The Seeker

CHAPTER IV

The Big House of Portents

In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that was all strange. Novel was the outer house with its high portico and fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window; its big front door with the polished brass knocker and the fan-light above. Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new life to its very center.

For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought daily to their notice. In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily, informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine wrath impressed upon them "when the memory is wax to receive and marble to retain."

Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child, and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder. But Clytie, who had said "I'll make my own of them," was tireless and not without ingenuity in opening the way of life to their little feet.

Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught many instructive bits chosen from the scrap-book in which her literary treasures were preserved. His rendition of a passage from one of Mr. Spurgeon's sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he listened.

"There is a place," the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, "where the only music is the symphony of damned souls. Where howling, groaning, moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert. There is a place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire, torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water—that water all denied. When thou diest, O Sinner——"

But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Always he became thirsty here. And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire his brother in the closing periods.

—"but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then thou wilt have twin hells; body and soul will be tormented together, each brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood, thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of hell's unutterable torment."

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled God with a little g.

As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief passage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going "down—down—DOWN—into the bottomless depths of HELL!" Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say, at each of his failures, "if you only could do it the way Mr. Murphy did—and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,—just like he was associating with a body in their own parlour—and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he'd been!"

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as:

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being:

She was not a little proud of Bernal the day he recited this to Grandfather Delcher without a break, though he began the second stanza somewhat timidly, because it sounded so much like swearing.

Nor did she neglect to teach both boys the lessons of Holy Writ.

Of a Sabbath afternoon she would read how God ordered the congregation to stone the son of Shelomith for blasphemy; or, perhaps, how David fetched the Ark of the Covenant from Kirjath-jearim on a new cart; and of how the Lord "made a breach" upon Uzza for wickedly putting his hand upon the Ark to save it when the oxen stumbled. The little boys were much impressed by this when they discovered, after questioning, exactly what it meant to Uzza to have "a breach" made upon him. The unwisdom of touching an Ark of the Covenant, under any circumstances, could not have been more clearly brought home to them. They liked also to hear of the instruments played upon before the Lord by those that went ahead of the Ark; harps, psalteries, and timbrels; cornets, cymbals, and instruments made of fir-wood.

Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession "girded with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed, it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David's wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him "leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of David's years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."

So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy, prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys—a place where they had gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not see God there, actually, neither in the horsehair sofa nor the bleak melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from the ceiling—yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb—an all-pervading thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or spirit he conceived to be God—the more as it came to him in a flash of divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark of the Covenant.

Thus the Front Room became what "Heaven" meant to him when he heard the word—a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart; a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games and sweets and joyous idleness.

The word "God," then, became at this time a word of evil import to the littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie's, with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who, clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely, like very princes.

To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, "Oh, it must be awful, awful wicked—because I want to do it very, very much! —not like, going to church."

Yet the ascetic life was not devoid of compensation— particularly when Milo Barrus, the village atheist, was pointed out to him among the care-free Sabbath loafers.

Clytie predicted most direly interesting things of him if he did not come to the Feet before he died. "But I believe he will come to the Feet," she added, "even if it's on his very death-bed, with the cold sweat standing on his brow. It would make a lovely tract—him coming to the Feet at the very last moment and his face lighting up and everything."

The little boy, however, rather hoped Milo Barrus wouldn't come to the Feet. It was more worth while going to Heaven if he didn't, and if you could look down and see him after it was too late for him to come. During church that morning he chiefly wondered about the Feet. Once, long ago, it seemed, he had been with his dear father in a very big city, and out of the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it—and what did you have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the Front Room—particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.

During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a neighbouring State. It began thus:

Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza——

After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her voice—

He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.

Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself. He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own:

But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven. And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands. There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.

There was being good—which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the Feet—not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there was the matter of Blood. There were hymns, for example, that left him confused. The " fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel's veins" sounded interesting. Vividly he saw the "sinners plunged beneath that flood" losing all their guilty stains. It was entirely reasonable, and with an assumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet. But who was Immanuel? And where was this excellent fountain?

Then there was being "washed in the blood of the lamb," which was considerably simpler—except for the matter of its making one "whiter than snow." He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only poetry-writing which doesn't mean everything it says. He meant to try this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as a desirable experiment.

But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more important and effectual—if it were only practicable. As the sinners came out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running with the Magnetic Ointment—even redder!

The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed. And if its inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces; where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of petunias and fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.

Life was severely earnest but by no means impracticable.

CHAPTER V

The Life of Crime is Appraised and Chosen

It came to seem expedient to Bernal, however, in the first spring of his new life, to make a final choice between early death and a life, of sin. Matters came to press upon him, and since virtue was useful only to get one into Heaven, it was not worth the effort unless one meant to die at once. This was an alternative not without its lures, despite the warnings preached all about him. It would surely be interesting to die, if one had come properly to the Feet. Even coming to but one of the Feet, as he had, might make it still more interesting. Perhaps he would not, for this reason, be always shut up in Heaven. In his secret heart was a lively desire to see just what they did to Milo Barrus, if he should continue to spell God with a little g on his very death-bed—that is, if he could see it without disadvantage to himself: But then, you could save that up, because you must die sometime, like Xerxes the Great; and meantime, there was the life of evil now opening wide to the vision with all enticing refreshments.

First, it meant no school. He had ceased to picture relief in this matter by the school-house burning some morning, preferably a Monday morning, one second after school had taken in. For a month he had daily dramatised to himself the building's swift destruction amid the kind and merry flames. But Allan, to whom he had one day hinted the possibility of this gracious occurrence, had reminded him brutally that they would probably have school in the Methodist church until a new school-house could be built. For Allan loved his school and his teacher.

But a life of evil promised other joys besides this negative one of no school. In his latest Sunday-school book, Ralph Overton, the good boy, not only attended school slavishly, so that at thirteen he "could write a good business hand"; but he practised those little tricks of picking up every pin, always untying the string instead of cutting it, keeping his shoes neatly polished and his hands clean, which were, in a simpler day, held to lay the foundations of commercial success in our republic. Besides this, Ralph had to be bright and cheery to every one, to work for his widowed mother after school; and every Saturday afternoon he went, sickeningly of his own accord, to split wood for an aged and poor lady. This lady seemed to Bernal to do nothing much but burn a tremendous lot of stove-wood, but presently she turned out to be the long-lost cousin of Mr. Granville Parkinson, the Great Banker from the City, who thereupon took cheery Ralph there and gave him a position in the bank where he could be honest and industrious and respectful to his superiors. Such was the barren tale of Virtue's gain. But contrasted with Ralph Overton in this book was one Budd Jackson, who led a life of voluptuous sloth, except at times when the evil one moved him to activity. At these bad moments he might go bobbing for catfish on a Sabbath, or purloin fruit from the orchard of Farmer Haskins (who would gladly have given some to him if he had but asked for it civilly, so the book said); or he might bully smaller boys whom he met on their way to school, taking their sailor hats away from them, or jeering coarsely at their neatly brushed garments. When Budd broke a window in the Methodist parsonage with his slung-shot and tried to lie it on to Ralph Overton, he seemed to have given way utterly to his vicious nature. He was known soon thereafter to have drunk liquor and played a game called pin-pool with a "flashy stranger" at the tavern; hence no one was surprised when he presently ran off with a circus, became an infidel, and perished miserably in the toils of vice.

This touch about the circus, well-intended, to be sure, was yet fatal to all good the tale might have done the little boy. Clytie, who read most of the story to him, declared Budd Jackson to be "a regular mean one." But in his heart Bernal, thinking all at once of the circus, sickened unutterably of Virtue. To drive eight spirited white horses, seated high on one of those gay closed wagons—those that went through the street with that delicious hollow rumble—hearing perchance the velvet tread, or the clawing and snarling of some pent ferocity—a leopard, a lion, what not; to hear each day that muffled, flattened beating of a bass drum and cymbals far within the big tent, quick and still more quickly, denoting to the experienced ear that pink and spangled Beauty danced on the big white horse at a deathless gallop; to know that one might freely enter that tented elysium—if it were possible he would run off with a circus though it meant that he had the morals of a serpent!

Now, eastward from the big house lay the village and its churches: thither was tame virtue. But westward lay a broad field stretching off to an orchard, and beyond swelled a gentle hill, mellow in the distance. Still more remotely far, at the hill's rim, was a blur of woods beyond which the sun went down each night. This, in the little boy's mind, was the highway to the glad free Life of Evil. Many days he looked to that western wood when the sky was a gush of colour behind its furred edge, perceiving all manner of allurements to beckon him, hearing them plead, feeling them tug. Daily his spirit quickened within him to their solicitations, leaping out and beyond him in some magic way to bring back veritable meanings and values of the future.

Then a day came when the desire to be off was no longer resistible. There was a month of school yet; an especially bitter thought, for had he not lately been out of school a week with mumps; and during that very week had not the teacher's father died, so that he was cheated out of the resulting three-days' vacation, other children being free while he lay on a bed of pain—if you tasted pickles or any sour thing? Not only was it useless to try to learn to write "a good business hand," like Ralph Overton—he took the phrase to mean one of those pictured hands that were always pointing to things in the newspaper advertisements—but there was the circus and other evil things—and he was getting on in years.

It was a Saturday afternoon. To-morrow would be too late. He knew he would not be allowed to start on the Sabbath, even in a career that was to be all wickedness. In the grape-arbour he massed certain articles necessary for the expedition: a very small strip of carpet on which he meant to sleep; a copy of "Golden Days," with an article giving elaborate instructions for camping in the wilderness. He was compelled to disregard all of them, but there was comfort and sustenance in the article itself. Then there was the gun that came at Christmas. It shot a cork as far as the string would let it go, with a fairly satisfying report (he would have that string off, once he was in the woods!). Also there were three glass alleys, two agate taws and thirty-eight commies. And to hold his outfit there was a rather sizable box which he with his own hands had papered inside and out from a remnant of gorgeously flowered wall-paper.

When all was ready he went in to break the news to Clytie. She, busy with her baking, heard him declare:

"Now—I'm going to leave this place!" with the look of one who will not be coaxed nor in any manner dissuaded. He thought she took it rather coolly, though Allan ran, as promptly as he could have wished, to tell his grandfather.

"I'm going to be a regular mean one—worse'n Budd Jackson!" he continued to Clytie. He was glad to see that this brought her to her senses.

"Will you stay if I give you—an orange?"

"No, sir;—you'll never set eyes on me again!"

"Oh, now!—two oranges?"

"I can't—I got to go!" in a voice tense with effort.

"All right! Then I'll give them to Allan."

She continued to take brown loaves from the oven and to put other loaves in to bake, while he stood awkwardly by, loath to part from her. Allan came back breathless.

"Grandpa says you can go as far as you like and you needn't come back till you get ready!"

He shifted from one foot to the other and absently ate a warm cookie from the jarful at his hand. He thought this seemed not quite the correct attitude to take toward him, yet he did not waver. They would be sorry enough in a few days, when it was too late.

"I guess I better take a few of these along with me," he said, stowing cookies in the pockets of his jacket. He would have liked one of the big preserved peaches all punctuated with cloves, but he saw no way to carry it, and felt really unable to eat it on the spot.

"Well, good-bye!" he called to Clytie, turning back to her from the door.

"Good-bye! Won't you shake hands with me?"

Very solemnly he shook her big, floury hand.

"Now—could I take Penny along?" (Penny was an inconsequential dog that had been given to Clytie by one whom she called Cousin Bill J.)

"Yes, you'll need a dog to keep the animals off. Now be sure you write to us—at least twice a year— don't forget!" And, brutally before his very eyes, she handed the sniffing and virtuous Allan two of the largest, most goldenly beautiful oranges ever beheld by man.

Bitterly the self-exiled turned from this harrowing scene and strode toward his box.

Here ensued a fresh complication. Nancy, who had chosen the good name of Lillian May, wanted to go with him. She, too, it appeared, was fresh from a Sunday-school book—one in which a girl of her own age was so proud of her long raven curls that she was brought to an illness and all her hair came out. There was a distressing picture of this little girl after a just Providence had done its work as a depilatory. And after she recovered from the fever, it seemed, she had cared to do nothing but read the Scriptures to bed-ridden old ladies—even after a good deal of her hair came in again —though it didn't curl this time. The only pleasure she ever experienced thereafter was that, by virtue of her now singularly angelic character, she was enabled to convert an elderly female Papist—an achievement the joys of which were problematic, both to Nancy and the little boy. Certainly, whatever converting a Papist might be, it was nothing comparable to driving a red-and-green-and-gold wagon in which was caged the Scourge of the Jungle.

But Nancy could not go with him. He told her so plainly. It was no place for a girl beyond that hill where they commonly drove caged beasts, and no one ever so much as thought of Coming to the Feet or washing in the blood of the Lamb, or writing a good business hand with the first finger of it pointing out, or anything.

The little girl pleaded, promising to take her new pink silk parasol, her buff buttoned shoes, a Christmas card with real snow on it, shining like diamonds, and Fragile, her best doll. The thing was impossible. Then she wept.

He whistled to Penny, who came barking joyously— a pretender of a dog, if there ever was one—and they moved off. Weeping after them went Nancy—as far as the first fence, between two boards of which she put her head and sobbed with a heavenly bitterness; for to the little boy, pushing sternly on, her tears afforded that certain thrill of gratified brutality under conscious rectitude, the capacity for which is among those matters by which Heaven has set the male of our species apart from the female. The sensation would have been flawless but for Allan's lack of dignity: from the top board of the fence he held aloft in either hand a golden orange, and he chanted in endless inanity:

Still he was actually and triumphantly off.

And here should be recalled the saying of a certain wise, simple man: "If our failures are made tragic by courage they are not different from successes." For it came about that the subsequent dignity of this revolt was to be wholly in its courage.

The way led over a stretch of grassy prairie to a fence. This surmounted, there came a ploughed field, of considerable extent to one carrying an inconvenient box. At the farther end of this was another fence, and beyond this an ancient orchard with a grassy floor, where lingered a few old apple-trees, under which the recumbent cows, chewing and placid, dozed like stout old ladies over their knitting.

Nearest the fence was an aged, gnarled and riven tree, foolishly decked in blossoms, like some faded, wrinkled dame, fatuously reluctant to leave off girlish finery. Under its frivolous branches on the grassy sward would be the place for his first night's halt—for the magic wood just this side of the sun was now seen to be farther off than he had once supposed. So he spread his carpet, arranged the contents of his box neatly, and ate half his food-supply, for one's strength must be kept up in these affairs. As he ate he looked back toward the big house—now left forever—and toward the village beyond. The spires of the three churches were all pointing sternly upward, as if they would mutely direct him aright, but in their shelter one must submit to the prosaic trammels of decency. It was not to be thought of.

He longed for morning to come, so that he might be up and on. He lay down on his mat to be ready for sleep, and watched a big bird far above, cutting lazy graceful figures in the air, like a fancy skater. Then, on a bough above him, a little dusty-looking bird tried to sing, but it sounded only like a very small door creaking on tiny rusted hinges. A fat, gluttonous robin that had been hopping about to peer at him, chirped far more cheerfully as it flew away.

Just at this point he suffered a real adventure. Eight cows sauntered up interestedly and chewed their cuds at him in unison, standing contemplative, calculating, determined. It is a fact in natural history not widely enough recognised that the domestic cow is the most ferocious appearing of all known beasts—a thing to be proved by any who will survey one amid strange surroundings, with a mind cleanly disabused of preconceptions. A visitor from another planet, for example, knowing nothing of our fauna, and confronted in the forest simultaneously by a common red milch cow and the notoriously savage black leopard of the Himalyas, would instinctively shun the cow as a dangerous beast and confidingly seek to fondle the pretty leopard, thus terminating his natural history researches before they were fairly begun.

It can be understood, then, that a moment ensued when the little boy wavered under the steady questioning scrutiny of eight large and powerful cows, all chewing at him in unison. Yet, even so, and knowing, moreover, that strange cows are ever untrustworthy, only for a moment did he waver. Then his new straw hat was off to be shaken at them and he heaved a fierce "H-a-y—y-u-p!"

At this they started, rather indignantly, seeming to meditate his swift destruction; but another shout turned and routed them, and he even chased them a little way, helped now by the inconsiderable dog who came up from pretending to hunt gophers.

After this there seemed nothing to do but eat the other half of the provisions and retire again for the night. Long after the sun went down behind the magic wood he lay uneasily on his lumpy bed, trying again and again to shut his eyes and open them to find it morning—which was the way it always happened in the west bedroom of the big house he had left forever.

But it was different here. And presently, when it seemed nearly dark except for the stars, a disgraceful thing happened. He had pictured the dog as faithful always to him, refusing in the end even to be taken from over his dead body. But the treacherous Penny grew first restive, then plainly desirous of returning to his home. At last, after many efforts to corrupt the adventurer, he started off briskly alone—cornerwise, as little dogs seem always to run—fleeing shamelessly toward that east where shone the tame lights of Virtue.

Left alone, the little boy began strangely to remember certain phrases from a tract that Clytie had tried to teach him—"the moment that will close thy life on earth and begin thy song in heaven or thy wail in hell"—"impossible to go from the haunts of sin and vice to the presence of the Lamb"—"the torments of an eternal hell are awaiting thee"——

This was more than he had ever before been able to recall of such matters. He wished that he might have forgotten them wholly. Yet so was he turned again to better things. Gradually he began to have an inkling of a possibility that made his blood icy —a possibility that not even the spectacle of Milo Barrus having interesting things done to him could mitigate—namely, a vision of himself in the same plight with that person.

Now it was that he began to hear Them all about him. They walked stealthily near, passed him with sinister rustlings, and whispered over him. If They had only talked out—but they whispered—even laughing, crying and singing in whispers. This horror, of course, was not long to be endured. Yet, even so, with increasing myriads of Them all about, rustling and whispering their awful laughs and cries —it was no ignominious rout. With considerable deliberation he folded the carpet, placed it in the box with his other treasure, and started at a pace which may, perhaps, have quickened a little, yet was never undignified —never more than a moderately fast trudge.

He wondered sadly if Clytie would get up to unlock the door for him so late at night. As for Penny, things could never be the same between them again.

He was astounded to see lights burning and the house open—how weird for them to have supper at such an hour! He concealed his box in the grape-arbour and slunk through the kitchen into the dining-room. Probably they had gotten up in the middle of the night, out of tardy alarm for him. It served them right. Yet they seemed hardly to notice him when he slid awkwardly into his chair. He looked calculatingly over the table and asked, in tones that somehow seemed to tell of injury, of personal affront:

"What you having supper for at this time of night?"

His grandfather regarded him now not unkindly, while Clytie seemed confused.

"It's more'n long past midnight!" he insisted.

"Huh! it ain't only a quarter past seven," put in his superior brother. He seemed about to say more, but a glance from the grandfather silenced him.

So that was as late as he had stayed—a quarter after seven? He was ready now to rage at any taunt, and began to eat in haughty silence. He was still eating when his grandfather and Allan left the table, and then he began to feel a little grateful that they had not noticed or asked annoying questions, or tried to be funny or anything. Over a final dish of plum preserves and an imposing segment of marble cake he relented so far as to tell Clytie something of his adventures —especially since she had said that the big hall-clock was very likely slow—that it must surely be a lot later than a quarter past seven. The circumstances had combined to produce a narrative not entirely perspicuous—the two clear points being that They do everything in a whisper, and that Clytie ought to get rid of Penny at once, since he could not be depended upon at great moments.

As to ever sleeping under a tree, Clytie discouraged him. She knew of some Boys that once sat under a tree which was struck by lightning, all being killed save one, who had the rare good luck to be the son of a Presbyterian clergyman. The little boy resolved next time to go beyond the trees to sleep; perhaps if he went far enough he would come to the other one of the Feet, and so have a safeguard against lightning, foreign cows, and Those that walk with rustlings and whisper in the lonely places at night.

The little boy fell asleep, half-persuaded again to virtue, because of its superior comforts. The air about his head seemed full of ghostly "good business hands," each with its accusing forefinger pointed at him for that he had not learned to write one as Ralph Overton did.

Down the hall in his study the old man was musing backward to the delicate, quiet girl with the old-fashioned aureole of curls, who would now and then toss them with a little gesture eloquent of possibilities for unrestraint when she felt the close-drawn rein of his authority. Again he felt her rebellious little tugs, and the wrench of her final defiance when she did the awful thing. He had been told by a plain speaker that her revolt was the fault of his severity. And here was the flesh of her flesh—was it in the same spirit of revolt against authority, a thousandfold magnified? Might he not by according the boy a wise liberty save him in after years from some mad folly akin to his mother's?

CHAPTER VI

The Garden of Truth and the Perfect Father

It was a different summer from those that had gone before it.

A little passionate Protestant had sallied out to make bed with the gods; and the souls of such the just gods do truly take into certain shining realms whither poor involatile bodies of flesh may not follow. The requirement is that one feel his own potential godship enough to rebel. For, having rebelled, he will assuredly venture beyond mortal domains into that garden where stands the tree of Truth—this garden being that one to the west just beyond the second fence (or whichever fence); that point where the mortal of invertebrate soul is beset with the feeling that he has already dared too far—that he had better make for home mighty quick if he doesn't want Something to get him. The essence of this decision is quite the same whether the mortal be eight years old or eighty. Now the Tree of Truth stands just over this line at which all but the gods' own turn to scamper back before supper. It is the first tree to the left—an apple-tree, twisted, blackened, scathed, eaten with age, yet full of blossoms as fresh and fertile as those first born of any young tree whatsoever. Those able rightly to read this tree of Truth become at once as the gods, keeping the faith of children while absorbing the wisdom of the ages—lacking either of which, be it known, one may not become an imperishable ornament of Time.

But to him who is bravely faithful to the passing of that last fence, who reclines under that tree even for so long as one aspiration, comes a substantial gain: ever after, when he goes into any solitude, he becomes more than himself. Then he reads the first lesson of the tree of Truth, which is that the spirit of Life ages yet is ageless; and suffers yet is joyous. This is no inconsiderable reward for passing that frontier, even if one must live longer to comprehend reasons. It is worth while even if the mortal become a mere dilettante in paradoxes and never learn even feebly to spell the third lesson, which is the ultimate wisdom of the gods.

These matters being precisely so, the little boy knew quite as well as the gods could know it, that a credit had been set down to his soul for what he had ventured— even though what he had not done was, so far, more stupendous than what he had, in the world of things and mere people. He now became enamoured of life rather than death; and he studied the Shorter Catechism with such effect that he could say it clear over to "Every sin deserveth God's wrath and curse both in this life and that which is to come." Each night he tried earnestly to learn two new answers; and glad was he when his grandfather would sit by him, for the old man had now become his image of God, and it seemed fitting to recite to him. Often as they sat together the little boy would absently slip his hand into the big, warm, bony hand of the old man, turning and twisting it there until he felt an answering pressure. This embarrassed the old man. Though he would really have liked to take the little boy up to his breast and hold him there, he knew not how; and he would even be careful not to restrain the little hand in his own—to hold it, yet to leave it free to withdraw at its first uneasy wriggle.

Of this shackled spirit of kindness, always striving within the old man, the little boy had come to be entirely conscious. So real was it to him, so dependable, that he never suspected that a certain little blow with the open hand one day was meant to punish him for conduct he had persisted in after three emphatic admonitions.

"Oh! that hurts!" he had cried, looking up at the confused old man with unimpaired faith in his having meant not more than a piece of friendly roughness. This look of flawless confidence in the uprightness of his purpose, the fine determination to save him chagrin by smiling even though the hurt place tingled, left in the old man's mind a biting conviction that he had been actually on the point of behaving as one gentleman may not behave to another. Quick was he to make the encounter accord with the child's happy view, even picking him up and forcing from himself the gaiety to rally him upon his babyish tenderness to rough play. Not less did he hold it true that "The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame——" and with the older boy he was not unconscientious in this matter. For Allan took punishment as any boy would, and, indeed, was so careful that he seldom deserved it. But the old man never ceased to be grateful that the littler boy had laughed under that one blow, unable to suspect that it could have been meant in earnest.

From the first day that the little boy felt the tender cool grass under his bare toes that summer, life became like perfectly played music. This was after the long vacation began, when there was no longer any need to remember to let his voice fall after a period, or to dread his lessons so that he must learn them more quickly than any other pupil in school. There would be no more of that wretched fooling until fall, a point of time inconceivably far away. Before it arrived any one of a number of strange things might happen to avert the calamity of education. For instance, he might be born again, a thing of which he had lately heard talk; a contingency by no means flawless in prospect, since it probably meant having the mumps again, and things like that. But if it came on the very last day of vacation, or on the first morning of school, just as he was called on to recite, snatching him from the very jaws of the Moloch, and if it fixed him so he need not be afraid in the night of going where Milo Barrus was going, then it might not be so bad.

Nancy, who had now discarded the good name of Lillian May for simple Alice, disapproved heartily of being born again; unless, indeed, one could be born a boy the second time. She was only too eager for the day when she need not submit to having her hair brushed and combed so long every morning of her life. Not for the world would she go through it again and have to begin French all over, even at "J'ai, tu as, il a." Yet, if it were certain she could be a boy——

He was too considerate to tell her that this was as good as impossible—that she quite lacked the qualities necessary for that. Instead, he reassured her with the chivalrous fiction that he, at least, would like her as well as if she were a boy. And, indeed, as a girl, she was not wholly unsatisfactory. True, she played "school" (of all things!) in preference to "wild animals," practised scales on the piano an hour every day, wore a sun-hat frequently—spite of which she was freckled— wore shoes and stockings on the hottest days, when one's feet are so hungry for the cool, springy turf, and performed other acts repugnant to a soul that has brought itself erect. But she was fresh and dainty to look at, like an opened morning glory, with pretty frocks that the French lady whose name was Madmasel made her wear every day, and her eyes were much like certain flowers in the bed under the bay-window, with very long, black lashes that got all stuck together when she cried; and she made superb capital letters, far better than the little boy's, though she was a year younger.

Also, which was perhaps her chief charm, she could be made to believe that only he could protect her from the Gratcher, a monstrous thing, half beast, half human, which was often seen back of the house; sometimes flitting through the grape-arbour, sometimes coming out of the dark cellar, sometimes peering around corners. It was a thing that went on enormous crutches, yet could always catch you if it saw you by daylight out of its right eye, its left being serviceable only at night, when, if you were wise, you kept in the house. Once the Gratcher saw you with its right eye the crutches swung toward you and you were caught: it picked you up and began to look you all over, with the eyes in the ends of its fingers. This tickled you so that you went crazy in a minute.

Nancy feared the Gratcher, and she became supremely lovely to the little boy when she permitted him to guard her from it, instead of running home across the lawn when it was surely coming;—a loveliness he felt more poignantly at certain reflective times when he was not also afraid. For, the Gratcher being his own invention, these moments of superiority to its terrors would inevitably seize him.