Part 8

Dicky sat primly, looking at the ceiling. As he had expected, a broad violet streamer fell in his lap. He leaped to the floor, seized Cecelia by her skirt, hustled the tomboy, as in duty bound, within the purple leash, and beckoned to the next girl in the row. They arranged themselves three abreast, and he drove them, to the inspiring two-step, across the room, in line with two other drivers similarly equipped. On the return trip they were confronted by three bands of prancing little boys, perilously realistic in their interpretation of the pretty figure, and as they met in the middle, with a scramble of adjustment, the steeds paired off neatly, and the flushed drivers, more or less entangled in their long ribbons, accomplished an ultimate two-step.

“Now, you choose me,” he commanded, as they scrambled into the chairs. Again she smiled, again she hid her cheek with her hair.

“All right,” she said again.

In vain Louise Hetherington made signs to him; in vain the rosy blonde snapped her fingers—he was blind and deaf. He slipped into the broad blue ribbon she held out to him at arm’s length, and cantered cheerfully before her, her slave forever. How lightly she floated on behind them! Not like that tomboy Frances, who clucked at her team as if they were horses, and nearly ran them down; nor like that silly, fat, yellow-curled Gladys, who bubbled with laughter and hung back on the satin reins until her team nearly fell over. Cecelia swam like thistledown in their wake, and slipped the ribbon over their heads with all the effect of a scarf dance.

“That will do for to-day,” said Miss Dorothy, gathering up the ribbons, and they surged into the dressing-rooms, to be buttoned up and pulled out of draughts and trundled home.

She was swathed carefully in a wadded silk jacket, and then enveloped in a hooded Mother Hubbard cloak; she looked like an angelic brownie. Dicky ran up to her as a woman led her out to a coupé at the curb, and tugged at the ribbon of her cloak.

“Where do you live? Say, where do you?” he demanded.

Her hair was under the hood, but she hid her face behind the woman.

“I—I don’t know,” she said softly. The woman laughed.

“Why, yes, you do, Cissy,” she reproved. “Tell him directly, now.”

She put one tiny finger in her mouth.

“I—I gueth I live on Chethnut Thtreet,” she called as the door slammed and shut her in.

His sister amicably offered him half the plush bag to carry, and opened a running criticism of the afternoon.

“Did you ever see anybody act like that Frannie Leach? She’s awfully rough. Miss Dorothy spoke to her twice—wasn’t that dreadful? What made you dance all the time with Cissy Weston? She’s an awful baby—a regular ’fraid-cat! We girls tease her just as easy—do you like her?”

“She’s the prettiest one there!” he said.

His sister stared at him.

“Why, Dick Pendleton, she is not! She’s so little—she’s not half so pretty as Agnes, or—or lots of the girls. She’s such a baby. She puts her finger in her mouth if anybody says anything at all. If you ask her a single thing she does like this: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’”

He smiled scornfully. Did he not know how she did it? Had he not seen that adorable finger, those appealing eyes?

“And she can’t talk plain! She lisps—truly she does!”

Heavens! Was ever a girl so thick-headed as that sister of his! Brains, technical knowledge, experience of the world, these he had never looked to find in her; but perceptions, feminine intuitions—were they lacking, too?

Poor deluded sex! What shall emancipation, what shall higher education profit you that cannot even now discern what charm has entangled your brothers and husbands?

“She puts her finger in her mouth! She can’t talk plain!” Alas, my sisters, it was Helen’s finger that toppled over Troy, and Diane de Poitiers stammered!

He listened calmly to his sister’s account of his infatuation and its causelessness.

“Why, she’s a nice little girl,” said his aunt, smiling, “but, really, she can’t be called exactly pretty. There is something rather attractive about her eyes.”

In this wise may Mark Antony’s aunt have dismissed the very Serpent of old Nile herself!

“I should like,” he said to his mother the next day, “to go and see her.”

“Well, you can go with me to-morrow, perhaps, when I call on Mrs. Weston,” she assented.

“What? Why, of course not! Men don’t go calling in pumps. Your best shoes will do. Are you crazy? A straw hat in February! You will wear your middy cap. Now don’t argue the matter, Richard, or you can’t go at all.”

Seated opposite her on a hassock, their mothers chatting across the room, his assurance withered away. There was nothing whatever to say, and he said it, adequately perhaps, but with a sense of deepening embarrassment. She took refuge behind her hair, and they stared uncomfortably at each other.

“And he has never condescended to have anything to do with little girls before, so we are much impressed.”

Oh, why did not the hassock yawn beneath him and swallow him up! To discuss him as if he were a piece of furniture! Laugh away! The crackling of thorns under a pot....

Day before yesterday he had been so easily _grand seigneur_, so tolerantly charmed: to-day he wished he had not come. Why didn’t she speak? If only they were out of doors; in a room with pictures and cushions a man is at such a disadvantage.

“If you’ll come over to my house, I’ll show you the biggest rat-hole you ever saw—it’s in the stable!” he said desperately. It was a good deal to do for a girl, but she was worth it.

“Oh! Oh!” she breathed, and her eyes widened.

“Maybe you can see the rat—he doesn’t often come out, though,” he added honestly.

She shuddered and twisted her fingers violently.

“No! No!” she whispered revoltedly. “I—I hate ratths! I dreamed about one! I had to have the gath lit! Oh, no!”

Frightened at this long speech, she looked obstinately in her lap, though he tried persistently to catch her eye and smile.

Their mothers’ voices rose and fell; they chattered meaninglessly. Ladies talked and talked: they never did anything to speak of, they only talked.

She would not look at him: at his wits’ ends, he played his highest card. If she were of mortal flesh and blood, this would interest her.

“Look here! Do you know what Boston bull pups are? Do you?”

She nodded vigorously.

“Well, you know their tails?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“You know they’re just little stumps?”

“Oh, yeth!” she beamed at him. “My Uncle Harry’th got a bulldog. Hith name ith Eli. He liketh me.”

“Well, see here! Do you know how they make their tails short? _A man bites ’em off!_ A fellow told me——”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” She shuddered off the hassock, and rushed to her mother, gasping with horror.

“He thayth—he thayth—” words failed her. Broken sobs of “Eli! Oh, Eli!” filled the parlor. He was dazed, terrified. What had happened? What had he done? He was shuffled disgracefully from the room; apologies rose above her sobbing; the door closed behind Dicky and his mother.

Waves of rebuke rolled over his troubled spirit.

“Of all dreadful things to say to a poor, nervous little girl! I am too mortified. Richard, how do you learn such dreadful, dreadful things? It’s not true.”

“But, mamma, it _is_! It truly is. When they are little a man bites them off. Peter told me so. He puts his mouth right down——”

“Richard! Not another word! You are disgusting—perfectly disgusting. You trouble me very much.”

He retired to the clothes-tree in the side yard—there were no junipers there—and cursed his gods. To have made her cry! They thought he didn’t care, but oh, he did! He felt as if he had eaten a cold, gray stone that weighed down his stomach. The cat slunk by, but he threw nothing at her, and his neighbor’s St. Bernard puppy rolled inquiringly into the hedge, stuck there, and thrashed about helplessly, but he said nothing to frighten it. He thought of supper—they had spoken of cinnamon rolls and little yellow custards—but without the usual thrill. What was the matter? Was he going to be sick? There seemed no outlook to life—one thing was as good as another. He regarded going to bed with a dull acquiescence. As well that as anything else. It might be eight o’clock now for all he cared.

At night his mother came and sat for a moment on the side of the bed.

“Papa doesn’t want you to feel too bad, dear,” she said. “He knows that you never meant to frighten Cecelia so. You know that little girls are very different from little boys in some ways. Things that seem—er—amusing to you, seem very cruel to them. To-morrow would you like to send her some flowers and write her a little note, and tell her how sorry you are?”

He could not speak, but he seized his mother’s hand and kissed it up to her lace ruffle. The cold, gray stone melted away from his stomach; again the future stretched rosily vague before him. In happy dreams he did the honors of the rat-hole to a sweet, shy guest.

In the morning he applied himself to his note of apology; his sister ruled the lines on a beautiful sheet of paper with a curly gold “P” at the top, and he bent to his task with extended tongue and lines between his eyes. Hitherto his mother had been his only correspondent. He carried her the note with a sense of justifiable pride.

“It’s spelled all right,” he said, “because every word I didn’t know I asked Bess, and she told me.”

_My dear Cecelia_:

I am going to send you some flowrs. I am sory they bite them of but they do. I hope you did not hafto lite the gas. we are all well and haveing a good time. with much love I am your loving son.

RICHARD CARR PENDLETON.

“Bess did the periods, but I remembered the large I’s myself,” he added comfortably. “Is it all right?”

His mother left the room abruptly, and he, supposing it to be one of her many suddenly-remembered errands, was mercifully unconscious of any connection between himself and the roars of laughter that came from his father’s study.

“Just as it is, mind you. Lizzie, just as it is!” his father called after her as she came out again; and though she insisted that it was too absurd, and that something was the matter with her children, she was sure, nevertheless she kissed him with no particular occasion, and held her peace nobly when he selected a hideous purple blossom with spotty leaves, assisted by the interested florist.

His offering was acceptable, and if, on the renewal of an acquaintance destined to grow into a gratifying intimacy, he learned from bitter experience that more than one subject was tabooed, that more than one sudden emotion must expect no answering sympathy, how was he to evade the tribulations of his kind? This cup was prepared for them from the beginning. If earthly bliss were flawless, should we concern ourselves at all with heaven?

That day she met him on her walk, and smiling almost fearlessly, offered him a camel animal cracker! True, the most obvious projection was bitten off, and that process is the best part of animal crackers; but then, she was only seven! It is not an age to which one looks for the most brilliant altruism.

He gave her in return a long-cherished cane-top of polished wood, cut in the shape of a greyhound’s head, with eyes of orange-colored glass. She seemed almost to appreciate it. He had been offered a white mouse for it more than once.

For two long months the Little God led him along the primrose way. The poor fellow thought it was the main road; he had yet to learn it was but a by-path. But the Little God was not through with him.

Her brother, an uninteresting fellow at first, had improved on acquaintance, and though he scoffed at Dicky’s devotion to his sister—thinking her a great baby—he had come to consider him a friend. One day, late in April, he led Dick out to a deserted corner of the grounds, and for the sum of a small red top and a blue glass eye that had been a doll’s most winning feature, consented to impart to him a song of such delicious badness that it had to be sung in secret. He had just learned it himself, and the knowledge of it admitted one to a sort of club, whose members were bound together by the vicious syllables. Dicky was pleasantly uncertain of its meaning, but it contained words that custom has banished from the family circle. They crooned it fearfully, with faces averted from the house, and an exhilarating sense of dissipation.

“_Yellow belly, yellow belly, come an’ take a swim! Yes, by golly, when the tide comes in!_”

As he slipped back to the house alone, practising it furtively and foretasting the joys of imparting it to Peter, the stableman, Cecelia appeared suddenly from behind a large tree. She was all smiles—she was not afraid of him any more. Dancing lightly on one foot, she waved her bonnet and began to sing, bubbling with laughter. Horror! What did he hear?

“_Yelly belly, yelly belly, comin’ take a thwim! Yith, by——_”

“Oh, stop! Cissy, stop it! You mustn’t sing that!” he cried wildly.

She looked elfish.

“Why not? Dicky thingth it,” she said with a happy smile.

She had a heavenly habit, left from babyhood, of referring to her interlocutor and occasionally to herself in the third person.

“But girls mustn’t sing it,” he warned her sternly. “Don’t you dare to—it’s a secret.”

She danced farther away.

“Dicky thingth it. Thithy thingth it!” she persisted, and as he scowled she pursed her lips again.

“_Yelly belly, yelly belly——_”

“I won’t sing it! I won’t!” he cried desperately. “I won’t if you’ll keep still! So there! I tell you I won’t!”

She stopped, amused at his emotion. All ignorant of his sacrifice, all careless of his heroic defense of her, she only knew that she could tease him in an entirely new way.

And the Little God, knowing that Dicky would keep his word, and that Peter would never get the chance for the scandalized admiration once in store for him, strutted proudly away and polished up his chains. His victim was secure.

Her brother, on learning the facts, suggested slapping her well—good heavens!—and having nothing more to do with her, for a mean, sneaking tattle-tale. Here was an opportunity to break his bonds. But to those who have served the Little God it will be no surprise to learn that it was on that very evening that he made his famous proposal to the assembled family, namely, that he and Cecelia should be really engaged like her Uncle Harry and Miss Merriam, and in a little while marry and set up housekeeping in the guest chamber.

“That’s what Miss Merriam is going to do,” he explained, “and Cissy’s grandma is sorry, too; it doesn’t leave her any place for company but the hall bedroom. But they’ve got to have the room, she s’poses.”

“That will do, Richard! You are not to repeat everything you hear. And I am afraid I need the guest chamber. What should we do when Aunt Nannie comes?”

“Oh, Cissy could have her crib right in the room. She wouldn’t mind Aunt Nanny,” he replied superbly. “She always sleeps in a crib, and she always will. A bed scares her—she’s afraid she’ll fall out. I could sleep on the couch, like Christmas time!”

But in the manner of age the wide world over, they merely urged him to wait. There was plenty of time. Time! and she might be living in the house with them!

It was that very night that he reached the top of the wave, and justified the Little God’s selection.

He came down to breakfast rapt and quiet. He salted his oatmeal by mistake and never knew the difference. His sister laughed derisively, and explained his folly to him as he swallowed the last spoonful, but he only smiled kindly at her. After his egg he spoke.

“I dreamed that it was dancing-school. And I went. And I was the only fellow there. And what do you think? _All the little girls were Cecelia!_”

They gasped.

“You don’t suppose he’ll be a poet, do you, Ritch.? Or a genius, or anything?” his mother inquired anxiously.

“Lord, no!” his father returned. “I should say he was more likely to be a Mormon!”

Dick knew nothing of either class. But the Little God knew very well what he was, and was at that moment making out his diploma.

_The End_

❦

By A. Conan Doyle

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

A Sherlock Holmes Novel

Illustrated by Sidney Paget

❦

_The London Chronicle_, in a review headed

“THE ZENITH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES,”

says:

“We should like to pay Dr. Doyle the highest compliment at our command. It is not simply that this book is superior in originality and construction to the earlier adventures of the great detective. Dr. Doyle has provided a criminal who, as Mr. Holmes admits, is indeed a foeman worthy of his steel.[1] Hitherto he has found it comparatively easy to unmask his antagonists. But in the present case he finds himself checkmated again and again. There is pitted against him a skill nearly equal to his own, and he wins the game almost by a hair.”

Footnote 1:

“I tell you, Watson, this time we have a foeman who is worthy of our steel.”—_Sherlock Holmes._

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By Stewart Edward White

THE BLAZED TRAIL

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THE WESTERNERS

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MR. WHITE shows us the rough-and-ready life of a Western mining camp.

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By George Douglas

THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS

❦

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Hardy, Stevenson, Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, and Æschylus.

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By Henry Wallace Phillips

RED SAUNDERS

His Adventures, West and East

❦

There is plenty of dash and adventure in this book, told with a humor whose most delightful quality is its unstudied naturalness. The critics are all laughing, not at the book, but with it.

* * * * *

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“The creator of Red Saunders has an exuberant sense of humor.”—_N. Y. Evening Telegram._

Second Edition $1.25

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. Changed “her little courtesy” to “her little curtsy” on p. 107. 2. Changed “liebchen” to “Liebchen” on p. 86. 3. Silently corrected typographical errors. 4. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed. 5. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Madness of Philip, by Josephine Dodge Daskam