“So you think I would blame you, do you?” he asked, suddenly grown serious.
“Oh, no, I know you wouldn’t! You never would! But in your heart you could not help feeling I had not been quite square with you. Truly you cannot understand how hard it would be for you.”
“Would it make it harder for you if I was there to help share the unpleasantness?” he asked tenderly.
“Oh, no!” she said with a deep, drawn, wistful sigh, “only that I would blame myself for letting you be there.”
“Well, then, put that idea out of your head. I want to be there. I want to know and experience what you have been through and have to pass through, because only so can you and I be thoroughly one. I have found that we learn to know Christ only as we are permitted to share in His sufferings; only in that way can we be one with Him in His resurrection and triumph. And I think it is so, in lesser degree, in our earthly relations. Unless we are on in our troubles and unhappinesses, and bear them together, how can we possibly be one in our joys? I say it reverently.”
“Oh—you are wonderful!” said Kerry. “You make it almost seem right!”
“Of course I do!” he said joyously. “Now, come, lead me to my new mother, for I’m going to love her as you do whether she is disagreeable or not.
Kerry laughed.
“She’s not unpleasant to look at,” she admitted, “she’s very beautiful. Everybody admires her.”
“One would know that to look at her daughter,” said McNair, drinking in the beauty of the lovely face before him.
“Oh, I’m not beautiful!” said Kerry incredulously, “I’m nothing at all like mother. She is lovely!”
“Well, I’ll tell you whether you’re more beautiful after I see her,” said McNair, smiling, wwwdeandeandess but we won’t tell her. Come now, let us go and get this over with, and then, dear, you and I are going out to get married. Yes, I mean it,” he said as he saw protest in Kerry’s eyes. “I’m running no more risks. I’m going to have the right to stay by you whatever comes. And we’re going to get your mother so interested in our wedding that she won’t have time to be unhappy anymore. This is our job now, yours and mine, to take care of her, since the man she has married seems not be able to make her happy.”
Before she could protest longer, he had her in a taxi, and they were threading their way through traffic toward Mrs. Scott’s. As they went McNair went on planning.
“We’ll let your mother choose where we are to live. We’ll have to give up a honeymoon for the present perhaps, but we’re going to have a good time anyway. What’s a wedding trip! Why, we can make our whole lives into one!”
“You are wonderful!” said Kerry, her face full of deep joy and reverence. “I never knew that a man could be like that! Only my father! He never thought of himself ! And to think—why! I told my heavenly Father this very morning that I would give you up, and here I’m letting you go on and do this. I’m not keeping my promise to God!”
“Dearest, did you never know how God delights sometimes to give us back the treasures we have laid at His feet? I’m not calling myself a treasure, but our united love is, I’m sure of that, a God-given treasure. Now, here we are! Let’s remember we are one, and whatever one wants the other wants, too. And this is our job now, to make that beautiful little mother happy!”
He helped her out and Kerry went upstairs to call her mother, but when she got there she found the room empty.
Startled, she looked around and then ran down to ask Mrs. Scott if she had seen her.
That good woman was wiping happy tears from her eyes with her kitchen apron and rejoicing over the dear lad who had come back again from afar.
“Your mother went out,” said Mrs. Scott. “Yes, she come in here and said she was going and she’d left a note on the bureau for you. She said you would understand.”
Kerry rushed upstairs again to find the note, foreboding in her heart. What had her beautiful little mother done now? She unfolded the note hurriedly.
Dear Kerry:
I’m going back to Sam. I can’t stand this kind of a life. I wasn’t made for roughing it. Sam has just telegraphed that the Russian lady and her friends have left and he is meeting me in Philadelphia, and he thinks we had better take a trip to Bermuda on the yacht. He’s had my private cabin refurnished in orchid. You know that always was so becoming. I shall have one done in jade green for you whenever you decide you’d like to join us. I’m sorry to desert you this way, but it’s your own stubborn fault. You’re like your poor dear father, and I can’t stand hardships. Perhaps someday you’ll find out that it’s better to take what you can get and not be so squeamish. Good-bye, I’m going. Don’t work too hard, and do write me a line now and then.
Lovingly,
Mother
Kerry read this letter in a daze, read it over twice, gradually taking it in that the trouble was lifted. Her mother, it was true, had gone back to Sam Morgan and separated herself from her, but the way was made clear now for her to live her own life. Had God done that, too? Was it all in His plan?
She went down presently, a kind of wonder in her face and asked what time her mother left.
“Why, the telegram came soon after you went out,” said the woman, “and I should say it was about an hour later that she went. She had me to call the taxi, and asked me for a cup of coffee. She didn’t leave any message except that there was a note for you on the bureau and that she had been called away.”
“She has gone!” said Kerry, looking at McNair with troubled eyes.
“Where?” asked McNair, accepting the note she handed him to read.
“Gone back,” said Kerry, “just as she came, inconsequently. Just as she went in the first place.”
“She’s a bonnie wee lady,” said Mrs. Scott, saying nothing about the way the bonnie wee lady had ordered her around at the last, and demanded her assistance.
McNair read the letter slowly and then handed it back to Kerry, who stood by anxiously.
“It is all a part of the Father’s plan,” he said with a look of more than tenderness. “It will work out all in His good way, and when the next climax occurs we’ll be together to stand by her.” The smile that went with the words swept all of Kerry’s difficulties aside and thrilled her with a joy such as she had never dreamed could be. Her face broke into radiance.
“And now,” said McNair, “when can we have our wedding? Would an hour be too soon? I want to belong!”
“But what about my job?” said Kerry, suddenly remembering her obligations. “I can’t just leave right out of the blue like that!”
“Well, no, I suppose not. But I’ll be lenient. We’ll put that up to Holbrook, and let it work out the best way for all concerned. I want what you want. Need we bother about that today? We have all day today and tomorrow. We might even get in a preliminary wedding trip before Monday if we tried.”
“Well, you’ve got to give me time to get a wedding supper ready,” said Martha Scott anxiously. “I’d never forgive myself if I couldn’t do that for my lad and his bonnie lassie.”
“All right, Martha, we’ll eat it if you’ll cook it, but don’t make it too elaborate. Just some of your nice flapjacks would do, or corn fritters. I haven’t tasted any like them since you left us.”
“Bless his heart! Hear the lad. Well, I’ll run right out to the store and get a few things and I’ll have it ready by the time you are.”
“I’ve got to have a new dress!” said Kerry. “I can’t get married in this old rag.”
“Now, look here, lady,” said McNair, “you can’t get any delays on that score. I’ve waited ages already, and I’ll give you only two hours, and that is all. I’ll have to get the license and the minister, and if I thought I could do it sooner I’d make it less. If you can conjure a new dress in that length of time all right, but anything longer I object to. I’ve seen you in several different kinds of dresses, but I never saw you look prettier than you do at this minute—and—”
Just at
that moment the back door slammed. Mrs. Scott had discreetly taken herself to the store, and McNair folded his hungry arms around Kerry and gathered her to his heart for the first time.
Half an hour later they parted from each other in the shopping district, and Kerry dashed into a store and selected two dresses, one a little white silk, the other a lovely green ensemble with a creamy fur collar, which she had admired that morning as she passed the window. Two pairs of shoes, a little green hat, a pair of gloves and some hastily selected lingerie completed her trousseau, and she took another taxi back to the house, with just fifteen minutes left to dress for her wedding. In Martha Scott’s funny stiff little parlor Kerry stood up in her simple white dress and was married by the minister of the church that she and McNair had attended together that first night in New York. Martha Scott in her best black dress, with her hands reverently folded at her waist stood adoringly by and beamed on them both, her dear lad and bonnie lassie. And she was canny enough not to remark: “It’s a pity your bonnie little mother couldn’t have stayed for the wedding.” Martha Scott did not need to be told such things.
After the wedding supper, which was excellent in every detail even to a piece of fruit cake, hurriedly iced, that Martha Scott had kept put away ripening for months, they went unhurriedly away to a quiet unfashionable little town on the coast that had been the delight of McNair in years before. There they spent the first Sunday of their married life. It was a holy and a blessed time to them both.
“I’m so surprised,” said Kerry, Sunday evening when they came in from attending a sweet little country service in the local church, “to find there is real happiness on the earth. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve thought that people could not really be happy on earth. But I’ve been perfectly happy today. The memory of it will be like a beautiful jewel to possess always and carry to heaven with me when I go.”
“You blessed child!” said McNair, taking her into his arms. “Please, God, I shall make it my business to see that you have many more days of happiness if we are spared here. And the best of it is that we are both expecting to spend eternity in the same place!”
They took the very early train into town Monday morning that Kerry might get to her desk on time. The morning papers arrived as the train came in, and McNair bought one from a sleepy village boy who had come down to get them to distribute.
“I wonder how your friend Dawson is,” said McNair as they settled themselves in the train. “You don’t suppose perhaps we should send him announcement cards do you?”
Kerry giggled and gave a little shiver.
“I’m so glad,” she said, “that now I have somebody to stand between me and him.”
A moment later McNair turned to the inside of the paper and exclaimed, “Look here! I guess you won’t need to be protected from Dawson for some time to come. Read that!”
Kerry leaned over and read:
NOTED CROOK CAUGHT AT LAST!
A literary and scientific crook Henry Dawson, PhD, as he signs himself, for whom the secret service has been quietly combing the country for the past three years, has been neatly rounded up and brought to justice by a fifteen-year-old boy from the Bronx, Ted Gallagher by name, employed in the publishing house of Holbrook, Harris, and Company, publishers of technical books.
Henry Dawson, PhD, will be remembered as the so-called scientist who sold synthetic bones of a prehistoric beast to the Museum several years ago, for a fabulous sum, professing to have dug them up himself. The bones were afterward found on investigation to be handmade, and the account of his finding them manufactured out of whole cloth. In fact, there was no such spot as the place he described. Later Dawson stole the manuscript of a book of poems and published them under his own name, and the next year got possession of a book on Electricity by one of the professors in the State University and attempted to do the same thing, but was discovered before the book was actually in print. He succeeded, however, in getting away with the advance royalty, forging a check incidentally. Later, he forged a check for a hundred thousand dollars in the name of J. D. T. Wilkinson of California, since which time Dawson has been wanted for any one of these misdemeanors. His latest enterprise has been an attempt to marry the daughter of the late Dr. Shannon Kavanaugh, perhaps the greatest investigator of the Einstein theory and various other subjects. A few days ago Mr. Dawson, without the knowledge or consent of Miss Kavanaugh, announced his engagement to her in our papers, together with a statement that he had helped to prepare for publication Dr. Kavanaugh’s new book, which is to be released for sale this week.
Dawson attempted to kidnap Miss Kavanaugh in a hired taxicab as she came out from the publishing house in the early evening. Young Gallagher heard her scream, as she was about to leave the place on his motorcycle, and followed her; succeeded in tripping Dawson as he got out of the cab, called a policeman and captured the kidnapper, then rescued the lady on his motorcycle.
Dawson’s case was rushed through without preliminaries, and he will be under strict confinement for at least twenty-one years for forgeries, to say nothing of his minor offenses.
Kerry lifted startled eyes to her husband’s face.
“And I’ve been worrying a lot lest I ought not to have let that policeman know about my room being ransacked!” she said. “Oh, God has been good to me! He’s worked it all out for us.”
“Indeed He has! Been good to us both!” said McNair. “And He always does work things out if we let Him have His way. But to think I went off and left you in the same house with that snake! Oh! I should never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to you! What was business beside your safety?”
Kerry went demurely to her desk at the office that morning, with only the big blue diamond on her finger to call attention to the modest band of platinum it guarded.
Everybody in the office was so excited over the account in the paper that at first nobody noticed the rings. It was Ted who saw them first, as Kerry put up an unthinking hand to push back a wave of the red-gold hair that would persist in falling over her forehead.
His eyes got large and his jaw dropped, as he looked, until the others followed his gaze and stared, too.
“Oh, gee!” he said. “Look what! She’s pulled a wedding after all. I don’t call that fair. You might have rung us all in on that!”
“Well, it rather took me by surprise myself,” Kerry said, smiling. “You see Mr. McNair came on sooner than I expected, and when he heard what happened he thought he’d put me in bonds so I couldn’t get strayed or stolen again. By the way, he’s coming around this afternoon at quitting time, Ted, especially on purpose to thank you for rescuing me! And he wants to meet you all!” she added, smiling about upon her fellow workers!
“You’re not going to leave us?” they asked anxiously, for everybody in the office loved Kerry.
“Not right away,” she assured them happily.
Mysterious whisperings floated around among the office people during the day, and there was much exchanging of money. Even the heads of the firm had a part in the conspiracy, but Kerry noticed none of it. She was too busy and too happy. Her father’s book was coming out that day, and she almost felt as if too many beautiful things were happening at once for her to fully enjoy them all.
Late in the afternoon McNair called for Kerry in a shiny new car, which he explained to her later he was using on trial.
The entire office force gathered around to be introduced, and while they were all there, Holbrook himself with them, Ted stepped forward and blurted out an invitation.
“Miss Kav—I mean Mrs. McNair—excuse me—why—we’re pulling a party tonight at the Ritz and in the name of the office I invite you and Mr. McNair to be among those present. At least if you aren’t, there won’t be any party!” he finished bravely, amid the shouts and laughter of the entire group.
So Kerry went to the party looking her loveliest in her white wedding silk with a string of real pearls around her neck. They had belonged to McNair’s mother, but he h
ad not had time to get them out of the bank before the ceremony Saturday evening.
It was a real party indeed, flowers and sumptuous foods, but no liquors. Strange to say young Harrington Holbrook had been the one to taboo that.
“She doesn’t like it,” he said emphatically in his father’s office where the committee was arranging things, “won’t even drink a cocktail!”
“I should say not!” seconded Ted, who by right of his recent rescue was on the committee by common consent.
Everybody was there, even Mrs. Holbrook and Natalie, who now that Kerry had become a heroine of kidnapping and married a stunning new man without anybody’s social assistance, were quite disposed to be chummy and affect a former friendship. Kerry even overheard Mrs. Holbrook telling the head proofreader that Harrington was brokenhearted that he hadn’t found her before McNair came on the scene.
They had a beautiful time with merry speeches, and when it came time, Ted made the speech of the evening in his own characteristic boy language, presenting in the name of the office a handsome sterling silver tea service, rare in workmanship and exquisite in simplicity of design.
Kerry made a shy little speech and Graham McNair spoke a few witty and grateful words, and then Ripley Holbrook stood. A waiter brought in a white satin cushion, and on it lay a copy of Shannon Kavanaugh’s new book, bound in leather, hand tooled, and with a hand-illuminated inscription from the house of Holbrook for Shannon Kavanaugh’s daughter, in token of the great service she had rendered in the preparation and publishing of the book.
Late that evening when they were back at Martha Scott’s where they were to stay until they should find a house, McNair brought out a package wrapped in brown paper and handed it to Kerry.
“Kerry,” he said tenderly, “this is your real wedding present. I forgot all about it yesterday, but I’ve been keeping it for you a long time.”