Chapter XXI: The Denouement

It was not a feigned headache of which she complained when she went down to breakfast. Her temples were throbbing with pain and there were dark circles around her eyes.

“Mother,” she said, “I am going to New York on the noon train to see Dr. Allen. I believe I am malarious, I am having so much headache and feel so languid. Charlotte, you know, is in our house. I can stay there to-night and come back to-morrow.”

Mrs. Tracy was at once concerned and anxious and unwilling to have her go alone, or to have her go at all.

“Why not consult some physician in town?”

“Yes, and have tons of quinine prescribed, with a little morphine, perhaps, to make me sleep!” Helen answered impatiently. “No country quacks for me. I want my good old Dr. Allen or nobody.”

“Then I shall go with you, and for that matter we might as well pack up and leave altogether. I am quite ready,” Mrs. Tracy said.

Here was a dilemma which Helen had anticipated and which she met promptly.

“Of course not,” she said, in the tone which usually subdued her mother. “Have you forgotten that Craig is coming back on Saturday? What would he say to find us gone, and what use for you to fatigue yourself with a journey to New York just to chaperone me? No, mamma; make yourself comfortable with Celine and don’t worry about me. If there are any errands I can do for you I may perhaps have the time. I can at least see the fashions.”

Mrs. Tracy was not convinced and to the last insisted that if Helen must go she or Celine ought to go with her.

“I tell you I prefer to go alone, and if I can’t do that I’ll not go at all,” Helen said, and that decided it.

When Uncle Zach was told of the arrangement and asked to have Paul and Virginia ready to take her to the station for the noon train, he was at once on the alert for the reputation of his house.

“Got malary here! That can’t be. There ain’t no sweeter drain in the state. Dot never pours bean water in it and keeps it stuffed with copperas all the time. No, sir! ’Tain’t malary. It’s bile, and boneset tea is good for that. Dot’ll steep you some.”

Helen declined the boneset and insisted upon New York.

“Wall, then, why not wait till night? Mark is goin’ on the eight train, and will see to you,” was Mr. Taylor’s next suggestion, and when Helen declined Mark’s company, as she had the boneset, saying she preferred to go at noon, he continued: “Of course we’ll send you down; and what do you say to Mark’s tacklin’ up Dido? She or’to be used before she knocks the stable to pieces. She’s kicked off two boards already.”

From this proposition Helen recoiled. To have Mark drive her to the station after Dido would be the acme of cruelty and insult to Craig.

“No, no,” she said. “I don’t want Dido. Let Sam take me when he goes to the train.”

“Mebby that will be best, as Mark is kinder busy lookin’ over papers and castin’ up accounts,” was Uncle Zach’s reply, as he went to order Sam to have the carriage and Paul and Virginny ready for the noon train.

Helen felt like a guilty thing as she made her preparations, and once resolved to give it up. Going to the office where she found Mark alone, she said to him, “I can’t do it. I’d rather stay and brave mother and Craig than sneak off this way.”

“Very well,” Mark said, looking at her with an expression before which her eyes fell. “Suit yourself,” and he turned to his papers again.

“Do you wish to give it up?” she asked timidly, and he replied, “Certainly not for myself. But I know you, and that between your mother and Mr. Mason I should get the worst of it and lose you, while you might lose us both.”

This was a catastrophe which Helen did not care to contemplate. She had staked everything and could not lose.

“I’ll go,” she said.

Mark put out his hand and taking one of hers pressed it warmly as he said, “My darling, you shall never regret it.”

After this there was no wavering on Helen’s part. She ate, or tried to eat, her early lunch; was very loving to her mother when she said good-bye, and went so far as to kiss Mrs. Taylor, who wondered at her effusiveness, when she was to be gone so short a time. As she passed the office Mark sauntered to the door and said, “Off so soon? Is it time?”

“Yes, good-bye,” she answered gayly, while he returned to the papers and accounts he was putting in order for his successor, and feeling pangs of remorse as he thought how Mr. Taylor would miss and mourn for him.

Uncle Zacheus went to the station with Helen, and at the last moment when the train was in sight he said to her, “Wall, good-bye. You’ll be comin’ back tomorrer, or I should be sorry, you seem so like our folks.”

She grasped his pudgy hand and said, “I can’t begin to tell you how kind you have been to me, or how much I have enjoyed myself at your house. Good-bye.”

She pressed his hand to her lips and stepped upon the train, which was soon bearing her away across the meadow lands between the river and the cemetery, where her grandfather’s tall monument was the last thing on which her eyes rested. It was many years before she saw it again.

On the platform where she had left him Uncle Zacheus stood, looking at the back of his hand as earnestly as if he could see the kiss Helen had imprinted there.

“Wall, I’ll be dumbed,” he soliloquized. “Yes, I will, if this ain’t droll. A young gal like her kissin’ an old codger like me! I wonder what Dot would think of it? I guess I won’t tell her. She mightn’t like it. She hain’t kissed me since I can remember.”

If the kiss had been in a tangible form Uncle Zach would have put it away in the hair trunk with Taylor’s Tavern and little Johnny’s blanket. As it was he kept one hand carefully over the spot which Helen’s lips had touched and smoothed it occasionally as he was driven back to the hotel.

“Fust rate girl,” he said to Mark, to whom he began to talk of what he was to do in New York. “When you git your business done stay a day or two, if you want to,” he said. “It’s some time sense you was there, and if I’s you I’d call at Miss Tracy’s. They say her home is grand. You know where ’tis?”

“Yes,” Mark answered.

He could say no more for the lump which was choking him as he kept on with his work. It was harder leaving the old place than he had anticipated, and had Helen been there then and said, “Let’s give it up,” he might have listened to her. Helen was gone. He would not be less courageous than she, and he kept on until every paper and account was labeled and in its place, easy to find and examine. Then he went through the rooms of the hotel one by one, saying good-bye to them, and always with that lump in his throat, making him swallow hard to keep it down.

“I am as weak as a woman,” he said to himself, when he went to the stables to say good-bye to the horses.

He was fond of animals, and both Paul and Virginia turned their heads towards him and whinnied as he came in. In her box stall Dido was curvetting round as well as she could in that small space, pawing with her fore feet and kicking occasionally with her hind ones as the spirit moved her. She, too, whinnied when she saw Mark and looked beyond him toward the door.

“I believe she is looking for her master, or Helen,” Mark thought, as he remembered that the latter had frequently brought her apples and tufts of fresh grass. “Dido,” he said, stroking her glossy coat, “are you expecting Helen? She’s gone. She will never come back, or drive behind you again. Are you sorry?”

There was almost a human look in the dumb creature’s eyes, as Mark talked to her, and he half felt that he was understood.

“Good-bye, Dido, and Paul and Virginia,” he said, as he left the stable and closed the door.

Just outside he met Jeff. Next to Helen Jeff was dearer to Mark than any other living creature. He had rescued him from the street; there was a kind of link between them connecting them with the tragedy of the Dalton house, and the man’s heart yearned towards the boy.

“Jeff,” he said, “when I am in New York I may look around for some place different from this. If I find one and go there later, would you like to live with me?”

“In New York? You bet!” was Jeff’s reply, as he darted away.

Mark did not dare to be very demonstrative in his adieus to the family lest they should wonder at it. Mrs. Tracy, who always treated him as an inferior had seen the safe opened that morning and knew her diamonds were there, and it was not necessary to speak to her at all. He found Mrs. Taylor, with whom he shook hands, feeling glad that it was dusky in the hall so she could not see his face.

“Yes, I _am_ weaker than a woman and weaker than water,” he thought, as he felt his knees shake under him, for the hardest was yet to come, the saying good-bye to Uncle Zach, who was standing on the walk, bareheaded in a misty rain which was beginning to fall.

“Good-bye, Mark, my boy,” he said cheerily. “Have a good time, and don’t hurry back. It’s lonesome without you, but I can stan’ it and git along a day or two, and if you see that gal give her Uncle Zach’s love.”

Mark could not reply, and opening his umbrella and taking up his gripsack he walked rapidly away, stopping once at the corner to look back at the house, at the lights in the kitchen and office and Mrs. Tracy’s salon and at Dot standing in the door and calling to her husband to come in out of the rain before he took his death cold.

“There’ll be an awful hubbub there in two or three days,” he said, as he hurried away in the darkness to catch the train whose faint rumble he heard in the distance.

This was Wednesday night and neither Mark nor Helen came back the next day, nor the next, nor was anything heard from them, and Mrs. Tracy began to feel anxious about her daughter.

“I told Mark to stay if he wanted to, and I don’t expect him till to-morrow. Mabby they’ll come together. I b’lieve he was goin’ to call on her,” Uncle Zach said to her on Friday afternoon, when she suggested telegraphing to Helen, and questioned him with regard to the safe, which troubled him so to open that she had not been near it since Wednesday, when her diamonds were there as usual.

She was getting accustomed to finding them all right, and did not worry about them now as at first. Still they were on her mind and she said to Mr. Taylor, “If Mr. Hilton does not come back to-morrow, you must open the safe somehow.”

“I will, I will; yes marm, I will; yes marm,” Uncle Zach replied.

He was in the habit of “yes-marm-ing” Mrs. Tracy, when talking with her, and he was quite profuse with his “yes-marms” as he assured her that Mark would be back and the safe opened by the next day at the farthest. She had tossed her head proudly when he spoke of Mark’s calling at her house and of Helen coming back with him. Mark was _scum_ in her estimation, as were all the people outside her set, and thus she was poorly prepared for the shock which awaited her Saturday morning, when the New York mail was in. Mark did not come, nor Helen, but there was a letter from the latter, which Mrs. Tracy opened eagerly and read with her eyes staring wildly at what the letter contained. It was as follows:

“New York, Friday afternoon.

“Dear Mother:

“I was married to Mark Hilton yesterday morning, and to-night we start for Chicago. Don’t faint and make a scene. It will help nothing. I love my husband and he loves me, and we shall be happy together. As to his position that don’t count. He is my husband, and whoever receives me will receive him.

“I am sorry about Mr. Mason. It was a mean thing to do, and he is too good a man to be served such a trick. Still it is better for him to be rid of me. We are not at all alike, and it would hurt him more to be deceived in his wife than in his _fiancée_.

“When I know where we are to live I will write you again. Perhaps you will cut me off entirely, but that won’t pay; and if you do you know I have quite a fortune of my own. Mark says, tell Mr. Taylor the business he was to transact for him in New York is satisfactorily arranged for 200 dollars more than he expected. The ledger and papers of the hotel are perfectly straight. Mark saw to that.

“If the safe has been opened you will probably find one box of diamonds gone,—the pin and ear-rings. They were to be mine on my wedding day. It was no theft to take them and I had Mark bring them with him. I do not care for the pin and shall leave it for you with Charlotte, who is dazed with what has happened, but says Mr. Hilton is the handsomest man she ever saw. I think so, too. When we are settled you can send my clothes which are in Ridgefield to me, if you choose. If not, all right. I am sorry I was obliged to tell you so many fibs. I had to do something, and I did have a great deal of headache, and I have been to see the doctor. Tell Mr. and Mrs. Taylor I shall never forget their kindness, and sometime I may visit them again when they have forgotten how bad I was to Mr. Mason.

“I must go now and help Charlotte with my trunks. Good-bye, mother. You said I’d take up with a crooked stick; but I haven’t. Mark is straight as an arrow, and I am very happy.

“Your naughty, but loving daughter,
“HELEN TRACY HILTON.”