Red Pepper Burns Part 22

It must be as useless for the magnet to resist as for the bar. And when they, have come within a certain distance of each other--

If Red Pepper's left arm caught her in the stronger grasp, the right did all, and more than all, that could have been expected of it. It was his right arm which slowly drew her hands up, one after the other, and indicated to them that their place was locked together, behind his neck.

An old garden in South Carolina is a place to lure the Northerner out-of-doors. Before breakfast next morning Burns was walking down the box-bordered paths, feasting his gaze and his sense of fragrance on the clumps of blue and white violets, the cl.u.s.ters of gay crocuses, the splendid spikes of Roman hyacinths. But he did not fail to keep track of all doorways in sight, and when she appeared at the open French window of the drawing-room he was there in a trice, offering her a bunch of purple violets and feasting his eyes upon her morning freshness.

"I'm still dreaming, I think," said he when he had drawn her back into the quiet room long enough to satisfy himself with the active demonstration that possession means privilege, and had himself fastened the violets in the front of her crisp white morning dress. "Dreaming that I can stay down here in this wonderful paradise with you and not go back to the slave's life I lead."

"You would never be happy away from that slave's life long, you know,"

she reminded him. "The rush of it is the joy of it to you."

"How will it be to you? I shall be yours, you remember, till Joe Tressler or any other ne'er-do-weel wants me, then I'm his."

"But you'll always come back to me," said she.

"And will you be content with that?"

"So long as you want to come back."

He looked steadily into her eyes, and his own took fire. "Want to come back! I've waited a long time to find the woman I could be sure I should always want to come back to. I thought there would never be such a woman: not for an erratic fellow like me.... But now I'm wondering how I shall ever be able to stay away."

CHAPTER XIV. IN WHICH HE DEFIES SUPERSt.i.tION

"Hades of Hymen! Red, are you making calls this morning?"

"Why not? I'm not to be married till noon, am I?"

"I say, take me with you, will you? I want to go along with a man who has the nerve to see patients up to the last minute before his wedding!"

"Takes less nerve than to sit around and wait for the fateful hour, I should say. Come on, if you think you'll have time to dress when you get back. It may be close work."

"Haven't you got to dress yourself?" demanded Arthur Chester, settling himself in the car beside its driver. "Or shall you go to the altar in tweeds with April mud on your boots?"

"Rather than not get there, yes. But I can dress in half the time you can--always could, and necessity has developed the art. Look here, there isn't any April mud. The roads are fine."

"Oh, I suppose if I were booked for a wedding journey in the Green Imp before the leaves were fairly out I shouldn't be able to see any mud myself. As it is, well, I don't know the colour of the bride's motoring clothes, but I presume they'll be adapted to the circ.u.mstances. I never saw her look anything but ready for whatever situation she happened to be in. That's a trick that'll serve her many a good turn as the wife of R. P. Burns, M.D., eh, Red?"

The Imp whirled about the country all the morning, having made an early start. The car was in fine fettle, like a horse that has been trained for a race. Although it was beginning its second season it had never been in better trim for business. The engine, having been cared for and seldom abused, was running more smoothly than when it had been first put upon the road. The Imp had had a fresh coat of the dark-green which gave it its name, and its bra.s.swork was s.h.i.+ning as only Johnny Caruthers by long and untiring labors could make metal s.h.i.+ne. It had that morning acquired a luggage-rack attached to its rear, which was soon to receive a leather-covered motor trunk at that moment receiving its final consignments in the Macauley house; and there were several other new fittings about the machine which indicated that it was presently to be put to uses which had never been required of it before.

The Imp drew up in front of the hospital. Chester looked anxiously at his watch for the twenty-seventh time that morning. "For Heaven's sake, hurry, Red," he urged. "Women are the d.i.c.kens about having a wedding late, and it's ten minutes of eleven now. Noon comes sure and soon, and at noon, allow me to remind you--"

Burns nodded. "Keep cool, boy," he recommended. "No use getting excited before a critical operation."

But he disappeared at a pace fast enough to satisfy Chester, who sat back and said to himself that R. P. had come nearer giving the crisis before him its appropriate name than he had ever heard done before.

He became anxious again, however, before Burns returned, and his watch was in his hand when the prospective bridegroom bolted out of the hospital door and ran for his car as if he had not a moment to spare.

"Glad to see you're losing your head a trifle at last," commented Chester as the Imp turned a dizzy curve and shot away. "It's the only proper thing. But we've really enough time if you don't stop anywhere else. What's the matter? Good Lord, man, you'll get nabbed if you speed up like this within limits. You--"

"Cut it and don't talk. I've got to make time," was all the answer or explanation he received; and Chester, with the wisdom of long a.s.sociation with Red Pepper at his pepperest, obeyed.

As they approached the house Burns spoke for the first time since they had left the city. "Go in and tell the bunch I have to do an operation at the hospital as quick as I can get my stuff and drive back there.

I'll be back at--"

"Great Christopher, man! But--"

"I can be back by two. Ellen will understand."

"The deuce she will! Don't ask me to explain to her."

"I won't. I'll do it myself. You tell the rest."

The Imp shot up the driveway. Burns jumped out and ran to his office.

Five minutes later, instrument bag in hand, he ran out again, Miss Mathewson following. He bolted in at the Macauleys' front door. Chester had already broken the incredible news to Martha Macauley and was standing out a storm of expostulations and reproaches, as if by any chance anybody could expect Arthur Chester to be able to stop R. P.

Burns when he had started upon any course of action whatsoever. But when Burns himself appeared at the doorway the situation came to a crisis.

Towering beside a group of palms which decorated the foot of the staircase Burns demanded to see Ellen.

"Why, Red, you can't. She's--besides how can you--"

"Ask her to come where I can speak to her then. Quick, please."

"But she--"

There was no knowing how long the sparring might have lasted, or what extreme measures might have been taken, had not a figure in a floating lilac-and-white garment, with two long braids of dark hair hanging over its shoulders, appeared upon the staircase landing. Burns looked up, saw it, and was up the stairs to the landing before Chester could flick an eyelash.

"Dear, to save a life I want to delay things just two hours. There's n.o.body else to do it. Van Horn was taken ill just as he was getting ready. The only other man who would venture under the conditions--Grayson--is out of town."

His arms were about her as she stood a step above him. So, her eyes were level with his.

"Do it, of course," she whispered. "And take my love with you."

For one minute Burns stayed to tell her that he had known she would send him to his duty, then he was off. The door slammed behind him, and outside the Imp's horn sent back a parting salute.

From the bottom stair Martha Macauley, distressed young matron and hostess, gazed up at her sister, who, with arms leaning on the vine-wreathed rail at the landing, was smiling down at her.

"Ellen! Was ever anything so crazy! I did suppose Red would take time enough to be married in. There's everybody coming."

"So few you can easily telephone them all to wait."

"And the breakfast under way--"

"It will keep."

"Aren't you superst.i.tious enough not to want to postpone your wedding?"

demanded Martha urgently.