_ CHAPTER XX. THE HEART OF A BRUNETTE
HE recovered the shoebrush from under the window of Tabby, the young assistant house-master, and tucking it into his pocket, skirted the outer limits of the school, dodged behind a fence, and creeping on all-fours, made a wide detour via the pond and rejoined the high road to Trenton which lay five dusty miles away. Luckily the evening was overclouded and the shadows protecting. His problem was not simply to arrive at the Lafontaines' at exactly the hour but to arrive there with a cool and dignified appearance. It was hot, and the derby hat pressed down on the vaselined hair was hotter than anything about him, hotter even than the parched fields and the steaming asphalt which yielded to his feet.
"Gosh, I oughter have brought a towel," he said, when at the end of twenty minutes he stopped to remove his hat and allow the hot vapors to escape. He sat down and fanned himself vigorously. Then he took off his necktie and collar and placed them in his pocket, and finally shed his coat under favor of the night. He could scarcely distinguish the road beneath him, and several times only saved himself from sprawling on his nose by a convulsive grasping at a nearby fence. But what did the toil, the heat, or the terrors of the night matter? He was going to see her again. Not only that but he would come to her surrounded by the romance of a great danger run, just to sit in her presence, to hear her voice, to see in her eyes some tender recognition of what he had dared for her. This was romance indeed!
A dog came savagely out of the night. How was he to know that a fence intervened? He ran a quarter of a mile and again sat down. It grew hotter; he was dripping from head to foot. A wagon or two went by, but he did not dare to ask for a ride, for fear of encountering some agent of the Doctor's secret police. For, perhaps, his absence was already discovered and the alarm had gone out.
The heat and the discomfort somewhat interfered with the free play of his imagination, but the quality of romance still kept with him.
"When I'm twenty-one," he said to himself again and again, in a vague defiance of all the hostile powers of Society. Only five years and six weeks intervened before the glowing horizon of liberty. Did she care? Even that did not matter. She knew what the future held for him. The main thing, the thing to cling to, was that her heart was kind. Of that there could be no question. How gentle and how understanding she had been! He could come to her and tell her anything--absolutely anything!
"Good Lord, what a difference it makes to have some one you can trust," he said solemnly to the night. "Some one to work for!"
At nine o'clock he reached the outskirts of Trenton, and having cooled off, put on his collar and necktie. Then he stopped at a stationer's to ask his way. A large florid young woman, chewing gum, was behind the counter, patting down her oily chestnut curls.
"Say, can you tell me where the Lafontaines live?" he said with an extra polite bow.
Fortunately she knew and directed him.
"You're one of them Lawrenceville boys, ain't you?" she said, eyeing with curiosity the oozy ruffle of his hair.
Skippy was shocked at this easy discovery of his youth.
"Come off. I'm a member of the Princeton faculty," he said loftily.
"Well, I think you're one of them Lawrenceville boys," she said, following him to the door.
He waved back gaily and went skipping up the street. He arrived before the Lafontaine mansion with exactly five minutes to spare. The old Colonial house was set back in a wide plot and masked by convenient foliage. Skippy, passing down the side wall, sheltered himself behind a bush, his heart pumping with excitement, and drew on the gloves which he had borrowed from Butcher Stevens. Then extracting the shoebrush and cloth from his pocket, he busied himself hurriedly with removing from his trousers and shoes all traces of the dusty way he had come. This done, he hid the brush and cloth under the bush and straightened up. Unfortunately either the last preparations or the terrific sentimental strain of facing his first call upon a member of the opposite sex had so increased his temperature that his forehead was again covered with perspiration.
"Great Willies! I can't go in like this--if I only had a handkerchief--what am I to do?"
But just at the moment when he had improvised into a towel the most available part of his shirt, his heart stood still at hearing above him the following conversation:
"Mimi, you're a witch," said the voice of his sister, "I never would have believed it."
"Well, my dear, you wanted me to wake him up. I've done it. Goodness, I never saw any one go down so quickly. I really believe he's going to propose! If you could have seen his funny eyes when he told me that there was something he just
had to say to me."
"For heaven's sake keep it up. It's better than soap, Mimi. One look at his hands and I knew he was in love."
"My dear, what do you think--he's had my photograph for weeks--the one I gave you, of course. Now if that isn't a real romance. . . ."
"He ought to be spanked, that boy--stealing away from school!"
"My dear, he's told me all about his life's ambitions."
"What's that?"
"It's something about a bathtub--some sort of an invention that's going to revolutionize the bathtub industry."
"Then it must be the outside of a bathtub," said Clara with a sisterly laugh. "Mimi, I just must hear his proposal."
"You'll laugh and spoil it all."
"On my honor!"
Ten minutes later, Miss Mimi Lafontaine put on her kindliest smile as ushered in by the maid Mr. John C. Bedelle came magnificently into the room, spick and span, cool as the cucumber is credited to be at any temperature; an immaculate purple tie blooming under an unsullied collar, with only a slight pollen on the carefully-divided hair. How was she to know that, in five minutes, under the sting of betrayed confidence and broken illusions, a complete moral transformation had made of the urchin a man in the embryo, fired by the burning impulses of the deadliest hatred?
He did not stumble or wind himself up in the curtain or upset the bowl of goldfish on the slight etagere by the sofa. He came in with a manner that was so completely nonchalant that Miss Mimi was manifestly impressed.
"Why, Jack, you don't look as though you had
run at all," she said encouragingly.
"Oh, I picked up a buggy and took it easy," he said, seating himself and arranging the trouser crease with nicety. Then having perceived under the sofa the telltale slippers of Miss Clara Bedelle, he added, "I say, how did you ever keep it from Sis?"
"Oh, she thinks it's another caller," said Mimi, staring a little. "Really, Jack, I'm beginning to suspect you're an old hand."
"Well, of course this isn't the first time," he said, leaning back and sinking his fists in his trousers pockets.
Miss Mimi gave a gasp of astonishment.
"Well, I never, and all you said to me too about the photograph and the letters you tore up."
"Did you really believe all that?" said Skippy with a smile that seemed to cut across his face. His heart was bursting; yet the task of revenge was sweet. "You know Sidell and I are old hunting partners."
Miss Lafontaine sat upright, forgetting everybody in the dismay of her discovery.
"Jack Bedelle, do you mean to say that it was all fixed up between you two?"
Again Mr. John C. Bedelle smiled.
"Oh, we know a trick or two, even if we're still in school."
Miss Mimi's look was not such as is generally ascribed to the gentler sex. She bit her lip and said furiously:
"You just tell Mr. Sidell--" and then, quite suffocated with rage, she stopped and flung a little fan, furiously, across the room.
"Now I see her as she is," thought Skippy with a healing delight. Aloud he added: "Oh, if you really want to know the truth about Sidell, just ask Sis. She probably put him up to the whole game."
Now this was rather crude, and at another time Miss Lafontaine would have detected the artifice and consequently divined the whole fabrication, but at present she was quite too angry, particularly when she realized that her best friend was a witness to her discomfiture.
"Just what do you mean by that?" she said angrily.
"Why, they've been sweet on each other for a couple of years," he said, with malice aforethought. "Guess you're not on to Sis. She'd steal anything with pants on that came within a mile of her. Ask her sometime about the mash notes the plumber's boy used to shoot up to her window, or perhaps you'd better not, it gets her too hot. But anyway I advise you to keep your eyes open." He rose, for the sudden shifting of the slippers back of the sofa warned him it was time to depart.
"Good-bye, Mimi," he said carelessly. "Two can play the same game, remember that."
Then, calculating the moment, he bumped into the etagere, upsetting the goldfish, and as the dripping figure of Miss Clara Bedelle emerged with a scream, Mr. Skippy Bedelle, Chesterfieldian to the last, departed saying:
"He laughs best who laughs last."
* * * * *
He arrived at the little stationery shop without having seen where he had been going, his eyes blinded with rage, his mind filled with bitter imprecations. Of his night's infatuation not a vestige remained except the weakness of disillusionment and the suffering of a proud nature.
"Well, Professor, how was your girl?"
He looked up to see the dark-complexioned lady still methodically chewing away.
"She's like all the rest," he thought darkly, "fooling some man, I bet."
Then his eyes fell on a group of photographs in the shape of postal cards; a wonderful assortment of fleshlings, of young ladies who dazzle and display abundant charms before the footlights. He remembered that an explanation was due to Snorky, and that the explanation would have to be very convincing. One photograph fascinated him; it was so like the way Tina would look, if there were a Tina!
The young lady in graceful tights, legs crossed in a figure four, elbow resting on a marble column, her chin supported by the index finger, was smiling out at him with a full dental smile.
"Say, do a fellow a favor?" he said.
"Sure for a nice boy like you I will," she said, encouragingly.
"Just sign across here--it's a joke."
"Oh, it's a joke?"
"Yes, of course. Sign 'Faithfully yours,'--no--'Fondly yours.'"
"Fondly yours," said the gum chewer, writing with a flourish.
"Tina."
"T--I--N--A."
"Turner."
"Indeed, I'll not!" said the girl with sudden indignation. "Turner's my name, and I can't have any such picture--"
"All right, all right, make it 'Tanner' then."
With the photograph as evidence safely bestowed in an inner pocket, he set out on the long homeward trudge. The weakness was gone, his imagination was now all on the story he would have to tell Snorky. Heavens, what had been crowded into one short hour;--love, treachery, revenge and triumph! Once a sudden rush of tears caught him, but he fought down the mood. The test had been soul-trying, but the victory was his. So he marched along, blowing out his courage as he chanted a defiant marching song and if Providence had but endowed him with a tail, he would have carried it proudly like a banner as he stalked across the campus and found his way into the Kennedy.
"Who is it?" said a startled voice.
"Hush, it's Skippy."
"Thank God."
Snorky jumped up and caught him in his arms with such genuine emotion that Skippy was profoundly touched, so touched that he almost made a clean breast of this affair--almost but not quite.
"What happened? You look all shot to pieces," said Snorky, holding up a candle and gazing at him in awe.
"It's all over," said Skippy stonily.
"Over."
"She'd have had to give up her career and--and I'm too young yet to support her."
"Honest, Skippy?" said Snorky, with a lingering doubt.
"Here's all that's left to me now," said Skippy, and he brought forth the photograph. _