"May I play with him just a little while, grandmama?" begged Sally, and when the old lady nodded permission, we joined hands and went through the open window out upon the sunny porch.
On that spring morning the colours of the garden were all clear white and purple, for at the foot of the curving stairway, and on the upper terrace, bunches of lilacs bloomed high above the small spring flowers that bordered the walk. Beneath the fluted columns a single great s...o...b..ll bush appeared to float like a cloud in the warm wind. As we went together down the winding path to the box maze which was sprinkled with tender green, a squirrel, darting out of one of the latticed arbours, stopped motionless in the walk and sat looking up at us with a pair of bright, suspicious eyes.
"I reckon I could make him skeet, if I wanted to," I remarked, embarra.s.sed rather than malevolent.
Her glance dwelt on me thoughtfully for a moment, while she stood there, kicking a pebble with the toe of a red shoe.
"An" I reckon I could make _you_ skeet, if I wanted to," she replied with composure.
Since the parade of mere masculinity had failed to impress her, I resorted to subtler measures, and kneeling among the small spring flowers which powdered the lower terrace, I began laboriously erecting a palace of moss and stones.
"I make one every evening, but when the ghosts come out and walk up an"
down, they scatter them," observed Sally, hanging attentively upon the work.
"Are there ghosts here really an" have you seen "em?" I asked.
Stretching out her hand, she swept it in a circle over the growing palace. "They are all around here--everywhere," she answered. "I saw them one night when I was running away from my father. Mamma and I hid in that big box bush down there, an" the ghosts came and walked all about us. Do you have to run away from your father, too?"
For an instant I hesitated; then my pride triumphed magnificently over my truthfulness. "I ran clear out to the hill an" all the way down it,"
I rejoined.
"Is his face red and awful?"
"As red as--as an apple."
"An apple ain"t awful."
"But he is. I wish you could see him."
"Would he kill you if he caught you?"
"He--he"d eat me," I panted.
She sighed gravely. "I wonder if all fathers are like that?" she said.
"Anyway, I don"t believe yours is as bad as mine."
"I"d like to know why he ain"t?" I protested indignantly.
Her lips quivered and went upward at the corners with a trick of expression which I found irresistible even then.
"It"s a pity that it"s time for you to go home," she observed politely.
"I reckon I can stay a little while longer," I returned.
She shook her head, but I had already gone back to the unfinished palace, and as the work progressed, she forgot her hint of dismissal in watching the fairy towers. We were still absorbed in the building when her mother came down the curving stairway and into the maze of box.
"It"s time for you to run home now, pretty blue eyes," she said in her soft girlish way. Then catching our hands in hers, she turned with a merry laugh, and ran with us up the terraced walk.
"Is your mamma as beautiful as mine?" asked Sally, when we came to a breathless stop.
"She"s as beautiful as--as a wax doll," I replied stoutly.
"That"s right," laughed the lady, stooping to kiss me. "You"re a dear boy. Tell your mother I said so."
She went slowly up the steps as she spoke, and when I looked back a moment later, I saw her smiling down on me between two great columns, with the s...o...b..ll bush floating in the warm wind beneath her and the swallows flying low in the sunshine over her head.
I had opened the side gate, when I felt a soft, furry touch on my hand, and Sally thrust the forgotten kitten into my arms.
"Be good to her," she said pleadingly. "Her name"s Florabella."
Resisting a dastardly impulse to forswear my bargain, I tucked the mewing kitten under my coat, where it clawed me un.o.bserved by any jeering boy in the street. Pa.s.sing Mrs. Cudlip"s house on my way home, I noticed at once that the window stood invitingly open, and yielding with a quaking heart to temptation, I leaned inside the vacant room, and dropped Florabella in the centre of the old lady"s easy chair. Then, fearful of capture, I darted along the pavement and flung myself breathlessly across our doorstep.
A group of neighbours was gathered in the centre of our little sitting-room, and among them I recognised the flushed, perspiring face of Mrs. Cudlip herself. As I entered, the women fell slightly apart, and I saw that they regarded me with startled, compa.s.sionate glances. A queer, strong smell of drugs was in the air, and near the kitchen door my father was standing with a frightened and sheepish look on his face, as if he had been thrust suddenly into a prominence from which he shrank back abashed.
"Where"s ma?" I asked, and my voice sounded loud and unnatural in my own ears.
One of the women--a large, motherly person, whom I remembered without recognising, crossed the room with a heavy step and took me into her arms. At this day I can feel the deep yielding expanse of her bosom, when pushing her from me, I looked round and repeated my question in a louder tone.
"Where"s ma?"
"She was took of a sudden, dear," replied the woman, still straining me to her. "It came over her while she was standin" at the stove, an" befo"
anybody could reach her, she dropped right down an" was gone."
She released me as she finished, and walking straight through the kitchen and the consoling neighbours, I opened the back door, and closing it after me, sat down on the single step. I can"t remember that I shed a tear or that I suffered, but I can still see as plainly as if it were yesterday, the clothes-line stretching across the little yard and the fluttering, half-dried garments along it. There was a striped shirt of my father"s, a faded blue one of mine, a pink slip of baby Jessy"s, and a patched blue and white gingham ap.r.o.n I had seen only that morning tied at my mother"s waist. Between the high board fence, above the sunken bricks of the yard, they danced as gayly as if she who had hung them there was not lying dead in the house. Samuel, trotting from a sunny corner, crept close to my side, with his warm tongue licking my hand, and so I sat for an hour watching the flutter of the blue, the pink, and the striped shirts on the clothes-line.
"There ain"t n.o.body to iron "em now," I said suddenly to Samuel, and then I wept.
CHAPTER V
IN WHICH I START IN LIFE
With my mother"s death all that was homelike and comfortable pa.s.sed from our little house. For three days after the funeral the neglected clothes still hung on the line in the back yard, but on the fourth morning a slatternly girl, with red hair and arms, came from the grocery store at the corner, and gathered them in. My little sister was put to nurse with Mrs. Cudlip next door, and when, at the end of the week, President went off to work somewhere in a mining town in West Virginia, my father and I were left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths lay in a sloppy pile on the kitchen floor; and the vegetable rinds were left carelessly to rot in the bucket beside the sink. The old neatness and order had departed before the garments my mother had washed were returned again to the tub, and day after day I saw my father shake his head dismally over the soggy bread and the underdone beef. Whether or not he ever realised that it was my mother"s hand that had kept him above the surface of life, I shall never know; but when that strong grasp was relaxed, he went hopelessly, irretrievably, and unresistingly under. In the beginning there was merely a general wildness and disorder in his appearance,--first one b.u.t.ton, then two, then three dropped from his coat. After that his linen was changed less often, his hair allowed to spread more stiffly above his forehead, and the old ashes from his pipe dislodged less frequently from the creases in his striped shirt. At the end of three months I noticed a new fact about him--a penetrating odour of alcohol which belonged to the very air he breathed. His mind grew slower and seemed at last almost to stop; his blue eyes became heavier and glazed at times; and presently he fell into the habit of going out in the evenings, and not returning until I had cried myself to sleep, under my tattered quilt, with Samuel hugged close in my arms.
Sometimes the red-haired girl would stop after her work for a few friendly words, proving that a slovenly exterior is by no means incompatible with a kindly heart; but as a usual thing I was left alone, after the boys had gone home from their play in the street, to amuse myself and Samuel as I could through the long evening hours. Sometimes I brought in an apple or a handful of chestnuts given me by one of the neighbours and roasted them before the remnants of fire in the stove.
Once or twice I opened my mother"s closet and took down her clothes--her best bombazine dress, her black cashmere mantle trimmed with bugles, her long rustling c.r.a.pe veil, folded neatly beneath her bonnet in the tall bandbox--and half in grief, half in curiosity, I invaded those sacred precincts where my hands had never dared penetrate while she was alive.
My great loss, from which probably in more cheerful surroundings I should have recovered in a few weeks, was renewed in me every evening by my loneliness and by the dumb sympathy of Samuel, who would stand wagging his tail for an hour at the sight of the cloak or the bonnet that she had worn. Like my father I grew more unkempt and ragged every day I lived. I ceased to wash myself, because there was n.o.body to make me. My b.u.t.tons dropped off one by one and n.o.body scolded. I dared no longer go near the gate of the enchanted garden, fearing that if the little girl were to catch sight of me, she would call me "dirty," and run away in disgust. Occasionally my father would clap me upon the shoulder at breakfast, enquire how I was getting along, and give me a rusty copper to spend. But for the greater part of the time, I believe, he was hardly aware of my existence; the vacant, flushed look was almost always in his face when we met, and he stayed out so late in the evening that it was not often his stumbling footsteps aroused me when he came upstairs to bed.
So accustomed had I become to my lonely hours by the kitchen stove, with Samuel curled up at my feet, that when one night, about six months after my mother"s death, I heard the unexpected sound of my father"s tread on the pavement outside, I turned almost with a feeling of terror, and waited breathlessly for his unsteady hand on the door. It came after a minute, followed immediately by his entrance into the kitchen, and to my amazement I saw presently that he was accompanied by a strange woman, whom I recognised at a glance as one of those examples of her s.e.x that my mother had been used to cla.s.sify sweepingly as "females." She was plump and jaunty, with yellow hair that hung in tight ringlets down to her neck, and pink cheeks that looked as if they might "come off" if they were thoroughly scrubbed. There was about her a spring, a bounce, an animation that impressed me, in spite of my inherited moral sense, as decidedly elegant.
My father"s eyes looked more vacant and his face fuller than ever.
"Benjy," he began at once in a husky voice, while his companion released his arm in order to put her ringlets to rights, "I"ve brought you a new mother."
At this the female"s hands fell from her hair, and she looked round in horror. "What boy is that, Thomas?" she demanded, poised there in all her flashing brightness like a figure of polished bra.s.s.
"That boy," replied my father, as if at a loss exactly how to account for me, "that boy is Ben Starr--otherwise Benjy--otherwise--"