Half a dozen voices in the crowd took up the chorus, and it rang across the playground until Tom looked up at the professor’s window in agony.
Ah, those words! The lame child understood it all now! In one instant the veil his good angel had hung for all those years between his eyes and his deformity was taken away and an evil demon seemed to be chuckling the whole truth in his ear.
He was a cripple, a hunchback, an ugly thing to look upon! He should never be like other people, and other people would never forget that he was unlike them. Wherever he went he was to be marked, ridiculed, and avoided! A prince indeed! Ah, the doctor had been mocking him, mocking him, with all the rest! The lonely life he had thought ended to-day, had in reality only begun, for “what was a fellow like him going to do?” Who wanted a humpback to take a share in their games, much less to be counted among their friends? What was there for him but to shrink away and hide from scornful eyes for ever?
His eager, glowing face had turned white as marble; the great eyes dilated and flashed. He drew himself up for a moment, quite beyond his poor shrunken height, and then with a wild cry, started from the grounds and fled away down the street. Away, away! Anywhere that his flying feet could carry him, only away from everybody and everything!
The boys stood and looked in each others’ faces without a word. “I guess you’ve done it now,” said Davis, turning to where Carter stood.
“I didn’t do it,” said Carter, too near being really terrified to retort as warmly as he might another time. “Better aim where it belongs if you’ve got anything to say.”
At this moment Aleck ran down the steps, looking as if in search of some one.
“I say, Tom,” he began, “where’s that little fellow that came this morning? I thought he was up stairs, but the professor says he made him over to you. What have you done with him?”
Tom’s tongue was fast to the roof of his mouth, and Aleck looked at the tell-tale faces of the other boys.
“Look here!” and his eyes flashed as the boys had never seen them, “don’t tell me there’s a coward among you dastardly enough to touch a helpless little fellow that’s carrying a burden like that!”
“We didn’t touch him,” muttered Hal Fenimore. “I suppose he didn’t like what we had to say, and he stepped out.”
“Didn’t touch him! You’d better have touched him, better have struck him in the face a hundred times over, than—which way did he go?”
Tom pointed to one of the gates, and Aleck followed through it in a flash, and was looking up and down the street; but in vain—only brisk, erect walkers were passing on as far as his eye could reach. He ran a little way past one corner and then another, but no crooked, dwarfed little figure was in sight; and burning with indignation, he came hastily back, to find the bell had rung and the boys had taken seats some time before.
And was that the professor standing in the desk, his eyes flashing fire, his face white, and his voice so terrible that half the boys had got their heads hidden behind one thing or another, as if they thought it was going to strike them?
“Didn’t think, and didn’t touch him!” he was thundering, in answer to the excuses offered; “you did think; you thought it would be a pleasure to see a suffering little life crushed down still farther under your taunts! And you did touch him; you touched him with words that were sharper than a serpent’s tooth, and may rankle like poisoned arrows in his heart to the latest day of his life! No one could ever have made me believe that I had such a school; and I could give it up now, and give my whole time to one little fellow like that you have driven away, with more hope of reward than I feel with you to-day.”
There was no reprimand for Aleck’s tardiness; the professor understood too well. He had missed the two boys together, and on inquiring for them the truth had come out. It seemed as if the rest of that morning never would take itself away, but it was gone at last, and the boys filed out under the still scornful glances of the master.
But as Aleck passed he beckoned him to the desk with a different look.
“You are a friend of that little fellow?” he asked.
“I’d like to be,” said Aleck; “but though I’ve seen him two or three times, I didn’t know his name or even where he lives.”
“You know where Dr. Thorndyke’s is?”
Aleck nodded assent.
“Well, he belongs there, and I want to send our apologies to the doctor; excuses I have none. Will you go and see how much harm has been done, and say whatever can be said? And assure the doctor, if he will try once more, not only shall there be no more trouble, but every possible reparation shall be made.”
Aleck took the commission gladly, but at the same time doubtfully enough. Now he should be able to tell Nelly that he had really found him; but to “say whatever was to be said,” was not so easy, by a long mark. Still he must know the worst of what had been done, and perhaps it might not be so very bad, after all, and it would certainly be some comfort to the little fellow to hear what a towering wrath the professor was in about it.
CHAPTER XII.
The black horse stood at the door, but Joan had no idea of letting Aleck see the doctor. It was part of her duty to stand guard over his minutes and save them for him when she could.
“The doctor’s hame,” she said; “I’ll nae deny it, but it’s no office-hours, and I mind he’s engaged just at this moment. If ye wad hae the gudeness to call again atween the hours o’ twa and three ye might see him then wi’ convenience to every one, or if ye will e’en leave an order on the slate. It hangs just here in the reach o’ all.”
“Thank you,” said Aleck; “but if the doctor is engaged, can I see—” he hesitated, for in all the excitement of coming off he had not even asked the professor Creepy’s name.
“The little fellow that—that came to school this morning?” he went on.
“The wee bairnie? He’s no come hame, and unco whiles it is to keep a bit thing like him cooped between walls where never a breath of free air or sunshine can find its way.”
“He’s not come home?” said Aleck in alarm, “then I must see the doctor!” and Joan, frightened herself, though she did not know why, opened the office-door without another word.
The doctor stood before the library with an open book in his hand, studying up authorities on a difficult point, but one glance at Aleck brought back his thoughts and sent a misgiving through them like a flash; he remembered seeing him on the school-grounds that morning.
“Have you a message from the little fellow at the school?” he asked, with one of his quick looks, and without waiting for Aleck.
“No, sir, I hoped I should find him here; but the professor wished me to say how much he regretted—indeed, sir, he is very sorry, as well as very angry, and we cannot really tell how it happened, but the boys did something or said something at recess that troubled him, and he disappeared before any one could tell which way he went. The professor was sure he was at home, or he would have sent sooner, but—”
Before the sentence was finished the doctor had thrown his book across the room with such force that it went flying through the open window, where nothing but the iron railing of the little balcony outside saved it from the sidewalk, and the doctor himself was halfway out of the front-door. He turned suddenly and put his hand on Aleck’s shoulder.
“Thank you, my man,” he said, “and thank the professor for me, if you please,” and in another instant he was gone, and sparks were flying from under the black horse’s hoofs, almost out of sight down the road leading to the almshouse. He did not know why he chose it, except that it was the way he had taken so many times to find him before, and the one most familiar to Creepy himself. On, on, a mile, more than a mile, no distance at all to the flying hoofs, but a walk the doctor had never consented to Creepy’s trying yet, though he had begged for it more than once. The almshouse was in sight now, but there was Enoch working on the road, and taking off his hat with as grand a flourish and as serene a smile as if he had never heard of such a thing as trouble in the world. Creepy could not have gone that way, but here was the old turn in the road that he used to visit so often.
A sudden thought struck the doctor. They had passed in there to follow the trout brook, and down the road, perhaps half a mile away, was a great overhanging rock, facing the brook, covered with moss, and a deep velvety bed of moss beneath it. Creepy had looked at it, and said what a place that would be to hide from a storm, and the doctor remembered the half-laughing half-serious look in his face as he said it.
He turned the black horse with a whirl round the corner and down the road toward the point where the rock lay. Not a trace of any one yet, and none to ask whom they had seen; but now the rock was coming in sight, and what was that fluttering on a torn splinter of the fence? Something white, a little thing, one of the very handkerchiefs Joan had been hemming in such a hurry that “the wee bairnie suld be as weel supplied wi’ everything as ony he might meet wi’ at the school.”
Was that Creepy, that poor little huddled up heap of something lying there, with hands holding tightly the very roots of the moss, and a white face half buried in its depths?
For one instant, at the sound of the doctor’s step, he raised the eyes that had been so bright that morning; but in another he had turned them hastily away.
“What did you come here for?” he cried, as he had once before so long ago; “what does any one come to me for? I came here to be alone! No one must come to me again! No one must ever look at me until I die!”
The doctor stooped and lifted Creepy gently but firmly in his arms.
“Yes, they must,” he said, “I must come and take you away from here this very moment. Don’t you know you might die, lying on such a bed as that all this time?”
“Oh, I wish I could! I wish I were dead, dead, dead!” and then suddenly raising his head, he looked almost fiercely in the doctor’s face.
“No I don’t! I don’t wish it, for then the angels would cry out, ‘Look at Humpy!’ when they saw me coming! Oh, where shall I go? Where will no one ever come?”
What the doctor would have said at that moment, if he could have reached the right people to say it to, and how much more terrible than even the professor’s his words would have been, there was no opportunity to know. He clenched his teeth together for a moment as if he were fighting a terrible battle with something, and then spoke in tenderer tones than even Creepy had ever heard from him, but with the same ring in them that had always brought comfort to the lame child.
“Where shall you go? I hope you don’t want to go anywhere away from me; don’t you know you are all I have in the world, little man?”
Once more Creepy opened his eyes and looked at him. All through the long hour that he had lain there, an hour that had seemed like a year of agony sweeping through his life, the same evil voice that had whispered to him on the playground, had brought up every such word the doctor had ever spoken, and thrown them at him like cruel taunts! He had been mocking him with all the rest! It was not true there was a place in the world and a share in it for him, as well as other people! He had never meant it, he had known better all the time! How dared he ever tell him so!
But he was here again, he had come to find him, he did care! He had not meant to mock him, it was not all a vanished dream!
With a low cry he threw his arms around the doctor’s neck and clung convulsively there, and in another moment Jet looked wonderingly over his shoulder again while the doctor, one arm still holding the crippled child, stepped into the chaise and gathered up the reins with his free hand.
CHAPTER XIII.
There never had been anything in the professor’s school like the excitement that was buzzing in every corner the next morning before the bell rang. The boys were gathered in groups here and there, and the affair of the day before, and its probable consequences, were the only subjects under discussion.
“I say, Carter,” said one of the smaller boys, “I guess you wont hear much more about the almanac, after what you had to do with this!”
“What did I have to do with it?” retorted Carter. “If you’ve got anything to say, you’d better keep it for the one that was first to call out Humpy!”
“And if it comes to that,” answered Hal, bravely enough, but looking rather pale, “the first one never would have been heard if a dozen or more of you hadn’t taken it up and shouted it loud enough for all the world to hear. There’s a few of you to divide what the professor has to say anyhow.”
“Well, never mind who it was,” said another voice, “but what’s up anyhow? What’s the mischief done, and what’s the professor going to do about it?”
No one seemed to have an answer to these questions, and at last Tom ventured, though terrified at the sound of his own words.
“They say he’ll never get over it; they say he’s going to die.”
“Pshaw!” said Carter, “die of what?” but Tom’s words sounded very disagreeably and there was a moment’s silence again.
“Well,” said one of the larger boys at last, “it’s too bad anyhow; it’s a shame to crowd a little fellow like that, that’s never had half a chance, though I don’t know as anybody meant to do it; but anyhow the professor is in a terrible way, and I don’t know how he’s going to get over it, if one or two fellows don’t get a ticket of leave before he’s done with the thing.”
This had about as ugly a sound as what Tom had said, and the boys feeling there wasn’t much comfort to be had in pursuing the subject, broke up and went slowly into their places. But that was only fleeing into the very teeth of the tempest. The black eyes of the professor were fixed on the door, and each one as he entered had to pass under a look so scathing that it seemed every guilty conscience must be read through to the depths. And when he did speak, the words of yesterday seemed only the first mutterings of a storm that was crashing over their very heads to-day.
“Would you like to hear the message Dr. Thorndyke sends to my school this morning? He sends you word that he doesn’t know whether you have killed the little fellow or not; the chances of life and death seem about equal at present; but that you might about as well have killed him, as to do the work you did for him, body and soul!
“And I would rather have heard that any misfortune had fallen on you, than that you were capable of so cowardly a deed: striking at the one little glimmer of light that was struggling up in a poor life like that, and putting it out for ever, for aught you know! I have seen enough of the same spirit among yourselves—the spirit that delights in seeing another humiliated and pained; and it’s base and contemptible enough even where each one takes his turn and stands his chance with the rest. But when it comes to a little creature who, with hardly the physical strength that lies in the left-hand of one of you great, cowardly fellows, is trying to stand up, and is standing like a hero under the burden Heaven has seen fit to lay upon him, I have no words for it. If I had had the least conception of the natures you have, I would have gone down into the playground and defended him from you as I would from a company of tigers; and with more need, for I believe many a wild beast would have found some noble instinct by which the strong cherishes the weak, and have saved his life. And if I can learn the names of those who are responsible in this affair, I will expel them every one from my school, for nothing I can teach them from books will ever make anything better than brutes of them, until they learn what are the first elements of a manly nature and a life that is above contempt!”
There was no hiding away this time. No one dared to hide, lest he should be taken for the guilty one; but guilty and innocent alike almost felt their blood stand still before the professor was done with them, and could bring those flashing eyes back from their sweep around the room and fasten them down upon anything like a book. Carter felt that if he could only live through the next six weeks, till his graduation, he would not meet the professor’s eyes again as long as he lived, if he could help it; Hal Fenimore had a mental somerset by which his memory carried him back to the night of his chess-playing with Tom, and a vague idea occurred to him that what his uncle had said about “principles” then hadn’t altogether a different key-note from what the professor was thundering this morning; and poor innocent little Tom sat trembling with the feeling that in some way the whole thing lay at his door, and would almost have been ready to change places with Creepy, if that could in any sense have undone or atoned for it.
Aleck sat feeling almost as much distressed as Tom with the thought how different everything might have been if he had spied Creepy before going back to the schoolroom, where his errand had really been to see if he could find him. He had followed slowly behind, when the doctor left the house in such hot haste, wishing he could do something or search somewhere—but where? He felt sure the doctor knew, however, from the unhesitating way he had dashed off, and it would be all right; but when evening came he felt as if he must go once more and see how things really were, and, moreover, he had given only half of the professor’s message. Perhaps there had been no great harm done, after all, and it would be such a comfort to know.
But he would hardly have mustered courage if he had realized the reception he was to meet with. The moment Joan recognized him she bristled like a watch-dog that had seen one onset upon his charge, and did not know how to be furious enough in guarding it from a second. Her face was white and hard, the spectacles sat grimly on her nose, and she held the door so little open that her own form filled the space, as if she thought Aleck was going to squeeze himself in if the least opportunity were left.
“He’s asleep,” she said in a sharp, dry tone, “and the doctor says he’s to remain sae for mony an hour yet, and it’s o’ the Lord’s mercy that there’s aught in the power o’ medicine that can do it for a puir suffering soul and body that a parcel o’ iron-clad boys have made it their pleasure to trample upon.”
“Is he so very ill?” asked Aleck, too much troubled to be intimidated by her manner. “The boys will want to know how he is.”
“The boys!” exclaimed Joan; “we want nane o’ their messages, but if ye will tak them ane from mysel’, ye might tell them—”
She checked herself. “Na, na, that were a sinfu’ thought; I maun forgie as I hope to be forgi’en; but it’s a cruel sight to look upon a little life that the doctor had been cherishing and nourishing as no other man could or would hae done, and see it lyin’ there now a crushed and blighted thing.”
“Is he too ill?” ventured Aleck once more; “do you think he will be too ill when he wakes to care for these flowers my sister has sent him? He has seemed to like them once or twice before.”
“And were it your very sel’,” exclaimed Joan, throwing open the door, “were it your very sel’ that made the bairnie’s heart sae glad mony a time, when he’d never kenned before sae muckle as the fashion God made a flower to grow in? Come inside, then, and see the doctor himsel’. It will do his heart good to see a face that has once looked friendly on the bairn.”
“No,” said Aleck, “I wont come in now, thank you, but I would like to come every day for a while and ask how he is.”
“Come, then,” said Joan, “and as often as ye like, and the first day he’s weel eneugh to speak to ony friend but the twa that’s truest to him, ye shall e’en talk wi’ him a bit yoursel’.”
Joan wondered what made the doctor start, just the merest trifle, as she carried the flowers to him and told him where they came from, and she didn’t hear him say to himself, “So, so! the little fellow has been thinking he hasn’t a friend in the world, and he’s richer than I am this very moment!” She marched off up stairs again to take another look at Creepy, and make sure the medicine was doing its work, and that he was still asleep. But the doctor had looked out for that; and wherever Creepy might be wandering, this world with all its ugliness and sharp places was shut out; perfect rest for body and heart was the only hope for saving them from going down together under the shock they had received, and not until late the next morning did Creepy open his eyes with anything like a clear look at things around him.
There stood the doctor, looking as strong and as fresh and exactly the same in every way as the first day he saw him under the old butternut.
“Well, little man, and so you have waked at last. You and I both had a nap of it last night; but the sun is shining and the birds are singing for us once more.”
“All but me!”
“All but me!” those self-same dreaded, almost forgotten words once more. So that miserable work of yesterday had brought them to life, and killed everything else at the same time! The doctor stepped out of sight, and for one instant Creepy did not know where he was. Only at the window, having a sharp tussle with yesterday’s battle again; but the next moment he was at Creepy’s side once more, looking just as before, and holding Nellie Halliday’s flowers before his eyes.
“See here, little man, the world is beautiful after all, is it not?”
“All but me,” and the great eyes looked wearily at the doctor.
It took all the self-command the doctor could muster at that moment to place the vase quietly on the table again, and take Creepy’s pulse in his fingers without letting him suspect how hotly his own were flying.
“What is it?” he asked as gently as if there were neither battles nor enemies to be thought of, as Creepy closed his eyes and turned wearily on his pillow.
“Only the pain.”
“The old pain?”
Creepy nodded, and the doctor laid down his hand and stepped quietly out of sight again, for that was the very story he had dreaded to hear. There it was, raging and burning up and down the twisted spine, the same trouble as of old, and threatening not only to undo all the winter’s work, but to make mischief ten times greater than had ever been there before.
“Hoot!” muttered Joan from the half-open door where she had been watching the whole scene, “and fever too, plain eneugh, and as dree a pain i’ the head, I warrant, as in the puir back itsel’, wi’ sic great cords o’ blue veins swellin’ above the bairn’s brow. Not a word wad the doctor hearken when I told him a cripple like itsel’ wad be wantin’ a nurse ane day; but now the day has come, the nurse shall be Joan and nane beside;” and stalking noiselessly to the head of the bed she took her stand.
Aleck came the next day and the next; there was only the same story to be told.
“He’s no himsel’ at all yet, wi’ all the drugs and sleeping potions we’re striving to rest his soul and body wi’,” Joan said, and Aleck turned away, feeling miserable enough. As he reached the corner, he heard some one call him, and Carter came running up from behind.
“I say,” he said, pointing back toward Dr. Thorndyke’s, “have you been up there?”
“Yes,” said Aleck.
“What’s the news there?”
“Just the same.”
“Do they call him very sick?”
“I’m afraid so. It’s the shock, they say, and the long run, and lying so long on the wet ground. They say even if he pulls through this, he’ll never be well again.”
“Well, it’s a shame,” said Carter, “and I’d give all I’m worth if I’d had nothing to do with it. But I felt so confounded mean when they were all letting me have it about that miserable almanac, that I couldn’t help letting fly at the first game that came along.”
“And did that take off any of the meanness?” asked Aleck.
“Did it? I tell you I could have sold myself for a yellow dog any minute since. I didn’t see it at the time; but if I ever get through with this, I’m going to start things on a different tack somehow. The only trouble is to see just how.”
“I’ll tell you how,” said Aleck. “If you could manage to remember how the Lord has treated us, and that the only way to make a gentleman or a Christian, is the one he taught us, to love him first, and your neighbor as yourself.”
“Yes, but it makes a fellow too much of a prig to keep going over all that in his mind all the time, and measuring a text to everything he does or says.”
“Well, don’t go over it in your mind then,” said Aleck smiling; “just feel it in your heart, and you’ll be all right without stopping to measure anything when the time comes.”
“I don’t know,” said Carter, “but I must manage it somehow; I’ll never be mean enough to make anybody else feel mean again, if I can help it. But what’s the professor going to do about it? Has he found out anything yet?”
“I don’t know; I think he’s got an idea he’d have to come into the graduating class, and he don’t like to break that up. And I heard the doctor begging him not to make any trouble.”
“Good for him,” said Carter, with a grateful warming at his heart; “it would make a horrid mess for me at home if I got into trouble just now. The executive has some pretty strict notions, and I should be likely to lose something I’ve been fighting hard for, for a year. Do you know what I want to strike for when I’ve done with Latin grammar and all that rubbish? I want to go to sea, and my father wants me in the counting-house with him. Think of that! Mounted up on a stool behind a set of leather-covered books, with never a chance to stretch yourself, or breathe the air from morning till night, and smelling of everything from gunny-bags up.”
“And what do you expect to smell if you get aboard ship?” asked Aleck laughing.
“Oh, I don’t know; horrid things enough, I suppose, but there will always be a sniff of the glorious old ocean, and the feeling you’re a free man, any how. That is to say, after you get on to the quarter-deck, and that’s what I shall aim for, and make it too, as fast as those things can be done. There are ships enough coming to the counting-house every year to give all the boys in the firm good berths if they wanted them; and as I’m the only one that does, it would seem pretty tough if I couldn’t have one. The counting-house! Bah!”
“Where do you think I’m going, if you think the counting-house so bad?” asked Aleck.
“I don’t know. Where?”
“In with Uncle Ralph.”
“You don’t mean it!” exclaimed Carter, looking at him in amazement. “I thought you were a dead shot for the law.”
“So dead that I shall never come to life again, I guess,” said Aleck. “Just step in one week after graduation, and you’ll find me there behind the counter, mixing up everything that ever went into a mortar, and not feeling myself anything but a free man either. But you never could rest on dry land since I knew you, and I suppose you must follow your destiny.”
“And when I have caught it, I’ll come to you to fit out my medicine chest, and we’ll have time then to decide who’s having the best of it,” said Carter. “But see here, can’t a fellow do anything down there at the doctor’s? It would be a sort of comfort to make amends if there was any way to do it.”
Aleck shook his head.
“He wont be fit to see any one for longer than I like to think, and I believe his old nurse would sooner let a flying dragon into the house, if she knew you belonged to the school. Making amends is a comfort that don’t always come after a piece of work like that.”
“That’s a fact,” said Carter; “well, let me know if there’s a chance turning up anywhere;” and the two boys separated.
CHAPTER XIV.
Aleck came for news every day for a week before he got any different report, but at last the hard anxious look had lifted a little from Joan’s face, and she almost smiled as she saw who was there.
“The bairnie’s waked once mair,” she said, “and lifts his een at us as if he kenned wha were his friends again, and the doctor’ll no object to his having a pillow on the lounge for a bit change, the day. But the pain is unco dree, and shows no sign o’ wearin’ out for many a day, though the Lord suld een show pity and tak it frae him at the last. But ye’ll come again, and I mak nae doubt we’ll soon find the day when ye can speak wi’ him yoursel’, and get his ain thanks for all your kindness.”
But the doctor was not quite ready for any more experiments just yet. If he had been sure that Creepy had only seen Aleck at the window, he would gladly have tried, but he would have liked to keep every remembrance of the school out of his sight for ever.
But in a few days more, it showed plainly that something must be done, or he would have only the same little patient as a year ago on his hands, and with nothing like the hope there was of better things.
“They’ve done their work well, those boys,” he said. “I should say that was the same grieved hopeless face, the same old pain, and the same silent matter-of-course bearing of it, that I found under that dismal old butternut-tree a year ago. The only difference is, it’s got a ten-times stronger hold than it ever had before, the pain as well as the rest of it, and I’m afraid it’s a life business this time. I can’t get a word from the child unless I fight for it, and I don’t dare try even that, for fear of that miserable ‘all but me,’ that’s taken possession of him again. I wish those fellows at the school could just once see the smile he tries to give me, as if he wanted things to be comfortable with me, though there was no hope for him in the world. And there isn’t, if time and doing just the right thing don’t bring him up out of this better than I see any promise of just now; and what that right thing is, isn’t so easy to decide from one day to another.”
The doctor paced the room two or three times, and then stopped and shot one of the old quick looks and warming smiles into Creepy’s face.
“See here, little man, do you know what friend has been bringing you these flowers ever since you were sick?”
Creepy shook his head.
“I haven’t any friends except you—you two,” he said.
“Haven’t you? Perhaps you have more than you think. Do you remember who jumped through a window to give you a bunch of roses one day? It is he, and he wants to see you. Do you think you feel well enough to-day?”
“Oh no!” exclaimed Creepy, shrinking back among his pillows with almost a look of terror, and a hot flush coming up to his face, “don’t let any one come here! Don’t let any one come to see me ever again, as long as I live!” and the doctor saw the slender fingers tremble as he shut them tightly together.
“Well, well,” said the doctor quickly, “no one shall come until you wish it, but perhaps you will think differently before long. You will be tired of Joan and me some day;” and he turned off to talking of something else.
But he would not leave it so long.
“This will never do,” he said, when he had waited a few days more and Creepy was regularly established on the lounge; “the child must have his medicines, however bitter the first taste may be, and he needs just what he did need when I sent him to school. If he had found companions then, instead of a set of wild animals—” The doctor stopped, for he didn’t like to finish the sentence, even in his thoughts. The contrast of what might have been, with what was likely to be, was too sharp.
So he turned suddenly and lifted Creepy in his arms. “Look here, little man,” he said, “whose word would you take first, mine or the first person’s you might happen to come across?”
Creepy hesitated.
The recollection of the whispering he had heard as he lay under the old rock, shot through him. “The doctor had been mocking him with all the rest;” but he could not think so; he knew it was a lie—and yet!
“Eh, little man?” asked the doctor again, waiting for his answer.
“I know—I know you always tell me what you think is true,” he said at last.
The doctor wouldn’t notice how he shaped what he said, and went on.
“Good. Do you remember I told you once there was a place in the world and a share in it for you, the same as for anyone else? Well, I told you the truth, and it is just as true to-day as it was then, but there’s a battle to share in, as well as a kingdom. We’ve each got to take our place in the ranks, little man, and you with the rest, and you’ve got some fighting to do that doesn’t come to all of us for each one has his own. As a general thing you’ve got to fight this old pain of yours I’m afraid. I hoped it was sent where it would never find its way back, but I’m afraid now we shall have more or less of it in the way, for a good many years. And you’ll have to fight with feeling tired and ill a good deal, while you see others well and strong; and you’ll have to remember that you are small and crooked while you see them tall and straight. And you will have to know that every one who looks at you for the first time will notice this, though those who know you will never think of it, unless to be sorry.
“Do you think you can step right into the ranks and meet all this like a brave soldier, remembering that you are serving the King and the Elder Brother? Never mind about answering just now; you can think about it awhile, and remember he has not set you to do this without providing you with weapons. He has given you a nature that can make every one love you, and a brain that can make every one respect you, and can enable you to leave half the rest of the world behind in anything you undertake; and I promise you you’ll get stronger, and find yourself richer, every day you carry on the fight, like a brave little man as you are.”
The fight began then and there! Must he, could he go out into the world again? Must he let any one but the doctor and Joan look at him? must he hear what any one might choose to say? He had thought he could never open the doctor’s door again, never see a boy of his own age, never see any one. But if it was serving the King and the Elder Brother! If they wished it! And if they would think he were a coward or a shirk if he didn’t come up!
There isn’t sharper fighting on many a battle-field, than went on in the corner of Creepy’s lounge that day; but it was too sharp to last long, and he was too brave a little soldier to lose the battle; and when Joan opened the door for Aleck the next morning, a voice, not very strong to be sure, but clear and true, called from the little room at the head of the stairs, “Ask him to come in, please.”
“Come, then,” said Joan, only too gladly, and Aleck sprang up the stairs and pushed open the door which stood a little ajar.
Creepy’s courage had almost left him again, by that time. What if he should say anything about that day?
Aleck himself had taken one second on the way to wonder how he was going to manage it, but he stepped in as briskly and as gayly as if they were the oldest friends in the world, and everything had always been going on merrily between them.
“Why, how are you?” he said, giving his hand to Creepy; “we’ve missed you so long from the window, Nelly and I, that we were afraid you weren’t coming any more, and how to find you we didn’t know. And here you are, not five minutes walk from us after all! You see we couldn’t let it go so, after we had once got to expecting you, and so when you stopped coming I returned some of your visits. That’s fair, isn’t it? But you’ve been horridly sick, haven’t you? Shut up here all these pleasant days, and no end of pain, they tell me.”
“Yes,” said Creepy, “but that doesn’t matter much. I was used to pain a long time, and if it comes back now, why it’s only the same thing, you know.”
“Well, if it went off once, it will again, I hope; and the first thing when it’s better, we shall be looking for you. There isn’t much in the conservatory just now of course, but the garden almost goes ahead of it. Did you ever take care of flowers?”
“I never saw one till I saw yours,” said Creepy; and then seeing a look of astonishment, he added, “I never saw anything, until the doctor came.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Aleck, laughing, that Creepy need not see how he really felt, “those eyes of yours look as if they had seen a great deal, and looked through it all pretty well too. But books are the main things, I guess, from what I see about here. Does the doctor let you read yet?”
“Not much; he brought me a book yesterday, but I’m not to read it yet.”
“That looks jolly,” said Aleck, taking up the book and running over the illustrations. “There’s a sail-boat that looks for all the world like mine. Do you like sailing? I’m going out in the harbor this afternoon, and I wish you were well enough to go along. Perhaps you’d like a row-boat better; everybody likes rowing, I believe.”
“All but me,” said Creepy, and then he was glad the doctor was not there to hear; he did not mean to say it, but it slipped out.
“It does want a pretty strong arm,” said Aleck, “and I don’t know that it’s quite equal to sailing, after all;” and then he went off into a long discourse about boats and yachts and rigging, that was rather bewildering to Creepy; but it was so pleasant to hear it for all that, that he almost forgot everything else, and the battle of the day before went clear out of sight. But it all rose up again when Aleck said he was afraid he was staying too long, and then returned to the subject of Creepy’s visits.
“You’ll come and let Nelly see you again the first day you’re well enough, wont you?”
The hot flush came up once more, and Creepy shrank back among the pillows, as he had when the doctor had asked him to see Aleck, and for a moment the enemy had the upper-hand again.
“Oh, I can’t! I can’t let her see me, and I don’t want ever to look at her again; she is too beautiful!”
“And don’t you like beautiful things?” asked Aleck, though fearing that he understood only too well.
“Yes; but if she should look at me! If she should say ‘Humpy!’ She would think it, if she didn’t say the words, and I couldn’t bear it.”
There! he had done the very thing he had thought would kill him if Aleck did it!
In a moment Aleck was on his knee before Creepy’s corner, and had one arm placed gently and tenderly about his neck.
“Are you thinking of that still?” he said. “Haven’t you got those miserable words out of your head yet? If you only knew how the boys are always saying such things to each other, and how nobody ever minds it or thinks of it again. It’s a horrid way they have, and they ought to have seen that you weren’t used to roughing it; they’ve been sorry enough since, but if you only knew how they never gave a thought to what they were saying, you might forget it.”
“But they told the truth,” said Creepy, looking drearily at Aleck; “they called me Humpy, and said, ‘What is a fellow like him going to do?’ and it was true! No, I can’t forget it, but I can bear it; the doctor says I must, to be a good soldier, but I shall always know it is true.”
“And what if it is true? What if you are not as straight as they, and haven’t the strength for all the rough things they have going on? Don’t you know you’ve got a face that would make up for all the backs in the world, and that you can leave all the boys where they can’t find themselves in their studies?”
Creepy shook his head.
“It isn’t only they; every one will say it as long as I live.”
“Nobody will say it that has any sense, and you can soon show the rest of them that they don’t know what they are talking about. You’ll make a place for yourself in the world to be proud of yet.”
Creepy looked up with the same smile that worried the doctor so when he saw it.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think there’ll be anything for me but to fight. The doctor used to think I should have my share, but he doesn’t think so now; he thinks I shall always be sick. Not that he says so, but I know.”
“Oh, don’t say so, don’t even think so, until you know it is true. And even if it should be true, don’t you know how close the Lord Jesus used to come to the weak and the sick, and that he’s just the same now in his heart? It always seemed to me it would almost pay to suffer a good deal, just to know how tender his heart was towards you, and how he must be thinking of it all, and only waiting for the day to come when he can take it all away. He must have a great many thoughts about you, that he never has about great, strong, rough fellows like the rest of us.”
Creepy did not answer for a moment; he could not have told Aleck for his life what a help it was to hear him say all these things. He only looked in his face, and said, “I shall never be one of His princes, but I’ll try to make as good a soldier as I can. And I hope you’ll come again—that is—you’ve been so kind that I forgot—but, of course, you’ll have other things to do.”
“Of course I’ll come,” said Aleck; “I should not know how to be refused, after this. I’ve got to keep a sharp look out ahead, it’s true, till after examination; but a fellow must have his pleasures somewhere, you know. Good-by; I’ll be sure to find you better when I come again.”
The doctor thought so too. Creepy was off the lounge the next day, and in a day or two more insisted upon beginning to open the door for patients again. The pain was there still, and bad enough, it is true, and there was too much of the old expression in his smile; but there he was, going quietly about again, very much as if nothing had happened, except indeed that there was no strength yet.
“Look at that!” said the doctor. “If one visit from a boy four years older than himself has been such a medicine, what would it have been if he could have gone to school with twenty of his own age, as I wanted him to, instead of being hunted down by a set of—well, no matter what they were—the very first day I trusted him among them!”
The doctor was right, but he hadn’t got hold of quite the whole of it. Aleck’s visit had done a great work, true enough, but the best part of it was helping Creepy to clinch the victory the doctor’s words had set him to fighting for just before. And if he had lost the feeling, perhaps for ever, that had made Mrs. Ganderby notice how light his step was, and how he “held up his head to look other folks in the face,” there was something else keeping his heart warm, and giving him courage for what might be before him. He couldn’t help seeing what he had to meet; no one could convince him that it was not there; but he would be one of the King’s soldiers; he would fight as bravely as he could!
CHAPTER XV.
Examination-day passed off as it always did at the professor’s school, creditably, if not brilliantly, for teachers and scholars. Aleck was decidedly the star, but Carter and Davis both did well; and in the lower classes Hal and Tom came off with a very respectable score and some flying colors. Tom had kept out of Hal’s way as he would have avoided rocks and shallows if he had been putting to sea; and Hal was for once so entirely engrossed in keeping his own lookout, that he had no leisure to watch for slips in his neighbors, or to enjoy them if they happened to occur. There was enough for the boys to talk over for at least the first week of holidays, and Carter lost very little time in getting hold of Aleck for a talk about past, present, and future. The future had the best of it, though, and he was jubilant over the prospect that it gave.
“Isn’t that what you call pretty jolly?” he went on. “Carter & Co. have consented at last, and are going to give me a chance in life, instead of making me into a wooden thing mounted on a stool and doing short sums in arithmetic for them all day! Just imagine me standing on the quarter-deck and giving orders to every soul on board, and feeling my vessel bound over the blue waves as I direct!”
Aleck laughed.
“Do you expect to take command the day you go aboard?”
“Well, no, it must be confessed, that isn’t the usual way. I’ve got to share my mess with the roughest of them for a while, and work my way up; but I shall have a command just as soon as I am fit for it.”
“And when will that be?” asked Aleck.
“When I understand the ship and the ship’s work. A man isn’t fit to give orders until he knows how everything, to the very last twist of a rope, ought to be done, and how to do it himself, too.”
“And is that all?”
“I don’t know,” said Carter, a little puzzled; “that’s what the officers say. Shouldn’t you think that was about the whole of it?”
“It may be,” said Aleck; “but I was always taught that a man wasn’t ready to command others until he had learned to command himself.”
“Pshaw!” said Carter. “What a fellow you are to preach! I don’t believe I could tell you what time it is, that it wouldn’t give you a handle for a sermon or a lecture, whatever it may be. But the truth is, you hit the nail on the head so well that I can’t help liking it every time. I’ll treasure that up, and what you said the other day about making a man and a gentleman of myself.”
“By becoming a Christian!” said Aleck.
“Well, I suppose so, only it sounds so much like prigging to put it that way.”
“What sounds like prigging? If a ship-captain should offer to take you under his special instruction after you get aboard, and teach you all he knew, and make a first-rate officer of you, would you call it prigging if you were to try your best to learn, and come as near his own mark as you could?”
“No, indeed! And if I can only get a chance on the Cumbermede, I should be proud to be even the shadow of the captain, for I tell you what it is, I don’t believe a finer officer ever stepped the quarter-deck! But he wont notice me, not for a year at least. It would be beneath him, of course.”
“Well, I’ll tell you who will notice you, and not think it beneath him, either, and that is the Great Captain, and you know what he is; all the hosts of heaven call him glorious. You can study him and study with him and wear his colors, and get closer to his standard every year, and not be very much of a prig either.”
“And is that what you call being a Christian? I thought it was all in drawing down your face and quoting Scripture, and never doing anything to have a good time.”
“I don’t believe you thought any such thing,” said Aleck, “you have too much sense for that. A Christian is a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and nothing more or less, except that you can’t very well follow him without believing in him first and loving him afterwards.”
“Well, a fellow might look at it that way, and not be a milksop, after all; and I’ve got to get hold of something or other that will carry me a peg beyond where I was that day we got the professor into such a rage. It wasn’t the rage I cared for, but I did feel so contemptibly mean; and an idea came across me that there must be some different rule a fellow could work by; but I don’t know as I should ever have seen it any plainer if you hadn’t given me a lift.”
“You’ll want more lifts than I can give you,” said Aleck; “it’s only the Commander-in-chief that can take raw recruits like us and bring them up to the ranks; but he’ll never think it beneath him to help the lowest of us, you may be sure of that.”
A week from that day the Cumbermede weighed anchor, and Carter, regularly shipped as ordinary seaman, stood on her deck, the desire of his heart accomplished.
“Good-by, old fellow, I shall take that sermon along!” were his last words to Aleck; and Aleck, after watching the vessel towed well out into the stream, turned and made his way back to town, and presented himself for his own enrolment behind the counter at his Uncle Ralph’s. He could hardly realize he was there at first; it seemed more like a joke played off for the day than a life-long decision, and he could not quite persuade himself that he had set sail for a longer voyage than Carter’s. But as the day wore on, the earnest way his uncle took of setting him to work at this and that, and the occasional quiet glance of pleasure that he cast towards him, began to make him feel that it was a real thing to one party at least, and would soon become so to the other.
“I tell you what it is, Nelly,” he said, when business hours were over at last, and he was at home once more, “I feel as if I had taken a flying leap somewhere, and hadn’t quite found out what sort of ground I was going to strike yet. It’s a pretty different thing from old times, anyhow.”
“And different from what we thought new times were going to be, once,” said Nelly, looking up half regretfully from her work.
“Well, if you could just get one look at Uncle Ralph’s face, you’d think the difference was pretty good, and I’m sure papa would too. The only trouble is, Uncle Ralph hasn’t found out yet what a stupid fellow he has taken up. I declare I thought my poor head would be turned there to-day; chemistry and science went clear out of sight, and it was nothing but weights and measures and compatibilities and all the rest. But I assure you there’s some pleasure in seeing how the best doctors in the city hang by Uncle Ralph, Doctor Thorndyke among the rest.”
“Have you been to the doctor’s within a day or two, Aleck?”
“Yes,” said Aleck, with a sudden change of tone.
“No better yet, Aleck?”
“Oh, I suppose so; but it’s a horrid shame to see the way he is. He never had known a well day in his life till the doctor took hold of him; but he said there was no reason why he shouldn’t, and he went to work and did everything that could be thought of for six months or more, and had just got him where he was finding out what life was—of course not to be quite as strong as other people, but ready to feel pretty well and have a good time with the rest of the world; and now there he is, just able to creep about the house or look at a book now and then, the old pain ten times worse than ever, and what’s more, the doctor don’t believe he can ever bring him round to where he was again. It’s more than he had much hope of at one time to get him through at all. And that isn’t the worst of it, either; he behaves like a little man, but I don’t believe he’ll ever forget what happened an hour as long as he lives.”
“Oh, he must forget it, Aleck. Bring him up here, and see if we can’t make him.”
“I don’t know,” said Aleck, smiling. “I invited him once, but I don’t know as I can flatter you by telling you what objection he had.”
“Well, only once persuade him, and I’m sure we can find some way to make his objections vanish.”
CHAPTER XVI.
A year passed away, and things began to look a good deal clearer to Aleck; and the farther he went, the more ready he was to confess his uncle was keeping his promise to show him he could study a profession behind his counter, as well as he could in a doctor’s office or a law-school.
“It isn’t so bad, after all, Nelly,” he said now and then as he came home with a glowing account of some new experiment, “and you may be proud of me yet as a distinguished chemist, assayer, and what not. If you’re not, it will only be because you can’t appreciate me.”
The year as it closed brought another graduating-class to their leave-takings at the professor’s, and this time Hal Fenimore gathered his laurels, and said farewell with the rest, but with no tears of regret for the past or the future.
“What a ridiculous little goose Will Carter was,” he said the next day as he came into Halliday’s for a few minutes’ chat with Aleck; “what a queer notion that he didn’t like business, and would rather go off and play middy on that old prison of a ship than enter the counting-house. I’m going straight in with my uncle, and thankful enough to do it, and expect to be taken in as partner, and make my fortune before he’s anything more than second-mate, and it isn’t half the chance there was at Carter & Co.’s, either. I don’t wonder he didn’t want to go to college and stuff with Latin and Greek four years more; but to throw away such a chance as he had at home, to go and put himself under the thumb of a second-mate, and tar ropes and eat hard-tack for nobody knows how long before he gets a peg higher!”
Aleck didn’t tell Hal that he himself was stealing every hour he could get by day and by night to follow up the college course; he only laughed, and said,
“Well, it might go rather hard with your store if nobody took a fancy to go to sea; I don’t know where some of your best goods would come from.”
“That’s a fact,” said Hal; “every one to his taste, and I’m glad Carter’s got a berth to his fancy, and I hope he’ll make the most of it.”
Just as Hal left the store, old Joan opened the door of the doctor’s office and stepped softly in. There was no fire to be brushed up this time, but she made one pretext after another until she got round in front of the doctor’s chair, as she always did when she meant to open a discussion. But this time it seemed as if she could not manage to begin, and the doctor, guessing at her subject, concluded he must help her.
“Where’s Thorndyke, Joan?”
That was enough; Joan was fairly launched.
“Hoot, laddie, and where suld the bairnie be, but moping over a book in some corner or anither o’ the house? It’s little change frae that he has; and what wi’ his books and the pain, and nae companions to run in the free sunshine wi’, e’en if he had the strength to do it, we shall no find we ha’ him wi’ us much longer; either the gude Lord will take him a’thegither frae our hands, or we shall hae no bairn at a’, but only a little auld mon, withered and shrunken before his time.”
“And what do you propose to do about it, Joan?”
“What wad I propose to do? Ye ken weel eneugh it’s na proposing or disposing o’ mine, to say what suld be done wi’ the bairn. It were no notion o’ mine sending him to the school i’ the first place; but I’m no sae sure I wadna be more favorable to trying something o’ the kind once mair, provided sic a place could be found and sic companions as wouldn’t trample the soul out o’ his body before they had time to see what it waur made of. But I’m e’en thinking he might hae mair strength to bear a little rough wind now, and it’s a cruel and unnatural thing to let a bairn o’ his age ken nae mair o’ life than lies within these four walls and the covers o’ his book, except indeed when the one friend he has outside comes to talk a bit wi’ him, or tak him to pass an hour at his ain house now and then.”
“And you don’t think that’s as much as any reasonable man could ask?” said the doctor, as a vision of Nelly Halliday, as she stopped one day with her pony-chaise to leave Thorndyke, as every one called him now, at the door, rose up before him.
“As muckle as what?” asked Joan, quite in a puzzle. “I dinna a’thegither understand how muckle it may be, but mercifu’ as it is, and sent frae the Lord’s pity, it’s no eneugh. It’s no eneugh for ony bairn to gang frae his book to the front-door all day lang, and never a step farther into the world, and never feel his blood stirred wi’ ony little brush in life, and always wearing a patient, sorrowfu’ look that’s eneugh to grieve the hardest heart that could look upon it. Not that I wad hae the boldness to bring aught before your notice as if ye couldna see the whole wi’ far better een than mysel’.”
The doctor got up and paced the room a few times after Joan went out, and when he sat down again, he had come to another decision. Not that Joan had put any new thoughts into his mind; she had only dropped a spark upon tinder that he had been gathering together for some months past, as he watched Thorndyke from week to week. He was no slower to act upon a decision than a year ago, and in fifteen minutes more the black horse stood before Halliday’s, and the doctor was having a little private talk behind the desk.
“I’d like to put him in here,” he was saying, “for I can’t think of any place where he would do so well. The boy has got brains enough to make almost anything, and I meant to have made a doctor of him, and one that would have found high-water mark in his profession before many years; but that’s all over now. If all I can do for him can give him strength to get over here two or three times a day and meet his work after he gets here, it’s the most I can hope for; but we’ll make a man of him yet, and one we can both be proud of, if you’ll take him after he gets here and do what you can for him. And I assure you, you shall not be the loser, if you can manage the matter for me as I wish.”
Mr. Halliday looked thoughtful, but not because he was hesitating as to his answer. He was thinking of the time when some one, once long ago, had it in his power to decide for him whether he should be anything or nothing in the world.
He turned suddenly with a smile,
“You don’t care about sending him before to-morrow,” he said.
“Why, no,” said the doctor, smiling in return. “I don’t know that to-morrow would not do on the whole.”
“Well, send him to-morrow, then, or any day after, when you and he are ready, and Aleck here shall teach him what he knows for a while, and then I’ll take him in hand and see if we can’t make something pretty nearly as good as a doctor out of him.”
“All right, and thank you,” said the doctor laughing; “I don’t doubt you’ll get him in advance of some of us, and before so very many years either.”
So far so good; now for settling the matter with Thorndyke, and he lost no more time about that than in what had come before.
“See here, little man,” he said, darting one of the old glances in Thorndyke’s face, as he came in and found him waiting as usual in the office, and as usual buried in a book, “do you remember my telling you once on a time, and possibly more than once, that there was a place in the world for you as well as for the rest of us?”
Thorndyke had started, as he always did, at the first sound of the doctor’s voice, and met it with the same smile that had troubled him a year ago, but which he had seen so many times since as to expect nothing else. But as the sentence was finished he shrank back again. What could the doctor be going to say? If it were only about a share in the fight, why that was all right, but anything more! The doctor could not be mistaken in anything else, but it was of no use talking about that. He could be a soldier, and he was trying hard for it; but one of the princes!
“Do you remember, little man?” said the doctor again.
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, that’s just as true as it ever was; but there’s another thing, that I did not say at that time. The only way to make sure of places, sometimes, is to step into them, and the only way to get our share, is to reach out and take it. Do you see?”
Thorndyke nodded.
“Well, now, there comes a time to most of us, when we have to do that, though the change from pleasant old ways makes a rough sort of break sometimes. For instance, it would go pretty hard with me to miss you out of the office, but it would not do to keep you here too long, and I never meant to do it. I meant to make a doctor of you after awhile, but I’m afraid that isn’t going to do, as things are. Doctors have a pretty hard time now and then, and as long as that pain holds on, I’m afraid it wouldn’t do. But what would you say to just going round the corner to Halliday’s once or twice a day, and trying whether you or your friend Aleck there can do most toward keeping up the credit of the firm? How do you think that would do?”
A soldier! Thorndyke had meant to be one, and thought he had won some battles, and vanquished some foes for ever, but here the whole thing seemed to be rising up again, stronger than ever, and the soldier thrown to the ground in a moment.
He dropped his book on the table, and hid his face in it for a moment; then he looked suddenly up.
“Oh, I cannot,” he cried; “I never, never can! Why do you ask me such a thing? To stand there all day long and have people come in every minute to say, ‘Look at Humpy!’ Oh, it would be too much! I don’t believe even the King would ever think I could do it.”
A whole year, and that wound no nearer healing than it was at first! Not even the words forgotten! Then might not the doctor as well give up all hope that they ever would be! and all hope of everything else but making life a little easier from day to day! The pain would be there, in the heart as well as in the back, for life, he feared.
It was lucky for Carter and Hal Fenimore that he had nothing to say to them at that instant, but he stopped before Thorndyke’s chair, and lifting the white face that had dropped upon the book again, held it gently in his hands.
“You cannot let people see the form the King has seen fit to give you, when you can show them at the same time that he has given you a soul and a brain worthy of any of his princes? Is it hard to choose between hiding away here like some poor frightened thing, and stepping out where you can find every hour filled with work any man might be proud of, and make yourself known and valued all over the city by-and-by? What should you say if the day were to come when I thought I could not be satisfied with any prescription that you should not put up? Wouldn’t that be almost as good as having you for a partner, as I might if you were stronger?
“And even if you can’t get over feeling that this costs you a good deal, can’t you remember that when the Prince Royal was here, his visage was more marred than any man’s, and yet he let every one look at it? And if he has a work for you now, and a place where you can gather up a great share of what is worth having in life, can’t you take it up for his sake, and for my sake, if not for you own?”
The blue veins were swelling again, and the old throbbing at the heart coming back in full force; but he would not forget that he was a soldier! And yet even a soldier might beg for a truce!
“Oh, wait, please,” he cried, “only wait till to-morrow!”