Young Lucretia and Other Stories Part 22

Mrs. Rose stowed away the boy's belongings in the little bedroom off the kitchen where she meant him to sleep; then she kindled the fire and got supper. She made sa.s.safras-tea, and the new boy, sitting beside w.i.l.l.y, had a cup poured for him. But he did not drink much nor eat much, although there were hot biscuits and berries and custards. He hung his forlorn head with its shock of white hair, and only gave fleeting glances at anything with his wild, blue eyes. He was a thin boy, smaller than w.i.l.l.y, but he looked wiry and full of motion, like a wild rabbit.

After supper Mrs. Rose sent him for a pail of water; then he split up a little pile of kindling-wood. After that he sat down on the kitchen door-step in the soft twilight, and was silent.

w.i.l.l.y went into the sitting-room, where his mother and Miss Elvira were.

"He's settin' out there on the door-step, not speakin' a word," said he, in a confidential whisper.

"Well, you had better sit down here with us and read your Sunday-school book," said his mother. She and Miss Elvira had agreed that it was wiser that w.i.l.l.y should not be too much with the d.i.c.key boy until they knew him better.

When it was nine o'clock Mrs. Rose showed the d.i.c.key boy his bedroom.

She looked at him sharply; his small pale face showed red stains in the lamplight. She thought to herself that he had been crying, and she spoke to him as kindly as she could--she had not a caressing manner with anybody but w.i.l.l.y. "I guess there's clothes enough on the bed," said she. She looked curiously at the bundle and the wooden box. Then she unfastened the bundle. "I guess I'll see what you've got for clothes,"

said she, and her tone was as motherly as she could make it towards this outcast d.i.c.key boy. She laid out his pitiful little wardrobe, and examined the small ragged shirt or two and the fragmentary stockings. "I guess I shall have to buy you some things if you are a good boy," said she. "What have you got in that box?"--the boy hung his head--"I hope you ain't got a pistol?"

"No, marm."

"You ain't got any powder, nor anything of that kind?"

"No, marm." The boy was blushing confusedly.

"I hope you're tellin' me the truth," Mrs. Rose said, and her tone was full of severe admonition.

"Yes, marm." The tears rolled down the boy's cheeks, and Mrs. Rose said no more. She told him she would call him in the morning, and to be careful about his lamp. Then she left him. The d.i.c.key boy lay awake, and cried an hour; then he went to sleep, and slept as soundly as w.i.l.l.y Rose in his snug little bedroom leading out of his mother's room. Miss Elvira and Mrs. Rose locked their doors that night, through distrust of that little boy down-stairs who came of a thieving family. Miss Elvira put her gold watch and her breastpin and her pocket-book, with seventeen dollars in it, under the feather-bed; and Mrs. Rose carried the silver teaspoons up-stairs, and hid them under hers. The d.i.c.key boy was not supposed to know they were in the house--the pewter ones had been used for supper--but that did not signify; she thought it best to be on the safe side. She kept the silver spoons under the feather-bed for many a day, and they all ate with the pewter ones; but finally suspicion was allayed if not destroyed. The d.i.c.key boy had shown himself trustworthy in several instances. Once he was sent on a test errand to the store, and came home promptly with the right change. The silver spoons glittered in the spoon-holder on the table, and Miss Elvira wore her gold watch and her gold breastpin.

"I begin to take a good deal more stock in that boy," Mrs. Rose told her brother Hiram.

"He ain't very lively, but he works real smart; he ain't saucy, and I ain't known of his layin' hands on a thing."

But the d.i.c.key boy, although he had won some confidence and good opinions, was, as Mrs. Rose said, not very lively. His face, as he did his little tasks, was as sober and serious as an old man's. Everybody was kind to him, but this poor little alien felt like a chimney-sweep in a queen's palace. Mrs. Rose, to a d.i.c.key boy, was almost as impressive as a queen. He watched with admiration and awe this handsome, energetic woman moving about the house in her wide skirts. He was overcome with the magnificence of Miss Elvira's afternoon silk, and gold watch; and dainty little w.i.l.l.y Rose seemed to him like a small prince. Either the d.i.c.key boy, born in a republican country, had the original instincts of the peasantry in him, and himself defined his place so clearly that it made him unhappy, or his patrons did it for him. Mrs. Rose and Miss Elvira tried to treat him as well as they treated w.i.l.l.y. They dressed him in w.i.l.l.y's old clothes; they gave him just as much to eat; when autumn came he was sent to school as warmly clad and as well provided with luncheon; but they could never forget that he was a d.i.c.key boy. He seemed, in truth, to them like an animal of another species, in spite of all they could do, and they regarded his virtues in the light of uncertain tricks. Mrs. Rose never thought at any time of leaving him in the house alone without hiding the spoons, and Miss Elvira never left her gold watch unguarded.

n.o.body knew whether the d.i.c.key boy was aware of these lurking suspicions or not; he was so subdued that it was impossible to tell how much he observed. n.o.body knew how homesick he was, but he went about every day full of fierce hunger for his miserable old home. Miserable as it had been, there had been in it a certain element of shiftless ease and happiness. The d.i.c.key boy's sickly mother had never chided him; she had not cared if he tracked mud into the house. How anxiously he sc.r.a.ped his feet before entering the Rose kitchen. The d.i.c.key boy's dissipated father had been gentle and maudlin, but never violent. All the d.i.c.key children had done as they chose, and they had agreed well. They were not a quarrelsome family. Their princ.i.p.al faults were idleness and a general laxity of morals which was quite removed from active wickedness. "All the d.i.c.keys needed was to be bolstered up," one woman in the village said; and the d.i.c.key boy was being bolstered up in the Rose family.

They called him d.i.c.key, using his last name for his first, which was w.i.l.l.y. Mrs. Rose straightened herself unconsciously when she found that out. "We can't have two w.i.l.l.i.e.s in the family, anyhow," said she; "we'll have to call you d.i.c.key."

Once the d.i.c.key boy's married sister came to see him, and Mrs. Rose treated her with such stiff politeness that the girl, who was fair and pretty and gaudily dressed, told her husband when she got home that she would never go into _that_ woman's house again. Occasionally Mrs. Rose, who felt a duty in the matter, took d.i.c.key to visit his little brothers and sisters at the almshouse. She even bought some peppermint-candy for him to take them. He really had many a little extra kindness shown him; sometimes Miss Elvira gave him a penny, and once Mr. Hiram Fairbanks gave him a sweet-apple tree--that was really quite a magnificent gift.

Mrs. Rose could hardly believe it when w.i.l.l.y told her. "Well, I must say I never thought Hiram would do such a thing as that, close as he is,"

said she. "I was terribly taken aback when he gave that tree to w.i.l.l.y, but this beats all. Why, odd years it might bring in twenty dollars!"

"Uncle Hiram gave it to him," w.i.l.l.y repeated. "I was a-showin' d.i.c.key my apple-tree, and Uncle Hiram he picked out another one, and he give it to him."

"Well, I wouldn't have believed it," said Mrs. Rose.

n.o.body else would have believed that Hiram Fairbanks, careful old bachelor that he was, would have been so touched by the d.i.c.key boy's innocent, wistful face staring up at the boughs of w.i.l.l.y's apple-tree.

It was fall, and the apples had all been harvested. d.i.c.key would get no practical benefit from his tree until next season, but there was no calculating the comfort he took with it from the minute it came into his possession. Every minute he could get, at first, he hurried off to the orchard and sat down under its boughs. He felt as if he were literally under his own roof-tree. In the winter, when it was heavy with snow, he did not forsake it. There would be a circle of little tracks around the trunk.

Mrs. Rose told her brother that the boy was perfectly crazy about that apple-tree, and Hiram grinned shamefacedly.

All winter d.i.c.key went with w.i.l.l.y to the district school, and split wood and brought water between times. Sometimes of an evening he sat soberly down with w.i.l.l.y and played checkers, but w.i.l.l.y always won. "He don't try to beat," w.i.l.l.y said. Sometimes they had pop-corn, and d.i.c.key always shook the popper. d.i.c.key said he wasn't tired, if they asked him. All winter the silver spoons appeared on the table, and d.i.c.key was treated with a fair show of confidence. It was not until spring that the sleeping suspicion of him awoke. Then one day Mrs. Rose counted her silver spoons, and found only twenty-three teaspoons. She stood at her kitchen table, and counted them over and over. Then she opened the kitchen door. "Elviry!" she called out, "Elviry, come here a minute!

Look here," she said, in a hushed voice, when Miss Elvira's inquiring face had appeared at the door. Miss Elvira approached the table tremblingly.

"Count those spoons," said Mrs. Rose.

Miss Elvira's long slim fingers handled the jingling spoons. "There ain't but twenty-three," she said finally, in a scared voice.

"I expected it," said Mrs. Rose. "Do you s'pose he took it?"

"Who else took it, I'd like to know?"

It was a beautiful May morning; the apple-trees were all in blossom. The d.i.c.key boy had stolen over to look at his. It was a round hill of pink-and-white bloom. It was the apple year. w.i.l.l.y came to the stone wall and called him. "d.i.c.key," he cried, "Mother wants you;" and d.i.c.key obeyed. w.i.l.l.y had run on ahead. He found Mrs. Rose, Miss Elvira, w.i.l.l.y, and the twenty-three teaspoons awaiting him in the kitchen. He shook his head to every question they asked him about the missing spoon. He turned quite pale; once in a while he whimpered; the tears streamed down his cheeks, but he only shook his head in that mute denial.

"It won't make it any easier for you, holding out this way," said Mrs.

Rose, harshly. "Stop cryin' and go out and split up some kindlin'-wood."

d.i.c.key went out, his little convulsed form bent almost double. w.i.l.l.y, staring at him with his great, wondering blue eyes, stood aside to let him pa.s.s. Then he also was sent on an errand, while his mother and Miss Elvira had a long consultation in the kitchen.

It was a half-hour before Mrs. Rose went out to the shed where she had sent the d.i.c.key boy to split kindlings. There lay a nice little pile of kindlings, but the boy had disappeared.

"d.i.c.key, d.i.c.key!" she called. But he did not come.

"I guess he's gone, spoon and all," she told Miss Elvira, when she went in; but she did not really think he had. When one came to think of it, he was really too small and timid a boy to run away with one silver spoon. It did not seem reasonable. What they did think, as time went on and he did not appear, was that he was hiding to escape a whipping. They searched everywhere. Miss Elvira stood in the shed by the wood-pile, calling in her thin voice, "Come out, d.i.c.key; we won't whip you if you _did_ take it," but there was not a stir.

Towards night they grew uneasy. Mr. Fairbanks came, and they talked matters over.

"Maybe he didn't take the spoon," said Mr. Fairbanks, uncomfortably.

"Anyhow, he's too young a chap to be set adrift this way. I wish you'd let me talk to him, 'Mandy."

"_You!_" said Mrs. Rose. Then she started up. "I know one thing," said she; "I'm goin' to see what's in that wooden box. I don't believe but what that spoon's in there. There's no knowin' how long it's been gone."

It was quite a while before Mrs. Rose returned with the wooden box. She had to search for it, and found it under the bed. The d.i.c.key boy also had hidden his treasures. She got the hammer and Hiram pried off the lid, which was quite securely nailed. "I'd ought to have had it opened before," said she. "He hadn't no business to have a nailed-up box 'round. Don't joggle it so, Hiram. There's no knowin' what's in it.

There may be a pistol."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THERE, AMONG THE BLOSSOMING BRANCHES, CLUNG THE d.i.c.kEY BOY."]

Miss Elvira stood farther off. Mr. Fairbanks took the lid entirely off.

They all peered into the box. There lay an old clay pipe and a roll of faded calico. Mr. Fairbanks took up the roll and shook it out. "It's an ap.r.o.n," said he. "It's his father's pipe, and his mother's ap.r.o.n--I--swan!"

Miss Elvira began to cry. "I hadn't any idea of anything of that kind,"

said Mrs. Rose, huskily. "w.i.l.l.y Rose, what _have_ you got there?"

For w.i.l.l.y, looking quite pale and guilty, was coming in, holding a muddy silver teaspoon. "Where did you get that spoon? Answer me this minute,"

cried his mother.

"I--took it out to--dig in my garden with the--other day. I--forgot--"

"Oh, you naughty boy!" cried his mother. Then she, too, began to weep.

Mr. Fairbanks started up. "Something's got to be done," said he. "The wind's changed, and the May storm is comin' on. That boy has got to be found before night."

But all Mr. Fairbanks's efforts, and the neighbors' who came to his a.s.sistance, could not find the d.i.c.key boy before night or before the next morning. The long, cold May storm began, the flowering apple-trees bent under it, and the wind drove the rain against the windows. Mrs.

Rose and Miss Elvira kept the kitchen fire all night, and hot water and blankets ready. But the day had fairly dawned before they found the d.i.c.key boy, and then only by the merest chance. Mr. Fairbanks, hurrying across his orchard for a short cut, and pa.s.sing d.i.c.key's tree, happened to glance up at it, with a sharp pang of memory. He stopped short.

There, among the blossoming branches, clung the d.i.c.key boy, like a little drenched, storm-beaten bird. He had flown to his one solitary possession for a refuge. He was almost exhausted; his little hands grasped a branch like steel claws. Mr. Fairbanks took him down and carried him home. "He was up in his tree," he told his sister, brokenly, when he entered the kitchen. "He's 'most gone."