A tall man, who was very good looking indeed, stood beside the library table. A man of perhaps forty, with a fair skin, bronzed by much exposure to the sun, abundant light hair that grew in a pleasing way and fine blue eyes. He was gazing expectantly toward the door.
Henrietta, after one look at the visitor, was across the room with her arms about his neck.
“Daddy! Why, Dad!”
Marjory, wisely concluding that no chaperon was needed, slipped unheeded from the room and fled away through twisting hallways and long corridors to the West wing where she found that Sallie had already spread the news.
“Henrietta’s father,” breathed Bettie, “isn’t that great! And only two hours ago Henrietta was weeping on her bed because her grandmother’s letter was so discouraging.”
“Does he look like Henrietta?” asked Jean. “You know we’ve never seen him.”
“Not a bit,” said Marjory, “he’s fair—a regular blond. And oh, so good looking. She’s like the pictures of her dark mother, you know.”
“He looks just like an earl or a duke or something like that,” said Sallie. “When the Seniors see him they’re going to be glad that they were polite to Henrietta. He’s the best looking father that ever came to this school and I ought to know, because I’ve been making a study of fathers for a long, long time. Of course, most any kind of a father looks mighty good to me. I don’t envy Henrietta her good clothes, her pretty looks or her pretty ways; but I would like to wake up suddenly and find myself down in that library shaking hands with a father.”
In the meantime, Henrietta, who had been almost speechless at first, was making up for lost time. There were traces of tears on her cheeks but her eyes were joyful.
“So you went right straight to Lakeville from San Francisco and as soon as Grandmother told you where I was you came right here?”
“And I didn’t bring you a single thing. My luggage is still in Shanghai, I suppose. I believe I picked up some odds and ends in Canton. I was there for a very short time and foolishly neglected to cable Henshaw. When they rescued me from that coral reef, absolutely the only thing I owned was half a pair of trousers. I had to borrow clothes from the captain of the ship before I could land in San Francisco and I had to telegraph to London for money with which to travel east. Your Grandmother tells me that Henshaw has sent out a relief expedition—perhaps he’ll rescue my luggage. It seems to me I bought a mandarin’s coat and some beads—”
“I wouldn’t have cared if you hadn’t bought me a single thing. It was just you I wanted, Daddy. Don’t ever get lost again. It’s too hard on the family.”
“Do you know, it hadn’t occurred to me that you were grown up enough to worry; but, since you are, I suppose I’ll have to mend my ways. I have been careless a great deal of the time. I haven’t always written when I could; and of course, sometimes, I couldn’t. Now, couldn’t we go outside, some place? It seems dark and stuffy in here to a man who has lived on a coral reef for months.”
“Why,” cried Henrietta, “I do believe it’s clearing up.”
Henrietta was right. The rain had ceased, the sun was making up for lost time and in more ways than one it was now a pleasant day. On the veranda the happy little girl introduced her father to such of her special friends as were there and sent little Jane Pool flying after all the others. The entire West Corridor rushed down and out, as Maude said afterwards. Mr. Bedford bowed and smiled in a charming way and murmured: “Delighted, I’m suah.” He was not a talkative man, for which the girls were sorry because his speech was so delightfully English that the thoroughly American children were greatly impressed. They loved to hear him say “Cawn’t” and “Just fawncy,” and “Chuesday”—for Tuesday. And they were overjoyed when he asked Henrietta if she hadn’t better put on her “goloshes” before she walked on the wet grass.
Henrietta took her father for a walk to the village. It is to be suspected that she led him straight to the best candy store in the village because she returned later with an enormous box of chocolates. The girls were even gladder to see that her cheeks were glowing with some of their former bright color. Her father was placed in the company seat at Doctor Rhodes’s own table at dinner time that night; Henrietta sat demurely beside him; but occasionally she turned her head long enough to make an impish face at the girls at her own table.
“She’d rather be here,” said Jean, sagely.
“I wish she were,” said Maude. “I love to hear her father talk.”
It was bedtime before the West Corridor girls had a chance to hear all about it. They had flocked into Henrietta’s room and most of them undressed in there while listening to what she had to say.
“I’m going to do something wonderful,” said Henrietta. “First, I’m to spend tomorrow in Chicago with Father, and then he’s going right to England. Grandmother is going to meet us in Chicago, and what do you think! You couldn’t guess in a thousand years. We are both going right over to England with him so we can have a good long visit on the way. We’re going to stay just long enough for Grandmother to count her relatives over there—Father says it won’t be more than three weeks altogether—and then we’re coming back. I’m going to bring something to every one of you. I may even get to Paris for just about a minute—Father says he has to go there to tell something to the French Government about something he dug up somewhere.”
“How lovely!” cried Jean.
“How splendid,” cried Bettie.
“How grand!” cried Marjory.
“How perfectly sweet,” cried Cora.
“How darling,” cried little Jane Pool.
“But, Henrietta,” demanded Mabel. “You haven’t told us where your father has been all this time. Why didn’t he write?”
“Why, so I haven’t,” said Henrietta, “And this is my last chance—I’m going early in the morning, with just a few duds in a suitcase. Well, here’s the story, all I could dig out of him. I’ll sit on the dresser so you can all hear. It’s really quite a tale.
“Well, first he went to Shanghai because he’d heard of a temple that was different from most temples; but it was way up the Yengtze river—in China, you know—so he rushed right up there to look for it. It was on the estate of an old Chinaman who didn’t want any Englishmen or other foreigners poking round his old temple even outside—and it was said to be certain death to go inside. But father did manage to get inside and was copying some of the inscriptions as well as he could—it was too dark to use his camera and he didn’t dare make a flashlight—when something hit him on the head. He doesn’t know yet what it was.
“The next thing he knew, he was in kind of a dungeon, all stone and metal bars, under some building—that temple, perhaps, or possibly under a warehouse near the river. He says he doesn’t know why they didn’t kill him at once; but for some reason they didn’t. Just kept him there and gave him very little food once a day for weeks and weeks and weeks—he does not know exactly how long.
“Then, one night, when he had just about given up all hope of ever getting out of that place, four big, ugly-looking Chinamen came and tied a bag over his head and bound his hands and feet and loaded him into a boat and poled it down a river for hours and hours. They chattered a lot in Chinese but Father couldn’t understand them—his interpreter wasn’t with him when he went into the temple, and he doesn’t know what became of him. After a long, long time, Father heard sounds like men clambering aboard a vessel; but he thinks that the small boat he was in was towed for a long time behind some larger boat. He slept for part of the time, he says, and of course with that bag tied over his head he couldn’t see anything or even hear a great deal.
“The next thing he was really sure of was that his hands were free. By the time he got the bag off his head, there was an old Chinese junk—that’s a kind of a ship—way off in the distance, sailing away from him. He was alone in the boat but in one end of it he found a jar of water and some food. Also a long pole and a paddle. Of course he couldn’t reach bottom with the pole because he was out of the river by that time and quite far out at sea—in the Yellow Sea or possibly the Eastern Sea. You know how they run together along there; and he showed me what he thought might be the place, on the atlas in the library.
“Well, Father thought other boats might come along that way so he stayed right there for about six hours; but none did; so then he fastened the long pole up like a mast and ripped open that bag that had been over his head and used it for a sail. He found some bits of rope and string and some old fishing tackle stuffed into the bow of the boat and used them to tie his sail to the pole.
“He sailed wherever the wind took him and after awhile he was picked up by another Chinese junk. He thinks that the men aboard this one were smugglers or pirates or something. He tried to get them to take him to Shanghai or Hong Kong or some other Chinese port; but he was so ragged and dirty that probably they didn’t believe he’d be able to pay them what he promised—even if they understood him—and all he could get out of what they said was something about ‘Philippines.’
“But they never got to the Philippine Islands, if that’s where they were bound for. There was a typhoon—a sudden, terrible storm—and they were wrecked. My father and one very strong young Chinese sailor were thrown by the waves inside a coral reef that stuck up like kind of a fence, in a big half-circle. It made sort of a front yard to a small coral island and the water was smoother inside so they managed to swim ashore. But they were quite battered up at first and just crawled ashore on their hands and knees and fell asleep on the first dry spot.
“Their island was only a little one, just about big enough for two persons to live on. Fortunately there was a small spring of fresh water but it ran very slowly so that it took a long time to catch enough for a satisfying drink; and the young Chinaman was smart about catching fish and snaring sea birds and finding turtles’ eggs. There were lots of shell fish, too; and a box of rice washed ashore about the time they did and they saved some of that, so of course they didn’t starve.
“But they had to stay there for months and months and months; until another ship got blown out of her course and was almost wrecked on that coral fence outside their little island. As soon as that storm calmed down, the ship sent a boat ashore to explore the island. There were English sailors aboard her but the ship was going to Calcutta. Father says she was a rotten old tub but he and the Chinaman were glad to be rescued by anything. He wanted to go to England and he didn’t want to go to Calcutta; but after a day or two he had a good chance to be transferred to a much faster and safer ship bound for San Francisco so he took it. The Captain had to give him some clothes—he lost just about all he had left when he was swimming to the island. He sent a wireless to my grandmother from the American ship but for some reason she didn’t get it. And he didn’t telegraph her from San Francisco because he supposed she had received the wireless.”
“Tell us all the awful part of it,” pleaded Mabel. “Cannibals and tigers and things like that.”
“That’s one trouble with Father’s adventures,” complained Henrietta. “He doesn’t tell the ghastly details. He just gives the main facts. He must have been almost dead in that dungeon, he must have hated that nasty bag over his head, and he must have been almost drowned swimming ashore and almost scared to death in that typhoon; but he doesn’t say so. He did mention a shark in the lagoon—the Chinaman killed that with his knife. Of course I’ll be able to dig more out of him when there’s more time; but he won’t tell me the worst things; he never does.”
“I think,” said Jean, “you managed to get considerable.”
“Yes,” agreed Maude, “you certainly own an exciting father.”
“I’m so glad I still own him,” breathed Henrietta.
And then the girls slipped away to their own beds to dream of Chinese temples, junks, dark dungeons, yellow pirates, sunny reefs and sunburned fathers. And of course they were all glad to have their Henrietta again happy and free from care; for they had all suffered with her.