Читать книгу God's Sparrows - Philip Child - Страница 7

I

The christening was to be held on the afternoon of Murdo’s arrival.

Summer stole into the gloomy drawing room, bringing to those inside the hum of insects and the fanning of a light breeze. An open French window framed a picture of ladies in muslin dresses “looking at the garden” and of the two boys skylarking on the lawn.

The room in which three of the last children of the nineteenth century were to be made children of God embodied the dim gentility of the Victorian age. Here the more Victorian members of the family had by now assembled. The Burnets were contriving to be subtly at home to the Thatchers from New England, whom for the first time they beheld as a clan within a clan in their own territory. No one versed in the delicate antagonisms of “in-laws ” could have failed to observe that this was a family gathering.

About the Thatchers there was a bred-in-the-bone stiffness; they were too much in earnest, too desirous to “do what’s right” to thread their way with finesse through the iridescent web of the social relations. To a Burnet — to Charles Burnet, for instance, who moved carelessly in flannels and blazer through a phalanx of formal cutaways — there was a locked-up look about the expressions of the Thatchers. The faces of the Thatcher women were all that women’s faces should be, gentle and solicitous; and yet always with a shade of obstinacy, of reserved opinion. Studiously affable, they mingled warily with the Burnets, evincing an interest, more than usually proprietary, in Pen’s children, as if subtly to underline the fact that the children were, after all, Thatchers. Their talk was of the family, the never stale epic of Thatcher births, marriages, and deaths.

Several of them were clustered near the fireplace, drawing, perhaps unconsciously, a feeling of family solidarity from the photographs of Thatchers past and present who gazed uncompromisingly from the mantelpiece upon this Burnet room. There Pen was talking to his eldest brother Diodate who had come from Ohio for the christening. Diodate sat in silence, making his presence felt, though he uttered no word, by the decisive severity of his attention. In him the inherited puritan earnestness, informing a more robust nature than Pen’s, had settled solidly into an upright practicality. He began to speak in a deep voice that boomed sepulchrally upon an instantly attentive circle, patting his knee at each point made. “They have — too many — missionaries (pat) — seem to think — they can’t get along without more (pat) — so I don’t help them — when they come to me (decisive pat) — I say let them get together and fight the devil at home (pat) — if that’s what they really want to do” (hands folded, knees crossed: full stop). The ladies confronted with indubitable male logic, fluttered and hastened to agree.… Something very likeable about Diodate: ability, honesty, kindliness.

His son Quentin, too shy to join his cousins on the lawn, stood near his father, swaying backward and forward on his heels and pretending that the Thatchers on the mantelpiece (especially the whiskered ones in the daguerreotypes) were a jury — no, better than that, were congress, whom he was swaying by a speech of great eloquence. There was a war — it was like the Civil War. The land was torn with strife and no one knew what to do. Then he, Quentin Thatcher.… Then after the war, the plaudits of his grateful countrymen surrounding him whenever he stirred abroad in his state carriage, preceded by a glittering escort of cavalry, brought tears to his eyes. It was tremendous.… Diodate exclaimed: “Quentin, stop mooning! … He’s a strange boy, Penuel. Half the time he does not seem to hear what you say.” The boy was like his mother, Diodate thought, lovable but not well-balanced . Emotional, not solid.… He had the Thatcher conscience, though.

But the very pith of the Thatchers was the old lady who sat on a horsehair sofa beside the pianola. There might be fewer Thatchers than Burnets present, but at no assemblage attended by Great-Aunt Joanna could the family be held inadequately represented. The repository of Thatcher lore, no baptism, marriage, or funeral could have taken place without her cognizance. She sat stiffly with her hands folded like talons over her ear trumpet, which she was holding in the lap of a formless dress of some black stuff that made little Joanna, who could not take her eyes from her godmother-to-be , think of “my Jewish gaberdine.” It was because of little Joanna that she had stirred from the old Thatcher house on the Connecticut river where, the last of her generation, she passed her days alone, utterly determined to die as she had lived without being “looked after” by a companion or even a servant.

Euphemia Burnet, thinking that the old lady, because of her tranquil attitude, would be a suitable subject for her own histrionics, set sail for the pianola and dropped anchor with the air of having at last reached port after a long voyage. Composing her features to an air of mysticism, she addressed Great-Aunt Joanna in the brassy voice of one summoning spirits from the vasty deep or addressing the very deaf.

“I am so glad to speak with one of the same generation as my dear father, Sir Rae Burnet,” she announced, carefully articulating each syllable. “I am strongly of the opinion, dear Miss Thatcher,” she went on, “that we do not have time really to live nowadays. No time to ‘loaf and invite the soul’ as your great poet Walt Whitman puts it. I think that is so important. Do you not agree? Now baptism, for example. I have vainly urged my brother-in-law to hold the service in the open air where the great words of the ritual could come to one reinforced by the beauty of nature and where one could linger over those magnificent phrases and savour them. Children’s little minds are so open to nature’s beauty, don’t you think?” With a studied wave of her hand Euphemia indicated Dan and Alastair who were lingering on the lawn till the last possible moment because of a conviction that the Thatcher aunts and uncles were hearty kissers.

No longer hearing a buzzing in her ear, Great-Aunt Joanna perceived that she had been asked a question and smiled blandly. Sensitive of her deafness, she had a disconcerting habit of not using her ear trumpet when she thought the conversation would not interest her.

But a smile was all Euphemia needed and she plunged into her latest religiosity (she was always titillating her imagination with new cults). The children, she said, ought to be christened amid nature’s foison and under heaven’s sun — an influence so favourable to young and impressionable spirits. Within an old house like this, haunted by who knew what malign effluences of people who formerly dwelt there.

“Whutt?” asked the old lady. “Whutt did you say?”

“Malign effluences ,” shouted Euphemia. “I am referring, Miss Thatcher, to the malign animal magnetism of an old house! In an old house who knows what malign effluences —”

Great-Aunt Joanna had caught the single word “animal,” and fixing Euphemia with a look of uncomprehending benevolence, she began to tell of an experience she had had downtown in Wellington. For several moments both spoke together, but the old lady had the placid self-sufficiency of a natural phenomenon, of a river or a waterfall, whereas Euphemia, an artist, needed an audience. Charles and Murdo Burnet, attracted by Euphemia’s struggle to be heard, came up in time to witness her discomfiture. One of those horseless wagons — those contraptions ! said the old lady, had spattered her with mud. She had marched out into the traffic and seized a policeman by the sleeve and made him blow his whistle.

Charles seized the ear trumpet, and putting it to Aunt Joanna’s ear, shouted: “What did you tell him, Miss Thatcher?”

“Whutt? I said to him, ‘Young man, in my country we respect old folks!’”

“Good for you!” said Charles.

“Don’t shout!” rebuked Aunt Joanna, “the trumpet isn’t deaf.”

“My sister Euphemia,” said Charles mischievously, “thinks christenings should be held out of doors. That’s how the Druids did it. Euphemia is a piercer of the veil. It’s her latest religion. What do you think, Miss Thatcher?”

“Hold your tongue, Charles!” exclaimed Euphemia. But Murdo interposed irritably:

“Euphemia, you’ve been talking nonsense. Charles, you’re a scatterbrain.”

“On the contrary,” said Charles, “I think Euphemia has hit on a charming idea — really, Euphemia, I must look into the Druids. I say I like beauty, Miss Thatcher. Yes — beauty. Beauty in nature, you know. Fauns and satyrs and so on. Pan ready to twitch the nymph’s last garment off, you know. I quote from Browning, of course, Miss Thatcher.… Don’t you?”

“Whutt? You’re a mischievous young man! And you’re trying to tease an old lady. But you can’t. I understand young folks. Like ’em, too!”

“I bet you do!” said Charles enthusiastically.

“Nobody,” asserted Murdo crisply, “pays the slightest attention to Charles. He is a rattle.”

“Charming to have you home again, my dear Murdo,” said Charles.

Murdo turned his back on Charles and stumped away. Piercers of the veil. Bosh! Nymphs and satyrs. Rubbish! That made him think of the children. Little pagans! he thought. Bound to be.… “I suppose I’d better see them.”

He spoke to Maud and she called the children into the room.

Joanna came first and curtsyed to him. Murdo humphed — “Sort of thing Maud would teach a child!” — but he was pleased; the girl was graceful, a Burnet.

“Well, goddaughter?” he said. He did not smile, but the grimness melted from his face.

Alastair marched up with a confident grin, his hand outstretched, looking the image of Charles; he was followed by Dan, hanging back unwillingly. “This is the mischievous one,” said Maud smiling at Alastair, “very annoying sometimes, and very lovable.” The high spirits shining in the boy’s face moved her so that she could not help hugging him. Who could resist Alastair when he smiled at you? She turned to Daniel who was standing awkwardly, waiting to be noticed: he did not go out to people like Alastair. Maud put her arm about him, too, and gave him a special hug because she had noticed Alastair first. “My two dear boys!” she said. Dan was undemonstrative and often he gave her such a queer feeling: as if she were a stranger to her own son. Even now he was stiff and resisting beneath her arm. “Dan is the silent one,” she said, “he runs deep. Alastair is like his mother, Dan like his father.”

Murdo looked at Dan. The boy was hostile to him. “Are you afraid of me, my boy?” he said.

“No, sir!” said Dan promptly.

“I see. Well, sullen he may be, hangdog he is not!” Nothing ever prevented Murdo from saying what he thought; he believed that character, like water, should find its own level, especially within a family. He addressed Maud over Dan.

“Is this the one who —” But Maud stopped him with a warning glance and whispered: “Prends garde! We don’t speak of it. It’s to be forgotten.”

Murdo muttered thoughtfully. “It may be a mistake to ignore it with the boy. Um, yes. I shouldn’t be surprised if he thinks of it more than you imagine. He’s sullen, that boy.”

Pen’s other brother, Daniel Thatcher, was peering nearsightedly across the room at his young wife. Tessa was a butterfly. She flitted about the room chattering to anybody and everybody about anything or nothing; though, once she came lightly to rest beside her husband, putting her hand on his sleeve and smiling up at him confidentially without saying anything. He was still a little afraid of her, wondering what a sober old stick such as he should say to a young girl who happened to be his wife; and he watched her coming into her careless youth not without a pang.

Daniel was not the only one who watched Tessa Thatcher. Like Maud, she was really a Burnet, the children’s second cousin. Two months before on her eighteenth birthday, she had been married to Daniel (“a birthday present that won’t wear out, my dear Tessa,” said the irrepressible Charles), and she epitomized in her small self Burnet fire and Burnet recklessness. Secretly, the Burnets wondered how the marriage would turn out. “Such a charming, high-spirited girl,” said Fanny to Maud. “It would be a pity if — Do you think it will do, Maud? Daniel’s a splendid man. Tessa needs ballast.”

“Perhaps. But a Burnet and a New England puritan?”

“I married one.”

“Yes, but you two are of an age. And besides, you have poise.… Well, we’ll see.” Fanny, who was forty and unmarried, was sceptical of most marriages.

Tessa was pretty and vivacious, therefore Charles came to talk to her. He liked to pronounce her name; it made him think of a peal of bells or of curls flung upward from a nymph’s forehead.

Eyes dancing, Tessa seized his arm and swung him round to face her. “Good afternoon Uncle Charles. I hear you don’t like me!”

Charles’s age was near enough to hers to make the “uncle” piquant. Joyously, he adjusted his mind to a skirmish. “Now who could have told you that! I only said it in the family.”

“Then it is true? You did say it.… Charles, what did you say, really?”

Charles liked to say outrageous things with a charming smile. “I told your mother,” said he, “that you were a graceful brat; ‘unspanked but graceful’ was the phrase I used. I was annoyed because you were flirting with green youths — with my junior at the bank, if you want to know. It interferes with his bookkeeping and makes a lot of trouble for me.”

“But I didn’t.”

“You have all the stability of a kitten. You can’t help it: champagne bubbles and you flirt.… Like you? You’re my dearest enemy.… Heard anything else about me, Mrs. Thatcher?”

“Yes,” said Tessa spitefully, “I heard you lost a lot of money buying stocks on margin — do they call it?”

“And claws, too,” murmured Charles. “Oh, that ? Unlucky in money — you know the rest of it, Tessa.”

“Are you lucky in love, Charles?”

“It is a family characteristic, Tessa,” said Charles bowing with mock gallantry.

The children, according to their different natures, considered this thing that was presently to be done to them. Dan was rebellious. Alastair, always willing to take a new experience in his stride, felt rather important. But Joanna was so excited that she could not wait another minute for the ceremony to begin. She stood beside her mother, who was talking to Fanny, and tugged at her sleeve.

“In a minute, dear,” said her mother and went on talking. Joanna was an imaginative and believing little girl, and she wondered what it would feel like when you were made into a Christian. Would it be like a miracle? Like the devils coming out of the sick man and going into the herd of swine? She felt queer and tickly in the pit of her stomach.

“When will it start, Mother? Mother, when will it start?” she whispered urgently, and sidling up to her mother, she took her arm and put it round her own shoulders.

“Presently, dear. Now, Joanna, I want you to talk to your Great-Aunt Joanna. She’s your godmother. Remember to curtsy and to speak into her trumpet. And if she asks you questions, dear, answer her truthfully and politely.”

Great-Aunt Joanna, perhaps dozing a little, perhaps fallen into a reverie, did not at first notice her great-niece , so Joanna took the ear trumpet and breathed into it the word “godmother.” She thought her great-aunt looked fearfully like the picture of the witch in Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.

The old lady turned her head as quickly as a bird, and saw that the child was frightened. “You need not curtsy to me, little Joanna,” she said kindly. “I like little girls. When I was young, people used to frighten me, too, but you must not be afraid of me. Come here, goddaughter.” She made Joanna sit on a leather hassock and smiled down at her.… “She is a beautiful child,” the old lady thought, “but such an odd, elfin, little face.”

She said to Joanna:

“Do you know, Joanna, that I was once a little girl rather like you?”

“Yes,” said Joanna, but it was a child’s answer, for she had no real sense of time passing and of herself growing old like Great-Aunt Joanna.

“Joanna, bring me that small photograph from the mantelpiece.”

Joanna brought her a daguerreotype of a child in a velvet crinoline. She had to tilt it to just the right angle to make the small, stiff figure appear from the background.

“Do you see that she has brown curls to her shoulders just like you?”

“Oh, Great-Aunt Joanna, is that really you?”

“It was, Joanna.… Now let me see what sort of a child my goddaughter is. Do you love your brothers?”

“Oh, yes! ’Specially Dan. I love him awfully.” She went on with a rush of confidence: “Sometimes when I don’t feel very well I am cross.”

“So are we all.… Do you go to church? Did you go this morning, Joanna?”

“Yes,” said Joanna, pleased.

“Tell me about the sermon.”

“All of it?”

“Why, yes, whatever you can remember.”

“The text, too? Everything he said?”

Surprised at the girl’s eagerness, Aunt Joanna nodded with a smile. Joanna settled herself comfortably on the hassock and a faraway look came into her eyes.

“The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse,” she announced in a low, intense voice; then with a slight alteration of tone: “The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”

Aunt Joanna moved uneasily and put down her trumpet for a moment. The note of human despair on a child’s lips sounded eerie and dreadful.… But how perfectly and how unconsciously the child mimicked with her thin voice the intonations of a theatrical preacher. The old lady began to think: “I ought not to have —”

“My dear friends,” said Joanna, raising both her palms with the gesture of a preacher compelling the attention of his congregation. “These terrible words of the man of Uz, spoken from the tomb of the past, bring us face to face with the age old problem of evil. Sickness? Suffering? Why must they be? Who among us, seeing his dear ones, his parents and children bearing the mysterious cross of suffering, has not asked that question.…”

Great-Aunt Joanna Thatcher gazed at the rapt face of her goddaughter. Did the child know what she was saying? One by one the Thatchers and the Burnets in the room stopped talking and listened in tense silence to a child’s voice uttering the thoughts of a rather unctuous man.

“Oh-h , my dear friends” — the thin little voice swelled with the studied emotion of a preacher whose voice reaches out and gathers his audience into an embrace — “The suffering of those we love, is it not a challenge to us who are whole? How ap-applicable to us of the twentieth century is this Bible of ours! Sickness! Social injustice! Bereavement! War, bringing suffering to the innocent with the guilty! All the ills of human life! Have we not all had our pride humbled into the dust through seeing those whom we deemed part of ourselves — our own children, perhaps — suffering, and we powerless to help them…?”

Word for word Joanna repeated what she had heard that morning, with the same gestures, the same florid fluctuations of emotion. Unmindful of herself and of her audience of grown-ups , and unconscious that she, a child of six about to be baptized, was a figure of irony, she pierced the heart of more than one person in the room: of Pen, who thought how a man spends his youth trying to make a secure inner life for himself, only to see it vanish like a puff of smoke when he finds himself living his own bitter troubles over again in his children’s lives; of Maud, who always managed her moods and was cheerful except when unexpected chance brought her face to face with a hidden fear; of the old lady sitting on the sofa, in whom age had long since dulled the pain of life so terribly uttered by a young voice.

She put her hand on her godchild’s shoulder and her voice shook a little. “Thank you, Joanna. You are a dear little girl. But now I think you should stop before you become too excited.”

Murdo in surplice and stole came into the room and the service began. Joanna was excited, and all at once she felt that the pain which she knew so well was not far away. That would be dreadful! … The words of the service moved her to the depth of her soul.… And being steadfast in faith, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world. … The waves rolled in like surf beating on the shore. She trembled.… Great-Aunt Joanna lifted her trumpet and gave response in a firm voice: All this I steadfastly believe . Presently, everyone knelt and there was a rustle of silk like a breeze passing through leaves. The scene and the spoken words became dulled to Joanna, for pain had surrounded her like a mist. She whispered: “Father, please take me upstairs. I feel ill.”

Pen gathered her in his arms and took her upstairs, and Maud followed.

Burnets and Thatchers, drawn for a moment into one family by the too-bigness of life, watched them go in silence.

Dan stood by himself, awkward and self-conscious , though no one was looking at him. Murdo noticed him and said in a voice which he meant to be kind, but which sounded stern to Dan: “Well, my boy. You must take care of your sister. Someday it may be your responsibility. We don’t choose our responsibilities, you know; they choose us.”

Dan did not answer. He looked at the ground with the confused, troubled expression of a child who has been scolded; he was not quite sure why.

II

Most of the relations had left Ardentinny after the christening. Dan mooned about watching his mother and Aunt Fanny. His mother was ironing a flannel nightgown for Joanna. Tamp-tamp-tamp with the iron in short jabs on the collar and sleeves; then she lifted the garment carefully to fold it. Looking up, she smiled at him with her calm smile; it made him feel better.

Aunt Fanny was talking in an undertone, but he heard a little. “The doctor … Maud, it’s a terrible thing.…”

Mother put down the iron carefully on the mat and her look went inside as if she were thinking to herself. “It’s devilish,” she said softly.

He went up to his room and undressed by candlelight, dawdling in order to put off being put in bed with the light out. Alastair was asleep, and Joanna now slept in another room. He heard his mother’s murmur from Joanna’s room telling Joanna about the Princess Perdita and the fairy toadstools. “Ten good fairies sat on a circle of toadstools, and on another magic circle sat ten bad fairies; the good fairies liked people and wanted to help them, but the bad fairies wanted to harm them. One day Perdita went for a walk and all the fairies, both the good fairies and the bad fairies, beckoned to her.…” The wax melted and ran down the candle, making a glistening pool at the bottom. Idly, Dan picked up the lump of hot wax and pressed it into a pellet. “If I flip this so that it hits the doorknob, Joanna will get well,” he thought. But he was afraid to throw it. He blew out the candle, and presently, he went to sleep.

He awoke with a voice ringing in his ears and knew instantly whose it was. It was still nighttime, but moonlight lightened the room with cold brightness. The boy listened with taut muscles for the cry that had awakened him, and almost at once it came again. “Mother! Where are you? Come quickly!” Then the sound of his parents, hurrying up the stairs, their footfalls as they moved about the room, their voices talking low so that he and Alastair should not hear. Alastair was still asleep — of course.

Dan got out of bed, and barefoot, tiptoed down the hall until he stood outside the room. He listened, his heart thumping in his breast like a clock in an empty room.

He heard his father’s voice. “We must never let him feel it was his fault, Maud. It would do him harm to grow up with a thought like that.”

“We must not think it ourselves, Pen. You can’t blame a child for an accident.… Do you think he remembers?”

“No! No, of course not, thank heaven. A child doesn’t look backward or forward.”

The little boy standing outside the door did not know that he was shivering from cold. He was not conscious of himself standing there with the moonlight cleaving the dark, still hall to his feet like a spear. He did not even think, with the detachment of grown people, that he felt miserable, but a terrible dart pierced him, as when in a dream you fall suddenly before you can brace yourself. He felt a sickening dread, but he felt it as a child feels it, with no remembered pattern of dismay and panic to teach him that even despair heals, leaving a scar to be sure, but smoothed out to a recollection.

The picture that flashed in his memory was of Joanna crumpled on the floor of the barn with her head gashed … the other children stricken suddenly into silence … his father carrying Joanna in his arms and giving Dan, as he passed him, an unforgettable look of horror. “Come into the house, all of you,” he had said. Hours later, it seemed, his father had come out to them and asked sternly: “How did this happen?”

They had all answered at once, except Dan, who could not have spoken. “We were playing theatre — Dan was going to juggle with croquet balls and —”

“Alastair, you tell me,” said Pen.

“Dan had on a dress suit, Father, and when he started to juggle, he fell and lost his temper and —”

“Mr. Thatcher,” exclaimed Beatrice Elton indignantly (she always took Dan’s side), “it wasn’t like that at all. Alastair tripped Dan on purpose and Dan fell and was hit by a ball and ripped his dress suit. Then Dan lost his temper and he threw a ball at Alastair and Alastair ducked and it hit Joanna and it knocked her off the stage and she hit a shovel and Alastair is a sneak and Dan didn’t do it on purpose, truly he didn’t.”

His father had said: “My boy, you have done a terrible thing.”

Joanna’s voice, calling in panic out of the night’s vacancy, froze his heart. He was too young to bear the knowledge of man’s insecurity in life, and yet the urgency of the cry sank down to that dark fear born with the child, only later to be understood completely by the man.… Beyond the door he could still hear his parents’ voices whispering so that he should not hear. He could not bear it.

There was only one thing for a child to do, and he did it instinctively. He had to run away. He was fleeing from himself, not from persons or places.

He crept back to his room and sat down on the bed, dangling his legs in the path of the moonbeam. Silence now in the house except for the footsteps pacing up and down, up and down in Joanna’s room.… You wished to march out into the wide world — there it lay, outside the window, you had only to step into it.

He put on old clothes, quietly, so as not to wake Alastair. Then he took his twenty-two rifle out of the bureau drawer; for a gipsy often had to shoot rabbits for the pot. Gipsies lived by their good right arm; here today and gone tomorrow, they roamed over the wide world with never a care as long as they had horses and tents and their guns to get food with. He dropped the rifle from the window, climbed out, walked along a ledge to the upper veranda, and swarmed down a post onto the lawn. The grass was wet with dew and shone like silver.

At the gate he turned and looked back at Ardentinny. It stood rambling, ivy-clad , its incongruities mellowed as age mellows the visible marks of conflict in a man; dark, though, and a little grim, like the visage of a puritan. But to the boy it was simply his home. He said goodbye to it.

He turned his face down Galinée Street and began to walk fast. The gipsies! Kekkeno mush’s poov. There was not a single footfall but his own in the deserted streets. Presently, he had passed the limits of the city and was walking down a dusty country road toward Cholera Point. He began to feel tired, but he was still elated. Beside the road there was a neglected garden; he climbed the fence and lay down in the long grass under a snowball bush in blossom, and stared up through the leaves into the moon-white sky. Behind the bush a Lombardy poplar pointed its spear to the sky, standing guard over the blossoming shrub like a pikeman over dreaming beauty. But Dan did not think of that; no words came to him to express the poetry of the night. Uncorrupted by the need of maturity to voice the beauty that eluded us, he could drink it in, not with coldly analyzing reason, but with his whole soul. This is to be free! No moment before or after — only this!

He got up and walked on and on.

A dog barked and Dan, rounding a turn in the road, spied the gaudy gipsy wagons with their empty shafts nuzzling the grass and the horses tethered to their carved sides. A man was sitting beside the embers of a fire in front of the wagons, mending a harness. He was the colour of an Indian, Dan thought, only with sharper features. He went on working at the harness without looking up. Dan was very tired, and all at once he felt frightened. His boy’s dream of himself living a glorious life among gipsies changed to reality. These were strangers; what would they say?

He marched forward over his fear, and the gipsy looked up and surveyed with sharp eyes the small apparition shouldering a twenty-two rifle. He showed no surprise, and Dan suddenly realized that he had been observed for some time.

He planted himself in front of the man and said, “Good morning,” in a faltering voice.

“Is it?” said the gipsy impassively.… “Now who may you be?”

“I’m Daniel Thatcher.”

“Thatcher? And where do you live?”

“I live in Ardentinny. That’s the big house under the hill, near the asylum.… Only I don’t anymore.”

“Oho! So you don’t anymore?”

“No.… I’d like to be a gipsy.”

The man did not seem in the least surprised. He turned his head a little, without taking his eyes from Dan, and called: “Lil, auvacoi !” A woman glided out from the caravan door and stood beside him. The man spoke to her quietly and so low that Dan could not hear what they said. Gipsy talk? he wondered. Then the man raised his voice. “He wants to be a Romany chal , Lil.”

The woman stared at Dan, then she and the man looked at each other. Dan thought they smiled.

“He looks like a —” began the woman, but the man said imperiously, “Jal a bit!” Then to Dan, “So you want to be a gipsy, boy?”

“Yes,” said Dan.

“What does your father do?”

“He is a maner — manufacturer of steel.”

“Of steel, eh? Why did you run away?”

“Because — because I wanted to.”

“To see the world, eh?”

“Yes.”

“And what will your father and mother say?”

Dan hung his head.

“Don’t they want you at home?”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Dan, “but — but you see my sister —” But he could not tell strangers about Joanna. “What can you do, boy? Could you go without food for three days? Could you lie all night under a hedgerow when it’s raining? Could you walk all day and watch the horses at night? Could you?”

“Yes,” said Dan stoutly.

“Do you know how to steal chickens?” asked the man with a twinkle. “Do you know how to lie? Can you bakkarder a horse — tell fortunes — read a patteran ? What can you do?”

“I can shoot rabbits,” asserted Dan.

“He can shoot rabbits!” repeated the gipsy drolly to Lil, and they both burst into laughter that was so contagious and so friendly that he began to like them.

“Now look you, boy. You have to be born free to be a gipsy.… Now you lie down here and put this blanket over you.”

“But I don’t want to sleep,” said Dan suspiciously.

“Then look at the stars. Which is the Pole Star?”

“I don’t know,” said Dan sheepishly.

“And you want to be a gipsy!”

Dan settled into the blanket which the gipsy woman tucked around his shoulders. From the caravan came a procession of dark sprites younger than Dan, without so much as a rag of clothing over their little pot bellies; they formed a ring around Dan and stared at him solemnly. They began to whisper to their mother.

“Hush!” said the woman sternly. “Don’t you know enough not to rakker Romany before a gorgio ?”

“But he’s dark like us.”

“He’s not a Romany chal , he’s a gorgio .”

Dan watched the gipsy unhitch a horse, mount him bareback and set off into the night toward Wellington.

He slept and dreamed that he and the little gipsies were playing together. He was one of them; they talked gipsy and he could understand them. Joanna was there, too, but she was not one of them. They all began to tease her because she could not understand what they said. He was teasing her, too. She burst out weeping and began to cry for her mother, but no one came.… In his sleep Dan tossed off his blanket and called shrilly for his mother. Then he awoke. Dazed with sleep, he saw his mother and father bending over him. He clung to his mother as if he would never let her go.

Behind his parents stood Uncle Murdo and Uncle Charles. Murdo looked grim as if he had been prepared for the worst all along. Uncle Charles winked at him and grinned. A bill changed hands between Pen and the gipsy.

“It’s worth more than a ten spot, ain’t it boss, me being honest and riding miles into the city?”

“And mind you,” said Pen, but with a humorous twinkle to take the edge off his words, “the house has police protection and burglar alarms.”

“Right you are, sir,” said the gipsy with a gracious wave of the hand. “Nothing in it for me in them old houses. Give me the noovoo rich every time.”

“Goodbye, my little chal ,” called the woman, “you come back to me when you’re a grown man!” and the gipsy woman and the gipsy man and Uncle Charles and even the gipsy dogs laughed; Dan could not see why. But his father and Uncle Murdo looked angry.

They were in the carriage going back to Ardentinny. Dan sat hunched up between his father and Uncle Murdo; his mother and Uncle Charles were on the seat facing him. “Well, Daniel?” said Pen. “Do you think it was kind to your mother to run away without a word?” Dan hung his head.

“One would suppose,” put in Murdo, talking across Dan, “that his mother and father had troubles enough without his adding to them.” He gave the boy a penetrating look. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you?”

Dan began to weep.

“What you seem to need is stiffening. Stop snivelling, my boy! You’ve got to learn to be a man. You mustn’t shirk your responsibilities.”

Charles exclaimed indignantly: “Fiddlesticks, Murdo! He’s only a boy. And I’m glad he had the — the guts to run away! Much better than getting sullen and curdled inside. It’s a promising sign — action, no brooding.” Dan sobbed uncontrollably.

“I will say only this,” said Pen, “and then we won’t speak of it again. Never again run away from your troubles, my dear boy. Face them. Fight them out. Do you understand? And will you promise?”

“Y-yes .”

Maud put her hand on his knee and whispered: “Tell me, dear, why did you?” The boy stiffened; at last, under her coaxing, he stammered: “I thought you didn’t love me because I hurt Jo.” Appalled, she stared mistily over his head. “How could you think such a thing!” she choked.

“It’s damned odd,” said Charles hastily, “that he should run to a gipsy camp. Damned odd!”

No one answered him.

“Well, in that boy New England meets the cavaliers, Pen — and we’ll see.”

“Pen,” said Maud, “I think Dan needs to get away from home more. Why not send him to school? There’s St. Horatius. He and Alastair could go in the autumn.”

Pen considered. “He does need discipline.”

“Yes. To iron out that sullen temper of his,” agreed Murdo.

“There’s temper on both sides of the family, Murdo,” said Maud quickly.

Pen said doubtfully: “It’s a poor school, though. They don’t teach them anything much.”

“It is not bad in some ways, Pen. They make gentlemen of them and the boys have a happy time there. And, Pen, they do have good discipline.”

The carriage stopped before Ardentinny and they got out. Walking up from the front gate, Charles put one arm in Dan’s and thumped him in the ribs. “You poor little shrimp!… Listen to me Dan. I’ll tell you a secret. Things don’t matter as much as you think they do, laddie. Now you enjoy life, keep your own counsel and your private thoughts, and think how amusing people are. Most likely you’ll take it hard, though — you’re a Thatcher, I expect.… Chin up, now! You’re only a boy, but you’ll make a man someday.”

Dan liked his tone, though he did not understand him.