“I wonder what Tad and Sylvia did after they were married,” said Hinpoha, with romantic curiosity. “Did they stay in Oakwood, or did they go away? Is there any more, Nyoda?”
Nyoda was already glancing down the next page, which was written over with lines in blacker ink, and broader and heavier strokes of the pen, which seemed somehow to express grim satisfaction on the part of Uncle Jasper. Grim satisfaction Uncle Jasper must indeed have felt when he wrote those lines, for misfortune had overtaken the one who had caused his own anguish of heart. The entry told how Tad had become staff physician at one of the large army posts in the west. There was an epidemic of typhoid and quite a few of the men were ill at once, all requiring the same kind of medicine. Through carelessness in making up a certain medicine he put in a deadly poison instead of the harmless ingredient he intended to put in, and a dozen men died of the dose. There was a tremendous stir about the matter, and the newspapers all over the country were full of it. He was court-martialed, and though he was acquitted, the mistake being entirely accidental, the matter had gained such publicity that his career as a doctor was ruined. He left the army and fled out of the country, taking Sylvia with him. Some months later the papers brought the announcement of both their deaths from yellow fever in Cuba. Again the handwriting began to waver on the last sentence. “She is dead.” In those three little words the Winnebagos seemed to hear the echo of the breaking of a strong man’s heart. There were no more entries.
“Isn’t it perfectly thrilling!” gulped Hinpoha, with eyes overflowing again. “It’s better than any book I ever read! And to think we never suspected there was anything like that connected with your Uncle Jasper! There, now, Katherine Adams, what did I tell you? You said he was a born bachelor, and just look at the romance he had!”
“He certainly did,” said Katherine, in a tone of surrender.
“That must be why the house we lived in was shut up so long,” said Sylvia musingly. “The man that said we could live in it said that old Mrs. Phillips had moved away many years ago and had never come back, and although people knew she was dead, no one had ever come to live in the house, and nobody in Oakwood knew who owned it. The man said he had heard from older people in the town that Mrs. Phillips had had a son who was away from home all the time after he was grown up and who had gotten into some kind of trouble—he couldn’t remember what it was. This must have been it! How queer it is, that I should first come to live in Tad’s house, and then stay in the house of his friend! I never dreamed, when I heard that man telling Aunt Aggie about the almost forgotten people that used to live in the old house, that I should ever hear of them again. Things have turned out to be so interesting since I came to stay in the Winter Palace!” she finished up with sparkling eyes.
Darkness had fallen by the time Nyoda had finished reading Uncle Jasper’s Diary, and she jumped up with a little exclamation as the clock on the mantel-piece chimed six. The other hours had struck unnoticed. “Mercy!” she cried, “it’s time dinner was on the table, and here we haven’t even begun to get it! I forgot all about dinner, thinking about poor Uncle Jasper.”
All the rest had forgotten about dinner, too, and the Winnebagos could not get their minds off the tale they had just heard read. “Poor Uncle Jasper!” they all said, looking up at his picture, and to their pitying eyes his face was no longer grim and stern, but only pathetic.
CHAPTER VII
Sylvia’s Story
“Katherine Adams, whatever has happened to you?” asked Gladys suddenly, meeting her under the bright light in the hall that evening after dinner.
“Why?” asked Katherine, looking startled. “Is there any soot on my face?”
“No,” replied Gladys with a peal of laughter, “I didn’t mean anything like that. I meant that you look different from the way you used to look, that’s all. You’ve changed since the days when I first knew you. What have you done to yourself in the last year? You’re the same old Katherine, of course, but you’re different, somehow. I noticed it when you first came to Brownell last fall, but I’ve been too busy to give it much thought. But since we’ve been here I’ve been watching you and I can’t help noticing the difference. Now stand right there under that light and let me look at you.”
Katherine laughed good humoredly and stood still dutifully while Gladys inspected her with appraising eyes that took in all the little improvements in Katherine’s appearance. She was heavier than she used to be; some of her angles were softened into curves. She now stood erect, with her head up and her shoulders thrown back, which made her look several inches taller. Her hair no longer hung about her face in stringy wisps; the loose ends were curled becomingly around her temples and ears and held in place with invisible hairpins. She wore a trim worsted dress of an odd shade of blue, which was just the right shade to go with her dull blonde hair and with the dark brown of her neat shoes. Her knuckles were no longer red and rough; her fingernails were manicured; the sagging spectacles of the old days had given way to intellectual looking nose glasses with narrow tortoise shell rims.
“Well, what’s the verdict?” asked Katherine, smiling broadly at Gladys.
“You’re wonderful!” said Gladys enthusiastically. “You’re actually stunning! Whoever told you to get that particular shade of blue to bring out the color of your hair?”
“Nobody told me,” answered Katherine. “I bought it because it was a bargain.” But there was a knowing twinkle in her eyes which gave her dead away, and Gladys, seeing it, knew that Katherine had at last achieved that pride of appearance which she had struggled so long to instill into her.
“However did you do it?” she murmured.
“It was your eleven Rules of Neatness that did it,” replied Katherine, laughing, “or was it seven? I forget. But I did do just the things you told me to do, and it worked. There is no longer any danger of my coming apart in public! What a trial I used to be to you, though!” she said, flushing a little at the recollection. “How you ever put up with me I don’t know. How did you stand it, anyway?”
“Because we loved you, sweet child,” replied Gladys fondly, “and because we all believed the motto, ‘While there’s life, there’s hope.’ We knew you would be a paragon of neatness some day as soon as you got around to it. You never could think of more than one thing at a time, Katherine dear!”
“O my, O my, look at them hugging each other!” exclaimed a teasing voice from above. Looking up they saw Justice Dalrymple leaning over the banisters at the head of the stairs. “You never do that to me,” he continued in a plaintive tone.
Katherine and Gladys merely laughed at him and walked on, arm in arm, and Justice came down the stairs wringing mock tears out of his handkerchief and singing mournfully,
“Forsaken, forsa-ken,
Forsa-a-a-ken a-m I,
Like the bones at a banquet
All men pass me-e-e by!”
“Do behave yourself, Justice,” said Katherine with mock severity. “If you disgrace me I’ll never get you invited anywhere again. Why can’t you be good like the other two boys?”
“’Cause I’m a Junebug,” warbled Justice, to the tune of “I’m a Pilgrim,”
“’Cause I’m a Junebug,
And I’m a beetul,
And I can’t be no
Rhinoscerairus,
’Cause I’m a Junebug,
And I’m a beetul,
I can’t be no,
Rhinoscerairus!”
He advanced into the drawing room, where Katherine now stood alone, and drew out the last syllable of his absurd song into a long bleating wail that sent her into convulsions of laughter till the tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Tears, idle tears—”
began Justice, picking up a vase from the table and holding it under her eyes, and then he stopped, as if struck by a sudden recollection. “I said that to you once before,” he said, “don’t you remember? The first time we really got acquainted with each other. You were standing by the stove,
weeping into the apple sauce.”
“It was pudding,” Katherine corrected him, with a little shamefaced laugh at the remembrance, “huckleberry pudding. And I streaked it all over my face and you nearly died laughing.”
“Well, you laughed too,” Justice defended himself, “and that’s how we got to be friends.”
“That seems ages ago,” said Katherine, “and yet it’s only a little over a year. What a year that was!”
Both stopped their bantering and looked at each other with sober eyes, each thinking of what the trying year at Spencer had been to them. Justice’s eyes traveled over Katherine, and he, too, noticed that she was much better looking than when he first knew her. Katherine noticed the admiration dawning in his eyes and divined his thoughts. After Gladys’s spontaneous outburst of approval she knew beyond any doubt that her appearance no longer offended the artistic eye. The knowledge gave her a new confidence in herself, and a thrill of pleasure that she had never experienced before went through her like an electric shock. At last people had ceased to look upon her as a cross between a circus and a lunatic asylum, she told herself exultingly.
“Well, what are you thinking about?” she asked finally, as Justice continued silent.
“I was just thinking,” replied Justice gravely, “about the difference in plumage that different climates bring about.”
“Whatever made you think about birds?” asked Katherine wonderingly. “You jump from one subject to another like a flea. I don’t see how you can keep your mind on your work long enough to invent anything. By the way, how is that thingummy of yours going? You’re as mum as an oyster about it.”
“Pretty well,” replied Justice. “I’m hampered though, by not having the right kind of help, and not being able to get some of the things I need.”
Katherine looked at him scrutinizingly. He looked tired and rather worn. The nonsensical boy had vanished and a man stood in his place, a man with a heavy responsibility on his shoulders. Justice had that way of changing all in an instant from a boy to a man. At times he would go frolicking about the house till you would have sworn he was not a day older than Slim and the Captain; an instant later he was all gravity, and looked every day of his twenty-six years.
Katherine always stood in awe of him whenever that change took place. He seemed so old and wise and experienced then that she felt hopelessly ignorant and childish beside him. She liked him best when he seemed like the other boys.
“What do you think of my Winnebagos?” she asked him, leading him away from the subject of his work. He always got old looking when he talked about it.
“Greatest bunch of girls I ever saw,” he replied heartily. “Never came across such an accomplished lot in all my life. Each one’s more fun than the next. Hinpoha’s a beauty, and Gladys is a dainty fairy, and Sahwah looks like a brown thrush, and Migwan’s a regular Madonna. And, say—would you mind telling me how you do it, anyway?”
“Do what?”
“Stick together like that. I thought girls always squabbled among themselves. I never thought they could do things together the way you girls do.”
“Camp Fire Girls can do things together!” Katherine informed him with emphasis. “You boys think you’re the only ones that know anything about teamwork. Teamwork is our first motto.”
“I guess it must be,” admitted Justice. “You certainly are a team.”
The rest of the “team” came in then, Sahwah and Gladys and Hinpoha, all three arm in arm, and Migwan behind them, pushing Sylvia in her rolling chair. They settled in a circle before the fireplace, and the talk soon drifted around to Uncle Jasper and his blighted romance. Indeed, Hinpoha had done nothing but talk about it all during dinner. Sylvia, too, was completely taken up with it.
“I love Sylvia Warrington!” she exclaimed fervently. “I am going to have her for my Beloved. I’m glad she had black hair. I adore black hair. And I’m so glad my name is Sylvia, too. I’ve been pretending that she was my aunt, and that I was named after her. I’ve been pretending, too, that she taught me to sing, ‘Hark, hark, the lark!’ Now, when I sing it I always think of her. Wasn’t it beautiful, what Uncle Jasper said about her? ‘She is like a lark, singing in the desert at dawning!’ Oh, I can see it all, the desert, and the sun coming up, and the lark soaring up and singing. I just can’t breathe, it’s so beautiful. And my Beloved is like that!”
A radiant dream light came into her eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have traveled far away from the group by the fire and to be wandering in some far-off land.
“Sylvia is a beautiful name,” said Katherine. “For whom are you called? Was your mother’s name Sylvia?” It was the first time any of them had spoken of Sylvia’s mother, who they knew must be dead.
Sylvia’s eyes lost their dreaminess and she looked up with a merry smile.
“I made it up myself,” she said. “I don’t know what my first real name was, but when Aunt Aggie got me she named me Aggie, after herself. But Aggie is such a hopelessly unimaginative sort of name. It doesn’t make you think of a thing when you say it. You might just as well be named ‘Empty’ as ‘Aggie.’ Then once we lived in the same house with a lady who sang, and she used to sing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ It was the most tuneful name I’d ever heard, and I wondered and wondered who Sylvia was. But I guess the lady never found out, because she kept right on singing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ So one day I said to myself, ‘I’ll be Sylvia!’ Don’t you think it’s a fragrant name? When I say it I can see festoons of pink rosebuds tied with baby ribbon. I made people call me Sylvia, and that’s been my name ever since.”
“Oh, you funny child!” said Nyoda, joining in the general laugh at Sylvia’s tale of her name.
“But Sylvia,” said Sahwah wonderingly, “you said you didn’t know what your first real name was before you came to live with your aunt. Didn’t your aunt know it?”
“No,” replied Sylvia. “You see,” she continued, “Aunt Aggie isn’t my real aunt. She adopted me when I was a baby.”
“Oh-h!” said the Winnebagos in surprise.
“But why do you call her ‘aunt’?” asked Sahwah. “Why don’t you call her ‘mother’?”
“She never would have it,” replied Sylvia. “She always taught me to call her Aunt Aggie. I don’t know why.”
Sylvia moved restlessly in her chair, and from the folds of the loose dressing gown which she wore a picture tumbled out. Katherine picked it up and laid it back on her lap. It was a small colored poster sketch of a red haired girl in a golf cape, which had evidently been the cover design of a magazine some years ago.
“Why are you so fond of that poster, Sylvia?” asked Katherine curiously. “You brought it along with you when you came here, and you keep it with you all the time.”
Sylvia’s tone when she answered was half humorous and half wistful. “That’s my mother,” she said.
“Your mother!” exclaimed Katherine, incredulously.
“Oh, not my really real mother,” Sylvia continued quickly. “I never saw a picture of her. But Aunt Aggie said my mother had red hair and was most uncommonly good looking, so I found a picture of a beautiful lady with red hair and called it my mother. It’s better than nothing.” The Winnebagos nodded silently and no one spoke for a moment.
Then Katherine asked gently, “What else do you know about mother?”
Sylvia sat up and related the tale told her hundreds of times by Aunt Aggie, in answer to her eager questioning about her mother. Unconsciously she used Aunt Aggie’s expressions and gestures as she told it.
“‘Me an’ Joe was coming on the steam cars from Butler to Philadelphy, and in back of us sat a young couple with a baby about a month old. The girl—she wasn’t nothing but a girl even though she was a married woman—was most uncommon good looking. She had bright red hair and big grey eyes, and she wore a golf cape. Her husband was a big, red faced feller, homely but real honest lookin’. They weren’t either of them twenty years old. Farmers, I could tell from their talk, and as
well as I could make out, the name on their bag was Mitchell. Well, well, along between Waterloo and Poland there suddenly come a terrible bump, and then a smash and a crash, and the next thing I was layin’ under the seat and Joe was trying to pull me out. When I did finally get out the car was a-layin’ over on its side all smashed to bits. Somehow or other when Joe dug me out from under the seat I had ahold of the little baby that had been in the seat in back of me. The young man and woman were under the wreck. They were both killed, but the baby never had a scratch.
“‘Nobody ever found out who the red headed woman and the man were, because they were all burned up in the wreck, and all their luggage.
“‘I had taken care of the baby, thinkin’ I’d keep her until her people were found, but they were never heard from, so I decided to keep her for my own. That baby was you, Sylvia.’
“So that’s all I know about my mother and father,” finished Sylvia with a sigh. “But I can think up the most dazzling things about them!”
“Sylvia,” said Katherine, “who was the man I saw on the stairs of your house the night I came in and found you?”
Sylvia looked at her in wonder. “What man?”
“When I came into the hall there was a man leaning over the banisters about half way up the stairs. When I came in he ran down the stairs and out of the front door.”
“I can’t imagine,” said Sylvia. “No man ever came to the house to see us. I didn’t hear anybody come in that day.”
“But the front door stood open when I came up on the porch,” said Katherine. “That hadn’t been standing open all day, had it?”
“No,” replied Sylvia, “for Aunt Aggie was always careful about closing it when she went out.”
“Then he must have opened it,” said Katherine.
“How queer!” said Sylvia. “What do you suppose he could have been doing there? He never knocked on the inside door.”
“Possibly he thought the house was empty, and went in to get out of the cold,” concluded Katherine. “Then he heard you singing, and it scared him. He looked frightened out of his wits when I saw him. When I came in he just ran for his life.” Katherine laughed as she remembered her own dismay at seeing the man and thinking that he was the owner of the house, when he was only a stray visitor himself and worse frightened than she. Here she had prepared such an elaborate apology in her mind, and he was nothing but a tramp! The humor of it struck her forcibly, now that it was all in the past, and she laughed over it most of the evening.
The Girl Detective Megapack: 25 Classic Mystery Novels for Girls Page 308
