The Little Red Chimney: Being the Love Story of a Candy Man
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
_In which the Candy Man relates his story, and the Miser comes uponVolume I of the shabby book with the funny name._
"I want you to know all about me," began the Candy Man, taking from hispocket the shabby little book Virginia had once remarked on, "so theremay be no more wrong impressions."
They sat in the sunshine on the top step of the little pavilion, facingthe river. Margaret Elizabeth, supporting her chin in her hand, regardedhim gravely. The west wind was cool on their faces.
"I have often imagined myself telling you," he went on. "Not that thereis much to it, besides its strangeness. In fact, to be brief, I don'tknow who I am."
The surprise in Miss Bentley's eyes caused him to add quickly: "Not thatI am a foundling. But my father and mother were lost at sea when I wasthree years old. We were coming from Victoria to San Francisco, when thesteamer went down. Only a few of the passengers were saved, I amongthem."
"How sad and terrible!" cried Margaret Elizabeth. "Can you remember it?How lost and lonely you must have been! Poor little child!"
"I recall it only in a vague way," he answered, "confused with what hassince been told me. When it was known that my parents were lost, a manand his wife, fellow passengers, offered to adopt me. Beyond the name'Robert Deane, Wife and Child,' on the list at the ship's office, theywere unable to learn anything about me, and I was too young andbewildered to give any clue."
"That is very strange," said Margaret Elizabeth. "Your new father andmother were kind to you?"
"So kind I soon forgot the terror and loneliness, and grew happy andcontent. Everything was done to make me forget, and I think while theymade every effort to find out something about me, they were glad whenthey failed. I wish now that my childish memories might have beenfostered, for I find myself reaching back into a mist full of vagueshapes.
"My new father was a civil engineer, whose work took him here, there andeverywhere throughout the broad West. I never knew a permanent home. Myadopted mother died when I was twelve. After that came boarding schooland college. About the time I left college my father's health failed,and for several years he was helpless and very dependent upon me, soI gave up my plan of entering a mining school.
"It was during his illness that he began to speak to me of my ownparents. He had talked to them on several occasions during the voyage,and he described them as young people of refinement and education. Mymother, he thought from her speech, was English. They rather held aloof,he said, and seemed disinclined to mention their own affairs. While hewas ill the news came to us of the finding in a storage warehouse in SanFrancisco of an old trunk which it seemed probable had belonged to myparents. Without going into detail, I may say it was through an oldacquaintance of my adopted father's, who knew the circumstances of myadoption, that we heard of it. He had some interest in the warehouse,which was about to be torn down and rebuilt. This trunk was found insome forgotten corner where it had lain for twenty-five years."
"And did it throw any light?" asked Margaret Elizabeth.
"Not much, it rather deepened the mystery. There was little ofsignificance in it, but this book and a package of letters. From them Ilearned nothing definite, but gathered the unwelcome probability that myfather was under some sort of cloud, and was not using his real name.This was a matter of inference--of deduction, largely, but it was plainhe had left his home in some sort of trouble.
"It is not easy to piece together scattered allusions, when you have noclue. The letters were most of them written by my father to my mother,just before and soon after their marriage, with one or two from her tohim. One of these, which I found between the leaves of this little book,I want you to read. It concludes my story, and to my mind lightens it alittle."
The letter the Candy Man held out to Margaret Elizabeth was written onthin paper, in a delicate angular hand.
"Ought I to read it?" she demurred. "Are you sure she would like it?"
"Somehow I am very sure," he answered. "And I feel that it will be agrip on our friendship. I have told you the worst, I wish you to knowthe best of me."
She acquiesced, and, an elbow on her knee, shading her eyes with herhand, she read the letter, whose date was thirty years ago. Far backin the past this seemed to Margaret Elizabeth, yet it was a girl likeherself who wrote.
The first sentences were almost meaningless, so strong was the feelingthat she had no right to be reading it at all, but as she went on sheforgot her scruples. It was evidently a reply to a letter from her loverin which he had spoken of the cloud that hung over his name, and it wasa confession of her faith in him, girlish, sweet and tender. "I trustyou, Robert," it said. "It is in you to do heedless things, to bereckless, if only because you are young and eager and strong; but itis not in you to be dishonourable; of this I am as certain as I am ofanything in life. Some day the truth will be known and you will becleared, but whether it is or no, I choose to walk beside you. I chooseit gladly, happily. I write the words again, gladly, happily, Robert.Yours, Mary."
"Oh!" cried Margaret Elizabeth, lifting a glowing face, "I love Mary."
"She was brave and unselfish," said the Candy Man.
Margaret Elizabeth nodded. "Yes, that is one side of it. Still, you see,she was sure, and it was, as she says, a joy to cast in her lot withhim. 'Gladly, happily.'" Her eyes shone. She gazed far away down theriver. The wind blew little tendrils of bright hair across her cheek."It must be so when you care very much," she went on.
"But," argued the Candy Man, "under the stress of very noble feelingpeople sometimes do foolish things, do they not?"
"But this was not. Do you think for a moment Mary ever regretted it?I see what you mean by the best of you. It is something to have suchcredentials." Margaret Elizabeth's gaze met the Candy Man's, and hereyes were deep as they had been on Christmas Eve, in the firelight.
Oh, Margaret Elizabeth, it is your own fault, for being so dear, sounworldly! Could you, can you, cast in your lot with an unknown CandyMan? He has no business to ask you. He did not mean to, but only toprepare the way. He knows he is no great catch, even from the point ofview of a Little Red Chimney. These are not the precise words of theCandy Man, but something like them....
So absorbed was Margaret Elizabeth in the thought of Mary, she was a bitslow in taking in their meaning. She gave him one startled glance, andthen looked down, as it happened, upon the shabby little book which layon the step between them. Absently she drew it toward her, and withfingers that trembled, opened it, as if to find her answer in its pages.Then a smile began faintly to curl about her lips, and she read aloudfrom the book:
_"What we find then to accord with love and reason, that we may safely pronounce right and good."_
"Judged at the bar of reason I fear my case is hopeless," protested theCandy Man, putting out his hand to close the book.
But Margaret Elizabeth clasped it to her breast. "I see nothingunreasonable in it," she declared stoutly. As she spoke a faded crimsonflower fell in her lap.
Somewhat later in the afternoon, Miss Bentley and the Candy Man,walking together along the river path, had they not been so engrossedin their own affairs, might have recognised the tall, stooping figureof the Miser strolling slowly ahead of them. It was for a minute only,for near a turn in the path he bent forward and disappeared in a thicketof althea bushes. At this season it was not a dense thicket, and Mr.Knight, poking in the soft mould with his cane in search of a certaintiny plant, had no thought of hiding, but, as it chanced, was unobservedby his friends.
"Oh, Margaret Elizabeth," her companion was saying as they passed, "youare so dear! I have no business to be telling you so, but indeed I can'thelp it."
And she with a little laugh replied: "I am glad you can't, Candy Man."And the next moment they were gone around the turn.
That was all, but it was enough. What rarer flower was likely to comethe Miser's way, on this or any day?
He stood and looked after them. These two had brought into his greylife the touch
of golden youth. He began to tremble under the forceof a wonderful thought. He sought a bench and sank upon it. It wouldbe a solution of his problem. He had come out to-day into the springsunshine, feeling his burden more than he could bear, for in his pocketwas a letter which put an end to the hope he had long cherished of atlength righting a great wrong.
There must be a way of doing what he wished. The consent of the CandyMan once gained, that hateful fortune, which through these years hadbeen slowly crushing him, might become a minister of joy and well being,might make possible for others those best things of life that he hadmissed.
The thought thrilled him. He rose and walked on, back to the pavilion,where he paused again to rest. There on the step lay the shabby bookwith the funny name and the small oval bit cut from the fly leaf,beneath which was the Candy Man's name, Robert Deane Reynolds.