CHAPTER X

AN INTERVENTION

Mary could not have described the thing there was about old Nat’s manner of going by her door that led her to halt him and inquire what he was up to.  One sees, sometimes, one of his children gliding very innocently along toward the nearest way out with an effect of held breath that prompts investigation.  In this sixty-year old child, upon whom the terror of John Wollaston’s desperate illness lay more visibly than on any other member of the household, this look of gusto was especially striking.  Mary’s question was prompted by no more serious an impulse than to share with him a momentary escape from the all-enveloping misery.

But she found old Nat unwilling to share his source of satisfaction with her.  He protested, indeed, with an air of deeply aggrieved innocence, that nothing of the sort existed.  A man was waiting now in the lower hall who had come to make the customary inquiries.  Nat had conveyed them to Paula and was returning with her answer.  This was so flagrantly disingenuous that Mary smiled.

“Who is the man?” she asked.

The old servant shuffled his feet.  “It’s that good-for-nothing piano tuner, Miss Mary,” he told her reluctantly.  “I reckon you don’t know much about him.  He’s been coming around a lot since you’ve been away.  He’s been sticking to Miss Paula like a leech, right up to the day your father got sick.  Then he didn’t come any more and I thought we were done with him.  But he came back to-day and asked me if Miss Paula was up in the music room.  He’d have gone right straight up to that room where Doctor John is fighting for his life if I hadn’t stopped him.”

“Did you tell him father was ill?” she asked, and was astonished at the flare of passion this evoked from him.

“It ain’t no business of his, Miss Mary,” he said grimly.  “Nothing about this family is any business of his.”  Then as if anxious to prevent the significance of that from reaching her, he hurried on.  “He was so sure Miss Paula wanted to see him, I told him if he’d wait, I’d inform her that he was here.  I’ve done told her and she said he was to go away.  She couldn’t be bothered with him.  And then she said to me with tears in her eyes, ‘I wish I’d never seen him, Nat.’  Those were her words, Miss Mary.  ‘I wish my eyes had never beheld him!’ That’s what she said to me not a minute ago.  I’m going down to fix him so she’ll never see him again.”

“You needn’t go down,” Mary said decisively.  “I’ll see him myself.”

She had got home that morning summoned by a telegram, one of those carefully composed encouraging telegrams that are a simple distillate of despair.  During the three days it had taken to accomplish her journey from the ranch, she had gradually relinquished all hope of finding her father alive.  Rush, who met the train, had reassured her.  It was a bad case of double pneumonia.  They were expecting the crisis within twenty-four hours.  The doctors gave him an even chance, but the boy was more confident.  “They don’t know dad,” he said.  “He isn’t going to die.”