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Read Ebook: Old-Dad by Abbott Eleanor Hallowell
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Ebook has 931 lines and 37059 words, and 19 pages
Well this is the favor, Clytie. If by Summer my little girl is still staggering under the nervous and moral burden of feeling herself the only "improper" person in the world, I shall ask your permission to tell her the incident here noted, assuring you of course in all fairness and decency--if I am any judge of young character--that she will never tell on you as you have told on her!
As for the rest if I have written over-garrulously I crave your pardon. This turning the hands of the clock backwards is slower work than turning them ahead.
For old time's sake believe me at least
JAFFREY BRETTON.
With a sigh of relief then he rose from his desk, lit another cigarette, and started down the hall, with Creep-Mouse, the blue hound, skulking close behind him.
As he crossed the threshold of his own room and glanced incidentally towards his bed a gasp of purely optical astonishment escaped him. All hunched up in a pale blue puffy-quilt his lovely little daughter lay ensconced among his snow-white pillows. Across her knees innumerable sheets of paper fluttered. Close at her elbow a discarded box of pencils lay tossed like a handful of jack-straws. And the great blue eyes that peered out at him from the cloud of bright gold hair were all brimmed up again with terror and tears.
"I'm--I'm writing to John," she said.
"John?" queried her father.
"Why--yes,--the English professor--at college,--don't you remember?" faltered the girl. "Don't--don't you want to know about John?"
"No, I don't!" said the man. "There's nothing important about 'John' that 'John' won't have a chance to show for himself--in this immediate situation."
"Isn't it--isn't it--Hell?" quivered the girl.
"N--o--o," said her father. "I shouldn't consider it just Hell. But I admit it's something of a poser for a man in John's position. He's one of the faculty of course?"
"Yes," said the girl.
"Yes," said the girl.
"Was your engagement--announced?" asked her father quite abruptly. "Generally known, I mean, among the girls?"
"No--not--exactly," said the girl.
"U--m--m," said her father. From his wordless stare at the wall he glanced down a bit sharply at the wan little face before him. "Heard from him yet?" he demanded.
Before the sudden rush of color to her face her father gave a little startled gasp.
"Hanged if you're not pretty!" he said. "Shockingly pretty!" With an almost amused interest his eyes swept down across the exquisite little face and figure all muffled up to the tips of its ears in the great blue puffy-quilt against the snow-white pillows. "Truly when I came in here just now," he laughed, "I thought a magazine-cover had come to life on my bed!" With the laughter still on his lips all the mischief went suddenly out of his eyes. "You heard what I said just now about going South to-morrow?" he asked a bit trenchantly. "I'm sorry if it seems peremptory. But my plans have been made for some time. I had intended to take only--Creep-Mouse with me."
"Creep-Mouse?" questioned the girl.
"Oh, of course, there are a dozen other dogs up country that I could choose from," reflected her father with a somewhat frowning introspection. "But when it comes to traveling about and putting up with things, Creep-Mouse alone combines the essential characteristics of an undauntable disposition--with folding legs."
"Hint?" snapped her father. "Oh, it wasn't so much the adaptability business I was thinking about as it was about the dog!" With a gesture almost embarrassed he reached down suddenly and drew the hound's plushy ear through his fingers. "Oh, hang it all, Daphne!" he resumed quite abruptly, "you and I might easily not like the same opera or the same hors-d'oeuvre--but I'd hate anyone round who didn't like the same dog."
"I--adore--Creep-Mouse!" said Daphne.
"Truly?" quizzed her father.
"Truly!" twinkled Daphne.
"Oh, all right then," said her father, "I guess we understand each other!"
"Perfectly," nodded Daphne.
"For all time," said her father.
"All time," acquiesced Daphne.
With his watch in his hand and his dark eyes narrowed to some unspoken thought he thrust out his last admonishment to her.
"A--wife?" gasped the girl. "Oh, this--this eternal marrying business!" she shivered. "If it's all so dreadful, about men, I mean, why do women keep marrying? What's the righteousness of it? What's the decency? What's it all about?"
"Don't forget that I'm one of these 'dreadful men,'" smiled her father.
"Yes--I--know," quivered the girl.
"Your mother has been dead for fifteen years," said the man.
"Yes--but Father," persisted the girl.
With folded arms the man stood watching her bright young color wax--and wane again.
"If there's anything you want to ask," he suggested, "maybe you'd better ask it now--and get it over with."
"Oh, I didn't want to be inquisitive," stammered the girl. "It's only that--that servants and relatives talk so--and I know so little. You--you and mother didn't live together, did you?" she questioned quite abruptly.
"No," said the man.
"You--you mean there was trouble?" flushed the girl.
"There was--some trouble," said the man.
"You mean that you--didn't like her?" probed the merciless little voice.
"No--I--didn't--like her," said the man without a flicker of expression.
Clutching the blue quilt about her the girl jumped to the floor and ran swiftly to him.
THE scene that Daphne had left behind her two thousand miles or more, though more academic of course, was none the less poignant to the one most concerned.
Deflected by a more or less erudite lecture-obligation to a town at least gossip-distance away, no faintest rumor of any college chaos whatsoever had reached John Burnarde's ears till the evening after the dance, when just recrossing the well-worn threshold of his beautiful, austere study, the shrill harsh clang of his telephone bell rang down the curtain on what had been the most exquisitely perfect episode of even his fastidious life.
Yet even then no whisper prepared him for what the alarm was all about. Poor John Burnarde!
Whatever else an academic training may teach an undergraduate it has certainly never taught a member of the faculty what to do when summoned post-haste to the President's office to consult with various other members of the faculty on what has been pronounced "a most flagrant breach of moral as well as of academic standards" he finds the case to be the exceedingly delicate one of a girl-student caught entertaining a man in her room late at night,--and the girl herself--his fiancee!
That the betrothal at that moment was known only to himself and the girl gave John Burnarde the last long breath, he felt, that he should ever draw again.
Still a bit flushed, a bit breezy, with his brisk sprint across the chill November campus, he was just slipping out of his overcoat in the doorway of the President's office when the name "Daphne Bretton" first struck across his startled senses. Half hampered by a balky overshoe, half pinioned by a ripped sleeve-lining he thrust his head alone into the conference.
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