Outside Inn Part 14

Collier Pratt found his child in Nancy's arms when he again mounted the stairs to the third floor of Outside Inn. The place was curiously cool to one who had been walking the sun-baked streets, and he gave an appreciative glance at the dim interior and the tableau of woman and child. Nancy's burnished head bent gravely over the shadowy dark one resting against her bosom.

"All right again, is she?" he inquired with the slow rare smile that Nancy had not seen before that day.

"Yes," Nancy said, "she's better. She's under-nourished, that's what the trouble is."

"I suspected that," Collier Pratt said ruefully. "I'm not specially talented as a parent. I feed her pa.s.sionately for days, and then I stop feeding her almost entirely. Artists in my circ.u.mstances eat sketchily at best. The only reason that I am fed with any regularity is that I have the habit of coming to this restaurant of yours. By the way, is it yours? I found you in charge to-day to my amazement."

"I am in charge to-day," Nancy acknowledged; "in fact I have taken over the management of it for--for a friend."

"The mysterious philanthropist."

"Ye-es."

"Then I will refrain from any comment on the lunch to-day."

"Oh! that--that was a mistake," Nancy cried, "an experiment. Gaspard the _chef_--was ill."

"He was very ill, father, dear," Sheila added gravely, "like crossing the Channel, much sicker than I was. I was only sick like crossing the ocean, you know."

"These fine distinctions," Collier Pratt said, "she's much given to them." His eyes narrowed as they rested again on the picture Nancy made--the cool curve of her bent neck, the rise and fall of the breast in which the breathing had quickened perceptibly since his coming,--the child swathed in the long folds of white linen outlined against the Madonna blue of the dress that she was wearing. Nancy blushed under the intentness of his gaze, understanding, thanks to Caroline's report of his conversation with Betty, something of what was in his mind about her.

"Gaspard is going to be taken away in an ambulance," the child said, "to the hospital."

"Then who is going to cook my dinner?" Collier Pratt asked.

"Good lord, I don't know," Nancy cried, roused to her responsibilities.

She looked at the watch on her wrist, a platinum bracelet affair with an octagonal face that d.i.c.k had persuaded her to accept for a Christmas present by giving one exactly like it to Betty and Caroline.

It was twenty-five minutes of five. Dinner was served every night promptly at half past six, and there was absolutely no preparation made for it, not so much as a loaf of bread ordered. Instead of doing the usual marketing in the morning she had sent Michael out for the things that she needed in the preparation of luncheon, and planned to make up a list of things that she needed for dinner just as soon as her midday duties in the kitchen had set her free. She thought that she would be more like Gaspard, "inspired to buy what is right" if she waited until the success of her luncheon had been a.s.sured. The ensuing events had driven the affairs of her cuisine entirely out of her mind.

She was constrained by her native tendency to concentrate on the business in hand to the exclusion of all other matters, big and little. She had dismissed Betty during the excitement that followed Sheila's illness, and Betty had seemed unnaturally willing to leave the hectic scene and go about her business. Michael had made several ineffectual attempts to speak to her, but she had waved him away impatiently. She knew that neither he nor any one else on the restaurant staff would believe that she hadn't made some adequate and mysterious provision for the serving of the night meal. She had never failed before in the smallest detail of executive policy. She set the child back upon the cus.h.i.+on, and arranged her perfunctorily in position there.

"I don't know _what_ you are going to have for dinner," she said, "much less who's going to cook it for you."

"Perhaps I had better arrange to have it elsewhere, since this seems to be literally the cook's day out."

"There'll be dinner," said Nancy uncertainly.

d.i.c.k came up the stairs three at a time, and in his wake she heard the murmur of women's voices--Caroline's and Betty's.

"I heard you were in difficulties," d.i.c.k said, "so I made Sister Betty and Caroline give up their perfectly good trip into the country, in order to come around and mix in."

"I didn't know Betty was going driving with you," Nancy said. "She didn't say so. Oh! d.i.c.k, there isn't any dinner. I forgot all about it. This is Mr. Collier Pratt and his little daughter,--Mr. Richard Thornd.y.k.e. She's coming to live with me soon, I hope, and let Hitty take care of her."

The two men shook hands.

"Hold on a minute," d.i.c.k said, "that paragraph is replete with interest, but I want to get it a.s.similated. Sure, Betty was going driving with me. I told her to ask you if she thought it would be any use, but she allowed it wouldn't. I am delighted to meet Mr. Pratt, and pleased to know that his daughter is coming to live with you, but isn't that rather sudden? Also, what's this about there not being any dinner?"

"There isn't," Nancy was beginning, when she realized that Caroline and Betty, who had followed closely on d.i.c.k's footsteps, were looking at her with faces pale with consternation and alarm. She could see the antic.i.p.atory collapse of Outside Inn writ large on Caroline's expressive countenance. Caroline was the type of girl who believed that in the very nature of things the undertakings of her most intimate friends were doomed to failure. "There isn't any dinner yet,"

Nancy corrected herself, "but you go up to my place, d.i.c.k, and get Hitty. Tell her she's got to cook dinner for this restaurant to-night.

She can cook three courses of anything she likes, and have _carte blanche_ in the kitchen. You have more influence with her than anybody, so, no matter what she says, make her do it. Then when she decides what she wants to cook, drive her around until she collects her ingredients. She won't let anybody do the marketing for her."

"All right," d.i.c.k said, "I'll do my best."

"You'll have to do more than that," Betty laughed as he started off, "but you're perfectly capable of it. How do you do, Mr. Pratt? This is Miss Eustace, pale with apprehension about the way things are going, but still recognizable and answering to her name." Betty always enjoyed introducing Caroline with an audacious flourish, since Caroline always suffered so much in the process.

"And this is little Miss Sheila Pratt," Nancy supplemented.

"_Enchante_," the little girl said, "I mean, I am very pleased to meet you. I was very sick, but I am better now, and I am going to live with Miss Dear."

"It seems to be settled," her father said, shrugging.

"Would you mind it so very much?" Nancy asked.

"I wouldn't mind it at all," Collier Pratt said. "I think it would be a delightful arrangement,--if I'm to take you seriously."

"Nancy is always to be taken seriously," Betty put in. "What she really wants of the child is to use her for dietetic experiment, I'm sure."

"That's what she's used to, poor child," Collier Pratt said ruefully.

The removal of Gaspard created a diversion. Nancy took Sheila in to bid him good-by, and the great creature was so touched by the farewell kiss that she imprinted on his forehead, and the revelation of the fact that a fellow being had been suffering kindred throes in the chamber just beyond his own that he was of two minds about letting himself be moved at all from her proximity. A group of waitresses collected on the second landing, and Nancy and her friends stood together at the head of the stairs while the white-coated intern from the hospital rolled his great bulk upon a fragile-looking stretcher, and with the a.s.sistance of all the male talent in the establishment, managed to head him down the stairs, and so on across the court and into the waiting ambulance.

Nancy's eyes filled with inexplicable tears, and she caught Collier Pratt regarding them with some amus.e.m.e.nt.

"He's such a dear," she said somewhat irrelevantly. "I really didn't care whether he was sick or not this morning,--but you get so fond of people that are around all the time."

"I don't," said Collier Pratt,--he spoke very lightly, but there was something in his tone that made Nancy want to turn and look at him intently. She seemed to see for the first time a shade of defiant cruelty in his face,--"I don't," he reiterated.

"I do," Nancy repeated stubbornly, but as she met his slow smile, the slight impression of unpleasantness vanished.

"We artists are selfish people," he said. "I'm going to run away now, and leave my daughter to cultivate your charming friends. Will you come and eat your dinner at my little table to-night, and talk, discuss this matter of her visit to you?"

"I will if there is any dinner," Nancy said, putting out a throbbing hand to him.

There was a dinner. It was. .h.i.tty's conception of an emergency meal--the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared on wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed clams and melted b.u.t.ter sauce. Hitty knew a fish market where the clams were imported direct from Cape Cod by the nephew of a man who used to go to school with her husband's brother, and he warranted every clam she bought of him. They were served in soup plates and the drawn b.u.t.ter in demi-ta.s.ses, but Hitty would have it no other way. The _piece de resistance_ was ham and eggs, great fragrant crispy slices of ham browned faintly gold across their pinky surface, and eggs--Hitty knew where to get country eggs, too--so white, so golden-yolked, so tempting that it was difficult to a.s.sociate them with the prosaic process of frying, but fried they were. With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets,--no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato,--and afterward a course of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral b.a.l.l.s of dumplings that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of hot huckleberry--not blueberry, but country huckleberry--sauce.

"Where's the coffee?" Nancy asked Dolly miserably, when the humiliating meal was drawing to its close.

"She won't make coffee," Dolly whispered; "she says it will keep everybody awake, and they're much better off without it, but Miss Betty, she's watching her chance, and she's making it."

Collier Pratt had received each course in silence, but had eaten heartily of the food that was set before him.

"I suppose he was hungry enough to eat anything," Nancy thought; "the lunch was humiliating enough, but this surpa.s.ses anything I dreamed of."

She had given up trying to estimate the calories that each man was likely to average in partaking of Hitty's menu. She noticed that a great many of her patrons had taken second helpings, and that threw her out in her calculation of quant.i.ties, while the relative digestibility of the protein and the fats in pork depend so much upon its preparation that she could not approximate the virtue of Hitty's bill of fare without consultation with Hitty.

"That was a very excellent dinner," Collier Pratt broke through her painful reverie to make his p.r.o.nouncement. "Astonis.h.i.+ng, but very satisfactory. It reminds me of days on my grandfather's farm when I was a youngster."

"I should think it might," Nancy said, for the first time in her relation with her new friend becoming ironical on her own account.