Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps, for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He wondered what had become of Marie Louise.

Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she a.s.sumed that they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her eyes.

She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before.

That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and drawn the face in new lines.

Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the poignant call:

"Mamise!"

That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician's "Abracadabra!"

Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her sister's charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: "Abbie darling! My darling Abbie!" while Abbie wept: "Mamise! Oh, my poor little Mamise!"

A cl.u.s.ter of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim, round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife's arms for a sister-in-law.

Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.

"Mamise!" she said. "I want you should meet my husbin'."

"I'm delighted!" said Mamise, before she saw her sister's fate. She was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock without reeling.

Jake's hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his cordiality was sincere as he growled:

"Pleaster meecher, Mamise."

He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle, and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and piece it together.

Her embarra.s.sment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked:

"Where are you living--here in Washington?"

"Laws, no!" said Abbie; and that reminded her of the bundles she had dropped at the sight of Mamise. They had played havoc with the sidewalk traffic, but she hurried to regain them.

Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody looking who counted. So he checked his wife with amazement at the preposterousness of her carrying bundles while Sir Walter Raleigh was at hand. He picked them up and brought them to Marie Louise's feet, disgusted at the stupid amazement of his wife, who did not have sense enough to conceal it. Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for noticing such things, but the eye is not to blame for what it can't help seeing, nor the ear for what is forced upon it. She had a feeling that the first thing to do was to get her sister in out of the rain of glances from the pa.s.sers-by.

"You must come to me at once," she said. "I've just taken a house.

I've got no servants in yet, and you'll have to put up with it as it is."

Abbie gasped at the "servants." She noted the authority with which Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed to the bundles, which he hastened to seize.

Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile and showed it on her face. She saw many palaces on the way and expected Marie Louise to stop at any of them. When the car drew up at Marie Louise's home Abbie was bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she found her dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie's loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This distress caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.

Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent enough to take off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch himself out on a divan whose ulterior maroon did not disturb his repose in the least.

"This is what I call something like," he said; and then, "And now, Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself."

This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she evaded with a plea:

"I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling. How are you, and how long have you been married, and where do you live?"

"Goin' on eight years come next October, and we got three childern. I been right poorly lately. Don't seem to take as much interest in worshin' as I useter."

"Washing!" Marie Louise exclaimed. "You don't wash, do you? That is, I mean to say--professionally?"

"Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too."

Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred thousand dollars, and her sister was a--washerwoman! It was intolerable. She glanced at Jake.

"But Mr.--your husband--"

"Oh, Jake, he works--off and on. But he ain't got what you might call a hankerin' for it. He can take work or let it alone. I can't say as much for him when it comes to licker. Fact is, some the women say, 'Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do you ever--'"

"Your name isn't--it isn't Nuddle, is it?" Marie Louise broke in.

"Sure it is. What did you think it was?"

So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer. That solved one of her day's puzzles and solved it very tamely. So many of life's mysteries, like so many of fiction's, peter out at the end.

They don't sustain.

Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation that believed it a husband's duty to support his wife by his own labor. The thought of her sister supporting a worthless husband by her own toil was odious. The first task was to get Jake to work. It was only natural that she should think of her own new mania.

She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said: "I have it! Why doesn't your husband go in for ship-building?"

Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge had said of the need of men. She was sure that she could get him a splendid job, and that Mr. Davidge would do anything for her.

Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved, but a thought struck him, and he chewed it over. Among the gang of idealists he consorted with, or at least salooned with, the dearest ambition of all was to turn America's dream of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare of failure. In order to secure "just recognition" for the workman they would cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor--that was their ideal of labor.

As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the shipyard Jake's interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing, and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, to wreck launching-ways so that hulls that escaped all other attacks would crack through and stick--it was a Golconda of opportunities for this modern conquistador. He could hardly keep his face straight till he heard Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor; and when he asked, "Do you think your gentleman friend, this man Davidge, would really give me a job?" she cried, with more enthusiasm than tact:

"I know he would. He'd give anybody a job. Besides, I'm going to take one myself. And, Abbie honey, what would you say to your becoming a ship-builder, too? It would be immensely easier and pleasanter than washing clothes."

Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture of herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie peeked and whispered:

"It's a man."

"Do you suppose it's that feller Davidge?" said Jake.

"No, it's--it's--somebody else," said Marie Louise, who knew who it was without looking.

She was at her wit's end now. Nicky Easton was at the door, and a sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she had not suspected were in the parlor.

CHAPTER XI

If anything is anybody's very own, it is surely his past, or hers--particularly hers. But Nicky Easton was bringing one of the most wretched chapters of Marie Louise's past to her very door. She did not want to reopen it, especially not before her new-found family. One likes to have a few illusions left for these reunions. So she said: