testily.
Arnold Carruth snickered, and Johnny on one side, and Lily on the other,
prodded him with an elbow. They were close under the window.
“Burglars is up to all sorts of queer tricks, ma'am,” said Jane. “They
may mew like cats to tell one another what door to go in.”
“Jane, you talk like an idiot,” said Mrs. Meeks. “Burglars talking like
cats! Who ever heard of such a thing? It sounds right under that window.
Open my closet door and get those heavy old shoes and throw them out.”
It was an awful moment. The three dared not move. The cats and kittens
in the bags--not so many, after all--seemed to have turned into
multiplication-tables. They were positively alarming in their
determination to get out, their wrath with one another, and their
vociferous discontent with the whole situation.
“I can't hold my bag much longer,” said poor little Arnold Carruth.
“Hush up, cry-baby!” whispered Lily, fiercely, in spite of a clawing paw
emerging from her own bag and threatening her bare arm.
Then came the shoes. One struck Arnold squarely on the shoulder, nearly
knocking him down and making him lose hold of his bag. The other struck
Lily's bag, and conditions became worse; but she held on despite a
scratch. Lily had pluck.
Then Jane's voice sounded very near, as she leaned out of the window. “I
guess they have went, ma'am,” said she. “I seen something run.”
“I can hear them,” said Mrs. Meeks, querulously.
“I seen them run,” persisted Jane, who was tired and wished to be gone.
“Well, close that window, anyway, for I know I hear them, even if they
have gone,” said Mrs. Meeks. The three heard with relief the window
slammed down.
The light flashed out, and simultaneously Lily Jennings and Johnny
Trumbull turned indignantly upon Arnold Carruth.
“There, you have gone and let all those poor cats go,” said Johnny.
“And spoilt everything,” said Lily.
Arnold rubbed his shoulder. “You would have let go if you had been hit
right on the shoulder by a great shoe,” said he, rather loudly.
“Hush up!” said Lily. “I wouldn't have let my cats go if I had been
killed by a shoe; so there.”
“Serves us right for taking a boy with curls,” said Johnny Trumbull.
But he spoke unadvisedly. Arnold Carruth was no match whatever for
Johnny Trumbull, and had never been allowed the honor of a combat with
him; but surprise takes even a great champion at a disadvantage. Arnold
turned upon Johnny like a flash, out shot a little white fist, up struck
a dimpled leg clad in cloth and leather, and down sat Johnny Trumbull;
and, worse, open flew his bag, and there was a yowling exodus.
“There go your cats, too, Johnny Trumbull,” said Lily, in a perfectly
calm whisper. At that moment both boys, victor and vanquished, felt a
simultaneous throb of masculine wrath at Lily. Who was she to gloat
over the misfortunes of men? But retribution came swiftly to Lily. That
viciously clawing little paw shot out farther, and there was a limit to
Spartanism in a little girl born so far from that heroic land. Lily let
go of her bag and with difficulty stifled a shriek of pain.
“Whose cats are gone now?” demanded Johnny, rising.
“Yes, whose cats are gone now?” said Arnold.
Then Johnny promptly turned upon him and knocked him down and sat on
him.
Lily looked at them, standing, a stately little figure in the darkness.
“I am going home,” said she. “My mother does not allow me to go with
fighting boys.”
Johnny rose, and so did Arnold, whimpering slightly. His shoulder ached
considerably.
“He knocked me down,” said Johnny.
Even as he whimpered and as he suffered, Arnold felt a thrill of
triumph. “Always knew I could if I had a chance,” said he.
“You couldn't if I had been expecting it,” said Johnny.
“Folks get knocked down when they ain't expecting it most of the time,”
declared Arnold, with more philosophy than he realized.
“I don't think it makes much difference about the knocking down,” said
Lily. “All those poor cats and kittens that we were going to give a good
home, where they wouldn't be starved, have got away, and they will run
straight back to Mr. Jim Simmons's.”
“If they haven't any more sense than to run back to a place where they
don't get enough to eat and are kicked about by a lot of children, let
them run,” said Johnny.
“That's so,” said Arnold. “I never did see what we were doing such a
thing for, anyway--stealing Mr. Simmons's cats and giving them to Mr.
Van Ness.”
It was the girl alone who stood by her guns of righteousness. “I saw and
I see,” she declared, with dangerously loud emphasis. “It was only our
duty to try to rescue poor helpless animals who don't know any better
than to stay where they are badly treated. And Mr. Van Ness has so
much money he doesn't know what to do with it; he would have been real
pleased to give those cats a home and buy milk and liver for them. But
it's all spoiled now. I will never undertake to do good again, with a
lot of boys in the way, as long as I live; so there!” Lily turned about.
“Going to tell your mother!” said Johnny, with scorn which veiled
anxiety.
“No, I'm NOT. I don't tell tales.”
Lily marched off, and in her wake went Johnny and Arnold, two poor
little disillusioned would-be knights of old romance in a wretchedly
commonplace future, not far enough from their horizons for any glamour.
They went home, and of the three Johnny Trumbull was the only one
who was discovered. For him his aunt Janet lay in wait and forced a
confession. She listened grimly, but her eyes twinkled.
“You have learned to fight, John Trumbull,” said she, when he had
finished. “Now the very next thing you have to learn, and make yourself
worthy of your grandfather Trumbull, is not to be a fool.”
“Yes, Aunt Janet,” said Johnny.
The next noon, when he came home from school, old Maria, who had been
with the family ever since he could remember and long before, called him
into the kitchen. There, greedily lapping milk from a saucer, were two
very lean, tall kittens.
“See those nice little tommy-cats,” said Maria, beaming upon Johnny,
whom she loved and whom she sometimes fancied deprived of boyish joys.
“Your aunt Janet sent me over to the Simmonses' for them this morning.
They are overrun with cats--such poor, shiftless folks always be--and
you can have them. We shall have to watch for a little while till they
get wonted, so they won't run home.”
Johnny gazed at the kittens, fast distending with the new milk, and
felt presumably much as dear Robin Hood may have felt after one of his
successful raids in the fair, poetic past.
“Pretty, ain't they?” said Maria. “They have drank up a whole saucer of
milk. 'Most starved. I s'pose.”
Johnny gathered up the two forlorn kittens and sat down in a kitchen
chair, with one on each shoulder, hard, boyish cheeks pressed against
furry, purring sides, and the little fighting Cock of the Walk felt his
heart glad and tender with the love of the strong for the weak.
DANIEL AND LITTLE DAN'L
THE Wise homestead dated back more than a century, yet it had nothing
imposing about it except its site. It was a simple, glaringly white
cottage. There was a center front door with two windows on each side;
there was a low slant of roof, pierced by unpicturesque dormers. On
the left of the house was an ell, which had formerly been used as a
shoemaker's shop, but now served as a kitchen. In the low attic of the
ell was stored the shoemaker's bench, whereon David Wise's grandfather
had sat for nearly eighty years of working days; after him his eldest
son, Daniel's father, had occupied the same hollow seat of patient toil.
Daniel had sat there for twenty-odd years, then had suddenly realized
both the lack of necessity and the lack of customers, since the
great shoe-plant had been built down in the village. Then Daniel had
retired--although he did not use that expression. Daniel said to his
friends and his niece Dora that he had “quit work.” But he told himself,
without the least bitterness, that work had quit him.
After Daniel had retired, his one physiological peculiarity assumed
enormous proportions. It had always been with him, but steady work had
held it, to a great extent, at bay. Daniel was a moral coward before
physical conditions. He was as one who suffers, not so much from agony
of the flesh as from agony of the mind induced thereby. Daniel was a
coward before one of the simplest, most inevitable happenings of earthly
life. He was a coward before summer heat. All winter he dreaded summer.
Summer poisoned the spring for him. Only during the autumn did he
experience anything of peace. Summer was then over, and between him and
another summer stretched the blessed perspective of winter. Then Daniel
Wise drew a long breath and looked about him, and spelled out the beauty
of the earth in his simple primer of understanding. Daniel had in his
garden behind the house a prolific grape-vine. He ate the grapes, full
of the savor of the dead summer, with the gusto of a poet who can at
last enjoy triumph over his enemy.
Possibly it was the vein of poetry in Daniel which made him a
coward--which made him so vulnerable. During the autumn he reveled in
the tints of the landscape which his sitting-room windows commanded.
There were many maples and oaks. Day by day the roofs of the houses in
the village became more evident, as the maples shed their crimson and
gold and purple rags of summer. The oaks remained, great shaggy masses
of dark gold and burning russet; later they took on soft hues, making
clearer the blue firmament between the boughs. Daniel watched the autumn
trees with pure delight. “He will go to-day,” he said of a flaming maple
after a night of frost which had crisped the white arches of the grass
in his dooryard. All day he sat and watched the maple cast its glory,
and did not bother much with his simple meals. The Wise house was
erected on three terraces. Always through the dry summer the grass was
burned to an ugly negation of color. Later, when rain came, the grass
was a brilliant green, patched with rosy sorrel and golden stars of
arnica. Then later still came the diamond brilliance of the frost. So
dry were the terraces in summer-time that no flowers would flourish.
When Daniel's mother had come to the house as a bride she had planted
under a window a blush-rose bush, but always the blush-roses were few
and covered with insects. It was not until the autumn, when it was time
for the flowers to die, that the sorrel blessing of waste lands flushed
rosily and the arnica showed its stars of slender threads of gold, and
there might even be a slight glimpse of purple aster and a dusty spray
or two of goldenrod. Then Daniel did not shrink from the sight of the
terraces. In summer-time the awful negative glare of them under the
afternoon sun maddened him.
In winter he often visited his brother John in the village. He was very
fond of John, and John's wife, and their only daughter, Dora. When John
died, and later his wife, he would have gone to live with Dora, but
she married. Then her husband also died, and Dora took up dressmaking,
supporting herself and her delicate little girl-baby. Daniel adored this
child. She had been named for him, although her mother had been aghast
before the proposition. “Name a girl Daniel, uncle!” she had cried.
“She is going to have what I own after I have done with it, anyway,”
declared Daniel, gazing with awe and rapture at the tiny flannel bundle
in his niece's arms. “That won't make any difference, but I do wish you
could make up your mind to call her after me, Dora.”
Dora Lee was soft-hearted. She named her girl-baby Daniel, and called
her Danny, which was not, after all, so bad, and her old uncle loved the
child as if she had been his own. Little Daniel--he always called her
Daniel, or, rather, “Dan'l”--was the only reason for his descending into
the village on summer days when the weather was hot. Daniel, when he
visited the village in summer-time, wore always a green leaf inside his
hat and carried an umbrella and a palm-leaf fan. This caused the village
boys to shout, “Hullo, grandma!” after him. Daniel, being a little hard
of hearing, was oblivious, but he would have been in any case. His
whole mind was concentrated in getting along that dusty glare of street,
stopping at the store for a paper bag of candy, and finally ending in
Dora's little dark parlor, holding his beloved namesake on his knee,
watching her blissfully suck a barley stick while he waved his palmleaf
fan. Dora would be fitting gowns in the next room. He would hear the
hum of feminine chatter over strictly feminine topics. He felt very much
aloof, even while holding the little girl on his knee. Daniel had never
married--had never even h ad a sweetheart. The marriageable women he
had seen had not been of the type to attract a dreamer like Daniel Wise.
Many of those women thought him “a little off.”
Dora Lee, his niece, privately wondered if her uncle had his full
allotment of understanding. He seemed much more at home with her little
daughter than with herself, and Dora considered herself a very good
business woman, with possibly an unusual endowment of common sense. She
was such a good business woman that when she died suddenly she left her
child with quite a sum in the bank, besides the house. Daniel did not
hesitate for a moment. He engaged Miss Sarah Dean for a housekeeper, and
took the little girl (hardly more than a baby) to his own home. Dora
had left a will, in which she appointed Daniel guardian in spite of her
doubt concerning his measure of understanding. There was much comment in
the village when Daniel took his little namesake to live in his lonely
house on the terrace. “A man and an old maid to bring up that poor
child!” they said. But Daniel called Dr. Trumbull to his support. “It
is much better for that delicate child to be out of this village, which
drains the south hill,” Dr. Trumbull declared. “That child needs pure
air. It is hot enough in summer all around here, and hot enough at
Daniel's, but the air is pure there.”
There was no gossip about Daniel and Miss Sarah Dean. Gossip would have
seemed about as foolish concerning him and a dry blade of field-grass.
Sarah Dean looked like that. She wore rusty black gowns, and her
gray-blond hair was swept curtainwise over her ears on either side
of her very thin, mildly severe wedge of a face. Sarah was a notable
housekeeper and a good cook. She could make an endless variety of cakes
and puddings and pies, and her biscuits were marvels. Daniel had long
catered for himself, and a rasher of bacon, with an egg, suited him much
better for supper than hot biscuits, preserves, and five kinds of cake.
Still, he did not complain, and did not understand that Sarah's fare was
not suitable for the child, until Dr. Trumbull told him so.
“Don't you let that child live on that kind of food if you want her to
live at all,” said Dr. Trumbull. “Lord! what are the women made of, and
the men they feed, for that matter? Why, Daniel, there are many people
in this place, and hard-working people, too, who eat a quantity of food,
yet don't get enough nourishment for a litter of kittens.”
“What shall I do?” asked Daniel in a puzzled way.
“Do? You can cook a beefsteak yourself, can't you? Sarah Dean would fry
one as hard as soleleather.”
“Yes, I can cook a beefsteak real nice,” said Daniel.
“Do it, then; and cook some chops, too, and plenty of eggs.”
“I don't exactly hanker after quite so much sweet stuff,” said Daniel.
“I wonder if Sarah's feelings will be hurt.”
“It is much better for feelings to be hurt than stomachs,” declared Dr.
Trumbull, “but Sarah's feelings will not be hurt. I know her. She is
a wiry woman. Give her a knock and she springs back into place. Don't
worry about her, Daniel.”
When Daniel went home that night he carried a juicy steak, and he cooked
it, and he and little Dan'l had a square meal. Sarah refused the steak
with a slight air of hauteur, but she behaved very well. When she
set away her untasted layer-cakes and pies and cookies, she eyed them
somewhat anxiously. Her standard of values seemed toppling before her
mental vision. “They will starve to death if they live on such victuals
as beefsteak, instead of good nourishing hot biscuits and cake,” she
thought. After the supper dishes were cleared away she went into the
sitting-room where Daniel Wise sat beside a window, waiting in a sort of
stern patience for a whiff of air. It was a very close evening. The sun
was red in the low west, but a heaving sea of mist was rising over the
lowlands.
Sarah sat down opposite Daniel. “Close, ain't it?” said she. She began
knitting her lace edging.
“Pretty close,” replied Daniel. He spoke with an effect of forced
politeness. Although he had such a horror of extreme heat, he was always
chary of boldly expressing his mind concerning it, for he had a feeling
that he might be guilty of blasphemy, since he regarded the weather as
being due to an Almighty mandate. Therefore, although he suffered, he
was extremely polite.
“It is awful up-stairs in little Dan'l's room,” said Sarah. “I have got
all the windows open except the one that's right on the bed, and I told
her she needn't keep more than the sheet and one comfortable over her.”
Daniel looked anxious. “Children ain't ever overcome when they are in
bed, in the house, are they?”
“Land, no! I never heard of such a thing. And, anyway, little Dan'l's so
thin it ain't likely she feels the heat as much as some.”
“I hope she don't.”
Daniel continued to sit hunched up on himself, gazing with a sort of
mournful irritation out of the window upon the landscape over which the
misty shadows vaguely wavered.
Sarah knitted. She could knit in the dark. After a while she rose and
said she guessed she would go to bed, as to-morrow was her sweeping-day.
Sarah went, and Daniel sat alone.
Presently a little pale figure stole to him through the dusk--the child,
in her straight white nightgown, padding softly on tiny naked feet.
“Is that you, Dan'l?”
“Yes, Uncle Dan'l.”
“Is it too hot to sleep up in your room?”
“I didn't feel so very hot, Uncle Dan'l, but skeeters were biting me,
and a great big black thing just flew in my window!”
“A bat, most likely.”
“A bat!” Little Dan'l shuddered. She began a little stifled wail. “I'm
afeard of bats,” she lamented.
Daniel gathered the tiny creature up. “You can jest set here with Uncle
Dan'l,” said he. “It is jest a little cooler here, I guess. Once in a
while there comes a little whiff of wind.”
“Won't any bats come?”
“Lord, no! Your Uncle Dan'l won't let any bats come within a gun-shot.”
The little creature settled down contentedly in the old man's lap. Her
fair, thin locks fell over his shirt-sleeved arm, her upturned profile
was sweetly pure and clear even in the dusk. She was so delicately small
that he might have been holding a fairy, from the slight roundness of
the childish limbs and figure. Poor little girl!--Dan'l was much too
small and thin. Old man Daniel gazed down at her anxiously.
“Jest as soon as the nice fall weather comes,” said he, “uncle is going
to take you down to the village real often, and you can get acquainted
with some other nice little girls and play with them, and that will do
uncle's little Dan'l good.”
“I saw little Lucy Rose,” piped the child, “and she looked at me real
pleasant, and Lily Jennings wore a pretty dress. Would they play with
me, uncle?”
“Of course they would. You don't feel quite so hot, here, do you?”
“I wasn't so hot, anyway; I was afeard of bats.”
“There ain't any bats here.”
“And skeeters.”
“Uncle don't believe there's any skeeters, neither.”
“I don't hear any sing,” agreed little Dan'l in a weak voice. Very soon
she was fast asleep. The old man sat holding her, and loving her with
a simple crystalline intensity which was fairly heavenly. He himself
almost disregarded the heat, being raised above it by sheer exaltation
of spirit. All the love which had lain latent in his heart leaped
to life before the helplessness of this little child in his arms. He
realized himself as much greater and of more importance upon the face
of the earth than he had ever been before. He became paternity incarnate
and superblessed. It was a long time before he carried the little child
back to her room and laid her, still as inert with sleep as a lily,
upon her bed. He bent over her with a curious waving motion of his old
shoulders as if they bore wings of love and protection; then he crept
back down-stairs.
On nights like that he did not go to bed. All the bedrooms were under
the slant of the roof and were hot. He preferred to sit until dawn
beside his open window, and doze when he could, and wait with despairing
patience for the infrequent puffs of cool air breathing blessedly of wet
swamp places, which, even when the burning sun arose, would only show
dewy eyes of cool reflection. Daniel Wise, as he sat there through the
sultry night, even prayed for courage, as a devout sentinel might have
prayed at his post. The imagination of the deserter was not in the man.
He never even dreamed of appropriating to his own needs any portion
of his savings, and going for a brief respite to the deep shadows of
mountainous places, or to a cool coast, where the great waves broke in
foam upon the sand, breathing out the mighty saving breath of the sea.
It never occurred to him that he could do anything but remain at his
post and suffer in body and soul and mind, and not complain.
The next morning was terrible. The summer had been one of unusually
fervid heat, but that one day was its climax. David went panting
up-stairs to his room at dawn. He did not wish Sarah Dean to know that
he had sat up all night. He opened his bed, tidily, as was his wont.
Through living alone he had acquired many of the habits of an orderly
housewife. He went down-stairs, and Sarah was in the kitchen.
“It is a dreadful hot day,” said she as Daniel approached the sink to
wash his face and hands.
“It does seem a little warm,” admitted Daniel, with his studied air of
politeness with respect to the weather as an ordinance of God.
“Warm!” echoed Sarah Dean. Her thin face blazed a scarlet wedge between
the sleek curtains of her dank hair; perspiration stood on her triangle
of forehead. “It is the hottest day I ever knew!” she said, defiantly,
and there was open rebellion in her tone.
“It IS sort of warmish, I rather guess,” said Daniel.
After breakfast, old Daniel announced his intention of taking little
Dan'l out for a walk.
At that Sarah Dean fairly exploded. “Be you gone clean daft, Dan'l?”
said she. “Don't you know that it actually ain't safe to take out such a
delicate little thing as that on such a day?”
“Dr. Trumbull said to take her outdoors for a walk every day, rain or
shine,” returned Daniel, obstinately.
“But Dr. Trumbull didn't say to take her out if it rained fire and
brimstone, I suppose,” said Sarah Dean, viciously.
Daniel looked at her with mild astonishment.
“It is as much as that child's life is worth to take her out such a day
as this,” declared Sarah, viciously.
“Dr. Trumbull said to take no account of the weather,” said Daniel with
stubborn patience, “and we will walk on the shady side of the road, and
go to Bradley's Brook. It's always a little cool there.”
“If she faints away before you get there, you bring her right home,”
said Sarah. She was almost ferocious. “Just because YOU don't feel the
heat, to take out that little pindlin' girl such a day!” she exclaimed.
“Dr. Trumbull said to,” persisted Daniel, although he looked a little
troubled. Sarah Dean did not dream that, for himself, Daniel Wise would
have preferred facing an army with banners to going out under that
terrible fusillade of sun-rays. She did not dream of the actual heroism
which actuated him when he set out with little Dan'l, holding his big
umbrella over her little sunbonneted head and waving in his other hand a
palm-leaf fan.
Little Dan'l danced with glee as she went out of the yard. The small,
anemic creature did not feel the heat except as a stimulant. Daniel had
to keep charging her to walk slowly. “Don't go so fast, little Dan'l,
or you'll get overhet, and then what will Mis' Dean say?” he continually
repeated.