Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories Part 13

In another room the little mother looked at her husband wistfully.

"Karl," she began, timidly, "have you really prepared a surprise for the children? You won't disappoint them?"

"Betty, don't say a word! Wait! Did I ever disappoint you?"

Betty turned away with a half-suppressed sigh, while papa Karl strode up and down the room grandly, virtuously, with a good deal of injured innocence in his face.

II.

The great day had come. Hannah and Liseke hadn't slept a wink all night.

Mitz and family had come purring into the room in the early morning, as usual, but had been shamefully neglected. All six sat in a row by the bedside, watching indignantly the two heads peeping out from the feathers.

"To-day!" Hannah sighed rapturously.

How they got into their clothes, they never knew.

As for eating! why, they couldn't touch the delicious rolls, the gla.s.ses of milk, even that delicious preserve, "Apfel-kraut."

Max alone was himself, and, in his injured way, managed to eat enough for three. Yet, he was not satisfied; at the age of eight life had few attractions left for him.

Who could believe that a September day would be so long? Or that the old clock in the hall would go so ridiculously slow? There was a quiet jocularity in the motion of its long pendulum, as if it were laughing bitterly that anyone could be in a hurry. "Ha! ha! ha!" ticked the clock.

"Oh, dear!" Hannah said with a sigh, "will it never be three?"

How they kept their ears open to hear a crowd of men come stumbling up the stone steps with the weight of the piano!

"Perhaps it is already here," Liseke said, faintly.

"Perhaps it's coming," Hannah suggested, hopefully.

"One--two--three--," the clock struck.

"Come, mamma!" the children cried; and so they opened the sitting-room door with trembling hands.

n.o.body there; nothing there. Mamma sat down in a corner and began knitting, while the children looked out of the window into the narrow street to see a wagon drive up to the house.

"Perhaps they've forgotten all about it," Liseke was saying tremulously, when the sitting-room door burst open and there stood Max and behind him, papa Karl.

"Oh, Max, Max, where's the surprise?" the children implored.

"Why, don't you see!" Max cried, mightily injured, and turning himself about disclosed his small person arrayed in a new velveteen suit brilliant with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons.

"Oh--dear--dear," sobbed little Hannah with the tears rolling down, "we thought it was a piano!'

"Did I say it was a piano?" Max howled.

"You said it--it--was--was--covered with pl--plush," Liseke sobbed.

"Well, isn't it?"

"And--and you said it 'ud make a noise if one b--banged on it," Hannah cried, piteously.

"Well, see if it don't!" Max shrieked, when papa Karl's hand came down upon him with such superb effect there was no doubting the truth of the a.s.sertion.

"Ungrateful children, you are never satisfied," papa Karl cried majestically. "No matter what I do for you, you're always ungrateful--"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SHAMEFULLY NEGLECTED SIX.]

"But Karl," mamma Betty interrupted, with quiet decision, in the midst of a storm of sobs, "you can't expect the children to be very much delighted because Max gets a new suit--something necessary."

"And it's so tight I can't breathe," Max cried, goaded to frenzy by the general grief.

"Ingrates!" gasped papa Karl, and strode up and down the room, while Liseke sobbed her grief out on mamma's shoulder, and Max hid his face in her lap, and Hannah was bravely trying to dry her brown eyes.

"Karl, they are children," mamma Betty said: softly patting Max's head; then lifting it up gently; "Max, go to the confectioners." Max sprang to his feet as a war-horse at the sound of a trumpet.

"Here are ten groschens;"--mamma Betty took them out of her scanty purse with something of a sigh;--"buy as much cake and whatever you like.

Liseke tell Marie to make a pitcher of chocolate instantly. My little Hannah, you may set the table."

"Oh, mamma, may I put on the pretty china cups and saucers?" Hannah pleaded, as Max and Liseke bounded out of the room.

"Yes, but be careful, my dear."

"Chocolate!" said papa Karl with some scorn, "bribing them for the sake of peace."

They were children, she said. Had papa Karl forgotten that he, too, had once been a child?

Papa Karl had forgotten this trifling circ.u.mstance but he magnanimously declared he forgave them all.

There was a pattering of feet down the entry, and three tear-stained faces looked timidly in.

"The chocolate is on the table," Hannah said bravely, with only one tiny sob. Then the door closed and the little feet patted down the corridor.

"Come Karl, and drink a cup of chocolate. You need it as much as the children, for you were disappointed also. You thought to give them a pleasure, you mistaken man," mamma Betty said with a little smile.

"I really meant to," said Karl, quite softened.

Mamma Betty was just opening the door, when she suddenly paused.

"Karl," she said quite seriously, "will you promise me one thing?"

"Yes, my dear."

"Never surprise us again; surprises always end in disappointments."

"Well, Betty I promise," papa Karl said hurriedly, and he kept his word.