“That setter was an awful jumper,” said the little boy. “He died last winter. My sisters cried, but I didn't.” His voice trembled a little.
“He must have been a fine dog,” said Anderson.
“Yes, sir, he could jump. I think that piece of our house he used to jump over was higher than that,” said the boy, reflectively, with the loving tone of a panegyrist who would heap more and more honors and flowers upon a dear departed.
“A big jump,” said Anderson.
“Yes, sir, he was an awful jumper. Those boys they said I lied. First they said he couldn't do it, then they said I didn't have any dog, and then I—”
“And then you said you had the elephant?”
“Yes, sir. Say, you ain't going to tell 'em what I've told you?”
“You better believe I'm not. But I tell you one thing—next time, if you'll take my advice, you had better stick to the setter dog and let elephants alone.”
“Maybe it would be better,” said the boy. Then he added, with a curious sort of naïve slyness, “But I haven't said I didn't have any elephant.”
“That's so,” said Anderson.
Suddenly, as the two walked along, the man felt a hard, hot little hand slide into his. “I guess you must be an awful smart man,” said the boy.
“What is your name?” said Anderson, in lieu of a disclaimer, which somehow he felt would seem to savor of mock modesty in the face of this youthful enthusiasm.
“Why, don't you know?” asked the boy, in some wonder. “I thought everybody knew who we were. I am Captain Carroll's son. My name is Eddy Carroll.”
“I knew you were Captain Carroll's son, but I did not know your first name.”
“I knew you,” said the boy. “I saw you out in the field catching butterflies.”
“Where were you?”
“Oh, I was fishing. I was under those willows by the brook. I kept pretty still, and you didn't see me. Have to lay low while you're fishing, you know.”
“Of course,” said Anderson.
“I didn't catch anything. I don't believe fish are very thick in the brooks around here. I used to catch great big fellers when I lived in Hillfield. One day—”
“When do you have your dinner at home?” broke in Anderson.
“'Most any time. Say, Mr. Anderson, what are you going to have for dinner?”
Anderson happened to know quite well what he was going to have for dinner, because he had himself ordered it on the way to the store that morning. He answered at once:
“Roast lamb and green pease and new potatoes,” said he.
“Oh!” said the boy, with unmistakable emphasis.
“And I am quite sure there is going to be a cherry-dumpling for dessert,” said Anderson, reflectively.
“I like all those things,” stated the boy, with emphasis that was pathetic.
The man stopped and looked down at the boy. “Now, see here, my friend,” said he. “Honest, now, no dodging. Never mind if you do like things. Honest—you can't cheat me, you know—”
The boy looked back at him with eyes of profound simplicity and faith. “I know it,” he replied.
“Well, then, now you tell me, honest, if you do stay and have dinner with me won't your folks, your mother and your sisters, worry?”
The boy's face, which had been rather anxious, cleared at once. “Oh no, sir!” he replied. “Amy never worries, and Ina and Charlotte won't.”
“Who is Amy?”
“Amy? Why, Amy is my mother, of course.”
“And you are sure she won't worry?”
“Oh no, sir.” The boy fairly laughed at the idea. His honesty in this at least seemed unmistakable.
“Well, then,” said Anderson, “come along and have dinner with me.”
The boy fairly leaped with delight as, still clinging to the man's hand, he passed up the little walk to the Anderson house. He could smell the roast lamb and the green pease.
Arthur Carroll went on business to the City every morning. He brought up to the station in the smart trap, the liveried coachman, with the mute majesty of his kind, throned upon the front seat. Sometimes one of Carroll's daughters, as delicately gay as a flower in her light daintiness of summer attire, was with him. Often the boy, with his outlook of innocent impudence, sat beside the coachman. Carroll himself was always irreproachably clad in the very latest of the prevailing style. Had he not been such a masterly figure of a man, he would have been open to the charge of dandyism. He was always gloved; he even wore a flower in the lapel of his gray coat. He carried always, whatever the state of the weather, an eminent umbrella with a carved-ivory handle. He equipped himself with as many newspapers from the stand as would an editor of a daily paper. The other men drew conclusions that it was highly necessary for him to study the state of the market and glean the truth from the various reports.
One morning Henry Lee was also journeying to the City on the eight-o'clock train. He held a $2500 position in a publisher's office, and felt himself as good as any man in Banbridge, with the possible exception of this new-comer, and he accosted him with regard to his sheaf of newspapers.
“Going to have all the news there is?” he inquired, jocularly.
Carroll looked up and smiled and nodded. “Well, yes,” he replied. “I find this my only way—read them all and strike an average. There is generally a kernel of truth in each.”
“That's so,” said Lee.
Carroll glanced speculatively at the ostentatiously squared shoulders of the other man as he passed through the car.
When the train reached Jersey City, Carroll, leaving his newspapers fluttering about the seat he had occupied, passed off the train and walked with his air of careless purpose along the platform.
“This road is a pretty poorly conducted concern,” said a voice behind him, and Lee came up hurriedly and joined him.
“Yes,” replied Carroll, tentatively. His was not the order of mind which could realize its own aggrandizement by wholesale criticism of a great railroad system for the sake of criticism, and, moreover, he had a certain pride and self-respect about maintaining the majesty of that which he must continue to patronize for his own ends.
“Yes,” said Lee, moving, as he spoke, with a sort of accelerated motion like a strut. He was a much shorter man than Carroll, and he made futile hops to get into step with him as they proceeded. “Yes, sir, every train through the twenty-four hours is late on this road.”
Carroll laughed. “I confess that rather suits me, on the whole. I am usually late myself.”
They walked together to the ferry-slip, and the boat was just going out.
“Always lose this boat,” grumbled Lee, importantly.
Carroll looked at his watch, then replaced it silently.
“Going to miss an appointment?” questioned Lee.
“No, think not. These boats sail pretty often.”
“I wish the train-service was as good,” said Lee.
The two men stood together until the next boat came in, then boarded it, and took seats outside, as it was a fine day. They separated a couple of blocks from the pier. Lee was obliged to take an up-town Elevated.
“I suppose you don't go my way?” he said to Carroll, wistfully.
“No,” said Carroll, smiling and shaking the ashes from his cigar. Both men had smoked all the way across—Carroll's cigars.
“And I tell you they were the real thing,” Lee told his admiring wife that night. “Cost fifteen cents apiece, if they cost a penny; no cheap cigars for him, I can tell you.”
Carroll said good-morning out of his atmosphere of fragrant smoke, and Lee, with a parting wave of the hand, began his climb of the Elevated stairs. He cast a backward look at Carroll's broad, gray shoulders swinging up the street. Even a momentary glimpse was enough to get a strong impression of the superiority of the man among the crowd of ordinary men hastening to their offices.
“I wonder where he is going? I wonder where his office is?” Lee said to himself, accelerating his pace a little as the station began to quiver with an approaching train.
What Lee asked himself many another man in Banbridge asked, but no one knew. No one dared to put the question directly to Carroll himself.
Arthur Carroll had never been a man who opened wide all the doors of his secrets of life to all his friends and acquaintances. Some had one entrance, some another, and it is probable that he always reserved ways of entrance and egress unknown to any except himself. At the very time that he evaded the solicitude of Banbridge with regard to his haunts in the City he was more than open, even ostentatious concerning them to some parties in the City itself, but he was silent regarding Banbridge. It may have been for the reason that he did not for the present wish to mix the City and Banbridge, that he wished to preserve mysteries concerning himself in the regard of both. It is certain that nobody in his office, where he roused considerable speculation even among a more engrossed and less inquisitive class, knew where he lived. The office had not heard of Banbridge; Banbridge had heard of the office, but knew nothing about it. The office, in a way, was not nearly as wise as Banbridge, for it knew nothing whatever of his family affairs. There was therein much speculation and, more than that, heart-burning as to whether Captain Carroll was or was not married. In the inner office, whence issued a mad tick of type-writers all through business hours, were two girls, one quite young and very pretty, the other also young, but not so pretty, both working for very small returns. There was also a book-keeper, a middle-aged man, and vibrating from the inner to the outer office was a young fellow with an innocent, high forehead and an eager, anxious outlook of brown eyes and a fashion of seeming to hang suspended on springs of readiness for motion when an order should come.
This young fellow, who sped in and out with that alacrity at the word of command, who hastened on errands with such impetus that he inspired alarm among the imaginative, had acquired a curious springiness about his hips that almost gave the effect of dislocation. He winked very fast, having gotten a nervous trick. He hurried ceaselessly. He had upon him the profound conviction of not time enough and the need of haste. He was in love with the prettier of the stenographers, and his heart was torn when he heard the surmises as to his employer's married or single estate. He used to watch Carroll when he left the office at night, and satisfied himself that he turned towards Sixth Avenue, and then he satisfied himself no more. Carroll plunged into mystery at night as he did for Banbridge in the morning. It was borne in upon the clerk who had an opulent imagination that Carroll was a great swell and went every night to one of the swellest of the up-town clubs, where he resided in luxury and the most genteel and lordly dissipation. He had, at the same time, a jealousy of and a profound pride in Carroll. Carroll himself had a sort of kindly scorn of him, and treated him very well. He was not of the description of weak character who antagonized him.
As for the girls in the inner office, Carroll only recognized them there. Seen on the street, away from the environment, he would simply not have dreamed he had ever seen them. He knew them only in their frames. As for the middle-aged man at the book-keeper's desk, he disturbed him in a way that he would not admit to himself. He spoke to him rather curtly. If he could avoid speaking to him he did so. He had a way of sending directions to the book-keeper by the young man. The book-keeper, if he also surmised Carroll's private life, gave no sign, although he had ample time. He sat at his desk faithfully from eight o'clock until half-past four, but the work which he had to do was somewhat amazing to a mind which stopped to reason. Sometimes even this man, who understood the world in general as a place to be painfully clambered and tramped and even crawled over, to the accomplishment of the ulterior end of remaining upon it at all, and who paid very little attention to other people's affairs, except as they directly concerned the tragic pettiness of his own, wondered a little at the nature of the accounts which he faithfully kept.
This book-keeper, whose name was William Allbright, lived in Harlem, so far up that it seemed fairly in the country, and on the second floor of a small, ancient building which, indeed, belonged to the period when Harlem was country and which remained between two modern apartment houses. The book-keeper had a half-right in a little green backyard, wherein flourished with considerable energy an aged cherry-tree, from which the tenants always fondly hoped for cherries. The cherries never materialized, but the hope was something. The book-keeper's elder sister, who kept house for him, was fond of gazing at the cherry-tree, with its scanty spread of white blossoms, and dreaming of cherries. She was the fonder because she had almost no dreams left. It is rather sad that even dreams go, as well as actualities. However, the sister seemed not to mind so very much. Very little, except the pleasure which she took in watching the cherry-tree, gave evidence that she lamented anything that she had lost or merely missed in life. In general she had an air of such utter placidity and acquiescence that it almost amounted to numbness. The book-keeper at this time of year scratched away every evening with a hoe and trowel in his half of the backyard, where he was making a tiny garden-patch.
The garden represented to him, as the tree did to his sister, his one ladder by which his earthly dreams might climb higher. One night he came home and there were three green spears of corn piercing the mould, and he fairly chuckled.
“The corn has come up,” said he.
“So it has,” said his sister.
A widow woman and her son, who worked in one of the great retail stores, lived down-stairs in the building. The young man, rather consequential but interested, strolled out in the backyard and surveyed the corn. The widow, who was consumptive, thrust her head and shoulders, muffled in a white shawl, out of her kitchen window into the soft spring air.
“So the corn has come up,” said the son, throwing himself back on his heels with a lordly air. The mother smiled dimly at the green spears from between the woolly swaths of her shawl. She coughed, and pulled the white fleece closely over her mouth and nose. Then only her eyes were visible, which looked young as they gazed at the green spears of corn. The book-keeper nodded his elderly, distinctly commonplace, and unimportant head with the motion of a conqueror who marshals armies.
After all, it is something for a man to be able to call into life, even if under the force which includes him also, the new life of the spring. It is a power like that of a child in leading-strings, but still power. After the mother and son had gone away and he and his sister were still out in the cool, and the great evening star had come out and it was too dark to work any longer, for the first time he said something about the queer accounts in his books in Captain Carroll's office.
“I suppose it is all right,” he said, leaning a second on his hoe and staring up at the star, “but sometimes my books and the accounts I keep look rather—strange to me.”
“He pays you regularly, doesn't he?” inquired the sister. The question of pay could sting her from her numbness. Once there had been a period, years ago, before Carroll's advent, of no pay.
“Oh yes,” replied the brother. “He pays me. He has never been more than a week behind. Captain Carroll seems like a very smart man. I wonder where he lives. I don't believe anybody in the office knows. He went away very early this afternoon. I don't know whether he lives in the City or in the country. I thought maybe if he did live in the country he wanted to get home and go driving or something.”
It had been as the book-keeper surmised. Carroll had gone early to his home in the country with the idea of a drive. But when he reached home he found a state of affairs which precluded the drive. It seemed that young Eddy Carroll was given to romancing in more respects than one, and had not told the truth to Anderson when he had been asked if his family would feel anxious at his non-return to dinner. Eddy knew quite well that they would be anxious. In spite of a certain temperamental aversion to worry, the boy's mother and sisters were wont to become quite actively agitated if he failed to appear at expected times and seasons. Eddy Carroll, in the course of a short life, had contrived to find the hard side of many little difficulties. He had gotten into divers forms of mischief; he had met with many accidents. He had been almost drowned; he had broken an arm; he had been hit in the forehead by a stone thrown by another boy.
When Arthur Carroll reached home that afternoon he found his wife in hysterical tears, his sister trying to comfort her, and the two daughters and the maid were scouring the town in search of the boy. School was out, and he had still not come home. Carroll heard the news before he reached home, from the coachman who met him at the station.
“Mr. Eddy did not come home this noon,” said the man, with much deference. He was full of awe at his employer, being a simple sort, and this was his second place, his first having been with the salt of the earth who made no such show as Carroll. He reasoned that virtue and appearances must increase according to the same ratio. “Mrs. Carroll sent me to the school this noon,” said the man, further, “and the ladies are very much worried. The young ladies and Marie are out trying to find him.” Marie was the maid, a Hungarian girl.
“Well, drive home as fast as you can,” said Carroll, with a sigh. He reflected that his drive was spoiled; he also reflected that when the boy was found he should be punished. Yet he did not look out of temper, and, in fact, was not. It was in reality almost an impossibility for Arthur Carroll to be out of temper with one of his own family.
When Carroll reached home his wife came running down the stairs in a long, white tea-gown, and flung her arms around his neck. “Oh, Arthur!” she sobbed out. “What do you think has happened? What do you think?”
Carroll raised his wife's lovely face, all flushed and panting with grief and terror like a child's, and kissed it softly. “Nothing, Amy; nothing, dear,” he said. “Don't, my darling. You will make yourself ill. Nothing has happened.”
His sister Anna's voice, clear and strained, came from the top of the stairs. She stood there, holding an unbuttoned dressing-sack tightly across her bosom. The day was warm and neither of the ladies had dressed. “But, Arthur, he has not been home since morning,” said Anna Carroll, “and Martin has been to the school-house, and the master says that Eddy did not return at all after the noon intermission, and he did not come home to dinner, after all.”
“Yes, he did not come home to dinner,” said Mrs. Carroll; “and the butcher did send the roast of veal, after all. I was afraid he would not, because he had not been paid for so long, and I thought Eddy would come home so hungry. But the butcher did send it, but Eddy did not come. He cannot have had a thing to eat since morning, and all he had for breakfast were rolls and coffee. Thee egg-woman would not leave any more eggs, she said, until she was paid for the last two lots, and—”
Carroll pulled out a wallet and handed a roll of notes, not to his wife, but to his sister Anna, who came half-way down the stairs and reached down a long, slender white arm for it.
“There,” said he, “pay up the butcher and the egg-woman to-morrow. At least—”
“I understand,” said Anna, nodding.
“What do you care whether the butcher or the egg-woman are paid or not, when all the boy we've got is lost?” asked Mrs. Carroll, looking up into her husband's face with the tears rolling over her cheeks.
“That's so,” said Anna, and she gave the roll of notes a toss away from her with a passionate gesture. “Arthur, where do you suppose he is?”
The notes fell over the banisters into the hall below.
Carroll watched them touch the floor as he answered, “My dear sister, I don't know, but boys have played truant before, and survived it; and I have strong hopes of our dear boy.” Carroll's voice, though droll, was exceedingly soft and soothing. He put an arm again around his wife, drew her close to him, and pressed her head against his shoulder. “Dear, you will be ill,” he said. “The boy is all right.”
“I am sure this time he is shot,” moaned Mrs. Carroll.
“My dear Amy!”
“Now, Arthur, you can laugh,” said his sister, coming down the stairs, the embroidered ruffles of her white cambric skirt fluttering around her slender ankles in pink silk stockings, and her little feet thrust into French-heeled slippers, one of which had an enormous bow and buckle, the other nothing at all. “You may laugh,” said Anna Carroll, in a sweet, challenging voice, “but why is it so unlikely? Eddy Carroll has had everything but shooting happen to him.”
“Yes, he has been everything except shot,” moaned Mrs. Carroll.
“My dearest dear, don't worry over such a thing as that!”
“But, Arthur,” pleaded Mrs. Carroll, “what else is there left for us to worry about?”
Carroll's mouth twitched a little, but he looked and spoke quite gravely. “Well,” he said, “I am going now, and I shall find the boy and bring him home safe and sound, and— Amy, darling, have you eaten anything?”
“Oh, Arthur,” cried his wife, reproachfully, “do you think I could eat when Eddy did not come home to dinner, and always something dreadful has happened other times when he has not come? Eddy has never stayed away just for mischief, and then come home as good as ever. Something has always happened which has been the reason.”
“Well, perhaps he has stayed away for mischief alone, and that is what has happened now instead of the shooting,” said Carroll.
“Arthur, if—if he has, you surely will not—”
“Arthur, you will not punish that boy if he does come home again safe and sound?” cried his sister.
Carroll laughed. “Have either of you eaten anything?” he asked.
“Of course not,” replied his sister, indignantly.
“How could we, dear?” said his wife. “I had thought I was quite hungry, and when the butcher sent the roast, after all—”
“Perhaps I had better wait and not pay him until he does not send anything,” murmured Anna Carroll, as if to herself. “And when the roast did come, I was glad, but, after all, I could not touch it.”
“Well, you must both eat to-night to make up for it,” said Carroll.
“I had thought you would as soon have it cold for dinner to-night,” said Mrs. Carroll, in her soft, complaining voice. “We would not have planned it for our noon lunch, but we were afraid to ask the butcher for chops, too, and as long as there were no eggs for breakfast, we felt the need of something substantial; but, of course, when that darling boy did not come, and we had reason to think he was shot, we could not—” Mrs. Carroll leaned weepingly against her husband, but he put her from him gently.
“Now, Amy, dearest,” said he, “I am going to find Eddy and bring him home, and—you say Marie has gone to hunt for him?”
“Yes, she went in one direction, and Ina and Charlotte in others,” said Anna Carroll.
“Well,” said Carroll, “I will send Marie home at once, and I wish you would see that she prepares an early dinner, and then we can go for a drive afterwards.”
“Eddy can go, too,” said Mrs. Carroll, quite joyously.
“No, Amy,” said Carroll, “he will most certainly not go to drive with us. There are times when you girls must leave the boy to me, and this is one of them.” He stopped and kissed his wife's appealing face, and went out. Then the carriage rolled swiftly round the curve of drive.
“He will whip him,” said Anna to Mrs. Carroll, who looked at her with a certain defiance.
“Well,” said she, “if he does, I suppose it will be for his good. A man, of course, knows how to manage a boy better than a woman, because he has been a boy himself. You know you and I never were boys, Anna.”
“I know that, Amy,” said Anna, quite seriously, “and I am willing to admit that a man may know better how to deal with a boy than a woman does, but I must confess that when I think of Arthur punishing Eddy for the faults he may have—”
“May have what?” demanded Mrs. Carroll, quite sharply for her.
“May have inherited from Arthur,” declared Anna, boldly, with soft eyes of challenge upon her sister-in-law.
“Eddy has no faults worth mentioning,” responded Mrs. Carroll, seeming to enlarge with a sort of fluffy fury like an angry bird; “and the idea of your saying he inherits them from his father. You know as well as I do, Anna, what Arthur is.”
“I knew Arthur before you ever did,” said Anna, apologetically. “Don't get excited, dear.”
“I am not excited, but I do wonder at your speaking after such a fashion when we don't know what may have happened to the dear boy. Of course Arthur will not punish him if he is shot or anything.”
“Of course not.”
“And if he is not shot, and Arthur should punish him, of course it will be all right.”
“Yes, I suppose it will, Amy,” said Anna Carroll.
“Arthur feels so sure that nothing has happened to him that I begin to think so myself,” said Mrs. Carroll, beginning to ascend the stairs with a languid grace.
“Yes, he has encouraged me,” assented Anna. “I suppose we had better dress now.”
“Yes, if we are going to drive directly after dinner. I'll put on my cream foulard, it is so warm. I suppose we have, perhaps, worried a little more than was necessary.”
“I dare say,” said Anna, trailing her white frills and laces before her sister the length of the upper hall. “I think I'll wear my blue embroidered linen.”
“You said the bill for that came yesterday?”
“No, six weeks ago; certainly six weeks ago. You know I had it made very early. Oh yes, the second or third bill did come yesterday. I have had so many, I get mixed over those bills.”
“Well, it is a right pretty gown, and I would wear it if I were you,” said Mrs. Carroll.
Shortly after Captain Carroll started upon his search for his missing son, Randolph Anderson, sitting peacefully in his back office, by the riverward window, was rudely interrupted. He was mounting some new specimens. Before him the great tiger cat lay blissfully on his red cushion. He was not asleep, but was purring loudly in what resembled a human day-dream. His claws luxuriously pricked through the velvet of his paws, which were extended in such a way that he might have served as a model for a bas-relief of a cat running a race. Now and then the tip of his tail curled and uncurled with an indescribable effect of sensuousness. The green things in the window-box had grown luxuriantly, and now and then trailing vines tossed up past the window in the infrequent puffs of wind. The afternoon was very warm. The temperature had risen rapidly since noon. Down below the wide window ran the river, unseen except for a subtle, scarcely perceptible glow of the brilliant sunlight upon the water. It was a rather muddy stream, but at certain times it caught the sunlight and tossed it back as from the facets of brown jewels.
The murmur of the river was plainly audible in the room. It was very loud, for the stream's current was still high with the spring rains. The rustle of the trees which grew on the river-bank was also discernible, and might have been the rustle of the garments of nymphs tossed about their supple limbs by the warm breeze. In fact, a like fancy occurred to Anderson as he sat there mounting his butterflies.
“I don't wonder those old Greeks had their tales about nymphs closeted in trees,” he thought, for the rustle of the green boughs had suggested the rustle of women's draperies.
Then he remembered how Charlotte Carroll's skirts had rustled as she went out of the store that last afternoon when he had spoken to her. There was a soft crispness of ruffling lawns and laces, a most delicate sound, a maidenly sound which had not been unlike the sound of the young leaves of the willows overfolding and interlacing with one another when the soft breeze swelled high. Now and then all the afternoon came a slow, soft wave of warm wind out of the west, and all sounds deepened before it, even the purring song of the cat seemed to increase, and possibly did, from the unconscious assertion of his own voice in the peaceful and somnolent chorus of nature. It was only spring as yet, but the effect was as of a long summer afternoon. Anderson, who was always keenly sensitive to all phases of nature and all atmospheric conditions, was affected by it. He realized himself sunken in drowsy, unspeculative contentment. Even the strange, emotional unrest and effervescence, which had been more or less over him since he had seen Charlotte Carroll, was in abeyance. After all, he was not a passionate man, and he was not very young. The young girl seemed to become merely a part of the gracious harmony which was lulling his soul and his senses to content and peace. He was conscious of wondering what a man could want more than he had, as if he had suspected himself of guilt in that direction.
Then, suddenly, pell-mell into the office, starling the great cat to that extent that he sprang from his red cushion on the window-ledge, and slunk, flattening his long body against the floor, under the table, came the boy Eddy Carroll. The boy stood staring at him rather shamefacedly, though every muscle in his small body seemed on a twitch with the restrained impulse of flight.
“Well,” said Anderson, finally, “what's the trouble, sir?”
Then the boy found his tongue. He came close to the man.
“Say,” he said, in a hoarse whisper, “jest let a feller stay in here a minute, will you?”
Anderson nodded readily. He understood, or thought he did. He immediately jumped to the conclusion that the teasing boys were at work again. He felt a little astonished at this headlong flight to cover of the boy who had so manfully stood at bay a few hours before. However, he was a little fellow, and there had been a good many of his opponents. He felt a pleasant thrill of fatherliness and protection. He looked kindly into the little, pink-flushed face. “Very well, my son,” said he. “Stay as long as you like. Take a seat.” The boy sat down. His legs were too short for his feet to touch the floor, so he swung them. He gazed ingratiatingly at Anderson, and now and then cast an apprehensive glance towards the door of the office. Anderson continued mounting his butterflies, and paid no attention to him, and the boy seemed to respect his silence. Presently the great cat emerged quite boldly from his refuge under the table, crouched, calculated the distance, and leaped softly back to his red cushion. The boy hitched his chair nearer, and began stroking the cat gently and lovingly with his little boy-hand, hardened with climbing and playing. The cat stretched himself luxuriously, pricked his claws in and out, shut his eyes, and purred again quite loudly. Again the little room sang with the song of the river, the wind in the trees, and the cat's somnolent note. The afternoon light rippled full of green reflections through the room. The boy's small head appeared in it like a flower. He smiled tenderly at the cat. Anderson, glancing at him over his butterflies, thought what an angelic aspect he had. He looked a darling of a boy.
The boy, stroking the cat, met the man's kindly approving eyes, and he smiled a smile of utter confidence and trust, which conveyed delicious flattery. Then suddenly the hand stroking the cat desisted and made a dive into a small jacket-pocket and emerged with a treasure. It was a great butterfly, much dilapidated as to its gorgeous wings, but the boy looked gloatingly from it to the man.
“I got it for you,” he whispered, with another glance at the office door. Anderson recognized, with the dismay of a collector, a fine specimen, which he had sought in vain, made utterly worthless by ruthless handling, but he controlled himself. “Thank you,” he said, and took the poor, despoiled beauty and laid it carefully on the table.
“It got broke a little, somehow,” remarked the boy; “it's wings are awful brittle.”
“Yes, they are,” assented Anderson.
“I had to chase it quite a spell,” said the boy, with an evident desire not to have his efforts underestimated.
“Yes, I don't doubt it,” replied Anderson, with gratitude well simulated.
“It seemed rather a pity to kill such a pretty butterfly as that,” remarked the boy, unexpectedly, “but I thought you'd like it.”
“Yes, I like to have a nice collection of butterflies,” replied Anderson, with a faint inflection of apology. In reality, the butterflies' side of it had failed to occur to him before, and he felt that an appeal to science in such a case was rather feeble. Then the boy helped him out.
“Well,” said he, “I do suppose that a butterfly don't live very long, anyhow; he has to die pretty soon, and it's better for human beings to have him stuck on a pin and put where they can see how handsome he is, rather than have him stay out in the fields, where the rain would soak him into the ground, and that would be the end of him. I suppose it is better to save anything that's pretty, somehow, even if the thing don't like it himself.”
“Perhaps you are right,” replied Anderson, regarding the boy with some wonder.
“Maybe he didn't mind dying 'cause I caught him any more than just dying himself,” said Eddy.
“Maybe not.”
“Anyhow, he's dead,” said the boy.
He watched Anderson carefully as he manipulated the insect.
“I'm sorry his wing got broken,” he said. “I wonder why God makes butterflies' wings so awful brittle that they can't be caught without spoiling 'em. The other wing ain't hurt much, anyhow.”
A sudden thought struck Anderson. “Why, when did you get this butterfly?” he asked.
The boy flushed vividly. He gave a sorrowful, obstinate glance at the man, as much as to say, “I am sad that you should force me into such a course, but I must be firm.” Then he looked away, staring out of the window at the tree-tops tossing against the brilliant blue of the sky, and made no reply.
Anderson made a swift calculation. He glanced at a clock on the wall. “Where did you get this butterfly?” he inquired, harmlessly, and the boy fell into the net.
“In that field just beyond the oak grove on the road to New Sanderson,” he replied, with entire innocence.
Anderson surveyed him sharply.
“When is afternoon school out?” asked Anderson.
“At four o'clock,” replied the boy, with such unsuspicion that the man's conscience smote him. It was too easy.
“Well,” said Anderson, slowly. He did not look at the boy, but went on straightening the mangled wing of the butterfly which he had offered on his shrine. “Well,” he said, “how did you get time to go to that field and catch this butterfly? You say it took a long time, and that field is a good twenty minutes' run from here, and it is a quarter of five now.” The boy kicked his feet against the rounds of his chair and made no reply. His forehead was scowling, his mouth set. “How?” repeated Anderson.
Then the boy turned on the man. He slid out of his chair; he spoke loudly. He forgot to glance at the door. “Ain't you smart?” he cried, with scorn, and still with an air of slighted affection which appealed. “Ain't you smart to catch a feller that way? You're mean, if you are a man, after I've got you that big butterfly, too, to turn on a feller that way.”
Anderson actually felt ashamed of himself. “Now, see here, my boy,” he said, “I'm grateful to you so far as that goes.”
“I didn't run away from school,” declared Eddy Carroll, looking straight at Anderson, who fairly gasped.
He had seen people lie before, but somehow this was actually dazzling. He was conscious of fairly blinking before the direct gaze of innocence of this lying little boy. And then his elderly and reliable clerk appeared in the office door, glanced at Eddy, whom he did not know, and informed Anderson, in a slightly impressed tone, that Captain Carroll was in the store and would like to speak to him. Anderson glanced again at his young visitor, who had got, in a second, a look of pale consternation. He went out into the store at once, and was greeted by Carroll with the inquiry as to whether or not he had seen his son.
“My boy has not been seen since he started for school this morning,” said Carroll. “I came here because another little boy, one of my son's small school-fellows, who has succeeded in treading the paths of virtue and obedience, volunteered the information, without the slightest imputation of any guilty conspiracy on your part, that you had been seen leading my son home to your residence to dinner,” said Carroll.
“Your son made friends with me on his way from school this noon,” said Anderson, simply, “and upon his evident desire to dine with me I invited him, being assured by him that his so doing would not occasion the slightest uneasiness at home as to his whereabouts.”
Anderson was indignant at something in the other man's tone, and was careful not to introduce in his tone the slightest inflection of apology.
He made the statement, and was about to add that the boy was at that moment in his office, when Carroll interrupted. “I regret to say that my son has not the slightest idea of what is meant by telling the truth. He never had,” he stated, smilingly, “especially when his own desires lead him to falsehood. In those cases he lies to himself so successfully that he tells in effect the truth to other people. He, in that sense, told the truth to you, but the truth was not as he stated, for the ladies have been in a really pitiable state of anxiety.”
“He is in my office now,” said Anderson, coldly, pointing to the door and beginning to move towards it.
“I suspected the boy was in there,” said Carroll, and his tones changed, as did his face. All the urbanity and the smile vanished. He followed Anderson with a nervous stride. Both men entered the little office, but the boy was gone. Both stood gazing about the little space. It was absolutely impossible for anybody to be concealed there. There was no available hiding-place except under the table, and the cat occupied that, and his eyes shone out of the gloom like green jewels.
“I don't see him,” said Carroll.
Then Anderson turned upon him.
“Sir,” he said, with a kind of slow heat, “I am at a loss as to what to attribute your tone and manner. If you doubt—”
“Not at all, my dear sir,” replied Carroll, with a wave of the hand. “But I am told that my son is in here, and when, on entering, I do not see him, I am naturally somewhat surprised.”
“Your son was certainly in this room when I left it a moment ago, and that is all I know about it,” said Anderson. “And I will add that your son's visit was entirely unsolicited—”
“My dear sir,” interrupted Carroll again, “I assure you that I do not for a moment conceive the possibility of anything else. But the fact remains that I am told he is here—”
“He was here,” said Anderson, looking about with an impatient and bewildered scowl.
“He could not have gone out through the store while we were there,” said Carroll, in a puzzled tone.
“I do not see how he could have done so unobserved, certainly.”
“The window,” said Carroll, taking a step towards it.
“Thirty feet from the ground; sheer wall and rocks below. He could not have gone out there without wings.”
“He has no wings, and I very much fear he never will have any at this rate,” said Carroll, moving out. “Well, Mr. Anderson, I regret that my son should have annoyed you.”
“He has not annoyed me in the least,” Anderson replied, shortly. “I only regret that his peculiar method of telling the truth should have led me unwittingly to occasion your wife and daughters so much anxiety, and I trust that you will soon trace him.”
“Oh yes, he will turn up all right,” said Carroll, easily. “If he was in your office a moment ago, he cannot be far off.”
There was the faintest suggestion of emphasis upon the “if.”
Anderson spoke to the elderly clerk, who had been leaning against the shelves ranged with packages of cereal, surmounted by a flaming row of picture advertisements, regarding them and listening with a curious abstraction, which almost gave the impression of stupidity. This man had lived boy and man in one groove of the grocer business, until he needed prodding to shift him momentarily into any other.
In reality he managed most of the details of the selling. He heard what the two men said, and at the same time was considering that he was to send the wagon round the first thing in the morning with pease to the postmaster's, and a new barrel of sugar to the Amidons, and he was calculating the price of sugar at the slight recent rise.
“Mr. Price,” said Anderson to him, “may I ask that you will tell this gentleman if a little boy went into my office a short time ago?”
The clerk looked blankly at Anderson, who patiently repeated his question.
“A little boy,” repeated the clerk.
“Yes,” said Anderson.
Price gazed reflectively and in something of a troubled fashion at Anderson, then at Carroll. His mind was in the throes of displacing a barrel of sugar and a half-peck of pease by a little boy. Then his face brightened. He spoke quickly and decidedly.
“Yes,” said he, “just before this gentleman came in, a little boy, running, yes.”
“You did not see him come out while we were talking?” asked Anderson.
“No, oh no.”
Carroll asked no further and left, with a good-day to Anderson, who scarcely returned it. He jumped into his carriage, and the swift tap of the horse's feet died away on the macadam.
“Sugar ought to bring about two cents on a pound more,” said the clerk to Anderson, returning to the office, and then he stopped short as Anderson started staring at an enormous advertisement picture which was stationed, partly for business reasons, partly for ornament, in a corner near the office door. It was a figure of a gayly dressed damsel, nearly life-size, and was supposed by its blooming appearance to settle finally the merit of a new health food. The other clerk, who was a young fellow, hardly more than a boy, had placed it there. He had reached the first fever-stage of admiration of the other sex, and this gaudy beauty had resembled in his eyes a fair damsel of Banbridge whom he secretly adored.
Therefore he had ensconced it carefully in the corner near the office door, and often glanced at it with reverent and sheepish eyes of delight. Anderson never paid any attention to the thing, but now for some reason he glanced at it in passing, and to his astonishment it moved. He made one stride towards it, and thrust it aside, and behind it stood the boy, with a face of impudent innocence.
Anderson stood looking at him for a second. The boy's eyes did not fall, but his expression changed.
“So you ran away from your father and hid from him?” Anderson observed, with a subtle emphasis of scorn. “So you are afraid?”
The boy's face flashed into red, his eyes blazed.
“You bet I ain't,” he declared.
“Looks very much like it,” said Anderson, coolly.
“You let me go,” shouted the boy, and pushed rudely past Anderson and raced out of the store. Anderson and the old clerk looked at each other across the great advertisement which had fallen face downward on the floor.
“Must have come in from the office whilst our back was turned, and slipped in behind that picture,” said the clerk, slowly.
Anderson nodded.
“He is a queer feller,” said the clerk, further.
“He certainly is,” agreed Anderson.
“As queer as ever I seen. Guess his father 'll give it to him when he gits home.”
“Well, he deserves it,” replied Anderson, and added, in the silence of his mind, “and his father deserves it, too,” and imagined vaguely to himself a chastening providence for the eternal good of the father even as the father might be for the eternal good of his son. The man's fancy was always more or less in leash to his early training.
Just then the younger clerk, Sam Riggs, commonly called Sammy, entered, and espying at once with jealous eyes the fallen state of his idol in the corner, took the first opportunity to pick her up and straighten her to her former position.
Little Eddy Carroll, running on his slim legs like a hound, raced down the homeward road, and came in sight of his father's carriage just before it turned the corner. Carroll had stopped once on the way, and so the boy overtook him. When Carroll stopped to make an inquiry, he caught a glimpse of the small, flying figure in the rear; in fact, the man to whom he spoke pointed this out.
“Why, there's your boy, now, Cap'n Carroll,” he said, “runnin' as fast after you as you be after him.” The man was an old fellow of a facetious turn of mind who had done some work on Carroll's garden.
Carroll, after that one rapid, comprehensive glance, said not another word. He nodded curtly and sprang into the carriage; but the old man, pressing close to the wheel, so that it could not move without throwing him, said something in a half-whisper, as if he were ashamed of it.
“Certainly, certainly, very soon,” replied Carroll, with some impatience.
“I need it pooty bad,” the old man said, abashedly.
“Very soon, I tell you,” repeated Carroll. “I cannot stop now.”
The old man fell back, with a pull at his ancient cap. He trembled a little nervously, his face was flushed, but he glanced back with a grin at Eddy racing to catch up.
“Drive on, Martin,” Carroll said to the coachman.
The old gardener waited until Eddy came alongside, then he called out to him. “Hi!” he said, “better hurry up. Guess your pa is goin' to have a reckonin' with ye.”
“You shut up!” cried the boy, breathlessly, racing past. When finally he reached the carriage, he promptly caught hold of the rear, doubled up his legs, and hung on until it rolled into the grounds of the Carroll place and drew up in the semicircle opposite the front-door. Then he dropped lightly to the ground and ran around to the front of the carriage as his father got out. Eddy without a word stood before his father, who towered over him grandly, confronting him with a really majestic reproach, not untinctured with love. The man's handsome face was quite pale; he did not look so angry as severe and unhappy, but the boy knew well enough what the expression boded. He had seen it before. He looked back at his father, and his small, pink-and-white face never quivered, and his black eyes never fell.
“Well?” said Carroll.
“Where have you been?” asked Carroll.
The anxious faces of the boy's mother and his aunt became visible at a front window, a flutter of white skirts appeared at the entrance of the grounds. The girls were returning from their search.
“Answer me,” commanded Carroll.
“Teacher sent me on an errand,” he replied then, with a kind of doggedness.
“The truth,” said Carroll.
“I went out catching butterflies, after I had dined with Mr. Anderson and his mother.”
“You dined with Mr. Anderson and his mother?”
“Yes, sir. You needn't think he was to blame. He wasn't. I made him ask me.”
“I understand. Then you did not go to school this afternoon, but out in the field?”
“Yes, sir.”
Carroll eyed sharply the boy's right-hand pocket, which bulged enormously. The girls had by this time come up and stood behind Eddy, holding to each other, their pretty faces pale and concerned.
“What is that in your pocket?” asked Carroll.
“Marbles.”
“Let me see the marbles.”
“It ain't marbles, it's candy.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Mr. Anderson gave it to me.”
Carroll continued to look his son squarely in the eyes.
“I stole it when they wasn't looking,” said the boy; “there was a glass jar—”
“Go into the house and up to your own room,” said Carroll.
The boy turned as squarely about-face as a soldier at the word of command, and marched before his father into the house. The four women, the two at the window, the two on the lawn, watched them go without a word. Ina, the elder of the two girls, put her handkerchief to her eyes and began to cry softly. Charlotte put her arm around her and drew her towards the door.
“Don't, Ina,” she whispered, “don't, darling.”
“Papa will whip him very hard,” sobbed Ina. “It seems to me I cannot bear it, he is such a little boy.”
“Papa ought to whip him,” said Charlotte, quite firmly, although she herself was winking back the tears.
“He will whip him so hard,” sobbed Ina. “I quite gave up when papa found the candy. Stealing is what he never will forgive him for, you know.”
“Yes, I know. Don't let poor Amy see you cry, Ina.”
“Wait a minute before we go in. You remember that the time papa whipped me, the only time he ever did, when—”
“Yes, I remember. You never did again, honey.”
“Yes, it cured me, but I fear it will not cure Eddy. A boy is different.”
“Stop crying, Ina dear, before we go in.”
“Yes—I—will. Are my eyes very red?”
“No; Amy will not notice it if you keep your eyes turned away.”
But Mrs. Carroll turned sharply upon Ina the moment she saw her. The two elder ladies had left the parlor and retreated to a small apartment on the right of the hall, called the den, and fitted up with some Eastern hangings and a divan. Upon this divan Anna Carroll had thrown herself, and lay quite still upon her back, her slender length extended, staring out of the window directly opposite at the spread of a great oak just lately putting forth its leaves. Mrs. Carroll was standing beside her, and she looked at the two girls entering with a hard expression in her usually soft eyes.
“Why have you been crying?” she asked, directly, of Ina. Her hair was in disorder, as if she had thrust her fingers through it. It was pushed far off from her temples, making her look much older. Red spots blazed on her cheeks, her mouth widened in a curious, tense smile. “Why have you been crying?” she demanded again when Ina did not reply at once to her question.
“Because papa is going to whip Eddy,” Ina said then, with directness, “and I know he will whip him very hard, because he has been stealing.”
“Well, what is that to cry about?” asked Mrs. Carroll, ruffling with indignation. “Don't you think the boy's father knows what is best for his own son? He won't hurt him any more than he ought to be hurt.”
“I only hope he will hurt himself as much as he ought to be hurt,” muttered Anna Carroll on the divan. Mrs. Carroll gave her sister-in-law one look, then swept out of the room. The tail of her rose-colored silk curled around the door-sill, and she was gone. She passed through the hall, and out of the front-door to the lawn, whence she strolled around the house, keeping on the side farthest from the room occupied by her son.
“Hark!” whispered Ina, a moment after her mother had gone.
They all listened, and a swishing sound was distinctly audible. It was the sound of regular, carefully measured blows.
“Amy went out so she should not hear,” whispered Ina. “Oh, Dear!”
“It is harder for her than for anybody else because she has to uphold Arthur for doing what she knows is wrong,” said Anna Carroll on the divan. She spoke as if to herself, pressing her hands to her ears.
“Papa is doing just right,” cried Charlotte, indignantly. “How dare you speak so about papa, Anna?”
“There is no use in speaking at all,” said Anna, wearily. “There never was. I am tired of this life and everything connected with it.”
Ina was weeping again convulsively. She also had put her hands to her ears, and her piteous little wet, quivering face was revealed.
“There is no need of either of you stopping up your ears,” said Charlotte. “You won't hear anything except the—blows. Eddy never makes a whimper. You know that.”
She spoke with a certain pride. She felt in her heart that a whimper from her little brother would be more than she herself could bear, and would also be more culpable than the offence for which he was being chastised. She said that her brother never whimpered, and yet she listened with a little fear that he might. But she need have had no apprehension. Up in his bedroom, standing before his father in his little thin linen blouse, for he had pulled off his jacket without being told, directly when he had first entered the room, the little boy endured the storm of blows, not only without a whimper, but without a quiver.
Eddy stood quite erect. His pretty face was white, his little hands hanging at his sides were clinched tightly, but he made not one sound or motion which betrayed pain or fear. He was counting the blows as they fell. He knew how many to expect. There were so many for running away and playing truant, and so many for lying, more for stealing, so many for all three. This time it was all three. Eddy counted while his father laid on the blows as regularly as a machine. When at last he stopped, Eddy did not move. He spoke without moving his head.
“There are two more, papa,” he said. “You have stopped too soon.”
Carroll's face contracted, but he gave the two additional blows. “Now undress yourself and go to bed,” he told the boy, in an even tone. “I will have some bread and milk sent up for your supper. To-morrow morning you will take that candy back to the store, and tell the man you stole it, and ask his pardon.”
“Yes, sir,” said Eddy. He at once began unfastening his little blouse preparatory to retiring.
Carroll went out of the room and closed the door behind him. His sister met him at the head of the stairs and accosted him in a sort of fury.
“Arthur Carroll,” said she, tersely, “I wish you would tell me one thing. Did you whip that child for his faults or your own?”
Carroll looked at her. He was very pale, and his face seemed to have lengthened out and aged. “For both, Anna,” he replied.
“What right have you to punish him for your faults, I should like to know?”
“The right of the man who gave them to him.”
“You have the right to punish him for your faults—yourfaults?”
“I could kill him for my faults, if necessary.”
“Who is going to punish you for your faults? Tell me that, Arthur Carroll.”
“The Lord Almighty in His own good time,” replied Carroll, and passed her and went down-stairs.
The next morning, just before nine o'clock, Anderson was sitting in his office, reading the morning paper. The wind had changed in the night and was blowing from the northwest. The atmosphere was full of a wonderful clearness and freshness. Anderson was conscious of exhilaration. Life assumed a new aspect. New ambitions pressed upon his fancy, new joys seemed to crowd upon his straining vision in culminating vistas of the future. Without fairly admitting it to himself, it had seemed to him as if he had already in a great measure exhausted the possibilities of his own life, as if he had begun to see the bare threads of the warp, as if he had worn out the first glory of the pattern design. Now it was suddenly all different. It looked to him as if he had scarcely begun to live, as if he had not had his first taste of existence. He felt himself a youth. His senses were sharpened, and he got a keen delight from them, which stimulated his spirit like wine. He perceived for the first time a perfume from the green plants in his window-box, which seemed to grow before his eyes and give an odor like the breath of a runner. He heard whole flocks of birds in the sky outside. He distinguished quite clearly one bird-song which he had never heard before. His newspaper rustled with astonishing loudness when he turned the pages, his cigar tasted to an extreme which he had never before noticed. The leaves of the plants and the tree-boughs outside cut the air crisply. His window-shade rattled so loudly that he could not believe it was simply that. A great onslaught of the splendid wind filled the room, and everything waved and sprang as if gaining life. Then suddenly, without the slightest warning, came a shower of the confection known as molasses-peppermints through the door of the office. They are a small, hard candy, and being thrown with vicious emphasis, they rattled upon the bare floor like bullets. One even hit Anderson stingingly upon the cheek. He sprang to his feet and looked out. Nothing was to be seen except the young clerk, standing, gaping and half frightened, yet with a lurking grin. Anderson regarded him with amazement. An idea that he had gone mad flashed through his mind.
“What did you do that for, Sam?” he demanded.
“I didn't do it.”
“Who did?”
“That kid that was in here last night. That Carroll boy. He run in here and flung that candy, and out again, before I could more 'n' see him. Didn't know what were comin'.”
Anderson returned to his office, and as he crossed the threshold heard a duet of laughter from Sam and the older clerk. His feet crushed some of the candy as he resumed his seat. He took up his newspaper, but before he had fairly commenced to read he heard the imperious sound of a girl's voice outside, a quick step, and a dragging one.
“Come right along!” the girl's voice ordered.
“You lemme be!” came a sulky boy's voice in response.
“Not another word!” said the girl's. “Come right along!”
Anderson looked up. Charlotte Carroll was entering, dragging her unwilling little brother after her.
“Come,” said she again. She did not seem to regard Anderson at all. She held her brother's arm with a firm grip of her little, nervous white hand. “Now,” said she to him, “you pick up every one of those molasses-peppermint drops, every single one.”
The boy wriggled defiantly, but she held to him with wonderful strength.
“Right away,” she repeated, “every single one.”
“Let me go, then,” growled the boy, angrily. “How can I pick them up when you are holding me this way?”
The girl with a swift motion swung to the office door in the faces of the two clerks, the grinning roundness of the younger, and the half-abstracted bewilderment of the elder. Then she placed her back against it, and took her hand from her brother's arm. “Now, then, pick them up, every one,” said she.
Without another word the boy got down on his hands and knees and began gathering up the scattered sweets. Anderson had risen to his feet, and stood looking on with a dazed and helpless feeling. Now he spoke, and he realized that his voice sounded weak.
“Really, Miss Carroll,” he said, “I beg— It is of no consequence—” Then he stopped. He did not know what it was all about; he had only a faint idea of not putting any one to the trouble to pick up the débris on his office floor.
Charlotte regarded him as sternly as she had her brother. “Yes, it is of consequence. Papa told him to bring them back and apologize.”
Anderson stared at her, bewildered, while the little boy crawled like a nervous spider around his feet.
“Why bring them back to me?” he queried. For the moment the ex-lawyer forgot that molasses-peppermint balls yielded a part of his revenue, and were offered by him to the public from a glass jar on his shelf. He cast about in his mind as to what he could possibly have to do with those small, hard, brown lollipops rolling about on his office floor.
“You had them in a glass jar,” said Charlotte, in an accusing voice, “right in his way, and—when he came home last night he had them in his pocket, and—papa whipped him very hard. He always does when— My brother is never allowed to take anything that does not belong to him, however unimportant,” she concluded, proudly.
Anderson continued to look at her in a sort of daze.
“No,” she added, severely, “he is not. No matter if he is so young, no more than a child, and a child is very fond of sweets, and—they were left right in his way.”
Anderson looked at her with the vague idea floating through his mind that he owed this sweet, reproachful creature an abject pardon for keeping his molasses-peppermint balls in a glass jar on his own shelf and not locking them away from the lustful eyes of small boys.
“Papa told Eddy that he must bring them back this morning and ask your pardon,” said Charlotte, “and when he came running out of the store I suspected what he had done; and when I found out, I made him come back. Pick up every one, Eddy.”
“Here is one he stepped on his own self and smashed all to nothing,” said Eddy, in an aggrieved tone. “I can't pick that up, anyhow.”
“Pick up what you can of it, and put it in the paper bag.”
“I shouldn't think he could sell this to anybody without cheating them,” remarked Eddy, in a lofty tone, in spite of his abject position.
“Never you mind what he does with it. You pick up every single speck,” ordered the girl; and the boy scraped the floor with his sharp finger-nails, and crammed the candy and dust into a small paper bag. The girl stood watchfully over him; not the smallest particle escaped her eyes. “There's some more over there,” said she, sharply, when the boy was about to rise; and Eddy loped like some small animal on all-fours towards a tiny heap of crushed peppermint-drops.
“He must have stepped on this, too,” he muttered, with a reproachful glare at Anderson, who had never in his life felt so at a loss. He was divided between consternation and an almost paralyzing sense of the ridiculous. He was conscious that a laugh would be regarded as an insult by this very angry and earnest young girl. But at last Eddy tendered him the bag with the rescued peppermint-drops.
“I shouldn't think you would ask more than half-price for candy like this, anyway,” said Eddy, admonishingly, and that was too much for the man. He shouted with laughter; not even Charlotte's face, which suddenly flushed with wrath, could sober him. She looked at him a moment while he laughed, and her face of severe judgment and anger intensified.
“Very well,” said she, “if you see anything funny about this, I am glad, Mr. Anderson.”
But the boy, who had viewed with doubt and suspicion this abrupt change of aspect on the part of the man, suddenly grinned in response; his black eyes twinkled charmingly with delight and fun. “Say,you'reall right,” he said to Anderson, with a confidential nod.
“Eddy!” cried Charlotte.
“Now, Charlotte, you don't see how funny it is, because you are a girl,” said Eddy, soothingly, and he continued to grin at the man, half-elfishly, half-innocently. He looked very small and young.
The girl caught hold of his arm. “Come away immediately,” she said, in a choking voice. “Immediately.”
“It's just like a girl to act that way about my going, as if I wanted to come myself at all,” said the boy, following his sister's pulling hand, and still grinning understandingly at Anderson over his shoulder.
Charlotte turned in the doorway and looked majestically at Anderson. “I thought, when I obliged my brother to return here and pick up the candy, that I was dealing with a gentleman,” said she. “Otherwise I might not have considered it necessary.”
Even then Anderson could scarcely restrain his laughter, although he was conscious that he was mortally offending her. He managed to gasp out something about his surprise and the triviality of the whole affair of the candy.
“I regret that you should consider the taking anything without leave, however worthless, as trivial,” said she. “I have not been so brought up, and neither has my brother.” She said this with an indescribable air of offended rectitude. She regarded him like a small, incarnate truth and honesty. Then she turned, and her brother was following with a reluctant backward pull at her leading hand, when suddenly he burst forth with a shout of malicious glee.
“Say, you are making me go away, when I haven't given him back his old candy, after all! He didn't take it.”
Charlotte promptly caught the paper bag from her brother's hand, advanced upon Anderson, and thrust it in his face as if it had been a hostile weapon. Anderson took it perforce.
“Here is your property,” said she, proudly, but she seemed almost as childish as her brother.
“I ain't said any apology, either,” said Eddy.
“The coming here and returning it is apology enough,” said Anderson.
He looked foolishly at the ridiculous paper bag, sticky with lollipops. For the first time he felt distinctly ashamed of his business. It seemed to him, as he realized its concentration upon the petty details of existence, its strenuous dwelling upon the small, inane sweets and absurdities of daily life which ought to be scattered with a free hand, not made subjects of trade and barter, to be entirely below a gentleman. He gave the paper bag an impatient toss out of the open window over the back of the sleeping cat, which started a little, then stretched himself luxuriously and slept again.
“There, he's thrown it out of the window!” proclaimed Eddy. He looked accusingly at Charlotte. “I might just as well have kept it as had it thrown out of the window,” said he. “What good is it to anybody now, I'd like to know?”
“Never mind what he has done with it,” said Charlotte. “Come at once.”
“Papa told me I must apologize. He will ask me if I did.”
“Apologize, then. Be quick.”
“It is not—” began Anderson, who was sober enough now, and becoming more and more annoyed, but Charlotte interrupted him.
“Eddy!” said she.
“I am very sorry I took your candy,” piped Eddy, in a loud, declamatory voice which was not the tone of humble repentance. The boy, as he spoke, eyed the man with defiance. It was as if he blamed him, for some occult reason, for having his own property stolen. The child's face became, under the forced humiliation of the apology, revolutionary, anarchistic, rebellious. He might have been the representative, the walking delegate, of some small cult of rebels against the established order of regard for the property-rights of others. The sinner, the covetous one of another's sweets, became the accuser. Just as he was going out of the door, following the pink flutter of his sister's muslin gown, he turned and spoke his whole mind.