"Perhaps she feels that it would be better for David to be-in different
surroundings."
"But Willy! Wednesday night she told me that I must be sure and bring
him back to her on Saturday. What has happened between Wednesday and
Saturday?"
"Very likely nothing has happened between Wednesday and Saturday. But
perhaps she has just made up her mind."
"Ho!" said Dr. Lavendar; and after a while he added, "'Um."
Monday morning he went up to the Stuffed Animal House. But Mrs. Richie
sent word down-stairs that she wasn't well; would he be so kind as to
excuse her and to keep David a little longer. Sarah, when she gave the
message, looked as mystified as Dr. Lavendar felt. "I always thought
she was just wrapped up in that there boy," she told Maggie; "and yet
she lets him stay away two days after he gets home!" Dr. Lavendar,
poking on with Goliath up the hill to Benjamin Wright's, had very much
the same feeling: "Queer! I wish Willy wasn't bottled up; of course he
knows what it means. Well; if I wait, she'll explain it herself."
But many days were to pass before Helena made any effort to explain.
And meantime Dr. Lavendar's mind was full of something else: old
Benjamin Wright was running down-hill very rapidly.
In certain ways he seemed better; he could talk--and swear--quite
fluently. "He sayed to me, this mawnin'," Simmons told Dr. Lavendar,
"'Simmons, you freckled nigger,' he sayed, 'in the name of Lot's wife,
who salted my porridge?' He spoke out just as plain!" Simmons detailed
this achievement of the poor dulled tongue, with the pride of a mother
repeating her baby's first word. Then he simpered with a little vanity
of his own: "He was always one to notice my freckles," he said.
Benjamin Wright, lying in his bed with his hat on noticed other things
than Simmons's freckles, and spoke of them, too, quite distinctly. "My
boy, S-Sam, is a good boy. He comes up every day. Well, Lav-Lavendar,
sometimes I think I was--at fault?"
"I know you were, Benjamin. Have you told him so?"
"Gad-a-mercy! N-no!" snarled the other. "He would be too puffed up.
Won't do to make young people v-vain."
He "took notice," too, Simmons said, of the canaries; and he even
rolled out, stammeringly, some of his favorite verses. But, in spite of
all this, he was running down-hill; he knew it himself, and once he
told Dr. Lavendar that this business of dying made a man narrow. "I
th-think about it all the time," he complained. "Can't put my mind on
anything else. It's damned narrowing."
Yet William King said to Dr. Lavendar that he thought that if the old
man could be induced to talk of his grandson, he might rally. "He never
speaks of him," the doctor said, "but I am sure he is brooding over him
all the time. Once or twice I have referred to the boy, but he pretends
not to hear me. He's using up all his strength to bear the idea that he
is to blame, I wish I could tell him that he isn't," the doctor ended,
sighing.
They had met in the hall as William was coming down-stairs and Dr.
Lavendar going up. Simmons, who had been shuffling about with a
decanter and hospitable suggestions, had disappeared into the
dining-room.
"Well," said Dr. Lavendar, "why don't you tell him? Though in fact,
perhaps he is to blame in some way that we don't know? You remember, he
said he had 'angered the boy'?"
"No; that wasn't it," said William.
Dr. Lavendar looked at him with sudden attention. "Then what--" he
began, but a lean, freckled shadow in the dining-room doorway, spoke up:
"Maybe he might 'a' made Marster Sam's Sam mad, suh, that night; maybe
he might 'a'. But that weren't no reason," said Simmons, in a quivering
voice, "for a boy to hit out and give his own grandfather a lick. No,
suh; it warn't. An' call him a liar!" Dr. Lavendar and William King
stared at each other and at the old man, in shocked dismay. "His
grandfather used words, maybe, onc't in a while," Simmons mumbled on,
"but they didn't mean no mo'n skim-milk. Don't I know? He's damned me
for forty years, but he'll go to heaven all the same. The Lawd wouldn't
hold it up agin' him. if a pore nigger wouldn't. If He would, I'd as
lief go to hell with Mr. Benjamin as any man I know. Yes, suh, as I
would with you yo'self, Dr. Lavendar. He was cream kind; yes, he was!
One o' them pore white-trash boys at Morison's shanty Town, called me
'Ashcat' onc't; Mr. Wright he cotched him, and licked him with his own
hands, suh! An' he was as kind to Marster Sam as if he was a baby. But
Marster Sam hit him a lick. No, suh; it weren't right--" Simmons rubbed
the cuff of his sleeve over his eyes, and the contents of the tilting
decanter dribbled down the front of his spotted old coat.
"Simmons," said Dr. Lavendar, "what had they been quarrelling about?"
But Simmons said glibly, that 'fore the Lawd, he didn't know.
"He does know," said Dr. Lavendar, as the man again retired to his
pantry. "But, after all, the subject of the quarrel doesn't make any
difference. To think that the boy struck him! That must be a
satisfaction to Benjamin."
"A satisfaction?" William repeated, bewildered.
But Dr. Lavendar did not explain. He went on up-stairs, and sat beside
the very old man, listening to his muffled talk, and saying what he
could of commonplace things. Once Benjamin Wright asked about Mrs.
Richie:
"That female at the S-Stuffed Animal House-how is she? Poor cr-creeter;
pretty creeter! Tell her--"
"What, Benjamin?"
"Nothing." And then abruptly, "It was my fault. I made him angry. Tell
her."
He did not refer to her again; nor did he speak of the boy, except at
the very end. The end came the week that David was staying at the
Rectory; and perhaps Dr. Lavendar's pitying absorption in that dreary
dying, made him give less thought to the pleasure as well as the
perplexity of the child's presence; though certainly, when he got back
from his daily visit at The Top, he found David a great comfort. Dr.
Lavendar stopped twice that week to see Mrs. Richie, but each time she
sent word that she was engaged, would he excuse her? "Engaged," in the
sense of not wishing to see a neighbor, was a new word in Old Chester.
Dr. Lavendar did not insist. He went on up the hill to that other
house, where, also, there was a deep preoccupation which Benjamin
Wright had called "narrowing"; but here he was not shut out. He always
stopped to say a friendly word to Simmons, sniffling wretchedly about
among the cages in the dining-room, and then went on up-stairs.
On this October afternoon the old servant sneaked up at his heels; and
sliding into the room behind him as noiselessly as a shadow, settled
down on his hunkers close to the bedside. Once he put up a lean yellow
hand, and patted the bedclothes; but he made no more claim to attention
than a dog might have done. Dr. Lavendar found his senior warden in the
sick-room. Of late Samuel had been there every day; he had very little
to say to his father, not from any lingering bitterness, but because,
to poor Samuel, all seemed said--the boy was dead. When Dr. Lavendar
came in he glanced at the bed, and then, with a start, at the heavy
middle-aged figure sitting listlessly at the bedside. Samuel nodded
solemnly.
"A matter of hours, William says. I shall not go home until it's over."
"Does he hear you?" said Dr. Lavendar, in a low voice, leaning over to
look into the gray face.
"Oh, no;" said Samuel.
The dying man opened one eye and looked at his son. "How much you
know!" he said, then closed it again.
"Are you comfortable, Benjamin?" Dr. Lavendar asked him. There was no
reply.
Samuel's face reddened. "You can't tell when he hears," he said. It was
then that Simmons put out his hand and patted the bedclothes over the
old feet.
They sat there beside him for an hour before Benjamin Wright spoke
again; then William King came in, and stood looking down at him.
"He'll just sleep away," he told the son.
"I hope he is prepared," said Samuel, and sighed. He turned his back on
the big bed with the small figure sliding down and down towards the
foot-board, and looked out of the window. The boy had not been prepared!
Suddenly, without opening his eyes, Benjamin Wright began:
"'Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Qua nunc abibis in loca?'
"What do you think, Lavendar?"
"It will return to God, who gave it," said Dr. Lavendar.
There was another silence; until he wakened to say, brightly, "Simmons,
you freckled nigger, you'd better wring their necks, now, I guess."
"No, suh," came a murmur from the shadow on the floor, "I'm a-goin to
take care of 'em fine. Yes, suh, I'll chop their eggs small; I sho'ly
will."
The dying hand began to wander over the coverlet; his son took it, but
was fretfully repulsed; then Dr. Lavendar made a sign, and Simmons laid
his thin old hand on it, and Benjamin Wright gave a contented sigh.
After a while he opened that one eye again, and looked at Dr. Lavendar;
"Isn't it cus-customary on such occasions, to--admonish?" he said,
peevishly; "you ain't doing your duty by me, Lavendar."
"You don't need admonition, Benjamin. You know what to do."
Silence again, and after a while a broken murmur: "'I here forget...
cancel all grudge, repeal thee...'" Then distinctly and quietly he
said: "Sam, will you forgive me?"
Samuel Wright nodded; he could not speak at first, and Simmons lifting
his head, looked at him, fiercely; then he swallowed several times, and
said, with ponderous dignity: "Certainly, father. Certainly." And
Simmons fell back into the shadows.
"Of course," murmured Benjamin Wright, "if I g-get well, it needn't
hold, you know."
After that he seemed to sleep a little, until, his eyes still closed,
he said, "The boy slapped my face. So it's all right."
Samuel started up from his chair at the bedside, shocked and protesting.
"Gad-a-mercy!" said Benjamin Wright, fretfully, opening his eye and
looking at him--"that makes us square! Don't you see?"
There was a long silence. Once Dr. Lavendar spoke to him, and once
William King touched his wrist, but he seemed to sleep. Then abruptly,
and quite clearly, he spoke:
"'Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius'.... Lavendar?"
"Yes, Benjamin?"
"The debt is paid. Hey? I got the receipt."
"He is wandering," said Samuel. "Father, what do you want?"
But he did not speak again.