He got the connection with some difficulty and asked for Mr. Brighton.

"Mr. Brighton is at dinner," returned the smooth voice of a well-trained servant; "he cannot be interrupted."

"But this is very important," insisted Oliver. "I am quite sure that if he knew----"

"My orders are that he is not to be disturbed," was the politely firm answer while the boy raged and fumed impotently.

"Then tell him," Oliver directed, "that his cousin, Mr. Jasper Peyton, is in very great trouble and needs to see him as--as soon as he finds it quite convenient."

His voice was trembling with anger and he slammed down the receiver without waiting for a reply.

"There was no use sending for him, after all," he reflected in black discouragement. He was not used to such treatment nor did he think that a man should surround himself with so much ceremony that he could not hear a plea for help. "He is just what Cousin Eleanor's father would be," was his disgusted verdict. "I was a fool to hope for any help there. If it had been the Beeman----"

Never had the house seemed so enormous or so silent as it was to-night. He went out through a swinging door, attempting to find the kitchen, fumbling down a pa.s.sage, feeling in likely places for electric b.u.t.tons, and not discovering them. He b.u.mped his head against unexpected doors and cupboards, he upset something with a horrifying crash in the butler's pantry. At last he found the right door and the proper light switch, and stood in the big, shining white kitchen, looking about him helplessly at all the complicated apparatus of cookery, clean, polished, and complete, and utterly useless to him.

"This is no place for a boy," he exclaimed stormily after he had pinched his fingers in a drawer, spilled the water, and produced a roaring, spitting flame in the gas burner that blew up in his face and then went out. After fifteen minutes of miserable effort he at last heard the water boil noisily in the kettle where he had placed water and tea together. He poured out a cupful of the poisonous brew and stood regarding it in despair.

"I wish Mrs. Brown would come home," he groaned. "I'd be glad of any woman, any girl, even Cousin Eleanor."

He had opened a window, for the place was hot and close and through this he could hear, of a sudden, the sound of an automobile coming up the drive. He dashed through the dark pa.s.sage, hurried to the great front door, and flung it open. There was a crunching of big wheels on the gravel and the snorting of an engine checked suddenly to a stop.

It was not Mrs. Brown and Janet, for, though he heard voices, they were not theirs. The car had stopped beyond the fallen tree and some one was coming across the gra.s.s--two people, for the voices were a man's and a girl's. Apparently Cousin Tom had not stopped to finish his dinner, after all, and he had brought Cousin Eleanor.

"Yes, I'll be glad to see even her," he thought desperately.

The two came nearer, a man in white flannels, but bareheaded in the hurry of his coming, and a girl in white also. There was something familiar in the swing of those broad shoulders, in the tone of that voice. Yet Oliver stood, blinking stupidly, holding to the side of the door, too dazed to speak when the two stepped out of the dark and came up the steps--the Beeman and Polly.

CHAPTER XI

THREE COUSINS

"Good gracious, Oliver, do you mean to say you really did not know? We used to talk it over, Polly and I, and wonder whether you were not beginning to see through us. Janet had some suspicions, and when she met us at the fair this afternoon, she understood who we were at last.

Now I will present you to Miss Eleanor Marshall Brighton, known to her own family as Polly. I would not have broken this thing to you so suddenly, if I had taken time to think."

Oliver listened to Cousin Tom's half-apologetic explanations, yet he scarcely heard them, but still stood leaning against the doorpost, gaping with astonishment. Of course he had always known that there was something unusual about the Beeman, but as to who he really was he had never had an inkling. And this was Cousin Eleanor, the girl he had pictured so definitely that it seemed she could not be other than the prim, detested person he had so dreaded meeting. It was the very vividness of his idea of her that had stood in the way of his guessing the truth. But if the Beeman were really Cousin Tom, then he could, of course, put everything right and--more immediate cause for rejoicing--Polly could cook!

"Oh, come down to the kitchen and get Cousin Jasper something to eat,"

he begged. "He is almost starved. It is half past eight and he had lunch at twelve."

He gave Tom Brighton a rapid account of what had happened that day--of the letter, of Cousin Jasper's increasing agitation, of his final desperate call for help on his own responsibility.

"Poor Oliver, what a day you have had, while the rest of us were enjoying ourselves at the fair!" said Cousin Tom. "Polly and I happened to come home early before the storm, so that your message found us and we came at once."

"And he is starved himself," put in Polly. "He has not had anything to eat any more than Cousin Jasper."

It was wonderful to watch Polly making short shrift of the remains of his own awkward preparations, to see her skillful manipulation of the gas burners and her marvelous dexterity with the egg beater. And this slim, eager, shy Polly, with her crinkled brown hair and her freckled nose, this was really Eleanor Brighton. Oliver sat down limply upon one of the kitchen chairs to contemplate the wonder of it anew.

"I did not know who you were, myself, that first day," she said, "though Daddy guessed at once and even suspected that you were planning to go away. Janet told us all about it this afternoon, how Cousin Jasper made such a mistake and thought that he could force you to meet a girl that you were sure you wouldn't like. I would have done just the same myself if my father had tried to make me meet you, only he is too wise for such a thing."

But Oliver could only shake his head and marvel that he had not guessed.

Later, after Cousin Jasper and Oliver had feasted on the supper of Polly's providing, they all gathered about the table in the library and Cousin Tom unlocked the battered old strong box that he had brought in from the car.

"As I am the family lawyer," he explained to Oliver--"yes, bees are only a hobby, and my real business is the law--I have in my possession most of the records belonging to this affair. I have gone into the whole matter of Anthony's claims from the very beginning and I am prepared to fight him for every inch that he demands."

He began taking papers from the box, fat rolls of legal doc.u.ments, letters with their edges worn into tatters and addressed in the crabbed writing of a century ago, t.i.tle deeds discolored and yellow with age, most of them fastened with great red seals, a ma.s.s of musty records that looked dry and dull indeed.

While he was spreading them out upon the table, the door opened quietly and Janet slipped in. She a.s.sured them that she had dined and had not got wet, that, except for Mrs. Brown's terrible fever of anxiety lest Cousin Jasper should not be properly cared for, all had gone well. Might she listen, please, and was there going to be another story?

"Not of just the same kind that I have been telling you up yonder on the Windy Hill," replied Tom Brighton, "although here you see the source of all those tales and of a hundred others like them. They are all buried here in these dusty papers, the history of your forbears and of the lands in Medford Valley. It goes all the way back, does the record, to the time when our several times great-grandfather bought the first tract from the Indian, Nashola. I am always glad to think that the red man had enough intelligence and the white man enough honor to make something like a real bargain, that this valley was purchased for what the wild lands were worth instead of being paid for with a gun, a drink of bad spirits, and a handful of beads. See, here is Nashola's name; he learned to write after a fashion, although the Indian witnesses signed only with a mark. And here is the signature of that first one of our kin to settle in the New World, Matthew Hallowell."

"Hallowell?" echoed Oliver. "Did he belong to those same Hallowells in the story, who quarreled over the _Huntress_?"

"Yes," was the answer, "he was the beginning of a vigorous line, living in and near Medford Valley until there came at last the Hallowell who moved to the seaport town, who built his first ship there and launched into foreign trade. They became great merchants, the Hallowells, in that time between the Revolution and the War of 1812 when Yankee ships and Yankee owners were lords of the high seas.

But fortune failed after the death of Reuben Hallowell; his son Alan loved sailing rather than trading and his daughter Cicely married a junior partner in a lesser firm, Howard Brighton, who thought it better for his sons and daughter to go to live on the lands in Medford Valley that had belonged to their mother and had been given by her to him. Cicely's children were Ralph and Felix and Barbara Brighton, of all of whom you have heard."

"How have they heard, Tom?" asked Cousin Jasper, and the Beeman smiled.

"I have been filling up their minds with family history, for I knew that they must understand about this whole affair some day and it would take too long to tell them all the facts at once. So we have come now to the latest portion of the story," he went on, turning again to the younger members of his audience, "to a period when three cousins, Jasper Peyton, Anthony Crawford, and Tom Brighton used to spend much time together when they were growing up.

"Jasper and I are first cousins, since my father was Ralph Brighton and his mother was that younger sister, Barbara. I have had no reluctance in telling you of that bitter mistake my father made and the quarrel with his brother, for he spoke of it often himself and said that, in all his life, he never learned a more valuable lesson.

Felix did not marry, since his zeal for the orchard and the bees and later for farming on a larger and larger scale seemed to occupy his every thought. It was he who reclaimed the marshy, waste ground in the valley, 'for,' he said, 'it is wrong that we on the seaboard leave our home acres and move farther and farther westward, looking for new land that is easy to till. It is a wasteful policy, even for a new country.' That was one of the things he had learned on his long journey across the West and back again."

"But I do not understand about Anthony Crawford," put in Oliver. "I haven't seen yet where he comes in at all."

"He calls us cousin, but it is a distant kinship, since he is grandson of that Martin Hallowell who broke with his partner Reuben over the matter of the _Huntress_. He used to come often to stay in Medford Valley, for he had been left without parents and Felix Brighton was his guardian. My Aunt Barbara, Jasper's mother, had lost her husband early, and she went to live with her brother Felix in the yellow stone farmhouse that had come to him from some earlier Hallowell who had built it a hundred years ago. How we loved the place and how happy we all were there, for I spent almost as much time under that wide, friendly roof as did Anthony. How patient and good Jasper's mother was to three mischievous, active boys, and how unceasingly, wisely kind was Felix Brighton! He has done much for us, Jasper and me, and he would, if he could, have made a man of Anthony.

"He was not like the other two of us, we could see that even when we were children. He was quicker and more clever than we, and he was better, or at least wiser, at holding his tongue and keeping his temper when the occasion served. But the key to his whole character was that he could never see any possession in the hands of another without instinctively wishing to have it for himself. I have seen him move heaven and earth to get something that he did not really want, merely because it seemed of value when it belonged to some one else.

There was no one more clever than he at acquiring what he desired.

"Felix Brighton prospered greatly, but he never moved out of the comfortable farmhouse of which we were all so fond. It became very beautiful under his hands, extended and improved and filled with the rarest treasures of his gathering. He was especially fond of pictures, so that there was a wealth of portraits and landscapes that he had collected or inherited, that glowed like jewels on the mellow old walls. He did us unnumbered kindnesses when we were boys, and when, on growing up, we decided that we would all three be lawyers, he set us up as partners, Peyton, Crawford & Brighton. We felt very important with our law books, our profound knowledge, our newly painted sign and very little else. Even while we were studying, it was plain that Anthony, in his erratic, changeable way, was the cleverest of us all.

"And then history repeated itself, as it so often does. The grandson of Martin Hallowell and the two great-grandsons of Reuben fell out with each other over just such a questionable enterprise as had wrecked a partnership a hundred years ago. I can see him now as he came hurrying into our office that day full of the plan for his great scheme--just a quibble of the law and the thing was done. We were all to be made rich and successful by it, he explained. There is no use in describing to you the intricacies of his idea; it was one of those shoal waters in which the honesty of young lawyers can sometimes come to grief. The pursuit of law will winnow out the true from the false; it makes an upright man a hundred times more certain and more proud of his honor: it searches out the small, weak places of a meaner man's soul.

"Anthony tried to make this project sound quite simple and straightforward, but I can remember how narrowly he watched us and how, when he attempted to laugh at our objections, his voice cracked into shrill falsetto, under pressure of his excitement. I would have argued with him, explained, tried to dissuade him, but Jasper scorned my temporizing and would have had none of it. His sense of justice blazed high within him and his words leaped forth, a very avalanche of scorn and wrath. Anthony heard him through without replying, then turned on his heel and went out. Our partnership was at an end. Later we heard that he had become involved with his scheme even before he spoke to us, that he had made himself liable for a sum of money, and that, to pay it--don't wince, Jasper, these children must know the truth--to pay it he forged Felix Brighton's name.

"There is something very terrible in the sudden destruction of your confidence in some one you have loved and trusted. Anthony is greatly changed now, although there is still a little of his old charm left.

Yet you would not think of him as some one who had been an intimate part of our lives, a comrade whose cleverness we admired and whose honesty we had never doubted. And then he was suddenly blotted out of our existence. The wrong he had done was hushed up, he disappeared somewhere in the West, and it seemed that we were never to hear of him again. The years went by, Jasper's mother and then our Uncle Felix went from us. He had given me the lands on the west side of the river, since I was already owner of the cottage, the Windy Hill, and the bees that he had taught me to tend and love. To Jasper he had given the yellow stone house that had been like home for us all and his intimate possessions, the treasures it contained. He had given him also the drained farm lands by the river, a legacy that was an occupation in itself. He had seen that Jasper's bent was not really for the law, but that his best calling was the care of such an estate as this. More years pa.s.sed, I became more and more absorbed in my own work down in the seaport town that has become a city, spending my holidays and my vacations in caring for the bees, not seeing Jasper so often, for he was over-busy also. And then Anthony came home.

"Whatever he had been doing in all this time we have no way of knowing. He had altered greatly, so that there seemed nothing left of his old self except his cleverness, some lingering affection for the place where he had been happy as a boy, and that old habit of coveting what other people had. He came back with a claim to make, one that went back as far as the day when Reuben and Martin Hallowell quarreled and made a hasty division of what had belonged to them in common.

There had always been a slight doubt as to the t.i.tle of the land upon which the yellow stone farmhouse stood, and to the upper end of the farms by the river. Anthony knew of it from the days when we studied law together and he came back determined to make that property his. I will not deny that he had some slight basis for his claim. He would accept no compromise or offer of purchase, so in the end Jasper gave in to him."

Cousin Jasper had not spoken throughout Tom Brighton's recounting of the whole affair. But now he took up the tale himself, going over the ground that, very evidently, he had pondered and argued and weighed within himself a hundred times.

"I had much and he had nothing, he was in real want and had a wife and two children besides. There was, as Tom says, some real basis for his claim since the t.i.tle had never been made quite clear. And there is, further, no more bitter thing than a family quarrel, a division over the settlement of property, this one asking for what is more than his, that one fighting to hold what is not his own--no, it was unthinkable.