CHAPTER IX
“TOMMY, I have missed you shockingly. You haven’t been in for days and days. I suppose science has been benefiting at my expense. Magic must have been working like yeast?” Mr. Meadowcroft observed pensively.
“Magic nothing!” Tommy grumbled, pausing in his wandering about the big handsome parlor and dropping like a jack-in-the-box into a deep, cushioned chair. “I was kep’ in after school for an hour every night for a week, and instead of making up to me for missing all that magic and all my visits here with you, what do you think dad did? He kep’ me at home all day Saturday and made me clean the woodshed, and no magic all this week. It’s what you call adding insult to injury. And all for—I was going to say nothing, but I guess you were right, Mr. Meadowcroft. It was really for science, as you call magic.”
“How was that?”
“The girl that sits in front of me—or did, because I don’t sit there since—has got long yellow hair with sort of a tossel on the end. She’s always a-switching it over my desk, and I’m always wishing the tossel would fall into my ink-well and wanting to give it a little poke but never doing it. But in one of my tricks I pour a few drops of liquid into a red solution and it takes the color all out and I says to myself I’ll try it with ink. I took a bottle of the solution to school and dippedHelen’s hair—the tip end, you know—into the ink-well and was just going to neutralize it by putting it into the bottle when the teacher caught me. I tried to explain and to get her to let me try the antidote, but—nothing doing!”
“Did Helen’s hair come out all right?” Meadowcroft inquired.
“It washed out, I guess,” Tommy returned indifferently. “Anyhow, ’twas only an inch or two and Betty says her Aunt Sarah trims her hair every new moon and the queer part of it was there was a new moon just that time. And what do you think? Betty offered to let me try it on her hair!”
Meadowcroft started.
“I didn’t do it,” Tommy reassured him. “I think it would have been safe enough, but if anything had happened and Betty had had to trim the end of her braid, her Aunt Sarah would have been sure to have missed it and made a fuss. And she hasn’t even got back to ordinary yet with Betty since she made all the changes, you know. And even her ordinary ain’t none too good.”
He rose, picked up his cap, and seating himself in another chair twirled it about his knee.
“She ain’t a mite more aggravating than dad, Aunt Sarah ain’t. There’s no one that can beat him at spoiling a home run every time. But she talks a lot more. She goes over and over and over the same things, and dad doesn’t waste any words.”
“That was a friendly offer on Betty’s part,” Meadowcroft observed rather musingly. For that seemed a part of this new independence of the girl that so puzzled him. It wasn’t, of course, possible that one could bequite made over, transformed, overnight. And yet, that seemed to have happened. He wondered if he should get the key to the puzzle when he saw Betty. But he didn’t, as a matter of fact, have to wait.
“Sure, Betty’s all right,” Tommy declared, and added: “I suppose you have seen me walking past with her several times, haven’t you?”
Meadowcroft had noticed the pair—or rather, the two; for Tommy was so thin and carried himself so badly that Betty was truly a baby giant beside him.
“It’s the only way I can get hold of her to talk about magic, she’s so awfully busy,” Tommy explained. “But anyhow, it’s funny, for she ain’t really any thinner or any shorter—the heels of her new shoes don’t let her down hardly enough to count—but I don’t mind walking with Betty now. I like to. I’ve made up my mind it wasn’t her size before, hardly at all; but it was her looking so grown-up with long dresses and her hair pugged like a lady’s. Walking beside her was like walking with a teacher. And, gee! how a fellow feels to walk with a female teacher after he gets out of the primary!”
“Betty certainly looks different and she doesn’t act like the same person,” remarked Meadowcroft. “I hoped she would come in to see me soon again, but she hurries by the house always. You might tell her I want to see her to learn whether we have got to get acquainted all over again.”
“You won’t have to do that. She’s the same old Betty,” declared the boy. “And yet in a way she ain’t. Anyhow, the funny part of it all is, she is so sort of—well, innocent-like. Honest and true, Mr. Meadowcroft, you’d think she had always had her hair flapping downher back with a bow tied to it and worn brown shoes with ribbon strings and looked like other girls, she acts so natural. But I know why.”
“Why Tommy, what is it? What do you mean?” demanded the other.
“Bee in her bonnet,” remarked the boy, and the man marveled at his insight and wondered that he hadn’t had the wit to solve the problem thus.
“What’s the nature of the insect, Mr. Magician?” he inquired.
“It’s all about Rose Harrow, the girl that went blind, you know,” Tommy returned with an important air. “Betty simply went wild over her and the wilder she is the more she forgets about herself and being big or little or—anything.”
Meadowcroft knit his brows.
“But I thought that the Harrow’s girl’s affliction dated back some months?” he said.
“Yes, sir; well—listen. This is how it is now.” Tommy began, rounding his inky fingers and joining the tips before him. “First Betty started in doing like you advised her——”
“Yes?”
Tommy raised his eyes from the skeleton dome of his hands.
“Did you get a hunch from what I said about my cousin in Jersey, Mr. Meadowcroft?” he asked ingenuously.
“Possibly, Sir Wizard.”
“Well, no matter, I haven’t mentioned it,” Tommy said magnanimously. “But anyway, right in the midst of her thinking how she was to begin straight off actingas if she wasn’t fat, something made her think of Rose. It came to her all in a flash, she said—just like one of my tricks, you know—why couldn’t Rose do the same? Why couldn’t she start right in and act as if she wasn’t blind? Of course, Rosewasblind, but then, so was Betty fat; and if she could act as if she was just like anybody, Rose could act as if she could see. Well, Betty thought and thought of it, but she had to wait till Saturday till she could see Rose. And all the time she was thinking of it and forgetting other things and stepping along spry and all that.”
Mr. Meadowcroft understood the whole situation.
“And how did the other girl take it?” he inquired.
“Well, Rose took to it like quicksilver takes to gold—especially if it’s your mother’s ring and she don’t know you borrowed it,” rejoined Tommy, grinning, and trying another chair. “Rose is crazy over it, too. She was in our class in school, you know, awful bright, but gee! full of mischief and pep, and what do you suppose? Betty thinks she can go to the high school with the rest of us. Rose has set her heart on it and so has Betty hers even more. But don’t say anything about it yet, because they haven’t asked Rose’s mother yet. She’s awful careful of Rose and awful timid about her, and they hardly dare to tell her about this. And anyhow, as it is, she’s sort of stunned—having Rose flying about the house and going out with Betty and eating her meals at the table and begging to wash the dishes when she used to hate it.”
The clock struck six. Tommy seized his cap, and ran, calling back “So long!” from the door. Meadowcroft understood that he feared to be late for tea. During periods when his practise of magic was suspended,Tommy always strove so to keep within bounds as to regain the privilege at the appointed time. Meadowcroft watched the boy loping up the avenue, then fell to musing.
He realized that he ought to feel gratified that Betty Pogany had so speedily handed on the lighted torch to another. The girl had good stuff in her, truly, and an active and supple mind to have applied the principle given her so promptly and daringly to one far worse handicapped than herself. Of course it was a fine thing to do, and Meadowcroft knew he ought to be pleased; but he couldn’t help regretting that Betty had been moved to act so precipitately. He had wanted the girl to have a taste—a deep, long draught of happiness. He wanted her to have her fling, to be a happy, careless, frolicking school-girl. Instead of that, she had, almost in the act of striking for her freedom, fettered herself with a burden that would add to her years instead of reducing them. Instead of being a romping little girl, she would be an anxious old woman.
Humphrey Meadowcroft shook his head and sighed deeply. And yet there was a sort of rueful smile in his eyes.