With the same sort of agility which had come to him when he had heard the Doctor"s footstep on the stair, David seized the pieces of porcelain, and with fumbling eagerness he slipped them back into his blouse.
"It"s mine!" he called out. He scowled fiercely, as though expecting some one to dispute his claim.
"Where did you get it?"
"Up there," he said.
"Up where?"
Again the little boy was silent, but Mother insisted on more definite information. Three times she asked how he had come into possession of the picture before he would speak again. When he did so he scowled more heavily than at first, and exclaimed:
"I won"t not tell you!"
"But why, David; why not tell Mother about it?"
The child evaded a direct reply.
"Doctor will be mad at me," he said.
"Did he give it to you?"
The little boy nodded.
"Did he say you were not to tell me?"
Again the little boy nodded.
"Did he tell you who it was?"
Now that the wrong story was so well started, David was inspired to make it a good one. To do that he would use part of the truth, but unfortunately he could not recall much of what Dr. Redfield had said about the picture. There was but one word that had stood out prominently in the talk, and that was the word "Mother." It was a relief to David to remember that, and he blurted out his information with cruel finality.
"This," he said, holding the pieces of the miniature together, "is mother."
"But how can you have two mothers?" Miss Eastman inquired, with a smile that was not a good smile. "Tell me, David, tell me whose mother am I?"
"You?" he asked with puzzled anxiety. Then he stopped short. It is not easy to steal pictures and tell wrong stories about them.
He did not know what to do. Everything was against him, and he began to cry again.
It was now that Miss Eastman pa.s.sionately seized the little boy in her arms.
"Don"t you believe that!" she exclaimed, her words throbbing with the hurt he had given her. "I am your mother, David--I!"
CHAPTER XI
APOTHEOSIS
After declaring that she alone was David"s mother, Miss Eastman was called away to the telephone. It was Dr. Redfield inquiring anxiously about the little boy. Pulse normal, temperature normal, no symptoms of any sort, she told the physician, but she could scarcely control her voice to answer his questions. There was a tightness in her throat, and she spoke with crisp brevity, instead of detailing anything of what had pa.s.sed between her and David.
When she had hung up the receiver and gone back to the child, she took him in her lap and tried to entertain him with a book of "Mother Goose" jingles, turning the pages slowly and concealing her emotion under the silliness of the nursery rhymes. In the midst of her comical recital about Jack and Jill who went up the hill, she suddenly exclaimed:
"What great fun it was to be with Doctor!"
No matter how much she might try to divert her little boy, he was only indifferently amused; but presently he remembered something which, for the time being, caused him to forget the broken and pilfered miniature.
"Mother," he exulted, "Mother, I got "em! They have pockets--deep pockets. You don"t hardly know me, do you?"
David began strutting up and down the room; he stood still, with legs wide apart, and then dug his fists deep into his pockets.
Of course mother was astounded. It required only a little make-believe on her part to indicate that this was some strange boy whom she had never seen before. The surprising change in him had impressed her so disagreeably that she had been in no mood to speak of it. Even as she had taken off the wide-brimmed sailor hat, when David reached the house in Dr. Redfield"s arms, she had made no comment on the close-cropped, flaxen head. She had of course remarked each detail of the little boy"s altered appearance, but what she had seen even more clearly was the look in the man"s face when he had told her that her little boy was not well. It was this that she had seen at a glance, and it was this that she had taken deeply to heart, but now she diligently tried to enter into the spirit of trouvers.
All of a sudden the earnest look in David"s face was swept away by a smile. His little legs began to dance; his hands danced, and his piping laughter danced best of all. Making a prancing dash for Mother"s skirts, he demanded that she smell the good, barber smell of his hair. But she laughed such a queer laugh, as she gathered him up in her arms, that the gleefulness suddenly went out of him.
"I"m afraid," she said, "I"m afraid there"s not enough left of your hair to smell."
The suspicion came to David that Mother was not glad. Instead of applauding his fine hair-cut, she had a silly way of asking what had been done with the curls.
This is the way mothers act sometimes when they want to be downright discouraging. David showed how he felt about it by asking if supper wouldn"t soon be ready, and throughout the meal he bore himself with dignity. Although it is not easy to pa.s.s the rolls when one"s arms are so short and the plate is so large and wobbly, the little boy was sure that to-night he was reaching a surprising distance across the table. Surely Mother must have been impressed with this new and astonishing length of arm.
When it came bed-time, David felt it would be weakness on his part, now that he was almost grown to be a man, to allow Mother to continue her absurd habit of sitting beside him while he went to sleep. He told her very delicately that in the future she need not go to so much trouble. He was resolved not to be such a nuisance. Hereafter he would always go to sleep all by himself.
But in beginning this practice he did not think it advisable to take off his trousers. Perhaps he would not feel so man-grown if he took them off; perhaps the kilts-and-blouse feeling would come on him in the night, unless he were consciously secure in knickerbockers.
"I--I couldn"t keep them on, could I, Mother?" The question came plaintively, from the very depths of his desire.
"But, David," said Mother, "if you wear them out by sleeping in them, then how are you to get any more? And besides, don"t you think they need a rest as well as you?"
Anybody could see the logic of that. David reluctantly permitted his trousers to be taken off, and he was particularly eager to see that they should have honorable treatment. He had a misgiving that Mother did not know where they should properly be stowed for the night, and his doubt thus found expression:
"Where does Doctor put his?"
The result of the question was not satisfying. David found that he had brought up suddenly at the never-mind period. But his close-cropped head leaned out over the edge of the crib; and his eager eyes attentively regarded the floppy little legs of trouvers as they were folded over the back of a chair. Then came a sigh of resignation, and the shorn head was plumped down resolutely upon the pillow.
For the first time in many months he forgot to make a little smacky sound with his lips as a suggestion to Mother that she might have a kiss. Evidently such a matter was now of no importance, nor did he hold out his arms to her. All such childish ways as that had been put aside, and perhaps that is why a wistful look came into Mother"s face.
After she had left David in the big, dark room, she took up some dull-blue linen from her sewing-table. Only a short while ago she had been st.i.tching upon this apparel for her baby--a foolish little dress, all edged about with a narrow lace braid.
Mother sat down by the shaded lamp and slipped a finger into her thimble. But her needle, which in the afternoon had glanced and glinted swiftly, as the dainty braid was being fastened into place, somehow refused to do its work. The little blue suit fell from her hands; the thimble rolled across the floor.
Hers was the bereavement which comes to every mother. It comes upon her suddenly, leaving her surprised, wondering, and full of foolish little fears that in the boyhood of her boy she may not hold so big a place as was given her to hold through all his babyhood.
Where was the child of yesterday? Who had stolen from Mother and her little boy the elfin charm and the sweet wonderland which, for so long a time, had been his and hers together? Gone, as it must always go, when the little one of to-day goes speeding on and still on into the dust and weary prose of the hurrying years.