Mr. Tollivant admitted that he was.
"Youngster whose moth--"
Mrs. Tollivant interrupted kindly. "You needn't be afraid of that. He's
been with us for five years. I think I may say that all traces of the
past have been outlived. We can really give him a good character."
Tom was grateful. Mr. Quidmore examined him again. At last he shuffled
up to him, throwing his arm across his shoulder, and drawing him close
to himself.
"What about it, young fellow? Want to come?"
Entirely won by this display of kindliness, the boy smiled up into the
twisted face. "Yes, sir."
"Then that's settled. Put your duds together, and we'll go along. I
guess," he added to Mr. Tollivant, "that you can stretch a point to let
him come, and get your permit from the Guardians to-morrow."
Mr. Tollivant agreeing that after five years' care he could venture as
much as this, they drove over to Bere in Mr. Quidmore's dilapidated
motor car. Mrs. Quidmore met them at the door. Her husband called to
her:
"Hello, there! Got a new hand to help you with the strawberries."
She answered, dejectedly. "If he's as good as some of the other new
hands you've picked up lately--"
"Oh, rats! Give us a rest! If I brought the angel Gabriel to pick the
berries you'd see something to find fault with."
That there was a rift within the lute of this couple's happiness was
clear to Tom before he had climbed out of the machine.
"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.
"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"
"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten
place."
"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and
his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs.
Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as
man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I
stand it. Get in."
Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The
Tollivant house, with four children in it, was often belittered, but
with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping
wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.
"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as
they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung
crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier
than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."
But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and
begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he
helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal
account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself
attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her
attractiveness.
"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he
dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But
he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."
This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it
reached him from both parties to the contract.
"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing
her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the
fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."
To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which
they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them
mere humorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed
with a feeling of discomfort.
The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the
one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to
reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the
conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier
for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband
overlooked.
"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull
rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Who _is_
that woman that he meets?"
Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible.
That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a
possibility that had never come within his experience while living with
the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from
some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide
observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped
on it.
"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and
they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you
keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"
For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know
what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked
them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving
came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes,
and whenever she went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his
wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle,
honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them
ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a
son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as
a son.