The Romance of a Plain Man

She was so little and thin and wrinkled that it was a mystery to me, as I looked at her, how she managed to express so much authority through so small a medium. The chair in which she sat seemed almost to swallow her in its high arms of faded green leather; and out of her wide, gathered skirt of brocade, her body rose very erect, like one of my mother's black-headed bonnet pins out of her draped pincushion. On her head there was a cap of lace trimmed gayly with purple ribbons, and beneath this festive adornment, a fringe of false curls, still brown and lustrous, lent a ghastly coquetry to her mummied features. In the square of sunshine, between the gauze curtains at the window, a green parrot, in a wire cage, was scolding viciously while it pecked at a bit of sponge-cake from its mistress's hand. At the time I was too badly frightened to notice the wonderful space and richness of the room, with its carved rosewood bookcases, and its dim portraits of beruffled cavaliers and gravely smiling ladies.

"Sally," said the old lady, turning upon me a piercing glance which was like the flash of steel in the sunlight, "is that a boy?"

Going over to the armchair, the little girl stood holding the kitten behind her, while she kissed her grandmother's cheek.

"What is it, Sally, dear?" asked the younger woman, closing her book with a sigh.

"It's a boy, mamma," answered the child.

At this the old lady stiffened on her velvet cushions. "I thought I had told you, Sally," she remarked icily, "that there is nothing that I object to so much as a boy. Dogs and cats I have tolerated in silence, but since I have been in this house no boy has set foot inside the doors."

"I am sure, dear mamma, that Sally did not mean to disobey you," murmured the younger woman, almost in tears.

"Yes, I did, mamma," answered the child, gravely, "I meant to disobey her. But he has such nice blue eyes," she went on eagerly, her lips glowing as she talked until they matched the bright red of her dancing shoes; "an' he's goin' to take a kitten home for a pet, an' he says the reason he doesn't wash his face is because he hasn't any water."

"Is it possible," enquired the old lady in the manner of her pecking parrot, "that he does not wash his face?"

My pride could bear it no longer, and opening my mouth I spoke in a loud, high voice.

"If you please, ma'am, I wash my face every day," I said, "and all over every Saturday night."

She was still feeding the parrot with a bit of cake, and as I spoke, she turned toward me and waved one of her wiry little hands, which reminded me of a bird's claw, under its ruffle of yellowed lace.

"Bring him here, Sally, and let me see him," she directed, as if I had been some newly entrapped savage beast.

Catching me by the arm, Sally obediently led me to the armchair, where I stood awkward and trembling, with my hands clutching the flaps of my breeches' pockets, and my eyes on the ground.

For a long pause the old lady surveyed me critically with her merciless eyes. Then, "Give him a piece of cake, Sally," she remarked, when the examination was over.

Sally's mother had come up softly behind me while I writhed under the piercing gaze, and bending over she encircled my shoulders with her protecting arms.

"He's a dear little fellow, with such pretty blue eyes," she said.

As she spoke I looked up for the first time, and my glance met my reflection in a long, gold-framed mirror hanging between the windows. The "pretty blue eyes" I saw, but I saw also the straw-coloured hair, the broad nose sprinkled with freckles, and the sturdy legs disguised by the shapeless breeches, which my mother had cut out of a discarded dolman she had once worn to funerals. It was a figure which might have raised a laugh in the ill-disposed, but the women before me carried kind hearts in their bosoms, and even grandmama's chilling scrutiny ended in nothing worse than a present of cake.

"May I play with him just a little while, grandmama?" begged Sally, and when the old lady nodded permission, we joined hands and went through the open window out upon the sunny porch.

On that spring morning the colours of the garden were all clear white and purple, for at the foot of the curving stairway, and on the upper terrace, bunches of lilacs bloomed high above the small spring flowers that bordered the walk. Beneath the fluted columns a single great snowball bush appeared to float like a cloud in the warm wind. As we went together down the winding path to the box maze which was sprinkled with tender green, a squirrel, darting out of one of the latticed arbours, stopped motionless in the walk and sat looking up at us with a pair of bright, suspicious eyes.

"I reckon I could make him skeet, if I wanted to," I remarked, embarrassed rather than malevolent.

Her glance dwelt on me thoughtfully for a moment, while she stood there, kicking a pebble with the toe of a red shoe.

"An' I reckon I could make you skeet, if I wanted to," she replied with composure.

Since the parade of mere masculinity had failed to impress her, I resorted to subtler measures, and kneeling among the small spring flowers which powdered the lower terrace, I began laboriously erecting a palace of moss and stones.

"I make one every evening, but when the ghosts come out and walk up an' down, they scatter them," observed Sally, hanging attentively upon the work.

"Are there ghosts here really an' have you seen 'em?" I asked.

Stretching out her hand, she swept it in a circle over the growing palace. "They are all around here – everywhere," she answered. "I saw them one night when I was running away from my father. Mamma and I hid in that big box bush down there, an' the ghosts came and walked all about us. Do you have to run away from your father, too?"

For an instant I hesitated; then my pride triumphed magnificently over my truthfulness. "I ran clear out to the hill an' all the way down it," I rejoined.

"Is his face red and awful?"

"As red as – as an apple."

"An apple ain't awful."

"But he is. I wish you could see him."

"Would he kill you if he caught you?"

"He – he'd eat me," I panted.

She sighed gravely. "I wonder if all fathers are like that?" she said. "Anyway, I don't believe yours is as bad as mine."

"I'd like to know why he ain't?" I protested indignantly.

Her lips quivered and went upward at the corners with a trick of expression which I found irresistible even then.

"It's a pity that it's time for you to go home," she observed politely.

"I reckon I can stay a little while longer," I returned.

She shook her head, but I had already gone back to the unfinished palace, and as the work progressed, she forgot her hint of dismissal in watching the fairy towers. We were still absorbed in the building when her mother came down the curving stairway and into the maze of box.

"It's time for you to run home now, pretty blue eyes," she said in her soft girlish way. Then catching our hands in hers, she turned with a merry laugh, and ran with us up the terraced walk.

"Is your mamma as beautiful as mine?" asked Sally, when we came to a breathless stop.

"She's as beautiful as – as a wax doll," I replied stoutly.

"That's right," laughed the lady, stooping to kiss me. "You're a dear boy. Tell your mother I said so."

She went slowly up the steps as she spoke, and when I looked back a moment later, I saw her smiling down on me between two great columns, with the snowball bush floating in the warm wind beneath her and the swallows flying low in the sunshine over her head.

I had opened the side gate, when I felt a soft, furry touch on my hand, and Sally thrust the forgotten kitten into my arms.

"Be good to her," she said pleadingly. "Her name's Florabella."

Resisting a dastardly impulse to forswear my bargain, I tucked the mewing kitten under my coat, where it clawed me unobserved by any jeering boy in the street. Passing Mrs. Cudlip's house on my way home, I noticed at once that the window stood invitingly open, and yielding with a quaking heart to temptation, I leaned inside the vacant room, and dropped Florabella in the centre of the old lady's easy chair. Then, fearful of capture, I darted along the pavement and flung myself breathlessly across our doorstep.

A group of neighbours was gathered in the centre of our little sitting-room, and among them I recognised the flushed, perspiring face of Mrs. Cudlip herself. As I entered, the women fell slightly apart, and I saw that they regarded me with startled, compassionate glances. A queer, strong smell of drugs was in the air, and near the kitchen door my father was standing with a frightened and sheepish look on his face, as if he had been thrust suddenly into a prominence from which he shrank back abashed.

"Where's ma?" I asked, and my voice sounded loud and unnatural in my own ears.