THEN I'LL COME BACK TO YOU
On the drive home Wednesday Caleb rehearsed a half score of speeches
with which he might apprise his sister Sarah of the step he had taken;
but when the time came for him to employ one of them, he forgot the
entire lot and had to resort to a bald and stammered statement of the
facts, which sounded more like a confession of guilt than anything
else. It had grown colder with the storm and directly after a hastily
swallowed supper, with many indignant glances for her brother, Sarah
had bundled the boy off upstairs to bed, for he had come in out of the
rain as sleekly wet as a water-rat, and blue-fingered and blue-lipped
from cold. So it happened that they were alone before the fireplace
when Caleb made known his decision.
"I've never done much of anything for anybody but myself, you know,
Sarah," Caleb hesitatingly tried to account for his conduct. "And this
seems to me to be as big an opportunity as I'll ever have. You--you
like the boy, don't you, so far as you have become acquainted with him?"
While he was explaining Caleb wished that his sister would look him in
the face, once at least. It was hard to know what she was thinking
when she sat like that, staring into the fire. He waited, not without
grave misgivings, for her reply.
"Yes, I like him," she assented, after a while.
"You do think that he might amount to something?" Caleb insisted.
"I feel almost sure of it," his sister admitted.
There didn't seem much ground to be gained along that tack, so Caleb
gave up trying to apologize for what he had done.
"Of course it--it comes as a surprise to you," he murmured. "It is
pretty sudden--but I don't think that either of us will ever regret it."
And then Sarah faced 'round toward her brother. Her eyes were
unaccountably wet, but there was laughter on her lips.
"A surprise--a--a somewhat sudden!" she faltered. "Why, I knew you
were going to do it that first day when you came sidling up to the
veranda behind him. I was certain of it, even then. And if you hadn't
decided to, why, I'd made up my mind that I'd do it myself, if you ever
came back from that endless fishing-trip!"
And there, as Caleb put it later to Allison, were three days of
perfectly good diplomatic preparation gone all to waste. For it was
Sarah who monopolized the conversation that evening. She ran on and
on, from one plan to another, eager, half-breathless, and more wildly
prophetic than the man had dared to be, until the realization gradually
dawned in her brother's brain that great as had been his desire to keep
the boy there in the white place on the hill, it had been dwarflike
beside her woman-hunger. It astonished him, when he mentioned the
subject of clothes, to find how far she had outstripped him in actual
deed.
"I've been rummaging through some of the old chests upstairs, too," she
caught up his suggestion. "To-day I explored for hours and found some
of the things you used to wear which look as though they hadn't been
worn at all. I laid some of them out for him to put on when he gets up
in the morning. And, Cal, who'd ever believe now that a plump behemoth
like you ever could have worn such--such dainty and cunning things!"
The inferred description should have prepared Caleb, but at the moment
he failed to remember that it was some forty years since the garb she
mentioned had been in vogue. Instead he blushed uncomfortably at the
gurgle in her throat. And so, the next morning, when a little figure
in velvet jacket and pantaloons--velvet of the same jet hue in which
Barbara Allison had first appeared to the boy a day or two
before--stopped at the head of the long stairway, the moment was robbed
of not one whit of its sensationalism.
Caleb remembered then; and it did seem inconceivable that he could ever
have worn that costume, for the boy in the black velvet might have
stepped bodily from the pages of sheerest romance. There were
red-topped boots upon the slim feet which the day before had been
encased in Old Tom's cast-off brogans; these were ruffed cuffs of
sheerest white linen at brown and sinewy wrists, and burnished silver
buttons down the front of the jacket for the silken corded clasps which
fastened it across his small chest--silver buttons to match upon the
quaintly short sleeves.
Stephen O'Mara hesitated just the fraction of a moment before he
started methodically down the stairs. And immediately Caleb's
amazement at the thought that those clothes had once been worn by him
gave way to a newer wonder. For the boy, in spite of the fact that his
small face above the pleated collar was burning hot with consciousness
of self, wore them in a fashion unforgettable. Then Caleb realized how
great an effort it must be costing the boy to make that slow descent in
the face of his goggle-eyed stare, and with the most casual of good
mornings he led the way to the table.
There was something in Sarah's fluttering delight over the boy's
appearance that morning which awoke an almost hysterical impulse in her
brother. For he knew, as completely as though he had heard it from the
boy's own lips, that nothing in the world but the knowledge that "Miss
Sarah" wished it would have carried Steve through the ordeal of his
first appearance. They had a word together--Sarah and Caleb--after
breakfast.
"Did you ever see anything like him, Cal?" she demanded of her brother.
"Did you! Oh, I never dared hope he would look like that!"
Caleb pulled reflectively at his lower lip.
"I never did," he admitted. And then, offhandedly: "What--did he say
anything, last night, when you told him to wear those things, this
morning."
"Why, no," Miss Sarah laughed a little. "No. But he--Cal, he just sat
and looked at me, oh, so soberly, for the longest time. He made me
think somehow of a puppy that knows he's going to be scrubbed and--and
dreads it exceedingly. It's because of those dreadful things he's been
wearing, don't you suppose so?"
"No doubt of it," her brother said. "No doubt! And now I'm going over
to invite Dexter Allison to come and take a look at him. I was telling
him only yesterday that a gentleman had to be a gentleman born."
When Caleb came back, an hour later, with Allison at his heels, he
searched the house through without finding the boy. In his perplexity
he appealed to Sarah, who followed him to the front door.
"Where's Stephen?" he asked.
Sarah nodded to Allison.
"Why, I waited a half-hour, Cal," she said, "and then, when I thought
you wouldn't be back for a while, I sent him downtown--I sent him to
the village----"
Caleb seemed fairly to shrink.
"You sent him down to the village?" he echoed. "Did he--did he change
his clothes?"
"For some eggs," Sarah rounded out the sentence.
"And of course he didn't!" Suddenly her brother's face alarmed her.
"Cal," she exclaimed, "I haven't done anything I shouldn't have done,
have I?"
Caleb turned a wry face toward Allison.
"In--that--outfit!" he groaned. "Down to the village, and it's a
lumber town! He's gone, and if he doesn't have to fight his way back
then I----"
Sarah's alarm changed to fear instantly. She stepped out upon the
porch.
"I never thought of that," she whispered. "But you don't really
think----"
In her agitation she turned to Allison for contradiction. But Allison,
after placing a chair for her, drew one up for himself and, with an
expansive smile of anticipation upon his face, propped his feet upon
the rail.
"I think," he assured her, with no comfort in the assurance, "that this
will be well worth watching through to the finish!"
They sat and waited and in due course of time the boy returned. As he
appeared at the gate Sarah, with a strange choking sound in her throat,
half rose and then dropped weakly back into her chair. And even to
Allison, who had fondly looked forward to the worst, the little suit
with the pretty ruffed cuffs was an unbelievable wreck. The coat had
been ripped from hem to collar and dangled loose upon either side as
the boy advanced toward them; the knees of the trousers were split till
the bare skin showed through beneath, and those portions of the fabric
which were not encrusted with dirt were liberally o'er-spread with egg.
After one stricken glance at the spectacle Sarah tottered to her feet
and retreated none too steadily into the house. But it wasn't the
condition of the boy's clothes which held Caleb's gaze. He was
watching his face. For as Steve marched across the lawn the dangerous
whiteness of the boy's countenance half frightened the man. His lips
were a thin streak across a jaw tight clamped and flecked with blood in
one corner. And his eyes had the wide-open fixity of a sleep-walker.
Steve had reached the top of the steps in his mechanical approach
before Caleb spoke. And even then, when he turned, he seemed only half
to see the two men who were waiting his coming.
"Well?" faltered Caleb.
The boy stopped short and slowly turned his head. Both men heard that
breath, short and harsh, in the moment of silence.
"Just what does this mean?" Caleb attempted again. "Where have you
been?"
He hardly recognized the boy's voice.
"I been daown to the city," Steve slurred the words. "I been daown to
git Miss Sarah a dozen eggs--and I run into trouble--daown
there--a-gittin' 'em!"
"I--I should assume that you had," murmured Caleb. "But you've brought
the eggs back with you, or most of them, I see, even though they aren't
in particularly edible condition."
That was as long as Allison could endure it; he burst into a fit of
laughter which lasted until he was moaning for breath. And Steve,
teeth set, waited without moving until the noisy outburst was over.
"You'd better go upstairs and get into your old clothes," Caleb advised
him then. "And I'll get you something less--less dangerous to wear
before night."
But the boy stood rigid still.
"Will you," he asked, "will you give me another quarter now?"
Allison looked up quickly from wiping his eyes.
"A quarter," echoed Caleb slowly, even while he reached into his pocket
and handed the coin to the boy. "Now what do you----Here, where are
you going now?"
Steve had turned and was marching down the steps. He paused a minute
to explain, however.
"Why, I'm goin' back daown to the city," he grated out. "I'm goin'
back after Miss Sarah's eggs!"
And he went and when he returned the creases in the paper bag which
held his purchase were as fresh as when it had left the grocer's
counter.
"Well I'm--I'm damned!" Allison murmured, after the boy had entered the
house. "I _am_ damned! You'll have to bring that youngster over, Cal,
and introduce him to the children."
Caleb couldn't help it.
"I told you so!" he said.
That was only a beginning. The next fortnight was filled with more new
experiences than either Caleb or his sister would have believed could
be crammed into twenty times that duration. And Caleb spent most of
his waking hours boasting to the tolerant Allison of new and quite
astonishing traits which he found in the boy.
Acting upon Dexter's suggestion the man took Steve across the very next
day and presented him to the children who were guests in the big stucco
and timber house: Little, shy, transparent-skinned Mary Graves and
Garret Devereau and Archibald Wickersham--the Right Honorable Archie.
But from the very first, Steve's lack of enthusiasm for their company
impressed itself upon Caleb. As a matter of fact, the boy did cross
over and join in their games the first day or two, but it was only
after Caleb himself had suggested it. And more often than not he would
be back again, before an hour had passed, to sit silent and moody, chin
in hand, upon the steps, gazing north at the hills. It puzzled Caleb
mightily; he laid it to homesickness at the beginning.
Toward Barbara Allison, throughout those days, Steve's bearing was that
of frank and undisguised wonder and worship. Whatever they did, no
matter what they played at, his eyes rarely left the little girl's
bobbed head. For any feat which he performed he invariably turned to
her for approbation. And in return for that worship Barbara's
treatment of him was truly feminine. He out-ran the other boys as a
deer might outrun an ox; he out-leaped them without putting himself to
an effort, but he won scant attention or visible admiration from the
dark-eyed Barbara. She was far more likely to turn from his hungry
eyes to compliment the Honorable Archie upon his clumsy performance
with a sweetness that left Steve biting his lips in lack of
understanding. More than once it made even Caleb grit his teeth--the
little girl's disdainfully tilted chin--and when Steve's reluctance to
leave his own yard became an unmistakable thing, he spoke to Sarah
about it.
"Maybe I'm prejudiced, blindly," he growled, "but I do believe that
there is nothing in the world to equal the absolute and refined cruelty
of a woman-child of ten--unless it is that of a woman of twenty or
thirty, and on up the scale--when she first finds out that a man cares
enough for her so that she can really hurt him! If that Barbara was a
boy I'd catch her and switch her--Allison or no Allison!"
At any other time Sarah would have defended her own sex with much
asperity; instead, there was something oddly wistful in her answer.
"If it were only the way she treats him," she mused, "I wouldn't mind
so much." The sudden outraged glint in her eyes startled Caleb. "That
isn't the reason he doesn't want to play with them. They have been
laughing at him, Cal; they have all been making fun of him,
openly--mocking his speech and--and manners! All of them, that is,
save Garry Devereau."
Caleb's face hardened.
"Did he tell you that?" he demanded, surprised.
"Oh, no," Sarah exclaimed. "And you musn't mention it to him. I just
gathered it from something he let drop the other day. You know, Cal,
he hardly knows one figure from the other, but his reading is truly
marvelous. He can read as fluently, as expressively, as you or I can;
and one day, after he had been reading aloud for me, I asked him why he
didn't talk as--as he read. He didn't know what I meant at first, but
he understood the minute I tried to explain.
"'Do you mean I ought to talk in book language?' he asked.
"I told him that was my meaning, and after a time his blessed little
face began to go red.
"'Do--do they,' and he nodded over yonder, Cal, 'do they all talk--like
books?'
"So you see! And he's been trying ever since to correct his quaint
idioms and funny contractions, but it'll take a long time to correct a
mental process which is habit with him." Sarah's face grew resentful.
"I wish we'd never let him go over there, in the first place. We
should have known! For there isn't a look or a whispered comment,
which he doesn't catch. And, Cal, I doubt if even I have fathomed the
depths of his sensitiveness."
"We'll stop his going," Caleb stated flatly. "We'll keep him away from
them." And under his breath he added something which Sarah had never
heard him say in her presence.
But it needed no word of Caleb's to keep Steve at home. Without some
suggestion to urge him, the latter showed no inclination to leave his
own yard; and yet he would sit, too, for hours upon the top step of the
veranda, staring in the direction of the stucco lodge and listening to
the voices behind the high hedge. More and more often Garry Devereau
came over and joined him instead, and together the pair made almost
daily trips down to the mills. A quick intimacy had grown up between
the two boys--an intimacy which seemed all the stranger to Caleb
because of the very contrast between them.
Garret Devereau was two years older in actual age and a half dozen in
the matter of knowledge. Already, while still in knickerbockers, he
was beginning to show how entirely he was the son of his father. For
the older Devereau had grown up from a handsome, dark-skinned, reticent
boy into a moody and cynical skeptic who, at the age of thirty, had put
the muzzle of his own revolver against his temple and pulled the
trigger, because as he phrased it, "he was tired of the game." The
skepticism was already there in Garry Devereau's slow smile. And Caleb
often felt that the boy's black eyes were looking through and beyond,
rather than at him. The bond of mutual understanding which seemed to
exist between him and Steve puzzled Caleb; but he was glad of it, for
all that. It kept the boy from being left entirely alone.
Later, when he had had weeks and months to ponder it, the outcome of it
all seemed only logical to Caleb Hunter. It seemed to him then that he
should have foreseen it from the very first. But as it was, when the
denouement of which neither he nor Sarah had dreamed did come, it broke
with a suddenness that was cataclysmic to both of them.
From the beginning Steve had evinced an insatiable appetite for books;
he started in to devour everything upon which he could lay his hands,
and the Hunter library was lined with well-stocked cases. But it was
the history volumes which drew him most; with a fat tome upon his knees
he would sit for hours in a corner upon the floor, his eyes glued to
the pages. And one day, two weeks after the occurrence of the eggs, he
came to Sarah with a shy question, a book in one hand. After she had
caught the drift of his query, Sarah took the volume and found that he
had been reading of the fabulous deeds of King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table. His breathless interest in the subject thrilled
and warmed the tiny woman, for more than once she had asserted to her
brother that his very bearing was that of a small and sturdy knight of
old, and she explained and elaborated upon the printed text far more
appealingly than she had had any idea was in her power.
Steve went back to his reading after she had finished, but ever and
again that morning his eyes, blank with preoccupation, wandered from
the type; ever and again his ears seemed to be straining to catch the
echo of childish trebles from the yard beyond the hedge. And after
dinner Caleb was astonished when the boy explained, a little awkwardly,
that he was going over to Allison's grounds for a while. Allison
himself passed Steve in the hedge gap and, with a word of greeting,
stopped to shake hands with him gravely. So it came about that they
were sitting together, Dexter and Caleb, smoking in silence, when
Barbara Allison's first wild scream came shrilling to their ears. They
waited, staring at each other until the riotous clamor which rose set
them to running across the lawn. But the scene which met Caleb's eyes
when he burst through the shrubbery froze him into immobility.
There was a seething pack of children around two writhing figures upon
the ground; they were all shrieking in soprano panic--all save Garry
Devereau. He, standing a little to one side, was smiling his queer,
crooked, handsome smile, while Stephen O'Mara mauled the Honorable
Archibald Wickersham with true riverman thoroughness, which meant the
infliction of the greatest possible damage in the least possible time.
An inscrutable sort of contempt curled his lips when Barbara Allison
frantically begged him to rescue the small Britisher from the storm of
fists--a man's contempt for another man who does not take his
punishment in silence. For the howls of the Honorable Archie were
louder and more piercing than the loudest of the hysterical little
girls who were watching.
Caleb felt as a man feels who tries to run in a nightmare and cannot
make his feet obey the commands of his brain. It was only when Barbara
Allison dropped desperately to her knees beside the huddle of arms and
legs and straining bodies and began to beat with tight-clenched little
hands upon Steve's tousled head, that the power of action returned to
him. He fairly leaped forward then, scattering the circle before his
weighty rush and, leaning over to get a firm grip upon his collar,
jerked Steve upright with one mighty heave. That effort raised the
Honorable Archie to his feet, also, for Steve was clamped to his
antagonist, or victim, with a bulldog grip.
It grew very quiet when Caleb whirled the boy around and stood peering
sternly down into his battle-streaked features. Allison strode quietly
up in that moment.
"Well?" Caleb didn't know just how to begin, but his voice was cold.
"Well, young man, can you explain just what this means?"
The Honorable Archie limped away a pace or two and, whimpering, fell to
rearranging his crumpled raiment--fell to dabbling at a bruised and
swollen nose. When he found that there was blood upon his handkerchief
he howled again, but the rest of the children waited, appalled, for
Steve's answer.
Had the boy burst into bitter expletive at that instant Caleb would not
have been so surprised as he was at Steve's reception of his question.
The latter looked up, just pushed his long hair back from his forehead
with one quick hand; and then smiled, very, very slowly.
"Nuthin'--nuthin' much," he qualified the statement. "Only we was
goin' to play King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! He
wanted to be her knight"--an uncomplimentary thumb indicated the
Honorable Archie--"and--and so did I." This time his eyes went to
Barbara, who was listening, her teeth sunk in her lip. "He wanted to
be her knight--an'--an' he ain't got no call to be, because in case of
trouble, or anything, he couldn't purtect her! He couldn't fight good
enough to take good keer o' her, because I kin fight better. I--I just
licked him to prove it!"
And there the matter-of-fact explanation halted.
Caleb never knew just what he had meant to do when he first dragged the
boy away from his shrieking rival. But while he stood there, looking
down into that glowing face, he realized that he had walked into a
situation bigger than any with which he was prepared to cope. Already
it had become veritable comedy to the broadly grinning Allison--but it
seemed symbolic to Caleb. He sensed how close it lay to tragedy
itself; he found himself arguing kindly, in place of the rebuke which
he had thought to deliver.
"But in the days when knighthood was in flower, Steve," he explained
ponderously, "the--the fair ladies always chose their own knights,
didn't they?"
But the question had an entirely unexpected effect upon the boy. For,
instead of wiping the smile from the small and wistfully earnest face,
it only softened it. Shyly Steve fell to kicking the turf with the toe
of his new boot; then his head came up and, flaming red, he squared his
shoulders and faced Barbara full. The move was unmistakable--he was
just waiting for her to name him the knight of her choice. And,
instead, the little girl, her eyes twin shafts of searing scorn, curled
her lips at him and fairly spat out the words in her shaking rage.
"You--you--_my_ knight?" she half whispered, "_You_!" And she turned
her back and went, solicitously, toward Archie and his rumpled clothes.
Even Allison stopped smiling, even Devereau forgot his curious
amusement, at the livid change which came over Steve's face with that
answer which she flung at him. The boy fell away a step before her
fierce little visage; he crooked one arm, over the cheek where her
fists had beaten the skin pink a moment before. And then her meaning
struck him like a blow between the eyes.
Shoulders slumped forward, head hanging low, he wheeled on heel and
started for the gap in the hedge. Caleb could not move, nor did
Allison, whose wits were quick enough in most things. But Garry
Devereau followed and overtook his friend. He did not speak to him; he
merely dropped one hand upon his drooping shoulders. And yet the men,
had they talked for an hour, could not have conveyed all that there was
in that second of contact. For it proved electrical in its effect.
Steve whirled again and came marching back, head up now--back to the
group which had not moved. Straight up to Barbara he went and faced
her once again.
"I wa'n't good enough to be your knight, was I?" he accused her in a
hushed and vibrant voice. "I--I don't know enough, ner I can't talk
good enough, to be your knight. I ain't good enough fer you! But I'm
a-goin' to be--do you hear? I'm a-goin' to be--an' when I am . . .
when I am . . . then I'll come back to you!"
This time, rigid as a lance, he disappeared from sight. Caleb stood
staring at the ground. Allison stood and stared at the horizon.
And when Barbara finally started, white of face and silent, toward the
stucco house, Caleb, too, turned and followed his boy home. It was the
first time in his memory that he and Dexter Allison had parted in
anger, and at that moment Caleb believed that he hated the man and all
that was his!
Steve had gone straight to his room, but one glimpse of his bloodless
face had told Sarah too much and too little. After her brother had
explained she would not let him go upstairs to the boy.
"It will be better to leave him alone for a while," she said. "It has
been coming for days, this thing. I think I knew it would come--but
how could we have stopped it, Cal? And you won't believe me, but it's
because Barbara Allison cares more for our boy's little finger than she
could for a hundred Archie Wickershams that she--she said what she did.
Women do those things, and even I, who am a woman, can't tell you why!"
Steve did not come downstairs for supper that night, and when he failed
to appear at the breakfast hour, both Caleb and Sarah mounted to his
room, fear in their hearts. The bed had not been slept in; the sheets
were not even disarranged, but there was a scrap of paper pinned to one
pillow-slip. It wasn't written in "book language"--that short
message--for it was not his brain, but his heart, which had phrased it:
I'm a-comin' back--I'm comin' back to you, someday when they won't be
no need fer you to be ashamed fer me. I'm takin' my new clothes with
me because I knowed you would a-wanted me to--and the shoes, too. I'm
askin' you to take keer of Ole Samanthy til I come fer her--and Miss
Sarah ain't got no call to worry, fer I could always take keer o'
myself.
It was signed "Stephen O'Mara."
Sarah's face went white when she had read it through. Her knees
weakened under her and she had to sit down.
"Why, Cal--why, Cal, he's--he's gone," she quavered.
And Caleb nodded down into her stricken face.
"Yes--he--he's gone," he breathed.
Sarah swallowed hard. Then two bright tears crept out from under her
eyelids and went coursing down her cheeks. She rose and groped her way
to her own room.
Caleb found Barbara Allison waiting in the living-room when he, still
numb from the shock, went back downstairs. She came up to him and
stood a moment, twisting the fingers of one hand within those of the
other.
"I want to see Stephen, please, Uncle Cal," she faltered.
Caleb drew a deep and unsteady breath.
"Steve isn't here, Barbara," he said as gently as he could.
The child didn't understand.
"Father sent me over to apologize," she explained slowly. "I'm to tell
him that I'm sorry. But I--I want to tell him, too, that if I couldn't
have him for my knight--I--I wouldn't ever have any knight at all!"
Caleb felt a tightening at his throat which made speech difficult.
"But Steve has gone away," he managed to gulp.
A shadow came into the big dark eyes lifted to his.
"He'll be back for breakfast, won't he?" she asked, hopefully.
"I'm afraid not, Barbara. I'm afraid now that he may never come
back--again."
She didn't understand what he meant at first, so Caleb tried to
explain. But when his voice broke and trailed off into a husky whisper
there was no further need of explanation. She ran then and threw
herself in a passion of tears upon a window-seat in the corner. Caleb
found his chair. And after a time he felt a small hand touch his
sleeve; he felt a wet cheek pressed tight to his own.
"Oh, don't you feel so badly, too, Uncle Cal," Barbara sobbed.
"Please--please! Because he _is_ coming back! He told me he would--he
told me he would, himself!"