Part 32 (1/2)

”She must, indeed!”

”She could not go _that_ far!”

”Certainly _not_!”

”Even if she _does_ wear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!”

”Even if she _does_” I a.s.sented warmly.

And thus we were compelled to leave it. In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.

Eustace went the mad pace. So did Arthur Upd.y.k.e. It was rather to be expected of Arthur, however. His duties at the City Drug Store seemed to encourage a debonair lightness of conduct. He treated his blond ringlets a.s.siduously from the stock of pomades; he was as fastidious about his fingernails as we might expect one to be in an environment of manicure implements and nail beautifiers; it was his privilege to make free with the varied a.s.sortment of perfumes--a privilege he forewent in no degree; his taste in tooth-powders was widely respected; and in moments of leisure, while he leaned upon a showcase awaiting custom, he was wont to draw a slender comb from an upper waistcoat pocket and pa.s.s it delicately through his small but perfect mustache. Naturally enough, it was said by the ladies of Little Arcady that Arthur's attentions were never serious,--”except them he pays to himself!” Aunt Delia McCormick would often add, for that excellent woman was not above playing venomously with familiar words.

Also did G. Brown and Creston Fancett go the same mad pace. These four were filled with distrust of one another, but as they composed our male quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.

”She sleeps--my lady sleeps,” they sang, with a volume that seemed bound to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which a.s.suredly left them in the wrong as to her mother's attorney--if their song meant in the least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to send him around the world on a slow sailing s.h.i.+p; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.

On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, wors.h.i.+pping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I wors.h.i.+pped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of s.n.a.t.c.hing a hair ribbon.

But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof--still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do ”pretties” with her lips as she talked--almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the ta.s.sels dangling from her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her ”Miss Katharine” on the spot. But my business was with the child.

”Lucy,” I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, ”there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him--you catch him at it--but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood.”

”He has nice hair,” said my woman child.

”Oh, he _has!_ Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that--the name the boys call him by, you know?”

”Fatty--Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?”

”Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?”

”Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket.”

”He meant to give it to you, really--he bought it for you--but he couldn't when the time came.”

”Oh, did he tell you?”

”It wasn't necessary for him to tell me. I know that boy, I tell you, through and through. Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then--be sociable with him--not enough to hurt, of course? You don't know how he'd appreciate the least kindness. He might remember it all his life.”

”I might pat his hair--he has such nice hair--if he wouldn't know it--but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer--”

”Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless. Couldn't you even ask him to write in your autograph alb.u.m?”

”Y-e-s--I could, only he'd be sure to write something funny like 'In Memory's wood-box let me be a stick.' He always does write something witty, and I don't much care for ridiculous things in my alb.u.m; I'm being careful with it.”

”Well, if he's as witty as _that_ in your alb.u.m, it will be to mask a bleeding heart. I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be.”

”I'm sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I'm positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I could _ever_ feel deeply for. I don't believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friends.h.i.+p,” and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.