The wild fawn

MRS. CARTER looked up from her breakfast and glanced anxiously at the clock.

“I wonder where that postman can be!” she exclaimed fretfully. “He’s always late nowadays.”

“Nonsense!” retorted her husband, unfolding his newspaper. “It’s because you want a letter from William. The postman will be along all right.”

Mrs. Carter sighed. She could not understand the gap in her son’s correspondence. William was her eldest and the pride of her heart. At twenty-seven he had been a success in business. He had dominated the family, advising his stout, deliberate father, overwhelming his lame brother Daniel, and bossing the two younger children, Leigh and Emily, until, goaded to frenzy, first one and then the other of the worms turned. As the only girl in the family, Emily reached the limit of her endurance long before Leigh came into the battle as a feeble second.

But not even Emily could stem the tide of Mrs. Carter’s devotion to her first-born. It had cost her many a sleepless night when, more than a year ago, William Henry Carter had been selected by a well-known mercantile firm to go to Japan. It had been a crowning opportunity for William; to his mother it was a source of mingled pride and anguish. She packed his trunk with unnumbered socks and collar-buttons--she was sure he couldn’t get them in Japan--and she smuggled in some jars of strawberry jam, “the kind that dear Willie always loved.”

Afterward her only solace had been his letters. She overlooked his ungrateful wrath when the jam jars broke into the socks, and fell back on her pride in his continuing success, and on the fact that he had been permitted to come home via the Mediterranean, and was to act for his firm in Paris.

Now, after an absence of fourteen months, he might be home at any moment; but there had been a gap in the correspondence--no letters for more than two months. The maternal anxiety would have communicated itself to the family, if it had not been that William’s company had heard from the young man in the interim, and could assure the anxious Mr. Carter that his son was well and doing business with eminent talent and success. Mr. Payson, the head of the establishment, lived in town, and he was liberal in his praise.

Mrs. Carter’s mind dwelt upon this with a feeling of maternal pride, still tempered with anxiety, when she became aware that Emily and Leigh were quarreling openly because of the latter’s unfeeling remark that a girl with a snub nose and freckles should never do her hair in a Greek knot.

“It’s enough to make a cat laugh,” said Leigh. “What have you got to balance that knob on the back of your head?”

“Leigh, dear, don’t plague sister so,” Mrs. Carter remonstrated mildly.

“As if a boy like Leigh knew anything about a girl’s hair!” cried Emily indignantly. “It’s a psyche-knot.”

Leigh laughed derisively; but at this moment, when the quarrel had become noisy enough to disturb Mr. Carter, it was interrupted by the entrance of the morning mail. Miranda, the colored maid of all work, appeared with a replenished coffee-pot and a letter for Mrs. Carter.

The anxious mother gave a cry of joy.

“My goodness--it’s from Willie!”

The interest became general, and five pairs of expectant eyes focussed on Mrs. Carter as she opened the envelope, her fingers shaking with eagerness. Miranda, to whom the fifth pair of eyes belonged, became unusually attentive to Daniel, and insisted on replenishing his coffee-cup.

“This was written in Paris,” Mrs. Carter exclaimed eagerly, “and--and posted in New York! I wonder! ‘Dear mother,’” she began reading aloud, her voice tremulous with joy, “‘I’m coming home on the Britannic, and I’m bringing you the--the----’”

She stopped short, her mouth open like a fish’s, and a look of horror glazing the rapture in her eyes.

There was a profound and expectant pause. Daniel, the least interested member of the group, managed to drink his hot coffee with apparent relish, and sixteen-year-old Emily ate a biscuit, but Mr. Carter, who had laid down his newspaper to listen, became impatient.

“What’s the matter, mama?” he asked peevishly. “You look scared. Is William going to bring you a crocodile from the Nile?”

Mrs. Carter rallied.

“N-no, not exactly--that is----” She looked absently at the maid. “Miranda, go down to the ice-box and look it through. Let me know just what’s left over. I’ve got to ’phone to the market immediately.”

“Yes’m.”

Miranda, descrying a sensation from afar, retired reluctantly. She couldn’t hear quite as well in the kitchen entry when all the windows were open.

Mrs. Carter waited until the pantry door closed behind the maid; then she turned her horrified eyes upon her family.

“William’s married!” she gasped.

“Married?” echoed Mr. Carter angrily. “You’re crazy! William’s got too much sense. You haven’t read it straight. Give me that letter!”

He stretched out a fiercely impatient hand, but Mrs. Carter ignored his order.

“Listen! I did read it right. I know my own boy’s writing. I’ll read it aloud--listen!”

Mr. Carter thumped the table.

“Why in thunder don’t you read it, then? We’re listening! Of all the crazy notions! Married--you’ll find it’s ‘meandered.’ Go ahead!”

Mrs. Carter rallied her forces again, aware that Daniel and Leigh and Emily were gaping in amazed incredulity. She turned the letter over to the first page, caught her breath, and began.

“‘Dear mother,’” she read again, unsteadily this time, “‘I’m coming home on the Britannic, and I’m bringing you the sweetest daughter-in-law in the whole world. Her name is Fanchon la Fare, and she’s the cleverest, the dearest, the most devoted girl in France. I can’t tell you how beautiful she is, but you’ll fall in love with her at first sight--just as I did. She’s small, “just as high as my heart,” mother, and she’s got the eyes of a wild fawn----’”

“Wild fawn--thunder!” ejaculated Mr. Carter, unable to restrain himself. “Give me that letter!”

This time Mrs. Carter surrendered it. She passed it down via Daniel, who was looking unusually pale. His face startled her, and, while Mr. Carter was reading the letter, she met her second son’s eyes. They gave her another shock.

“Dan,” she whispered in an awe-struck voice, “I--do you think he was engaged to--to----”

She mouthed a name, unable to finish her sentence under the young man’s look. Daniel frowned, his white lips closing in a sharp line, but Emily spoke up unabashed.

“Willie’s engaged to Virginia Denbigh. She’s got his ring. I’ve seen it on her finger.”

“Oh, Emily!” her mother sank back in her chair, feeling weaker than ever. Her boy, her Willie! She couldn’t believe that he would do anything like that. She shook her head indignantly at Emily. “Hush!” she whispered.

“He is, too!” her daughter insisted. “Why, mama, you know he is!”

Mrs. Carter cast a miserable glance at her husband, who was still reading the letter. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, with a ruddy face and bristling gray hair. Although usually a man of fairly equable temperament, his expression at the moment was almost ferocious. He had grown very red, and his eyebrows were bushed out over the bridge of his nose in a scowl that transformed him.