Mrs. Henry Lord sent out a good many invitations to the fairies for
Cyril's birthday party, but Mr. Lord was at his critical point in the
first volume of his text book, and forgot that he had a son. Where both
parents are not interested in these little affairs, something is sure to
be forgotten. Cyril's mother was weak and ill at the time, and the
upshot of it was that the anger of The Fairy Who Wasn't Invited was
visited on the baby Cyril in his cradle. In the revengeful spirit of
that fairy who is omitted from these functions, she sent a threat
instead of a blessing, and decreed that Cyril should walk in fear all
the days of his life. Of course, being a fairy, she knew very well that,
if Cyril, or anybody very much interested in Cyril, went to declare that
there was no power whatever behind her curse, she would not be able to
gratify her spite; but she knew also, being a fairy, that if Cyril got
into the habit of believing himself a coward, he would end by being one,
so she stood a good chance of winning, after all.
Cyril, when he came into the world, had come with only half a welcome.
No mother and father ever met over his cradle and looked at him
together, wondering if it were "well with the child." When he was old
enough to have his red-gold hair curled, and a sash tied around his baby
waist, he was sometimes taken downstairs, but he always fled to his
mother's or his nurse's knee when his father approached. How many times
he and his little sister Olive had hidden under the stairs when father
had called mother down to the study to scold her about the grocer's
bill! And there was a nightmare of a memory concerning a certain
birthday of father's, when mother had determined to be gay. It was just
before supper. Cyril, clad in his first brief trousers, was to knock at
the study door with a little purple nosegay in his hand, to show his
father that the lilac had bloomed. Olive, in crimson cashmere, was to
stand near, and when the door opened, present him with her own picture
of the cat and her new kittens; while mother, looking so pretty, with
her own gift all ready in her hand, was palpitating on the staircase to
see how the plans would work. Nothing could have been worse, however, in
the way of a small domestic tragedy, than the event itself when it
finally came off.
Cyril knocked. "What do you want?" came from within, in tones that
breathed vexation at being interrupted.
"Knock again!" whispered Mrs. Lord. "Father doesn't remember that it's
his birthday, and he doesn't know that it's you knocking."
Cyril knocked again timidly, but at the first sound of his father's
irritable voice as he rose hurriedly from his desk, the boy turned and
fled through the kitchen to the shed.
Olive held the fort, picture in hand.
"It's your birthday, father," she said. "There's a cake for supper, and
here's my present." There was no love in the child's voice. Her heart,
filled with passionate sympathy for Cyril, had lost all zest for its
task, and she handed her gift to her father with tightly closed lips and
heaving breast.
"All right; I'm much obliged, but I wish you would not knock at this
door when I am writing,--I've told you that before. Tell your mother I
can't come to supper to-night, but to send me a tray, please!"
As he closed the door Olive saw him lay the picture on a table, never
looking at it as he crossed the room to one of the great book-cases that
lined the walls.
Mrs. Lord had by this time disappeared forlornly from the upper hall.
Olive, aged ten, walked up the stairs in a state of mind ferocious in
its anger. Entering her mother's room she tore the crimson ribbon from
her hair and began to unbutton her dress. "I hate him! I _hate_ him!"
she cried, stamping her foot. "I will never knock at his door again! I'd
like to take Cyril and run away! I'll get the birthday cake and fling it
into the pond; nothing shall stop me!". Then, seeing her mother's white
face, she wailed, as she flung herself on the bed: "Oh, mother,
mother,--why did you ever let him come to live with us? Did we _have_ to
have him for a father? Couldn't you _help_ it, mother?"
Mrs. Lord grew paler, put her hand to her heart, wavered, caught
herself, wavered again, and fell into the great chair by the window. Her
eyes closed, and Olive, frightened by the apparent effect of her words,
ran down the back stairs and summoned the cook. When she returned,
panting and breathless, her mother was sitting quite quietly by the
window, looking out at the cedars.
"It was only a sudden pain, dear! I am all well again. Nothing is really
the matter, Bridget. Mr. Lord will not be down to supper; spread a tray
for him, please."
"I'd like to spread a tray for him at the bottom of the Red Sea; that's
where he belongs!" muttered Bridget, as she descended to the kitchen to
comfort Cyril.
"Was it my fault, mother?" asked Olive, bending over her anxiously.
Her mother drew the child's head down and leaned her own against it
feebly. "No, dear," she sighed. "It's nobody's fault, unless it's mine!"
"Is the pain gone?"
"Quite gone, dear."
Nevertheless the pain was to prove the final wrench to a heart that had
been on the verge of breaking for many a year, and it was not long
before Olive and Cyril were motherless.
Mr. Lord did not have the slightest objection to the growing intimacy
between his children and the new family in the Yellow House, so long as
he was not disturbed by it, and so long as it cost him nothing. They had
strict orders not to play with certain of their village acquaintances,
Mr. Lord believing himself to be an aristocrat; the fact being that he
was almost destitute of human sympathy, and to make a neighbor of him
you would have had to begin with his grandfather and work for three
generations. He had seen Nancy and Gilbert at the gates of his place,
and he had passed Mrs. Carey in one of his infrequent walks to the
post-office. She was not a person to pass without mental comment, and
Mr. Lord instantly felt himself in the presence of an equal, an unusual
fact in his experience; he would not have known a superior if he had met
one ever so often!
"A very fine, unusual woman," he thought. "She accounts for that
handsome, manly boy. I wish he could knock some spirit into Cyril!"
The process of "knocking spirit" into a boy would seem to be
inconsistent with educational logic, but by very different methods,
Gilbert had certainly given Cyril a trifling belief in himself, and
Mother Carey was gradually winning him to some sort of self-expression
by the warmth of her frequent welcomes and the delightful faculty she
possessed of making him feel at ease.
"Come, come!" said the petrels to the molly-mocks in "Water Babies."
"This young gentleman is going to Shiny Wall. He is a plucky one to have
gone so far. Give the little chap a cast over the ice-pack for Mother
Carey's sake."
Gilbert was delighted, in a new place, to find a boy friend of his own
age, and Cyril's speedy attachment gratified his pride. Gilbert was
doing well these summer months. The unceasing activity, the authority
given him by his mother and sisters, his growing proficiency in all
kinds of skilled labor, as he "puttered" about with Osh Popham or Bill
Harmon in house and barn and garden, all this pleased his enterprising
nature. Only one anxiety troubled his mother; his unresigned and
mutinous attitude about exchanging popular and fashionable Eastover for
Beulah Academy, which seat of learning he regarded with unutterable
scorn. He knew that there was apparently no money to pay Eastover fees,
but he was still child enough to feel that it could be found, somewhere,
if properly searched for. He even considered the education of Captain
Carey's eldest son an emergency vital enough to make it proper to dip
into the precious five thousand dollars which was yielding them a part
of their slender annual income. Once, when Gilbert was a little boy, he
had put his shoulder out of joint, and to save time his mother took him
at once to the doctor's. He was suffering, but still strong enough to
walk. They had to climb a hilly street, the child moaning with pain, his
mother soothing and encouraging him as they went on. Suddenly he
whimpered: "Oh! if this had only happened to Ellen or Joanna or Addy or
Nancy, I could have borne it _so_ much better!"
There was a good deal of that small boy left in Gilbert still, and he
endured best the economies that fell on the feminine members of the
family. It was the very end of August, and although school opened the
first Monday in September, Mrs. Carey was not certain whether Gilbert
would walk into the old-fashioned, white painted academy with the
despised Beulah "hayseeds," or whether he would make a scene, and
authority would have to be used.
"I declare, Gilly!" exclaimed Mother Carey one night, after an argument
on the subject; "one would imagine the only course in life open to a boy
was to prepare at Eastover and go to college afterwards! Yet you may
take a list of the most famous men in America, and I dare say you will
find half of them came from schools like Beulah Academy or infinitely
poorer ones. I don't mean the millionaires alone. I mean the merchants
and engineers and surgeons and poets and authors and statesmen. Go ahead
and try to stamp your school in some way, Gilly!--don't sit down feebly
and wait for it to stamp you!"
This was all very well as an exhibition of spirit on Mother Carey's
part, but it had been a very hard week. Gilbert was sulky; Peter had had
a touch of tonsillitis; Nancy was faltering at the dishwashing and
wishing she were a boy; Julia was a perfect barnacle; Kathleen had an
aching tooth, and there being no dentist in the village, was applying
Popham remedies,--clove-chewing, roasted raisins, and disfiguring bread
poultices; Bill Harmon had received no reply from Mr. Hamilton, and when
Mother Carey went to her room that evening she felt conscious of a
lassitude, and a sense of anxiety, deeper than for months. As Gilbert
went by to his own room, he glanced in at her door, finding it slightly
ajar. She sat before her dressing table, her long hair flowing over her
shoulders, her head bent over her two hands. His father's picture was in
its accustomed place, and he heard her say as she looked at it: "Oh, my
dear, my dear! I am so careworn, so troubled, so discouraged! Gilbert
needs you, and so do I, more than tongue can tell!" The voice was so low
that it was almost a whisper, but it reached Gilbert's ears, and there
was a sob strangled in it that touched his heart.
The boy tiptoed softly into his room and sat down on his bed in the
moonlight.
"Dear old Mater!" he thought. "It's no go! I've got to give up Eastover
and college and all and settle down into a country bumpkin! No fellow
could see his mother look like that, and speak like that, and go his own
gait; he's just got to go hers!"
Meantime Mrs. Carey had put out the lamp and lay quietly thinking. The
last words that floated through her mind as she sank to sleep were those
of a half-forgotten verse, learned, she could not say how many
years before:--
You can glad your child or grieve it!
You can trust it or deceive it;
When all's done
Beneath God's sun
You can only love and leave it.