The Boss of Little Arcady Part 32

"She must, indeed!"

"She could not go _that_ far!"

"Certainly _not_!"

"Even if she _does_ wear too many ribbons and laces and fancy furbelows, with never a common-sense shoe to her foot!"

"Even if she _does_" I a.s.sented warmly.

And thus we were compelled to leave it. In view of those verses I could suggest no plan for relief, and my one poor morsel of encouragement had been stonily rejected.

Eustace went the mad pace. So did Arthur Upd.y.k.e. It was rather to be expected of Arthur, however. His duties at the City Drug Store seemed to encourage a debonair lightness of conduct. He treated his blond ringlets a.s.siduously from the stock of pomades; he was as fastidious about his fingernails as we might expect one to be in an environment of manicure implements and nail beautifiers; it was his privilege to make free with the varied a.s.sortment of perfumes--a privilege he forewent in no degree; his taste in tooth-powders was widely respected; and in moments of leisure, while he leaned upon a showcase awaiting custom, he was wont to draw a slender comb from an upper waistcoat pocket and pa.s.s it delicately through his small but perfect mustache. Naturally enough, it was said by the ladies of Little Arcady that Arthur's attentions were never serious,--"except them he pays to himself!" Aunt Delia McCormick would often add, for that excellent woman was not above playing venomously with familiar words.

Also did G. Brown and Creston Fancett go the same mad pace. These four were filled with distrust of one another, but as they composed our male quartette, they would gather late on summer nights and conduct themselves in a manner to make me wish that old Azariah Prouse's peculiar belief as to house structure might have included a sound-proof fence about his premises. For, on the insufficient stretch of lawn between that house and my own, the four rivals sang serenades.

"She sleeps--my lady sleeps," they sang, with a volume that seemed bound to insure their inaccuracy as to the lady, and which a.s.suredly left them in the wrong as to her mother's attorney--if their song meant in the least to report conditions at large. As this was, however, the one occasion when they felt that none of the four had any advantage over his fellows, they made the most of it. Then, in the dead of night, I would be very sorry that I had not counselled the mother of Eustace Eubanks to send him around the world on a slow sailing ship; for it was his voice, even in songs of sleep, that rendered this salutary exercise most difficult.

On one of these wakeful summer nights, however, I received a queer little shock. Perhaps I half dreamed it in some fugitive moment of half sleep; but it was as if I were again an awkward, silent boy, worshipping a girl new to the school, a girl who wore two long yellow braids. I worshipped her from afar so that she saw me not, being occupied with many adorers less timid, who made nothing of s.n.a.t.c.hing a hair ribbon.

But the face in that instant of dream was the face of Miss Katharine Lansdale, and coupled with the vision was a prescience that in some later life I should again look back and see myself as now, a grown but awkward boy, still holding aloof--still adoring from some remote background while other and bolder gallants captured trophies and lightly carolled their serenades. It seemed like borrowing trouble to look still farther into the future, but the vision was striking. Surely, History does repeat itself. I should have made this discovery for myself had it not been exploited before my day. For on the morrow I found my woman child on the Lansdale lawn when I went home in the afternoon. She had now reached an age when she was beginning to do "pretties" with her lips as she talked--almost at the age when I had first been enraptured by her mother, with the identical two braids, also the ta.s.sels dangling from her boot tops. This latter was unexciting as a coincidence, however. I myself had deliberately produced it.

Miss Lansdale turned from talk with the child to greet me. Her face was so little menacing that I called her "Miss Katharine" on the spot. But my business was with the child.

"Lucy," I said, as I took the wicker chair by the hammock in which they both lounged, "there is a boy at school who looks at you a great deal when you're not watching him--you catch him at it--but he never comes near you. He acts as if he were afraid of you. He is an awkward, stupid boy. If he gets up to recite about geography, or about 'a gentleman sent his servant to buy ten and five-eighths yards of fine broadcloth,' or anything of that sort, and if he happens to catch your eye at the moment, he flounders like a caught fish, stares hard at the map of North America on the wall, and sits down in disgrace. And when the other boys are chasing you and pulling off your hair ribbons, he mopes off in a corner of the school yard, though he looks as if he'd like to shoot down all the other boys in cold blood."

"He has nice hair," said my woman child.

"Oh, he _has!_ Very well; does his name happen to be 'Horsehead' or anything like that--the name the boys call him by, you know?"

"Fatty--Fatty Budlow, if that's the one you mean. Do you know him, Uncle Maje?"

"Better than any boy in the world! Haven't I been telling you about him?"

"Once he brought a bag of candy to school, and I thought he was coming up to hand it to me, but he turned red in the face and stuffed it right into his pocket."

"He meant to give it to you, really--he bought it for you--but he couldn't when the time came."

"Oh, did he tell you?"

"It wasn't necessary for him to tell me. I know that boy, I tell you, through and through. Lucy, do you think you could encourage him a little, now and then--be sociable with him--not enough to hurt, of course? You don't know how he'd appreciate the least kindness. He might remember it all his life."

"I might pat his hair--he has such nice hair--if he wouldn't know it--but of course he would know it, and when he looks at you, he is so queer--"

"Yes, I know; I suppose it is hopeless. Couldn't you even ask him to write in your autograph alb.u.m?"

"Y-e-s--I could, only he'd be sure to write something funny like 'In Memory's wood-box let me be a stick.' He always does write something witty, and I don't much care for ridiculous things in my alb.u.m; I'm being careful with it."

"Well, if he's as witty as _that_ in your alb.u.m, it will be to mask a bleeding heart. I happen to know that in a former existence he was never even asked to write, though he always hoped he might be."

"I'm sorry if you like him, Uncle Maje, but I'm positive that Fatty Budlow is not a boy I could _ever_ feel deeply for. I don't believe our acquaintance will even ripen into friendship," and she looked with profound eyes into the wondrous, opening future.

"Of course it won't," I said. "I might have known that. He will continue through the ages to be an impossible boy. Miss Lansdale feels the same way about him. Poor Fatty or Horsehead or whatever they call him stands off and glares at her, and can't say his lesson when he catches her eye--only he seldom does catch it, because she's so busy with other boys of more spirit who crowd about her and s.n.a.t.c.h hair ribbons and sing 'My lady sleeps' until no one else can."

"Do you know Fatty Budlow?" asked my surprised woman child of Miss Lansdale. But that young woman only reached out one foot to point its toe idly at a creeping green worm and turn its vagrant course. The toe was by no means common-sense, and the heel was simply idiotic.

"Of course she knows him," I said; "she knows he would give his right hand for her, which is a good deal under the circ.u.mstances, and she very properly despises him for it. She'd take her picture away from him if she could."

"She wouldn't," said Miss Lansdale, with a gesture of her foot that disconcerted me.

"Miss Kate," I said, "I have lived my life in terror of seeing one of those squashy green worms meet a fearful disaster in my presence. Would you mind--"

With a fillip of the bronzed toe she sent the amazed worm into a country that must have been utterly strange to it,

"She'd take it back quickly enough if she knew what he makes of it," I said, returning to the picture; "if she knew that he had kept it ever since he learned that agriculture, mining, and ship-building are princ.i.p.al industries--only at first it had two long yellow braids, and ta.s.sels dangling from its boot tops."

"My mother had beautiful long golden hair," said the woman child, adding simply, "papa says mine is just like it."

Miss Lansdale regarded me narrowly.

"You get me all mixed up," she said.

"I like to. You're heady then--like your mother's punch when it's 'all mixed up.'"

"I must put in more ice," remarked Miss Lansdale, calmly.

"Fatty Budlow is so serious," said the woman child, suspecting that the talk had drifted away from her.

"It's his curse," I admitted. "If he weren't an A No. 1 dreamer, he'd be too serious to live, but be goes dreaming and maundering along--dreaming that things are about as he would like to have them. He sees your face and Miss Lansdale's, and then they get mixed up in a queer way, and Miss Kate's face comes out of the picture with such a look in the eyes that a man of ordinary spirit would call her 'Little Miss' right off without ever stopping to think; but of course this Fatty or Horsehead or whatever it is can't say it right out, so he says it to himself about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand times a day, as nearly as he can reckon--he always was weak in arithmetic."

"You might let him write in _your_ autograph alb.u.m," said the woman child, brightly, to Miss Lansdale.

"I know what he'd write if he got the chance," I added incitingly. But it did not avail. Miss Lansdale remained incurious and merely said, "Long golden braids," as one trying to picture them.

"And later a little row of curls over each ear, and a tiny chain with a locket around the neck. I had a picture once--"

"You have had many pictures."

"Yes--two are many if you've had nothing else."

But she was now regarding the woman child with a curious, close look, almost troubled in its intensity.

"Do you look like your mother?" she asked.

"Papa says I do, and Uncle Maje thinks so too. She was very pretty,"

This came with an unconscious placidity.

"She looks almost as her mother's picture did," I said.

When the child had gone, Miss Lansdale searched my face long before speaking. She seemed to hesitate for words, and at length to speak of other matters than those which might have perplexed her.