"It seemed rude to be too surprised, so I just rattled off some of the usual congratulations. Gerard didn't say a word. He simply looked and looked, and there was something beautiful to me in his shame and backwardness and hesitation.

"'It's very unexpected,' he blurted out at last. 'I thought I was going to take care of her always. It is going to make a great difference in my life.'

"'I know how you always devoted yourself to her,' I said.

"'I had made up my mind never to marry,' he went on. 'How could I marry?--for it would have been like turning her out of doors.

She was too ill and helpless and despondent to live by herself, and had I brought a third person into the family it would have been misery all round.'

"Still I said nothing.

"'Jess,' he said suddenly, 'don't you understand? Can't you understand?'

"In fact, I did understand very well. It explained a heap of things--why he had always acted so strangely--sometimes so devoted to me, sometimes so distant; crazy to hold my hand one day and avoiding me the next. It was no wonder he had made me utterly desperate and piqued me into accepting the captain. Then he said: 'Jess, Jess!' like that; and 'for G.o.d's sake, was it too late?'

"I couldn't trust myself to speak and I could feel my lips trembling. I didn't sob or anything, but the tears just rolled down my cheeks. Wasn't it a dead giveaway? It's awful to care for a man as much as that. I thought it was splendid of him that he didn't try to kiss me. He simply took my hand and pulled off the captain's ring and said I had to give it back to him at once.

Then I broke down altogether and began to cry like a baby, while Gerard got out and emptied the kerosene from the oil lamps into the exhaust valves. You see, pieces of scale from the inside of the cylinders had wedged against the exhaust-valve seats so that they wouldn't close tight, but leaked and leaked. Gerard said that new Mantons always feed too rich a mixture at first and that he knew what was the matter the moment he stuck his fingers in.

"We went home on the second speed so that Gerard could steer with one hand.

"Oh, the captain? He acted kind of miserable at first, and was awfully sarcastic about being a gentleman and not a gas-engineer.

But I said the modern idea was to be both. He got himself transferred home and I really think it was the making of him--for what do you think happened last week? He won the nonstop London to Glasgow race on an eighteen horsepower Renault. I felt quite proud of him.

"He has asked Gerard and me and the Manton to spend a month with him in England when we go abroad. He said I'd probably be pleased to hear that he had made a lovely garage out of his ancestral Norman chapel. But I suppose that was just his English humor, you know. Anyway, we are the best of friends, and if I ever see him again I'll give him a double toot on my French horn."

"And what became of the curate and Gerard's sister?"

"Oh, they married and went into steam."

THE GREAT BUBBLE SYNDICATE

I suppose it was a fool arrangement, but anyway we did it; and Harry Prentiss, who is learning how to be a corporation lawyer and has specialized on contracts, spent a whole week making it what he called iron-clad. When it was typewritten it covered nine pages, and was so excessively iron-clad that n.o.body could understand it but Harry. He said it undoubtedly covered the ground, however, and would be worth all the trouble it cost him in the friction it would save afterward. You'd hardly know Harry as the same boy that played Yale full-back, he's grown so cynical and suspicious, and he's got that lawyer way of looking at you now, as though you were a liar and he was just about to pounce on you with the truth. I thought he might have brought Nelly and himself into the agreement under one head, considering he was engaged to her and they were only waiting to save a thousand dollars in order to get married; but he couldn't see it in that way at all, and spoke about people changing their minds, and how in law you must be prepared for everything (especially if it were disagreeable and unexpected) and put supposistious cases till Nelly broke down and cried.

They had got five hundred toward the thousand when they were both taken with automobile fever--and taken bad; and then they decided that, though marriage was all right, they were still young, and the bubble had the first call. Harry had been secretly taking the Horseless Age for three months, and as for Nelly--anybody with a four-cylinder tonneau could have torn her from her happy home. Not that she didn't love Harry tremendously. She was crazy about him--but crazier for a bubble. It's an infatuation like any other, only worse, and I guess I was no better than Nelly myself, for I used to ride regularly with Lewis Wentz and you know what Lewis Wentz is. And he only had a wheezy old steam carriage anyway, and sometimes blue flames would leap up all around you till you felt like a Christian martyr, and his boiler was always burning out when he'd try to hold my hand instead of watching the gage. You paid in every kind of way for riding with Lewis Wentz, and people talked about you besides--but I always went just the same. Oh, I know I ought to be ashamed to admit it, and I said to myself every time should be the last; yet he only had to double-toot at the front door for me to drop everything and run. This naturally made him awfully forward and troublesome, not to speak of complicating me with pa, who didn't approve of him the least bit, and who used to regale me with little talks beginning: "I would rather see you lying dead in your coffin," and winding up with, "Now, won't you promise your poor old dad?" till I was all broken up. But, as I said before, Lewis Wentz had only to toot for me to forget my old dad and the coffin and everything.

With only five hundred dollars to go on, Harry and Nelly, of course, had to look about for more capital; and that was why they chose me to go in with them. I didn't have any capital except a rich father, but I suppose they thought that was the same thing.

People are so apt to--though I never found it the same thing at all. Then, too, Nelly and I were bosom friends, and they naturally wanted to give me the first chance. Their original plan had been to have the bubble held in four equal shares, taking in Morty Truslow as the fourth. I think there was a little scheme in that, too, for Morty and I hadn't spoken for three months, and it was all off between us. There was a time when I thought there was only one thing in the world, and that was Morty Truslow--but that was over for good, with nothing left of it but a great big ache. I can never be grateful enough to Mrs. Gettridge for putting me on to it, for, however much a girl cares for a man, her pride won't let her--and she was Josie's aunt, you know, and if anybody was on the inside track, she was--and I cut him dead and sent back his letters unopened, though he wrote and wrote--and it was awfully hard, you know, because I just had to grit my teeth together to keep from loving him to death. Nelly said I was just too proud and silly for anything, and pa looked as depressed as though there was another slump in Preferred Steel, and mama said he was such a catch that the first designing girl would snap him up, and Harry said you wouldn't know Morty now, he was so changed and different.

So that was how it was when Nelly and Harry started the Great Bubble Syndicate and wanted to take Morty and me into it as quarter share-holders each. But I wouldn't have joined in a heavenly chariot on those terms, and so we talked and talked till finally Morty was eliminated and we settled on a two-third and one-third basis. The next point was to choose the car, for it had to be a cheap car and we wanted to get the very best for our money. Harry said the Model E Fearless runabout at seven hundred and fifty was the bulliest little car on the market; and that the Fearless agent was so good and kind and looked so much like Henry Ward Beecher that you felt uplifted just to be with him; and that you knew instinctively that his car was sure to be the best car.

A picture of the Fearless settled the matter, for it was a real little beauty--long in the cha.s.sis and very low, with wood artillery wheels and guards and lamps thrown in for nothing.

Harry said it had more power than it knew what to do with and was a bird on the hills, and that he had a friend who had a friend who owned one and swore by it. Afterward we met him and towed him nine miles, and what swearing he did was all the other way; however, I mustn't get ahead of the story, or antic.i.p.ate, as they say in novels.

Getting two hundred and fifty dollars from pa was the next step, and of all my automobiling experiences it was certainly the worst. He couldn't see it at all, though I caught him after dinner and sat on the arm of his chair and rubbed my cheek against his like the sunny-haired daughter on the stage.

He ought to have reciprocated by doing angel parent, but he talked horse-sense instead; how he couldn't afford to buy me a whole car, and how in his experience divided ownership always ended in the people hating one another ever afterward, and how dangerous automobiling was anyway, and how much nicer it would be to have a beautiful little horse.

Then I gave him the iron-clad agreement. He put on his spectacles and read it, asking me not to breathe on his neck, as it tickled him. (How different real life is from the stage!) And he began to giggle at the second page; at the third he could hardly go on; and finally, when mama came in and asked what was the matter, he couldn't speak at all, but got up and stamped about the room till you thought he was going to have a fit. Then he sat down again and wiped his eyes and asked as a favor whether he mightn't have a copy for himself. I said I might possibly manage it if he would come down with the two hundred and fifty.

Then he got kind of serious again; asked if I didn't know any cheaper way of getting killed; said I might have appendicitis for the same money and be fashionable. When pa is in the right humor he can tease awfully, and that agreement had set him off worse than I had ever remembered. But I stuck to my bubble and wasn't to be guyed out of the idea, and finally he lit a cigar and started, in to bargain.

Pa is the worst old skinflint in Connecticut, and never even gave me a bag of peanut candy without getting a double equivalent.

First of all, I had to give up Lewis Wentz entirely; I wasn't to speak to him, or bow or bubble or dance or anything. I put up a good fight for Lewis Wentz--not that I cared two straws for him, now that I was going to have an automobile of my own, but just to head pa off from grasping for more. I didn't want to be eaten out of house and home, you know, and I guess I am too much pa's daughter to surrender more than I could help.

It was well I did so, for on top of that I had to promise never to ride in any car except my own, and then he branched off into my giving up coffee for breakfast, going to bed at ten, only one dance a week, wearing flannel in winter, minding my mother more, and Heaven only knows what all. But I said that Lewis Wentz alone was worth two hundred and fifty, and that I'd draw on the other things when I needed money for repairs. Then pa suddenly had a new notion and said he wanted to be in the thing, too; would take a quarter interest of his own; that we'd change the syndicate to fourths instead of thirds.

I was almost too thunderstruck to speak. Think of hearing pa saying he wished to buy in! It was like an evangelist wanting to take shares in the devil. I could only say "Pa!" like that, and gasp.

"I know I'm pretty old to change," he said. "But a fellow must keep up with the procession, you know. And I always liked the way they smell."

His eyes were dancing and I saw he meant mischief; but, after all, the bubble was a.s.sured now, and that was the great thing.

It wasn't till up to that moment that I felt really safe.

"I read here in the agreement," he went on, "that the automobile is taken in rotation by every member of the syndicate; and that when it's my day it's my day, and n.o.body can say a word or use it themselves, even if I don't care to."

"That's how we'll save any possibility of friction," I returned.

"For instance, to-day it is absolutely my car; to-morrow it's yours; day after to-morrow it is Harry's; the day after that it's Nelly's--and if anything breaks on your day it's up to you to pay for it."

"Oh, I'm not going to break anything," said pa with the satisfied look of a person who doesn't know anything about it.

"Don't you be too sure about that," I said. "I've been around enough with Lewis Wentz to know better."

"Well, you see," said pa, "that depends on how much you use your automobile. If you never take it out at all you eliminate most of the bothers connected with it."

"Never take it out at all?" I cried.

"On my day it stays in the barn," he said.

I began to see now what he was smiling at. Wasn't it awful of him? He simply meant to tie it up for a quarter of the time.

"Now, Virgie," he said, "you mustn't think that I am not stretching a point to promise you what I have. It's too blamed dangerous and you're all the little girl I have. Well, if you must do it, I am going to cut the risk by twenty-five per cent and my automobile days will be blanks."

I flared up at this. It's awful when your father wants to do something you're ashamed of. It was such a dog-in-the-manger idea, too, and so unsportsmanlike. But nothing could shake pa, though I tried and tried, and said things that ought to have pierced a rhinoceros. But pa ran for governor once, and his skin's thicker. I felt almost sorry we hadn't taken in Morty Truslow instead--not really, you know, but just for the moment.

"How can I tell Hairy and Nelly you're such a pig?" I said, half crying.

"I'm not a pig," said pa, "though now I'm the next thing to it --an automobilist. And, anyway, it's a straight business proposition. Take it or leave it."

"Pa," I said, "if you'll stay out of it altogether, I'll take it back about coffee for breakfast and not minding mama more."

"It's too late," he returned. "I've got the automobile fever now myself. For two cents I'd buy out Harry and Nelly and keep the red bug in the family."

Certainly pa has the most ingenious mind of anybody I know. He ought to have been in the Spanish Inquisition just to think up new torments. I don't wonder they like him so well on the Stock Exchange: he probably initiates new members and makes them ride goats. Anyway, nothing could change him about the automobile, and I closed the deal quick, lest he might carry out his other plan and absorb seventy-five per cent of the syndicate's stock.

The Fearless was even prettier than its picture, and there wasn't a runabout in town in the same cla.s.s with it. Then our lessons began, which we took separately, because there was only room on the seat for two, and n.o.body wanted the other members of the syndicate to see him running into the curb or trying to climb trees. The agent turned out less like Henry Ward Beecher than Harry had thought, and it was sickening how he lost interest in us after he got his money. But he threw in a tooter for nothing and a socket-wrench, and in some ways lived up to the resemblance. He would not take me out himself, but gave me in charge of a weird little boy we called the Gasoline Child. The Gasoline Child was about thirteen, and was so full of tools that he rattled when he walked, and I guess his head rattled, too--he knew so much about gas engines. He was the greasiest, messiest, grittiest and oiliest little boy that ever defied soap; and Harry always declared he was an automobile variety of coddling-moth or Colorado beetle or june-bug, who would wind up by spinning a cotton-waste coc.o.o.n in the center of the machinery and hatch out a million more like himself. Perhaps he was too busy to start his happy home, for I never saw him at the garage but his little legs were sticking out of a bonnet, and you could hear him hammering inside and telling somebody to "Turn it over, will you?" or "Now, try it that way, Bill."