Читать книгу Betty at Fort Blizzard - Molly Elliot Seawell - Страница 10

The combination of the kicking mare, the fallen troopers, the prostrate chaplain, and the screaming baby at once determined Colonel Fortescue to remain in his office; what he had to say to Mrs. Fortescue would not sound well in public. Unlike Kettle, Colonel Fortescue had no fear whatever for Mrs. Fortescue, and watched calmly from the window as Sergeant McGillicuddy brought Birdseye to her four feet. Mrs. Fortescue sprang to the ground and apologized gracefully to the chaplain, assuring him that Birdseye was the best disposed horse in the world, except when she was in a temper and her temper was merely bashfulness and stage fright.

"Whatever it is," answered Chaplain Brown, smiling while he rubbed a bruised shin, "it hurts. It hurts pretty badly, too."

Next, Mrs. Fortescue apologized profusely to the troopers who had been knocked down by the bashful Birdseye. After their kind, they preferred a kicker to a non-kicker, and accepted, with delighted grins, Mrs. Fortescue's sweet words. But it was another thing when Mrs. Fortescue had to face a frowning husband.

Mrs. Fortescue tripped into the Colonel's office, and going up to Colonel Fortescue gave him two soft kisses and a lovely smile, and this is what she got in return, in the Colonel's parade-ground voice:

"I supposed I had made myself perfectly clear, Elizabeth, in regard to your riding that kicking mare."

"But, darling," replied Mrs. Fortescue, "I thought you wouldn't mind. And please don't call me Elizabeth. It breaks my heart."

"I must ask—in fact, insist—that you shall not ride that mare again," answered the Colonel sternly, without taking any notice of Mrs. Fortescue's breaking heart.

"And her name is Birdseye," plaintively responded Mrs. Fortescue. "Don't you remember, the first horse you ever put me on was your first Birdseye."

Mrs. Fortescue accompanied this information with a little pinch of the Colonel's ear. The Colonel remained coldly unresponsive; he had steeled his heart; the kisses and the pinch were hard to resist, but hardest of all the look of wide-eyed innocence in the dark eyes uplifted to his. Mrs. Fortescue would never see forty again, and her rich hair had a wide streak of silver running from her right temple; but she was the same Betty Beverley of twenty years before. The Betty Beverleys of this world are dowered with immortal youth and change but little, even under strange stars.

Mrs. Fortescue had never in her life been at the end of her resources for placating men. She withdrew her arms from about her husband's neck, and running lightly into the drawing-room took the After-Clap from Kettle's arms, and, throwing him pick-a-back on her shoulders, tripped with her beautiful man-child into the Colonel's office. Mrs. Fortescue and the baby were the only persons who ever took liberties with Colonel Fortescue.

The baby, charmed with his father's uniform, seized a shoulder strap with one hand and grabbed the Colonel's carefully trimmed mustache with the other, and lifted a pair of laughing eyes, wonderfully like his mother's, into his father's face. Mrs. Fortescue, at first as demure as any C. O.'s wife in the world, suddenly smiled the radiant smile that began with her eyes and ended with her lips. The woman's cunning was too much for the man's strength. Colonel Fortescue put his arm around his wife, as she laid the baby's rose-leaf face against his father's bronzed cheek. Husband and wife looked into each other's eyes and smiled. With this baby their lost youth was restored to them. Once more the Colonel was a slim young lieutenant, and Mrs. Fortescue was holding in her arms another dark-eyed, rose-leafed baby, now a young soldier in the gray uniform of a military cadet. They, themselves, could scarcely realize the flitting of the years. This new baby was a glorious surprise in their later married life. The baby's little hand had led them backward to the splendid sunrise of their married happiness.

"It is because I love you so that I can't—I won't let you ride that black devil, Betty dear," said the Colonel.

"How ridiculous!" replied Mrs. Fortescue. "You know I can ride as well as you can—can't I, After-Clap?"

"Goo-goo-goo-goo!" replied the baby, positively.

"And I never could understand why you should take the trouble to get angry with me," Mrs. Fortescue kept on, "when you can't stay angry with me to save your life."

Colonel Fortescue made a last stand.

"But if I didn't get angry with you sometimes, Betty——"

"'Betty' sounds cheerful," interrupted Mrs. Fortescue, and then there was peace between them.

Mrs. Fortescue and the Colonel went up-stairs to dress for dinner, and Kettle, on watch in the hall, took charge of the After-Clap, who commanded to be taken back into the office. Kettle, as always, promptly obeyed, and putting the baby on Sergeant McGillicuddy's desk, allowed the After-Clap to wreck everything in sight.

It had not been originally designed that Kettle should be the After-Clap's nurse. The colored mammy who had nursed Beverley and Anita with tender devotions having gone to her well-earned rest, Mrs. Fortescue had determined to be very modern with the After-Clap. A smart young trained nurse, in a ravishing cap, was his first nurse. But the baby showed such marked preference for Kettle, and Kettle dogging the baby by day and night and thrusting superfluous services and advice upon the nurse, she decided she would not stand being "bossed by a nigger," and took a train for the East. Then, Mrs. Fortescue determined to return to first principles and imported from Virginia, at great cost and trouble, a colored mammy, most capable and experienced. But the complications with Kettle grew more acute, and the mammy, in a blaze of indignation, took even stronger ground than the trained nurse, and declared she "warn't goin' to be bossed by no black nigger." When she had shaken the snow of Fort Blizzard from her feet, there was nothing left but to hand the baby over to Kettle and Mrs. McGillicuddy, as coadjutor. After tending her own brood and keeping a sharp eye on Anna Maria McGillicuddy, her eldest daughter, who had reached the stage of beaux, and cooking the best meals for the Sergeant that any sergeant could ask, Mrs. McGillicuddy still had time to lend a helping hand with the After-Clap.

Kettle and Mrs. McGillicuddy had been good friends ever since the time, nineteen years before, when she had become the little Sergeant's two-hundred-pound bride. But in the twenty years, during which Kettle had never left "Miss Betty" and Sergeant McGillicuddy had been Colonel Fortescue's factotum, there had been a continual guerilla warfare between Kettle and the Sergeant. The Sergeant alluded scornfully to Kettle as "the naygur," while with Kettle the Sergeant was always "ole McGillicuddy." Mrs. McGillicuddy was invariably on Kettle's side, and one blast upon her bugle horn was worth ten thousand men in what Kettle called his "collusions," with the Sergeant. Sergeant McGillicuddy had performed prodigies of valor in fights with Indians; he had been mentioned in general order, along with Colonel Fortescue, and was commonly reputed to fear neither the devil nor the doctor. But he was under iron discipline with Mrs. McGillicuddy, and Kettle, like everybody else, knew it.

While the After-Clap was disporting himself with the articles on the Sergeant's desk, under the full glare of the electric light, a shadow passed the window. The next minute Sergeant McGillicuddy entered, the lion in him aroused by the sight of the liberties taken with his desk.

"I say, you naygur," snorted the Sergeant wrathfully, "you take that baby off my desk and out of this office. The C. O's office ain't no day nursery."

"You go to grass," replied Kettle boldly.

The reason for Kettle's boldness was in sight. Mrs. McGillicuddy's majestic figure was seen approaching from the region back of the dining-room, and she had heard the Sergeant's remark about the C. O.'s office being a day nursery.

"And it's you, Patrick McGillicuddy," cried Mrs. McGillicuddy, sailing into the office, "the father of eight children, complaining of this sweet blessed lamb."

"D' ye mean the naygur?" asked McGillicuddy.

Mrs. McGillicuddy, scorning to reply, seized the baby, and with Kettle following marched out. It was not really judicious for the After-Clap to be taken into the C. O.'s office.

The Sergeant began meekly to straighten up his desk, and Colonel Fortescue, coming in later to glance over the evening newspaper, found McGillicuddy gazing meditatively at the Articles of War, lying in a volume on the table.

The Sergeant was not the modern educated non-com, with an eye to a commission, but an old-timer, unlearned in books, but an expert in handling men and horses.

"What is it, Sergeant?" asked the C. O.

"Just this, sir," replied the Sergeant respectfully, "I was thinkin' a man ought to be mighty keerful when he picks out a wife."

"Certainly," replied the Colonel, gravely, who had exercised no forethought at all, after once falling under the spell of Betty Beverley's laughing eyes.

"When I got married I didn't act rash at all, sir, because I'm by nature a timid man," continued the Sergeant, who was a valiant man, and free. "I went to a palmist and paid him a dollar for my horrorscope. I told him I wanted a little woman, about my size, who would follow me around like a poodle dog. The palmist, he said, sir, he seen a little woman in my hand as would follow me around like a poodle dog. Then I went to a reg'lar fortune teller, and she told me the same thing, for a dollar. And I went to a mind reader, the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and she promised me the little woman, too. I bought a dream book and there was the same little woman again, sir. Within a fortnight after all this I met Araminta Morrarity, as is now Missis Patrick McGillicuddy, and she is six-foot-two-and-three-quarters inches in height, and tipped the scale then at a hundred and ninety-six pounds—and I'm the lightest man in the regiment. Missis McGillicuddy has been a good wife, sir—I ain't sayin' a word about that, sir."

"I should think not," replied Colonel Fortescue, to whom the Sergeant's married life was known intimately for nineteen years, "Mrs. McGillicuddy keeps all the soldiers' wives satisfied and is a boon to the regiment."

"That's so, sir," the Sergeant agreed, "and the chaplain, he compliments her on the way she marches them eight children and me to the chapel every Sunday, rain or shine, me havin' the right of the line, Missis McGillicuddy herself bein' the rear guard, the line properly dressed, no stragglers, everything done soldier-like. But Missis McGillicuddy don't follow me around like a poodle dog, as the palmist, and the mind reader, and the dream book said she would. She's hell-bent—excuse me sir—on havin' her own way all the time."

Just then a vision flitted past the door. It was Anita, dressed for dinner, in a filmy gown of pale blue and white, the colors of the Blessed Damozel. A light came into Colonel Fortescue's eyes as they rested on this darling of his heart. The Sergeant had a pretty daughter, Anna Maria by name, who was just Anita's age and of whom the Sergeant was extravagantly fond. The two fathers, the Colonel and the Sergeant, exchanged intelligent glances. Often, in their twenty years of daily association, they talked together about things of which they never spoke to any other man.

"Anna Maria is a fine girl," said the Colonel.

"Yes, sir," answered the Sergeant, "if she'd just get over the fancy she has for Briggs, the artillery corporal. That man is bound to be killed by a wheel runnin' over him. You know, sir, if there is anything on earth that skeers me stiff it is a horse hitched to any kind of a vehicle. I don't mind ridin' 'em because then the horse's heels is behind me. But in a vehicle the horse's heels is in front of me, and it makes me nervous. I have told Anna Mariar that she shan't so much as look at Briggs unless he exchanges into the cavalry, so the horse's heels will be behind him, and not in front of him."

The entrance bell rang, and Kettle went to the front door. Colonel Fortescue could neither hear nor see the visitor, but the step and the sound of a military cloak thrown on a chair indicated the arrival of a junior lieutenant. Colonel Fortescue looked annoyed. The junior officer running after Anita bothered him even more than Briggs, the artillery corporal, bothered Sergeant McGillicuddy. Anita was but a child—only seventeen; the Colonel had proclaimed this when he brought Anita to the post. Colonel Fortescue did all that a father and a Colonel could do to keep the junior lieutenants away from Anita, but no method has yet been found to keep junior officers away from pretty girls.

There were still twenty minutes before dinner, and the scoundrel, as Colonel Fortescue classified all the juniors who, like himself, adored Anita, seemed determined to stay until the musical gong sounded, and later, if he were asked. This particular scoundrel, Broussard, was the one to whom the Colonel most objected of all the slim, good-looking scoundrels who wore shoulder straps, for Broussard had too much money to spend, and spent it wildly, so the Colonel thought; he, himself, had something handsome besides his pay, but he had also a sensible father who held him down. Broussard had too many motors, too many horses, too many dogs, too many clothes, too many fighting chickens, and, above all, was too intimate with a certain soldier, a gentleman-ranker who was disapproved, both of officer and man. A gentleman-ranker is a man serving in the rank who might be an officer. This one, Lawrence by name, was a bad lot altogether. The Colonel could add quite a respectable number of demerits to Broussard's credit. And to make matters worse, Broussard was a dashing fellow, the best rider in his troop, and had a way with him that made Anita's eyes soften and her tea-rose cheeks brighten when he came within her presence.

Meanwhile, Broussard was walking up the long and handsome drawing-room toward the little glass room at the end, which had been fitted up for Anita's birds, her doves and her canaries.

Anita, leaning backward in the cushioned window seat, held to her breast a fluttering white dove. She did not see Broussard until he was quite in the little room, and had closed the glass door after him. As Anita gave Broussard her hand, a great wave of delicate color flooded her face. This quickened the beating of Broussard's heart—Anita did not blush like that for everybody. She had a gentle aloofness generally toward men which was a baffling mystery to her mother.

Broussard, being frankly in love with Anita, lost all his importance and presumption in her sweet presence, and was as gentle and modest as the white dove that Anita still held to her breast. As he longed to sit near her and ask her poignant questions, Broussard sat a long way off and talked common-places, chiefly about birds, of which he showed a surprising knowledge, gleaned that afternoon from the encyclopaedia, in anticipation of his visit. Also, Broussard had, very artfully, secured a traitor in the enemy's camp because it was well understood at Fort Blizzard that Colonel Fortescue was the enemy of every subaltern at the post who dared to raise his sacrilegious eyes to the Colonel's daughter.

This traitor was Kettle, into whose hand Broussard never failed to place a quarter whenever they met, and at the same time to wink gravely. Kettle knew the meaning both of the quarter and the wink.

Across the hall Kettle was arranging the dinner table, it being Mrs. McGillicuddy's duty to put the After-Clap to bed. The dining-room door was ajar, and Kettle kept an eye open to Broussard's advantage.

Presently, Mrs. Fortescue came down-stairs, dressed for dinner in a gown of a jocund yellow, which Colonel Fortescue liked. As she passed the open door of the handsome dining-room, Kettle beckoned to her mysteriously. Mrs. Fortescue walked into the room and Kettle closed the door after her.

"Miss Betty," whispered Kettle earnestly, "doan' you go into that there apiary," by which Kettle meant the aviary. "Miss Anita is in there with Mr. Broussard, an' he got on his courtin' breeches, an' they's jest as quiet as a couple of sleepin' babies."