Front matter (continued 2)

"No, ma'am," he said, blankly.

"Then I'll tell you. There are two things children must learn as soon as they're able to learn anything. One is to be honest; the other is to tell the truth. You know what telling the truth is, don't you?"

He did know, but paralyzed by her earnestness, he denied the fact. "No, ma'am."

"So there you are! And I don't suppose you've been taught anything about honesty."

"No, ma'am."

"Then you must begin to learn."

He began to learn that minute. Still treating him as a class, she delivered a little lecture, such as a child of tender years could understand, on the two basic virtues of which he had pleaded ignorance. He listened as in a trance, his eyes fixed on her vacantly. Though seizing a disconnected word or two, fear kept him from getting the gist of it all, as he generally did.

"It's your influence on the children that I want you to beware of. Arthur is older than you, but he's only ten; and a boy with your experience could easily teach him a good deal of harm. Cilly is eight, and Bertie only five. You'll be careful with them, won't you? Do you know that if we lead others astray God will call us to account for it?"

"No, ma'am."

"Well, He will; and I want you to remember it, and be afraid. Unless you're afraid of God you'll never grow into the good boy I hope we're going to make of you."

The homily finished, he was instructed in the ways of the upper floor, where, in the sloping space under the eaves, he was to have his room. After this he came back to the sitting room, not knowing what else to do. He was in a daze. It was as if he had dropped on another planet where nothing was familiar. Whether to stand up or sit down he didn't know. He didn't know what to think, or what to think about. Cut loose from his bearings, he floated in mental space.

As standing seemed to commit him to least that was wrong, he stood. Standing implied looking out of the window, and looking out of the window showed him, about half past twelve, a well-built boy, rosy with the cold, noisy from exuberance of spirit, swinging in at the gate and brandishing a hockey stick. From her preparation of the dinner his mother ran to meet him at the door. She spoke in a loud whisper that easily reached the sitting room.

"Now be careful, Arthur. He's come. He's in there."

Arthur responded with noisy indifference. "Who? The crook?"

"Sh-h-h, dear! You mustn't call him that. We must help him to forget it, and to grow into being like ourselves."

Arthur grunted noncommittally. Presently he strolled into the sitting room, whistling a tune. With hands in his pockets, his bearing was that of an overlord. He made a circuit of the room, eying the new guest, as the new guest eyed him back.

"Hello?" the overlord said at last, with a faint note of interrogation.

Still whistling and still with his hands in his pockets, he strolled out again.

Tom Whitelaw's nerves had become so many runlets for shame. He was the crook! He knew the word as one which crooks themselves use contemptuously. If he should hear it again.... But happily Mrs. Tollivant had put her veto on its use.

The gate clicked again. Coming up the pathway, he saw a girl of about his own age, with a boy much younger who swung himself on crutches. All his movements were twisted and grotesque. His head was sunk into his shoulders as if he had no neck. His feet and legs wore metal braces. His face had the uncannily aged look produced by suffering. Without actually helping him, the little girl kept by his side maternally. She was a dainty little girl, very fair, with shiny yellow hair hanging down her back, like a fairy princess in a picture book. The boy looking out of the window fell in love with her at sight. He was sure that in her he would find a friend.

On entering she called out in a whiny voice, very musical to Tom Whitelaw's ear:

"Ma! Bertie's been a naughty boy. He wouldn't sing 'Pretty Birdling' for Miss Smallbones. I told him you'd punish him, and you will, won't you, ma?"

As there was no response to this, the young ones came to the door of the sitting room and looked in. They stared at the stranger, and the stranger stared at them, with the unabashed frankness of young animals. Having stared their fill, the son and daughter of the house went off to ask about dinner.

To Tom that dinner was another new experience. For the first time in his life he sat down to what is known as a family meal. Attempts had sometimes been made by well-meaning women in the tenements to rope him to their tables, but his mother had never permitted him to yield to them. Now he sat down with those of his own age, to be served like them, and on some sort of footing of equality. The honor was so great that he could hardly swallow. Second helpings were beyond him.

The afternoon was blank again. "You'll begin to go to school on Monday," Mrs. Tollivant had explained; but in the meantime he had the hours to himself. They were long. He was lonely. Having been given permission to go into the yard, he stood studying the Plymouth Rocks. Presently he was conscious of a light step behind him. Before he had time to turn around he also heard a voice. It was a whiny voice, yet sharp and peremptory.

"You stop looking at our hens."

The fairy princess had not come up to him; she had paused some two or three yards away. Her expression was so haughty that it hurt him. It hurt him more from her than from anybody else because of his admiration. He looked at her beseechingly, not for permission to go on studying the Plymouth Rocks, but for some shade of relenting. He got none. The sharp little face was as glittering and cold as one of the icicles hanging from the roof behind her. Heavy at heart, he turned to go into the house by the back door.

He had climbed most of the hill when the clear, whiny voice arrested him.

"Who's a crook?"

At this stab in the back he leaped round, fury in his dark blue eyes. But the fairy princess was used to fury in dark blue eyes, and knew how best to defy it. The tip of the tongue she thrust out at him added insolence to insult. He turned again, and, wounded in all his being, went on into the house.

Near the back door there was a sun parlor, and in it he saw Bertie, squatting in a small-wheeled chair built for his convenience. Bertie called to him invitingly.

"I've got a book."

"I've got a book, too," he returned, in Bertie's own spirit.

"You show me your book, and I'll show you mine."

The proposal being fair, he went in search of his History of Mankind. In a few minutes he was seated on the floor beside Bertie's chair, exchanging literary criticisms. He liked Bertie. He had a premonition that Bertie was going to like him. After the disdain of the fairy princess, and the superciliousness of the overlord, this was comforting. Moreover, he could return Bertie's friendliness by doing things for him which no one else had time to do. He could push his wheeled chair; he could run his errands; he could fetch and carry; he would like doing it.

"I've got infantile paralysis."

"I've got a rubber ball."

"I've got a train."

"I've got a funny little man what dances."

Coming into the house, Cilly found them the best of friends, in the best of spirits. Without entering the sun-parlor, she spoke through the doorway, coldly.

"Bertie, I don't think momma would like you to act like that. I'll go and ask her."

Mrs. Tollivant hurried from the kitchen, scouring a saucepan as she looked in on them. Seeing nothing amiss, she went away again. Then as if distrusting her own vision, she came back. She came back more than once, anxiously, suspiciously. Bertie was enjoying himself with this boy picked out of the gutter. That the boy had been picked out of the gutter was not what troubled her, but that Bertie should enjoy himself in the lad's society. Wise enough not to put notions into Bertie's head, she stopped her ward later in the day, when she had the chance to speak to him alone.

"I saw you playing with Bertie. Well, that's all right. Only you'll remember your promise, won't you? You won't teach him anything harmful?"

"No, ma'am," the boy answered, humbly, as one who has a large selection of harmful things to impart.

IX

He had looked forward to Monday and school. After four days in the Tollivant household he was eager for relief from it. Except for Cilly's occasional, and always private, taunts, they were not unkind to him; they only treated him as an outcast whom they had been obliged to succor because no one else would do so. He had the same food and drink as they; his room was good enough; of whatever was material he had no complaint to make. There was only the distrust which rendered his bread bitter and the bed hard to lie upon. They didn't take him in as one of them. They kept him outside, an alien, an intruder.

It was again a new experience in that for the first time in his life he was doing without love. When he was Tom Coburn he had had plenty of it at the worst of times. The Swindon Street Home was full of it. In the Tollivant house it was the only thing weighed and measured and stinted. He couldn't, of course, make this analysis. He only knew that something on which his life depended was not given him.

He hoped to find it in the school. In any case the school would admit him to the larger life. It would bind him to that human family which he had so long craved to enter. In addition to that, it was at school you learned things.

He was the more eager to learn things for the reason that Mrs. Tollivant had declared him backward. In the primary school Cilly was in the second grade; he must go into the first. He would be with children a year younger than himself. But the humiliation would be an incentive to ambition. He had already decided that only by "knowing things" should he be able to lift himself out of his despised estate.

The school session was all he had hoped for. Miss Pollard, the teacher, put in touch with his story by Mrs. Tollivant, kept him near to her, and watched over him. He learned to discriminate between his, has, and had, as matters of orthography, as well as between cat, car, and can. That twice two made four and twice four made eight added much to his understanding of numbers. He sang Roving the Old Homeland, while Miss Pollard pointed on the map to the places as they were named.

From Plymouth town to Plymouth town The Pilgrims made their way; The Puritans settled Salem, And Boston on the Bay.

The air had a rhythm and a lilt which allowed for the inclusion of any reasonable number of redundant syllables.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam, Where the blue waters fork; The English came and conquered it, And turned it into New York.

A little history, a little geography, being taught by the simple method of doggerel, much pleasure was evoked by the exercise of healthy lungs. Listening to her new pupil, Miss Pollard discovered a sweet treble that had never before been aware of itself, with a linnet's joy in piping. A linnet's joy was his joy throughout the whole morning, with no more than a slight flaw in his ecstasy in the thought of two hours in the Tollivant home before he came back for the afternoon.

As Cilly called for Bertie at the kindergarten, he walked homeward by himself. Happy with a happiness never experienced before, he had not noticed that his school-mates hung away from him, tittering as he passed. To well-dressed little boys and girls his worn old cap, his frayed knickerbockers, and above all his cheap gray overcoat with a stringy sheepskin collar, naturally marked him for derision. They would have marked him for derision even had his story not been known to everyone.

He went singing on his way, stepping manfully to the measure.

The Dutch lived in New Amsterdam, Where the blue waters fork; The English came and conquered it, And turned it into New York.

They massed themselves behind him, convulsed by his lack of self-consciousness. The little girls giggled; the boys attempted to make snowballs from snow too powdery to hold together. One lad found a frozen potato which he hurled in such a way as to skim close to the singing figure while just missing it. Tom Whitelaw, unsuspicious of ill-will, turned round in curiosity. He was greeted by a hoot from the crowd, but from whom he couldn't tell.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jail?"

The hoot became a chorus of jeers. By one after another the insult was taken up.

"Who's the boy what his mother was put in jaaa-il?"

As far as he was able to distinguish, the voices of the little girls were the louder. In their merriment they screamed piercingly.

"Gutter-snipe! Gutter-rat! Crook! Crook! Crook! Who's the boy what his mother was put in ja-aa-ail?"

Crimson, with clenched fists, with gnashing teeth, with tears of rage in his eyes, he stood his ground while they came on. They swept toward him in a semicircle of which he made the center. Very well! So much the better! He could spring on at least one of them, and dash his brains out on the ground. There was no ferocity he would not enjoy putting into execution.

He sprang, but amid the yells of the crowd his prey dodged and escaped him. The semicircle broke. Instead of advancing in massed formation, it danced round him now as forty or fifty imps. The imps bewildered him, as banderilleros bewilder a bull in the ring. He didn't know which to attack. When he lunged at one, the charge was diverted by another, so that he struck at the air wildly. Shrieks of mockery at these failures maddened him, with the heartbreaking madness of a loving thing goaded out of all semblance to itself. He panted, he groaned, he dashed about foolishly, he stumbled, he fell. When pelted with pebbles or scraps of ice, he was hardly aware of the rain upon his head.

But the mob swept on, leaving him behind. At gates and corners the boy baiters disappeared, hungry for their dinners. Most of them forgot him as soon as they had turned their backs. It was easy for them to stop for awhile since they could begin again.

He was alone on the gritty, icy slope surrounding the schoolhouse. There was no comfort for him in the world. Faintly he remembered as a satisfaction that he hadn't cried, but even this consolation was cold. He wondered if he couldn't kill himself.

He did not kill himself, though he pondered ways and means of doing it. He came to the conclusion that it would be foolish to kill himself before killing some of his tormentors. He prayed about it that night, his first prayer, except for the one taught him on Christmas Eve by Mrs. Crewdson.

To the family devotions, for which all were assembled about eight o'clock, before the younger children went to bed, Mr. Tollivant had begun to add a new petition.

"And, O Heavenly Father, take pity on the little stranger within our gates, even as we have welcomed him into our home. Blot out his past from Thy book. Give him a new heart. Make him truthful and honest especially. Help him to be gentle, obedient...."

But savagely the boy intervened on his own behalf. "O Heavenly Father, don't! Don't give me a new heart, or make me gentle and obedient, till I kill some of them fellows that called me a crook, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."

X

He killed none of the fellows who called him a crook, though during the first two years of his schooling he was called a crook pretty often. Whatever grade he was in, he was always that boy who differs from other boys, and is therefore the black swan in a flock of white ones. Whatever his progress, he made it to the tune of his own history. He was a gutter-snipe. His mother had killed herself in jail! Before she had killed herself both he and she had been arrested for thieving in a shop! There was not a house in Harfrey where the tale was not told. There was never a boy or girl in the school who hadn't learned it before making his acquaintance.

Besides, they said of him, he would have been "different" anyhow. Being "different" was an offense less easily pardoned than being criminal. Dressed more poorly than they, and with no claims of a social kind, he carried himself with that bearing which they could only describe as putting on airs. It was Cilly Tollivant who first brought this charge home to him.

"But I don't, Cilly," he protested, earnestly. "I don't know how to be any other way."

Cilly was by this time growing sisterly. She couldn't live in the house with him and not feel her heart relenting, and though she disdained him in public, as her own interests compelled her to do, in private she tried to help him.

"Don't know how to be any other way!" she exclaimed, indignantly. "Tom Whitelaw, you make me sick. Don't you know even how to talk right?"

"Yes, but...."

"There you go," she interrupted, bitterly. "Why can't you say Yep, like anybody else?"

He took the suggestion humbly. He would try. His only explanation of his eccentricity was that Yep and Nope didn't suit his tongue.

But adopting Yep and Nope, as he might have adopted words from a foreign language, adopting much else that was crude and crass and vulgar and noisy and swaggering and standardized, according to schoolboy notions of the standard, he still found himself "different." For one thing, he looked different. Debase his language as he might, or coarsen his manners, or stultify his impulses, he couldn't keep himself from shooting up tall and straight, with a carriage of the head which was in itself an offense to those who knew themselves inferior. It made nothing easier for him that his teachers liked and respected him. "Teacher's pet" was a term of reproach hardly less painful than crook or gutter-snipe. But he couldn't help learning easily; he couldn't help answering politely when politely spoken to; he couldn't help the rapture of his smile when a friendly word came his way. All this told against him. He was guyed, teased, worried, tortured. If there was a cap to be snatched it was his. If there was one of a pair of rubber shoes to be stolen or hidden it was his. If there was an exercise book to be grabbed and thrown up into a tree where the owner could be pelted while he clambered after it, it was his. Because he was poor, friendless, defenseless, and yet with damnable pride written all over him, it became a recognized law of the school that any meanness done to him would be legitimate.

But in his third year at the Tollivants the persecution waned, and in the fourth it stopped. His school-mates grew. Growing, they developed other instincts. Fair play was one of them; admiration for pluck was another.

"You've got to hand it to that kid," Arthur Tollivant, now fourteen, had been heard to say in a circle of his friends. "He's stood everything and never squealed a yelp. Some young tough, believe me!"

This good opinion was reflected among the lads of Tom Whitelaw's own age. They had never been cruel; they had only been primitive. Having passed beyond that stage, they forgot to no small degree what they had done while in it. The boy who at seven was the crook was at eleven Whitey the Sprinter. He walked to and from school with the best of them. With the best of them he played and fought and swore privately. If he put on airs it was the airs of being a much sadder dog than he was, daring to smoke a cigarette and go home with the smell of the wickedness on his breath.

So, outwardly, Tom Whitelaw came in for two full years of good-natured toleration. If it did not go further than toleration it was because he was a State ward. On the baseball or the football team he might be welcomed as an equal; in homes there was discrimination. He was not invited to parties, and among the young people of Harfrey parties were not few. Girls who met him at the Tollivants' didn't speak to him outside. When Cilly, now being known as Cecilia, had her friends to celebrate her birthday, he remained in his room with no protest from the family at not joining them. None the less, it was a relief to be free from jeering in the streets, as well as from being reminded every day at school of his mother's tragedy. It was a relief to him; but it was no more.

For more than that the wound had gone too deep. Outwardly, he accepted their approaches; in his heart he rejected them, biding his time. He was biding his time, not with longings for revenge—he was too sensible now for that—but in the hope of passing on and forgetting them. By the time he was twelve he was already aware of his impulse toward growth.

It was in his soul as a secret conviction, the seed's knowledge of its own capacity to germinate. Most of the boys and girls around him he could judge, not by a precocious worldly wisdom, but by his gift for intuitive sizing up. Their range was so far and no farther, and they themselves were aware of it. They would become clerks and plumbers and carpenters and school-teachers and shoe dealers and provision men, and whatever else could reach its fulfillment in a small country town. He himself felt no limit. Life was big. He knew he could expand in it. To nurse resentments would be small, and would keep him small. All he asked was to forget them, to forget, too, those who called them forth; but to that end he must be far away.

XI

The road to this Far-away began in the summer vacation of the year when he was supposed to be twelve. It was the year when he first went to work, though the work was meant to last for no more than a few weeks.

Mr. Quidmore, a market gardener at Bere, in Connecticut, some seven or eight miles eastward toward the Sound, had come over to ask Mr. Tollivant for a few hours' work in straightening out his accounts. Straightening out accounts for men who were but amateurs at bookkeeping was a means by which Mr. Tollivant eked out his none-too-generous salary.

It was a Sunday afternoon in June. They were in the yard, looking at the Plymouth Rocks behind their defenses of chicken-wire. That is, Mr. Quidmore was looking at the Plymouth Rocks, but Tom was looking at Mr. Quidmore. Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant were giving their guest information as to how they raised their hens and marketed their eggs.

It was a family affair. Mrs. Tollivant prepared the food; Cecilia fed the birds; Art hunted for the eggs; Bertie and Tom packed them. Mr. Quidmore was moved to say:

"I wish I had a fine boy like your Art to help me with the berrypicking. Good money in it. Three a week and his keep for as long as the strawberries hold out."

Tom saw Mrs. Tollivant shake her head at her husband behind Mr. Quidmore's back. This meant disapproval. Disapproval could not be disapproval of the work, but of Mr. Quidmore. Art already gave his holiday services to a dairy for a dollar less than Mr. Quidmore's offer, and no keep. It was the employer, then, and not the employment that Mrs. Tollivant distrusted.

And yet Mr. Quidmore fascinated Tom. He had never before seen anyone whose joints had the looseness of one of those toys which you worked with a string. He was so slim, too, that you got little or no impression of a body beneath his flapping clothes. Nervously restless, he walked with a shuffle of which the object seemed the keeping of his shoes from falling off. When he talked or laughed one side of his long thin face was screwed up as if by some early injury or paralysis. The right portion of his lips could smile, while the left trembled into a rictus. This made his speech slower and more drawling than Tom was accustomed to hear; but his voice was naturally soft, with a quality in it like cream. It was the voice that Tom liked especially.

In reply to the suggestion about Art, Mr. Tollivant replied, as one who sees only a well-meant business proposal,

"We'd like nothing better, Brother Quidmore; but the fact is Art has about as much as he can do for the rest of his vacation." He waved his hand toward Tom. "What do you say to this boy?"

At the glorious suggestion Tom's heart began to fail for fear. He was not a fine boy like Arthur Tollivant. The possibility of earning three dollars a week, to say nothing of his board, was too much like the opening up of an Aladdin's palace for the hope to be more than deceptive. It was part of his daily humiliation never to have had any money of his own. The paternity of the State paid for his food, shelter, and education; but it never supplied him with cash, or with any cash that he ever saw. To have three dollars a week jingling in his pocket would not only lift him out of his impotent dependence, but would make him a man. While Mr. Quidmore walked round him, inspecting him as if he were a dog or pig or other small animal for sale, he held himself with straightness, dignity, and strength. If he was for sale he would do his best to be worthy of his price.

Mr. Quidmore nodded toward Mr. Tollivant. "State ward, ain't he?"

Mr. Tollivant admitted that he was.

"Youngster whose moth—"

Mrs. Tollivant interrupted kindly. "You needn't be afraid of that. He's been with us for five years. I think I may say that all traces of the past have been outlived. We can really give him a good character."

Tom was grateful. Mr. Quidmore examined him again. At last he shuffled up to him, throwing his arm across his shoulder, and drawing him close to himself.

"What about it, young fellow? Want to come?"

Entirely won by this display of kindliness, the boy smiled up into the twisted face. "Yes, sir."

"Then that's settled. Put your duds together, and we'll go along. I guess," he added to Mr. Tollivant, "that you can stretch a point to let him come, and get your permit from the Guardians to-morrow."

Mr. Tollivant agreeing that after five years' care he could venture as much as this, they drove over to Bere in Mr. Quidmore's dilapidated motor car. Mrs. Quidmore met them at the door. Her husband called to her:

"Hello, there! Got a new hand to help you with the strawberries."

She answered, dejectedly. "If he's as good as some of the other new hands you've picked up lately—"

"Oh, rats! Give us a rest! If I brought the angel Gabriel to pick the berries you'd see something to find fault with."

That there was a rift within the lute of this couple's happiness was clear to Tom before he had climbed out of the machine.

"Where's he to sleep?" Mrs. Quidmore asked in her tone of discontent.

"I suppose he can sleep in the barn, can't he?"

"I wouldn't put a dog to sleep in that barn, nasty, smelly, rotten place."

"Well, put him to sleep where you like. He'll get three a week and his keep while he's here, and that's all I'm responsible for." Mrs. Quidmore turned and went into the house. Her husband winked at Tom as man to man. "Can you beat it? Always like that. God! I don't know how I stand it. Get in."

Tom got in, finding an interior as slack as Mrs. Quidmore herself. The Tollivant house, with four children in it, was often belittered, but with a little tidying it became spick and span. Here the housekeeping wore an air of hopelessness. Whoever did it did it without heart.

"God! I hate to come into this place," its master confided to Tom, as they stood in the hall, of which the rug lay askew, while a mirror hung crooked on the wall. "You and me could keep the shack looking dandier than this if she wasn't here at all. I wish to the Lord...."

But before the week was out the boy had won over Mrs. Quidmore, and begun to make her fond of him. Because he was eager to be useful, he helped her in the house, showing solicitude, too, on her personal account. A low-keyed, sad-eyed woman who did nothing to make herself attractive, she blamed her husband for perceiving the loss of her attractiveness.

"He's bound to me," she would complain, tearfully, to the boy, as he dried the dishes she had washed. "It's his duty to be fond of me. But he ain't. There's fifty women he likes better than he does me."

This note of married infelicity was new to Tom, especially as it reached him from both parties to the contract.

"God, how she gets my goat! Sometimes I think how much I'd enjoy seeing her stretched out with a bullet through her head. I tell you that the fellow who'd do that for me wouldn't be sorry in the end...."

To the boy these words were meaningless. The creamy drawl with which they were uttered robbed them of the vicious or ferocious, making them mere humorous explosions. He could laugh at them, and yet he laughed with a feeling of discomfort.

The discomfort was the greater because in kindness to him lay the one point as to which the couple were agreed. Making no attempt to reconcile elements so discordant, all he could do was to soften the conditions which each found distasteful. He kept the house tidier for the man; he did for the woman a few of the things her husband overlooked.

"It's him that ought to do that," she would point out, in dull rebellion. "He's doing it for some other woman I'll be bound. Who is that woman that he meets?"

Conjugal betrayal was also new to Tom, and not easily comprehensible. That a man with a wife should also be "going with a girl" was a possibility that had never come within his experience while living with the Tollivants. He had heard a good many things from Art, as also from some other boys, but this event seemed to have escaped even their wide observation. It would have escaped his own had not Mrs. Quidmore harped on it.

"I do believe he'd like to see me in my grave. I'm in their way, and they'd like to get me out of it. Oh, you needn't tell me! Couldn't you keep an eye on him, and tell me what she's like?"

For Mrs. Quidmore's sake he watched Mr. Quidmore, but as he didn't know what he was watching him for the results were not helpful. And he liked them both. He might have said that he loved them both, since loving came to him so easily. Mrs. Quidmore washed and mended his clothes, and whenever she went to Harfrey or some other town she added to his wardrobe. Mr. Quidmore was forever dropping into his ear some gentle, honeyed confidence of which Mrs. Quidmore was the butt. Neither of them ever scolded him, or overworked him. He was in the house almost as a son. And then one day he learned that he was to be there altogether as a son.

XII

He never knew how and when the question as to his adoption had been raised, or whether the husband or the wife had raised it first. Here, too, the steps were taken with that kind of mystification which shrouded so much of his destiny. He himself was not consulted till, apparently, all the principal parties but himself had decided on the matter. One of the Guardians, or a representative, asked him the formal question as to whether or not he should like it, and being answered with a Yes, had gone away. The next thing he knew he had legally become the son of Martin and Anna Quidmore, and was to be henceforth called by their name.

The outward changes were not many. He had won so much freedom in the house that when he became its son and heir there was, for the minute, little more to give him. His new mother grew more openly affectionate; his new father drove him round in the dilapidated car and showed him to the neighbors as his boy. As far as Tom could judge, there was general approval. Martin Quidmore had taken a poor outcast lad and given him a home and a status in the world. All good people must rejoice in this sort of generosity. The new father rejoiced in it himself, smiling with a twisted smile that was like a leer, the only thing about him which the new son was afraid of.

It was August now. The picking of the strawberries having long been over, the boy had been kept on for other jobs. He still worked at them. He dug potatoes; he picked peas and beans; he pulled carrots, parsnips, and beets; he culled cucumbers. The hired hands did the heaviest work, but he shared in it to the limit of his strength. Sometimes he went off early in the morning on the great lorry, loaded with garden-truck, which his father drove to the big markets.

On these journeys the new father grew most confidential and lovable. His mellifluous voice, which was sad and at the same time not quite serious, was lovable in itself.

"God, how I'd like to give you a better home than you've got! But it's no use, not as long as she's there. She'll never be anything different. She'd not make things brighter or cleaner or jollier, not even if she was to try."

"Well, she is trying," the boy declared, in her defense; but the only answer was a melancholy laugh.

And yet now that he had the duties, of a son, he set to work to improve the family relationships. He petted the mother, he cajoled the father. He found small ruses of affection in which, as it seemed to him, he gained both the one and the other, insensibly to either. His proof of this came one morning as once more they were driving to one of the big markets.

"Say, boy, I'm beginning to be worried about her. I don't think she can be well. She's never been sick much; but gosh! now I'll be hanged if I don't think I'll go and see a doctor and ask him to give her some medicine."

As this thoughtfulness, in spite of all indications to the contrary, implied a fundamental tenderness, the boy was glad of it. He was the more glad of it when, on a morning some days later, and in the same situation, the father drawled, in his casual way:

"Say, I've seen that doctor, and he's given me something he wants her to take. Thinks it will put her all right in no time."

"And did you give it to her?" he asked, eagerly.

The honeyed voice grew sweeter. "Well, no; that's the trouble. You can't get her to take doctor's stuff, if she knows she's taking it. Got to get her on the sly. Once when she needed a tonic I used to watch round and put it in her tea. Bucked her up fine."

"And is that what you're going to do now?"

"Well, I would, only she'd be afraid of me. Watches me like a cat, don't you see she does? What I was thinking of was this. You know she makes a cup of tea for herself every day in the middle of the afternoon while we're out at work. Well, now, if you could make an excuse to slip into the kitchen, and put one of these powders in her teapot—" he tapped the packet in his waistcoat pocket—"she'd never suspect nothing. She'd take it—and be cured."

The boy was silent.

"You don't want to do it, hey?"

"Oh, I don't say that. I was—I was—just wondering."

"Wondering what?"

"Whether it's fair play to anyone to give them medicine when they don't know they're taking it."

"But if it's to do them good?"

"But ought we to do good to people against their wills?"

"Why, sure! What you thinking of? Still if you don't want to...."

The tone hurt him. "Oh, but I will."

"Say I will, father. Why don't you call me that? Don't I call you son?"

He braced himself to an effort. "All right, father; I will."

"Good! Then here's the powder." He drew one from the packet. "Don't let none of it fall. You'll steal into the kitchen this afternoon—she generally lays down after she's washed the dinner things—and just empty the paper into the little brown teapot she always makes her tea in. Then burn the paper in the stove—there's sure to be a fire on—so that she won't find nothing lying around to make her suspicious. You understand, don't you?"

He said he understood, though in his heart of hearts he wished that he hadn't been charged with the duty.

XIII

If you had asked the boy who was now legally Tom Quidmore why he was reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would have been unable to explain his hesitation. Reason, in the main, was in favor of his doing it. In the first place, he had promised, and he had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid stress on keeping his word. Not to keep his word had come to seem an offense of the nature of personal defilement.

Then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority higher than himself. The child mind, like the childish mind at all times, is under the weight of authority. The source of the authority is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. It is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right to it.

In the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a knowledge of his insufficiency. The man who provides food, clothing, shelter, is invested with the right to speak. The child mind is logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline. Except on severe provocation it does not rebel. Tom Quidmore felt no impulse to rebellion, even though his sense of right and wrong was, for the moment, mystified.

He lacked data. Such data as came to his hearing, and less often to his sight, lay morally outside his range. Like those scientifically minded men who during the childhood of our race registered the phenomena of electricity without going further, he had no power of making deductions from what eyes and ears could record. He knew that there was in life such an element as sexual love; but that was all he knew. It entered into the relations of married people, and in some puzzling way contributed to the birth of children; but of its wanderings and aberrations he had never heard. That man and wife should reach a breaking point was no part of his conception of the things that happened. There was nothing of the kind between the Tollivants, nor among the parents of the lads with whom he had grown up at Harfrey. That which at Harfrey had been clear unrelenting daylight was at Bere a gloaming haunted by strange shapes which perplexed and rather frightened him.

Not until he was fourteen or fifteen years of age, and the Quidmore episode behind him, like an island passed at sea, did the significance of these queer doings and sayings really occur to him. All that for the present his mind and experience were equal to was listening, observing, and wondering. He knew already what it was to have things which he hadn't understood at the time of their happening become clear as he grew older.

An illustration of this came from the small events of that very afternoon. On going back from his midday dinner to work in the carrot patch he fixed on half past two as the hour at which he would make the attempt to force on his mother the prescribed medicine. That time having arrived, he rose, brushed the earth from his knees, dusted his hands against each other, and started slowly for the house. A faraway memory which had been in the back of his mind ever since his father had made the odd request now began to assert itself, like the throb of an old pain.

He was a little boy again. In the dim hall of the Swindon Street Home he was listening to the friendly policeman talking to Miss Honiton. He recaptured his own emotions, the dumb distress of the young creature lost in the dark, and ignorant of everything but its helplessness. His mother had taken something, or had not taken something, he wasn't sure which. The beaming young lady handed him his present from the Christmas Tree, and told him that cyanide of potassium—the words were still branded on his brain—was a deadly poison. Then he stood once more, as in memory he had stood so many times, in the half-darkened room where words were mumbled over the long black box which they spoke of as "the body."

Now that it was all in far perspective he knew what it had meant. That is, he knew the type of woman his mother had been; he knew the kind of soil he had sprung from. The events of five years back to a boy of twelve are a very long distance away. So his mother seemed to Tom. So did the sneaking through shops, and the flights from tenement to tenement. So did the awful Christmas Eve when he had lost her. He could think of her tenderly now because he understood that her mind had been unhinged. What hurt him with a pain which never fell into perspective was that in trying to create in his boyish way some faint tradition of self-respect, he worked back always to this origin in shame.

While seeing no connection between such far-off things and the task put upon him by his father, he found them jostling each other in his mind. You took something—and there was disaster. It was as far as his thought carried him. After that came the fact that, his respect for authority being strong, he dared not disobey.

He could only dawdle. A delay of five minutes would be five minutes to the good. Besides, dawdling on a hot, windless summer afternoon, on which the butterflies, bees, and humming-birds were the only nonhuman living things not taking a siesta, eased the muscles cramped with long crouching in the carrot beds. There being two ways of getting to the house, he took the longer one.

The longer one led him round the duck pond, whence the heat had driven ashore all the ducks and geese with the exception of one gander. For no particular reason the gander's name was Ernest. Between Ernest and Gimlets, the wire-haired terrier pup, one of those battles such as might take place between Bolivia and Switzerland was in full swing of rage. Gimlets fought from the bank; Ernest from the pond. When Ernest paddled forward, with neck outstretched and nostrils hissing, Gimlets scampered to the top of the shelving shore, where he could stand and bark defiantly. When Ernest swung himself round and made for the open sea, Gimlets galloped bravely down to the water's edge, yelping out challenges. This bloody fray gave the boy a further excuse for lingering. Three or four times had Ernest, stung by the taunts to which he had tried to seem indifferent, wheeled round on his enemy. Three or four times had Gimlets scrambled up the bank and down again. But he, too, recognized authority, and a call that he couldn't disobey. A long whistle, and the battle was at an end! Gimlets trotted off.

The whistle came from the grove of pines climbing the little bluff on the side of the duck pond remote from the house. It struck the boy as odd that his father should be there at a time when he was supposed to be cutting New Zealand spinach for the morrow's market. Not to be caught idling, the boy slipped down the bank to creep undetected below the pinewood bluff. Neither seeing nor being seen, he nevertheless heard voices, catching but a single word. The word was Bertha, and it was spoken by his father. The only Bertha in the place was a certain beautiful young widow living in Bere. That his father should be talking to her in the pinewood was another of those details difficult to explain.

More difficult to explain he found a little scene he caught on looking backward. Having now passed the bluff, he was about to round the corner of the pond where the path led through a plantation of blue spruces which hid the house. His glancing back was an accident, but it made him witness of an incident pastoral in its charm.

Bertha, being indeed the beautiful young widow, the boy was astonished to see his father steal a kiss from her. Bertha responded with such a slap as nymphs give to shepherds, running playfully away. His father shambled after her, as shepherds after nymphs, catching her in his arms.

Tom plunged into the blue spruce plantation where he could be out of sight. Hot as he was already, he grew hotter still. What he had seen was so silly, so stupid, so undignified! He wished he hadn't seen it. Having seen it, he wished he could forget it. He couldn't forget it because, unpleasant as he found it, he was somehow aware that it had bearings beyond unpleasantness. What they were he had nothing to tell him. He could only run through the plantation as if he would leave the thing as quickly as possible behind him; and all at once the house came into sight.

With the house in sight he remembered again what he had come to do. He stopped running. His steps again began to lag. Feeling for the powder in his waistcoat pocket, he reminded himself that it would do his mother good. The house lay sleeping and silent in the heat. He crept up to the back door.

And there at the open window stood his mother rolling dough on a table. She rolled languidly, as she did everything. Her head drooped a little to one side; her expression was full of that tremulous protest against life which might with a word break into a rain of tears.

Relieved and delighted, he stole round the house, to enter by another way. She was now lifting a cover of the stove, so that she didn't hear his approach. Before she knew that anyone was there he had slipped his arm around her, and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. She turned slowly, the lifter in her hand. A new life seemed to dawn in her, brightening her eyes and flushing her sallowness.

"You bad little boy! What did you come home for?"

He replied as was true, that he had come for a drink of water. He had meant to take a drink of water after putting her powder in the teapot. "I thought," he ended, "you'd be lying down asleep."

"I was lying down, but something made me get up."

He was curious. "Something—like what?"

"Well, I just couldn't sleep. And then I remembered that it was a long time since I'd made him any of them silver cookies he used to be so fond of."

He liked the name. "Is that what you're baking?"

"Yes; and you'll ..." she went back to the table, picking up the cutter—"you'll have some for supper if you'll—if you'll call me ma."

"But I do."

Her smile had the slow timidity that might have been born of disuse. "Yes, when I ask you. But I want you to do it all the time, and natural."

"All right then; I will—ma."

While he stood drinking a first, and then a second, cup of water, she began on the memories dear to her, but which few now would listen to. She had been born in Wilmington, Delaware, where Martin also had been born. His father worked in a powder factory in that city. It was owing to an explosion when he was a lad that Martin's frame had been partially paralyzed.

"He wasn't blowed up or anything; he just got a shock. He was awful delicate, and used to have fits till he grew out of them. I think the crook in his face makes him look aristocratic, don't you?"

The boy having said that he didn't know but what it did, she continued plaintively, cutting out her cookies with a heart-shaped cutter.

"I was awful pretty in those days, and that refined I wouldn't hardly do a thing for my mother in the house, or carry the tiniest little parcel across the street. I was just born ladylike. And when Martin and I were married he let me have a girl for the first two years to do everything. All he ever expected of me was to get up and dress, and look stylish; and now...."

As she paused in her cutting to press back a sob, the boy took the opportunity to speak of getting back to work.

"I think I must beat it, ma. I've got all those carrots—"

"Oh, wait a little while. He can spare you for a few minutes, can't he? Anyhow, nothing you can do'll save him from going bankrupt. This place don't pay. He'll never make it pay. His work was to run a hat store. That's what he did when he married me, and he made swell money at it, too."

The family history interested the boy, as all tales did which accounted for the personal. He knew now how Martin Quidmore's health had broken down, and the doctor had ordered out-of-door life as a remedy. Out-of-door life would have been impossible if an uncle hadn't died and left him fifteen thousand dollars.

"Enough to live on quite genteel for life," his wife complained, "but nothing would do but that he should think himself a market-gardener, him that couldn't tell a turnip from a spade. Blew in the whole thing on this place, away from everywheres, and making me a drudge that hardly knew so much as to wash a dish. Even that I could have stood if he'd only gone on loving me as his marriage vows made it his duty to do, but—"

"I'll love you, ma," the boy declared, tenderly. "You don't have to cry because there's no one to love you, not while I'm around."

The new life in her eyes was as much of incredulity as of joy. "Don't say that, dearie, if you don't mean it. You don't have to love me just because I'm trying to be a mother to you, and look after your clothes."

"But, ma, I want to. I do."

They gazed at each other, she with the cutter in her hand, he with the cup. What he saw was not a feeble, slatternly woman, but some one who wanted him. He had not been wanted by anyone since the night when his mudda—he still used the word in his deep silences—had gone away with the wardress who looked like a Fate. In the five intervening years he had suffered less from unkindness than from being shut out of hearts. Here was a heart that had need of him, so that he had need of it. The type of heart didn't matter. If it made any difference it was only that where there was weakness the appeal to him was the greater. With this poor thing he would have something on which to spend his treasure.

"You'll see, ma! I'll bring in the water for you, and split the kindlings, and get up in the morning and light the fire, and milk the cow, and everything."

Straight and sturdy, he looked at her with the level gaze of eyes that seemed the calmer and more competent because they were hidden so far beneath his bushy, horizontal eyebrows. The uniform tan from working in the sun heightened his air of manliness. Even the earth on his clothes, and a smudge of it across his forehead where a dirty hand had been put up to push back his crisp ashen hair, hinted at his capacity to share in the world's work. To the helpless woman whose prop had failed her, the coming of this young strength to her aid was little short of a miracle.

In the struggle between tears and laughter she was almost hysterical. "Oh, you darling boy!" she was beginning, advancing to clasp him in her arms. But with old, old memories in his heart he dreaded the paroxysm of affection.

"All right, ma!" he laughed, dodging her and slipping out. "I've got to beat it, or fath—" he stumbled on the word because he found it difficult to use—"or father will wonder where I am." But once in the yard, he called back consolingly, though keeping to the practical, "Don't you bother about Geraldine. I'll go round by the pasture and drive her home as I come back from work. I'll milk her, too."

"God bless you, dearie!"

Standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her hand, her limp figure seemed braced to a new power, as she watched him till he disappeared within the plantation of blue spruces.

XIV

When a whistle blew at five o'clock the hired men on the Quidmore place stopped working. As a son of the house, Tom Quidmore paid to the signal only enough attention to pile his carrots into a wheelbarrow and convey them to the spot where they would help to furnish the market lorry in the morning. In fulfillment of his promise to his adopted mother, he then went in search of Geraldine.

Of all the tasks that he liked at Bere he liked most going to the pasture. It was not his regular work. As regular work it belonged to old Diggory; but old Diggory was as willing to be relieved of it as Mrs. Quidmore of the milking. Brushing himself down, and washing his hands at the tap in the garage after a fashion that didn't clean them, he marched off, whistling. He whistled because his heart was light. His heart was light because his mother having been in the kitchen, he had escaped the necessity for giving her the medicine as to which he felt his odd reluctance.

Leaving the garage behind him, he threaded a tiny path running through the beet-field. The turnip-field came next, after which he entered a strip of fine old timber, coming out from that on the main road to Bere. Along this road, for some five hundred yards, he tramped merrily, kicking up the dust. He liked this road. Not only was it open, free, and straight, but along its old stone walls raspberries and blackberries grew ripe in a tangle of wild spirea, meadow-rue, jewel weed, and Queen Anne's lace. He loved this luxuriance, this summer sense of abundance. To the boy who had never known anything but poverty, Nature at least, in this lush Connecticut countryside, seemed generous.

The pasture was on the edge of a scrubby woodland in which the twenty acres of the Quidmore property trailed away into the unkempt. Eighty or a hundred years earlier, it had been the center of a farm now cut up into small holdings, chiefly among market gardeners. In the traces of the old farmhouse, the old garden, the old orchard, the boy found his imagination touched by the pathos of a vanished human past.

The land sloped from the hillside, till in the bottom of the hollow it became a little brambly wood such as in England would be called a spinney. Through the spinney trickled a stream which somewhere fell into Horseneck Brook, which somewhere fell into one of those shallow inlets that the Sound thrusts in on the coastline. Halfway between the road and the streamlet, was the old home-place, deserted so long ago that the cellar was choked with blackberry vines, and the brick of the foundation bulging out of plumb. A clump of lilac which had once snuggled lovingly against a south wall was now a big solitary bush. What used to be a bed of pansies had reverted to a scattering of cheery little heartsease faces, brightening the grass. The low-growing, pale-rose mallow of old gardens still kept up its vigor of bloom, throwing out a musky scent. There was something wistful in the spot, especially now that the sun was westering, and the birds skimmed low, making for their nests.

In going for Geraldine Tom always stole a few minutes to linger among these memories of old joys and sorrows, old labors and rewards, of which nothing now remained but these few flowers, a few wind-beaten apple trees, and this dint in the ground which served best as a shelter for chipmunks. It was the part of the property farthest from the house. It was far, too, from any other habitation, securing him the privilege of solitude. The privilege was new to him. At Harfrey he had never known it. About the gardens, even at Bere, there were always the owner, the hired men, the customers, the neighbors who came and went. But in Geraldine's pasture he found only herself, the crows, the robins, the thrushes singing in the spinney, and the small wild life darting from one covert to another, or along the crumbling stone wall hung with its loopings of wild grape.

He was not lonely on these excursions. Companionship had never in the Harfrey schools been such a pleasure that he missed anything in having to do without it. Rather, he enjoyed the freedom to be himself, to wear no mask, to have no part to play. It was only when alone like this that he understood how much of his thought and effort was spent in dancing to other people's tunes. In the Tollivant home he could never, like the other children, speak or act without a second thought. As a State ward it was his duty to commend himself. To commend himself he was obliged to think twice even before venturing on trifles. He had formed a habit of thinking twice, of rarely being spontaneous. By himself in this homey pasture he felt the relief of one who has been balancing on a tight rope at walking on the ground.

When he had climbed the bars Geraldine, who was down the hill and near the spinney, had lifted her head and swung her tail in recognition. Not being impatient, she went on with her browsing, leaving him a few minutes' liberty. Among the heartsease and the mallows he flung himself down, partly because he was tired and partly that he might think. With so much to think about thought came without sequence. It centered soon on what he was to be.

Of one thing he was certain; he didn't want to be a market gardener. Not but that he enjoyed the open-air life and the novelty of closeness to the soil. Like the whole Quidmore connection, it was good enough for the time. All the same, it was only for the time, and one day he would break away from it. How, he didn't ask. He merely knew by his intuitions that it would be so.

He was going to be something big. That, too, was intuitive conviction. What he meant by big he was unable to define, beyond the fact that knowledge and money would enter into it. He was interested in money, not so much for what it gave you as for what it was. It was a queer thing when you came to think of it. A dollar bill in itself had no more value than any other scrap of paper; and yet it would buy a dollar's worth of anything. He turned that over in his mind till he worked out the reason why. He worked out the principle of payment by check, which at first was as blank a mystery as marital relations. When newspapers came his way he studied the reports of the stock exchange, much as a savage who cannot read scans the unmeaning hieroglyphs which to wiser people are words. He did make out that railways and other great utilities must be owned by a lot of people who combined to put their money into them; but daily fluctuations in value he couldn't understand. When he asked his adopted father he was told that he couldn't understand it, though he knew he could.

Long accustomed to this answer as to the bewilderments of life, he rarely now asked anything. If he was puzzled he waited for more data. Even for little boys things cleared themselves up if you kept them in your mind, and applied the explanation when it came your way. The point, he concluded, was not to be in a hurry. There were the spiders. He was fond of watching them. They would sit for hours as still as metal things, their little eyes fixed like jewels in a ring. Then when they saw what they wanted one swift dart was enough for them. So it must be with little boys. You got one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but you got everything in time if you waited and kept alert.

By waiting and keeping alert he would find out what he was to be. He had reached his point when he saw Geraldine pacing up the hill toward the pasture bars. She was giving him the hint that certain acknowledged rites were no longer to be put off.

He had lowered the bars, over which she was stepping delicately, when he saw his father come tearing down the road, going toward Bere, with all the speed his shuffling gait could put on. Used by this time to erratic actions on Quidmore's part, he was hardly surprised; he was only curious. He was more curious still when, on drawing nearer, the man seemed in a panic. "Looks as if he was running away from something," was the lad's first thought, though he couldn't imagine from what.

"Is anything the matter?"

From panic the indications changed to those of surprise, though the voice was as velvety as ever.

"Oh, so it's you! I thought it was Diggory. What did you—what did you—do with that powder?"

The boy began putting up the bars while Geraldine plodded homeward.

"I couldn't give it to her. She was in the kitchen baking." He thought it wise to add: "She was making silver cookies for you. You'll have them for supper."

There followed more odd phenomena, of which the boy, waiting and keeping alert, only got the explanation later. Quidmore threw himself face downward on the wayside grass. With his forehead resting on his arm, he lay as still as one of those drunken men Tom had occasionally seen like logs beside some country road. Geraldine turned her head to ask why she was not followed, but the boy stood waiting for a further sign. He wondered whether all grown-up men had minutes like this, or whether it was part of the epilepsy he had heard about.

But when Quidmore got up he was calm, the traces of panic having disappeared. To a more experienced person the symptoms would have been of relief; but to the lad of twelve they said nothing.

"I'll go back with you," was Quidmore's only comment, as together they set out to follow Geraldine.

Having reached the barn where the milking was to be done, Quidmore was proceeding to the house. In the hope of a negative, Tom asked if he should try again to-morrow.

Quidmore half turned. "I'll leave that to you."

"I'll do whatever you say," Tom pleaded, desperate at this responsibility.

Quidmore went on his way, calling back, in his creamy drawl, over his shoulder: "I'll leave it entirely to you."

XV

Left to him, Tom saw nothing in the duty but to do it. He was confirmed in this resolution by Quidmore's gentleness throughout the evening. It was a new thing in Tom's experience of the house. As always with those in the habit of inflicting pain, merely to stop inflicting it seemed kindness. Supper passed without a single incident that made Mrs. Quidmore wince. On her part she played up with an almost brilliant vivacity in making none of her impotent complaints. Anything he could do to further this accord the boy felt he ought to do.

He hung back only from the deed. That made him shudder. He was clear on the point that it made him shudder because of its association in his mind with the thing which had happened years before; and that, he knew, was foolish. If it would please his father he should make the attempt. He should make it perhaps the more heartily since he was free not to make it if he chose.

It was the freedom that troubled him. So long as he did only what he was told he had nothing on his conscience. Now he must be sure that he was right; and he was not sure. Once more he didn't question the fact that the medicine would do his mother good. The right and wrong in his judgment centered round doing her good against her own will. With no finespun theories concerning the rights of the individual, he was pretty certain as to what they were.

A divine beauty came over the evening when, after he had gone to bed about half-past eight, his mother, in the new blossoming of her affection, came to tuck him in, and kiss him good night. No such thing had happened to him since Mrs. Crewdson had last done it. Mrs. Tollivant went through this endearing rite with all her own children; but him she left out. Many a time, when from his bed beneath the eaves he heard her making her rounds at night, he had pressed his face into the pillow to control the trembling of his lips. True, he had come to regard the attention as too babyish for a man of twelve; but now that it was shown him he was touched by it.

It brought to his memory something Mrs. Crewdson had said, and which he had never forgotten. "God's wherever there's love, it seems to me, dear. I bring a little bit of God to you, and you bring a little bit of God to me, and so we have Him right here." Mrs. Quidmore, too, brought a little bit of God to him, and he brought a little bit of God to Mrs. Quidmore. They showed God to each other, as if without each other they were not quite able to see Him. The fact suggested the thought that in the matter of the secret administration of the medicine he might pray.

One thing he had learned with some thoroughness while in the Tollivant family, and that was religion. Both in Sunday school and in domestic instruction he had studied it conscientiously, and conscientiously accepted it. If he sometimes admitted to Bertie Tollivant, the cripple, that he "didn't see much sense in it," the confession applied to his personal inabilities. Bertie was the cynic and unbeliever in the Tollivant household. "There's about as much sense in it," he would declare secretly to Tom, "as there is in those old yarns about Pilgrim's Progress and Jack and the Beanstalk. Only don't say that to ma or pop, because the poor dears wouldn't get you." On Tom this skepticism only made the impression that he and Bertie didn't understand religion any more than they understood sex, which was also a theme of discussion. They would grow to it in time, by keeping ears and eyes open.

Now that he was away from the Tollivants, in a world where religion was never spoken of, he dismissed it from his mind. That is, he dismissed its intricacies, its complicated doctrines, its galloping through prayers you were too sleepy to think of at night, and too hurried in the morning. Here he was admittedly influenced by Bertie. "If God loves you, and knows what you want, what's the good of all this Now I lay me? It'd be a funny kind of God that wouldn't look after you anyhow." Tom had given up saying Now I lay me, partly because that, too, seemed babyish, but mainly on account of Bertie's reasoning. "It's more of a compliment to God," was his way of explaining it to himself, "to know that He'll do right of His own accord, than to suppose He'll do it just because I pester Him." So every night when he got into bed he took a minute to say to himself that God was taking care of him, making this confidence serve in place of more explicit petition. When he had anything special to pray about, he said, he would begin again.

And now something special had arisen. He got out of bed. He didn't kneel down because, being anxious not to mislead God by giving Him wrong information, he had first to consider what he ought to say. Stealing softly across the floor, lest the creaking of the boards should betray the fact that he was up, he went to the open window, and looked out.

It was one of those mystic nights which, to a soul inclined to the mystical, seem to hold a spiritual secret. The air, scented by millions of growing things, though chiefly with the acrid perfume of the blue spruces on which he looked down, had a pungent, heavenly odor such as he never caught in the daytime. There was a tang of salt in it, too, as from the direction of the Sound came the faintest rustle of a breeze. The rustle was so faint as not to break a stillness, which was more of the nature of a holy suspense because of the myriads of stars.

Seeking a formula in which to couch his prayer, he found a phrase of Mr. Tollivant's often used in domestic intercession. "And, O Heavenly Father, we beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of our needs." What constituted wisdom in the matter of their needs would then be pointed out by Mr. Tollivant according to the day's or the season's requirements. Accepting this language as that of high inspiration, and forgetting to kneel down, the boy began as he stood, looking out on the sanctified darkness:

"And, O Heavenly Father, I beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of my needs." Hung up there for lack of archaic grandiloquence, he found himself ending lamely: "And don't let me give it to her if I oughtn't to, for Jesus Christ's sake, Amen."

With his effort he was disappointed. Not only had the choice of words not taken from Mr. Tollivant been ludicrously insufficient, but he had forgotten to kneel down. He had probably vitiated the whole prayer. He thought of revision, of constructing a sentence that would balance Mr. Tollivant's, and beginning again with the proper ceremonial. But Bertie's way of reasoning came to him again. "I guess He knows what I mean anyhow." He recoiled at that, however, shocked at his own irreverence. The thought was a blasphemous liberty taken with the watchful and easily offended deity of whom Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant had begged him always to be afraid. He was wondering if by approaching this God at all he hadn't made his plight worse, when the rising of the wind diverted his attention.

It rose suddenly, in a great soft sob, but not of pain. Rather, it was of exultation, of cosmic joyousness. Coming from the farthest reaches of the world, from the Atlantic, from Africa, from remote islands and mountain tops, it blew in at the boy's window with a strong, and yet gentle, cosmic force.

"And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind."

Tom Quidmore had but one source of quotation, but he had that at his tongue's end. The learning by heart of long passages from the Bible had been part of his education at the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant. Rightly or wrongly, he quoted the Scriptures, and rightly oftener than not. He quoted them now because, all at once, his room seemed full of the creative breath. He didn't say so, of course; but, confusedly, he felt it. All round the world there was wind. It was the single element in Nature which you couldn't see, but of which you received the living invigoration. It cooled, it cleansed, it strengthened. Wherever it passed there was an answer. The sea rose; the snows drifted; the trees bent; men and women strove to use and conquer it. A rushing mighty wind! A sound from heaven! That it might be an answer to his prayer he couldn't stop to consider because he was listening to the way it rose and fell, and sighed and soughed and swelled triumphantly through the plantation of blue spruces.

By morning it was a gale. The tall things on the property, the bush peas, the scarlet runners, the sweet corn, were all being knocked about. In spots they lay on the earth; in other spots they staggered from the perpendicular. All hands, in the words of old Diggory, had their work cut out for them. Tom's job was to rescue as many as possible of the ears of sweet corn, in any case ready for picking, before they were damaged.

But at half-past two he dragged himself out of the corn patch to fulfill the dreaded duty. Nothing had answered his prayer. He had not so much as seen his father throughout the day, as the latter had gone to the markets and had not returned. The gale was still raging, and he might be waiting for it to go down.

Since the scene by the roadside on the previous afternoon he had taken a measure of his father not very far from accurate. He, Quidmore, wanted something of which he was afraid. He was too much afraid of it to press for it urgently; and yet he wanted it so fiercely that he couldn't give it up. What it was the boy could not discover, except that it had something to do with them all. When he said with them all he included the elusive Bertha; though why he included her he once more didn't know.

In God he was disappointed; that he did not deny. In spite of the shortcomings of his prayer, he had clung to the hope that they might be overlooked. He argued a little from what he himself would have done had anyone come with a request inadequately phrased. He wouldn't think of the manners or the words in his eagerness to do what lay within his power. With God apparently it was not so.

There was, of course, the other effect of his prayer. He had only asked to be stopped if the thing was not to be done. If he was not stopped the inference was obvious. He was to go ahead. It was in order to go ahead that he left the corn patch.

The kitchen when he got to it was empty. Both the windows, that in the south wall and that in the west, were open to let the wind sweep out the smell of cooking. Creeping halfway up the stairs, he saw that his mother had closed her bedroom door, a sign that she was really lying down. There was no help now for what he had to do.

He stole back to the kitchen again. On the dresser he saw the brown teapot in which she would presently make her tea. He would only have to take it down, and spill the powder into it. The powder was in his waistcoat pocket. He drew it out. It was small and flat, in a neatly folded paper. Opening the paper, he saw something innocent and white, not unlike the sugar you spread on strawberries. Laying it in readiness on the table by the west window, at which his mother baked, he turned to take down the teapot.

The gale grew fiercer. It was almost a tornado. With the teapot in his two hands he paused to look out of the south window at the swaying of the blue spruces. They moaned, they sobbed, they rocked wildly. You might have fancied them living creatures seized by a madness of despair. The fury of the wind, even in the kitchen, blew down a dipper hanging on the wall.

There was now no time to lose. The noise of the falling dipper might have disturbed his mother, so that at any minute she might come downstairs. With the teapot again in his hands he turned to the table where he had left the thing which was to do her good.

It was not there.

Dismayed, startled, he looked for it on the floor; but it was not there. It was not anywhere in the kitchen. He searched and searched.

Going outside, he found the paper caught in a rosebush under the window, but the something innocent and white had been blown to the four corners of the world.

The rushing mighty wind had done its work; and yet it was not till two or three years later, when the Quidmores had passed from his life, that he wondered if after all his prayer had not been answered.

XVI

Of helping his mother against her will he never heard any more. When his father returned that evening he had the same look of panic as on the previous day, followed by the same expression of relief at seeing the domestic life going on as usual. But he asked no questions, nor did he ever bring the subject up again. When a day or two later Tom explained to him that the powder had been blown away he merely nodded, letting the matter rest.

Autumn came on and Tom went to school at Bere. He liked the school. No longer a State ward, but the son of a man supposed to be of substance, he passed the tests inflicted by the savage snobbery of children. His quickness at sports helped him to a popularity justified by his good nature. With the teachers he was often forced to seem less intelligent than he was, so as to escape the odious soubriquet of "teacher's pet."

On the whole, the winter was the happiest he had so far known. It could have been altogether happy had it not been for the tragic situation of the Quidmores. After the brief improvement that had followed on his coming they had reacted to a mutual animosity even more intense. Each made him a confidant.

"God! it's all I can do to keep my hands off her," the soft drawl confessed. "If she was just to die of a sickness, and me have nothing to do with it, I don't believe I'd be satis—" He held the sentence there as a matter of precaution. "What do you think of a woman who all the years you've known her has never done anything but whine, whine, whine, because you ain't givin' her what you promised?"

"And are you?" Tom asked, innocently.

"I give her what I can. She don't tempt me to do anything extra. Say, now, would she tempt you?"

Tom did his best to take the grown-up, man-to-man tone in which he was addressed. "I think she's awful tempting, if you take her the right way."

To take her the right way, to take him also the right way, was the boy's chief concern throughout the winter. To get them to take each other the right way was beyond him.

"So long as he goes outside his home," Mrs. Quidmore declared, with an euphemism of which the boy did not get the significance, "I'll make him suffer for it."

"But, ma, he can't stay home all the time."

"Oh, don't tell me that you don't know what I mean! If you wasn't on his side you'd have found out for me long ago who the woman is. Just tell me that—"

"And what would you do?"

"I'd kill her, I think, if I got the chance."

"Oh, but ma!"

She brandished the knife with which she was cutting cold ham for the supper. "I would! I would!"

"But you wouldn't if I asked you not to, would you, ma?"

The knife fell with a despairing movement of the hand. "Oh, I don't suppose I should do it at all. But he ought to love me."

"Can he make himself love you, ma?"

The ingenuous question went so close to the point that she could only dodge it. "Why shouldn't he? I'm his wife, ain't I?"

The challenge brought out another of the mysteries which surrounded marriage, as a penumbra fringes the moon on a cloudy night. When his father next reverted to the theme, while driving back from market, the penumbra became denser.

"Say, boy, don't you go to thinking that the first time you fall in love with a pretty face it's goin' to be for life. That's where the devil sets his snare for men. Eight or ten years from now you'll see some girl, and then the devil'll be after you. He'll try to make you think that if you don't marry that girl your one and only chance'll come and go. And when he does, my boy, just think o' me."

"Think of you—what about?"

The sweetness of the tone took from the answer anything like bitterness. "Think how I got pinched. Gosh, when I look back and remember that I was as crazy to get her as a pup to catch a squir'l I can't believe it was me. But don't forget what I'm tellin' you. No fellow ought to think of bein' married till he's over thirty. He can't be expected to know what he'll love permanent till then."

It was the perpetual enigma. "But you always love your wife when you're married to her, don't you?"

The answer was in loud satirical laughter, with the observation that Tom was the limit for innocence.

Quite as disturbing as questions of love and marriage were those relating to the fact that the man who had done very well as a hatter was a failure as a market gardener.

"A hell of a business, this is! Rothschild and Rockefeller together couldn't make it pay. Gosh, how I hate it! Hate everything about it, and home worst of all. Know a little woman that if she'd light out with me...."

In different keys and conjunctions these confidences were made to the boy all through the winter. If they did not distress him more it was because they were over his head. The disputes of the gods affect mortals only indirectly. When Jupiter and Juno disagree men feel that they can leave it to Olympus to manage its own affairs. So to a boy of twelve the cares of his elders pass in spheres to which he has little or no access. In spite of his knowledge that their situation was desperate, the couple who had adopted him were mighty beings to Tom Quidmore, with resources to meet all needs. To be so went with being grown up and, in a general way, with being independent.

Their unbosomings worried him; they did not do more. When they were over he could dismiss them from his mind. His own concerns, his lessons, his games, his friends and enemies in school, and the vague objective of becoming "something big," were his matters of importance. Martin and Anna Quidmore cared for him so much, though each with a dash of selfishness, that his inner detachment from them both would have caused them pain.

And yet it was because of this detachment that he was able, in some sense, to get through the winter happily. Whatever might have hurt him most passed on the kind of Mount Olympus where grown-up people had their incredible interests. Told, as he always was, that he couldn't understand them, he was willing to drop them at that till they were forced on him again. As spring was passing into summer they were forced on him less persistently; and then one day, quite unexpectedly, he struck the beginning of the end.

It was a Saturday. As there was no school that day he had driven in on the truck with his father, to market a load of lettuce and early spinach. On returning through Bere in the latter part of the forenoon, Quidmore stopped at the druggist's.

"Jump down and have an ice cream soda. I'll leave the lorry here, and come back to you. Errand to do in the village."

The words had been repeated so often that for these excursions they had come to be a formula. By this time Tom knew the errand to be at Bertha's house, which was indirectly opposite. Seated at a table in the window, absorbing his cool, flavored drink through a pair of straws, he could see his father run up the steps and enter, running down again when he came out. Further than the fact that there was something regrettable in the visit, something to be concealed when he went home, the boy's mind did not work.

The tragedy of that morning was that, as he was enjoying himself thus, the runabout, driven by one of the hired men, glided up to the door, and Mrs. Quidmore, dressed for shopping, and very alert, sprang out. As she rarely came into Bere, and almost never in the morning when she had her work to do, Tom's surprise was tinged at once with fear. Recognizing the lorry, Mrs. Quidmore rushed into the drug store. Except for the young man, wearing a white coat, who tended it, the long narrow slit was empty. As he peeped above his glass, with the two straws between his lips, Tom saw the wrath of the wronged when close on the track of the wrong-doer. Wheeling round, she caught him looking conscious and guilty.

"Oh! So you're here? Where is he?"

Tom answered truthfully. "He said he had an errand to do. He didn't tell me what it was."

"And is he coming back for you here?"

"He said he would."

"Then I'll wait."

To wait she sat down at Tom's side, having Bertha's house within range. Whether she suspected anything or not Tom couldn't tell, since he hardly suspected anything himself. That there was danger in the air he knew by the violence with which she rejected his proposal to refresh herself with ice cream.

"There he is!"

They watched him while he came down the steps, hesitated a minute, and turned in the direction away from where they were waiting. Tom understood this move.

"He's going to Jenkins's about that new tire."

As she jumped to her feet her movements had a fierceness of activity he had never before seen in her.

"That's all I want. I'm goin' back. Don't you say you seen me, or that I've been over here at all."

Hurrying to the street and springing into the car, she bade the hired man turn round again for home.

What happened between that Saturday and the next Tom never knew exactly. A few years later, when his powers of deduction had developed, he was able to surmise; but beyond his own experience he had no accurate information. That there were bitter quarrels he inferred from the sullenness they left behind; but he never witnessed them. Not having witnessed them, he had little or no sense of a strain more serious than usual.

On the next Saturday afternoon he was crouched in the potato field, picking off the ugly reddish bugs and killing them. Suddenly he heard himself called. On rising and looking round he found the runabout car stopped in the road, and Billy Peet, one of the hired men, beckoning him to approach. Brushing his hands against each other, he stepped carefully over the rows of young potatoes, and was soon in the roadway.

"Get in," Billy Peet ordered, briefly. "The boss sent me over to fetch you."

"Sent you over to fetch me—in the machine? What's up?" His eye fell on a small straw suitcase in the back of the car. "What's that for?"

"Get in, and I'll tell you as we go along." Tom clambered in beside the driver. "Mis' Quidmore's sick."

"What's the matter with her?"

"I'd'n know. Awful sick, they say."

When they passed the Quidmore entrance without turning in Tom began to be startled. "Say! Where we going?"

"You're not going home. Doctor don't want you there. Boss telephoned over to Mrs. Tollivant, and she's goin' to keep you till Mis' Quidmore's better—or somethin'."

The boy was not often resentful, but he did resent being trundled about like a package. If his mother was sick his place was at home. He could light the fire, bring in the water from the well, and do the score of little things for which a small boy can be useful. To be shunted off like this, as if he could only be an additional care, was an indignity to the thirteen years he was now supposed to have attained to. But what could he do? Protest was useless. There was nothing for it but to go where he was driven, like Geraldine or the dilapidated car.

And yet at Harfrey he settled down among the Tollivants naturally. No State ward having succeeded him, his room under the eaves was still vacant. Once within its familiar shelter, he soon began to feel as if he had never been away. The family welcomed him with the shades of warmth which went with their ages and characters—Mr. and Mrs. Tollivant overcoming their repugnance to a born waif with that Christian charity which doubtless is all the nobler for being visibly against the grain; Art, now a swaggering fellow of sixteen, with patronizing good nature; Cilly, who affected baby-blue ribbons on a blond pigtail, with airs and condescension; Bertie, the cripple, with satiric cordiality. If it was not exactly a home-coming, it was at least as good as a visit to old friends. He was touched by being included almost as a member of the family in Mr. Tollivant's evening prayer.

"And, O Heavenly Father, take this young wanderer as Thy child, even as we offer him a shelter. Visit not Thine anger upon him, lest he be tempted overmuch."

At the thought of being tempted overmuch Tom felt a pleasing sense of importance. It offered, too, a loophole for excuse in case he should fall. If God didn't intervene on his behalf, easing temptation up, then God would be responsible. And yet, such was the lack of fairness he was bidden to see in God, He would knock a fellow down and then punish him when he tumbled.

In the midst of these reflections a thought of the Quidmore household choked him with unexpected homesickness. The people who had been kind to him were in trouble, and he was not there! He wondered what they would do without him. He could sometimes catch the man's cruelties and turn them into pleasantries before they reached the wife. He could sometimes forestall the wife's complaints and twist them into little mollifying compliments. Would there be anyone to do that now? Would they keep the peace? He wished Mr. Tollivant would pray for them. He tried to pray for them himself, but, as with his effort of the previous year, the right kind of words would not come. If only God could be addressed without so much Thee and Thou! If only He could read a little boy's heart without calling for fine language! For lack of fine language he had to remain dumb, leaving God, who might possibly have helped Martin and Anna Quidmore, with no information about them.

Nevertheless, with the facile emotions of youth, a half hour later he was playing checkers with Bertie, in full enjoyment of the game. He slept soundly that night, and on Sunday fell into the old routine of church and Sunday school. Monday and Tuesday bored him, because for most of the day school claimed the children; but when they came home, and played and squabbled as usual, life took on its old zest. Only now and then did the thought of the sick woman and the lonely man sweep across him in a spasm of pain; after which he could forget them and be cheerful.

But on Wednesday forenoon, as he was turning away from watching the Plymouth Rocks pecking at their feed, his father arrived in the old runabout. Dashing up the hill, Tom reached the back door in time to see him enter by the front.

"How's ma?"

He got no answer, because Quidmore followed Mrs. Tollivant into the front parlor, where they shut the door. In anticipation of being taken home, the boy ran up to his room and packed his bag.

"How's ma?"

He called out the question from halfway down the stairs. Quidmore, emerging from the parlor with Mrs. Tollivant, ignored it again. Bidding good-by to his hostess and thanking her for taking in the boy, he went through these courtesies with a nervous anxiety almost amounting to anguish to convince her of the truth of something he had said.