CHAPTER XXXIII
THE last day of the term had come and the last day of Mr. Meadowcroft’s incumbency; for the principal of the school had fully recovered and would return to his duty after the Easter holidays. Despite their affection for Mr. Appleton, the greater number of the pupils were very loath to part with the man who had filled his place temporarily. For, even apart from his impressive elegance and the finer flavor of his scholarship, they recognized in Humphrey Meadowcroft a rare personality. The fact that he demanded rather more of them had acted rather as a stimulant; and they had found him quite as kind as Mr. Appleton and perhaps more understandingly sympathetic.
As for Mr. Meadowcroft himself—for him the day was very different from what it might have been. He was relieved when the day was over, though not with an healthful, wholesome relief. After the last straggler had finally departed, as he gathered his personal belongings together and set the desk in order, depression seized and settled upon him. On a sudden this whole experience, which started as a succession of red-letter days, seemed to have been signal failure.
He sat for some time with his brow in his hand. Then, realizing that he must be getting to the station, he raised his head and glanced around the big room in farewell review, seeing phantom forms with pleasant, eager faces filling the long rows of empty seats. Hisheart warmed. He had certainly been happy for those first three weeks—as happy as he had ever been in his life. That wasn’t a slight thing. He recalled a passage in Gibbon he had recently come upon in reading for one of his history classes which spoke of a mighty potentate who, at the end of a rarely successful reign over a prosperous kingdom, counted up the really happy days he had known in the fifty years. They had amounted to fourteen! And he had had twenty-one!
School had closed early, and though the boys and girls had lingered long over the parting, there was none in sight now as Meadowcroft passed through the street, and none of the South Paulding children at the station. Of course they would all have taken the earlier train, he said to himself, as he realized that he had been hoping for Tommy’s company home. And in any event, Tommy had probably walked, as he always did except when he stayed for the extra lesson after school.
As he made his way through the aisle of the train, however, he saw Betty Pogany ahead, sitting alone, and joined her. Betty had had an errand in Paulding to do for her father which kept her, and as the village dress-maker was waiting for Rose, she had gone home with some of the other girls.
Betty’s coldness was always gentle. But her gravity did not lift, and after the word of greeting, she turned and gazed steadily out the window. There was something demure, something at once pretty and pathetic, in the dignity of her manner. Vain, silly, headstrong, as he was forced to believe her, he saw only sweetness, nevertheless, in her deep brown eyes and goodness that was almost nobility in her face. After all, the follyhadn’t gone deeply; it hadn’t really hurt her. In some manner, the girl must have felt herself privileged; she had somehow believed that she had a charter to do wrong rightly. Certainly she looked to-day rather a martyr than a sinner.
“The last day is over,” he said quietly as the train started. “And now that the relationship of pupil and teacher is over between us, Betty, I wonder if we can’t slip back into the simpler one that preceded it? Can’t we forget what has happened and be friends again?”
The girl had nothing to say. He didn’t know whether it was that she couldn’t or wouldn’t speak.
“Of course it has been hard, awfully hard,” he admitted, “but perhaps you haven’t realized that it has been hard for me, too. I felt forced to act as I did. And yet, although I tried to do only what seemed to be my plain duty in the circumstances, I daresay I bungled things sadly. And perhaps if I hadn’t felt personally rather hurt, I might have had more patience. If I was harsh and over-severe, Betty, I am truly sorry and ask you to pardon and forget.”
The girl’s white cheeks flushed. Turning, she raised her dark, gentle eyes steadily to his. She was Bouncing Bet no longer. She was thin and worn and truly martyr-like with that seemingly fixed expression of sadness upon her innocent, childish face.
“I can never forgive you, Mr. Meadowcroft,” she returned in a voice which though very low wasn’t quite steady. “And forget—I can never, never to the end of my life forget—what you have done. I ought——”
She choked, clasped her hands tightly, and drew a long, sobbing breath. Then she went on.
“O, I don’t know what I ought to have done!” she cried despairingly. “I don’t know what I could have done, only—I ought to have done something! But I didn’t know—I’m only a little girl, really, though I look so big—and anyhow—I couldn’t have stood out against everybody. And—everybody would have been against me.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she pressed her pocket handkerchief to them and would not give way.
“Betty!” he protested, greatly distressed, “you know I——”
“You might have trusted me!” she cried reproachfully. “You might have known I wouldn’t break rules just for the sake of being bad, and that for all the world I wouldn’t have been hateful to you on purpose. You might—you might have trusted me, Mr. Meadowcroft.”
“Yes, Betty, I might have,” he owned, deeply moved, but more perplexed than ever. “I almost wish I had. And yet—how could I? You wouldn’t explain—you wouldn’t vouchsafe one word, and when I appealed to you, you seemed—well, just plain stubborn and headstrong. And you must consider my position. I was in another’s place, trying to hold things together for him as best I could. And I had to regard the others. Everyone knew that you and Tommy and I were like old friends, and it was my duty, not to favor you as inclination might have urged, but to be strictly impartial, just as it was yours not to——”
He broke off, for he couldn’t find words which would express the idea without sounding unkindly. Betty turned to the window again. Her distress was evident,and good as were his intentions, he felt constrained to cease from troubling her. Only as they drew into South Paulding he spoke.
“I am going away to-morrow, going to Philadelphia for a little, so I will say good-bye now, Betty. I hope your holidays may be very happy.”
Happy! as if she would ever know a happy day again with Rose blind forever when she might have recovered her sight—and he who spoke thus mockingly, to blame! She put a limp hand into his without a word. Tommy was waiting for her, and they went off together.
Later, Tommy appeared in Meadowcroft’s sitting-room.
“I hear you’re going off again,” he grumbled.
“I am glad there’s someone who will regret my absence,” Meadowcroft observed.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. Two whole weeks without magic is no cinch, believe me! I think I’d rather go to school even with the extra class after school thrown in,” he declared.
He grinned and Meadowcroft smiled.
“I wish myself I could be here to help you while away some of the time, Tommy,” he assured the boy warmly. “But I must return to Philadelphia to finish something I had just started in January when I was summoned back to take the school. If it were not really important, I would wait a fortnight and play with you. I have been thinking that perhaps we might rig up a sort of laboratory in the billiard-room and do a bit of experimentation in chemistry and physics in lieu of magic?”
“Gee! that would be bully!” Tommy cried with shining eyes.
“And more useful and perhaps just as much fun?” Meadowcroft suggested.
Whereupon Tommy Finnemore approved himself a true artist.
“’Twould be heaps of fun and I’d like to do it first-rate, but if it was a free choice, you know, magic for mine always,” he confessed. “I shouldn’t wonder if part of the reason I like it so much is that it ain’t any real good—all goes up in smoke. Dad thinks I’m lazy and shiftless and good-for-nothing, and like as not I am. He says I don’t take after him, and if he only knew it, I’m mighty thankful I don’t. But I’ll get along till you come back—one thing and another. There are other things. Like as not, I’ll get off in the woods by myself and play on a comb—that ain’t so bad.”
“You’d better devote yourself to Betty as much as you can,” Meadowcroft counseled. “Something’s wrong with her—terribly wrong, it would appear—and I rather think you know what it is. Fortunately, she hasn’t turned against you, and you may be able to do something to cheer her up.”
“If I could only do magic!” cried the boy. “A trick I was just going to work on would fairly take your breath away if I could get it to come out. And that’s what Betty needs—to have her breath taken away so that she—forgets, you know.”
Bouncing from his chair, he went to the fire and poked it vigorously sending the smoke out into the room.
“You know, honestly, Mr. Meadowcroft, Betty is—all right,” he said in a low voice, turning, but keeping his eyes upon the hearth rug. “Things do seem queer—she seems so herself—and—I don’t blame you. Youwere up against it and just couldn’t do anything else. But there’s something about Betty if you have always known her and are pretty near her age and sort of growing older together, you know, so that—why, you just can’t help believing in her more’n you would in any fellow. And whatever she does, you can’t help feeling somehow it’s—just right.”
Such faith of youth in youth—Credo quia impossibile—touched Humphrey Meadowcroft deeply. He envied the boy, and yet, as he had said to Betty, how could he himself have acted otherwise? One who has had nearly half a century of experience must make use of knowledge painfully won and tested. And a man isn’t the free agent a boy may be.