Tracy Park Part 55

Then, as her eye fell upon the first package she had taken out, and which was wrapped in a silk handkerchief, she took it up, and removing the covering, started as suddenly as if a blow had been dealt her, for there was the tortoise-sh.e.l.l box, with its blue satin lining, and its diamonds, which seemed to her like so many sparks of fire flas.h.i.+ng in her eyes and dazzling her with their brilliancy.

Just such a box as this, and just such diamonds as these, Mrs. Frank Tracy had lost years ago, and as Jerrie held them in her hand and turned them to the light, till they showed all the hues of the rainbow, she experienced a feeling of terror as if she were a thief and had been convicted of the theft. Then, as she remembered what she had read, she burst into a hysterical fit of laughing and crying together, and whispered to herself:

'I believe I am going mad like him.'

After a time she arose, and with the bag on her arm and the diamonds in her hand, she started for home, with only one thought in her mind:

'I must tell Harold, and ask him what to do.'

She had forgotten that he was to leave that afternoon on the train--forgotten everything, except the one subject which affected her so strongly, so that in one sense she might be said to be thinking of nothing, when, as she was walking with her head bent down, she came suddenly face to face with Harold, who, with his satchel in his hand, was starting for the train due now in a few minutes.

'Jerrie,' he exclaimed, 'how late you are! I waited until the last minute to say good-bye. Why, what ails you, and where have you been?' he continued, as she raised her head and he saw the bruise on her forehead and the strange pallor of her face.

'In the Tramp House,' the answered, in a voice which was not hers at all, and made Harold look more curiously at her.

As he did so he saw peeping from a fold of the silk handkerchief the corner of the tortoise-sh.e.l.l box which he remembered so well, and the sight of which brought back all the shame and humiliation and pain of that memorable morning when he had been suspected of taking it.

'What is it? What have you in your hand?' he asked.

Then Jerrie's face, so pale before, flushed scarlet, and her eyes had in them a wild look which Harold construed into fear, as, without a word, she laid the box in his hand, and then stood watching him is he opened it.

Harold's face was whiter than Jerrie's had been, and his voice trembled as he said, in a whisper:

'Mrs. Tracy's diamonds!'

'Yes, Mrs. Tracy's diamonds,' Jerrie replied, with a marked emphasis on the _Mrs. Tracy_.

'How came you by them, and where did you find them,' Harold asked next, shrinking a little from the glittering stones which seemed like fiery eyes confronting him.

'I can't tell you now. Put them up quick. Don't let any one see them.

Somebody is coming,' Jerrie said, hurriedly, as her ear caught a sound and her eye an object which Harold neither saw nor heard as he mechanically thrust the box into his side pocket and then turned just as Tom Tracy came up on horseback.

'Hallo, Jerrie! hallo, Hal!' he cried, dismounting quickly and throwing the bridle-rein over his arm. 'And so you are off to that suit?' he continued, addressing himself to Harold. 'By George, I wish I were a witness. I'd swear the old man's head off; for, upon my soul, I believe he is an old liar?' Then turning to Jerrie, he continued: 'Are you better than you were this morning? Upon my word, you look worse. It's that infernal watching last night that ails you. I told mother you ought not to do it.'

Just then a whistle was heard in the distance; the train was at Truesdale, four miles away.

'You will never catch it,' Tom said, as Harold s.n.a.t.c.hed up his bag and started to run, 'Here, jump on to Beaver, and leave him at the station.

I can go there for him.'

Harold knew it was impossible for him to make time against the train, and, accepting Tom's offer, he vaulted into the saddle and galloped rapidly away, reaching the station just in time to give his horse to the care of a boy and to leap upon the train as it was moving away.

Meanwhile Tom walked on with Jerrie to the cottage, where he would have stopped if she had not said to him:

'I would ask you to come in, but my head is aching so badly that I must go straight to bed. Good-bye, Tom,' and she offered him her hand, a most unusual thing for her to do on an ordinary occasion like this.

What ailed her, Tom wondered, that she spoke so kindly to him and looked at him so curiously? Was she sorry for her decision, and did she wish to revoke it?

'Then, by Jove, I'll give her a chance, for every time I see her I find myself more and more in love,' Tom thought, as he left her and started for the station after Beaver, whom he found hitched to a post and pawing the ground impatiently.

Mrs. Crawford was in the garden when Jerrie entered the house, and thus there was no one to see her as she hurried up stairs and hid the leather bag away upon a shelf in her dressing-room. First, however, she took out two of the papers and read them again, as if to make a.s.surance doubly sure; then she tried the little key to the lock, which it fitted perfectly.

'There is no mistake,' she whispered; 'but I can't think about it now, for this terrible pain in my head. I must wait till Harold comes home; he will tell me what to do, and be so glad for me. Dear Harold; his days of labor are over, and grandmother's, too. Those diamonds are a fortune in themselves, and they are _mine_! my own! she said so! Oh, mother, I have found you at last, but I can't make it real; my head is so strange.

What if I should be crazy?' and she started suddenly. 'What if that dreadful taint should be in my blood, or what if I should die just as I have found my mother! Oh, Heaven, don't let me die; don't let me lose my reason, and I will try to do right; only show me what right is.'

She was praying now upon her knees with her throbbing head upon the side of the bed, into which she finally crept with her clothes on, even to her boots, for Jerrie was herself no longer. The fever with which for days she had been threatened, and which had been induced by over-study at Va.s.sar, and the excitement which had followed her return home, could be kept at bay no longer, and when Mrs. Crawford, who had seen her enter the house, went up after a while to see why she did not come down to tea, she found her sleeping heavily, with spots of crimson upon her cheeks, while her hands, which moved incessantly, were burning with fever. Occasionally she moaned and talked in her sleep of the Tramp House, and rats, and Peterkin, who had struck the blow and knocked something or somebody down, Mrs. Crawford could not tell what, unless it were Jerrie herself, on whose forehead there was a bunch the size now of a walnut.

'Jerrie, Jerrie,' Mrs. Crawford cried in alarm, as she tried to remove the girl's clothes. 'What is it, Jerrie? What has happened? Who hurt you? Who struck the blow?'

'Peterkin,' was the faint response, as for an instant Jerrie opened her eyelids only to close them again and sink away into a heavier sleep or stupefaction. It seemed the latter, and as Mrs. Crawford could not herself go for a physician, and as no one came down the lane that evening, she sat all night, by Jerrie's bed, bathing the feverish hands and trying to lessen the lump on the forehead, which, in spite of all her efforts, continued to swell until it seemed to her it was as large as a hen's egg.

'Did Peterkin strike you, and what for?' she kept asking; but Jerrie only moaned and muttered something she could not understand, except once when she said, distinctly:

'Yes, Peterkin. Such a blow; it was like a blacksmith's hammer, and knocked the table to pieces. I am glad he did it.'

What did she mean? Mrs. Crawford asked herself in vain, and when at last the early summer morning broke, she was almost as crazy as Jerrie, who was steadily growing worse, and who was saying the strangest things about arrests and blows, and Peterkin, and Harold, and Mr. Arthur, whose name she always mentioned with a sob and stretching out of her hands, as to some invisible presence. Help must be had from some quarter; and for two hours, which seemed to her years, Mrs. Crawford watched for the coming of someone, until at last she saw Tom Tracy galloping up on Beaver.

'Tom, Tom,' she screamed from the window, as she saw him dismounting at the gate, 'don't get off, but ride for your life and fetch the doctor, quick. Jerrie is very sick; has been crazy all night, and has a bunch on her head as big as a bowl, where she says Peterkin struck her.

'Peterkin struck Jerrie! I'll kill him!' Tom said as he tore down the lane and out upon the highway in quest of the physician, who was soon found and at Jerrie's side, where Tom stood with him, gazing awe struck upon the fever stricken girl, who was tossing and talking all the time, and whose bright eyes unclosed once and fixed themselves on him, as he spoke her name and laid his hand on one of hers.

'Oh, Tom, Tom,' she said, 'you told me you'd kill her. Will you kill her? Will you kill her?' And a wild, hysterical laugh echoed through the room, as she kept repeating the words, 'Will you kill her? Will you kill her?' which conveyed no meaning to Tom, who had forgotten what he had said he would do if a claimant to Tracy Park should appear in the shape of a young lady.

Whatever Jerrie took up she repeated rapidly until something else came into her mind, and when Mrs. Crawford, referring to the bunch on her head, said to the physician, 'Peterkin struck the blow, she says,' she began at once like a parrot. 'Peterkin struck the blow! Peterkin struck the blow!' until another idea suggested itself, and she began to ring changes on the sentence. 'In the rat-hole; in the Tramp House; in the Tramp House; in the rat-hole,' talking so fast that sometimes it was impossible to follow her.

The blow on her head alone could not have produced this state of things; it was rather over-excitement, added to some great mental shock, the nature of which he could not divine, the doctor said to Tom, who in his wrath at Peterkin was ready to flay him alive, or at least to ride him on a rail the instant he entered town.

It was a puzzling case, though not a dangerous one as yet, the physician said. Jerrie's strong const.i.tution could stand an attack much more severe than this one; and prescribing perfect quiet, with strict orders that she should see no more people than was necessary, he left, promising to return in the afternoon, when he hoped to find her better.

Tom lingered a while after the doctor had left, and showed himself so thoughtful and kind that Mrs. Crawford forgave him much which she had harbored against him for his treatment of Harold.

All night Tom's dreams had been haunted with Jerrie's voice and Jerrie's look as she gave him her hand and said, 'Good-bye, Tom,' and he had ridden over early to see if the look and tone were still there, and if they were, and he had a chance, he meant to renew his offer. But words of love would have been sadly out of place to this restless, feverish girl, whose incoherent babblings puzzled and bewildered him.

One fact, however, was distinct in his mind--Peterkin had struck her a terrible blow in the Tramp House. Of that he was sure, though why he should have done so he could not guess; and vowing vengeance upon the man, he left the cottage at last and rode down to the Tramp House, where he found the table in a state of ruin upon the door, three of the legs upon it and the other one nowhere to be seen.

'He struck her with it and then threw it away, I'll bet,' he said to himself, as he hunted for the missing leg; 'and it was some quarrel he picked with her about Hal, who is going to swear against him. Jerrie would never hear Hal abused, and I've no doubt she aggravated the wretch until he forgot himself and dealt her that blow. I'll have him arrested for a.s.sault and battery, as sure as I am born.'

Hurrying home, he told the story to his mother, who smiled incredulously and said she did not believe it, bidding him say nothing of it to Maude, who was not as well as usual that day. Then he told his father, who started at once for the cottage, where Mrs. Crawford refused to let him see Jerrie, saying that the doctor's orders were that she should be kept perfectly quiet. But as they stood talking together near the open door, Jerrie's voice was heard calling:

'Let Mr. Frank come up.'

So Frank went up, and, notwithstanding all he had heard from Tom, he was surprised at Jerrie's flushed face and the unnatural expression of her eyes, which turned so eagerly toward him as he came in.

'Oh, Mr. Tracy,' she said, as he sat down beside her and took one of her burning hands in his, 'you have always been kind to me, haven't you?'

'Yes,' he replied, with a keen pang of remorse, and wondering if she would call it kindness if she knew all that he did.

'And I think you like me some,' she continued: 'don't you?'

'Like you!' he repeated; 'yes, more than you can ever know. Why, sometimes I think I like you almost as much as I do Maude.'