In the Mist of the Mountains Part 5

"I'm coming, too," he said.

"You're not," she cried,--"you can't,--I shan't be ready for you; there'll be no breakfast. Get out immediately, Hugh, and don't be so foolish." She actually dragged at his coat to pull him up from his seat.

But then the train gave a jerk, and she recognized the matter was out of her hands.

"Well, of all the wild doings!" she said; "you really might be twenty again, Hugh, and going off to England at two days' notice with your very socks undarned."

"I wish I were," he said, and ruefully smoothed a bald patch on the top of his head.

"But--but--you don't realize things a bit. I haven't ordered anything,--the very beds aren't made,--there won't be a meal fit to eat for at least two days." Kate looked as nearly put out as a stout, bright-faced woman of forty-five could look.

"I'll sleep on a sofa," he said, good-humouredly.

"It will have to be made up," she snapped, or tried to snap.

"Very well, I'll sleep under it."

"And what about breakfast? Well, you will simply have to go to the hotel till I'm ready for you."

"I'll go to no hotel," he said; "I'm sick of them. I'll have half of your breakfast."

"A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no b.u.t.ter," she said scornfully.

"A boiled egg and bread, and the possibility of no b.u.t.ter be it," he answered.

"But what on earth induced you to do such a mad thing?" she persisted.

He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"I think it was chiefly because the beggar wouldn't propose," he said.

"What are you talking about, you mad boy?"

"You see," he said, "he was a decent fellow--I'd quite spread myself on him, and she was no end of a girl, quite the best I've done. And I'd got him right up to the fence, and I'm hanged if I could get him over. He perorated, he posed like a shop-walker, you could see him hanging limp like a broken puppet, and me behind with beads on my forehead uselessly jerking the wires."

"Poor old boy!" said Kate sympathetically. "Oh, he'll do it beautifully when once you're on the mountains. Now I look at you I can see you really are run down. I've been planning how I will make you a comfortable little study out of one of the bedrooms, and fix up your writing-table under a window that has a view, and give you a verandah to stalk up and down on when the fine frenzies seize you. But I don't want you to come in for all the confusion of the first day."

"Nonsense," he said; "if you can stand it, I ought to be able to."

But that n.o.ble sentiment was uttered at night, after a comfortable dinner at the club, and with the grateful appreciation of the sacrifice this loyal sister was making in breaking all her engagements to come to look after his welfare. It was before breakfast now, a time when the sentiments are absolutely raw, and the n.o.blest mind is capable of resentment when not fortified with food. Hugh went out of the pantry and settled himself gloomily upon a side verandah, uncertain which to anathematize, the flies that had broken in upon his slumbers, or the ones that evidently were studiously refraining from awakening his sister and her handmaid.

But after a time the peace of the perfect morning soothed him, and he put his feet up on the verandah rail, and fell to marvelling at his own fame.

Five years ago he had been quite unknown--a struggling journalist savagely treated by Fate. And for sheer need once of saner employment for his leisure hours, he poured out some of the bitterness that a severe attack of indigestion had deposited on the wholesome substratum of his nature in perhaps as fierce a novel as had yet been written.

Five publishers rejected it with their customary regret; to the stereotyped refusal of the sixth the reader added a few lines, saying he had found much to admire in the work, but that a gracious public full of nerves would not stand so much cold water poured upon it. The seventh firm to whom he submitted the tale was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Kinross was absolutely startled when he received a laconic note accepting his MS., and offering a very fair royalty. He was not to know that these publishers had taken it in the spirit of a man who with six s.h.i.+llings for his only capital puts five of them in a sweep where the odds are a thousand to one.

And then Fortune, who for more than forty years had pretended she did not know that there was any such person as Hugh Kinross c.u.mbering the globe, suddenly veered round and smiled one of her most gracious smiles upon him.

He fairly leapt into fame. The inscrutable reading world, long bored almost to death by a sameness of methods, actually rose up and waved its hat at this savage treatment, and demanded that he should continue so to deal with it.

So Hugh, marvelling more than any one, continued to "lay about him with a knotted stick" as Kate, who had long typed his stories unsuccessful and successful, expressed it.

And he found himself wealthy, or at least comfortable, beyond the hopes of his most avaricious days, and famous beyond the wildest dreams that had flamed up in him when he had read his first journalese in print.

Even at forty-nine he had made no close ties. One sister, Mrs. Gowan, was married to a somewhat consequential brewer, who in the journalistic days had rather patronized Hugh. So there was no corner in that home the author cared to accept for his own.

The other sister, Kate--

"Fair, fat and fort.i.ter in re, And suave in manner"--

had long since refused the brewer's patronage and pompous proposal that she should make a home in his house, and in return act as governess to his children. She had thrown in her lot with Hugh, and was soon making, as a typewriter who could be relied upon for faithful work, a very comfortable income. The brother and sister boarded generally at the same house, and, absorbed in their work, drifted over the borderland of middle age together, and together lost their respective waist lines.

They were the best of chums and respected each other's weaknesses. It was rather a trial to Hugh, perhaps, that Kate, being fat, had taken ardently to the bicycle and was therefore a joke among onlookers. But seeing the extreme enjoyment she got from her machine, and recognizing that a healthy, hardworking woman, without home or children, must break out somewhere, he had never tried to make her desist from her pleasure.

And Kate had to bear with Hugh.

He had a maddening habit of casting forth the match with which he lighted his pipe.

He would sit at a table surrounded with match-holders of every variety--one Christmas Kate had put six of the latest novelties in this line in his sock--and he would strike a light, and then thoughtlessly throw the dead match either towards the window or the fireplace.

As he pointed out to Kate, the wish to do well was plainly imbedded in his breast, or he would simply fling the useless thing down at his feet.

Conscience was not deadened in him; he was quite aware that matches should not be casually strewn upon a carpet, and in his most absent-minded moods he sent them in the direction of those approved receptacles--the window or fireplace. Let her blame others if the window was closed--the sole use of a window, as far as he could see, was to throw matches through,--or if the fireplace was ridiculously decorated with plants and such foolishness, instead of holding its rightful consuming element for used vestas.

When Fortune smiled so marvellously on Hugh, one of the first things he did was to go down to the city, and with his own hands take down the strip of painted tin that, in a building of offices, announced "Miss Kinross, Typist."

He was on the verge of following this act by dropping the typewriter out of the window, when Kate came in just in time to point out to him that some one might be pa.s.sing beneath, and so receive a worse headache from the thing than it had ever given her. She accepted, as wholeheartedly as he gave it, an income of two hundred a year from him. But she clung to her old typewriter, and copied lovingly all his stories for him.

A deprecatory little cough just below him took Hugh's attention from himself, and the place he had come so unexpectedly to occupy in the economic scheme of Nature.

CHAPTER V

ANTE-PRANDIAL VISITORS

He looked and beheld a small maiden clad in a holland frock, with a white linen hat on the back of her gold-brown curls, instead of being set in orthodox fas.h.i.+on upon her head. Her white shoes and socks, fresh with the morning, were a little reddened with walking through the "Tenby" garden, which, as Pauline had borne witness, contained no gra.s.s whatever.

Just behind her was a small boy, sitting very firmly on a little red tricycle.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Hugh; "very glad to see you, I'm sure. Friends who look you up in the low ebb of the hours before breakfast are friends indeed.

Come along up, both of you, and tell me your names."

But Lynn stood loyal and steadfast at the foot of the steps, while she put the first necessary and searching question that was his due.

"Have you had whooping cough?" she said.