FOR Christmas day the weather turned mild again. There would be a family
dinner in the evening, but St. Peter was going to have the whole day to
himself, in the old house. He asked his wife to put him up some
sandwiches, so that he needn’t come back for lunch. He kept a few
bottles of sherry in his study, in the old chest under the forms.
Fortunately he had brought back a great deal of it from his last trip to
Spain. It wasn’t foresight--Prohibition was then unthinkable--but a
lucky accident. He had gone with his innkeeper to an auction, and bought
in a dozen dozens of a sherry that went very cheap. He came home by the
City of Mexico and got the wine through without duty.
As he was crossing the park with his sandwiches, he met Augusta coming
back from Mass.
“Are you still going to the old house, Professor?” she asked
reproachfully, her face smiling at him between her stiff black fur
collar and her stiff black hat.
“Oh, yes, Augusta, but it’s not the same. I miss you. There are never
any new dresses on my ladies in the evening now. Won’t you come in
sometime and deck them out, as a surprise for me? I like to see them
looking smart.”
Augusta laughed. “You are a funny man, Doctor St. Peter. If anyone else
said the things you do to your classes, I’d be scandalized. But I always
tell people you don’t mean half you say.”
“And how do you know what I say to my classes, may I ask?”
“Why, of course, they go out and talk about it when you say slighting
things about the Church,” she said gravely.
“But, really, Augusta, I don’t think I ever do.”
“Well, they take it that way. They are not as smart as you, and you
ought to be careful.”
“It doesn’t matter. What they think to-day, they’ll forget to-morrow.”
He was walking beside Augusta, with a slack, indifferent stride, very
unlike the step he had when he was full of something. “That reminds me:
I’ve been wanting to ask you a question. That passage in the service
about the Mystical Rose, Lily of Zion, Tower of Ivory--is that the
Magnificat?”
Augusta stopped and looked at him. “Why, Professor! Did you receive no
religious instruction at all?”
“How could I, Augusta? My mother was a Methodist, there was no Catholic
church in our town in Kansas, and I guess my father forgot his
religion.”
“That happens, in mixed marriages.” Augusta spoke meaningly.
“Ah, yes, I suppose so. But tell me, what is the Magnificat, then?”
“The Magnificat begins, doth magnify _My soul dot magnify the Lord_; you
must know that.”
“But I thought the Magnificat was about the Virgin?”
“Oh, no, Professor! The Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat.”
St. Peter became intensely interested. “Oh, she did?”
Augusta spoke gently, as if she were prompting him and did not wish to
rebuke his ignorance too sharply. “Why, yes, just as soon as the angel
had announced to her that she would be the mother of our Lord, the
Blessed Virgin composed the Magnificat. I always think of you as knowing
everything, Doctor St. Peter!”
“And you’re always finding out how little I know. Well, you don’t give
me away. You are very discreet.”
Their ways parted, and both went on more cheerful than when they met.
The Professor climbed to his study feeling quite as though Augusta had
been there and brightened it up for him. (Surely she had said that the
Blessed Virgin sat down and composed the Magnificat!) Augusta had been
with them often in the holiday season, back in the years when holidays
were holidays indeed. He had grown to like the reminders of herself that
she left in his work-room--especially the toilettes upon the figures.
Sometimes she made those terrible women entirely plausible!
In the early years, no matter how hard he was working, he had always
felt the sense of holiday, of a special warmth and fragrance in the air,
steal up to his study from the house below. When he was writing his
best, he was conscious of pretty little girls in fresh dresses--of
flowers and greens in the comfortable, shabby sitting-room--of his
wife’s good looks and good taste--even of a better dinner than usual
under preparation downstairs. All the while he had been working so
fiercely at his eight big volumes, he was not insensible to the domestic
drama that went on beneath him. His mind had played delightedly with all
those incidents. Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long
tapestry now shown at Bayeux,--working her chronicle of the deeds of
knights and heroes,--alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she
and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts
that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters
of his history were interwoven with personal memories.
On this Christmas morning, with that sense of the past in his mind, the
Professor went mechanically to work, and the morning disappeared. Before
he knew it was passing, the bells from Augusta’s church across the park
rang out and told him it was gone. He pushed back his papers and
arranged his writing-table for lunch.
He had been working hard, he judged, because he was so hungry. He peered
with interest into the basket his wife had given him--a wicker bag, it
was, really, that he had once bought full of strawberries at Gibraltar.
Chicken sandwiches with lettuce leaves, red California grapes, and two
shapely, long-necked russet pears. That would do very well; and Lillian
had thoughtfully put in one of her best dinner napkins, knowing he hated
ugly linen. From the chest he took out a round cheese, and a bottle of
his wine, and began to polish a sherry glass.
While he was enjoying his lunch, he was thinking of certain holidays he
had spent alone in Paris, when he was living at Versailles, with the
Thieraults, as tutor to their boys. There was one All Souls’ Day when he
had gone into Paris by an early train and had a magnificent breakfast on
the Rue de Vaugirard--not at Foyot’s, he hadn’t money enough in those
days to put his nose inside the place. After breakfast he went out to
walk in the soft rainfall. The sky was of such an intense silvery grey
that all the grey stone buildings along the Rue St. Jacques and the Rue
Sufflot came out in that silver shine stronger than in sunlight. The
shop windows were shut; on the bleak ascent to the Pantheon there was
not a spot of colour, nothing but wet, shiny, quick-silvery grey,
accented by black crevices, and weatherworn bosses white as wood-ash.
All at once, from somewhere behind the Pantheon itself, a man and woman,
pushing a hand-cart, came into the empty street. The cart was full of
pink dahlias, all exactly the same colour. The young man was fair and
slight, with a pale face; the woman carried a baby. Both they and the
wheels of their barrow were splashed with mud. They must have come from
a good way in the country, and were a weary, anxious-looking pair. They
stopped at a corner before the Pantheon and fearfully scanned the bleak,
silvery, deserted streets. The man went into a bakery, and his wife
began to spread out the flowers, which were done up in large bouquets
with fresh green chestnut-leaves. Young St. Peter approached and asked
the price.
“_Deux francs cinquante, Monsieur_,” she said with a kind of desperate
courage.
He took a bunch and handed her a five-franc note. She had no change. Her
husband, watching from the bakery, came running across with a loaf of
bread under his arm.
“_Deux francs cinquante_,” she called to him as he came up. He put his
hand into his pocket and fumbled.
“_Deux francs cinquante_,” she repeated with painful tension. The price
agreed upon had probably been a franc or a franc fifty. The man counted
out the change to the student and looked at his wife with admiration.
St. Peter was so pleased with his flowers that it hadn’t occurred to him
to get more; but all his life he had regretted that he didn’t buy two
bunches, and push their fortunes a little further. He had never again
found dahlias of such a beautiful colour, or so charmingly arranged with
bright chestnut-leaves.
A moment later he was strolling down the hill, wondering to whom he
could give his bouquet, when a pathetic procession filed past him
through the rain. The girls of a charity school came walking two and
two, in hideous dark uniforms and round felt hats without ribbon or bow,
marshalled by four black-bonneted nuns. They were all looking down, all
but one--the pretty one, naturally--and she was looking sidewise,
directly at the student and his flowers. Their eyes met, she smiled, and
just as he put out his hand with the bouquet, one of the sisters flapped
up like a black crow and shut the girl’s pretty face from him. She would
have to pay for that smile, he was afraid. Godfrey spent his day in the
Luxembourg Gardens and walked back to the Gare St. Lazare at evening
with nothing but his return ticket in his pocket, very glad to get home
to Versailles in time for the family dinner.
When he first went to live with the Thieraults, he had found Madame
Thierault severe and exacting, stingy about his laundry and grudging
about the cheese and fruit he ate for dinner. But in the end she was
very kind to him; she never pampered him, but he could depend upon her.
Her three sons had always been his dearest friends. Gaston, the one he
loved best, was dead--killed in the Boxer uprising in China. But Pierre
still lived at Versailles, and Charles had a business in Marseilles.
When he was in France their homes were his. They were much closer to him
than his own brothers. It was one summer when he was in France, with
Lillian and the two little girls, that the idea of writing a work upon
the early Spanish explorers first occurred to him, and he had turned at
once to the Thieraults. After giving his wife enough money to finish the
summer and get home, he took the little that was left and went down to
Marseilles to talk over his project with Charles Thierault _fils_, whose
mercantile house did a business with Spain in cork. Clearly St. Peter
would have to be in Spain as much as possible for the next few years,
and he would have to live there very cheaply. The Thieraults were always
glad of a chance to help him. Not with money,--they were too French and
too logical for that. But they would go to any amount of trouble and no
inconsiderable expense to save him a few thousand francs.
That summer Charles kept him for three weeks in his oleander-buried
house in the Prado, until his little brig, _L’Espoir_, sailed out of the
new port with a cargo for Algeciras. The captain was from the
Hautes-Pyrénées, and his spare crew were all Provençals, seamen
trained in that hard school of the Gulf of Lyons. On the voyage
everything seemed to feed the plan of the work that was forming in St.
Peter’s mind; the skipper, the old Catalan second mate, the sea itself.
One day stood out above the others. All day long they were skirting the
south coast of Spain; from the rose of dawn to the gold of sunset the
ranges of the Sierra Nevadas towered on their right, snow peak after
snow peak, high beyond the flight of fancy, gleaming like crystal and
topaz. St. Peter lay looking up at them from a little boat riding low in
the purple water, and the design of his book unfolded in the air above
him, just as definitely as the mountain ranges themselves. And the
design was sound. He had accepted it as inevitable, had never meddled
with it, and it had seen him through.
It was late on Christmas afternoon when the Professor got back to the
new house, but he was in such a happy frame of mind that he feared
nothing, not even a family dinner. He quite looked forward to it, on the
contrary. His wife heard him humming his favorite air from _Matrimonio
Segreto_ while he was dressing.
That evening the two daughters of the house arrived almost at the same
moment. When Rosamond threw off her cloak in the hall, her father
noticed that she was wearing her new necklace. Kathleen stood looking at
it, and was evidently trying to find courage to say something about it,
when Louie helped her by breaking in.
“And, Kitty, you haven’t seen our jewels! What do you think? Just look
at it.”
“I was looking. It’s too lovely!”
“It’s very old, you see, the gold. What a work I had finding it! She
doesn’t like anything showy, you know, and she doesn’t care about
intrinsic values. It must be beautiful, first of all.”
“Well, it is that, surely.”
Louie walked up and down, admiring his wife. “She carries off things
like that, doesn’t she? And yet, you know, I like her in simple things,
too.” He dropped into reflection, just as if he were alone and talking
to himself. “I always remember a little bracelet she wore the night I
first met her. A turquoise set in silver, wasn’t it? Yes, a turquoise
set in dull silver. Have you it yet, Rosie?”
“I think so.” There was a shade of displeasure in Rosamond’s voice, and
she turned back into the hall to look for something. “Where are the
violets you brought for Mamma?”
Mrs. St. Peter came in, followed by the maid and the cocktails. Scott
began the usual Prohibition lament.
“Why don’t you journalists tell the truth about it in print?” Louie
asked him. “It’s a case where you could do something.”
“And lose my job? Not much! This country’s split in two, socially, and I
don’t know if it’s ever coming together. It’s not so hard on me, I can
drink hard liquor. But you and the Professor like wine and fancy stuff.”
“Oh, it’s nothing to us! We’re going to France for the summer,” Louie
put his arm round his wife and rubbed his cheek against hers, saying
caressingly, “and drink Burgundy, Burgundy, Burgundy!”
“Please take me with you, Louie,” Mrs. St. Peter pleaded, to distract
him from his wife. Nothing made the McGregors so uncomfortable and so
wrathful as the tender moments which sometimes overtook the Marselluses
in public.
“We are going to take you, and Papa too. That’s our plan. I take him for
safety. If I travelled on the Continent alone with two such handsome
women, it wouldn’t be tolerated. There would be a trumped-up quarrel,
and a stiletto, and then somebody would be a widow,” turning again to
his wife.
“Come here, Louie.” Mrs. St. Peter beckoned him. “I have a confession to
make. I’m afraid there’s no dinner for you to-night.”
“No dinner for me?”
“No. There’s nothing either you or Godfrey will like. It’s Scott’s
dinner to-night. Your tastes are so different, I can’t compromise. And
this is his, from the cream soup to the frozen pudding.”
“But who said I didn’t like cream soup and frozen pudding?” Louie held
out his hands to show their guiltlessness. “And are there _haricots
verts_ in cream sauce? I thought so! And I like those, too. The truth
is, Dearest,” he stood before her and tapped her chin with his finger,
“the truth is that I like all Scott’s dinners, it’s he who doesn’t like
mine! He’s the intolerant one.”
“True for you, Louie,” laughed the Professor.
“And it’s that way about lots of things,” said Louie a little
plaintively.
“Kitty,” said Scott as they were driving home that night, Kathleen in
the driver’s seat beside him, “that silver bracelet Louie spoke of was
one of Tom’s trinkets, wasn’t it? Do you suppose she has some feeling
for him still, under all this pompuosity?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. But, oh, Scott, I do love you very
much!” she cried vehemently.
He pinched off his driving-glove between his knees and snuggled his hand
over hers, inside her muff. “Sure?” he muttered.
“Yes, I _do_!” she said fiercely, squeezing his knuckles together with
all her might.
“Awful nice of you to have told me all about it at the start, Kitty.
Most girls wouldn’t have thought it necessary. I’m the only one who
knows, ain’t I?”
“The only one who ever has known.”
“And I’m just the one another girl wouldn’t have told. Why did you,
Kit?”
“I don’t know. I suppose even then I must have had a feeling that you
were the real one.” Her head dropped on his shoulder. “You know you are
the real one, don’t you?”
“I guess!”
X
THAT winter there was a meeting of an Association of Electrical
Engineers in Hamilton. Louie Marsellus, who was a member, gave a
luncheon for the visiting engineers at the Country Club, and then
motored them to Outland. Scott McGregor was at the lunch, with the other
newspaper men. On his return he stopped at the university and picked up
his father-in-law.
“I’ll run you over home. Which house, the old? How did you get out of
Louie’s party?”
“I had classes.”
“It was some lunch! Louie’s a good host. First-rate cigars, and plenty
of them,” Scott tapped his breast-pocket. “We had poor Tom served up
again. It was all right, of course--the scientific men were interested,
didn’t know much about him. Louie called on me for personal
recollections; he was very polite about it. I didn’t express myself very
well. I’m not much of a speaker, anyhow, and this time I seemed to be
talking uphill. You know, Tom isn’t very real to me any more. Sometimes
I think he was just a--a glittering idea. Here we are, Doctor.”
Scott’s remark rather troubled the Professor. He went up the two flights
of stairs and sat down in his shadowy crypt at the top of the house.
With his right elbow on the table, his eyes on the floor, he began
recalling as clearly and definitely as he could every incident of that
bright, windy spring day when he first saw Tom Outland.
He was working in his garden one Saturday morning, when a young man in a
heavy winter suit and a Stetson hat, carrying a grey canvas telescope,
came in at the green door that led from the street.
“Are you Professor St. Peter?” he inquired.
Upon being assured, he set down his bag on the gravel, took out a blue
cotton handkerchief, and wiped his face, which was covered with beads of
moisture. The first thing the Professor noticed about the visitor was
his manly, mature voice--low, calm, experienced, very different from the
thin ring or the hoarse shouts of boyish voices about the campus. The
next thing he observed was the strong line of contrast below the young
man’s sandy hair--the very fair forehead which had been protected by his
hat, and the reddish brown of his face, which had evidently been exposed
to a stronger sun than the spring sun of Hamilton. The boy was
fine-looking, he saw--tall and presumably well built, though the
shoulders of his stiff, heavy coat were so preposterously padded that
the upper part of him seemed shut up in a case.
“I want to go to school here, Professor St. Peter, and I’ve come to ask
your advice. I don’t know anybody in the town.”
“You want to enter the university, I take it? What high school are you
from?”
“I’ve never been to high school, sir. That’s the trouble.”
“Why, yes. I hardly see how you can enter the university. Where are you
from?”
“New Mexico. I haven’t been to school, but I’ve studied. I read Latin
with a priest down there.”
St. Peter smiled incredulously. “How much Latin?”
“I read Cæsar and Virgil, the _Æneid_.”
“How many books?”
“We went right through.” He met the Professor’s questions squarely, his
eyes were resolute, like his voice.
“Oh, you did.” St. Peter stood his spade against the wall. He had been
digging around his red-fruited thorn-trees. “Can you repeat any of it?”
The boy began: “_Infandum, jubes renovare dolorem_,” and steadily
continued for fifty lines or more, until St. Peter held up a checking
hand.
“Excellent. Your priest was a thorough Latinist. You have a good
pronunciation and good intonation. Was the Father by any chance a
Frenchman?”
“Yes, sir. He was a missionary priest, from Belgium.”
“Did you learn any French from him?”
“No, sir. He wanted to practise his Spanish.”
“You speak Spanish?”
“Not very well, Mexican Spanish.”
The Professor tried him out in Spanish and told him he thought he knew
enough to get credit for a modern language. “And what are your
deficiencies?”
“I’ve never had any mathematics or science, and I write a very bad
hand.”
“That’s not unusual,” St. Peter told him. “But, by the way, how did you
happen to come to me instead of to the registrar?”
“I just got in this morning, and your name was the only one here I knew.
I read an article by you in a magazine, about Fray Marcos. Father
Duchene said it was the only thing with any truth in it he’d read about
our country down there.”
The Professor had noticed before that whenever he wrote for popular
periodicals it got him into trouble. “Well, what are your plans, young
man? And, by the way, what is your name?”
“Tom Outland.”
The Professor repeated it. It seemed to suit the boy exactly.
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty.” He blushed, and St. Peter supposed he was dropping off a
few years, but he found afterward that the boy didn’t know exactly how
old he was. “I thought I might get a tutor and make up my mathematics
this summer.”
“Yes, that could be managed. How are you fixed for money?”
Outland’s face grew grave. “I’m rather awkwardly fixed. If you were to
write to Tarpin, New Mexico, to inquire about me, you’d find I have
money in the bank there, and you’d think I had been deceiving you. But
it’s money I can’t touch while I’m able-bodied. It’s in trust for
someone else. But I’ve got three hundred dollars without any string on
it, and I’m hoping to get work here. I’ve been bossing a section gang
all winter, and I’m in good condition. I’ll do anything but wait table.
I won’t do that.” On this point he seemed to feel strongly.
The Professor learned some of his story that morning. His parents, he
said, were “mover people,” and both died when they were crossing
southern Kansas in a prairie schooner. He was a baby and had been
informally adopted by some kind people who took care of his mother in
her last hours,--a locomotive engineer named O’Brien, and his wife. This
engineer was transferred to New Mexico and took the foundling boy along
with his own children. As soon as Tom was old enough to work, he got a
job as call boy and did his share toward supporting the family.
“What’s a call boy, a messenger boy?”
“No, sir. It’s a more responsible position. Our town was an important
freight division on the Santa Fé, and a lot of train men live there.
The freight schedule is always changing, because it’s a single track
road and the dispatcher has to get the freights through when he can.
Suppose you’re a brakeman, and your train is due out at two A. M.; well,
like as not, it will be changed to midnight, or to four in the morning.
You go to bed as if you were going to sleep all night, with nothing on
your mind. The call boy watches the schedule board, and half an hour
before your train goes out, he comes and taps on your window and gets
you up in time to make it. The call boy has to be on to things in the
town. He must know when there’s a poker game on, and how to slip in
easy. You can’t tell when there’s a spotter about, and if a man’s
reported for gambling, he’s fired. Sometimes you have to get a man when
he isn’t where he ought to be. I found there was usually a reason at
home for that.” The boy spoke with gravity, as if he had reflected
deeply upon irregular behaviour.
Just then Mrs. St. Peter came out into the garden and asked her husband
if he wouldn’t bring his young friend in to lunch. Outland started and
looked with panic toward the door by which he had come in; but the
Professor wouldn’t hear of his going, and picked up his telescope to
prevent his escape. As he carried it into the house and put it down in
the hall, he noticed that it was strangely light for its bulk. Mrs. St.
Peter introduced the guest to her two little girls, and asked him if he
didn’t want to go upstairs to wash his hands. He disappeared; as he came
back something disconcerting happened. The front hall and the front
staircase were the only hard wood in the house, but as Tom came down the
waxed steps, his heavy new shoes shot out from under him, and he sat
down on the end of his spine with a thump. Little Kathleen burst into a
giggle, and her elder sister looked at her reprovingly; Mrs. St. Peter
apologized for the stairs.
“I’m not much used to stairs, living mostly in ’dobe houses,” Tom
explained, as he picked himself up.
At luncheon the boy was very silent at first. He sat looking admiringly
at Mrs. St. Peter and the little girls. The day had grown warm, and the
Professor thought this was the hottest boy he had ever seen. His stiff
white collar began to melt, and his handkerchief, as he kept wiping his
face with it, became a rag. “I didn’t know it would be so warm up here,
or I’d have picked a lighter suit,” he said, embarrassed by the activity
of his skin.
“We would like to hear more about your life in the South-west,” said his
host. “How long were you a call boy?”
“Two years. Then I had pneumonia, and the doctor said I ought to go on
the range, so I went to work for a big cattle firm.”
Mrs. St. Peter began to question him about the Indian pueblos. He was
reticent at first, but he presently warmed up in defence of Indian
housewifery. He forgot his shyness so far, indeed, that having made a
neat heap of mashed potato beside his chop, he conveyed it to his mouth
on the blade of his knife, at which sight the little girls were not able
to conceal their astonishment. Mrs. St. Peter went on quietly talking
about Indian pottery and asking him where they made the best.
“I think the very best is the old,--the cliff-dweller pottery,” he said.
“Do you take an interest in pottery, Ma’am? Maybe you’d like to see some
I have brought along.” As they rose from the table he went to his
telescope underneath the hat-rack, knelt beside it, and undid the
straps. When he lifted the cover, it seemed full of bulky objects
wrapped in newspapers. After feeling among them, he unwrapped one and
displayed an earthen water jar, shaped like those common in Greek
sculpture, and ornamented with a geometrical pattern in black and white.
“That’s one of the real old ones. I know, for I got it out myself. I
don’t know just how old, but there’s piñon trees three hundred years
old by their rings, growing up in the stone trail that leads to the
ruins where I got it.”
“Stone trail ... piñons?” she asked.
“Yes, deep, narrow trails in white rock, worn by their moccasin feet
coming and going for generations. And these old piñon trees have come
up in the trails since the race died off. You can tell something about
how long ago it was by them.” He showed her a coating of black on the
under side of the jar.
“That’s not from the firing. See, I can scratch it off. It’s soot, from
when it was on the cook-fire last--and that was before Columbus landed,
I guess. Nothing makes those people seem so real to me as their old
pots, with the fire-black on them.” As she gave it back to him, he shook
his head. “That one’s for you, Ma’am, if you like it.”
“Oh, I couldn’t think of letting you give it to me! You must keep it for
yourself, or put it in a museum.” But that seemed to touch a sore spot.
“Museums,” he said bitterly, “they don’t care about our things. They
want something that came from Crete or Egypt. I’d break my jars sooner
than they should get them. But I’d like this one to have a good home,
among your nice things”--he looked about appreciatively. “I’ve no place
to keep them. They’re in my way, especially that big one. My trunk is at
the station, but I was afraid to leave the pottery. You don’t get them
out whole like that very often.”
“But get them out of what, from where? I want to know all about it.”
“Maybe some day, Ma’am, I can tell you,” he said, wiping his sooty
fingers on his handkerchief. His reply was courteous but final. He
strapped his bag and picked up his hat, then hesitated and smiled.
Taking a buckskin bag from his pocket, he walked over to the window-seat
where the children were, and held out his hand to them, saying: “These I
would like to give to the little girls.” In his palm lay two lumps of
soft blue stone, the colour of robins’ eggs, or of the sea on halcyon
days of summer.
The children marvelled. “Oh, what are they?”
“Turquoises, just the way they come out of the mine, before the
jewellers have tampered with them and made them look green. The Indians
like them this way.”
Again Mrs. St. Peter demurred. She told him very kindly that she
couldn’t let him give his stones to the children. “They are worth a lot
of money.”
“I’d never sell them. They were given to me by a friend. I have a lot,
and they’re no use to me, but they’ll make pretty playthings for little
girls.” His voice was so wistful and winning that there was nothing to
do.
“Hold them still a moment,” said the Professor, looking down, not at the
turquoises, but at the hand that held them: the muscular, many-lined
palm, the long, strong fingers with soft ends, the straight little
finger, the flexible, beautifully shaped thumb that curved back from the
rest of the hand as if it were its own master. What a hand! He could see
it yet, with the blue stones lying in it.
In a moment the stranger was gone, and the St. Peter family sat down and
looked at one another. He remembered just what his wife had said on that
occasion.
“Well, this is something new in students, Godfrey. We ask a poor
perspiring tramp boy to lunch, to save his pennies, and he departs
leaving princely gifts.”
Yes, the Professor reflected, after all these years, that was still
true. Fellows like Outland don’t carry much luggage, yet one of the
things you know them by is their sumptuous generosity--and when they are
gone, all you can say of them is that they departed leaving princely
gifts.
With a good tutor, young Outland had no difficulty in making up three
years’ mathematics in four months. Latin, he owned, had been hard for
him. But in mathematics, he didn’t have to work, he had merely to give
his attention. His tutor had never known anything like it. But St. Peter
held the boy at arm’s length. As a young teacher full of zeal, he had
been fooled more than once. He knew that the wonderful seldom holds
water, that brilliancy has no staying power, and the unusual becomes
commonplace by a natural law.
In those first months Mrs. St. Peter saw more of their protégé than
her husband did. She found him a good boarding-place, took care that he
had proper summer clothes and that he no longer addressed her as
“Ma’am.” He came often to the house that summer, to play with the little
girls. He would spend hours with them in the garden, making Hopi
villages with sand and pebbles, drawing maps of the Painted Desert and
the Rio Grande country in the gravel, telling them stories, when there
was no one by to listen, about the adventures he had had with his friend
Roddy.
“Mother,” Kathleen broke out one evening at dinner, “what do you think!
Tom hasn’t any birthday.”
“How is that?”
“When his mother died in the mover wagon, and Tom was a baby, she forgot
to tell the O’Briens when his birthday was. She even forgot to tell them
how old he was. They thought he must be a year and a half, because he
was so big, but Mrs. O’Brien always said he didn’t have enough teeth for
that.”
St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his
mother died in a wagon.
“Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her
health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom’s father
went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom’s
mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some
people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when
they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her
into the O’Briens’ yard, because that was nearest the doctor’s and Mrs.
O’Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours.”
“Does Tom know anything about his father?”
“Nothing except that he was a school-teacher in Missouri. His mother
told the O’Briens that much. But the O’Briens were just lovely to him.”
St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there
were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his free-lance childhood
as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at
being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older
than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and
Indians. “And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa Fé, and went
off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with
Tom and take care of him after he’d had pneumonia,” Kathleen told them.
“That wasn’t the only reason,” Rosamond added dreamily. “Roddy was
proud. He didn’t like taking orders and living on pay cheques. He liked
to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at
night. You know Tom said that, Kitty.”
“Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!” Kathleen
finished it off.
After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced
himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with
the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do
so. He would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about
Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been his teacher, about
the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely
and confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy
could afford to spend so much time with the children. All through that
summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the
garden. In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play
Five Hundred or to take a dancing-lesson.
There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the
house to a boy who had always lived a rough life. He enjoyed the
prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were
flowers. Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of
pleasure would come over Tom’s face--so much fairer now than when he
first arrived in Hamilton--if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to
squeeze it hard enough to hurt, crying: “Oh, Tom, _tell_ us about the
time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and then afterward tell us
about when the rattlesnake bit Henry!” He would whisper: “Pretty soon,”
and after a while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear
them in the garden: the laughter and exclamations of the little girls,
and that singularly individual voice of Tom’s--mature, confident, seldom
varying in pitch, but full of slight, very moving modulations.
He couldn’t have wished for a better companion for his daughters, and
they were teaching Tom things that he needed more than mathematics.
Sitting thus in his study, long afterward, St. Peter reflected that
those first years, before Outland had done anything remarkable, were
really the best of all. He liked to remember the charming groups of
three he was always coming upon,--in the hammock swung between the
linden-trees, in the window-seat, or before the dining-room fire. Oh,
there had been fine times in this old house then: family festivals and
hospitalities, little girls dancing in and out, Augusta coming and
going, gay dresses hanging in his study at night, Christmas shopping and
secrets and smothered laughter on the stairs. When a man had lovely
children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and
generous impulses, why couldn’t he keep them? Was there no way but
Medea’s, he wondered?