The Lieutenant paused helplessly.
“_In this faith_,” added the Vicar with triumph, dashing on with almost
unintelligible rapidity, “_and evermore defend ’s from all ’dversities,
who livest ’n’ reignest one God, world ’thout end. Amen!_”
She took a necessary breath, and pushed back her mask still further from
her tumbled bang.
The Head Captain was visibly impressed. It had never occurred to him to
say a collect. The Lieutenant was not such a poor stick, after all.
Gravely he led the way down-stairs and climbed abstractedly through the
little window. Something was evidently on his mind.
“The last time I saw that pirate,” he began.
The Lieutenant tripped, and sat down abruptly.
“The—the last time you saw him?” he stammered.
“That’s what I said,” responded the Head Captain shortly. “The last time
I saw him I didn’t s’pose I’d have to bury him. He’d just got a lot of
treasure and stuff and—_Sst! Sst!_ For your lives!”
They scuttled off desperately. The ground was new to them, and had it
not been for providential garbage barrels and outhouses, they could
hardly have hoped to conceal themselves from the man who was raking up
the yard. To avoid him they dashed straight through his barn, and
rounded a summer-house without perceiving a small tea-party going on
there, till they ran through it, to their own sick terror, and the
abject amazement of the tea-party. They tore through a hedge, panted a
doubtful moment in a woodhouse, then took up their headlong flight with
the vague, straining pace of crowded dreams. On, on, on. Slip behind
that lilac clump—wait! _Sst! Sst!_ Then get along! Oh, hurry, hurry!
Pick up your sash! Whose _is_ this yard? Never mind! hurry!
[Illustration: “_Then took up their headlong flight._”]
They dropped exhausted under their own pear tree.
“My, but that was a close shave! I thought they’d got us sure!” breathed
the Head Captain.
“Wh-who were they?” asked the Lieutenant, round-eyed.
“Who were they? Who were they?” the Head Captain repeated scornfully.
“The idea! I guess you’d find out who they were if they caught you
once!”
The Lieutenant shot a sly glance at the Vicar. Did she know? You never
could tell, she pretended so. She shivered at the Head Captain’s
implication.
“Yes, sirree, I guess you’d find out then,” she assured him.
Suddenly the Head Captain’s face fell. “The treasure!” he gasped. “It’s
gone!”
In dismay they turned out their pockets. All those vessels of gold and
vessels of silver were lost—lost in that last mad rush. All but the
shallow, gold-colored saucer in the Vicar’s hand. They looked at it
enviously, but honor kept them silent. To the Vicar belonged the spoils.
“I don’t see what good they were, anyhow,” began the Lieutenant
morosely.
“’Good’?” mimicked the Head Captain, enraged. “’Good’? Why, didn’t we
_steal_ ’em?”
Slowly they took off their uniforms and hid them under the back piazza.
Slowly the occasion faded into the light of common day; objects lost
their mystery, the barn and the tool-house imperceptibly divested
themselves of all glamour. It was only the back yard.
The Head Captain and the Lieutenant threw themselves down under the pear
tree again and fell into a doze. The Vicar, grasping her treasure,
stumbled up the back stairs and took an informal nap on the landing. It
must have been at this time that the gold-colored saucer slipped from
her hand, for when she woke on the sofa in the upper hall, it was
nowhere about.
The same hands that had transferred her to that more conventional
resting-place, bathed and attired her for supper, and though two hours
ago she would, as a pirate, have exulted in her guilty possession,
somehow as a neat, small person in pink ribbons she felt shy at
approaching the subject, and ate her custard in silence.
[Illustration: “_A neat small person in pink ribbons._”]
Some time during the hours of the next long morning, as she played
quietly on the piazza, she caught her mother’s voice, slightly raised to
reach the cook’s ear:
“Why, I suppose it is. I shouldn’t wonder, Maggie. I suppose the child
picked it up somewhere. Did you hear that, Fred, about Mr. Van Tuyl’s
best harness? All scattered through half the back yards on Winter
Street. All those brass ornaments, and parts of the very side-lamps,
too. Fortunately they found it all. Take that piece, Maggie, and give it
to the man when you see him.”
The Vicar sighed. Just then she felt, with the poet, that home-keeping
hearts are happiest.
BOBBERT’S MERRY CHRISTMAS
“And _that’s_ how I came to be born in a manger!” Bobbert concluded.
The baby nodded, her mouth a comprehending bud, her eyes big with
interest.
“Nuv’ ’tory! Tell Babe nuv’ ’tory!” she demanded.
“So then the wise men came. They were shepherds. They came with their
flocks-by-night——”
“Huh?”
“Flocks-by-night, I say. It was something they had. They brought me some
Frank’s incense——”
“Unka F’ank! _Goo-ood_ Unka F’ank!”
“_Will_ you keep still? It wasn’t that Frank.”
“_Warum nicht?_” inquired the baby, with a startling intelligibility.
Her German, for some reason best known to herself, was as distinct as
her English was garbled.
“Because it isn’t, silly. Uncle Frank isn’t a wise man—he’s a p’fessor
in college. And they brought me——”
“Look here, Bobbert, what on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m telling her all about Christmas, Uncle Frank.” Bobbert removed the
corner of the rug from the baby’s mouth and handed her her silk rag
doll. “Minna said to amuse her, and I was. About the manger I was
telling——”
“So I heard. But why do you cast it in that form precisely? You see, you
weren’t born in one, and—and—er—you really oughtn’t to talk that way,
don’t you know.”
“Why wasn’t I?”
“Because you weren’t.”
“Well, where was I, then?”
“You were born in this house.”
“Where in this house?”
“Where? Why, upstairs, I suppose.”
“Are people always born upstairs?”
“Usually.”
“Never born down-stairs at all? Didn’t you ever know anybody that was
born down—”
“Oh, stop, Bobbert! Go on amusing your sister. You have a genius for
pure idiocy. Where’s your mother?”
Bobbert’s face fell. The baby tore off a bit of her doll and swallowed
it unrebuked—it was one of her swallowing days—and began wetting her
finger and following in a smudgy outline the figures on the Kate
Greenaway wall-paper, without one reprimand from her brother.
“’F I’m goin’ to have a tree, I want to make it myself. They’re all down
in the lib’r’y, and I have to keep out. They’ve got a ladder in there,
too. And they laugh all the time. I have to stay here with _her_! What’s
the good o’ calling it my tree if I can’t help? Aunt Helena says won’t
my eyes pop out when I see; but they won’t.”
(“Hadn’t she better keep the doll to play with and eat something else?”)
“I think I might go in! Here, stop eating that, Baby! Let go! Somebody
fell off the ladder, too, and there I was out in the hall! I don’t
believe they had the little back thing up that keeps it from doubling
up, sort of, that way it does, you know. Do you? I could ’a’ told them
about that. What’s the good of a tree, anyway?”
(“Do you think she improves the wall-paper with that border? Perhaps the
color comes off.”)
“Here, stop that! Don’t suck your hand, Baby. Oh, goodness! I wish Minna
was here. I’m not a nurse. I never made such a fuss when I was little, I
know. If I had a tree for anybody, I’d let them have the fun of it.
Wouldn’t you?”
His audience looked uncertain. In his heart he felt that his nephew was
right, but prudence restrained him, and he rose to go with a temporizing
air. “Well, you know, it’s usually done this way,” he suggested. “It’s
supposed to be in the nature of a surprise. If you arranged the whole
thing, there wouldn’t be anybody to surprise, would there?”
Bobbert sniffed. “Oh, if you stay out, we could s’prise you, I s’pose,”
he said, somewhat cynically.
“But I’ve seen so many trees——” The defence was very feeble, and he knew
it.
[Illustration: “’_Here, stop that._’”]
“Oh, all right,” said Bobbert testily, jerking the baby away from the
high fender. “And they’re popping corn over the fire in there; I heard
it pop. And Aunt Helena said that it was so good sugared, and that fat
one—the one with the yellow mustache—said that he should think all that
she ate would taste——”
“How do you know what they said?”
“I heard.”
“How?”
“I heard.”
“How did you hear?”
“Through the key-hole!” Bobbert set his jaw and twisted a piece of the
baby’s dress nervously.
“And since when have you adopted that method of obtaining information,
Robertson?”
“I don’t care! I only did a moment! I don’t care if it is sneaky—I might
just as well be sneaky if I’m not going to Annapolis! If I do anything
at all, everybody says: ‘Oh dear! I’m afraid you’ll never be a
lieutenant, after all. They never do so!’ And if I say I’m going to be
one, they say, ‘I wouldn’t count on it, Bobbert,’ till I’m just sick and
tired! Am I going to Annapolis? Am I? I don’t care about the old tree if
I know that.”
“My dear boy, how do I know? It will depend on—on—on circumstances,” he
concluded weakly.
Bobbert stamped his foot. His uncle slipped out of the room.
In the library the tree was towering to completion. A gilt angel held
ropes of pop-corn that straggled artistically downward; snowy,
ribbon-bound packets dangled from the boughs; candles dotted the ends.
Aunts and uncles chattered and laughed and quarrelled amicably, while
Bobbert’s father and mother, bubbling over with delight and busyness and
vague Christmas good feeling, ran about holding the same parcels,
straightening the same red candle, pulling at the same rope of
cranberries.
“Isn’t it grand, Frank? This is really the best we’ve ever had. How are
the children? Do they suspect anything?”
“Nothing—nothing whatever,” he assured her. “Bobbert thinks the odor of
hemlock and pop-corn is to be attributed to the window-boxes, and I have
no doubt that he supposes you’re conducting a funeral down here. It’s so
still and solemn.”
“Oh, Frank, how absurd! Well, I suppose he does begin to suspect——”
“My dear sister, your penetration does you credit. Bobbert is only nine,
and he has only seen this performance nine times, so it would be odd if
he should have any _exact_ idea of what you are all doing, but he
probably has a dim——”
“Now, Frank, you are tiresome. Of course he knows, but how can he know
the size of it? He never saw one so big. And we never had so many
candles—there are three boxes here. And look at this. What do you think
Uncle Ritch. has sent him?”
One of the aunts waved at him a set of red, blue and yellow balls
attached by elastic cords to a brightly colored stick.
“I suppose the dear old man thinks Bobbert is about two years old! Where
have you put that Japanese juggler’s outfit, Kate? See, Frank, that
beautiful French puzzle! It’s awfully interesting. I hope he’ll like it.
More candy? The idea! The child would die! Where’s Father Robertson’s
bird-book, dear? I sha’n’t dare let him take it alone; it’s too
exquisite. See, Frank, there are two hundred and fifty colored plates.
Isn’t it beautiful?”
Bobbert’s uncle fell upon the book. “By George!” he said, “but that’s a
beauty! Rather wasted on Bobbert, isn’t it? Doesn’t know an ostrich from
a canary, does he?”
“Well, that’s what Father Robertson wants him to learn!” they cried in
chorus.
He nodded doubtfully. “Pity he can’t come in and help,” he suggested,
“he’d enjoy this rumpus.”
They stared at him in consternation.
“Why, Francis Robertson, what are you thinking of? Have Bobbert help on
his own tree? Are you crazy?”
“I suppose it wouldn’t do,” he admitted, “but you see that’s just what a
little fellow likes—all the noise and fuss and running about and
the—smells,” he added vaguely.
“The smells?” demanded Bobbert’s mother.
“The hemlock and the candy and the _new_ smell of all the things,” he
persisted.
“In short,” said the fat one with the yellow mustache, looking up from a
box of many-colored baubles with which he and Aunt Helena were playing
in undisguised joy, “just what we like!”
“Precisely,” remarked Uncle Frank.
“Really,” said Aunt Kate, somewhat stiffly, “if Bobbert and Babe should
help about the tree, I can’t quite see whom we’d call in to see it this
evening! What are we working so hard for—to please ourselves?”
“Oh, no! great heavens, no!” cried Uncle Frank.
Bobbert’s father appeared with an armful of steel rails and
cross-pieces. “What do you say to this, Robertson?” he called
delightedly. “Jove! these are heavy. Three switches to the thing, and
you ought to see the engine! There’s a parlor-car, a smoker, and two
passengers. See the tender? Jove! I call that pretty good. Ring the
bell, Kate. Look at that piston-rod, Frank!”
They clustered about him excitedly.
“Father sent it round just now. Wouldn’t tell what he paid for the
thing. You clamp it down to the carpet—right through it goes. There are
forty-two feet of railing—how’s that? Four curves and three
switches—regular thing, you know. We’ll put it right through the
library, across the hall, and loop it back in front of the conservatory.
What do you say?”
“Won’t he be delighted!” sighed the aunts.
“Can we get it down before evening?” said Bobbert’s mother nervously.
“Well, I should say so!” The fat one with the yellow mustache seized an
armful of rails and began to study the joinings; Bobbert’s father and
Uncle Christopher explained the switch-workings eagerly to each other;
and Bobbert’s mother flew about wondering how the rugs could stand it,
and picturing Bobbert’s joy as the train puffed out from the base of the
tree.
“This is great!” Uncle Christopher cried, as the rails went down with
wonderful celerity. “Haven’t had such fun in an age! Half the fun’s in
getting it ready!”
The fat one with the mustache glanced up and caught Uncle Frank’s eye.
“Perhaps he’d rather——”
Bobbert’s mother shook her head at them. “Now stop right there,” she
said merrily, “if you’re going to suggest that he should come down and
help! You don’t seem to see my plan at all, Frank. I want this thing to
be perfect—I want it all to burst on him at once. How can we put it down
in the evening when we’re all dressed? And there wouldn’t be time,
anyway. Oh, Chris, you didn’t get him that, too? See that lovely dog
collar! And the chain, too! Now Don will look respectable. Just step up
stairs, won’t you, Frank, and keep Bob on that floor till supper? Minna
will bring it to him up there. He’ll see the rails, you see, if he comes
down into the hall. Helena, if you and Mr. Ferris eat any more of that
broken candy, you’ll certainly be sick. No, I don’t mean ill—I mean
plain sick.”
“Do you mean to say you’re not going to let that child out into the
dining-room? He’ll be so disgusted there’ll be no managing him.”
Bobbert’s mother looked plaintive. “I wish to heaven, Frank,” she said,
“that you had some children of your own! Perhaps you wouldn’t be so
ridiculous then. How on earth is it going to hurt Bobbert, to-night of
all nights, to stay in the nursery a few hours, just so that we may all
toil for his own particular amusement? Tell him a story, or something.
We’ll barely have time——”
A burst of laughter interrupted her. Uncle Christopher had wound up the
train and started it on what extent of rail was already laid, to his own
great comfort and the disgust of Bobbert’s father and the fat one with
the mustache, who shrieked at him to “stop it off,” and nervously waved
their hands at the engine as it hove down upon the unfinished curve at
the hearth rug, while Aunt Helena waved a red flag wildly, and Aunt Kate
began to pass round a hat for a purse for “the brave girl who risked her
life so gallantly to save the train.”
[Illustration: “’_What are they doing in the hall?_’”]
He left them with a chuckle, and began to mount the stairs two steps at
a time, just saving himself from falling upon a huddled group at the top
of the flight.
“What _are_ they doing in the hall?” Bobbert demanded, abruptly,
clutching the baby’s skirts with one hand and supporting himself in a
peering attitude with the other. “What makes ’em scream that way? Why do
they say, ‘Down brakes’? Is it a game? When Aunt Helena laughs and
laughs that way, she us’ally cries afterward.”
Uncle Frank towed them back into the nursery, and led the conversation
story-ward, but Bobbert was not to be beguiled.
“I’m tired of stories. I’d rather be down-stairs,” he yawned. “I know
one thing—if I get another old carpenter’s set, I’ll sell it to-morrow
for five cents. I hate ’em. All I want’s a boat, and I can’t have that.
I don’t see why I can’t go out, if it _is_ snowing. I never can do a
single thing I want, anyway.”
“You are a little cross,” observed his uncle, surveying him critically,
“but I don’t know that I blame you. Minna’s coming up soon.”
“Well, she better.” Bobbert scowled at the baby, who smiled sweetly
back.
“You’re bad,” he said, shortly.
“Oh, _nein_,” she smiled.
[Illustration:
“_‘Oh, nein,’ she smiled._
_‘Oh, ja,’ he scowled._”
]
“Oh, _ja_,” he scowled. “You’re always chewing the wrong thing. Look at
your shoe, all wet! What’ll Minna say?”
She screwed her face into wrinkles and shook her head, wringing her
hands with Minna’s gesture. “_Pfui! pfui doch! ’s ist abscheulich!_” she
scolded.
“I don’t believe you’ll get a present at all,” he continued.
“Babe get p’es’t! Babe get big p’es’t!”
“Not a one! Not a one!” he persisted.
Her eyes filled; she implored him earnestly.
“_P’ease_, Babe get big p’es’t!”
“Not a——”
“Stop teasing your sister, Bobbert. Of course she’ll get a present. Why
not?”
“Because she swore.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean what I say.”
“When did she swear?”
“Day before yesterday night. She said she was going to be bad when she
got up, and they kept at her to say she wouldn’t and she said she would.
She can be the worst you ever saw.”
“Worse ever saw!” echoed the baby.
“And all day they were afraid she would be, and she wasn’t and she
wasn’t, and she wasn’t. Not till she went to bed. And she said her
prayers—that one she says, ‘_Herr Jesus, mild und_—something—_Du_’—and
then she just looked right up at the ceiling and swore as hard as she
could.”
“What in th—time did she say?”
“She said: ‘O Lord! Good Heavens! Damn!’”
[Illustration: “’_Oh Lord! Good Heavens! Damn!_’”]
“Oh!”
“And she got her little hands mighty well slapped, too. She must never
say it again, must you, Baby?”
The baby laughed impishly. There was no telling what more she knew.
At exactly half-past six the library doors flew open with a bang, the
piano struck up a brilliant march and Minna escorted her charges
pompously down the stairs, the baby in white, with a bewildering number
of pink bows, Bobbert in a blue sailor suit.
Around the gleaming tree stood a ring of aunts, uncles and grandparents,
flushed and happy.
“Merry Christmas, Bobbert! Merry Christmas, Babe! How do you like it?
Isn’t it grand? See the angel? See the pop-corn? Don’t look at the floor
yet! (No, it isn’t time so soon. Chris will start it.) Well, was it
lovely, bless her little heart? _Wunderschön, Liebchen, nicht wahr?_”
Bobbert smiled perfunctorily at the tree, blinked a little, leaped
through the ring of bright-frocked relatives, and fell upon a red-faced,
apologetic man standing with the group of delighted servants near the
door.
“Hello David!” he cried. “When did you come back? Are you going to stay?
Did you know I could swim? Will you tell me a story to-night?”
David, whose only fault was too great an attachment to the cup that
cheered him too frequently, and who had been devoted to Bobbert, coughed
deprecatingly and explained: “Only dropped in for the tree, Mr. Bob,
your papa havin’ asked me in with the rest. And a fine tree it is, I’m
sure. I expect most o’ them presents will be for you, Mr. Bob?”
David prefixed the title of respect in public, but his private relations
with Bobbert had been anything but formal.
Aunt Kate, dancing with impatience, had begun to detach the presents
from the lower boughs, and soon they were piling up around him.
“Master Robertson Wheeler. Master Robertson Wheeler—oh, Bobbert, that’s
a whopping fine present. Miss Dorothea Wheeler. _Siehst du, mein süsses
Kind?_ Master Robertson Wheeler. See what Uncle Ritch. sent you, Bob! He
forgot how you had grown!”
They were laughing, explaining, thanking, eating, all at once.
“And the candy, mother’ll keep till to-morrow. Now, Bob, see! Under the
tree!”
The engine rattled proudly forth. The uncles and aunts fell upon it.
“There! I told you it wasn’t oiled enough! See, where the smoke-stack
joins on! Will she take the curve by the rug? See, Bobbert, how the
switches work! Real switches! Father! Here, this way, Father Robertson!
Mr. Ferris is going to work the switch. Isn’t it wonderful, Bobbert?
It’s from Grandpa Wheeler. Thank him. It goes through the hall. Oh,
Kate, you can’t work that switch, can you? See Aunt Kate work the
switch, dear.”
Bobbert watched it curiously. He ran forward to the third switch.
“Want to see how it goes, Bob? Here, I’ll work it for you. It’s a little
catchy at first. Yes indeed, Mr. Robertson, we had more fun than a
little getting this ready, I assure you. Quite complete, isn’t it?”
Uncle Christopher began to juggle with the Japanese outfit, to the
intense delight of the servants. The aunties and Mr. Ferris played with
the engine explaining its mechanism to the wondering grandfathers.
Grandma Wheeler marvelled at the French dissecting puzzle. Bobbert’s
mother happily guarding the candy, laughed at the baby, who, harnessed
into the dog collar, pranced along before her father, waving the colored
balls in the air, a woolly lamb under her free arm. The merry moments
passed.
Suddenly Grandfather Wheeler looked up from the bird-book, which he was
sharing with Uncle Frank. “But where is Robertson, Jr.?” he inquired
mildly.
They stared. “Why, right here,” they said. But he was not right there.
Uncle Frank looked about comprehensively at the relatives and smiled a
superior smile. Then his eye fell on the bird-book in his lap, and the
smile changed its quality.
He glanced at the ring of servants. “And where is David?” he added.
Suddenly he sprang to his feet. “Come on!” he said. “We’ll find him.
Don’t make a noise—walk softly, now.”
And still holding the presents, they trooped after him through the hall,
Bobbert’s mother close to the leader, the aunties and Mr. Ferris at the
end of the line. Through the dining-room, through the wide pantry,
through the hall, and up to the kitchen door they tiptoed.
Uncle Frank paused a moment, nodded, and made room for Bobbert’s father,
while the grandfathers crowded up and the aunties peeped under and over.
On the floor before the well-swept kitchen hearth sat David; beside him,
a little space away, squatted Bobbert, a long black hockey-stick in his
hand. Between them were arranged large pieces of coal from the
hod—arranged in what appeared to be nine-pin patterns.
“I shall attack from the right at daybreak. You’ll see what the Mosquito
Fleet can do, Mr. David! Your clumsy old Spanish ships can’t move quick
enough! Can they?”
“Wait and see, Bob, my boy!”
“This coal makes dandy ships—don’t it? A lot of coal would be a fine
present—wouldn’t it? They use wood upstairs, and I don’t believe I could
get hold of any. Are you enjoying yourself, David?”
“You bet I am, Bob. Put your flagship in line.”
“Well, I will. She was out for—for repairs. When I go skating, David,
I’ll never use any other hockey-stick. I wanted a black one next to a
boat. You were lovely to give it to me. I’ll be big enough for a boat
next year, I hope.”
“Well, now it’s daybreak. Lieutenant, are you ready?”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Begin the fight!”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
The coal flew about thick and fast, the commanders shuffled the lumps
into place, cheering and encouraging their officers and crews. Ship
after ship sank, to rise no more, in a clatter of coal on the hearth.
Under cover of the noise Uncle Frank led them away, silent, through the
empty rooms, to where the deserted Christmas tree sheltered only Minna,
cooing German cradle-songs to her sleeping baby.
“Now look here,” he said. “Let’s be sensible, dear people. We’ll go on
enjoying our presents and sports—and let Bobbert enjoy his. Why not,
eh?”
THE HEART OF A CHILD