Now--now what do you think of staying with me, and--and starting in this fall?"
The boy"s lips fell apart while he stood and gaped up into Caleb"s slightly red face.
"You mean," he breathed, "you mean--jest live--with you?"
"That was my idea," said Caleb.
And then, slowly, the boy"s head dropped again, as it had when he bowed to gaze at his uncouth, begrimed clothes. The man thought that he caught the inference of that moment of silence.
"We can fix up the matter of clothes later," he made haste to forestall any objection in that direction. "That doesn"t amount to anything, anyway."
The clear eyes lifted again, steady and wide and very, very grave.
"I always knowed it was comin"," said Stephen O"Mara. "I always knowed it was a-comin"--this chance--even when I didn"t know _haow_ it would come. Ner I wa"n"t thinkin" about my clothes. I reckon I kin learn jest as fast in these as in any. I was jest thinkin" about Miss Sarah.
She--she might not like it, hevin" two men folks a-raound the house, under foot."
It was Caleb"s turn to stand, agape.
"Miss Sarah?" he faltered, astonished--and then he remembered. He laughed, unsteadily, with relief. For an instant he had been inexplicably afraid that the boy was going to refuse his offer.
"Why, you musn"t mind what Sarah said yesterday," he rushed on.
"She--she--well, she"s a Baptist, Steve, and you know what that means."
He leaned forward a little, his voice quite stealthily confidential.
"But I can fix that all right," he promised. "I can surely fix that.
For I"ll tell her--I"ll tell her you"re a Baptist, too! Will you--will you stay?"
And after a time solemnly Steve nodded. Later, when alone, Caleb chuckled mountainously over his reply.
"Thet"s--thet"s what I cal"late I be," he said.
CHAPTER V
THEN I"LL COME BACK TO YOU
On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehea.r.s.ed a half score of speeches with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken; but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything else. It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped from cold. So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace when Caleb made known his decision.
"I"ve never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know, Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct. "And this seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I"ll ever have. You--you like the boy, don"t you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"
While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in the face, once at least. It was hard to know what she was thinking when she sat like that, staring into the fire. He waited, not without grave misgivings, for her reply.
"Yes, I like him," she a.s.sented, after a while.
"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.
"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.
There didn"t seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.
"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured. "It is pretty sudden--but I don"t think that either of us will ever regret it."
And then Sarah faced "round toward her brother. Her eyes were unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.
"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered. "Why, I knew you were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the veranda behind him. I was certain of it, even then. And if you hadn"t decided to, why, I"d made up my mind that I"d do it myself, if you ever came back from that endless fishing-trip!"
And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste. For it was Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening. She ran on and on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually dawned in her brother"s brain that great as had been his desire to keep the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike beside her woman-hunger. It astonished him, when he mentioned the subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual deed.
"I"ve been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she caught up his suggestion. "To-day I explored for hours and found some of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn"t been worn at all. I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up in the morning. And, Cal, who"d ever believe now that a plump behemoth like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"
The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she mentioned had been in vogue. Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the gurgle in her throat. And so, the next morning, when a little figure in velvet jacket and pantaloons--velvet of the same jet hue in which Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two before--stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed of not one whit of its sensationalism.
Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance. There were red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been encased in Old Tom"s cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver b.u.t.tons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which fastened it across his small chest--silver b.u.t.tons to match upon the quaintly short sleeves.
Stephen O"Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he started methodically down the stairs. And immediately Caleb"s amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him gave way to a newer wonder. For the boy, in spite of the fact that his small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable. Then Caleb realized how great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good mornings he led the way to the table.
There was something in Sarah"s fluttering delight over the boy"s appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her brother. For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the boy"s own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his first appearance. They had a word together--Sarah and Caleb--after breakfast.
"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
"Did you! Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"
Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.
"I never did," he admitted. And then, offhandedly: "What--did he say anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this morning."
"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little. "No. But he--Cal, he just sat and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time. He made me think somehow of a puppy that knows he"s going to be scrubbed and--and dreads it exceedingly. It"s because of those dreadful things he"s been wearing, don"t you suppose so?"
"No doubt of it," her brother said. "No doubt! And now I"m going over to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him. I was telling him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."
When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he searched the house through without finding the boy. In his perplexity he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.
"Where"s Stephen?" he asked.
Sarah nodded to Allison.
"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought you wouldn"t be back for a while, I sent him downtown--I sent him to the village----"
Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.
"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed. "Did he--did he change his clothes?"
"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.
"And of course he didn"t!" Suddenly her brother"s face alarmed her.
"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven"t done anything I shouldn"t have done, have I?"