Kerry (30 page)

With this letter in her hand Kerry sat for a few minutes, just staring down at the lovely words, her face glorified with her joy. Then suddenly she sprang up, the letters still in her hand and clasping them to her breast she dropped upon her knees beside her bed.

“Oh, my dear Father God,” she prayed, “I can never, never thank Thee enough for this wonderful love, that Thou hast sent me!”

Then she went to her desk and began to write. Soon she appeared downstairs with a folded paper in her hand and her hat on.

“Could you tell me where to find the nearest telegraph office, Mrs. Scott?” she asked shyly. “I’m going to send a telegram.”

“Oh, I’m glad you are dearie,” said the good woman with quick intuition. “The lad will be so relieved to know you are all right. I’m glad you won’t keep him waiting a whole week for a letter, he’s such a dear lad. But you’ll not be needin’ to go out to telegraph, darlin’. You can phone in your message right from here. I’m just runnin’ out next door for a minute now, and you can have the telephone all to yourself. Give him my love, dearie, and I’ll pay for part of the message. Tell him Martha sends her love.”

The canny old lady seized her hat from a closet shelf and took herself off in a whisk of time, and there was Kerry left with her glowing cheeks, and her starry eyes trying to say those wonderful mysteries into the telephone to a sharp-voiced, tired operator. She managed the address all right, reading carefully from her paper, but over the message she choked, and lost her voice several times, and had to be snapped up from Central with a sharp “What? Please repeat that.”

Then with a radiant, embarrassed face, Kerry hung up the receiver and went upstairs to write her letter.

Kerry mailed her letter on the way down to the office next morning and went on with her work, singing praises in her heart. For even the hot, dusty avenue seemed to her like a way paved with joy that morning. But perhaps if she had stayed to look at the morning paper before she left Mrs. Scott’s she would not have felt so much like singing.

She had not been at her desk more than half an hour when she was summoned to the office to see Mr. Holbrook.

This was quite unusual as Holbrook was a busy man and seldom had time for personal contact with the employees in the office. Also, this was the first intimation that Kerry had that Holbrook was at home again.

He greeted her in dignified silence, and there was something in his glance that sent a quiver of premonition through her heart. He motioned her to a chair and closed the outer door of the office.

“Miss Kavanaugh,” he said and his kindly tone was almost severe, “you did not tell me that you were engaged to be married!”

“Oh!” said Kerry, her cheeks flaming into color. “Why—why, it only just happened—last night. I would have—I have had no opportunity. It was all so unexpected—! But—” And a bewildered look came into her eyes. “I don’t see how you knew about it. No one knows but Mrs. Scott. Unless—are you a friend of Mr. McNair’s? But even then—Why I only sent him an answer last night.”

“Mighty quick work, I should say,” remarked Holbrook dryly. “Haven’t you seen the morning papers, Miss Kavanaugh?”

“No!” said Kerry sharply sitting up straight in alarm. “What could the morning paper possibly know?”

For answer Holbrook handed her his morning paper, folded with the second page out, and in the very middle at the top of the page Kerry saw her own face looking out at her, a clear good likeness, and just below it in a smaller oval, another picture of herself and her father standing together with the lace-like architecture of the great Rheims Cathedral in the background.

Large headlines caught her horrified gaze.

There was more of it, a half column, but Kerry did not read it. The letters swam and danced before her horrified eyes. She lifted her blanched face to her employer and there was no mistaking her misery.

“Oh, how could anybody be so wicked!” she said with white lips. “Oh, how terrible! What shall I do?”

“Do?” said Holbrook, stooping to pick up the paper that she had dropped from nervous fingers. “Do? Didn’t you allow this to be put into the papers? Did you furnish the pictures? Isn’t it true that you are to marry this man? And isn’t he the Dawson whom you warned us against?”

Kerry was stung into action.

“He certainly is, but I am not going to marry him. I would rather die!” she said with vehemence. “He has been dogging my steps ever since I came to the city. He had the impertinence to tell me that he intended to marry me the first week I was here, followed me to the park where I was walking, and insisted on talking to me, then when I ran away and took a bus I found him in the hall of the lodging house waiting to finish his sentence when I arrived there. How he knew where I was living I have no idea, but he came and took a room on the floor above me. I managed to keep out of his way for several weeks, but a few days ago I went home one night and found all my belongings pulled out of my trunk and desk and bureau, and two of my father’s books and these snapshots gone. I called in the police, and then I tried to see you the next day and tell you, fearing he might try to use the books in some way that was not legitimate. But you were gone—and—Oh!”

Kerry suddenly covered her face with her hands and groaned.

There was silence in the office for an instance, and then Holbrook spoke again, still in a cold tone of voice.

“Then you didn’t know that this man, Dawson, has written an article for one of the biggest scientific papers published in this country, and that he says he was your father’s closest friend and coworker, and that he claims to have rewritten and finished your father’s book? You didn’t know that he has in that article told the story of your and his romance, begun while you were quite a little girl, and that he quotes from your father’s own words in several instances? You didn’t know that it was scheduled to come out in the middle of this month?”

Holbrook was watching Kerry with a mingling of compassion and doubt in his eyes, as she lifted her gaze to him once more. If her face had been white before it was ashen now, and it seemed as if her lips were powerless to speak.

“No, I didn’t know,” and it seemed to her that her voice sounded like one dead.

“But didn’t you tell me you were engaged, when you first came into the office? Didn’t you admit it?”

Then did Kerry’s joy, like a new tide of life, flood into her heart, and into her face in radiance as she remembered.

“Oh, yes!” she said, “I—am engaged! But—not to that creature! I am engaged to Mr. McNair, the man who came here with me the first day, and whom I introduced to you down in the reception room.”

“Ah!” said Holbrook with relief. “Ah! That’s a different matter! Well, I congratulate you! But now, what shall we do about this? What is your wish in the matter? Of course I’ve stopped the publication of the article. I have a friend over there in the office of the magazine, and he happened to mention that they were publishing such an article and I asked to see the proof of it. He sent it over to my house last night. You see it mentions several things with regard to your father’s book which are not true, and which we could not permit, but when I saw the paper this morning I did not know what to think, Miss Kavanaugh!”

Then Kerry struggling with her tears, went carefully over the whole story from the time she left London, and by the time she was through Holbrooks’s eyes were full of sympathy, and he was blowing his nose and dabbing at his eyes as freely as if Kerry had been his own Natalie.

In a kind and fatherly way, he talked it all over and promised to telephone at once to the office of the paper and see that the announcement was corrected. Also to telephone to the police and have them recover the photographs if possible.

When they were through talking Holbrook asked her to go out to lunch with him.

“Oh, if you’ll excuse me,” she said shyly, “I’d like to go right away and send a telegram to California. I am afraid Mr. McNair might somehow get hold of this. Doesn’t the Associated Press telegraph news all over the country? Couldn’t they get this? Of course they wouldn’t do it on my account, but having my father’s name connected with it, wouldn’t they perhaps put it in California papers?”

“It’s quite possible,” laughed Holbrook. “Run along, little girl, and set your lover’s mind at rest, and then meet me downstairs in half an hour, and I’ll have the notice ready and tell you what the magazine and newspaper people said.”

So Kerry sent her telegram, took time to telephone to Martha Scott, who was probably worrying her heart out if she had read the paper, went to lunch with the head of the great publishing house, and then came back to her desk and worked overtime to make up for it.

It was growing dark when Kerry finally put on her hat and started to the door. It had started to rain, and the air was chilly and mean. Kerry had on a thin dress and no wrap.

Ted had made it his business to hover around going in and out while she was working, pretending that he was doing overtime too, but really reluctant to leave her alone with only the janitor and the scrub women.

“Good night!” said Ted cheerily, as she came out of the cloak room and started toward the street door.

“Good night, Ted,” called Kerry with a lilt in her voice, as Ted disappeared into the back room where he kept his motorcycle, for he lived far out in the Bronx.

Ted emerged from the little side entrance with his machine, just as Kerry stepped out from the big door.

A shabby old taxi was drawn up in front of the main door of the house, or—was it a taxi? Ted stepped back into the shadow to see who it was.

The driver came toward Kerry and took off his cap.

“Is this Miss Kavanaugh?” he asked in a gruff tone, not at all mannerly, Ted thought, for such a flower of a girl as Miss Kavanaugh.

Kerry answered yes brightly. All her tones were full of gladness tonight.

“Well, I was to say Mrs. Scott sent the taxi because it was raining. She didn’t want you to walk home in the rain.”

Kerry paused, astonished, looked at the shabby cab, then with a laugh and “Oh, that was kind of her!” she stepped toward it.

Ted, watching from his shadowed doorway, thought he saw a hand reach out and pull the girl in, heard a scream! He was sure he heard a scream! Could that have been that Mrs. Scott inside to surprise her? Could it have been her hand that pulled her in, and perhaps frightened Miss Kavanaugh for a minute? That was probably it. A poor joke, he thought. But why did that driver seem so hurried? And was that a frightened white face he saw at the window? A hand waved for an instant, then pulled away? Was that his name he heard called in muffled tones as if the voice were being smothered? “Ted! Help!” Did he hear that or was it his imagination carved out from the screech of the passing trolley just then.

“Ted! Help! Help!”
The words rang in his brain.

The cab was half a block away by now, its wicked little taillight winking like a red berry in the distance. What was the matter with his engine? Oh, why in sixty couldn’t he get it started? There, that cab had turned the corner to the left! Ah! He was off ! Was that it there, just turning another corner? Could he make it before the lights turned and stopped him?

On he flew, trying ever to get near enough to look inside the back, realizing very soon that the cab was not going in the direction in which Miss Kavanaugh lived.

Sometimes the traffic blocked them both, and Ted could almost have got off and stepped up to the cab and looked inside, only he dared not desert his machine, for in a moment they would be off again and he would get farther separated. Sometimes, the light would change just as Ted came up to it, and the cab would ride far out of sight around a corner, but by this time Ted had learned its license number and could always recognize the right car.

Once he came on a mounted policeman riding along to his location.

“Hey, Chief !” yelled Ted, as he slowed by him. “Send a cop after me. Kidnapping ahead! That cab there! Girl yelled for help!”

He dared not stop to be sure the officer understood, but he thought he saw him nod his head, and a little while later he thought he heard the chug, chug of a motorcycle coming on behind. He began to think of some of the things Miss Kavanaugh had said to him now and then, those noon hours when they went to a cheap café together, about his mother who was still sick, and about praying and trusting God. He tried to frame a crude prayer in his heart as he thrashed along through the crowded streets. Farther out where the traffic was less he had all he could do to keep up with the cab, which was rattling away at a great rate now that the road was clear. Did they see the cop coming, and were they trying to get away? They never would connect him with Miss Kavanaugh. He hadn’t brought out his machine until they were well under way.