第82章

Larry, just before this, had noted Joe Ellison in his blue overalls and wide straw hat cleaning out a bank of young dahlias a distance up the bluff. He now took Maggie's arm and guided her in that direction.

"See that man there working among the dahlias?--the man who once brought you a bunch of roses? Joe Ellison is his name. He's the man I've been talking about--your father."

He felt her quivering under his hand for a moment, and heard her breath come in swift, spasmodic pants. He was wondering what was the effect upon her of this climax of his revelation, when she whispered:

"Do you suppose--I can speak--to my father?"

"Of course. He likes all young women. And I told you that he and I were close friends."

"Then--come on." She arose, clinging to him, and drew him after her.

Halfway to Joe she breathed: "You please say something first.

Anything."

He recognized this as the appeal of one whose faculties were reeling.

There had never been any attempt here at Cedar Crest to conceal Joe Ellison's past, and in Larry's case there had been only such concealment as might help his evasion of his dangers. And so Larry remarked as Joe Ellison took his wide hat off his white hair and stood bareheaded before them:

"Joe, Miss Cameron knows who I really am, and about my having been in Sing Sing; and I've just told her about our having been friends there.

Also I told her about your having a daughter. It interested her and she asked me if she couldn't talk to you, so I brought her over."

Larry stood aside and tensely watched this meeting between father and daughter. Joe bowed slightly, and with a dignified grace that overalls and over fifteen years of prison could not take from one who during his early and middle manhood had been known as the perfection of the finished gentleman. His gray eyes warmed with appreciation of the young figure before him, just as Larry had seen them grow bright watching the young figures disporting in the Sound.

"It is very gracious for a young woman like you, Miss Cameron," he said in a voice of grave courtesy, "to be interested enough in an old man like me to want to talk with him."

Maggie made the supreme effort of her life to keep herself in hand. "I wanted to talk to you because of something Mr. Brainard told me about--about your having a daughter."

Larry felt that this was too sacred a scene for him to intrude upon.

"Would you mind excusing me," he said; "there are some calculations I've got to rush out"--and he returned to the bench on which they had been sitting and pretended to busy himself over a pocket notebook.

While Larry had been speaking and moving away, Maggie had swiftly been appraising her father. His gray eyes were direct as against the furtiveness of Jimmie's; his mouth had a firm kindliness as against the wrinkled cunning of Jimmie's; his bearing was erect, self-possessed, as against Jimmie's bent, shuffling carriage. Maggie felt no swift-born daughter love for this stranger who was her father. The turmoil of her discovery filled her too completely to admit a full-grown affection; but she thrilled with the sense of the vast difference between her supposed father and this her real father.

In the meantime her father had spoken. Joe would have been more reserved with men or with older women; but with this girl, so much the sort of girl he had long dreamed about, his reserve vanished without resistance, and in its place was a desire to talk to this beautiful creature who came out of the world which the big white house represented.

"I have a daughter, yes," he said. "But Larry--Mr. Brainard perhaps I should say--has likely told you all there is to tell."

"I'd like to hear it from you, please--if you don't mind."

"There's really not much to tell," he said. "You know what I was and what happened. When I went to prison my daughter was too young to remember me--less than two years old. I didn't want her ever to be drawn into the sort of life that had been mine, or be the sort of woman that a girl becomes who gets into that life. And I didn't want her ever to have the stigma, and the handicap, of her knowing and the world knowing that her father was a convict. You can't understand it fully, Miss Cameron, but perhaps you can understand a little how disgraced you would feel, what a handicap it would be, if your father were a convict. I had a good friend I could trust. So I turned my daughter over to him, to be brought up with no knowledge of my existence, and with every reasonable advantage that a nice girl should have. I guess that's all, Miss Cameron."

"This friend--what was his name?"

"Carlisle--Jimmie Carlisle. But his name could never have meant anything to you. Besides, he's dead now."

Maggie forced herself on. "Your plan--it turned out all right? And you--you are happy?"