The Best of Gene Stratton-Porter

by Gene Stratton-Porter

  The Angel deliberately turned back the cover, slipped up the sleeve, and laid her lips on the scars.

  “Freckles! Wake up!” she cried, almost shaking him. “Come to your senses! Be a thinking, reasoning man! You have brooded too much, and been all your life too much alone. It’s all as plain as plain can be to me. You must see it! Like breeds like in this world! You must be some sort of a reproduction of your parents, and I am not afraid to vouch for them, not for a minute!

  “And then, too, if more proof is needed, here it is: Mr. McLean says that you never once have failed in tact and courtesy. He says that you are the most perfect gentleman he ever knew, and he has traveled the world over. How does it happen, Freckles? No one at that Home taught you. Hundreds of men couldn’t be taught, even in a school of etiquette; so it must be instinctive with you. If it is, why, that means that it is born in you, and a direct inheritance from a race of men that have been gentlemen for ages, and couldn’t be anything else.

  “Then there’s your singing. I don’t believe there ever was a mortal with a sweeter voice than yours, and while that doesn’t prove anything, there is a point that does. The little training you had from that choirmaster won’t account for the wonderful accent and ease with which you sing. Somewhere in your close blood is a marvelously trained vocalist; we every one of us believe that, Freckles.

  “Why does my father refer to you constantly as being of fine perceptions and honor? Because you are, Freckles. Why does the Bird Woman leave her precious work and come here to help look after you? I never heard of her losing any time over anyone else. It’s because she loves you. And why does Mr. McLean turn all of his valuable business over to hired men and watch you personally? And why is he hunting excuses every day to spend money on you? My father says McLean is full Scotch-close with a dollar. He is a hard-headed business man, Freckles, and he is doing it because he finds you worthy of it. Worthy of all we all can do and more than we know how to do, dear heart! Freckles, are you listening to me? Oh! Won’t you see it? Won’t you believe it?”

  “Oh, Angel!” chattered the bewildered Freckles, “Are you truly maning it? Could it be?”

  “Of course it could,” flashed the Angel, “because it just is!”

  “But you can’t prove it,” wailed Freckles. “It ain’t giving me a name, or me honor!”

  “Freckles,” said the Angel sternly, “you are unreasonable! Why, I did prove every word I said! Everything proves it! You look here! If you knew for sure that I could give you a name and your honor, and prove to you that your mother did love you, why, then, would you just go to breathing like perpetual motion and hang on for dear life and get well?”

  A bright light shone in Freckles’s eyes.

  “If I knew that, Angel,” he said solemnly, “you couldn’t be killing me if you felled the biggest tree in the Limberlost smash on me!”

  “Then you go right to work,” said the Angel, “and before night I’ll prove one thing to you: I can show you easily enough how much your mother loved you. That will be the first step, and then the remainder will all come. If my father and Mr. McLean are so anxious to spend some money, I’ll give them a chance. I don’t see why we haven’t comprehended how you felt and so have been at work weeks ago. We’ve been awfully selfish. We’ve all been so comfortable, we never stopped to think what other people were suffering before our eyes. None of us has understood. I’ll hire the finest detective in Chicago, and we’ll go to work together. This is nothing compared with things people do find out. We’ll go at it, beak and claw, and we’ll show you a thing or two.”

  Freckles caught her sleeve.

  “Me mother, Angel! Me mother!” he marveled hoarsely. “Did you say you could be finding out today if me mother loved me? How? Oh, Angel! Nothing matters, IF ONLY ME MOTHER DIDN’T DO IT!”

  “Then you rest easy,” said the Angel, with large confidence. “Your mother didn’t do it! Mothers of sons such as you don’t do things like that. I’ll go to work at once and prove it to you. The first thing to do is to go to that Home where you were and get the clothes you wore the night you were left there. I know that they are required to save those things carefully. We can find out almost all there is to know about your mother from them. Did you ever see them?”

  “Yis,” he replied.

  “Freckles! Were they white?” she cried.

  “Maybe they were once. They’re all yellow with laying, and brown with blood-stains now,” said Freckles, the old note of bitterness creeping in. “You can’t be telling anything at all by them, Angel!”

  “Well, but I just can!” said the Angel positively. “I can see from the quality what kind of goods your mother could afford to buy. I can see from the cut whether she had good taste. I can see from the care she took in making them how much she loved and wanted you.”

  “But how? Angel, tell me how!” implored Freckles with trembling eagerness.

  “Why, easily enough,” said the Angel. “I thought you’d understand. People that can afford anything at all, always buy white for little new babies—linen and lace, and the very finest things to be had. There’s a young woman living near us who cut up her wedding clothes to have fine things for her baby. Mothers who love and want their babies don’t buy little rough, ready-made things, and they don’t run up what they make on an old sewing machine. They make fine seams, and tucks, and put on lace and trimming by hand. They sit and stitch, and stitch—little, even stitches, every one just as careful. Their eyes shine and their faces glow. When they have to quit to do something else, they look sorry, and fold up their work so particularly. There isn’t much worth knowing about your mother that those little clothes won’t tell. I can see her putting the little stitches into them and smiling with shining eyes over your coming. Freckles, I’ll wager you a dollar those little clothes of yours are just alive with the dearest, tiny handmade stitches.”

  A new light dawned in Freckles’s eyes. A tinge of warm color swept into his face. Renewed strength was noticeable in his grip of her hands.

  “Oh Angel! Will you go now? Will you be hurrying?” he cried.

  “Right away,” said the Angel. “I won’t stop for a thing, and I’ll hurry with all my might.”

  She smoothed his pillow, straightened the cover, gave him one steady look in the eyes, and went quietly from the room.

  Outside the door, McLean and the surgeon anxiously awaited her. McLean caught her shoulders.

  “Angel, what have you done?” he demanded.

  The Angel smiled defiance into his eyes.

  “‘What have I done?’” she repeated. “I’ve tried to save Freckles.”

  “What will your father say?” groaned McLean.

  “It strikes me,” said the Angel, “that what Freckles said would be to the point.”

  “Freckles!” exclaimed McLean. “What could he say?”

  “He seemed to be able to say several things,” answered the Angel sweetly. “I fancy the one that concerns you most at present was, that if my father should offer me to him he would not have me.”

  “And no one knows why better than I do,” cried McLean. “Every day he must astonish me with some new fineness.”

  He turned to the surgeon. “Save him!” he commanded. “Save him!” he implored. “He is too fine to be sacrificed.”

  “His salvation lies here,” said the surgeon, stroking the Angel’s sunshiny hair, “and I can read in the face of her that she knows how she is going to work it out. Don’t trouble for the boy. She will save him!”

  The Angel laughingly sped down the hall, and into the street, just as she was.

  “I have come,” she said to the matron of the Home, “to ask if you will allow me to examine, or, better yet, to take with me, the little clothes that a boy you called Freckles, discharged last fall, wore the night he was left here.”

  The woman looked at her in greater astonishment than the occasion demanded.

  “Well, I’d be glad to let you see them,” she said at last, “but the
fact is we haven’t them. I do hope we haven’t made some mistake. I was thoroughly convinced, and so was the superintendent. We let his people take those things away yesterday. Who are you, and what do you want with them?”

  The Angel stood dazed and speechless, staring at the matron.

  “There couldn’t have been a mistake,” continued the matron, seeing the Angel’s distress. “Freckles was here when I took charge, ten years ago. These people had it all proved that he belonged to them. They had him traced to where he ran away in Illinois last fall, and there they completely lost track of him. I’m sorry you seem so disappointed, but it is all right. The man is his uncle, and as like the boy as he possibly could be. He is almost killed to go back without him. If you know where Freckles is, they’d give big money to find out.”

  The Angel laid a hand along each cheek to steady her chattering teeth.

  “Who are they?” she stammered. “Where are they going?”

  “They are Irish folks, miss,” said the matron. “They have been in Chicago and over the country for the past three months, hunting him everywhere. They have given up, and are starting home today. They—”

  “Did they leave an address? Where could I find them?” interrupted the Angel.

  “They left a card, and I notice the morning paper has the man’s picture and is full of them. They’ve advertised a great deal in the city papers. It’s a wonder you haven’t seen something.”

  “Trains don’t run right. We never get Chicago papers,” said the Angel. “Please give me that card quickly. They may escape me. I simply must catch them!”

  The matron hurried to the secretary and came back with a card.

  “Their addresses are there,” she said. “Both in Chicago and at their home. They made them full and plain, and I was to cable at once if I got the least clue of him at any time. If they’ve left the city, you can stop them in New York. You’re sure to catch them before they sail—if you hurry.”

  The matron caught up a paper and thrust it into the Angel’s hand as she ran to the street.

  The Angel glanced at the card. The Chicago address was Suite Eleven, Auditorium. She laid her hand on her driver’s sleeve and looked into his eyes.

  “There is a fast-driving limit?” she asked.

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Will you crowd it all you can without danger of arrest? I will pay well. I must catch some people!”

  Then she smiled at him. The hospital, an Orphans’ Home, and the Auditorium seemed a queer combination to that driver, but the Angel was always and everywhere the Angel, and her methods were strictly her own.

  “I will take you there as quickly as any man could with a team,” he said promptly.

  The Angel clung to the card and paper, and as best she could in the lurching, swaying cab, read the addresses over.

  “O’More, Suite Eleven, Auditorium.”

  “‘O’More,’” she repeated. “Seems to fit Freckles to a dot. Wonder if that could be his name? ‘Suite Eleven’ means that you are pretty well fixed. Suites in the Auditorium come high.”

  Then she turned the card and read on its reverse, Lord Maxwell O’More, M. P., Killvany Place, County Clare, Ireland.

  The Angel sat on the edge of the seat, bracing her feet against the one opposite, as the cab pitched and swung around corners and past vehicles. She mechanically fingered the pasteboard and stared straight ahead. Then she drew a deep breath and read the card again.

  “A Lord-man!” she groaned despairingly. “A Lord-man! Bet my hoecake’s scorched! Here I’ve gone and pledged my word to Freckles I’d find him some decent relatives, that he could be proud of, and now there isn’t a chance out of a dozen that he’ll have to be ashamed of them after all. It’s too mean!”

  The tears of vexation rolled down the tired, nerve-racked Angel’s cheeks.

  “This isn’t going to do,” she said, resolutely wiping her eyes with the palm of her hand and gulping down the nervous spasm in her throat. “I must read this paper before I meet Lord O’More.”

  She blinked back the tears and spreading the paper on her knee, read: “After three months’ fruitless search, Lord O’More gives up the quest of his lost nephew, and leaves Chicago today for his home in Ireland.”

  She read on, and realized every word. The likeness settled any doubt. It was Freckles over again, only older and well dressed.

  “Well, I must catch you if I can,” muttered the Angel. “But when I do, if you are a gentleman in name only, you shan’t have Freckles; that’s flat. You’re not his father and he is twenty. Anyway, if the law will give him to you for one year, you can’t spoil him, because nobody could, and,” she added, brightening, “he’ll probably do you a lot of good. Freckles and I both must study years yet, and you should be something that will save him. I guess it will come out all right. At least, I don’t believe you can take him away if I say no.”

  “Thank you; and wait, no matter how long,” she said to her driver.

  Catching up the paper, she hurried to the desk and laid down Lord O’More’s card.

  “Has my uncle started yet?” she asked sweetly.

  The surprised clerk stepped back on a bellboy, and covertly kicked him for being in the way.

  “His lordship is in his room,” he said, with a low bow.

  “All right,” said the Angel, picking up the card. “I thought he might have started. I’ll see him.”

  The clerk shoved the bellboy toward the Angel.

  “Show her ladyship to the elevator and Lord O’More’s suite,” he said, bowing double.

  “Aw, thanks,” said the Angel with a slight nod, as she turned away.

  “I’m not sure,” she muttered to herself as the elevator sped upward, “whether it’s the Irish or the English who say: ‘Aw, thanks,’ but it’s probable he isn’t either; and anyway, I just had to do something to counteract that ‘All right.’ How stupid of me!”

  At the bellboy’s tap, the door swung open and the liveried servant thrust a cardtray before the Angel. The opening of the door created a current that swayed a curtain aside, and in an adjoining room, lounging in a big chair, with a paper in his hand, sat a man who was, beyond question, of Freckles’s blood and race.

  With perfect control the Angel dropped Lord O’More’s card in the tray, stepped past his servant, and stood before his lordship.

  “Good morning,” she said with tense politeness.

  Lord O’More said nothing. He carelessly glanced her over with amused curiosity, until her color began to deepen and her blood to run hotly.

  “Well, my dear,” he said at last, “how can I serve you?”

  Instantly the Angel became indignant. She had been so shielded in the midst of almost entire freedom, owing to the circumstances of her life, that the words and the look appeared to her as almost insulting. She lifted her head with a proud gesture.

  “I am not your ‘dear,’” she said with slow distinctness. “There isn’t a thing in the world you can do for me. I came here to see if I could do something—a very great something—for you; but if I don’t like you, I won’t do it!”

  Then Lord O’More did stare. Suddenly he broke into a ringing laugh. Without a change of attitude or expression, the Angel stood looking steadily at him.

  There was a silken rustle, then a beautiful woman with cheeks of satiny pink, dark hair, and eyes of pure Irish blue, moved to Lord O’More’s side, and catching his arm, shook him impatiently.

  “Terence! Have you lost your senses?” she cried. “Didn’t you understand what the child said? Look at her face! See what she has!”

  Lord O’More opened his eyes widely and sat up. He did look at the Angel’s face intently, and suddenly found it so good that it was difficult to follow the next injunction. He arose instantly.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “The fact is, I am leaving Chicago sorely disappointed. It makes me bitter and reckless. I thought you one more of those queer, useless people who have thrust themselves on me constantly,
and I was careless. Forgive me, and tell me why you came.”

  “I will if I like you,” said the Angel stoutly, “and if I don’t, I won’t!”

  “But I began all wrong, and now I don’t know how to make you like me,” said his lordship, with sincere penitence in his tone.

  The Angel found herself yielding to his voice. He spoke in a soft, mellow, smoothly flowing Irish tone, and although his speech was perfectly correct, it was so rounded, and accented, and the sentences so turned, that it was Freckles over again. Still, it was a matter of the very greatest importance, and she must be sure; so she looked into the beautiful woman’s face.

  “Are you his wife?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said the woman, “I am his wife.”

  “Well,” said the Angel judicially, “the Bird Woman says no one in the whole world knows all a man’s bignesses and all his littlenesses as his wife does. What you think of him should do for me. Do you like him?”

  The question was so earnestly asked that it met with equal earnestness. The dark head moved caressingly against Lord O’More’s sleeve.

  “Better than anyone in the whole world,” said Lady O’More promptly.

  The Angel mused a second, and then her legal tinge came to the fore again.

  “Yes, but have you anyone you could like better, if he wasn’t all right?” she persisted.

  “I have three of his sons, two little daughters, a father, mother, and several brothers and sisters,” came the quick reply.

  “And you like him best?” persisted the Angel with finality.

  “I love him so much that I would give up every one of them with dry eyes if by so doing I could save him,” cried Lord O’More’s wife.

  “Oh!” cried the Angel. “Oh, my!”

  She lifted her clear eyes to Lord O’More’s and shook her head.

  “She never, never could do that!” she said. “But it’s a mighty big thing to your credit that she thinks she could. I guess I’ll tell you why I came.”

  She laid down the paper, and touched the portrait.