco and ’Mento, Dallas’s two little owls that fly in the dark, and she would say, “Go home quickly and tell Daddy Grandpa that Bethany wants him.”’”
The Judge was listening intently. “How curious is the working of a child’s mind!” he said. “In that statement she confesses a belief that I was here all the time, that I had not gone to New York. She must have had an intuitive distrust of those women.”
“I believe she had,” said Berty, decidedly. “It was just her sweet, yielding nature that made her go with them.”
“She is not always sweet and yielding. You should see her when Airy Tingsby is about.”
“I know she does not like Airy,” said Berty, in an amused voice, “but Airy likes her.”
The Judge looked grave. “Bethany is trying to overcome her dislike. She has Airy here a good deal lately.”
“And you have put Airy in Miss Featherby’s school, I hear,” said Berty, with slight curiosity.
The Judge smiled. “Yes, you know Dallas undertook to instruct her. He mystified me greatly, for I knew he did not mind doing it, and yet he suddenly became loath to go out to the Tingsby cottage to give Airy her lessons.”
“Of course, now, you understand that that was in consequence of his instructions from us, to keep about the house as much as possible.”
“Yes, now, I understand, but then I did not. However, I reasoned the matter out with myself. Airy would be better under a woman’s care, so I called on Miss Featherby. I had some scruples about putting Airy in a boarding school.”
“And such a fashionable one,” murmured Berty.
“But Miss Featherby is such a sensible, such a very sensible person,” continued the Judge, “that I very much wished Airy to be under her care.”
“You really like the poor little mortal, Judge, I do believe,” exclaimed Berty, irrepressibly.
The Judge looked cautiously over his shoulder as if he were afraid the horses and the cow might be eavesdropping.
“I do not like her, I do not like her,” he said, seriously.
Berty burst into a merry peal of laughter. “No one does, yet. Why is it she makes us all stand round?”
“I don’t like her,” repeated the Judge, cautiously, “and yet I find myself in the presence of a very strong young personality when I am with her. That strength will be expended in some way. If I can train it, perhaps I ought to.”
“She is very clever, very peculiar, and very fascinating,” said Berty, succinctly. “She could twist me round her little finger if she wished to, but she doesn’t. Her ideals are not mine.”
“She has affection, too,” said the Judge, warmly. “She came rushing in the morning after Bethany’s attempted capture by those women and alarmed me by her demonstrations of anger and alarm.”
“I suppose she does not come here very much now that she is at Miss Featherby’s.”
“She comes whenever she is allowed to go out. If it is to go downtown with a teacher she takes us in on her way.”
Berty laughed again. “You will have to adopt her too, Judge; that is, if you have no scruples about lifting her out of her sphere.”
“I have scruples, but what am I to do? Is not ambition a good thing? Mrs. Tingsby does not want to rise, Airy does. I have talked very seriously to the child. I have explained to her that her wild ambition is going to create a gulf between her and her family. She says it won’t.”
“It will,” remarked Berty, decidedly.
“Well, my course is clear,” said the Judge. “I feel it. The spectacle of that little sick creature sitting up at night, studying in a cheerless room, haunted me. I have put her where she is warm and comfortable, where her very environment is enough to cheer and uplift her.”
“How does she get on with the other girls?”
The Judge smiled. “Peculiarly. I fancied that she would have a hard time with them on account of her different social station. However, I said to her, ‘No stories, Airy. Tell the truth about yourself.’”
“And did she?”
“She did,” said the Judge, laconically. Then, after a time, he laughed suddenly and heartily. “The truth in her case so far transcended the schoolgirls’ anticipations or realizations that they looked upon it as the wildest absurdity.”
Berty seemed puzzled.
The Judge repressed his amusement, and looking down at her in his fatherly, benevolent way said, “Imagine to yourself, my dear Mrs. Everest, a schoolroom full of girls, all interested in the newcomer—I have this straight from Airy—she, poor child, sitting grim and composed, ready for anything. Finally, one girl plucks up courage enough to ask Airy what her name is, where she has lived, how many servants her mother kept, what her father’s business is, what church she goes to, how much money she has in the bank, how many silk dresses her mother owns, and so on.”
Berty laughed gleefully. “I know them—that is schoolgirls—they are so delightfully silly. What did Airy say?”
“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
“And the girls were staggered, I suppose,” chuckled Berty.
“Staggered and confounded. Then Airy says they looked her over. Having foreseen something of this, in a dim and masculine way, I had taken care to provide my protégée with a carefully selected wardrobe. Her clothes were not showy, but they were what you women call elegant. I suppose you will think it the foolish whim of an old man when I tell you that I myself interviewed the dressmaker who fitted Airy out. I told her to line her little garments with the best of satin.”
Berty leaned against the stable doorway and laughed long and irrepressibly. “Well, Judge, you are the greatest man—”
“And I gave her a gold watch,” he went on, with twinkling eyes—“a very little one, but very exquisite—and a chain of wonderful workmanship.”
“You dear man!” exclaimed Berty, impulsively. “You did all this not to encourage vanity, but to spare a child’s feelings.”
“Well,” said the Judge, modestly, “I did not plan to deceive Airy’s schoolmates, but the little witches had heard of my other protégée, Bethany, and her rich grandfather, so Airy says they received her truthful account of herself as the most absurd kind of fairy tale. They shouted with laughter over her laconic description of the penury to which she had been accustomed. Then she was received into the inner circle as a kind of mystery. She says that the girls think her a foreigner, on account of her dark complexion, and this opinion is heightened by her poor English. The most accredited rumor is that she is an Italian princess, stolen from a magnificent castle by gypsies.”
Berty was convulsed with amusement. “And how does Airy take all this?”
“Philosophically,” laughed the Judge. “Really she is an astonishing girl. Details don’t concern her as much as they do most people. She grasps the whole. Dress and environment are secondary things with her, things not to be disregarded, but not to be overestimated. The primary thing is to get an education. Then she wishes to earn money, and repay me for what I have done for her, and also to support her family—a heavy burden for such young shoulders.”
“I wonder what she is going to be when she grows up?” remarked Berty, meditatively.
“Now that brings me to something that I wish to ask your advice about,” said the Judge. “Ever since the attempt was made to steal Bethany from us I have been thinking that I need some young person to look after my children—particularly the two little girls.”
“Are you counting Airy in the family?” said Berty, significantly. “I thought she would end by establishing herself here.”
“How can one defeat such an ingenious child?” responded the Judge, frankly. “She began by calling, then dropping in at mealtimes. Really, she spent the most of her time here before she went to Miss Featherby’s, and I know that when holidays come we shall have her altogether.”
“In which case you will need a lady housekeeper,” said Berty, promptly, “or Airy will rule you all. Now I know just the person for you, Judge.”
“Who is it?” he inquired, with interest.
“My friend Nancy Armitage Steele.”
“You don’t mean little Nancy, the daughter of the late General Armitage?”
“The same, Judge; but she is a tall young married woman now, and, unfortunately, a widow.”
“What! That child married!”
“Child—she is twenty-five years old.”
“How time flies!” said the Judge, musingly. “It seems only the other day that the General and I were lads in school. But how is it that his daughter needs to support herself.”
“Her husband’s health failed, then after a long illness he died. He left Nancy nothing and her father had left her nothing, so she had to go to work.”
“Poor Armitage—I knew that he made some bad investments, but I thought he could leave his child a competency. However, I have rather lost sight of the family.”
“Yes, it is some time since they left here. Now, Judge, don’t you think Mrs. Nancy would preside charmingly over your household? She is the sweetest girl.”
“I do, indeed,” said the Judge, heartily, “if she would not be too much of a fine lady to have a motherly or sisterly care of the children. You see, Mrs. Blodgett is getting old, and her department is the housekeeping. I want the next best thing to a mother for those little girls.”
“Nancy is at present mothering two hundred and fifty children in an orphan asylum,” said Berty, warmly, “and mothering them so well that the board of managers has offered to increase her salary ever so much if she will stay. But the responsibility is too much for her. She is a great worker, but she is not very strong. Next week she is coming to visit me. I know of several positions that have been offered her, but I don’t believe she has anything in view that would suit her as well as this one with her father’s old friend.”
“I shall be obliged if you will arrange an interview with her for me,” said the Judge, “but don’t say anything decisive. Twenty-five does not seem very young to you, but a girl of that age appears like a child to me, and I don’t want to adopt any more children.”
“You used not to be afraid,” replied Berty, smilingly. “Nancy has an old head on her young shoulders.”
“Mrs. Everest,” said the Judge, suddenly, “I am keeping you in a draught. Let us step back here and see the horses.”
Berty went with him; then, a sudden thought of the baby coming over her, she hurried the Judge into the house.
Baby had been good—a perfect angel, and his proud young mother took him upstairs, where he fell asleep in the Judge’s study.
The Judge himself went downtown, and the tired Berty, putting down her head on the sofa beside young Tom, fell asleep, and did not wake till Bethany and the Judge came home for luncheon.
After lunch there was a long drive with the Judge. Baby again was good, but upon coming back to the avenue he distinguished himself. Before dinner was announced he had successively worn out the Judge, his mother, Dallas, Titus, and Bethany. He had beaten Higby with a hearth-brush, pulled out two of Sukey’s tail feathers and sent her shrieking out to the balcony, upset a bottle of ink on the handsome study carpet, torn leaves out of a valuable Shakespeare that he snatched from the table, and generally conducted himself with such shameless impropriety that his young mother at last slapped his hands.
He promptly whipped hers. “Never mind, dear Judge,” she said, with an imploring glance at him. “After dinner you will be rid of this nightmare.”
The Judge smiled cheerfully. “I assure you I have not suffered. If you worry I shall suffer, so please forgive your baby. He is full of animal spirits.”
She kissed the little hands that she was holding, then looked up as Jennie uttered her name.
The modest, pretty young maid stood in the doorway and gazed alternatively at the Judge and at Berty.
“There’s a lady downstairs,” she said, doubtfully. “She asked if Judge Sancroft lived here. She said she must see Mrs. Everest. It was something very special. Her name is Mrs. Tralee, and she has a little boy with her.”
Berty gave a joyful cry. “O, Judge, dear Judge, she has got her boy. Come downstairs with me. Jennie, look after the baby—I can’t take him down in the parlor; he would demolish every bit of bric-a-brac there. Come, dear Judge,” and seizing his hand she drew him from the room.
A little, a very little woman stood in the middle of the large parlor. The Judge gazed intently at her. Berty had spoken truly when she had said that Mrs. Tralee was mostly eyes and veil—and what eyes!
The Judge stepped back. He felt himself an intruder. This was no common scene, and there was no formal introduction. The two women stood for an instant looking at the little boy who accompanied the lady. Then they fell on each other’s necks—that is, Berty and the little widow.
There was a sound of crying and kissing, and the Judge quietly turned and was about to withdraw when Berty called to him.
“O, Judge, Judge,” she said, “this is the boy—the lost boy. O, my dear Mrs. Tralee, where did you get him. Tell me about it.”
The strange lady was gazing in rapt admiration at Berty, who had run to the little lad and was holding his hand and earnestly looking into his eyes.
Mrs. Tralee turned to the Judge. “Sir,” she said, simply, “the only son of a widow—they stole him from me. But this dear girl found him, and I bought him. I bought back my precious child. Can you wonder that I worship her?”
As she spoke she pointed to Berty. Her tone was animated, even passionate, and the Judge nodded comprehendingly.
“O, I am so tired,” said Mrs. Tralee, suddenly dropping into a chair. “For weeks I have scarcely slept for grief, and now I cannot sleep for joy.”
Berty turned round suddenly. “You are coming right home with me,” she said, “and I am going to put you in a quiet room where you can rest, and I will watch your boy every minute while you sleep. Dear Judge, may we have a carriage?”
Mrs. Tralee sat gazing at Berty in mute acquiescence. The expression in her eyes was almost painful, and the Judge averted his head. “How women suffer!” he murmured to himself, as he went to the telephone for a carriage. “And how they can comfort each other!”