The Return of Peter Grimm Part 31

"Here," ordered Peter Grimm, his face alight, "take my hand. Have you got it?"

He placed his right hand around the boy's groping palm.

"No, sir," replied Willem.

"Now," urged Peter Grimm, enclosing the boy's hand in both his own, "do you feel it?"

"I--I feel _something_," returned Willem, in doubt. "Yes, sir. But where is your hand? There's--there's nothing there!"

"But you _hear_ me?" asked the Dead Man anxiously.

"I--I can't _really_ hear you. It's some kind of a dream, I suppose.

Isn't it? Oh, Mynheer Grimm!" he pleaded brokenly. "Take me back with you!"

"You're not quite ready to go with me, yet," said the Dead Man in gentle denial. "Not till you can _see_ me."

The boy reached out for another cake. Still looking straight ahead where he imagined his unseen protector might be, he asked:

"What did you come back for, Mynheer Grimm? Wasn't it nice where you went?"

"Oh, yes! Beyond all belief, dear lad. But I had to come back. Willem, do you think you could take a message for me? Listen very carefully now.

Because I want you to remember every word of it. I want you to try to understand. You are to tell Miss Kathrien----"

"It's too bad you died before you could go to the circus, Mynheer Grimm," broke in Willem, munching the cake.

"Willem," persisted the Dead Man, patiently starting his plan of campaign all over again from another angle, "there must be a great many things you remember,--things that happened when you lived with your mother. Aren't there?"

"I was very little," hesitated Willem, echoing a phrase he had once heard Marta use in speaking of his earlier days.

"Still," pursued the Dead Man, "you remember?"

"I--I was afraid," replied the boy, groping back in the blurred past for a fact and seizing on a gruesomely prominent one.

"Try to think back to that time," urged Peter Grimm. "You loved--_her_?"

"Oh, I _did_ love Anne Marie!" exclaimed the child.

"Now," pointed out the Dead Man, "through that one little miracle of love you can remember many things that are tucked away in the back of your baby brain. Hey? Things that a single spark could kindle and light up and make clear to you. It comes back? Think! There were you--and Anne Marie----"

"And the Other One," suggested Willem on impulse.

"So! And who was the 'Other One'?"

"I'm afraid----" babbled the child.

And again the Dead Man shifted the form of his questions to quiet the nervous dread that had sprung into the big eyes.

"Willem," said he, "what would you rather see than anything else in all this world? Think. Something that every little boy loves?"

"I--I like the circus," hazarded Willem, setting his tired wits to work at this possible conundrum, "and the clowns, and----"

He hesitated. Peter Grimm motioned toward the photograph's fragments on the desk.

"----and my mother," finished the boy.

Then, his gaze following the Dead Man's gesture, he caught sight of part of a pictured face, torn diagonally across. With a cry he picked it up.

"Why," he exclaimed, "there she is! There's her face,--part of it. And,"

fumbling among the torn bits of cardboard, "there's the other part. It's a picture of Anne Marie. All torn up."

"It would be fun to put it together," suggested Peter Grimm, "the way you did with those picture puzzles I got you once. Suppose we try?"

The idea caught the child's fancy. With knitted brows and puckered lips he bent over the desk and began the task of piecing the sc.r.a.ps into a whole.

"That's right," approved the Dead Man. "Put it all together until the picture is all perfect.--See, there's the bit you are looking for to finish off the shoulder,--and then we must show it to everybody in the house, and set them all to thinking."

With an apprehensive glance over his shoulder toward the front door Willem proceeded more hurriedly with his work of joining the strewn pieces.

"I must get it put together before _he_ comes back," he muttered.

"Ah!" mutely rejoiced the Dean Man, "I'm making you think about _him_ at last! I'll succeed in getting your mind to connect him with Anne Marie by the time the others----"

"'Uncle Rat has gone to town! Ha.-_H'M!_'"

chanted Willem under his breath as his fingers moved from part to part of the nearly completed picture. "'_To buy his niece a wedding gown._'--There's her hand!" he interrupted himself as an elusive sc.r.a.p of the photograph was at last discovered and put into place.

Peter Grimm's eyes were fixed on the door of Kathrien's room in a compelling stare.

"Her other hand!" mused Willem. "'_What shall the wedding breakfast be?

Ha-H'M! What shall the----?_' Where's--here's the last two parts. There!

It's _done_! Oh, Anne Marie! Mamma! I----"

The door of Kathrien's room opened. The girl, under a spell of the Dead Man's will, came out to the banisters.

CHAPTER XVI

THE "SENSITIVE"

Kathrien, looking down into the firelit room, saw the white-clad boy starting up in triumph with his work.

"Why, Willem!" she cried, dumfounded at sight of the invalid out of bed at such an hour. "What are you doing down there? You ought to----"

"Oh, Miss Kathrien!" exclaimed the child, pointing toward the picture.

"Come down, quick!"