Читать книгу Concerning Sally - William John Hopkins - Страница 7

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It is to be feared that Professor Ladue had gone and done it again, as Sally said. Not that Sally knew what "it" was, nor did her mother know, either. Indeed, Mrs. Ladue made no inquiries concerning that point, being glad to put the most favorable construction possible upon the matter and, perhaps, afraid that she would not be able to do so if she knew any more. Perhaps, too, she realized that, unless she pursued her inquiries among comparative strangers, she would learn nothing. The professor would lie freely and skillfully, assuming that he considered it necessary or desirable to lie, and might be led to bully a little. Whatever course he might take, she would be no better off. So, as I said, she made no inquiries, which may have been wise or it may not; and she kept on hoping, although each occasion left her with less ground for any reasonable hope.

At all events, Professor Ladue came back early the next afternoon in the most fiendish temper, which may have been due to excess in any of its customary forms. Whatever the exact cause, the effect was, apparently, to make him hate himself and everybody with whom he came in contact. Mrs. Ladue was aware of the state of mind that he would be in, from experience, I suppose; an experience which she did not seem at all anxious to repeat. Sally was aware of it, too, and even Charlie seemed to realize that any meeting with his father was to be avoided. So it happened that Professor Ladue found the way into the house and to his room unobstructed. His wife and his children were nowhere to be seen; which circumstance, in itself, annoyed him exceedingly, although it is probable that he would have found their presence equally annoying.

Once in his room, he paced to and fro for a few minutes, nervously; then he took off his coat and bathed his head and face with cold water, pouring it over his head repeatedly. When he had rubbed his head partially dry he appeared to feel somewhat better, and he seated himself, frowning, at his desk, and tried to apply himself to his work. In this, as he undoubtedly expected, he was not very successful. He would not have expected one of his own students to be able to apply himself to work with any success under similar circumstances, whatever those circumstances were. So he pushed his work aside with some impatience, got up, took the skull from the desk and handled it absently. The feel of the skull seemed to suggest some ideas to him, for he put it down, went to the half-mounted skeleton of that ancient reptile that I have mentioned as lying between his windows, and began to work in earnest.

He soon became interested; so much interested that he was forgetting about his head, which felt as if it had been pounded with hammers—tiny hammers which had not yet finished their work, whatever it was—and he was forgetting about his eyes, which ached as if the pressure of blood behind the eyeballs was forcing them out of his head. He didn't know but it was; but it didn't matter. And he was forgetting about his body, every bone and muscle of which was crying out for rest and sleep. He sat there, on the floor under one of his windows, puzzling over a bone which he held in his hand, and completely absorbed.

Suddenly he glanced involuntarily out of the window. There sat Sally, astride a limb of the great tree, looking in at him intently. She was a most annoying child; yes, a most devilishly annoying child. He sprang to his feet and threw up the window, almost in one motion. Sally did not move a muscle; not even her eyes. He did not say the sharp things that were on the tip of his tongue, he could not have told why; he did not say anything for very nearly a minute. Under such circumstances, a minute is a long time. Nor did Sally say anything. She only gazed solemnly at him.

"Sally," he demanded at last, "what are you doing there?" The look in his eyes had softened. You might have mistaken it for a look of affection.

"Nothing, father," Sally answered, briefly and respectfully.

"Well, what the—" Professor Ladue was at a loss for words in which to express his exasperation. This was an unusual condition for him to be in. "Well, why don't you get down?"

"I don't want to get down," Sally returned. "I like being up here."

"You'll break your neck."

Sally made no reply.

"Can you get down safely?"

"Yes, father."

"Get down, then," said Professor Ladue, less sharply than he had meant to speak. "Don't you know that it must annoy me very much to have you spying in upon me in that way?"

"No, father, I didn't know it annoyed you," replied Sally in a colorless voice. "I beg your pardon. But I wasn't spying on you. I was only enjoying myself. I won't do it again."

Sally began slipping and sliding and scrambling down the tree. She seemed to have no fear and to be very familiar with the road she was taking. She knew every foothold. Her father watched her as she went from one insecure hold to another. It must have appeared to him a perilous descent, one would suppose; but I do not know what he thought. At all events, he called to her when she had swung off the lowest branch and dropped safely. He still had in his hand that prehistoric bone.

"Sally!" he called; "don't you want to come up here?"

Sally looked up, evidently greatly surprised. She was not easily surprised.

"To your room?" she asked.

"Yes," replied her father impatiently, "of course. To my room."

"Do you want me to?" Sally is to be excused for pressing the point. She did not wish to make any mistake. Mistakes had been made before.

"I should be greatly pleased," said the professor, smiling and bowing airily. "I should consider it a great honor if Miss Sally Ladue would favor me with her company at the present juncture." He leaned a little out of the window. "You know I am working on the skeleton."

"Yes," said Sally. "I'll come up right away."

It is to be noted that Sally had not answered the exact question which the professor had asked her. She may have been reluctant to answer it just as it was asked. It is to be supposed that she was aware of the question and that she knew the answer. Sally was a truthful young person, but she preferred to take the course that made for peace if it was consistent with truth. The professor did not press the matter.

He was again sitting on the floor when Sally knocked on the door and came in. His head was a little better. Perhaps the tiny hammers had nearly finished their work. At all events, he soon forgot it completely.

"Sally," he said, after he had been working for some minutes and Sally had been watching him in silence, "what do you think this is?"

"I don't know, father," she answered. "Is it a—an alligator?"

"No," he said, stopping and looking thoughtfully at the skeleton. "No, it is not an alligator, although you came nearer than I should have thought you would. You were just barely warm, Sally. It is a distant relative of the alligator; perhaps I should call it a connection. The thirteenth cousin of his hundred thousandth great-grandfather, or something like that. It is a sort of a lizard, Sally. It is a very small one."

"Oh!" cried Sally. "A small one! A small lizard! Why, father!"

Professor Ladue smiled. "It lived a great many thousands of years ago. Nobody knows how many thousands of years, although they will tell you very glibly. They don't know anything about it except that it was a long time. I know that. This little lizard is a kind that nobody has ever discovered; nobody except me. It is my lizard. It must be known by my name. What do you think of that, Sally?"

"It must be very fine," Sally murmured, "to discover things."

"At that far-off time," the professor continued, "there were lots of great horrid creeping and flying things. Even my little lizard may have been able to fly. See! These seem to be the beginning of his wing bones. There are some bones missing, so that I can't tell, yet, whether he had wings that would bear him up. But probably he had. Probably he had." And the professor relapsed into a thoughtful silence.

"Father," said Sally presently. She had been thinking and her interest in the skeleton was more active than it had been.

The professor looked up. "Any question that Miss Ladue has to ask," he observed, "will be cheerfully answered, provided that I know the answer. If I do not know the answer, and have the courage to say so, I trust she will not regard me as wholly ignorant of the subject."

Sally gave vent to a chuckle which was entirely unexpected; entirely unexpected by herself, at least.

"Father," she asked, as soon as she had managed to suppress her chuckles, "then could your little lizard fly up high?"

"Yep," he answered; "like a pigeon. Or, more probably, he flew more like a bat than like a pigeon."

"Right up into the tops of the trees?"

"Right up into the topmost branches of the coal trees."

"The coal trees!"

"The coal trees. Fed on the fruit. Large lizards customarily ate furnace coal, middle-sized lizards ate stove coal. Little lizards ate chestnut coal."

Sally burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. In all her experience of her father, she had never known him to be so amusing.

"And the littlest lizards?"

"Ate pea coal," replied the professor promptly, "and the tiniest babies ate buckwheat coal. Very nourishing, chestnuts and peas and buckwheat. Cracked it with their teeth."

Sally was still giggling.

"Seriously, Sally," said the professor, with a change of manner, "by the coal trees I meant the trees which have become the coal we are burning in the stove and the furnace and to make steam. I see no reason to doubt that this little lizard could fly up into the tops of the trees. Perhaps he actually alighted on some tree which we now have down cellar in the coal bin."

"Oh!" cried Sally. "Let's suppose he did. And what did he see from his topmost branch?"

"Very little," replied the professor, "except treetops and a swamp or two."

"Well," said Sally, "it's rather disappointing. But I wish I could have seen it."

"Then," said her father solemnly, "there would now be nothing left of you but a skeleton which I would be puzzling my brains over. It would be somewhat disconcerting, Sally, to find a skeleton of a little girl among these bones of a past age; very disconcerting, indeed, to find that of Miss Sally Ladue."

"But how would you know it was Miss Sally Ladue's skeleton?" asked Sally, her eyes twinkling.

"That is a poser," her father answered. "I should know it, though. If there were no other means of identifying it, I should know it for Miss Ladue's by the large bump of inquisitiveness on the skull."

"What's my bump of inquisitiveness?"

The professor turned towards her. "Hand me that skull on my desk, and I'll show you." Sally obediently handed him the skull. "There it is," he continued. "You can see it, although it is not as large as your own. Come here and let us see if it is."

Sally came.

"The phrenologists," he began, feeling of her head, "would—hello!"

"Ouch!" cried Sally, squirming but giggling irrepressibly, nevertheless.

"It is a very large bump," said the professor gravely; "unexpectedly large, even for you. What makes it so large, Sally?"

"I—I fell out of a tree yesterday," Sally said. "I suppose it was that."

"Ah, yes," the professor returned; "and because the bump was so large by nature it stuck out in a most inappropriate and uncomfortable way and was made more inappropriate and uncomfortable. It might be safer for you if you could fly, like my little lizard."

"I wish I could," said Sally; "I wish I could fly into the top of any tree I wanted to."

"You find the trees very attractive?"

"Yes, I do," Sally replied, simply. "You can see a lot from the top of a tall tree. The trouble is that you can't find big enough branches when you get nearly to the top."

"No," observed the professor, "I can't. If I could, I suppose I might climb trees oftener. It is very disconcerting to get almost up, just where the leaves are thickest, and find that I can't get any higher and can't see anything to speak of, either. And twigs that you wouldn't hesitate to trust yourself upon, Sally, are not nearly big enough for me. That," he finished, reflectively, "is, I think, the only reason why I have given up tree-climbing at such an early age."

Sally chuckled delightedly. "Did you climb trees when you were a boy, father?"

"Huh! Climb trees! Gracious, yes. Used to run right up one side and down the other. Tallest trees I could find, too. Hundreds of feet high. Did I use to climb trees!" The professor turned away in excess of scorn.

"Oh!" cried Sally, clapping her hands.

"Climb trees!" murmured the professor. "Why, there was one tree that I remember—"

He was interrupted, at this point, by a gentle knock at the door.

"That sounds like your mother's knock, Sally. Will you be kind enough to see?"

It was Mrs. Ladue. She had heard the unaccustomed sounds of merriment issuing from her husband's room and had come up—rather timidly, it must be confessed—to see what it was all about. If her heart was fluttering a little with symptoms of hope, as she came, it is not to be wondered at. There was another reason for her coming, although she was not conscious that it had weight with her.

She was half smiling as she entered; half smiling in a doubtful, hesitating sort of way, ready to let the smile develop in its own lovely manner or to check it and let it fade away, according to circumstances. Sally held tightly to her hand. Professor Ladue got upon his feet with more agility than would have been expected of him.

"Sally and I were having a session with my lizard," he said, "and were variously entertaining ourselves. I hope your head is better, Sarah."

Mrs. Ladue appeared to see some reason for letting her smile take its natural course. It was a very lovely smile, almost tender. Professor Ladue should have been a very proud and happy man that it was for him. There is no reason to think that he was.

"Thank you, Charlie," she replied. "It is all right, to-day. Won't you and Sally go on with your session and let me be a visitor? It must have been a very amusing session. I don't know when I have heard Sally laugh so much."

Sally clapped her hands again. "Oh, do," she said. "You were going to tell me about a tree, father. What about it?"

Professor Ladue talked much nonsense in the next half-hour and was surprisingly gay; and Sally sat, holding her mother's hand, and smiling and chuckling and enjoying it intensely. Of course Mrs. Ladue enjoyed it. The professor seemed so genial and care-free that she reproached herself for her doubts. She even thought, unfortunately, that it was a favorable time for asking for something that she was very much in need of. But she hesitated, even then.

"Charlie," she said timidly, as they were going, "can you—can you let me have this week's money for the house? Katie, you know—we owe her for two weeks, and there's the—"

Professor Ladue interrupted her. "Money?" he said airily. "Money? What's money? Certainly, my dear. Help yourself. You're welcome to anything you find there."

He tossed her his pocketbook and turned back to his skeleton. Perhaps it was to hide some embarrassment; perhaps it was only to indicate that, so far as he was concerned, the incident was closed. For the pocketbook was empty.

Mrs. Ladue spoke low and tried hard to keep any hint of reproach out of her voice. "Did you—did you lose it?" she asked.

"I suppose I must have lost it, if there was anything to lose," Professor Ladue replied nonchalantly. He did not turn away from his work.

"And—and did you notify the police?"

"No, my dear, I have not notified the police, yet." He smiled dryly as he spoke. "I will take that matter under advisement."

Mrs. Ladue did not push the question further. There were tears in her eyes as she joined Sally.

"Oh, mother," cried Sally joyously, "wasn't it fun? Did you ever know that father could be so funny?"

"Yes, darling child. He was full of fun and nonsense before we were married, and for some years after."

She bent and kissed her daughter, but would say no more.