Part 5 (1/2)
”You jest take care, Shovel.”
”Ain't yer?”
”Na-o!”
”Will yer swear?”
”So I will swear.”
”Let's hear yer.”
”Dagont!”
So for a time the truth was kept hidden, and Shovel retired, casting aspersions, and offering to eat all the hair on Elspeth's head for a penny.
This hair was white at present, which made Tommy uneasy about her future, but on the whole he thought he might make something of her if she was only longer. Sometimes he stretched her on the floor, pulling her legs out straight, for she had a silly way of doubling them up, and then he measured her carefully with his mother's old boots. Her growth proved to be distressingly irregular, as one day she seemed to have grown an inch since last night, and then next day she had shrunk two inches.
After her day's work Mrs. Sandys was now so listless that, had not Tommy interfered, Elspeth would have been a backward child. Reddy had been able to walk from the first day, and so of course had he, but this little slow-coach's legs wobbled at the joints, like the blade of a knife without a spring. The question of questions was How to keep her on end?
Tommy sat on the fender revolving this problem, his head resting on his hand: that favorite position of mighty intellects when about to be photographed, Elspeth lay on her stomach on the floor, gazing earnestly at him, as if she knew she was in his thoughts for some stupendous purpose. Thus the apple may have looked at Newton before it fell.
Hankey, the postman, compelled the flowers in his window to stand erect by tying them to sticks, so Tommy took two sticks from a bundle of firewood, and splicing Elspeth's legs to them, held her upright against the door with one hand. All he asked of her to-day was to remain in this position after he said ”One, two, three, four, _picture_!” and withdrew his hand, but down she flopped every time, and he said, with scorn,
”You ain't got no genius: you has just talent.”
But he had her in bed with the scratches nicely covered up before his mother came home.
He tried another plan with more success. Lost dogs, it may be remembered, had a habit of following Shovel's father, and he not only took the wanderers in, but taught them how to beg and shake hands and walk on two legs. Tommy had sometimes been present at these agreeable exercises, and being an inventive boy he--But as Elspeth was a nice girl, let it suffice to pause here and add shyly, that in time she could walk.
He also taught her to speak, and if you need to be told with what luscious word he enticed her into language you are sentenced to re-read the first pages of his life.
”Thrums,” he would say persuasively, ”Thrums, Thrums. You opens your mouth like this, and shuts it like this, and that's it.” Yet when he had coaxed her thus for many days, what does she do but break her long silence with the word ”Tommy!” The recoil knocked her over.
Soon afterward she brought down a bigger bird. No Londoner can say ”Auld licht,” and Tommy had often crowed over Shovel's ”Ol likt.” When the testing of Elspeth could be deferred no longer, he eyed her with the look a hen gives the green egg on which she has been sitting twenty days, but Elspeth triumphed, saying the words modestly even, as if nothing inside her told her she had that day done something which would have baffled Shakespeare, not to speak of most of the gentlemen who sit for Scotch const.i.tuencies.
”Reddy couldn't say it!” Tommy cried exultantly, and from that great hour he had no more fears for Elspeth.
Next the alphabet knocked for admission; and entered first _M_ and _P_, which had prominence in the only poster visible from the window. Mrs.
Sandys had taught Tommy his letters, but he had got into words by studying posters.
Elspeth being able now to make the perilous descent of the stairs, Tommy guided her through the streets (letting go hurriedly if Shovel hove in sight), and here she bagged new letters daily. With Catlings something, which is the best, she got into capital _C_s; _y_s are found easily when you know where to look for them (they hang on behind); _N_s are never found singly, but often three at a time; _Q_ is so aristocratic that even Tommy had only heard of it, doubtless it was there, but indistinguishable among the ma.s.ses like a celebrity in a crowd; on the other hand, big _A_ and little _e_ were so dirt cheap, that these two scholars pa.s.sed them with something very like a sneer.
The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which. Elspeth's faith in it was absolute, and as it only spoke to her from placards, here was her religion, at the age of four:
”PRAY WITHOUT CEASING.
HAPPY ARE THEY WHO NEEDING KNOW THE PAINLESS POROUS PLASTER.”
Of religion, Tommy had said many fine things to her, embellishments on the simple doctrine taught him by his mother before the miseries of this world made her indifferent to the next. But the meaning of ”Pray without ceasing,” Elspeth, who was G.o.d's child always, seemed to find out for herself, and it cured all her troubles. She prayed promptly for every one she saw doing wrong, including Shovel, who occasionally had words with Tommy on the subject, and she not only prayed for her mother, but proposed to Tommy that they should buy her a porous plaster. Mrs. Sandys had been down with bronchitis again.