Chapter XVIII

They parted outside the little gate, agreeing to meet at the Square in the afternoon, and John pursued his way homeward. The very ground seemed to fall away from his feet as he put them down. His whole body felt like an imponderable thing over which he had little control. The swelling joy within him fairly choked him.

"My God! My God!" he said several times, aloud. "Sam's a fool. Sam's a fool. It can't be so. My Lord! how could it? And that little house. It is a beauty and most women would like to run it and keep it in order. I wonder if she would with me. I wonder."

He found Dora under an apple-tree in the front yard, playing with some rag dolls she had made from scraps of finery cast off by her aunt and Mrs. Trott. A brick represented a table, and on it were arranged bits of china for plates. Other pieces of make-believe furniture were constructed of cardboard cut and bent into shape. She glanced up as he swung open the gate, smiled a welcome from a soiled face, and wiped her itching nose on the back of her slender hand. She did not rise or make any sort of physical demonstration by way of greeting.

"Where are the folks?" he asked, glancing into the house through the open doorway.

"Asleep, I reckon," she said, busy with the pink sash of one of her legless ladies, the tinseled hat of which was pinned askew over a pair of eyes formed of green beads. "They've only been home about an hour. Aunt Jane is sick. Your ma said she fainted at the party and they all thought she was dead for a while."

"Those are not good dolls," John said, from the depths of his turbulent joy. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll buy you a real wax one with yellow hair and blue eyes. I saw one in a show-window as I came along just now. It had on shoes and stockings and held a parasol in its little hand."

"All talk--all wind, hot air!" the child said, indifferently, and she had evidently picked up the expressions from her elders. "A drummer--the fellow with the striped shirts that is always whistling and sells cloaks--he told me he was going to get me a doll and a baby-carriage, but he never came back--changed his rowt, so Aunt Jane said. But this doll's all right. Don't you think so, brother John?"

"It will do till I get the other," he answered, and then he felt an impulse that he had never felt before. He bent down and put his hand caressingly on the almost matted hair, and she, not understanding, impatiently shook it off and went on with her work, her mouth now full of pins.

There was a chair near by and he sat down in it, bending toward the child. Seldom had his boyishness been so apparent. He wanted to open his cramped heart to some one--why not to her? He wanted to hear his own voice applauding the things that were leaping, singing, shouting in the penetralia of his being.

"Say, Dora," he began, clasping his warm hands between his knees, "can you keep a secret?"

"A secret?" she repeated, letting her doll lie for an instant in her ragged lap and staring straight at him with growing interest. "Have you got one--a real one?"

He had. His smile and generous nod admitted it. "Can you keep your mouth shut, that is what I want to know?"

"Yes, yes!" she exclaimed, eagerly. "You ask Aunt Jane if I ever let your ma know--let her know--but never mind. I can keep one. Try me--that is if you are not kidding. I don't want any foolishness from you or anybody else. Life is too short."

"Well, listen!" he began, and something in the blaze of his eyes, the tremolo of his erstwhile brusk voice, the warm look of his face, caught and held her attention. "Did you ever think the day would come when I'd go with a girl?"

"Who, you?" Dora sniffed. "Now I _know_ you are kidding."

"No, I'm not," he went on, riding the tide of his joyous self-emptying. "I have done it often since I went to Cranston. I got acquainted with one up there. Sam and I board with her pa and ma. You ought to see her, Dora. She is all right--as nice and pretty as any stuck-up girl in this town. Folks up there are different--very, very different from these down here who don't know that you and I are alive. They are polite and decent and civilized. Lord! somehow it makes me sick to think of living on here, but I reckon I will. Say, did you ever notice the stunning little cottage that Sam put up for Pete Carrol on the right-hand side of the street as you go down? But never mind that. What would you think if I was to tell you that before very long I might--" John was stalled. How could he express by mere lip and tongue the transcendental thing which so completely filled him?

"What are you trying to get through yourself?" It was another of the child's picked-up expressions, and she leaned toward him with a slow leer of wonder. "What is your great secret?"

"I was coming to it," he said, his words falling steadily now. "But you mustn't tell it to a living soul. Kid, I'm thinking about getting married."

"Married--you? Huh!" Dora laughed incredulously as she plucked a pin from her lips. "Why, you are too young! I heard your ma say it would be ten years before you ever thought of it, even if you did then, you old goody-goody poke of a boy."

"I'm not too young." John flared up resentfully. "Sam says I'm not, and he ought to know. It isn't settled yet, but it will be when I get back up there. Sam says it is as good as settled now, and Sam is in a position to know. Oh, she is all right, kid--believe me, she is a wonder! I wish you could see her. She wouldn't turn up her nose at you like some folks do around here. She is sweet and kind and gentle. They are working her to death up there--her folks are, but all that will be off when I bring her down here?"

"Are you in earnest--really dead in earnest?" Dora asked, her face still blank.

"I am, and I don't want a word said about it. It is none of my mother's business, you understand. She might try to pry into it and I want her to keep out of it. This is my affair--mine and nobody's else. Sam knows it, and you, but that's all."

"I won't tell it," Dora, now convinced, declared earnestly. "I'll never tell it till you let me. Have you got a picture of her?"

"No, she's got some, but she never gave me one-- I never asked for it. They are not good enough, nohow. They make her look too glum and pinched about the eyes. To know what she is like, you have to see her and hear her talk, or read the Bible out loud at prayer-time. She isn't big; her hands and feet are nearly as little as yours are; but above all else in the world, kid, she is good. The neighbors all love her. She waits on them when they are sick. Away late at night not long ago a farmer come to get her to go stay with his sick wife, and Tilly--that's her name--was away till sunup, and then came home and milked the cows and worked around the kitchen. She needs a long rest and she shall have it. I'll see that she gets it, and plenty of clothes and pretty things, besides. She is having an awfully hard time and that is one reason I don't feel so bad about asking her to--to come with just me. I am going into partnership with Sam later, and he and I will both make more money and I'll buy things for her. She plays an organ. I'll get her one. She shall tote the pocket-book, too. She has been skimped all her life. I know. I've had my eyes open up there. She never buys a thing, even a bit of ribbon, without her old daddy fingering it and calling her down for spending money for show, and it was her money, too, bless your life! She sells butter and eggs, takes them to the store herself. She has a little garden-patch all her own, and I've seen her out in it even in the rain, picking beans and peas to sell."

"If she is like that"--Dora was precociously and pessimistically wise for one so young, the fact being due, no doubt, to the tutelage of the two worldly women who were her sole companions--"if she is like that, it looks like some lazy feller would have got her before this. Aunt Jane says it takes money and clothes and lots of things to keep any man coming regular."

"There is--there _was_ another fellow," John put in, unctuously, "but she turned him down. Lord! Lord! it broke him all to pieces! She just somehow couldn't tie to him. She told me so out of her own mouth."

"What is she like?" Dora then demanded. "What does she look like?"

"Don't ask me," John smiled. "I can't tell you. When we walk together she strikes me about here," his hand on his left shoulder. "She has blue eyes, brown wavy hair, a pretty mouth, and a nose with a cute little tilt to it. There are bits of brown freckles on her wrists and cheeks, but they don't matter. If anything, I like them. I wouldn't rub them off. Folks don't say she is pretty--even Sam don't; but why I can't see, for she is simply stunning, and you'll say so, kid, when you see her."

"Well, I won't tell-- I won't tell," Dora promised, returning with lowered interest to her rag things after the flight with him into his empyrean.

Here a voice sounded from the window of Mrs. Trott's room up-stairs.

"Dora, is that John down there?"

"Yes'm. He's just got back."

"Well, tell him to come up here right away."

The order did not need repeating. John stood up, the old practical frown settling on his face. "I wonder what the ---- she wants?" he growled, with fierce emphasis on the omitted word. "I thought she was asleep."

"Come on up, John; I want to see you," Mrs. Trott's querulous voice rang out again, and without replying he turned away. He wore his best suit of clothes, had recently shaved the fuzz from his face, and looked rather more manly than formerly as he strode through the doorway and up the rickety old stairs. Reaching the upper floor, he turned into his mother's room, unceremoniously pushing the door open and standing on the threshold, just as Mrs. Trott, in a soiled wrapper, was getting back into bed after having been to the window. Her hair was in curl-papers, and the little bristling tufts gave to her face an uncouth, bleak look and left her penciled brows to a barren waste of forehead. Her cheeks were still rouged from the night before. A brazen necklace, recently doffed, had left dark streaks on her powdered bust.

"Why didn't you come on in?" Mrs. Trott demanded, irritably. "What did you sit down there and talk with that brat for?"

"Oh, I don't know. What do you want?" He frowned in his turn, and all but growled.

Mrs. Trott kicked the light covering down over her feet and wadded the pillow so that her head was raised higher. "I've been short of money ever since you went off," she explained, pettishly. "When you were here you always had some on Saturday nights, but after you went off you didn't send as much and Jane and I both got in a hole."

"Well, what do you want now?" he asked. "How much?"

"I'll have to think," Mrs. Trott said. "I borrowed five from Jane yesterday. We were playing a little game and I lost. I was about to drop out when Jane backed me. I lost again. My luck was against me, and her, too. Jane needs the five. She is sick and will have to have a doctor. You know they insist on cash--they won't come here, the silly fools, unless you shake the money in their faces, though they run the accounts of other people for years on a stretch."

"I haven't got that much with me," he gave in, wearily, "but I'm going to the bank after dinner and will get it."

"How much have you got there?" Mrs. Trott inquired.

"That's _my_ business, not yours," he said, with an oath, for under that roof it had always seemed natural for him to swear. "And don't you be nosing into my business, either. You went there once and tried to get money on my name, but don't you do it again. I've turned over a new leaf. I have to. You throw money away like water, on cards, whisky, beer, and what not. I can't keep that up, and I won't. I have to draw the line somewhere."

She raised her head a little higher and fixed her eyes, in their puffy sockets, on him in a sort of groping wonder.

"Why, what has got into you?" she asked, stupidly, and all at once he seemed older to her, older and more dignified, more business-like, more like his dead father, to whom she had been flagrantly untrue.

"Common sense, I reckon," he jerked out. "If I've been a fool I don't always have to stay one. I'm going to need money--for myself, for my _own_ self, do you understand? I--I don't intend to live on here always, either. I'll be of age before long. I've thought it all over. I'm willing to set aside a reasonable amount to help you along, but I'm done with these big drafts on me."

"John, what ails you?" There was a touch of shrinking fear in the almost childish appeal. "You have never talked like this before."

"Well, I might as well begin," he sniffed. "You have to be told. I've seen how other folks live away from here, and I want a change. I'm sick of it all--you and Jane and the gang you hang out with."

"John Trott," his mother gasped, "you sha'n't talk to me this way. I won't stand it."

"Well, then, think it all over," he answered. "I know my business. You can look out for yours. I know when I've had enough, and I _have_ had enough."

He turned and left her. She heard him in his room, the sordid cubbyhole he had occupied since he was a child, and somehow now she pictured its narrow confines and condition as being unsuited to the new and unaccountable dignity into which he had grown in his short absence. What could it mean? What?

She got up, slid her silk-dressed feet into a dainty pair of black-satin slippers, drew her wrapper about her, and went into Jane Holder's darkened room.

"Are you asleep, Jane?" she inquired, half timidly.

"How could I be, with you yelling out of your window to John at the top of your lungs?" Jane turned on her side as she answered. "Then it was wow-wow-wow! in your room after he came up. Oh, I'm sick, sick, sick! You let that sneaking Kelly mix those last drinks on me. I heard you snickering when he did it."

"Never mind; it will go off," Mrs. Trott said, and she sat down on the edge of the bed. "It always does. Listen to me, Jane. Something has happened to John."

"Happened? What do you mean?" Jane softly moaned and gagged, her hand at her thin throat.

"Why, I don't know! That's what I want to see you about. Somebody must have been meddling--talking to him. He has a queer look in the eyes. He fairly glared at me and spoke to me-- Well, he never did the like before. I was--was actually afraid of him. It looked to me once as if he was going to pounce on me. Do you remember how Judge Manis talked to us the day he remitted our fine, dismissed the court, and talked to us in private?"

"My God! woman," Jane groaned, desperately, "what are you--"

"John looked and talked like the judge did," Mrs. Trott ran on, with a little impatient wave of her hand. "I was glad he went to his room. There is no telling what he would have said about us both. Somebody has been meddling, I tell you, putting notions in the boy's head. Oh, he has changed--changed!"

"Spoiled, by that new job, I reckon," Jane Holder whined. "The new outfit Sam Cavanaugh gave him has stuck him up. Boys turn like that all of a sudden when they reach the gosling stage. He has been dreamy all his life, and he is getting his eyes open and thinks he is the whole show. You will have to put up with it, that's all."

"I don't know what to make of it-- I don't, I don't!" Mrs. Trott stood up, sighed heavily, yawned, and left the room. Outside she met Dora coming from John's room.

"I asked him what he wanted for dinner," the child remarked, "but he said he wasn't going to eat here. He's going down to the restaurant--said he didn't want me to cook and drudge for him. He is funny, Mrs. Trott. He is not one bit like he used to be."

"I don't care where he eats," Mrs. Trott answered, wearily. "We haven't much in the safe, anyway. Is the flour all gone?"

"Yes'm, and the coffee and bacon. I used the last sprinkling of flour for the batter-cakes yesterday."

"Well, stop the grocery-wagon the next time it goes by," Mrs. Trott concluded. "Tell the boy I'll have that money for him to-day. You left a great litter out in the yard. Go clean it up. If you have to play, play in the back yard. People passing will talk about the way you look."