From the Housetops | Page 6

Wade had been within sound of his voice, no matter how softly he called. The master never rang a bell, night or day. He did not employ Wade to answer bells. The butler could do that, or the parlour-maid, if the former happened to be tipsier than usual. Wade always kept his head cocked a little to one side, in the attitude of one listening, and so long had he been at it that it is doubtful if he could have cocked it the other way without snapping something in his neck. That right ear of his was open for business twenty-four hours out of the day. The rest of his body may have slept as soundly as any man's, but his ear was always awake, on land or sea. It was his boast that he had never had a vacation.
Braden, after his long ride down Fifth Avenue on the stage, found Wade in the hall.
"Is my grandfather in the library, Wade?" he asked, surprised to find the man at the foot of the stairs, quite a distance from his accustomed post.
"He is, sir," said Wade. "He asked me to wait here until you arrived and then to go upstairs for a little while, sir. I fancy he has something to say to you in private." Which was a na?ve way of explaining that Mr. Thorpe did not want him to have his ear cocked in the hall during the conversation that was to be resumed after an advisable interval. Observing the strange pallor in the young man's usually ruddy face, he solicitously added: "Shall I get you a glass of--ahem!--spirits, sir? A snack of brandy is a handy thing to--"
"No, thank you, Wade. You forget that I am a doctor. I never take medicine," said Braden, forcing a smile.
"A very good idea, sir," said Wade.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tresslyn had reported to Anne, in the cosy little boudoir at the top of the house in the Seventies.
"It is just as well that you insisted on me seeing him, dear," she said on entering the room. "He would have said things to you that you could not have forgiven. As it is, you have nothing to forgive, and you have saved yourself a good many tears. He--but, my dear, what's this? Have you been crying?"
Anne, tall and slender, stood with her back to the window, her exquisite face in the shadows. Even in the dim, colourless light of the waning day, she was lovely--lovely even with the wet cheeks and the drooped, whimpering lips.
"What did he say, mother?" she asked, her voice hushed and broken. "How did he look?" Her head was bent and she looked at her mother from beneath pain-contracted brows. "Was he angry? Was he desperate? Did--did he say that he--that he loved me?"
"He looked very well, he was angry, he was desperate and he said that he loved you," replied Mrs. Tresslyn, with the utmost composure. "So dry your eyes. He did just what was to have been expected of him, and just what you counted upon. He--"
"He honestly, truly said that he loved me?" cried the girl, lifting her head and drawing a deep breath.
"Yes,--truly."
Anne dried her eyes with a fresh bit of lace.
"Sit down, mother, and tell me all about it," she said, jerking a small chair around so that it faced the couch. Then she threw herself upon the latter and, reaching out with a slender foot, drew the chair closer. "Sit up close, and let's hear what my future grandson had to say."
CHAPTER III
Braden Thorpe had spent two years in the New York hospitals, after graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and Austria by his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under the advanced scientists of Vienna and Berlin. At twenty-nine he came back to New York, a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in his profession and heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his grandfather. The first day after his return he confided to his grim old relative the somewhat unprofessional opinion that hopelessly afflicted members of the human race should be put out of their misery by attending physicians, operating under the direction of a commission appointed to consider such cases, and that the act should be authorised by law!
His grandfather, being seventy-six and apparently as healthy as any one could hope to be at that age, said that he thought it would be just as well to kill 'em legally as any other way, having no good opinion of doctors, and admitted that his grandson had an exceptionally soft heart in him even though his head was a trifle harder and thicker than was necessary in one so young.
"It's worth thinking about, anyhow, isn't it, granddaddy?" Braden had said, with great earnestness.
"It is, my boy," said