THE last day of the term had come and the last day of Mr. Meadowcroft’s
incumbency; for the principal of the school had fully recovered and
would return to his duty after the Easter holidays. Despite their
affection for Mr. Appleton, the greater number of the pupils were
very loath to part with the man who had filled his place temporarily.
For, even apart from his impressive elegance and the finer flavor
of his scholarship, they recognized in Humphrey Meadowcroft a rare
personality. The fact that he demanded rather more of them had acted
rather as a stimulant; and they had found him quite as kind as Mr.
Appleton and perhaps more understandingly sympathetic.
As for Mr. Meadowcroft himself--for him the day was very different from
what it might have been. He was relieved when the day was over, though
not with an healthful, wholesome relief. After the last straggler had
finally departed, as he gathered his personal belongings together
and set the desk in order, depression seized and settled upon him.
On a sudden this whole experience, which started as a succession of
red-letter days, seemed to have been signal failure.
He sat for some time with his brow in his hand. Then, realizing that he
must be getting to the station, he raised his head and glanced around
the big room in farewell review, seeing phantom forms with pleasant,
eager faces filling the long rows of empty seats. His heart warmed.
He had certainly been happy for those first three weeks--as happy as
he had ever been in his life. That wasn’t a slight thing. He recalled
a passage in Gibbon he had recently come upon in reading for one of
his history classes which spoke of a mighty potentate who, at the end
of a rarely successful reign over a prosperous kingdom, counted up the
really happy days he had known in the fifty years. They had amounted to
fourteen! And he had had twenty-one!
School had closed early, and though the boys and girls had lingered
long over the parting, there was none in sight now as Meadowcroft
passed through the street, and none of the South Paulding children at
the station. Of course they would all have taken the earlier train, he
said to himself, as he realized that he had been hoping for Tommy’s
company home. And in any event, Tommy had probably walked, as he always
did except when he stayed for the extra lesson after school.
As he made his way through the aisle of the train, however, he saw
Betty Pogany ahead, sitting alone, and joined her. Betty had had an
errand in Paulding to do for her father which kept her, and as the
village dress-maker was waiting for Rose, she had gone home with some
of the other girls.
Betty’s coldness was always gentle. But her gravity did not lift,
and after the word of greeting, she turned and gazed steadily out
the window. There was something demure, something at once pretty and
pathetic, in the dignity of her manner. Vain, silly, headstrong, as
he was forced to believe her, he saw only sweetness, nevertheless, in
her deep brown eyes and goodness that was almost nobility in her face.
After all, the folly hadn’t gone deeply; it hadn’t really hurt her.
In some manner, the girl must have felt herself privileged; she had
somehow believed that she had a charter to do wrong rightly. Certainly
she looked to-day rather a martyr than a sinner.
“The last day is over,” he said quietly as the train started. “And now
that the relationship of pupil and teacher is over between us, Betty,
I wonder if we can’t slip back into the simpler one that preceded it?
Can’t we forget what has happened and be friends again?”
The girl had nothing to say. He didn’t know whether it was that she
couldn’t or wouldn’t speak.
“Of course it has been hard, awfully hard,” he admitted, “but perhaps
you haven’t realized that it has been hard for me, too. I felt forced
to act as I did. And yet, although I tried to do only what seemed to be
my plain duty in the circumstances, I daresay I bungled things sadly.
And perhaps if I hadn’t felt personally rather hurt, I might have had
more patience. If I was harsh and over-severe, Betty, I am truly sorry
and ask you to pardon and forget.”
The girl’s white cheeks flushed. Turning, she raised her dark, gentle
eyes steadily to his. She was Bouncing Bet no longer. She was thin and
worn and truly martyr-like with that seemingly fixed expression of
sadness upon her innocent, childish face.
“I can never forgive you, Mr. Meadowcroft,” she returned in a voice
which though very low wasn’t quite steady. “And forget--I can never,
never to the end of my life forget--what you have done. I ought----”
She choked, clasped her hands tightly, and drew a long, sobbing breath.
Then she went on.
“O, I don’t know what I ought to have done!” she cried despairingly.
“I don’t know what I could have done, only--I ought to have done
something! But I didn’t know--I’m only a little girl, really, though I
look so big--and anyhow--I couldn’t have stood out against everybody.
And--everybody would have been against me.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she pressed her pocket handkerchief to
them and would not give way.
“Betty!” he protested, greatly distressed, “you know I----”
“You might have trusted me!” she cried reproachfully. “You might have
known I wouldn’t break rules just for the sake of being bad, and that
for all the world I wouldn’t have been hateful to you on purpose. You
might--you might have trusted me, Mr. Meadowcroft.”
“Yes, Betty, I might have,” he owned, deeply moved, but more perplexed
than ever. “I almost wish I had. And yet--how could I? You wouldn’t
explain--you wouldn’t vouchsafe one word, and when I appealed to you,
you seemed--well, just plain stubborn and headstrong. And you must
consider my position. I was in another’s place, trying to hold things
together for him as best I could. And I had to regard the others.
Everyone knew that you and Tommy and I were like old friends, and it
was my duty, not to favor you as inclination might have urged, but to
be strictly impartial, just as it was yours not to----”
He broke off, for he couldn’t find words which would express the
idea without sounding unkindly. Betty turned to the window again.
Her distress was evident, and good as were his intentions, he felt
constrained to cease from troubling her. Only as they drew into South
Paulding he spoke.
“I am going away to-morrow, going to Philadelphia for a little, so I
will say good-bye now, Betty. I hope your holidays may be very happy.”
Happy! as if she would ever know a happy day again with Rose blind
forever when she might have recovered her sight--and he who spoke thus
mockingly, to blame! She put a limp hand into his without a word. Tommy
was waiting for her, and they went off together.
Later, Tommy appeared in Meadowcroft’s sitting-room.
“I hear you’re going off again,” he grumbled.
“I am glad there’s someone who will regret my absence,” Meadowcroft
observed.
“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. Two whole weeks without magic
is no cinch, believe me! I think I’d rather go to school even with the
extra class after school thrown in,” he declared.
He grinned and Meadowcroft smiled.
“I wish myself I could be here to help you while away some of the time,
Tommy,” he assured the boy warmly. “But I must return to Philadelphia
to finish something I had just started in January when I was summoned
back to take the school. If it were not really important, I would wait
a fortnight and play with you. I have been thinking that perhaps we
might rig up a sort of laboratory in the billiard-room and do a bit of
experimentation in chemistry and physics in lieu of magic?”
“Gee! that would be bully!” Tommy cried with shining eyes.
“And more useful and perhaps just as much fun?” Meadowcroft suggested.
Whereupon Tommy Finnemore approved himself a true artist.
“’Twould be heaps of fun and I’d like to do it first-rate, but if it
was a free choice, you know, magic for mine always,” he confessed. “I
shouldn’t wonder if part of the reason I like it so much is that it
ain’t any real good--all goes up in smoke. Dad thinks I’m lazy and
shiftless and good-for-nothing, and like as not I am. He says I don’t
take after him, and if he only knew it, I’m mighty thankful I don’t.
But I’ll get along till you come back--one thing and another. There are
other things. Like as not, I’ll get off in the woods by myself and play
on a comb--that ain’t so bad.”
“You’d better devote yourself to Betty as much as you can,” Meadowcroft
counseled. “Something’s wrong with her--terribly wrong, it would
appear--and I rather think you know what it is. Fortunately, she hasn’t
turned against you, and you may be able to do something to cheer her
up.”
“If I could only do magic!” cried the boy. “A trick I was just going to
work on would fairly take your breath away if I could get it to come
out. And that’s what Betty needs--to have her breath taken away so that
she--_forgets_, you know.”
Bouncing from his chair, he went to the fire and poked it vigorously
sending the smoke out into the room.
“You know, honestly, Mr. Meadowcroft, Betty is--all right,” he said
in a low voice, turning, but keeping his eyes upon the hearth rug.
“Things do seem queer--she seems so herself--and--I don’t blame you.
You were up against it and just couldn’t do anything else. But there’s
something about Betty if you have always known her and are pretty near
her age and sort of growing older together, you know, so that--why, you
just can’t help believing in her more’n you would in any fellow. And
whatever she does, you can’t help feeling somehow it’s--just right.”
Such faith of youth in youth--_Credo quia impossibile_--touched
Humphrey Meadowcroft deeply. He envied the boy, and yet, as he had
said to Betty, how could he himself have acted otherwise? One who has
had nearly half a century of experience must make use of knowledge
painfully won and tested. And a man isn’t the free agent a boy may be.