Part 17 (1/2)

The child's face cleared; he drew a deep breath as if he had accomplished something. Then he said good night, and trudged off to bed. Dr. Lavendar looked after him tenderly.

CHAPTER X

April brightened into May before David came to live at the Stuffed Animal House. Dr. Lavendar had his own reasons for the delay, which he did not share with anybody, but they resulted in a sort of intimacy, which Helena, eager for the child, could not refuse.

”He needs clothes,” Dr. Lavendar put her off; ”I can't let him visit you till Mary gets his wardrobe to rights.”

”Oh, let me get his little things.”

--Now, who would have supposed that Dr. Lavendar was so deep! To begin with, he was a man, and an old man, at that; and with never a chick or a child of his own. How did he know what a child's little clothes are to a woman?--”Well,” he said, ”suppose you make him a set of night- drawers.”

Helena's face fell. ”I don't know how to sew. I thought I could buy what he needed.”

”No; he has enough bought things, but if you will be so kind, my dear, as to make--”

”I will!” she promised, eagerly, and Dr. Lavendar said he would bring David up to be measured.

Her sewing was a pathetic blunder of haste and happiness; it brought Dr. Lavendar and David up to the Stuffed Animal House very often, ”to try on.” David's coming was always a delight, but the old man fretted her, somehow;--he was so good. She said so to William King, who laughed at the humor of a good woman's objection to goodness. The incongruity of such a remark from her lips was as amusing as a child's innocently base comment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Her sewing was a pathetic blunder of haste and happiness. _Awakening of Helena Richie_]

William had fallen into the habit of drawing up and calling out ”good morning” whenever he and his mare pa.s.sed her gate. Mrs. Richie's lack of common sense seemed to delight the sensible William. When he was with her, he was in the frame of mind that finds everything a joke. It was a demand for the eternal child in her, to which, involuntarily, she responded. She laughed at him, and even teased him about his shabby buggy with a gayety that made him tingle with pleasure. She used to wonder at herself as she did it--conscious and uneasy, and resolving every time that she would not do it again. She had none of this lightness with any one else. With Dr. Lavendar she was reserved to the point of coldness, and with young Sam Wright, matter-of-fact to a discouraging degree.

But she did not see Sam often in the next month. It had occurred to Sam senior that Adam Smith might cure the boy's taste for 'bosh'; so, by his father's orders, his Sunday afternoons were devoted to _The Wealth of Nations_. As for his evenings, his grandfather took possession of them. Benjamin Wright's proposal that the young man should go away for a while, had fallen flat; Sam replying, frankly, that he did not care to leave Old Chester. As Mr. Wright was not prepared to give any reasons for urging his plan, he dropped it; and instead on Sunday nights detained his grandson to listen to this or that drama or poem until the boy could hardly hide his impatience.

When he was free and could hurry down the hill road, as often as not the lights were out in the Stuffed Animal House, and he could only linger at the gate and wonder which was her window. But when he did find her, he had an evening of pa.s.sionate delight, even though occasionally she snubbed him, lazily.

”Do you go out in your skiff much?” she asked once; and when he answered, ”No; I filled it with stones and sunk it, because you didn't like rowing,” she spoke to him with a sharpness that surprised herself, though it produced no effect whatever on Sam.

”You are a very foolish boy! What difference does it make whether I like rowing or not?”

Sam smiled placidly, and said he had had hard work to get stones enough to fill the skiff. ”I put them in,” he explained, ”and then I sculled out in mid-stream, and scuttled her. I had to swim ash.o.r.e. It was night, and the water was like flowing ink, and there was a star in every ripple,” he ended dreamily.

”Sam,” she said, ”if you don't stop being so foolish, I won't let you come and see me,”

”Am I a nuisance about my drama?” he asked with alarm.

”Not about your drama,” she said significantly; but Sam was too happy to draw any unflattering deductions.

When old Mr. Wright discovered that his stratagem of keeping his grandson late Sunday evenings had not checked the boy's acquaintance with Mrs. Richie, he tried a more direct method. ”You young a.s.s! Can't you keep away from that house? She thinks you are a nuisance!”

”No, grandfather,” Sam a.s.sured him earnestly, ”she doesn't. I asked her, and she said--”

”Asked her?” roared the old man, ”Do you expect a female to tell the truth?” And then he swore steadily for a minute. ”I'll have to see Lavendar,” he said despairingly.

But Mr. Wright's cause was aided by some one stronger than Dr.

Lavendar. Helena's attention was so fixed on the visitor who was coming to the Stuffed Animal House that Sam's conversation ceased to amuse her. Those little night-drawers on which she p.r.i.c.ked her fingers interested her a thousand times more than did his dramatic visions.

They interested her so much that sometimes she could almost forget that Lloyd Pryor's visit was delayed. For though it was the first of May, he had not come again. ”I am so busy,” he wrote; ”it is impossible for me to get away. I suppose David will have his sling all ready for me when I do arrive?”