Chapter IV (3)

He was never formally enfranchised, but he took up his place in the department of Travel and Adventure, and held it unchallenged. All the long, spring afternoons he sat there, throned on the books, leaning against them, banked safely in from the tumult of the world outside, a quiet little shadow among the shadowy throngs that filled the covers.

Whatever he might read, for he turned to other books as one travels, for the joy of coming home again, the old brown book lay open on his knees, and he patted the pages with one hand, absently, as his eyes travelled over the print. Sooner or later he came back to the yellowed leaves--perhaps to the story of Dryope.

"_Now there was nothing left of Dryope but her face. Her tears still flowed and fell on her leaves, and while she could, she spoke. 'I am not guilty. I deserve not this fate. I have injured no one. If I speak falsely, may my foliage perish with drought and my trunk be cut down and burned. Take this infant and give it to a nurse. Let it often be brought and nursed under my branches, and play in my shade; and when he is old enough to talk, let him be taught to call me mother, and to say with sadness, "My mother lies hid under this bark." But bid him be careful of river-banks, and beware how he plucks flowers, remembering that every bush he sees may be a goddess in disguise. Farewell, dear husband and sister and father. If you retain any love for me, let not the axe wound me nor the flocks bite and tear my branches. Since I cannot stoop to you, climb up hither and kiss me; and while my lips continue to feel, lift up my child, that I may kiss him. I can speak no more, for already the bark advances up my neck, and will soon shoot over me. You need not close my eyes; the bark will soon close them without your aid.' Then the lips ceased to move, and life was extinct; but the branches retained, for some time longer, the vital heat._"

In fancy he walked by that fatal stream. He saw the plant dripping blood--the flower that was the poor nymph Lotis. The terrible, beautiful revenge, the swift doom of those wonderful Greeks, that delights even while it horrifies, he felt to the fullest measure. He had no more need to read them than a priest his breviary, for he knew them all, but he followed the type in very delight of recognition.

Through the window came the strong scent of the purple lilacs, that grew all over the little New England town. Faint cries of children playing drifted in with the breeze. The organ in the church nearby crooned and droned a continual fugue. Someone was always practising there. The deep, bass notes jarred the air, even the little building trembled to them at times. And since it had been at this season of the year, when he had first found the book, the lovely broken myths, elusive sometimes, and as dim to his understanding as the marble fragments that still bewilder the enchanted artist, he always connected with that throbbing, mournful melody, that haunting lilac odour. Sometimes the organ swelled triumphantly and cried out in a mighty chorus of tone: at those times Ulysses shot down the false suitors, or Perseus, hovering over the shrieking sea-beast, rescued the white Andromeda. Sometimes a minor plaintive strain troubled him vaguely, and then he listened to poor Venus, bending in tears above the slain Adonis.

"_'Yet theirs shall be but a partial triumph; memorials of my grief shall endure, and the spectacle of your death, my Adonis, and of my lamentation, shall be annually renewed. Your blood shall be turned into a flower; that consolation none shall envy me.' Thus speaking, she sprinkled nectar on the blood; and as they mingled, bubbles rose as in a pool, on which rain-drops fall, and in an hour's time there sprang up a flower of bloody hue, like that of the pomegranate. But it is short-lived._"

The peculiar odour of much leather on pine shelves was confused, too, with the darling book. He had never read it elsewhere; he had not money enough for a library-ticket. Old Mr. Littlejohn, quickly recognising the invaluable services that this little acolyte might be counted upon to render, had readily granted him the freedom of the shelves, and smoked his pipe in peace for hours together, thereafter, in the back room, sure of his monitor in front.

Miss Watkins needed no such assistance, but she found herself, to her amazement, not wholly ungrateful for the many steps saved her by Jimmy's tactful service to the children. At first she would have none of it, and groups of shy boys and girls waited awkwardly and in vain before the little gate, hoping for a glimpse of their kindly counsellor. She thrust lists of juveniles into their unwilling hands, led them cautiously into an inspection of Nature Lessons for Little Learners, displayed tempting rows of bound _St. Nicholas_--but to no purpose.

"Where's Jimmy?" they demanded stubbornly.

"What on earth do they want of him?" she asked of her assistant one day. "That stupid Meadows child--is she going to ask his opinion of the Dotty Dimple Books?"

"Not at all," Miss Mather replied tranquilly. "But he always gets her a Mary J. Holmes novel, and I stamp it and let it go. You always argue with her about it, and ask her if she wouldn't prefer something else--which she never would."

Little by little he grew to wait on the children as a matter of course. He was even allowed to keep the novels desired by the Meadows child in the juvenile shelf, where he insisted they belonged.

"Only the girls in Number Seven want 'em," he explained, when his superior complained of his audacity in removing them from adult fiction.

And so the little girl who had reached that period of little girlhood when every well-regulated young person is compelled by some inward power to ask the librarian, tremblingly, if she has a book in the libr'y called _St. Elmo_, was spared all embarrassment, for Jimmy handed it out to her almost before she asked.

Not that he lacked the discrimination to exercise a proper authority on occasion. Miss Watkins remembered long a surprising scene which she witnessed from the top of a ladder in the Biography and Letters Section. A shambling, unwholesome boy had asked Miss Mather in a husky voice for the works of Edgar A. Poe, and as she blew off the dust from the top and extended two fat volumes toward him, a rapid tapping heralded the youngest official.

"Don't you give 'em to him, don't you!" he cried, warningly. As she paused instinctively he shook his finger with a quaint, old-fashioned gesture at the boy.

"You ought to be ashamed, Sam Wheeler," he said reprovingly. "You shan't take those books a step. Not a step. If you think you're going to scare Susy to death you're mistaken. If you want to read 'em, come here and do it. But you aren't a-going to read 'em to her nights, again. So you go right off, now!"

Without a word Sam turned and left the library, and Miss Watkins from her ladder remonstrated feebly.

"Why, Jimmy, if that boy has a ticket you haven't any right----"

"Do you know what he does with those books, Miss Watkins?" replied the dauntless squire of dames. "He reads 'em after supper to his little sister Susy. That one where the house all falls down and the one where the lady's teeth come out and she carries 'em in her hand! And she don't dare take her feet off the rungs, she sits so still. And she don't go to sleep hardly ever. Do you s'pose I'd let him take 'em?"

The librarian threshed the matter over, and finally thought to stagger him by the suggestion that it would be difficult for him to ascertain the precise intention of everyone drawing out books. "How do you know," she asked, "that other people may not be frightening each other with various stories?"

"There aren't many fellows as mean as Sam Wheeler," he replied promptly, "and then I was sure that he was going to. I happened to know."

She turned again to her work and he went back to his corner, the brown book under his arm.

The syringa was out now, and the mournful, sweet odour blew in from the bushes around the church. In the still June air he could hear the bees buzzing there. He turned the beloved pages idly. Should it be poor Psyche, so sweet and foolish, or Danaë, the lovely mother, hushing her baby in the sea-tossed chest? He found the place of Proverbial Expressions at the back of the book, and read them with a never-failing interest. Around them he wove long stories to please himself.

"_Their faces were not all alike, nor yet unlike, but such as those of sisters ought to be._"

This one always pleased him--he could not have said why.

"_Here lies Phäton, the driver of his father's chariot, which if he failed to manage, yet he fell in a great undertaking._"

The simple grandeur of this one was like the trumpet tone of the organ. He thrilled to it delightedly.

The third he murmured to himself, entranced by the very sound of the words:

"_He falls, unhappy, by a wound intended for another; looks up to the skies, and dying remembers sweet Argos._"

Ah, why would Thomas never consent to the witchery of these words:

"----_and dying remembers sweet Argos._"

He sighed delightedly and dreamed into the dusk. Almost he thought he had known that man, almost he remembered sweet Argos....

In the middle of June the Vanderhoof's coachman brought bad news: Master Clarence was quite ill. No one knew what it was exactly, but if there was any exceptionally fine book that Jimmy could suggest, he'd be glad to be read to from it.

For the first time the little librarian parted from his darling.

"If you'll be especially careful of it, William, and I've put in slips of paper at the best ones. And as soon as he gets better, I'd be glad if he'd send it back--if he's through with it."

The days seemed long without it. The heat was intense, and when Miss Mather stayed at home a day or two, and all the summer people came in for books, he had a great deal to do. Miss Watkins was very glad of his help, now.

One hot Saturday afternoon he did not return to the library, but began a resolute journey to the Vanderhoof's big house on the hill. It was almost two miles, and he went slowly; now and then he stopped to rest on the stone horse-blocks. It took him an hour to get there, and at the door he had to stop to wipe his forehead and get his breath.

"I came to ask how Clarence was," he said to the maid.

"He's better, thank you, but it's dreadful sick he's been. 'Twas scarlet fever, dear," she answered, with a pitying glance at the crutch. "Not that you need be worried, for the half of the house is shut off, and we've not been near it," she added.

"I'm glad he's better, and--and is he through with the book?" he asked eagerly.

"The book? What book is it, my dear? Sure the nurse does be reading a hundred books to him."

"A brown book: Stories of Gods and Heroes. I--I'd like it, if he's through with it. I stay at the libr'y, and I sent it to him--" he sank on the step, exhausted.

The kind-hearted girl dragged him into the hall. "Come out with me, dear, and get a glass of cold milk," she said. "You've walked too far."

Seated on a chair in the kitchen, his eyes closed, he heard, as in a dream, his friend's voice raised in dispute with some distant person.

"And I say he shall have it, then. Walking all this way! And him lame, too! Tell Emma to put it on the tray, and leave it in the hall. The child's well enough now, anyway. I'll go get it myself--I'm not afraid. The whole of us had the fever, and no such smelling sheets pinned up, and no fuss at all, at all. I'm as good as a paid nurse, any day, if you come to that. A book'll hurt no one."

Later he found himself perched beside the coachman, who was going to meet a train, the beloved book tight in his arms. He fingered it lovingly; he smelled the leaves like a little dog. For the first time in his life he took it to his home, and clasped it in his arms as he lay in bed.

For days he did not appear, and it was Thomas, the janitor, who went finally to look him up, troubled by the children's reports of his illness. He returned grave-faced.

"It's the fever, Miss Watkins, and they say there's little chance for him, the poor little feller! He was worn out with the heat. They don't know how he got it. He's out of his mind. To think of Jimmy like that!"

The librarian's heart sank, and her assistant put her head on her arms and cried. Thomas sat sadly on his little porch, his unlighted pipe in his mouth. The library seemed strangely empty.

The little Meadows girl brought them the news the next morning.

"Jimmy's dead," she said abruptly. "He got it from a book up at the Vanderhoof's. His aunt feels awful bad. It was a libr'y book. They say he held it all the time."

The librarian put away the book in her hand, envying the younger woman her facile tears. She was not imaginative, but she realised dimly for a moment that this little boy had known more of books, had got more from them, than she, with all her catalogues.

They sat together, she, Miss Mather, and Thomas, a strange trio, at the simple funeral service in the church nearby. So far as daily living went, they were as near to him as the aunt who cared for him.

Coming back to the library, they lingered awhile in the reading-room, trying to realise that it was all over, and that that little, quick tapping would never be heard again among the books. At last Thomas spoke:

"It don't seem right," he said thickly, "it don't seem right nor fair. Here he was, doting on that book so, tugging it round, just living on it, you might say, and it turned on him and killed him. Gave it up, and a sacrifice it was, too--I know--and as a reward, it killed him. Went back to get it, brought it home, took it to bed--and it killed him. It's like those things he'd tell me out of it--they all died; seemingly without any reason, the gods would go back on 'em, and they'd die. He's often read it out to me."

"It will be lovely to have that Children's-room memorial," said Miss Mather, softly, "with all the books and pictures and the little chairs. It was beautiful in Mrs. Vanderhoof, I think. It wasn't her fault. I wish--I wish we'd had a little chair in there for Jimmy."

The librarian got up abruptly and moved around among the magazines, a mist before her eyes. Only now did she realise how she had grown to love him.

THE MAID OF THE MILL