Before they entered the Court of Honor Meg stopped them both. She was
palpitating with excitement.
“Robin,” she said, “let us make him shut his eyes. Then you can take one
of his hands and I can take the other, and we will lead him. And when we
have taken him to the most heavenly place, he shall look—suddenly!”
“I should like that,” said Ben, tremulous with anticipation.
“All right,” said Robin.
By this time it was as if they had been friends all their lives. They
knew each other. They had not ceased talking a moment since they set
out, but it had not been about the Fair. Meg had decided that nothing
should be described beforehand; that all the entrancement of beauty
should burst upon Ben’s hungry soul, as Paradise bursts upon translated
spirits.
“I don’t want it to be gradual,” she said, anxiously. “I want it to be
_sudden_! It can be gradual after.”
She was an artist and an epicure in embryo, this child. She tasted her
joys with a delicate palate, and lost no flavor of them. The rapture of
yesterday was intensified ten-fold to-day, because she felt it throbbing
anew in this frail body beside her, in which Nature had imprisoned a
soul as full of longings as her own, but not so full of power.
They took Ben by either hand, and led him with the greatest care. He
shut his eyes tight, and walked between them. People who glanced at them
smiled, recognizing the time-honored and familiar child trick. They did
not know that this time it was something more than that.
“The trouble is,” Meg said in a low voice to Robin, “I don’t know which
is the most heavenly place to stand. Sometimes I think it is at one end,
and sometimes at the other, and sometimes at the side.”
They led their charge for some minutes indefinitely. Sometimes they
paused and looked about them, speaking in undertones. Ben was rigidly
faithful, and kept his eyes shut. As they hesitated for a moment near
one of the buildings, a man who was descending the steps looked in their
direction, and his look was one of recognition. It was the man who had
watched them the day before, and he paused upon the steps, interested
again, and conscious of being curious.
“What are they going to do?” he said to himself. “They are going to do
something. Where did they pick up the other one—poor little chap!”
Meg had been looking very thoughtful during that moment of hesitancy.
She spoke, and he was near enough to hear her.
“He shall open them where he can hear the water splashing in the
fountain,” she said. “I think that’s the best.”
It seemed that Robin thought so, too. They turned and took their way to
the end of the Court, where the dome lifted itself, wonderful, against
the sky, and a splendor of rushing water, from which magnificent
sea-monsters rose, stood grand before.
Their man followed them. He had had a bad night, and had come out into a
dark world. The streams of pleasure-seekers, the gayly fluttering flags,
the exhilaration in the very air seemed to make his world blacker and
more empty. A year before he had planned to see this wonder, with the
one soul on earth who would have been most thrilled, and who would have
made him most thrill, to its deepest and highest meaning. Green grass
and summer roses were waving over the earth that had shut in all dreams
like these, for him. As he wandered about, he had told himself that he
had been mad to come and see it all, so alone. Sometimes he turned away
from the crowd, and sat in some quiet corner of palace or fairy garden;
and it was because he was forced to do it, for it was at times when he
was in no condition to be looked at by careless passers-by.
He had never been particularly fond of children; but somehow these two
waifs, with their alert faces and odd independence, had wakened his
interest. He was conscious of rather wanting to know where they had come
from and what they would do next. The bit of the story of the Genius of
the Palace of the Sea had attracted him. He had learned to love stories
from the one who should have seen with him the Enchanted City. She had
been a story lover, and full of fancies.
He followed the trio to the end of the great Court. When they reached
there, three pairs of cheeks were flushed, and the eyes that were open
were glowing. Meg and Robin chose a spot of ground, and stopped.
“Now,” said Meg, “open them—suddenly!”
The boy opened them. The man saw the look that flashed into his face. It
was a strange, quivering look. Palaces, which seemed of pure marble,
surrounded him. He had never even dreamed of palaces. White stairways
rose from the lagoon, leading to fair, open portals the wondering world
passed through to splendors held within. A great statue of gold towered
noble and marvellous, with uplifted arms holding high the emblems of its
spirit and power, and at the end of this vista, through the archway, and
between the line of columns, bearing statues poised against the
background of sky, he caught glimpses of the lake’s scintillating blue.
He uttered a weird little sound. It was part exclamation, and a bit of a
laugh, cut short by something like a nervous sob, which did not know
what to do with itself.
“Oh!” he said. And then, “Oh!” again. And then “I—I don’t know—what
it’s—like!” And he cleared his throat and stared, and Meg saw his narrow
chest heave up and down.
“It isn’t _like_ anything, but—but something we’ve dreamed of, perhaps,”
said Meg, gazing in ecstasy with him.
“No—no!” answered Ben. “But I’ve never dreamed like it.”
Meg put her hand on his shoulder.
“But you will now,” she said. “You will now.”
And their man had been near enough to hear, and he came to them.
“Good morning,” he said. “You’re having another day of it, I see.”
Meg and Robin looked up at him, radiant. They were both in good enough
mood to make friends. They felt friends with everybody.
“Good morning,” they answered; and Robin added, “We’re going to come
every day as long as we can make our money last.”
“That’s a good enough idea,” said their man. “Where are your father and
mother?”
Meg lifted her solemn, black-lashed eyes to his. She was noticing again
about the dreary look in his face.
“They died nearly four years ago,” she answered, for Robin.
“Who is with you?” asked the man, meeting her questioning gaze with a
feeling that her great eyes were oddly thoughtful for a child’s, and
that there was a look in them he had seen before in a pair of eyes
closed a year ago. It gave him an almost startled feeling.
“Nobody is with us,” Meg said, “except Ben.”
“You came alone?” said the man.
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a moment in silence, and then turned away and
looked across the Court to where the lake gleamed through the colonnade.
“So did I,” he said, reflectively. “So did I. Quite alone.”
Meg and Robin glanced at each other.
“Yesterday Rob and I came by ourselves,” said Meg next, and she said it
gently. “But we were not lonely; and to-day we have Ben.”
The man turned his eyes on the boy.
“You’re Ben, are you?” he said.
“Yes,” Ben answered. “And but for them I couldn’t never have seen
it—never!”
“Why?” the man asked. “Almost everybody can see it.”
“But not me,” said Ben. “And I wanted to more than any one—seemed like
to me. And when they roomed at our house last night, mother was going to
give me the fifty cents, but—but father—father, he took it away from us.
And they brought me.”
Then the man turned on Robin.
“Have you plenty of money?” he asked, unceremoniously.
“No,” said Rob.
“They’re as poor as I am,” put in Ben. “They couldn’t afford to room
anywhere but with poor people.”
“But everybody—” Meg began impulsively, and then stopped, remembering
that it was not Robin she was talking to.
“But everybody—what?” said the man.
It was Robin who answered for her this time.
“She said that last night,” he explained, with a half shy laugh, “that
everybody had something they could give to somebody else.”
“Oh, well, it isn’t always money, of course, or anything big,” said Meg,
hurriedly. “It might be something that is ever so little.”
The man laughed, but his eyes seemed to be remembering something as he
looked over the lagoon again.
“That’s a pretty good thing to think,” he said. “Now,” turning on Meg
rather suddenly, “I wonder what you have to give to _me_.”
“I don’t know,” she answered, perhaps a trifle wistfully. “The thing I
give to Rob and Ben is a very little one.”
“She makes up things to tell us about the places we can’t pay to go
into, or don’t understand,” said Robin. “It’s not as little as she
thinks it is.”
“Well,” said the man, “look here! Perhaps that’s what you have to give
to me. You came to this place alone and so did I. I believe you’re
enjoying yourselves more than I am. You’re going to take Ben about and
tell him stories. Suppose you take me!”
“You!” Meg exclaimed. “But you’re a man, and you know all about it, I
dare say; and I only tell things I make up—fairy stories, and other
things. A man wouldn’t care for them. He—he knows.”
“He knows too much, perhaps—that’s the trouble,” said the man. “A fairy
or so might do me good. I’m not acquainted enough with them. And if I
know things you don’t—perhaps that’s what I have to give to _you_.”
“Why,” said Meg, her eyes growing as she looked up at his odd, clever
face, “do you want to go about with us?”
[Illustration: “TAKE ME WITH YOU.”]
“Yes,” said the man, with a quick, decided nod, “I believe that’s just
what I want to do. I’m lonelier than you two. At least, you are
together. Come on, children,” but it was to Meg he held out his hand.
“Take me with you.”
And, bewildered as she was, Meg found herself giving her hand to him and
being led away, Robin and Ben close beside them.