The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary | Page 5

lawyer's letter, other reflections crowded to the fore in her mind.
"Funny! Whatever could have made the boy get up and go downtown at three in the morning, anyway?" she said. "Seems kind of queer, don't you think, Arethusa? Do you suppose he was ill and huntin' for a drug store?"
Arethusa had been sent for the second day previous because Lucinda's youngest sister's youngest child had come down with scarlet fever, and the family wanted Lucinda to enliven the quarantine. Arethusa had sent invitations out for a dinner party, but she had recalled them and hastened to obey the summons. It was an evil hour for her, for she loved her brother and was mightily distressed at the bad news.
"I don't believe he can have been ill," she said, at the top of her voice; "if he'd been ill he wouldn't have had the strength to hit the cab driver so hard."
"I don't blame him for hittin' the cab driver," said Aunt Mary warmly. "As near as I can recollect, I've often wanted to do that myself. But I can't make out where he got the man to hit, or why he was there to hit him. I can't make rhyme or reason out of it. I wish we knew more. Well, I presume we will, later."
Her surmise was correct. They knew much more later. They knew more from Mr. Stebbins, and they knew profusely more from the evening papers.
"I think our boy'd better have come home for his Easter," Aunt Mary remarked, with a species of angry undertow threading the current of her speech. "There's no sayin' what this will cost before we're done with it."
Arethusa choked; it was all so very terrible to her.
"What is it that the cabman wants, anyhow?" her aunt demanded presently.
"He doesn't want anything," yelled the unhappy sister. "He's going to die."
"Well, who is going to sue me, then?"
"It's his wife; she wants five thousand dollars damages."
Aunt Mary's lips tightened.
"Five thousand dollars!" she said, with a bitter patience. "I can see that this is goin' to be an awful business. Five thousand dollars! Dear, dear! I must say that that wife sets a pretty high price on her husband--at least, a'cordin' to my order of thinkin', she does. From what I've seen of cabmen, I'd undertake to get her another just as good for a tenth of the money, any day."
Arethusa was silent, staring thoughtfully at the newspaper cuts of a great Tammany leader and a noted pugilist, which had been labeled as the principals in the family tragedy.
Aunt Mary turned over another of the many papers received, and scanned its sensational columns afresh.
"Arethusa," she exclaimed suddenly, "do you know, I bet anythin' I know what this editor means to insinuate? It just strikes me that he's tryin' to give the impression that our boy's been drinkin'."
"Perhaps so," Arethusa screamed.
"Well, I don't believe it," said Aunt Mary firmly, "and I ain't goin' to believe it. And I ain't goin' to pay no five thousand dollars for no cabman's brains, neither. You write to Mr. Stebbins to compromise on two or maybe three."
She stopped and bit her lips and shook her head. "I don't see why Jack grows up so hard," she murmured, half in anger and half in sorrow. "Edward and Henry never had such times. Oh, well," she sighed, "boys will be boys, I suppose; an' if this all results in the boy's settlin' down it'll be money well spent in the end, after all. Maybe--probably--most likely."
The days that followed were anxious days, but at last the cabman rallied and concluded not to die, and Jack went off yachting with a light heart and a choice collection of good advice from Mr. Stebbins and Aunt Mary.
Nothing happened to mar his holiday. He ran a borrowed steam launch on to some rocks with rather heavy consequences to his aunt's exchequer, and returned from the West Indies so late that she never had a visit from him at all that summer; but, barring these slightly unwelcome incidents, he did remarkably well, and when he returned to college in the fall he was regarded as having become, at last, a stable proposition.
"I wonder whether our boy's comin' home for Christmas?" Aunt Mary asked her niece, Mary, as that happy period of family reunions drew near. Mary had come up to stay with her aunt while Lucinda went away to bury a second cousin. Mary was very different from Arethusa, having a voice that, when raised, was something between an icicle and a steam whistle, and a temperament so much on the order of her aunt's that neither could abide the other an hour longer than was absolutely necessary. But Arethusa had a sprained ankle, so there was no help for existing circumstances.
"No, he isn't," said Mary, who