Dawn
by Eleanor H. Porter · English · Gutenberg #5874 · 456,775 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dawn
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Dawn
Author: Eleanor H. Porter
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #5874]
Most recently updated: June 20, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5874
Credits: Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DAWN ***
Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
[Illustration: "I MUST GO, NOW, I--MUST--GO!"]
DAWN
BY
ELEANOR H. PORTER
With Illustrations by Lucius Wolcott Hitchcock
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
1919
To My Friend
MRS. JAMES D. PARKER
CONTENTS
I. THE GREAT TERROR
II. DAD
III. FOR JERRY AND NED
IV. SCHOOL
V. WAITING
VI. LIGHTS OUT
VII. SUSAN TO THE RESCUE
VIII. AUNT NETTIE MEETS HER MATCH
IX. SUSAN SPEAKS HER MIND
X. AND NETTIE COLEBROOK SPEAKS HERS
XI. NOT PATS BUT SCRATCHES
XII. CALLERS FOR "KEITHIE"
XIII. FREE VERSE--A LA SUSAN
XIV. A SURPRISE ALL AROUND
XV. AGAIN SUSAN TAKES A HAND
XVI. THE WORRY OF IT
XVII. DANIEL BURTON TAKES THE PLUNGE
XVIII. "MISS STEWART"
XIX. A MATTER OF LETTERS
XX. WITH CHIN UP
XXI. THE LION
XXII. HOW COULD YOU, MAZIE?
XXIII. JOHN MCGUIRE
XXIV. AS SUSAN SAW IT
XXV. KEITH TO THE RESCUE
XXVI. MAZIE AGAIN
XXVII. FOR THE SAKE OF JOHN
XXVIII. THE WAY
XXIX. DOROTHY TRIES HER HAND
XXX. DANIEL BURTON'S "JOB"
XXXI. WHAT SUSAN DID NOT SEE
XXXII. THE KEY
XXXIII. AND ALL ON ACCOUNT OF SUSAN
ILLUSTRATIONS
"I must go, now. I--must--go!"
Susan Betts talking with Mrs. McGuire over the back-yard fence
"Want you? I always want you!"
"You've helped more--than you'll ever know"
He gave her almost no chance to say anything herself
Keith's arm shot out and his hand fell, covering hers
It was well that the Japanese screen on the front piazza was down
CHAPTER I
THE GREAT TERROR
It was on his fourteenth birthday that Keith Burton discovered the
Great Terror, though he did not know it by that name until some days
afterward. He knew only, to his surprise and distress, that the
"Treasure Island," given to him by his father for a birthday present,
was printed in type so blurred and poor that he could scarcely read
it.
He said nothing, of course. In fact he shut the book very hastily,
with a quick, sidewise look, lest his father should see and notice the
imperfection of his gift.
Poor father! He would feel so bad after he had taken all that pains
and spent all that money--and for something not absolutely necessary,
too! And then to get cheated like that. For, of course, he had been
cheated--such horrid print that nobody could read.
But it was only a day or two later that Keith found some more horrid
print. This time it was in his father's weekly journal that came every
Saturday morning. He found it again that night in a magazine, and yet
again the next day in the Sunday newspaper.
Then, before he had evolved a satisfactory explanation in his own mind
of this phenomenon, he heard Susan Betts talking with Mrs. McGuire
over the back-yard fence.
Susan Betts began the conversation. But that was nothing strange:
Susan Betts always began the conversation.
"Have you heard about poor old Harrington?" she demanded in what Keith
called her "excitingest" voice. Then, as was always the case when she
spoke in that voice, she plunged on without waiting for a reply, as if
fearful lest her bit of news fall from the other pair of lips first.
"Well, he's blind--stone blind. He couldn't see a dollar bill--not if
you shook it right before his eyes."
"Sho! you don't say!" Mrs. McGuire dropped the wet sheet back into the
basket and came to the fence on her side concernedly. "Now, ain't that
too bad?"
"Yes, ain't it? An' he so kind, an' now so blind! It jest makes me
sick." Susan whipped open the twisted folds of a wet towel. Susan
seldom stopped her work to talk. "But I saw it comin' long ago. An' he
did, too, poor man!"
Mrs. McGuire lifted a bony hand to her face and tucked a flying wisp
of hair behind her right ear.
"Then if he saw it comin', why couldn't he do somethin' to stop it?"
she demanded.
[Illustration: SUSAN BETTS TALKING WITH MRS. MCGUIRE OVER THE BACKYARD
FENCE]
"I don't know. But he couldn't. Dr. Chandler said he couldn't. An'
they had a man up from Boston--one of them eye socialists what doesn't
doctor anythin' but eyes--an' he said he couldn't."
Keith, on his knees before the beet-bed adjoining the clothes-yard,
sat back on his heels and eyed the two women with frowning interest.
He knew old Mr. Harrington. So did all the boys. Never was there a
kite or a gun or a jack-knife so far gone that Uncle Joe Harrington
could not "fix it" somehow. And he was always so jolly about it, and
so glad to do it. But it took eyes to do such things, and if now he
was going to be blind--
"An' you say it's been comin' on gradual?" questioned Mrs. McGuire.
"Why, I hadn't heard-"
"No, there hain't no one heard," interrupted Susan. "He didn't say
nothin' ter nobody, hardly, only me, I guess, an' I suspicioned it, or
he wouldn't 'a' said it to me, probably. Ye see, I found out he wa'n't
readin' 'em--the papers Mr. Burton has me take up ter him every week.
An' he owned up, when I took him ter task for it, that he couldn't
read 'em. They was gettin' all blurred."
"Blurred?" It was a startled little cry from the boy down by the
beet-bed; but neither Susan nor Mrs. McGuire heard--perhaps because at
almost the same moment Mrs. McGuire had excitedly asked the same
question.
"Blurred?" she cried.
"Yes; all run tergether like--the printin', ye know--so he couldn't
tell one letter from t'other. 'T wa'n't only a little at first. Why,
he thought 't was jest somethin' the matter with the printin' itself;
an'--"
"And WASN'T it the printing at ALL?"
The boy was on his feet now. His face was a little white and
strained-looking, as he asked the question.
"Why, no, dearie. Didn't you hear Susan tell Mis' McGuire jest now? 'T
was his EYES, an' he didn't know it. He was gettin' blind, an' that
was jest the beginnin'."
Susan's capable hands picked up another wet towel and snapped it open
by way of emphasis.
"The b-beginning?" stammered the boy. "But--but ALL beginnings
don't--don't end like that, do they?"
Susan Betts laughed indulgently and jammed the clothespin a little
deeper on to the towel.
"Bless the child! Won't ye hear that, now?" she laughed with a shrug.
"An' how should I know? I guess if Susan Betts could tell the end of
all the beginnin's as soon as they're begun, she wouldn't be hangin'
out your daddy's washin', my boy. She'd be sittin' on a red velvet
sofa with a gold cupola over her head a-chargin' five dollars apiece
for tellin' yer fortune. Yes, sir, she would!"
"But--but about Uncle Joe," persisted the boy. "Can't he really see--at
all, Susan?"
"There, there, child, don't think anything more about it. Indeed,
forsooth, I'm tellin' the truth, but I s'pose I hadn't oughter told it
before you. Still, you'd 'a' found it out quick enough--an' you with
your tops an' balls always runnin' up there. An' that's what the poor
soul seemed to feel the worst about," she went on, addressing Mrs.
McGuire, who was still leaning on the division fence.
"'If only I could see enough ter help the boys!' he moaned over an'
over again. It made me feel awful bad. I was that upset I jest
couldn't sleep that night, an' I had ter get up an' write. But it made
a real pretty poem. My fuse always works better in the night, anyhow.
'The wail of the toys'--that's what I called it--had the toys tell the
story, ye know, all the kites an' jack-knives an' balls an' bats that
he's fixed for the boys all these years, an' how bad they felt because
he couldn't do it any more. Like this, ye know:
'Oh, woe is me, said the baseball bat,
Oh, woe is me, said the kite.'
'T was real pretty, if I do say it, an' touchy, too."
"For mercy's sake, Susan Betts, if you ain't the greatest!" ejaculated
Mrs. McGuire, with disapproving admiration. "If you was dyin' I
believe you'd stop to write a poem for yer gravestone!"
Susan Betts chuckled wickedly, but her voice was gravity itself.
"Oh, I wouldn't have ter do that, Mis' McGuire. I've got that done
already."
"Susan Betts, you haven't!" gasped the scandalized woman on the other
side of the fence.
"Haven't I? Listen," challenged Susan Betts, striking an attitude. Her
face was abnormally grave, though her eyes were merry.
"Here lieth a woman whose name was Betts,
An' I s'pose she'll deserve whatever she gets;
But if she hadn't been Betts she might 'a' been Better,
She might even been Best if her name would 'a' let her."
"Susan!" gasped Mrs. McGuire once more; but Susan only chuckled again
wickedly, and fell to work on her basket of clothes in good earnest.
A moment later she was holding up with stern disapproval two socks
with gaping heels.
"Keith Burton, here's them scandalous socks again! Now, do you go tell
your father that I won't touch 'em. I won't mend 'em another once. He
must get you a new pair--two new pairs, right away. Do you hear?"
But Keith did not hear. Keith was not there to hear. Still with that
strained, white look on his face he had hurried out of the yard and
through the gate.
Mrs. McGuire, however, did hear.
"My stars, Susan Betts, it's lucky your bark is worse than your bite!"
she exclaimed. "Mend 'em, indeed! They won't be dry before you've got
your darnin' egg in 'em."
Susan laughed ruefully. Then she sighed:--at arms' length she was
holding up another pair of yawning socks.
"I know it. And look at them, too," she snapped, in growing wrath.
"But what's a body goin' to do? The boy'd go half-naked before his
father would sense it, with his nose in that paint-box. Much as ever
as he's got sense enough ter put on his own clothes--and he WOULDN'T
know WHEN ter put on CLEAN ones, if I didn't spread 'em out for him!"
"I know it. Too bad, too bad," murmured Mrs. McGuire, with a virtuous
shake of her head. "An' he with his fine bringin'-up, an' now to be so
shiftless an' good-for-nothin', an'--"
But Susan Betts was interrupting, her eyes flashing.
"If you please, I'll thank you to say no more like that about my
master," she said with dignity. "He's neither shiftless, nor
good-for-nothin'. His character is unbleachable! He's an artist an' a
scholar an' a gentleman, an' a very superlative man. It's because he
knows so much that--that he jest hain't got room for common things like
clothes an' holes in socks."
"Stuff an' nonsense!" retorted Mrs. McGuire nettled in her turn. "I
guess I've known Dan'l Burton as long as you have; an' as for his
bein' your master--he can't call his soul his own when you're around,
an' you know it."
But Susan, with a disdainful sniff, picked up her now empty
clothes-basket and marched into the house.
Down the road Keith had reached the turn and was climbing the hill
that led to old Mr. Harrington's shabby cottage.
The boy's eyes were fixed straight ahead. A squirrel whisked his tail
alluringly from the bushes at the left, and a robin twittered from a
tree branch on the right. But the boy neither saw nor heard--and when
before had Keith Burton failed to respond to a furred or feathered
challenge like that?
To-day there was an air of dogged determination about even the way he
set one foot before the other. He had the air of one who sees his goal
ahead and cannot reach it soon enough. Yet when Keith arrived at the
sagging, open gate before the Harrington cottage, he stopped short as
if the gate were closed; and his next steps were slow and hesitant.
Walking on the grass at the edge of the path he made no sound as he
approached the stoop, on which sat an old man.
At the steps, as at the gate, Keith stopped and waited, his gaze on
the motionless figure in the rocking-chair. The old man sat with hands
folded on his cane-top, his eyes apparently looking straight ahead.
Slowly the boy lifted his right arm and waved it soundlessly. He
lifted his left--but there was no waving flourish. Instead it fell
impotently almost before it was lifted. On the stoop the old man still
sat motionless, his eyes still gazing straight ahead.
Again the boy hesitated; then, with an elaborately careless air, he
shuffled his feet on the gravel walk and called cheerfully:
"Hullo, Uncle Joe."
"Hullo! Oh, hullo! It's Keith Burton, ain't it?"
The old head turned with the vague indecision of the newly blind, and
a trembling hand thrust itself aimlessly forward. "It IS Keith--ain't
it?"
"Oh, yes, sir, I'm Keith."
The boy, with a quick look about him, awkwardly shook the fluttering
fingers--Keith was not in the habit of shaking hands with people,
least of all with Uncle Joe Harrington. He sat down then on the step
at the old man's feet.
"What did ye bring ter-day, my boy?" asked the man eagerly; then with
a quick change of manner, he sighed, "but I'm afraid I can't fix it,
anyhow."
"Oh, no, sir, you don't have to. I didn't bring anything to be mended
to-day." Unconsciously Keith had raised his voice. He was speaking
loudly, and very politely.
The old man fell back in his chair. He looked relieved, yet
disappointed.
"Oh, well, that's all right, then. I'm glad. That is, of course, if I
could have fixed it for you--His sentence remained unfinished. A
profound gloom settled over his countenance.
"But I didn't bring anything for you to fix," reiterated the boy, in a
yet louder tone.
"There, there, my boy, you don't have to shout." The old man shifted
uneasily hi his seat. "I ain't deaf. I'm only--I suppose you know,
Keith, what's come to me in my old age."
"Yes, sir, I--I do." The boy hitched a little nearer to the two
ill-shod feet on the floor near him. "And--and I wanted to ask you. Yours
hurt a lot, didn't they?--I mean, your eyes; they--they ached, didn't
they, before they--they got--blind?" He spoke eagerly, almost
hopefully.
The old man shook his head.
"No, not much. I s'pose I ought to be thankful I was spared that."
The boy wet his dry lips and swallowed.
"But, Uncle Joe, 'most always, I guess, when--when folks are going to
be blind, they--they DO ache, don't they?"
Again the old man stirred restlessly.
"I don't know. I only know about--myself."
"But--well, anyhow, it never comes till you're old--real old, does
it?" Keith's voice vibrated with confidence this time.
"Old? I ain't so very old. I'm only seventy-five," bridled Harrington
resentfully. "Besides anyhow, the doctor said age didn't have nothin'
ter do with this kind of blindness. It comes ter young folks, real
young folks, sometimes."
"Oh-h!" The boy wet his lips and swallowed again a bit convulsively.
With eyes fearful and questioning he searched the old man's face.
Twice he opened his mouth as if to speak; but each time he closed it
again with the words left unsaid. Then, with a breathless rush, very
much like desperation, he burst out:
"But it's always an awful long time comin', isn't it? Blindness is.
It's years and years before it really gets here, isn't it?"
"Hm-m; well, I can't say. I can only speak for myself, Keith."
"Yes, sir, I know, sir; and that's what I wanted to ask--about you,"
plunged on Keith feverishly. "When did you notice it first, and what
was it?"
The old man drew a long sigh.
"Why, I don't know as I can tell, exactly. 'T was quite a spell comin'
on--I know that; and't wasn't much of anything at first. 'T was just
that I couldn't see ter read clear an' distinct. It was all sort of
blurred."
"Kind of run together?" Just above his breath Keith asked the
question.
"Yes, that's it exactly. An' I thought somethin' ailed my glasses, an'
so I got some new ones. An' I thought at first maybe it helped. But it
didn't. Then it got so that't wa'n't only the printin' ter books an'
papers that was blurred, but ev'rything a little ways off was in a
fog, like, an' I couldn't see anything real clear an' distinct."
"Oh, but things--other things--don't look a mite foggy to me," cried
the boy.
"'Course they don't! Why should they? They didn't to me--once,"
retorted the man impatiently. "But now--" Again he left a sentence
unfinished.
"But how soon did--did you get--all blind, after that?" stammered the
boy, breaking the long, uncomfortable silence that had followed the
old man's unfinished sentence.
"Oh, five or six months--maybe more. I don't know exactly. I know it
came, that's all. I guess if 't was you it wouldn't make no difference
HOW it came, if it came, boy." "N-no, of course not," chattered Keith,
springing suddenly to his feet. "But I guess it isn't coming to me--of
course't isn't coming to me! Well, good-bye, Uncle Joe, I got to go
now. Good-bye!"
He spoke fearlessly, blithely, and his chin was at a confident tilt.
He even whistled as he walked down the hill. But in his heart--in his
heart Keith knew that beside him that very minute stalked that
shadowy, intangible creature that had dogged his footsteps ever since
his fourteenth birthday-gift from his father; and he knew it now by
name--The Great Terror.
CHAPTER II
DAD
Keith's chin was still high and his gaze still straight ahead when he
reached the foot of Harrington Hill. Perhaps that explained why he did
not see the two young misses on the fence by the side of the road
until a derisively gleeful shout called his attention to their
presence.
"Well, Keith Burton, I should like to know if you're blind!"
challenged a merry voice.
The boy turned with a start so violent that the girls giggled again
gleefully. "Dear, dear, did we scare him? We're so sorry!"
The boy flushed painfully. Keith did not like girls--that is, he SAID
he did not like them. They made him conscious of his hands and feet,
and stiffened his tongue so that it would not obey his will. The
prettier the girls were, the more acute was his discomfiture.
Particularly, therefore, did he dislike these two girls--they were the
prettiest of the lot. They were Mazie Sanborn and her friend Dorothy
Parkman.
Mazie was the daughter of the town's richest manufacturer, and Dorothy
was her cousin from Chicago, who made such long visits to her Eastern
relatives that it seemed sometimes almost as if she were as much of a
Hinsdale girl as was Mazie herself.
To-day Mazie's blue eyes and Dorothy's brown ones were full of
mischief.
"Well, why don't you say something? Why don't you apologize?" demanded
Mazie.
'"Pol--pologize? What for?" In his embarrassed misery Keith resorted
to bravado in voice and manner.
"Why, for passing us by in that impertinent fashion," returned Mazie
loftily. "Do you think that is the way ladies should be treated?"
(Mazie was thirteen and Dorothy fourteen.) "The idea!"
For a minute Keith stared helplessly, shifting from one foot to the
other. Then, with an inarticulate grunt, he turned away.
But Mazie was not to be so easily thwarted. With a mere flit of her
hand she tossed aside a score of years, and became instantly nothing
more than a wheedling little girl coaxing a playmate.
"Aw, Keithie, don't get mad! I was only fooling. Say, tell me, HAVE
you been up to Uncle Joe Harrington's?"
Because Mazie had caught his arm and now held it tightly, the boy
perforce came to a stop.
"Well, what if I have?" he resorted to bravado again.
"And is he blind, honestly?" Mazie's voice became hushed and
awestruck.
"Uh-huh." The boy nodded his head with elaborate unconcern, but he
shifted his feet uneasily.
"And he can't see a thing--not a thing?" breathed Mazie.
"'Course he can't, if he's blind!" Keith showed irritation now, and
pulled not too gently at the arm still held in Mazie's firm little
fingers.
"Blind! Ugghh!" interposed Miss Dorothy, shuddering visibly. "Oh, how
can you bear to look at him, Keith Burton? I couldn't!"
A sudden wave of red surged over the boy's face. The next instant it
had receded, leaving only a white, strained terror.
"Well, he ain't to blame for it, if he is blind, is he?" chattered the
boy, a bit incoherently. "If you're blind you're blind, and you can't
help yourself." And with a jerk he freed himself from Mazie's grasp
and hurried down the road toward home.
But when he reached the bend of the road he turned and looked back.
The two girls had returned to their perch on the fence, and were
deeply absorbed in something one of them held in her hand.
"And she said she couldn't bear--to look at 'em--if they were blind,"
he whispered. Then, wheeling about, he ran down the road as fast as he
could. Nor did he stop till he had entered his own gate.
"Well, Keith Burton, I should like to know where you've been," cried
the irate voice of Susan Betts from the doorway.
"Oh, just walking. Why?"
"Because I've been huntin' and huntin' for you.
But, oh, dear me,
You're worse'n a flea,
So what's the use of talkin'?
You always say,
As you did to-day,
I've just been out a-walkin'!"
"But what did you want me for?"
"I didn't want you. Your pa wanted you. But, then, for that matter,
he's always wantin' you. Any time, if you look at him real good an'
hard enough to get his attention, he'll stare a minute, an' then say:
'Where's Keith?' An' when he gets to the other shore, I suppose he'll
do it all the more."
"Oh, no, he won't--not if it's talking poetry. Father never talks
poetry. What makes you talk it so much, Susan? Nobody else does."
Susan laughed good-humoredly.
"Lan' sakes, child, I don't know, only I jest can't help it. Why,
everything inside of me jest swings along to a regular tune--kind of
keeps time, like. It's always been so. Why, Keithie, boy, it's been my
joy--There, you see--jest like that! I didn't know that was comin'. It
jest--jest came. That's all. I can make a rhyme 'most any time. Oh, of
course, most generally, when I write real poems, I have to sit down
with a pencil an' paper, an' write 'em out. It's only the spontaneous
combustion kind that comes all in a minute, without predisposed
thinkin'. Now, run along to your pa, child. He wants you. He's been
frettin' the last hour for you, jest because he didn't know exactly
where you was. Goodness me! I only hope I'll never have to live with
him if anything happens to you."
The boy had crossed the room; but with his hand on the door knob he
turned sharply.
"W-what do you mean by that?"
Susan Betts gave a despairing gesture.
"Lan' sakes, child, how you do hold a body up! I meant what I said--that
I didn't want the job of livin' with your pa if anything happened
to you. You know as well as I do that he thinks you're the very axle
for the earth to whirl 'round on. But, there, I don't know as I
wonder--jest you left, so!"
The boy abandoned his position at the door, and came close to Susan
Betts's side.
"That's what I've always wanted to know. Other boys have brothers and
sisters and--a mother. But I can't ever remember anybody only dad.
Wasn't there ever any one else?"
Susan Betts drew a long sigh.
"There were two brothers, but they died before you was born. Then
there was--your mother."
"But I never--knew her?"
"No, child. When they opened the door of Heaven to let you out she
slipped in, poor lamb. An' then you was all your father had left. So
of course he dotes on you. Goodness me, there ain't no end to the fine
things he's goin' ter have you be when you grow up."
"Yes, I know." The boy caught his breath convulsively and turned away.
"I guess I'll go--to dad."
At the end of the hall upstairs was the studio. Dad would probably be
there. Keith knew that. Dad was always there, when he wasn't sleeping
or eating, or out tramping through the woods. He would be sitting
before the easel now "puttering" over a picture, as Susan called it.
Susan said he was a very "insufficient, uncapacious" man--but that was
when she was angry or tried with him. She never let any one else say
such things about him.
Still, dad WAS very different from other dads. Keith had to
acknowledge that--to himself. Other boys' dads had offices and stores
and shops and factories where they worked, or else they were doctors
or ministers; and there was always money to get things with--things
that boys needed; shoes and stockings and new clothes, and candy and
baseball bats and kites and jack-knives.
Dad didn't have anything but a studio, and there never seemed to be
much money. What there was, was an "annual," Susan said, whatever that
was. Anyway, whatever it was, it was too small, and not nearly large
enough to cover expenses. Susan had an awful time to get enough to buy
their food with sometimes. She was always telling dad that she'd GOT
to have a little to buy eggs or butter or meat with.
And there were her wages--dad was always behind on those. And when the
bills came in at the first of the month, it was always awful then: dad
worried and frowning and unhappy and apologetic and explaining; Susan
cross and half-crying. Strange men, not overpleasant-looking, ringing
the doorbell peremptorily. And never a place at all where a boy might
feel comfortable to stay. Dad was always talking then, especially, how
he was sure he was going to sell THIS picture. But he never sold it.
At least, Keith never knew him to. And after a while he would begin a
new picture, and be SURE he was going to sell THAT.
But not only was dad different from other boys' dads, but the house
was different. First it was very old, and full of very old furniture
and dishes. Then blinds and windows and locks and doors were always
getting out of order; and they were apt to remain so, for there was
never any money to fix things with. There was also a mortgage on the
house. That is, Susan said there was; and by the way she said it, it
would seem to be something not at all attractive or desirable. Just
what a mortgage was, Keith did not exactly understand; but, for that
matter, quite probably Susan herself did not. Susan always liked to
use big words, and some of them she did not always know the meaning
of, dad said.
To-day, in the hallway, Keith stood a hesitant minute before his
father's door. Then slowly he pushed it open.
"Did you want me, dad?" he asked.
The man at the easel sprang to his feet. He was a tall, slender man,
with finely cut features and a pointed, blond beard. Susan had once
described him as "an awfully nice man to take care of, but not worth a
cent when it comes to takin' care of you." Yet there was every
evidence of loving protection in the arm he threw around his boy just
now.
"Want you? I always want you!" he cried affectionately. "Look! Do you
remember that moss we brought home yesterday? Well, I've got its twin
now." Triumphantly he pointed to the lower left-hand corner of the
picture on the easel, where was a carefully blended mass of greens and
browns.
"Oh, yes, why, so't is." (Keith had long since learned to see in his
father's pictures what his father saw.) "Say, dad, I wish't you'd tell
me about--my little brothers. Won't you, please?"
"And, Keith, look--do you recognize that little path? It's the one we
saw yesterday. I'm going to call this picture 'The Woodland Path'--and
I think it's going to be about the very best thing I ever did."
Keith was not surprised that his question had been turned aside:
questions that his father did not like to answer were always turned
aside. Usually Keith submitted with what grace he could muster; but
to-day he was in a persistent mood that would not be denied.
"Dad, WHY won't you tell me about my brothers? Please, what were their
names, and how old were they, and why did they die?"
[Illustration: "Want you? I always want you!"]
"God knows why they died--I don't!" The man's arm about the boy's
shoulder tightened convulsively.
"But how old were they?"
"Ned was seven and Jerry was four, and they were the light of my eyes,
and--But why do you make me tell you? Isn't it enough, Keith, that
they went, one after the other, not two days apart? And then the sun
went out and left the world gray and cold and cheerless, for the next
day--your mother went."
"And how about me, dad?"
The man did not seem to have heard. Still with his arm about the boy's
shoulder, he had dropped back into the seat before the easel. His eyes
now were somberly fixed out the window.
"Wasn't I--anywhere, dad?"
With a start the man turned. His arm tightened again. His eyes grew
moist and very tender.
"Anywhere? You're everywhere now, my boy. I'm afraid, at the first,
the very first, I didn't like to see you very well, perhaps because
you were ALL there was left. Then, little by little, I found you were
looking at me with your mother's eyes, and touching me with the
fingers of Ned and Jerry. And now--why, boy, you're everything. You're
Ned and Jerry and your mother all in one, my boy, my boy!"
Keith stirred restlessly. A horrible tightness came to his throat, yet
there was a big lump that must be swallowed.
"Er--that--that Woodland Path picture is going to be great, dad,
great!" he said then, in a very loud, though slightly husky, voice.
"Come on, let's----"
From the hall Susan's voice interrupted, chanting in a high-pitched
singsong:
"Dinner's ready, dinner's ready,
Hurry up, or you'll be late,
Then you'll sure be cross and heady
If there's nothin' left to ate."
Keith gave a relieved whoop and bounded toward the door. Never had
Susan's "dinner-bell" been a more welcome sound. Surely, at dinner,
his throat would have to loosen up, and that lump could then be
swallowed.
More slowly Keith's father rose from his chair.
"How impossible Susan is," he sighed. "I believe she grows worse every
day. Still I suppose I ought to be thankful she's good-natured--which
that absurd doggerel of hers proves that she is. However, I should
like to put a stop to it. I declare, I believe I will put a stop to
it, too! I'm going to insist on her announcing her meals in a proper
manner. Oh, Susan," he began resolutely, as he flung open the dining-room
door.
"Well, sir?" Susan stood at attention, her arms akimbo.
"Susan, I--I insist--that is, I wish----"
"You was sayin'--" she reminded him coldly, as he came to a helpless
pause.
"Yes. That is, I was saying--" His eyes wavered and fell to the table.
"Oh, hash--red-flannel hash! That's fine, Susan!"
But Susan was not to be cajoled. Her eyes still regarded him coldly.
"Yes, sir, hash. We most generally does have beet hash after b'iled
dinner, sir. You was sayin'?"
"Nothing, Susan, nothing. I--I've changed my mind," murmured the man
hastily, pulling out his chair. "Well, Keith, will you have some of
Susan's nice hash?"
"Yes, sir," said Keith.
Susan said nothing. But was there a quiet smile on her lips as she
left the room? If so, neither the man nor the boy seemed to notice it.
As for the very obvious change of attitude on the part of the man--Keith
had witnessed a like phenomenon altogether too often to give it
a second thought. And as for the doggerel that had brought about the
situation--that, also, was too familiar to cause comment.
It had been years since Susan first called them to dinner with her
"poem"; but Keith could remember just how pleased she had been, and
how gayly she had repeated it over and over, so as not to forget it.
"Oh, of course I know that 'ate' ain't good etiquette in that place,"
she had admitted at the time. "It should be 'eat.' But 'eat' don't
rhyme, an' 'ate' does. So I'm goin' to use it. An' I can, anyhow. It's
poem license; an' that'll let you do anything."
Since then she had used the verse for every meal--except when she was
out of temper--and by substituting breakfast or supper for dinner, she
had a call that was conveniently universal.
The fact that she used it ONLY when she was good-natured constituted
an unfailing barometer of the atmospheric condition of the kitchen,
and was really, in a way, no small convenience--especially for little
boys in quest of cookies or bread-and-jam. As for the master of the
house--this was not the first time he had threatened an energetic
warfare against that "absurd doggerel" (which he had cordially
abhorred from the very first); neither would it probably be the last
time that Susan's calm "Well, sir?" should send him into ignominious
defeat before the battle was even begun. And, really, after all was
said and done, there was still that one unfailing refuge for his
discomforted recollection: he could be thankful, when he heard it,
that she was good-natured; and with Susan that was no small thing to
be thankful for, as everybody knew--who knew Susan.
To-day, therefore, the defeat was not so bitter as to take all the
sweetness out of the "red-flannel" hash, and the frown on Daniel
Burton's face was quite gone when Susan brought in the dessert. Nor
did it return that night, even when Susan's shrill voice caroled
through the hall:
"Supper's ready, supper's ready,
Hurry up, or you'll be late,
Then you'll sure be cross and heady
If there's nothin' left to ate."
CHAPTER III
FOR JERRY AND NED
It was Susan Betts who discovered that Keith was not reading so much
that summer.
"An' him with his nose always in a book before," as she said one day
to Mrs. McGuire. "An' he don't act natural, somehow, neither, ter my
way of thinkin'. Have YOU noticed anything?"
"Why, no, I don't know as I have," answered Mrs. McGuire from the
other side of the fence, "except that he's always traipsin' off to the
woods with his father. But then, he's always done that, more or less."
"Indeed he has! But always before he's lugged along a book, sometimes
two; an' now--why he hain't even read the book his father give him on
his birthday. I know, 'cause I asked him one day what 't was about,
an' he said he didn't know; he hadn't read it."
"Deary me, Susan! Well, what if he hadn't? I shouldn't fret about
that. My gracious, Susan, if you had four children same as I have,
instead of one, I guess you wouldn't do no worryin' jest because a boy
didn't read a book. Though, as for my John, he----"
Susan lifted her chin.
"I wasn't talkin' about your children, Mis' McGuire," she interrupted.
"An' I reckon nobody'd do no worryin' if they didn't read. But Master
Keith is a different supposition entirely. He's very intelligible,
Master Keith is, and so is his father before him. Books is food to
them--real food. Hain't you ever heard of folks devourin' books? Well,
they do it. Of course I don't mean literaryly, but metaphysically."
"Oh, land o' love, Susan Betts!" cried Mrs. McGuire, throwing up both
hands and turning away scornfully. "Of course, when you get to talkin'
like that, NOBODY can say anything to you! However in the world that
poor Mr. Burton puts up with you, I don't see. _I_ wouldn't--not a
day--not a single day!" And by way of emphasis she entered her house
and shut the door with a slam.
Susan Betts, left alone, shrugged her shoulders disdainfully.
"Well, 'nobody asked you, sir, she said,'" she quoted, under her
breath, and slammed her door, also, by way of emphasis.
Yet both Susan and Mrs. McGuire knew very well that the next day would
find them again in the usual friendly intercourse over the back-yard
fence.
Susan Betts was a neighbor's daughter. She had lived all her life in
the town, and she knew everybody. Just because she happened to work in
Daniel Burton's kitchen was no reason, to her mind, why she should not
be allowed to express her opinion freely on all occasions, and on all
subjects, and to all persons. Such being her conviction she conducted
herself accordingly. And Susan always lived up to her convictions.
In the kitchen to-day she found Keith.
"Oh, I say, Susan, I was looking for you. Dad wants you."
"What for?"
"I don't know; but I GUESS it's because he wants to have something
besides beans and codfish and fish-hash to eat. Anyhow, he SAID he was
going to speak to you about it."
Susan stiffened into inexorable sternness.
"So he's goin' ter speak ter me, is he? Well, 't will be mighty little
good that'll do, as he ought to know very well. Beefsteaks an' roast
fowls cost money. Has he got the money for me?"
Without waiting for an answer to her question, she strode through the
door leading to the dining-room and shut it crisply behind her.
The boy did not follow her. Alone, in the kitchen he drummed idly on
the window-pane, watching the first few drops of a shower that had
been darkening the sky for an hour past.
After a minute he turned slowly and gazed with listless eyes about the
kitchen. On the table lay a folded newspaper. After a moment's
hesitation he crossed the room toward it. He had the air of one
impelled by some inner force against his will.
He picked the paper up, but did not at once look at it. In fact, he
looked anywhere but at it. Then, with a sudden jerk, he faced it.
Shivering a little he held it nearer, then farther away, then nearer
again. Then, with an inarticulate little cry he dropped the paper and
hurried from the room.
No one knew better than Keith himself that he was not reading much
this summer. Not that he put it into words, but he had a feeling that
so long as he was not SEEING how blurred the printed words were, he
would not be sure that they were blurred. Yet he knew that always,
whenever he saw a book or paper, his fingers fairly tingled to pick it
up--and make sure. Most of the time, however, Keith tried not to
notice the books and papers. Systematically he tried to forget that
there were books and papers--and he tried to forget the Great Terror.
Sometimes he persuaded himself that he was doing this. He contrived to
keep himself very busy that summer. Almost every day, when it did not
rain, he was off for a long walk with his father in the woods. His
father liked to walk in the woods. Keith never had to urge him to do
that. And what good times they had!--except that Keith did wish that
his father would not talk quite so much about what great things he,
Keith, was going to do when he should have become a man--and a great
artist.
One day he ventured to remonstrate.
"But, dad, maybe I--I shan't be a great artist at all. Maybe I shan't
be even a little one. Maybe I shall be just a--a man."
Keith never forgot his father's answer nor his father's anguished face
as he made that answer.
"Keith, I don't ever want you to let me hear you say that again. I
want you to KNOW that you're going to succeed. And you will succeed.
God will not be so cruel as to deny me that. _I_ have failed. You
needn't shake your head, boy, and say 'Oh, dad!' like that. I know
perfectly well what I'm talking about. _I_ HAVE FAILED--though it is
not often that I'll admit it, even to myself. But when I heard you say
to-day----
"Keith, listen to me. You've got to succeed. You've got to succeed not
only for yourself, but for Jerry and Ned, and for--me. All my hopes
for Jerry and Ned and for--myself are in you, boy. That's why, in all
our walks together, and at home in the studio, I'm trying to teach you
something that you will want to know by and by."
Keith never remonstrated with his father after that. He felt worse
than ever now when his father talked of what great things he was going
to do; but he knew that remonstrances would do no good, but rather
harm; and he did not want to hear his father talk again as he had
talked that day, about Jerry and Ned and himself. As if it were not
bad enough, under the best of conditions, to have to be great and
famous for one's two dead brothers and one's father; while if one were
blind----
But Keith refused to think of that. He tried very hard, also, to
absorb everything that his father endeavored to teach him. He listened
and watched and said "yes, sir," and he did his best to make the
chalks and charcoal that were put into his hands follow the copy set
for him.
To be sure, in this last undertaking, his efforts were not always
successful. The lines wavered and blurred and were far from clear.
Still, they were not half so bad as the print in books; and if it
should not get any worse--Besides, had he not always loved to draw
cats and dogs and faces ever since he could hold a pencil?
And so, with some measure of hope as to the results, he was setting
himself to be that great and famous artist that his father said he
must be.
But it was not all work for Keith these summer days. There were games
and picnics and berry expeditions with the boys and girls, all of
which he hailed with delight--one did not have to read, or even study
wavering lines and figures, on picnics or berrying expeditions! And
that WAS a relief. To be sure, there was nearly always Mazie, and if
there was Mazie, there was bound to be Dorothy. And Dorothy had said--
Some way he could never see Dorothy without remembering what she did
say on that day he had come home from Uncle Joe Harrington's.
Not that he exactly blamed her, either. For was not he himself acting
as if he felt the same way and did not like to look at blind persons?
Else why did he so persistently keep away from Uncle Joe now? Not
once, since that first day, had he been up to see the poor old blind
man. And before--why, before he used to go several times a week.
CHAPTER IV
SCHOOL
And so the summer passed, and September came. And September brought a
new problem--school. And school meant books.
Two days before school began Keith sought Susan Betts in the kitchen.
"Say, Susan, that was awfully good johnny-cake we had this morning."
Susan picked up another plate to dry and turned toward her visitor.
Her face was sternly grave, though there was something very like a
twinkle in her eye.
"There ain't no cookies, if that's what you're wantin'," she said.
"Aw, Susan, I never said a word about cookies."
"Then what is it you want? It's plain to be seen there's something, I
ween."
"My, how easy you do make rhymes, Susan. What's that 'I ween' mean?"
"Now, Keith Burton, this beatin' the bush like this don't do one mite
of good. You might jest as well out with it first as last. Now, what
is it you want?"
Keith drew a long sigh.
"Well, Susan, there IS something--a little something--only I meant
what I said about the johnny-cake and the rhymes; truly, I did."
"Well?" Susan was smiling faintly.
"Susan, you know you can make dad do anything."
Susan began to stiffen, and Keith hastened to disarm her.
"No, no, truly! This is the part I want. You CAN make dad do anything;
and I want you to do it for me."
"Do what?"
"Make him let me off from school any more."
"Let you off from school!" In her stupefied amazement Susan actually
forgot to pick up another plate from the dishpan.
"Yes. Tell him I'm sick, or 't isn't good for me. And truly, 't isn't
good for me. And truly, I am quite a little sick, Susan. I don't feel
well a bit. There's a kind of sinking feeling in my stomach, and----"
But Susan had found her wits and her tongue by this time, and she gave
free rein to her wrath.
"Let you off from school, indeed! Why, Keith Burton, I'm ashamed of
you--an' you that I've always boasted of! What do you want to do--grow
up a perfect ignominious?"
Keith drew back resentfully, and uptilted his chin.
"No, Susan Betts, I'm not wanting to be a--a ignominious, and I don't
intend to be one, either. I'm going to be an artist--a great big
famous artist, and I don't NEED school for that. How are
multiplication tables and history and grammar going to help me paint
big pictures? That's what I want to know. But I'm afraid that dad--
Say, WON'T you tell dad that I don't NEED books any more, and----" But
he stopped short, so extraordinary was the expression that had come to
Susan Betts's face. If it were possible to think of Susan Betts as
crying, he should think she was going to cry now.
"Need books? Why, child, there ain't nobody but what needs books. An'
I guess I know! What do you suppose I wouldn't give now if I could 'a'
had books an' book-learnin' when I was young? I could 'a' writ real
poetry then that would sell. I could 'a' spoke out an' said things
that are in my soul, an' that I CAN'T say now, 'cause I don't know the
words that--that will impress what I mean. Now, look a-here, Keith
Burton, you're young. You've got a chance. Do you see to it that you
make good. An' it's books that will help you do it."
"But books won't help me paint, Susan."
"They will, too. Books will help you do anything."
"Then you won't ask dad?"
"Indeed, I won't."
"But I don't see how books----" With a long sigh Keith turned away.
In the studio the next morning he faced his father.
"Dad, you can't learn to paint pictures by just READING how to do it,
can you?"
"You certainly cannot, my boy."
"There! I told Susan Betts so, but she wouldn't LISTEN to me. And so--I
don't have to go to school any more, do I?"
"Don't have to go to school any more! Why, Keith, what an absurd idea!
Of course you've got to go to school!"
"But just to be an artist and paint pictures, I don't see----"
But his father cut him short and would not listen.
Five minutes later a very disappointed, disheartened young lad left
the studio and walked slowly down the hall.
There was no way out of it. If one were successfully to be Jerry and
Ned and dad and one's self, all in one, there was nothing but school
and more school, and, yes, college, that would give one the proper
training. Dad had said it.
Keith went to school the next morning. With an oh-well-I-don't-care
air he slung his books over his shoulder and swung out the gate,
whistling blithely.
It might not be so bad, after all, he was telling himself. Perhaps the
print would be plainer now. Anyway, he could learn a lot in class
listening to the others; and maybe some of the boys would study with
him, and do the reading part.
But it was not to be so easy as Keith hoped for. To begin with, the
print had not grown any clearer. It was more blurred than ever. To be
sure, it was much worse with one eye than with the other; but he could
not keep one eye shut all the time. Besides--his eyes ached now if he
tried to use them much, and grew red and inflamed, and he was afraid
his father would notice them. He began to see strange flashes of
rainbow light now, too. And sometimes little haloes around the lamp
flame. As if one could study books with all that!
True, he learned something in class--but naturally he was never called
upon to recite what had already been given, so he invariably failed
miserably when it came to his turn. Even the "boy to study with"
proved to be a delusion and a snare, for no boy was found who cared to
do "all the reading," without being told the reason why it was
expected of him--and that was exactly what Keith was straining every
nerve to keep to himself.
And so week in and week out Keith stumbled along through those
misery-filled days, each one seemingly a little more unbearable than the
last. Of course, it could not continue indefinitely, and Keith, in his
heart, knew it. Almost every lesson was more or less of a failure, and
recitation hour was a torture and a torment. The teacher alternately
reproved and reproached him, with frequent appeals to his pride,
holding up for comparison his splendid standing of the past. His
classmates gibed and jeered mercilessly. And Keith stood it all. Only
a tightening of his lips and a new misery in his eyes showed that he
had heard and understood. He made neither apology nor explanation.
Above all, by neither word nor sign did he betray that, because the
print in his books was blurred, he could not study.
Then came the day when his report card was sent to his father, and he
himself was summoned to the studio to answer for it.
"Well, my son, what is the meaning of that?"
Keith had never seen his father look so stern. He was holding up the
card, face outward. Keith knew that the damning figures were there,
and he suspected what they were, though he could see only a blurred
mass of indistinct marks. With one last effort he attempted still to
cling to his subterfuge.
"What--what is it?" he stammered.
"'What is it?'--and in the face of a record like that!" cried his
father sternly. "That's exactly what I want to know. What is it? Is
this the way, Keith, that you're showing me that you don't want to go
to school? I haven't forgotten, you see, that you tried to beg off
going this fall. Now, what is the matter?"
Keith shifted his position miserably. His face grew white and
strained-looking.
"I--I couldn't seem to get my lessons, dad."
"Couldn't! You mean you wouldn't, Keith. Surely, you're not trying to
make me think you couldn't have made a better record than this, if
you'd tried."
There was no answer.
"Keith!" There was only pleading in the voice now--pleading with an
unsteadiness more eloquent than words. "Have you forgotten so soon
what I told you?--how now you hold all the hopes of Jerry and Ned and
of--dad in your own two hands? Keith, do you think, do you really
think you're treating Jerry and Ned and dad--square?"
For a moment there was no answer; then a very faint, constrained voice
asked:
"What were those figures, dad?"
"Read for yourself." With the words the card was thrust into his hand.
Keith bent his head. His eyes apparently were studying the card.
"Suppose you read them aloud, Keith."
There was a moment's pause; then with a little convulsive breath the
words came.
"I--can't--dad."
The man smiled grimly.
"Well, I don't know as I wonder. They are pretty bad. However, I guess
we'll have to have them. Read them aloud, Keith."
"But, honest, dad, I can't. I mean--they're all blurred and run
together." The boy's face was white like paper now.
Daniel Burton gave his son a quick glance.
"Blurred? Run together?" He reached for the card and held it a moment
before his own eyes. Then sharply he looked at his son again. "You
mean--Can't you read any of those figures--the largest ones?"
Keith shook his head.
"Why, Keith, how long----" A sudden change came to his face. "You
mean--is that the reason you haven't been able to get your lessons, boy?"
Keith nodded dumbly, miserably.
"But, my dear boy, why in the world didn't you say so? Look here,
Keith, how long has this been going on?"
There was no answer.
"Since the very first of school?"
"Before that."
"How long before that?"
"Last spring on my--birthday. I noticed it first--then."
"Good Heavens! As long as that, and never a word to me? Why, Keith,
what in the world possessed you? Why didn't you tell me? We'd have had
that fixed up long ago."
"Fixed up?" Keith's eyes were eager, incredulous.
"To be sure. We'd have had some glasses, of course."
Keith shook his head. All the light fled from his face.
"Uncle Joe Harrington tried that, but it didn't help--any."
"Uncle Joe! But Uncle Joe is----" Daniel Burton stopped short. A new
look came to his eyes. Into his son's face he threw a glance at once
fearful, searching, rebellious. Then he straightened up angrily.
"Nonsense, Keith! Don't get silly notions into your head," he snapped
sharply. "It's nothing but a little near-sightedness, and we'll have
some glasses to remedy that in no time. We'll go down to the
optician's to-morrow. Meanwhile I'll drop a note to your teacher, and
you needn't go to school again till we get your glasses."
Near-sightedness! Keith caught at the straw and held to it fiercely.
Near-sightedness! Of course, it was that, and not blindness, like
Uncle Joe's at all. Didn't dad know? Of course, he did! Still, if it
was near-sightedness he ought to be able to see near to; and yet it
was just as blurred--But, then, of course it WAS near-sightedness. Dad
said it was.
They went to the optician's the next morning. It seemed there was an
oculist, too, and he had to be seen. When the lengthy and arduous
examinations were concluded, Keith drew a long breath. Surely now,
after all that--
Just what they said Keith did not know. He knew only that he did not
get any glasses, and that his father was very angry, and very much put
out about something, and that he kept declaring that these old idiots
didn't know their business, anyway, and the only thing to do was to go
to Boston where there was somebody who DID know his business.
They went to Boston a few days later. It was not a long journey, but
Keith hailed it with delight, and was very much excited over the
prospect of it. Still, he did not enjoy it very well, for with his
father he had to go from one doctor to another, and none of them
seemed really to understand his business--that is, not well enough to
satisfy his father, else why did he go to so many? And there did not
seem to be anywhere any glasses that would do any good.
Keith began to worry then, for fear that his father had been wrong,
and that it was not near-sightedness after all. He could not forget
Uncle Joe--and Uncle Joe had not been able to find any glasses that
did any good. Besides, he heard his father and the doctors talking a
great deal about "an accident," and a "consequent injury to the optic
nerve"; and he had to answer a lot of questions about the time when he
was eleven years old and ran into the big maple tree with his sled,
cutting a bad gash in his forehead. But as if that, so long ago, could
have anything to do with things looking blurred now!
But it did have something to do with it--several of the doctors said
that; and they said it was possible that a slight operation now might
arrest the disease. They would try it. Only one eye was badly affected
at present.
So it was arranged that Keith should stay a month with one of the
doctors, letting his father go back to Hinsdale.
It was not a pleasant experience, and it seemed to Keith anything but
a "slight operation"; but at the end of the month the bandages were
off, and his father had come to take him back home.
The print was not quite so blurred now, though it was still far from
clear, and Keith noticed that his father and the doctors had a great
deal to say to each other in very low tones, and that his father's
face was very grave.
Then they started for home. On the journey his father talked
cheerfully, even gayly; but Keith was not at all deceived. For perhaps
half an hour he watched his father closely. Then he spoke.
"Dad, you might just as well tell me."
"Tell you what?"
"About those doctors--what they said."
"Why, they said all sorts of things, Keith. You heard them yourself."
The man spoke lightly, still cheerily.
"Oh, yes, they said all sorts of things, but they didn't say anything
PARTICULAR before me. They always talked to you soft and low on one
side. I want to know what they said then."
"Why, really, Keith, they----"
"Dad," interposed the boy a bit tensely, when his father's hesitation
left the sentence unfinished, "you might just as well tell me. I know
already it isn't good, or you'd have told me right away. And if it's
bad--I might just as well know it now, 'cause I'll have to know it
sometime. Dad, what did they say? Don't worry. I can stand it--honest,
I can. I've GOT to stand it. Besides, I've been expecting it--ever so
long. 'Keith, you're going to be blind.' I wish't you'd say it right
out like that--if you've got to say it."
But the man shuddered and gave a low cry.
"No, no, Keith, never! I'll not say it. You're not going to be blind!"
"But didn't they say I was?"
"They said--they said it MIGHT be. They couldn't tell yet." The man
wet his lips and cleared his throat huskily. "They said--it would be
some time yet before they could tell, for sure. And even then, if it
came, there might be another operation that--But for now, Keith, we've
got to wait--that's all. I've got some drops, and there are certain
things you'll have to do each day. You can't go to school, and you
can't read, of course; but there are lots of things you can do. And
there are lots of things we can do together--you'll see. And it's
coming out all right. It's bound to come out all right."
"Yes, sir." Keith said the two words, then shut his lips tight. Keith
could not trust himself to talk much just then. Babies and girls
cried, of course; but men, and boys who were almost men--they did not
cry.
For a long minute he said nothing; then, with his chin held high and
his breath sternly under control, he said:
"Of course, dad, if I do get blind, you won't expect me to be Jerry,
and Ned, and--and you, all in a bunch, then, will you?"
This time it was dad who could not speak--except with a strong right
arm that clasped with a pressure that hurt.
CHAPTER V
WAITING
Not for some days after his return from Boston did Keith venture out
upon the street. He knew then at once that the whole town had heard
all about his trip to Boston and what the doctors had said. He tried
not to see the curious glances cast in his direction. He tried not to
care that the youngest McGuire children stood at their gate and
whispered, with fingers plainly pointing toward himself.
He did not go near the schoolhouse, and he stayed at the post-office
until he felt sure all the scholars must have reached home. Then, just
at the corner of his own street, he met Mazie Sanborn and Dorothy
Parkman face to face. He would have passed quickly, with the briefest
sort of recognition, but Mazie stopped him short.
"Keith, oh, Keith, it isn't true, is it?" she cried breathlessly. "You
aren't going to be blind?"
"Mazie, how could you!" cried Dorothy sharply. And because she
shuddered and half turned away, Keith saw only the shudder and the
turning away, and did not realize that it was rebuke and remonstrance,
and not aversion, that Dorothy was expressing so forcibly.
Keith stiffened.
"Say, Keith, I'm awfully sorry, and so's Dorothy. Why, she hasn't
talked about a thing, hardly, but that, since she heard of it."
"Mazie, I have, too," protested Dorothy sharply.
"Well, anyway, it was she who insisted on coming around this way
to-day," teased Mazie wickedly; "and when I----"
"I'm going home, whether you are or not," cut in Miss Dorothy, with
dignity. And with a low chuckle Mazie tossed a good-bye to Keith and
followed her lead.
Keith, his chin aggressively high, strode in the opposite direction.
"I suppose she wanted to see how really bad I did look," he was
muttering fiercely, under his breath. "Well, she needn't worry. If I
do get blind, I'll take good care she don't have to look at me, nor
Mazie, nor any of the rest of them."
Keith went out on the street very little after that, and especially he
kept away from it after school hours. They were not easy--those winter
days. The snow lay deep in the woods, and it was too cold for long
walks. He could not read, nor paint, nor draw, nor use his eyes about
anything that tried them. But he was by no means idle. He had found
now "the boy to do the reading"--his father. For hours every day they
studied together, Keith memorizing, where it was necessary, what his
father read, always discussing and working out the problems together.
That he could not paint or draw was a great cross to his father, he
knew.
Keith noticed, too,--and noticed it with a growing heartache,--that
nothing was ever said now about his being Jerry and Ned and dad
himself all in a bunch. And he understood, of course, that if he was
going to be blind, he could not be Jerry and--
But Keith was honestly trying not to think of that; and he welcomed
most heartily anything or anybody that helped him toward that end.
Now there was Susan. Not once had Susan ever spoken to him of his
eyes, whether he could or could not see. But Susan knew about it. He
was sure of that. First he suspected it when he found her, the next
day after his return from Boston, crying in the pantry.
SUSAN CRYING! Keith stood in the doorway and stared unbelievingly. He
had not supposed that Susan could cry.
"Why, Susan!" he gasped. "What IS the matter?"
He never forgot the look on Susan's face as she sprang toward him, or
the quick cry she gave.
"Oh, Keith, my boy, my boy!" Then instantly she straightened back,
caught up a knife, and began to peel an onion from a pan on the shelf
before her. "Cryin'? Nonsense!" she snapped quaveringly. "Can't a body
peel a pan of onions without being accused of cryin' about somethin'?
Shucks! What should I be cryin' for, anyway, to be sure?
Some things need a knife,
An' some things need a pill,
An' some things jest a laugh'll make a cure.
But jest you bet your life,
You may cry jest fit to kill,
An' never cure nothin'--that is sure.
That's what I always say when I see folks cryin'. An' it's so, too.
Here, Keith, want a cooky? An' take a jam tart, too. I made 'em this
mornin', 'specially for you."
With which astounding procedure--for her--Susan pushed a plate of
cookies and tarts toward him, then picked up her pan of onions and
hurried into the kitchen.
Once again Keith stared. Cookies and jam tarts, and made for him? If
anything, this was even more incomprehensible than were the tears in
Susan's eyes. Then suddenly the suspicion came to him--SUSAN KNEW. And
this was her way----
The suspicion did not become a certainty, however, until two days
later. Then he overheard Susan and Mrs. McGuire talking in the
kitchen. He had slipped into the pantry to look for another of those
cookies made for him, when he heard Mrs. McGuire burst into the
kitchen and accost Susan agitatedly. And her first words were such
that he could not bring himself to step out into view.
"Susan," she had cried, "it ain't true, is it? IS it true that Keith
Burton is going--BLIND? My John says----"
"Sh-h! You don't have to shout it out like that, do ye?" demanded
Susan crossly, yet in a voice that was far from steady. "Besides,
that's a very extravagated statement."
"You mean exaggerated, I suppose," retorted Mrs. McGuire impatiently.
"Well, I'm sure I'm glad if it is, of course. But can't you tell me
anything about it? Or, don't you know?"
Keith knew--though he could not see her--just how Susan was drawing
herself up to her full height.
"I guess I know--all there is to know, Mis' McGuire," she said then
coldly. "But there ain't anybody KNOWS anything. We're jest waitin' to
see." Her voice had grown unsteady again.
"You mean he MAY be blind, later?"
"Yes."
"Oh, the poor boy! Ain't that terrible? How CAN they stand it?"
"I notice there are things in this world that have to be stood. An'
when they have to be stood, they might as well be--stood, an' done
with it."
"Yes, I suppose so," sighed Mrs. McGuire. Then, after a pause: "But
what is it--that's makin' him blind?"
"I don't know. They ain't sayin'. I thought maybe't was a catamount,
but they say't ain't that."
"But when is it liable to come?"
"Come? How do I know? How does anybody know?" snapped Susan tartly.
"Look a-here, Mis' McGuire, you must excuse me from discoursin'
particulars. We don't talk 'em here. None of us don't."
"Well, you needn't be so short about it, Susan Betts. I'm only tryin'
to show a little sympathy. You don't seem to realize at all what a
dreadful thing this is. My John says----"
"Don't I--DON'T I?" Susan's voice shook with emotion. "Don't you
s'pose that I know what it would be with the sun put out, an' the moon
an' the stars, an' never a thing to look at but black darkness all the
rest of your life? Never to be able to see the blue sky, or your
father's face, or--But talkin' about it don't help any. Look a-here,
if somethin' awful was goin' to happen to you, would YOU want folks to
be talkin' to you all the time about it? No, I guess you wouldn't. An'
so we don't talk here. We're just--waitin'. It may come in a year, it
may come sooner, or later. It may not come at all. An' while we ARE
waitin' there ain't nothin' we can do except to do ev'rything the
doctor tells us, an' hope--'t won't ever come."
Even Mrs. McGuire could have had no further doubt about Susan's
"caring." No one who heard Susan's voice then could have doubted it.
Mrs. McGuire, for a moment, made no answer; then, with an inarticulate
something that might have passed for almost any sort of comment, she
rose to her feet and left the house.
In the pantry, Keith, the cookies long since forgotten, shamelessly
listened at the door and held his breath to see which way Susan's
footsteps led. Then, when he knew that the kitchen was empty, he
slipped out, still cookyless, and hurried upstairs to his own room.
Keith understood, after that, why Susan did not talk to him about his
eyes; and because he knew she would not talk, he felt at ease and at
peace with her.
It was not so with others. With others (except with his father) he
never knew when a dread question or a hated comment was to be made.
And so he came to avoid those others more and more.
At the first signs of spring, and long before the snow was off the
ground, Keith took to the woods. When his father did not care to go,
he went alone. It was as if he wanted to fill his inner consciousness
with the sights and sounds of his beloved out-of-doors, so that when
his outer eyes were darkened, his inner eyes might still hold the
pictures. Keith did not say this, even to himself; but when every day
Susan questioned him minutely as to what he had seen, and begged him
to describe every budding tree and every sunset, he wondered; was it
possible that Susan, too, was trying to fill that inner consciousness
with visions?
Keith was thrown a good deal with Susan these days. Sometimes it
seemed as if there were almost no one but Susan. Certainly all those
others who talked and questioned--he did not want to be with them. And
his father--sometimes it seemed to Keith that his father did not like
to be with him as well as he used to. And, of course, if he was going
to be blind--Dad never had liked disagreeable subjects. Had HE
become--a disagreeable subject?
And so there seemed, indeed, at times, no one but Susan. Susan,
however, was a host in herself. Susan was never cross now, and almost
always she had a cooky or a jam tart for him. She told lots of funny
stories, and there were always her rhymes and jingles. She had a new
one every day, sometimes two or three a day.
There was no subject too big or too little for Susan to put into
rhyme. Susan said that something inside of her was a gushing siphon of
poems, anyway, and she just had to get them out of her system. And she
told Keith that spring always made the siphon gush worse than ever,
for some reason. She didn't know why.
Keith suspected that she said this by way of an excuse for repeating
so many of her verses to him just now. But Keith was not deceived. He
had not forgotten what Susan had said to Mrs. McGuire in the kitchen
that day; and he knew very well that all this especial attention to
him was only Susan's way of trying to help him "wait."
CHAPTER VI
LIGHTS OUT
And so Keith waited, through the summer and into another winter. And
April came. Keith was not listening to Susan's rhymes and jingles now,
nor was he tramping through the woods in search of the first sign of
spring. Both eyes had become badly affected now. Keith knew that and--
THE FOG HAD COME. Keith had seen the fog for several days before he
knew what it was. He had supposed it to be really--fog. Then one day
he said to Susan:
"Where's the sun? We haven't had any BRIGHT sun for days and days--just
this horrid old foggy fog."
"Fog? Why, there ain't any fog!" exclaimed Susan. "The sun is as
bright----" She stopped short. Keith could not see her face very
clearly--Keith was not seeing anything clearly these days. "Nonsense,
Keith, of course, the sun is shinin'!" snapped Susan. "Now don't get
silly notions in your head!" Then she turned and hurried from the
room.
And Keith knew. And he knew that Susan knew.
Keith did not mention the fog to his father--dad did not like
disagreeable subjects. But somebody must have mentioned it--Susan,
perhaps. At all events, before the week was out Keith went with his
father again to Boston.
It was a sorry journey. Keith did not need to go to Boston. Keith knew
now. There was no one who could tell him anything. Dad might laugh and
joke and call attention to everything amusing that he wanted to--it
would make no difference. Besides, as if he could not hear the shake
in dad's voice under all the fun, and as if he could not feel the
tremble in dad's hand on his shoulder!
Boston was the same dreary round of testing, talk, and questions,
hushed voices and furtive glances, hurried trips from place to place;
only this time it was all sharper, shorter, more decisive, and there
was no operation. It was not the time for that now, the doctors said.
Moreover, this time dad did not laugh, or joke, or even talk on the
homeward journey. But that, too, made no difference. Keith already
knew.
He knew so well that he did not question him at all. But if he had not
known, he would have known from Susan the next day. For he found Susan
crying three times the next forenoon, and each time she snapped out so
short and sharp about something so entirely foreign from what he asked
her that he would have known that Susan knew.
Keith did wonder how many months it would be. Some way he had an idea
it would be very few now. As long as it was coming he wished it would
come, and come quick. This waiting business--On the whole he was glad
that Susan was cross, and that his father spent his days shut away in
his own room with orders that he was not to be disturbed. For, as for
talking about this thing--
It was toward the last of July that Keith discovered how indistinct
were growing the outlines of the big pictures on the wall at the end
of the hall. Day by day he had to walk nearer and nearer before he
could see them at all. He wondered just how many steps would bring him
to the wall itself. He was tempted once to count them--but he could
not bring himself to do that; so he knew then that in his heart he did
not want to know just how many days it would be before--
But there came a day when he was but two steps away. He told himself
it would be in two days then. But it did not come in two days. It did
not come in a week. Then, very suddenly, it came.
He woke up one morning to find it quite dark. For a minute he thought
it WAS dark; then the clock struck seven--and it was August.
Something within Keith seemed to snap then. The long-pent strain of
months gave way. With one agonized cry of "Dad, it's come--it's come!"
he sprang from the bed, then stood motionless in the middle of the
room, his arms outstretched. But when his father and Susan reached the
room he had fallen to the floor in a dead faint.
It was some weeks before Keith stood upright on his feet again. His
illness was a long and serious one. Late in September, Mrs. McGuire,
hanging out her clothes, accosted Susan over the back-yard fence.
"I heard down to the store last night that Keith Burton was goin' to
get well."
"Of course he's goin' to get well," retorted Susan with emphasis. "I
knew he was, all the time."
"All the same, I think it's a pity he is." Mrs. McGuire's lips came
together a bit firmly. "He's stone blind, I hear, an' my John says--"
"Well, what if he is?" demanded Susan, almost fiercely. "You wouldn't
kill the child, would you? Besides SEEIN' is only one of his
facilities. He's got all the rest left. I reckon he'll show you he can
do somethin' with them."
Mrs. McGuire shook her head mournfully.
"Poor boy, poor boy! How's he feel himself? Has he got his senses, his
real senses yet?"
"He's just beginnin' to." The harshness in Susan's voice betrayed her
difficulty in controlling it. "Up to now he hain't sensed anything,
much. Of course, part of the time he hain't known ANYTHING--jest lay
there in a stupid. Then, other times he's jest moaned of-of the
dark--always the dark.
"At first he--when he talked--seemed to be walkin' through the woods;
an' he'd tell all about what he saw; the 'purple sunsets,' an'
'dancin' leaves,' an' the merry little brooks hurryin' down the
hillside,' till you could jest SEE the place he was talkin' about. But
now--now he's comin' to full conscientiousness, the doctor says; an'
he don't talk of anything only--only the dark. An' pretty quick
he'll--know."
"An' yet you want that poor child to live, Susan Betts!"
"Of course I want him to live!"
"But what can he DO?"
"Do? There ain't nothin' he can't do. Why, Mis' McGuire, listen! I've
been readin' up. First, I felt as you do--a little. I--I didn't WANT
him to live. Then I heard of somebody who was blind, an' what he did.
He wrote a great book. I've forgotten its name, but it was somethin'
about Paradise. PARADISE--an' he was in prison, too. Think of writin'
about Paradise when you're shut up in jail--an' blind, at that! Well,
I made up my mind if that man could see Paradise through them prison
bars with his poor blind eyes, then Keith could. An' I was goin' to
have him do it, too. An' so I went down to the library an' asked Miss
Hemenway for a book about him. An' I read it. An' then she told me
about more an' more folks that was blind, an' what they had done. An'
I read about them, too."
"Well, gracious me, Susan Betts, if you ain't the limit!" commented
Mrs. McGuire, half admiringly, half disapprovingly.
"Well, I did. An'--why, Mis' McGuire, you hain't any inception of an
idea of what those men an' women an'--yes, children--did. Why, one of
'em wasn't only blind, but deaf an' dumb, too. She was a girl. An' now
she writes books an' gives lecturin's, an', oh, ev'rything."
"Maybe. I ain't sayin' they don't. But I guess somebody else has to do
a part of it. Look at Keith right here now. How are you goin' to take
care of him when he gets up an' begins to walk around? Why, he can't
see to walk or--or feed himself, or anything. Has the nurse gone?"
Susan shook her head. Her lips came together grimly.
"No. Goes next week, though. Land's sakes, but I hope that woman is
expulsive enough! Them entrained nurses always cost a lot, I guess.
But we've just had to have her while he was so sick. But she's goin'
next week."
"But what ARE you goin' to do? You can't tag him around all day an' do
your other work, too. Of course, there's his father--"
"His father! Good Heavens, woman, I wonder if you think I'd trust that
boy to his father?" demanded Susan indignantly. "Why, once let him get
his nose into that paint-box, an' he don't know anything--not
anything. Why, I wouldn't trust him with a baby rabbit--if I cared for
the rabbit. Besides, he don't like to be with Keith, nor see him, nor
think of him. He feels so bad."
"Humph! Well, if he does feel bad I don't think that's a very nice way
to show it. Not think of him, indeed! Well, I guess he'll find SOME
one has got to think of him now. But there! that's what you might
expect of Daniel Burton, I s'pose, moonin' all day over those silly
pictures of his. As my John says--"
"They're not silly pictures," cut in Susan, flaring into instant
wrath. "He HAS to paint pictures in order to get money to live, don't
he? Well, then, let him paint. He's an artist--an extinguished
artist--not just a common storekeeper." (Mr. McGuire, it might be
mentioned in passing, kept a grocery store.) "An' if you're
artistical, you're different from other folks. You have to be."
"Nonsense, Susan! That's all bosh, an' you know it. What if he does
paint pictures? That hadn't ought to hinder him from takin' proper
care of his own son, had it?"
"Yes, if he's blind." Susan spoke with firmness and decision. "You
don't seem to understand at all, Mis' McGuire. Mr. Burton is an
artist. Artists like flowers an' sunsets an' clouds an' brooks. They
don't like disagreeable things. They don't want to see 'em or think
about 'em. I know. It's that way with Mr. Burton. Before, when Keith
was all right, he couldn't bear him out of his sight, an' he was goin'
to have him do such big, fine, splendid things when he grew up. Now,
since he's blind, he can't bear him IN his sight. He feels that bad.
He just won't be with him if he can help it. But he ain't forgettin'
him. He's thinkin' of him all the time. _I_ KNOW. An' it's tellin' on
him. He's lookin' thin an' bad an' sick. You see, he's so
disappointed, when he'd counted on such big things for that boy!"
"Humph! Well, I'll risk HIM. It's Keith I'm worry in' about. Who is
going to take care of him?"
Susan Betts frowned.
"Well, _I_ could, I think. But there's a sister of Mr. Burton's--she's
comin'."
"Not Nettie Colebrook?"
"Yes, Mis' Colebrook. That's her name. She's a widow, an' hain't got
anything needin' her. She wrote an' offered, an' Mr. Burton said yes,
if she'd be so kind. An' she's comin'."
"When?"
"Next week. The day the nurse goes. Why? What makes you look so queer?
Do you know--Mis' Colebrook?"
"Know Nettie Burton Colebrook? Well, I should say I did! I went to
boardin'-school with her."
"Humph!" Susan threw a sharp glance into Mrs. McGuire's face. Susan
looked as if she wanted to ask another question. But she did not ask
it. "Humph!" she grunted again; and turned back to the sheet she was
hanging on the line.
There was a brief pause, then Mrs. McGuire commented dryly:
"I notice you ain't doin' no rhymin' to-day, Susan."
"Ain't I? Well, perhaps I ain't. Some way, they don't come out now so
natural an' easy-like."
"What's the matter? Ain't the machine workin'?"
Susan shook her head. Then she drew a long sigh. Picking up her empty
basket she looked at it somberly.
"Not the way it did before. Some way, there don't seem anything inside
of me now only dirges an' funeral marches. Everywhere, all day,
everything I do an' everywhere I go I jest hear: 'Keith's blind,
Keith's blind!' till it seems as if I jest couldn't bear it."
With something very like a sob Susan turned and hurried into the
house.
CHAPTER VII
SUSAN TO THE RESCUE
It was when the nurse was resting and Susan was with Keith that the
boy came to a full, realizing sense of himself, on his lips the
time-worn question asked by countless other minds back from that
mysterious land of delirium:
"Where am I?"
Susan sprang to her feet, then dropped on her knees at the bedside.
"In your own bed--honey."
"Is that--Susan?" No wonder he asked the question. Whenever before had
Susan talked like that?
"Sure it's Susan."
"But I can't--see you--or anything. Oh-h!" With a shudder and a
quivering cry the boy flung out his hands, then covered his eyes with
them. "I know, now, I know! It's come--it's come! I am--BLIND!"
"There, there, honey, don't, please don't. You'll break Susan's heart.
An' you're SO much better now."
"Better?"
"Yes. You've been sick--very sick."
"How long?"
"Oh, several weeks. It's October now."
"And I've been blind all that time?"
"Yes."
"But I haven't known I was blind!"
"No."
"I want to go back--I want to go back, where I didn't know--again."
"Nonsense, Keith!" (Susan was beginning to talk more like herself.)
"Go back to be sick? Of course you don't want to go back an' be sick!
Listen!
Don't you worry, an' don't you fret.
Somethin' better is comin' yet.
Somethin' fine! What'll you bet?
It's jest the thing you're wantin' ter get!
Come, come! We're goin' to have you up an' out in no time, now, boy!"
"I don't want to be up and out. I'm blind, Susan."
"An' there's your dad. He'll be mighty glad to know you're better.
I'll call him."
"No, no, Susan--don't! Don't call him. He won't want to see me. Nobody
will want to see me now. I'm blind, Susan--blind!"
"Shucks! Everybody will want to see you, so's to see how splendid you
are, even if you are blind. Now don't talk any more--please don't;
there's a good boy. You're gettin' yourself all worked up, an' then,
oh, my, how that nurse will scold!"
"I shan't be splendid," moaned the boy. "I shan't be anything, now. I
shan't be Jerry or Ned or dad. I shall be just ME. And I'll be pointed
at everywhere; and they'll whisper and look and stare, and say, 'He's
blind--he's blind--he's blind.' I tell you, Susan, I can't stand it. I
can't--I can't! I want to go back. I want to go back to where I
didn't--KNOW!"
The nurse came in then, and of course Susan was banished in disgrace.
Of course, too, Keith was almost in hysterics, and his fever had gone
away up again. He still talked in a high, shrill voice, and still
thrashed his arms wildly about, till the little white powder the nurse
gave him got in its blessed work. And then he slept.
Keith was entirely conscious the next day when Susan came in to sit
with him while the nurse took her rest. But it was a very different
Keith. It was a weary, spent, nerveless Keith that lay back on the
pillow with scarcely so much as the flutter of an eyelid to show life.
"Is there anything I can get you, Keith?" she asked, when a long-drawn
sigh convinced her that he was awake.
Only a faint shake of the head answered her.
"The doctor says you're lots better, Keith."
There was no sort of reply to this; and for another long minute Susan
sat tense and motionless, watching the boy's face. Then, with almost a
guilty look over her shoulder, she stammered:
"Keith, I don't want you to talk to me, but I do wish you'd just SPEAK
to me."
But Keith only shook his head again faintly and turned his face away
to the wall.
By and by the nurse came in, and Susan left the room. She went
straight to the kitchen, and she did not so much as look toward
Keith's father whom she met in the hall. In the kitchen Susan caught
up a cloth and vigorously began to polish a brass faucet. The faucet
was already a marvel of brightness; but perhaps Susan could not see
that. One cannot always see clearly--through tears.
Keith was like this every day after that, when Susan came in to sit
with him--silent, listless, seemingly devoid of life. Yet the doctor
declared that physically the boy was practically well. And the nurse
was going at the end of the week.
On the last day of the nurse's stay, Susan accosted her in the hall
somewhat abruptly.
"Is it true that by an' by there could be an operator on that boy's
eyes?"
"Oper--er--oh, operation! Yes, there might be, if he could only get
strong enough to stand it. But it might not be successful, even then."
"But there's a chance?"
"Yes, there's a chance."
"I s'pose it--it would be mighty expulsive, though."
"Expulsive?" The young woman frowned slightly; then suddenly she
smiled. "Oh! Oh, yes, I--I'm afraid it would--er--cost a good deal of
money," she nodded over her shoulder as she went on into Keith's room.
That evening Susan sought her employer in the studio. Daniel Burton
spent all his waking hours in the studio now. The woods and fields
were nothing but a barren desert of loneliness to Daniel Burton--without
Keith.
The very poise of Susan's head spelt aggressive determination as she
entered the studio; and Daniel Burton shifted uneasily in his chair as
he faced her. Nor did he fail to note that she carried some folded
papers in her hand.
"Yes, yes, Susan, I know. Those bills are due, and past due," he cried
nervously, before Susan could speak. "And I hoped to have the money,
both for them and for your wages, long before this. But----"
Susan stopped him short with an imperative gesture.
"T ain't bills, Mr. Burton, an't ain't wages. It's--it's somethin'
else. Somethin' very importune." There was a subdued excitement in
Susan's face and manner that was puzzling, yet most promising.
Unconsciously Daniel Burton sat a little straighter and lifted his
chin--though his eyes were smiling.
"Something else?"
"Yes. It's--poetry."
"Oh, SUSAN!" It was as if a bubble had been pricked, leaving nothing
but empty air.
"But you don't know--you don't understand, yet," pleaded Susan,
unerringly reading the disappointment in her employer's face. "It's to
sell--to get some money, you know, for the operator on the poor lamb's
eyes. I--I wanted to help, some way. An' this is REAL poetry--truly it
is!--not the immaculate kind that I jest dash off! I've worked an'
worked over this, an' I'm jest sure it'll sell, It's GOT to sell, Mr.
Burton. We've jest got to have that money. An' now, I--I want to read
'em to you. Can't I, please?"
And this from Susan--this palpitating, pleading "please"! Daniel
Burton, with a helpless gesture that expressed embarrassment, dismay,
bewilderment, and resignation, threw up both hands and settled back in
his chair.
"Why, of--of course, Susan, read them," he muttered as clearly as he
could, considering the tightness that had come into his throat.
And Susan read this:
SPRING
Oh, gentle Spring, I love thy rills,
I love thy wooden, rocky rills,
I love thy budsome beauty.
But, oh, I hate o'er anything,
Thy mud an' slush, oh, gentle Spring,
When rubbers are a duty.
"That's the shortest--the other is longer," explained Susan, still the
extraordinary, palpitating Susan, with the shining, pleading eyes.
"Yes, go on." Daniel Burton had to clear his throat before he could
say even those two short words.
"I called this 'Them Things That Plague,'" said Susan. "An' it's
really true, too. Don't you know? Things DO plague worse nights, when
you can't sleep. An' you get to thinkin' an' thinkin'. Well, that's
what made me write this." And she began to read:
THEM THINGS THAT PLAGUE
They come at night, them things that plague,
An' gather round my bed.
They cluster thick about the foot,
An' lean on top the head.
They like the dark, them things that plague,
For then they can be great,
They loom like doom from out the gloom,
An' shriek: "I am your Fate!"
But, after all, them things that plague
Are cowards--Say not you?--
To strike a man when he is down,
An' in the darkness, too.
For if you'll watch them things that plague,
Till comin' of the dawn,
You'll find, when once you're on your feet,
Them things that plague--are gone!
"There, ain't that true--every word of it?" she demanded. "An' there
ain't hardly any poem license in it, too. I think they're a ways lots
better when there ain't; but sometimes, of course, you jest have to
use it. There! an' now I've read 'em both to you--an' how much do you
s'pose I can get for 'em--the two of 'em, either singly or doubly?"
Susan was still breathless, still shining-eyed--a strange, exotic
Susan, that Daniel Burton had never seen before. "I've heard that
writers--some writers--get lots of money, Mr. Burton, an' I can write
more--lots more. Why, when I get to goin' they jest come
autocratically--poems do--without any thinkin' at all; an'--But how
much DO you think I ought to get?"
"Get? Good Heavens woman!" Daniel Burton was on his feet now trying to
shake off the conflicting emotions that were all but paralyzing him.
"Why, you can't get anything for those da----" Just in time he pulled
himself up. At that moment, too, he saw Susan's face. He sat down
limply.
"Susan." He cleared his throat and began again. He tried to speak
clearly, judiciously, kindly. "Susan, I'm afraid--that is, I'm not
sure--Oh, hang it all, woman"--he was on his feet now--"send them, if
you want to--but don't blame me for the consequences." And with a
gesture, as of flinging the whole thing far from him, he turned his
back and walked away.
"You mean--you don't think I can get hardly anything for 'em?" An
extraordinarily meek, fearful Susan asked the question.
Only a shrug of the back-turned shoulders answered her.
"But, Mr. Burton, we--we've got to have the money for that operator;
an', anyhow, I--I mean to try." With a quick indrawing of her breath
she turned abruptly and left the studio.
That evening, in her own room, Susan pored over the two inexpensive
magazines that came to the house. She was searching for poems and for
addresses.
As she worked she began to look more cheerful. Both the magazines
published poems, and if they published one poem they would another, of
course, especially if the poem were a better one--and Susan could not
help feeling that they were better (those poems of hers) than almost
any she saw there in print before her. There was some SENSE to her
poems, while those others--why, some of them didn't mean anything, not
anything!--and they didn't even rhyme!
With real hope and courage, therefore, Susan laboriously copied off
the addresses of the two magazines, directed two envelopes, and set
herself to writing the first of her two letters. That done, she copied
the letter, word for word--except for the title of the poem submitted.
It was a long letter. Susan told first of Keith and his misfortune,
and the imperative need of money for the operation. Then she told
something of herself, and of her habit of turning everything into
rhyme; for she felt it due to them, she said, that they know something
of the person with whom they were dealing. She touched again on the
poverty of the household, and let it plainly be seen that she had high
hopes of the money these poems were going to bring. She did not set a
price. She would leave that to their own indiscretion, she said in
closing.
It was midnight before Susan had copied this letter and prepared the
two manuscripts for mailing. Then, tired, but happy, she went to bed.
It was the next day that the nurse went, and that Mrs. Colebrook came.
The doctor said that Keith might be dressed now, any day--that he
should be dressed, in fact, and begin to take some exercise. He had
already sat up in a chair every day for a week--and he was in no
further need of medicine, except a tonic to build him up. In fact, all
efforts now should be turned toward building him up, the doctor said.
That was what he needed.
All this the nurse mentioned to Mr. Burton and to Susan, as she was
leaving. She went away at two o'clock, and Mrs. Colebrook was not to
come until half-past five. At one minute past two Susan crept to the
door of Keith's room and pushed it open softly. The boy, his face to
the wall, lay motionless. But he was not asleep. Susan knew that, for
she had heard his voice not five minutes before, bidding the nurse
good-bye. For one brief moment Susan hesitated. Then, briskly, she
stepped into the room with a cheery:
"Well, Keith, here we are, just ourselves together. The nurse is gone
an' I am on--how do you like the weather?"
"Yes, I know, she said she was going." The boy spoke listlessly,
wearily, without turning his head.
"What do you say to gettin' up?"
Keith stirred restlessly.
"I was up this morning."
"Ho!" Susan tossed her head disdainfully. "I don't mean THAT way. I
mean up--really up with your clothes on."
The boy shook his head again.
"I couldn't. I--I'm too tired."
"Nonsense! A great boy like you bein' too tired to get up! Why Keith,
it'll do you good. You'll feel lots better when you're up an' dressed
like folks again."
The boy gave a sudden cry.
"That's just it, Susan. Don't you see? I'll never be--like folks
again."
"Nonsense! Jest as if a little thing like bein' blind was goin' to
keep you from bein' like folks again!" Susan was speaking very loudly,
very cheerfully--though with first one hand, then the other, she was
brushing away the hot tears that were rolling down her cheeks. "Why,
Keith, you're goin' to be better than folks--jest common folks. You're
goin' to do the most wonderful things that----"
"But I can't--I'm blind, I tell you!" cut in the boy. "I can't
do--anything, now."
"But you can, an' you're goin' to," insisted Susan again. "You jest
wait till I tell you; an' it's because you ARE blind that it's goin'
to be so wonderful. But you can't do it jest lyin' abed there in that
lazy fashion. Come, I'm goin' to get your clothes an' put 'em right on
this chair here by the bed; then I'm goin' to give you twenty minutes
to get into 'em. I shan't give you but fifteen tomorrow." Susan was
moving swiftly around the room now, opening closet doors and bureau
drawers.
"No, no, Susan, I can't get up," moaned the boy turning his face back
to the wall. "I can't--I can't!"
"Yes, you can. Now, listen. They're all here, everything you need, on
these two chairs by the bed."
"But how can I dress me when I can't see a thing?"
"You can feel, can't you?"
"Y-yes. But feeling isn't seeing. You don't KNOW."
Susan gave a sudden laugh--she would have told you it was a laugh--but
it sounded more like a sob.
"But I do know, an' that's the funny part of it, Keith," she cried.
"Listen! What do you s'pose your poor old Susan's been doin'? You'd
never guess in a million years, so I'm goin' to tell you. For the last
three mornin's she's tied up her eyes with a handkerchief an' then
DRESSED herself, jest to make sure it COULD be done, you know."
"Susan, did you, really?" For the first time a faint trace of interest
came into the boy's face.
"Sure I did! An' Keith, it was great fun, really, jest to see how
smart I could be, doin' it. An' I timed myself, too. It took me
twenty-five minutes the first time. Dear, dear, but I was clumsy! But
I can do it lots quicker now, though I don't believe I'll ever do it
as quick as you will."
"Do you think I could do it, really?"
"I know you could."
"I could try," faltered Keith dubiously.
"You ain't goin' to TRY, you're goin' to DO it," declared Susan. "Now,
listen. I'm goin' out, but in jest twenty minutes I'm comin' back, an'
I shall expect to find you all dressed. I--I shall be ashamed of you
if you ain't." And without another glance at the boy, and before he
could possibly protest, Susan hurried from the room.
Her head was still high, and her voice still determinedly clear--but
in the hall outside the bedroom, Susan burst into such a storm of sobs
that she had to hurry to the kitchen and shut herself in the pantry
lest they be heard.
Later, when she had scornfully lashed herself into calmness, she came
out into the kitchen and looked at the clock.
"An' I've been in there five minutes, I'll bet ye, over that fool cry
in'," she stormed hotly to herself. "Great one, I am, to take care of
that boy, if I can't control myself better than this!"
At the end of what she deemed to be twenty minutes, and after a
fruitless "puttering" about the kitchen, Susan marched determinedly
upstairs to Keith's room. At the door she did hesitate a breathless
minute, then, resolutely, she pushed it open.
The boy, fully dressed, stood by the bed. His face was alight, almost
eager.
"I did it--I did it, Susan! And if it hasn't been more than twenty
minutes, I did it sooner than you!"
Susan tried to speak; but the tears were again chasing each other down
her cheeks, and her face was working with emotion.
"Susan!" The boy put out his hand gropingly, turning his head with the
pitiful uncertainty of the blind. "Susan, you are there, aren't you?"
Susan caught her breath chokingly, and strode into the room with a
brisk clatter.
"Here? Sure I'm here--but so dumb with amazement an' admiration that I
couldn't open my head--to see you standin' there all dressed like
that! What did I tell you? I knew you could do it. Now, come, let's go
see dad." She was at his side now, her arm linked into his.
But the boy drew back.
"No, no, Susan, not there. He--he wouldn't like it. Truly, he--he
doesn't want to see me. You know he--he doesn't like to see
disagreeable things."
"'Disagreeable things,' indeed!" exploded Susan, her features working
again. "Well, I guess if he calls it disagreeable to see his son
dressed up an' walkin' around--"
But Keith interrupted her once more, with an even stronger protest,
and Susan was forced to content herself with leading her charge out on
to the broad veranda that ran across the entire front of the house.
There they walked back and forth, back and forth.
She was glad, afterward, that this was all she did, for at the far end
of the veranda Daniel Burton stepped out from a door, and stood for a
moment watching them. But it was for only a moment. And when she
begged mutely for him to come forward and speak, he shook his head
fiercely, covered his eyes with his hand, and plunged back into the
house.
"What was that, Susan? What was that?" demanded the boy.
"Nothin', child, nothin', only a door shuttin' somewhere, or a
window."
At that moment a girl's voice caroled shrilly from the street.
"Hullo, Keith, how do you do? We're awfully glad to see you out
again."
The boy started violently, but did not turn his head--except to Susan.
"Susan, I--I'm tired. I want to go in now," he begged a little wildly,
under his breath.
"Keith, it's Mazie--Mazie and Dorothy," caroled the high-pitched voice
again.
But Keith, with a tug so imperative that Susan had no choice but to
obey, turned his head quite away as he groped for the door to go in.
In the hall he drew a choking breath.
"Susan, I don't want to go out there to walk any more--NOT ANY MORE! I
don't want to go anywhere where anybody'll see me."
"Shucks!" Susan's voice was harshly unsteady again. "See you, indeed!
Why, we're goin' to be so proud of you we'll want the whole world to
see you.
You jest wait
An' see the fate
That I've cut out for you.
We'll be so proud
We'll laugh aloud,
An' you'll be laughin', too!
I made that up last night when I laid awake thinkin' of all the fine
things we was goin' to have you do."
But Keith only shook his head again and complained of feeling, oh, so
tired. And Susan, looking at his pale, constrained face, did not quote
any more poetry to him, or talk about the glorious future in store for
him. She led him to the easiest chair in his room and made him as
comfortable as she could. Then she went downstairs and shut herself in
the pantry--until she could stop her "fool cryin' over nothin'."
CHAPTER VIII
AUNT NETTIE MEETS HER MATCH
Mrs. Nettie Colebrook came at half-past five. She was a small,
nervous-looking woman with pale-blue eyes and pale-yellow hair. She
greeted her brother with a burst of tears.
"Oh, Daniel, Daniel, how can you stand it--how can you stand it!" she
cried, throwing herself upon the man's somewhat unresponsive shoulder.
"There, there, Nettie, control yourself, do!" besought the man
uncomfortably, trying to withdraw himself from the clinging arms.
"But how CAN you stand it!--your only son--blind!" wailed Mrs.
Colebrook, with a fresh burst of sobs.
"I notice some things have to be stood," observed Susan grimly. Susan,
with Mrs. Colebrook's traveling-bag in her hand, was waiting with
obvious impatience to escort her visitor upstairs to her room.
Susan's terse comment accomplished what Daniel Burton's admonition had
been quite powerless to bring about. Mrs. Colebrook stopped sobbing at
once, and drew herself somewhat haughtily erect.
"And, pray, who is this?" she demanded, looking from one to the other.
"Well, 'this' happens to be the hired girl, an' she's got some
biscuits in the oven," explained Susan crisply. "If you'll be so good,
ma'am, I'll show you upstairs to your room."
"Daniel!" appealed Mrs. Colebrook, plainly aghast.
But her brother, with a helpless gesture, had turned away, and Susan,
bag in hand, was already halfway up the stairs. With heightened color
and a muttered "Impertinence!" Mrs. Colebrook turned and followed
Susan to the floor above.
A little way down the hall Susan threw open a door.
"I swept, but I didn't have no time to dust," she announced as she put
down the bag. "There's a duster in that little bag there. Don't lock
the door. Somethin' ails it. If you do you'll have to go out the
window down a ladder. There's towels in the top drawer, an' you'll
have to fill the pitcher every day, 'cause there's a crack an' it
leaks, an' you can't put in the water only to where the crack is. Is
there anything more you want?"
"Thank you. If you'll kindly take me to Master Keith's room, that will
be all that I require," answered Mrs. Colebrook frigidly, as she
unpinned her hat and laid that on top of her coat on the bed.
"All right, ma'am. He's a whole lot better. He's been up an' dressed
to-day, but he's gone back to bed now. His room is right down here,
jest across the hall," finished Susan, throwing wide the door.
There was a choking cry, a swift rush of feet, then Mrs. Colebrook, on
her knees, was sobbing at the bedside.
"Oh, Keithie, Keithie, my poor blind boy! What will you do? How will
you ever live? Never to see again, never to see again! Oh, my poor
boy, my poor blind boy!"
Susan, at the door, flung both hands above her head, then plunged down
the stairs.
"Fool! FOOL! FOOL!" she snarled at the biscuits in the oven. "Don't
you know ANYTHING?" Yet the biscuits in the oven were puffing up and
browning beautifully, as the best of biscuits should.
When Susan's strident call for supper rang through the hall, Mrs.
Colebrook was with her brother in the studio. She had been bemoaning
and bewailing the cruel fate that had overtaken "that dear boy," and
had just asked for the seventh time how he could stand it, when from
the hall below came:
"Supper's ready, supper's ready,
Hurry up or you'll be late.
Then you'll sure be cross an' heady,
If there's nothin' left to ate."
"Daniel, what in the world is the meaning of that?" she interrupted
sharply.
"That? Oh, that is Susan's--er--supper bell," shrugged the man, with a
little uneasy gesture.
"You mean that you've heard it before?--that that is her usual method
of summoning you to your meals?"
"Y-yes, when she's good-natured," returned the man, with a still more
uneasy shifting of his position. "Come, shall we go down?"
"DANIEL! And you stand it?"
"Oh, come, come! You don't understand--conditions here. Besides, I've
tried to stop it."
"TRIED to stop it!"
"Yes. Oh, well, try yourself, if you think it's so easy. I give you my
full and free permission. Try it."
"TRY it! I shan't TRY anything of the sort. I shall STOP it."
"Humph!" shrugged the man. "Oh, very well, then. Suppose we go down."
"But what does that poor little blind boy eat? How can he eat--anything?"
"Why, I--I don't know." The man gave an irritably helpless gesture.
"The nurse--she used to--You'll have to ask Susan. She'll know."
"Susan! That impossible woman! Daniel, how DO you stand her?"
Daniel Burton shrugged his shoulders again. Then suddenly he gave a
short, grim laugh.
"I notice there are some things that have to be stood," he observed,
so exactly in imitation of Susan that it was a pity only Mrs. Nettie
Colebrook's unappreciative ears got the benefit of it.
In the dining-room a disapproving Susan stood by the table.
"I thought you wasn't never comin'. The hash is gettin' cold."
Mrs. Colebrook gasped audibly.
"Yes, yes, I know," murmured Mr. Burton conciliatingly. "But we're
here now, Susan."
"What will Master Keith have for his supper?" questioned Mrs.
Colebrook, lifting her chin a little.
"He's already had his supper, ma'am. I took it up myself."
"What was it?" Mrs. Colebrook asked the question haughtily,
imperiously.
Susan's eyes grew cold like steel.
"It was what he asked for, ma'am, an' he's ate it. Do you want your
tea strong or weak, ma'am?"
Mrs. Colebrook bit her lip.
"I'll not take any tea at all," she said coldly. "And, Susan!"
"Yes, ma'am." Susan turned, her hand on the doorknob.
"Hereafter I will take up Master Keith's meals myself. He is in my
charge now."
There was no reply--in words. But the dining-room door after Susan
shut with a short, crisp snap.
After supper Mrs. Colebrook went out into the kitchen.
"You may prepare oatmeal and dry toast and a glass of milk for Master
Keith to-morrow morning, Susan. I will take them up myself."
"He won't eat 'em. He don't like 'em--not none of them things."
"I think he will if I tell him to. At all events, they are what he
should eat, and you may prepare them as I said."
"Very well, ma'am."
Susan's lips came together in a thin, white line, and Mrs. Colebrook
left the kitchen.
Keith did not eat his toast and oatmeal the next morning, though his
aunt sat on the edge of the bed, called him her poor, afflicted,
darling boy, and attempted to feed him herself with a spoon.
Keith turned his face to the wall and said he didn't want any
breakfast. Whereupon his aunt sighed, and stroked his head; and Keith
hated to have his head stroked, as Susan could have told her.
"Of course, you don't want any breakfast, you poor, sightless lamb,"
she moaned. "And I don't blame you. Oh, Keithie, Keithie, when I see
you lying there like that, with your poor useless eyes--! But you must
eat, dear, you must eat. Now, come, just a weeny, teeny mouthful to
please auntie!"
But Keith turned his face even more determinedly to the wall, and
moved his limbs under the bed clothes in a motion very much like a
kick. He would have nothing whatever to do with the "weeny, teeny
mouthfuls," not even to please auntie. And after a vain attempt to
remove his tortured head, entirely away from those gently stroking
fingers, he said he guessed he would get up and be dressed.
"Oh, Keithie, are you well enough, dear? Are you sure you are strong
enough? I'm sure you must be ill this morning. You haven't eaten a bit
of breakfast. And if anything should happen to you when you were in MY
care--"
"Of course I'm well enough," insisted the boy irritably.
"Then I'll get your clothes, dear, and help you dress, if you will be
careful not to overdo."
"I don't want any help."
"Why, Keithie, you'll HAVE to have some one help you. How do you
suppose your poor blind eyes are going to let you dress yourself all
alone, when you can't see a thing? Why, dear child, you'll have to
have help now about everything you do. Now I'll get your clothes.
Where are they, dear? In this closet?"
"I don't know. I don't want 'em. I--I've decided I don't want to get
up, after all."
"You ARE too tired, then?"
"Yes, I'm too tired." And Keith, with another spasmodic jerk under the
bedclothes, turned his face to the wall again.
"All right, dear, you shan't. That's the better way, I think myself,"
sighed his aunt. "I wouldn't have you overtax yourself for the world.
Now isn't there anything, ANYTHING I can do for you?"
And Keith said no, not a thing, not a single thing. And his face was
still to the wall.
"Then if you're all right, absolutely all right, I'll go out to walk
and get a little fresh air. Now don't move. Don't stir. TRY to go to
sleep if you can. And if you want anything, just ring. I'll put this
little bell right by your hand on the bed; and you must ring if you
want anything, ANYTHING. Then Susan will come and get it for you.
There, the bell's right here. See? Oh, no, no, you CAN'T see!" she
broke off suddenly, with a wailing sob. "Why will I keep talking to
you as if you could?"
"Well, I wish you WOULD talk to me as if I could see," stormed Keith
passionately, sitting upright in bed and flinging out his arms. "I
tell you I don't want to be different! It's because I AM different
that I am so----"
But his aunt, aghast, interrupted him, and pushed him back.
"Oh, Keithie, darling, lie down! You mustn't thrash yourself around
like that," she remonstrated. "Why, you'll make yourself ill. There,
that's better. Now go to sleep. I'm going out before you can talk any
more, and get yourself all worked up again," she finished, hurrying
out of the room with the breakfast tray.
A little later in the kitchen she faced Susan a bit haughtily.
"Master Keith is going to sleep," she said, putting down the breakfast
tray. "I have left a bell within reach of his hand, and he will call
you if he wants anything. I am going out to get a little air."
"All right, ma'am." Susan kept right on with the dish she was drying.
"You are sure you can hear the bell?"
"Oh, yes, my hearin' ain't repaired in the least, ma'am." Susan turned
her back and picked up another dish. Plainly, for Susan, the matter
was closed.
Mrs. Colebrook, after a vexed biting of her lip and a frowning glance
toward Susan's substantial back, shrugged her shoulders and left the
kitchen. A minute later, still hatless, she crossed the yard and
entered the McGuires' side door.
"Take the air, indeed!" muttered Susan, watching from the kitchen
window. "A whole lot of fresh air she'll get in Mis' McGuire's
kitchen!"
With another glance to make sure that Mrs. Nettie Colebrook was safely
behind the McGuires' closed door, Susan crossed the kitchen and lifted
the napkin of the breakfast tray.
"Humph!" she grunted angrily, surveying the almost untouched
breakfast. "I thought as much! But I was ready for you, my lady. Toast
an' oatmeal, indeed!" With another glance over her shoulder at the
McGuire side door Susan strode to the stove and took from the oven a
plate of crisply browned hash and a hot corn muffin. Two minutes
later, with a wonderfully appetizing-looking tray, she tapped at
Keith's door and entered the room.
"Here's your breakfast, boy," she announced cheerily.
"I didn't want any breakfast," came crossly from the bed.
"Of course you didn't want THAT breakfast," scoffed Susan airily; "but
you just look an' see what I'VE brought you!"
Look and see! Susan's dismayed face showed that she fully realized
what she had said, and that she dreaded beyond words its effect on the
blind boy in the bed.
She hesitated, and almost dropped the tray in her consternation. But
the boy turned with a sudden eagerness that put to rout her dismay,
and sent a glow of dazed wonder to her face instead.
"What HAVE you got? Let me see." He was sitting up now.
"Hash--and--johnny-cake!" he crowed, as she set the tray before him,
and he dropped his fingers lightly on the contents of the tray. "And
don't they smell good! I don't know--I guess I am hungry, after all."
"Of course you're hungry!" Susan's voice was harsh, and she was
fiercely brushing back the tears. "Now, eat it quick, or I'll be sick!
Jest think what'll happen to Susan if that blessed aunt of yours comes
an' finds me feedin' you red-flannel hash an' johnny-cake! Now I'll be
up in ten minutes for the tray. See that you eat it up--every scrap,"
she admonished him, as she left the room.
Susan had found by experience that Keith ate much better when alone.
She was not surprised, therefore, though she was very much pleased--at
sight of the empty plates awaiting her when she went up for the tray
at the end of the ten minutes.
"An' now what do you say to gettin' up?" she suggested cheerily,
picking up the tray from the bed and setting it on the table.
"Can I dress myself?"
"Of course you can! What'll you bet you won't do it five minutes
quicker this time, too? I'll get your clothes."
Halfway back across the room, clothes in hand, she was brought to a
sudden halt by a peremptory: "What in the world is the meaning of
this?" It was Mrs. Nettie Colebrook in the doorway.
"I'm gettin' Keith's clothes. He's goin' to get up."
"But MASTER Keith said he did not wish to get up."
"Changed his mind, maybe." The terseness of Susan's reply and the
expression on her face showed that the emphasis on the "Master" was
not lost upon her.
"Very well, then, that will do. You may go. I will help him dress."
"I don't want any help," declared Keith.
"Why, Keithie, darling, of course you want help! You forget, dear, you
can't see now, and--"
"Oh, no, I don't forget," cut in Keith bitterly. "You don't let me
forget a minute--not a minute. I don't want to get up now, anyhow.
What's the use of gettin' up? I can't DO anything!" And he fell back
to his old position, with his face to the wall.
"There, there, dear, you are ill and overwrought," cried Mrs.
Colebrook, hastening to the bedside. "It is just as I said, you are
not fit to get up." Then, to Susan, sharply: "You may put Master
Keith's clothes back in the closet. He will not need them to-day."
"No, ma'am, I don't think he will need them--now." Susan's eyes
flashed ominously. But she hung the clothes back in the closet, picked
up the tray, and left the room.
Susan's eyes flashed ominously, indeed, all the rest of the morning,
while she was about her work; and at noon, when she gave the call to
dinner, there was a curious metallic incisiveness in her voice, which
made the call more strident than usual.
It was when Mrs. Colebrook went into the kitchen after dinner for
Keith's tray that she said coldly to Susan:
"Susan, I don't like that absurd doggerel of yours."
"Doggerel?" Plainly Susan was genuinely ignorant of what she meant.
"Yes, that extraordinary dinner call of yours. As I said before, I
don't like it."
There was a moment's dead silence. The first angry flash in Susan's
eyes was followed by a demure smile.
"Don't you? Why, I thought it was real cute, now."
"Well, I don't. You'll kindly not use it any more, Susan," replied
Mrs. Colebrook, with dignity.
Once again there was the briefest of silences, then quietly came
Susan's answer:
"Oh, no, of course not, ma'am. I won't--when I work for you. There,
Mis' Colebrook, here's your tray all ready."
And Mrs. Colebrook, without knowing exactly how it happened, found
herself out in the hall with the tray in her hands.
CHAPTER IX
SUSAN SPEAKS HER MIND
"How's Keith?"
It was Monday morning, and as usual Mrs. McGuire, seeing Susan in the
clothes-yard, had come out, ostensibly to hang out her own clothes, in
reality to visit with Susan while she was hanging out hers.
"About as usual." Susan snapped out the words and a pillow-case with
equal vehemence.
"Is he up an' dressed?"
"I don't know. I hain't seen him this mornin'--but it's safe to say he
ain't."
"But I thought he was well enough to be up an' dressed right along
now."
"He is WELL ENOUGH--or, rather he WAS." Susan snapped open another
pillow-case and hung it on the line with spiteful jabs of two
clothespins.
"Why, Susan, is he worse? You didn't say he was any worse. You said he
was about as usual."
"Well, so he is. That's about as usual. Look a-here, Mis' McGuire,"
flared Susan, turning with fierce suddenness, "wouldn't YOU be worse
if you wasn't allowed to do as much as lift your own hand to your own
head?"
"Why, Susan, what do you mean? What are you talkin' about?"
"I'm talkin' about Keith Burton an' Mis' Nettie Colebrook. I've GOT to
talk about 'em to somebody. I'm that full I shall sunburst if I don't.
She won't let him do a thing for himself--not a thing, that woman
won't!"
"But how can he do anything for himself, with his poor sightless
eyes?" demanded Mrs. McGuire. "I don't think I should complain, Susan
Betts, because that poor boy's got somebody at last to take proper
care of him."
"But it AIN'T takin' proper care of him, not to let him do things for
himself," stormed Susan hotly. "How's he ever goin' to 'mount to
anything--that's what I want to know--if he don't get a chance to
begin to 'mount? All them fellers--them fellers that was blind an'
wrote books an' give lecturin's an' made things--perfectly wonderful
things with their hands--how much do you s'pose they would have done
if they'd had a woman 'round who said, 'Here, let me do it; oh, you
mustn't do that, Keithie, dear!' every time they lifted a hand to
brush away a hair that was ticklin' their nose?"
"Oh, Susan!"
"Well, it's so. Look a-here, listen!" Susan dropped all pretense of
work now, and came close to the fence. She was obviously very much in
earnest. "That boy hain't been dressed but twice since that woman came
a week ago. She won't let him dress himself alone an' now he don't
want to be dressed. Says he's too tired. An' she says, 'Of course,
you're too tired, Keithie, dear!' An' there he lies, day in an' day
out, with his poor sightless eyes turned to the wall. He won't eat a
thing hardly, except what I snuggle up when she's out airin' herself.
He ain't keen on bein' fed with a spoon like a baby. No boy with any
spunk would be."
"But can he feed himself?"
"Of course he can--if he gets a chance! But that ain't all. He don't
want to be told all the time that he's different from other folks. He
can't forget that he's blind, of course, but he wants you to act as if
you forgot it. I know. I've seen him. But she don't forget it a
minute--not a minute. She's always cryin' an' wringin' her hands, an'
sighin', 'Oh, Keithie, Keithie, my poor boy, my poor blind boy!' till
it's enough to make a saint say, 'Gosh!'"
"Well, that's only showin' sympathy, Susan," defended Mrs. McGuire.
"I'm sure she ought not to be blamed for that."
"He don't want sympathy--or, if he does, he hadn't ought to have it."
"Why, Susan Betts, I'm ashamed of you--grudgin' that poor blind boy
the comfort of a little sympathy! My John said yesterday--"
"'T ain't sympathy he needs. Sympathy's a nice, soft little paw that
pats him to sleep. What he needs is a good sharp scratch that will
make him get up an' do somethin'."
"Susan, how can you talk like that?"
"'Cause somebody's got to." Susan's voice was shaking now. Her hands
were clenched so tightly on the fence pickets that the knuckles showed
white with the strain. "Mis' McGuire, there's a chance, maybe, that
that boy can see. There's somethin' they can do to his eyes, if he
gets strong enough to have it done."
"Really? To see again?"
"Maybe. There's a chance. They ain't sure. But they can't even TRY
till he gets well an' strong. An' how's he goin' to get well an'
strong lyin' on that bed, face to the wall? That's what I want to
know!"
"Hm-m, I see," nodded Mrs. McGuire soberly. Then, with a sidewise
glance into Susan's face, she added: "But ain't that likely to
cost--some money?"
"Yes, 't is." Susan went back to her work abruptly. With stern
efficiency she shook out a heavy sheet and hung it up. Stooping, she
picked up another one. But she did not shake out this. With the same
curious abruptness that had characterized her movements a few moments
before, she dropped the sheet back into the basket and came close to
the fence again. "Mis' McGuire, won't you please let me take a copy of
them two women's magazines that you take? That is, they--they do print
poetry, don't they?"
"Why, y-yes, Susan, I guess they do. Thinkin' of sendin' 'em some of
yours?" The question was asked in a derision that was entirely lost on
Susan.
"Yes, to get some money." It was the breathless, palpitating Susan
that Daniel Burton had seen a week ago, and like Daniel Burton on that
occasion, Mrs. McGuire went down now in defeat before it.
"To--to get some money?" she stammered.
"Yes--for Keith's eyes, you know," panted Susan. "An' when I sell
these, I'm goin' to write more--lots more. Only I've got to find a
place, first, of course, to sell 'em. An' I did send 'em off last
week. But they was jest cheap magazines; an' they sent a letter all
printed sayin' as how they regretted very much they couldn't accept
'em. Like enough they didn't have money enough to pay much for 'em,
anyway; but of course they didn't say that right out in so many words.
But, as I said, they wasn't anything but cheap magazines, anyway.
That's why I want yours, jest to get the addressin's of, I mean.
THEY'RE first-class magazines, an' they'll pay me a good price, I'm
sure. They'll have to, to get 'em! Why, Mis' McGuire, I've got to have
the money. There ain't nobody but me TO get it. An' you don't s'pose
we're goin' to let that boy stay blind all his life, do you, jest for
the want of a little money?"
'"A little money'! It'll cost a lot of money, an' you know it, Susan
Betts," cried Mrs. McGuire, stirred into sudden speech. "An' the idea
of you tryin' to EARN it writin' poetry. For that matter, the idea of
your earnin' it, anyway, even if you took your wages."
"Oh, I'd take my wages in a minute, if--" Susan stopped short. Her
face had grown suddenly red. "That is, I--I think I'd rather take the
poetry money, anyway," she finished lamely.
But Mrs. McGuire was not to be so easily deceived.
"Poetry money, indeed!" she scoffed sternly. "Susan Betts, do you know
what I believe? I believe you don't GET any wages. I don't believe
that man pays you a red cent from one week's end to the other. Now
does he? You don't dare to answer!"
Susan drew herself up haughtily. But her face was still very red.
"Certainly I dare to answer, Mis' McGuire, but I don't care to. What
Mr. Burton pays me discerns him an' me an' I don't care to discourse
it in public. If you'll kindly lend me them magazines I asked you for
a minute ago, I'll be very much obliged, an' I'll try to retaliate in
the same way for you some time, if I have anything you want."
"Oh, good lan', Susan Betts, if you ain't the beat of 'em!" ejaculated
Mrs. McGuire. "I'd like to shake you--though you don't deserve a
shakin', I'll admit. You deserve--well, never mind. I'll get the
magazines right away. That's the most I CAN do for you, I s'pose," she
flung over her shoulder, as she hurried into the house.
CHAPTER X
AND NETTIE COLEBROOK SPEAKS HERS
Mrs. Colebrook had been a member of the Burton household a day less
than two weeks when she confronted her brother in the studio with this
terse statement:
"Daniel, either Susan or I leave this house tomorrow morning. You can
choose between us."
"Nonsense, Nettie, don't be a fool," frowned the man. "You know very
well that we need both you and Susan. Susan's a trial, I'll admit, in
a good many ways; but I'll wager you'd find it more of a trial to get
along without her, and try to do her work and yours, too."
"Nobody thought of getting along without SOMEBODY," returned Mrs.
Colebrook, with some dignity. "I merely am asking you to dismiss Susan
and hire somebody else--that is, of course, if you wish me to stay.
Change maids, that's all."
The man made an impatient gesture.
"All, indeed! Very simple, the way you put it. But--see here, Nettie,
this thing you ask is utterly out of the question. You don't
understand matters at all."
"You mean that you don't intend to dismiss Susan?"
"Yes, if you will have it put that way--just that."
"Very well. Since that is your decision I shall have to govern myself
accordingly, of course. I will see you in the morning to say good-bye."
And she turned coldly away.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Why, that I am going home, of course--since you think more of having
that impossible, outrageously impertinent servant girl here than you
do me." Mrs. Colebrook was nearing the door how.
"Shucks! You know better than that! Come, come, if you're having any
trouble with Susan, settle it with the girl herself, won't you? Don't
come to me with it. You KNOW how I dislike anything like this."
At the door Mrs. Colebrook turned back suddenly with aggressive
determination.
"Yes, I do know. You dislike anything that's disagreeable. You always
have, from the time when you used to run upstairs to the attic and let
us make all the explanations to pa and ma when something got lost or
broken. But, see here, Daniel Burton, you've GOT to pay attention to
this. It's your son, and your house, and your maid. And you shall
listen to me."
"Well, well, all right, go ahead," sighed the man despairingly,
throwing himself back in his chair. "What is the trouble? What is it
that Susan does that annoys you so?"
"What does she do? What doesn't she do?" retorted Mrs. Colebrook,
dropping herself wearily into a chair facing her brother. "In the
first place, she's the most wretchedly impertinent creature I ever
dreamed of. It's always 'Keith' instead of 'Master Keith,' and I
expect every day it'll be 'Daniel' and 'Nettie' for you and me. She
shows no sort of respect or deference in her manner or language,
and--well, what are you looking like that for?" she interrupted
herself aggrievedly.
"I was only thinking--or rather I was TRYING to think of Susan--and
deference," murmured the man dryly.
"Yes, that's exactly it," Mrs. Colebrook reproved him severely.
"You're laughing. You've always laughed, I suspect, at her outrageous
behavior, and that's why she's so impossible in every way. Why, Daniel
Burton, I've actually heard her refuse--REFUSE to serve you with
something to eat that you'd ordered."
"Oh, well, well, what if she has? Very likely there was something we
had to eat up instead, to keep it from spoiling. Susan is very
economical, Nettie."
"I dare say--at times, when it suits her to be so, especially if she
can assert her authority over you. Why, Daniel, she's a perfect tyrant
to you, and you know it. She not only tells you what to eat, but what
to wear, and when to wear it--your socks, your underclothes. Why,
Daniel, she actually bosses you!"
"Yes, yes; well, never mind," shrugged the man, a bit irritably.
"We're talking about how she annoys YOU, not me, remember."
"Well, don't you suppose it annoys me to see my own brother so
completely under the sway of this serving-maid? And such a maid!
Daniel, will you tell me where she gets those long words of hers that
she mixes up so absurdly?"
Daniel Burton laughed.
"Susan lived with Professor Hinkley for ten years before she came to
me. The Hinkleys never used words of one or two syllables when they
could find one of five or six that would do just as well. Susan loves
long words."
"So I should judge. And those ridiculous rhymes of hers--did she learn
those, also, from Professor Hinkley?" queried Mrs. Colebrook. "And as
for that atrocious dinner-call of hers, it's a disgrace to any
family--a positive disgrace!"
"Well, well, why don't you stop her doing it, then?" demanded Daniel
Burton, still more irritably. "Go to HER, not me. Tell her not to."
"I have."
The tone of her voice was so fraught with meaning that the man looked
up sharply.
"Well?"
"She said she wouldn't do it--when she worked for me."
Daniel Burton gave a sudden chuckle.
"I can imagine just how she'd say that," he murmured appreciatively.
"Daniel Burton, are you actually going to abet that girl in her
wretched impertinence?" demanded Mrs. Colebrook angrily. "I tell you I
will not stand it! Something has got to be done. Why, she even tries
to interfere with the way I take care of your son--presumes to give me
counsel and advice on the subject, if you please. Dares to criticize
me--ME! Daniel Burton, I tell you I will not stand it. You MUST give
that woman her walking papers. Why, Daniel, I shall begin to think she
has hypnotized you--that you're actually afraid of her!"
Was it the scorn in her voice? Or was it that Daniel Burton's
endurance had snapped at this last straw? Whatever it was, the man
leaped to his feet, threw back his shoulders, and thrust his hands
into his pockets.
"Nettie, look here. Once for all let us settle this matter. I tell you
I cannot dismiss Susan; and I mean what I say when I use the words
'can not.' I literally CAN NOT. To begin with, she's the kindest-hearted
creature in the world, and she's been devotion itself all
these years since--since Keith and I have been alone. But even if I
could set that aside, there's something else I can't overlook. I--I
owe Susan considerable money."
"You owe her--MONEY?"
"Yes, her wages. She has not had them for some time. I must owe her
something like fifty or sixty dollars. You see, we--we have had some
very unusual and very heavy expenses, and I have overdrawn my
annuity--borrowed on it. Susan knew this and insisted on my letting
her wages go on, for the present. More than that, she has refused a
better position with higher wages--I know that. The pictures I had
hoped to sell--"He stopped, tried to go on, failed obviously to
control his voice; then turned away with a gesture more eloquent than
any words could have been.
Mrs. Colebrook stared, frowned, and bit her lip. Nervously she tapped
her foot on the floor as she watched with annoyed eyes her brother
tramping up and down, up and down, the long, narrow room. Then
suddenly her face cleared.
"Oh, well, that's easily remedied, after all." She sprang to her feet
and hurried from the room. Almost immediately she was back--a roll of
bills in her hand. "There, I thought I had enough money to do it," she
announced briskly as she came in. "Now, Daniel, I'LL pay Susan her
back wages."
"Indeed you will not!" The man wheeled sharply, an angry red staining
his cheeks.
"Oh, but Daniel, don't you see?--that'll simplify everything. She'll
be working for ME, then, and I--"
"But I tell you I won't have--" interrupted the man, then stopped
short. Susan herself stood in the doorway.
"I guess likely you was talkin' so loud you didn't hear me call you to
dinner," she was saying. "I've called you two times already. If you
want anything fit to eat you'd better come quick. It ain't gettin' any
fitter, waitin'."
"Susan!" Before Susan could turn away, Mrs. Colebrook detained her
peremptorily." Mr. Burton tells me that he owes you for past wages.
Now--"
"NETTIE!" warned the man sharply.
But with a blithe "Nonsense, Daniel, let me manage this!" Mrs.
Colebrook turned again to Susan. The man, not unlike the little Daniel
of long ago who fled to the attic, shrugged his shoulders with a
gesture of utter irresponsibility, turned his back and walked to the
farther side of the room.
"Susan," began Mrs. Colebrook again, still blithely, but with just a
shade of haughtiness, "my brother tells me your wages are past due;
that he owes you at least fifty dollars. Now I'm going to pay them for
him, Susan. In fact, I'm going to pay you sixty dollars, so as to be
sure to cover it. Will that be quite satisfactory?"
Susan stared frankly.
"You mean ME--take money from you, ma'am,--to pay my back wages?" she
asked.
"Yes."
"But--" Susan paused and threw a quick glance toward the broad back of
the man at the end of the room. Then she turned resolutely to Mrs.
Colebrook, her chin a little higher than usual. "Oh, no, thank you. I
ain't needin' the money, Mis' Colebrook, an' I'd ruther wait for Mr.
Burton, anyway," she finished cheerfully, as she turned to go.
"Nonsense, Susan, of COURSE you need the money. Everybody can make use
of a little money, I guess. Surely, there's SOMETHING you want."
With her hand almost on the doorknob Susan suddenly whisked about, her
face alight.
"Oh, yes, yes, I forgot, Mis' Colebrook," she cried eagerly. "There is
somethin' I want; an' I'll take it, please, an' thank you kindly."
"There, that's better," nodded Mrs. Colebrook. "And I've got it right
here, so you see you don't have to wait, even a minute," she smiled,
holding out the roll of bills.
Still with the eager light on her face, Susan reached for the money.
"Thank you, oh, thank you! An' it will go quite a ways, won't it?--for
Keith, I mean. The--" But with sudden sharpness Mrs. Colebrook
interrupted her.
"Susan, how many times have I told you to speak of my nephew as
'Master Keith'? Furthermore, I shall have to remind you once more that
you are trying to interfere altogether too much in his care. In fact,
Susan, I may as well speak plainly. For some time past you have failed
to give satisfaction. You are paid in full now, I believe, with some
to spare, perhaps. You may work the week out. After that we shall no
longer require your services."
The man at the end of the room wheeled sharply and half started to
come forward. Then, with his habitual helpless gesture, he turned back
to his old position.
Susan, her face eloquent with amazed unbelief, turned from one to the
other.
"You mean--you don't mean--Mis' Colebrook, be you tryin' to--dismissal
me?"
Mrs. Colebrook flushed and bit her lip.
"I am dismissing you--yes."
Once more Susan, in dazed unbelief, looked from one to the other. Her
eyes dwelt longest on the figure of the man at the end of the room.
"Mr. Burton, do you want me to go?" she asked at last.
The man turned irritably, with a shrug, and a swift outflinging of his
hands.
"Of course, I don't want you to go, Susan. But what can I do? I have
no money to pay you, as you know very well. I have no right to keep
you--of course--I should advise you to go." And he turned away again.
Susan's face cleared.
"Pooh! Oh, that's all right then," she answered pleasantly. "Mis'
Colebrook, I'm sorry to be troublin' you, but I shall have to give
back that 'ere notice. I ain't goin'."
Once again Mrs. Colebrook flushed and bit her lip.
"That will do, Susan. You forget. You're not working for Mr. Burton
now. You're working for me."
"For YOU?"
"Certainly. Didn't I just pay you your wages for some weeks past?"
Susan's tight clutch on the roll of bills loosened so abruptly that
the money fell to the floor. But at once Susan stooped and picked it
up. The next moment she had crossed the room and thrust the money into
Mrs. Colebrook's astonished fingers.
"I don't want your money, Mis' Colebrook--not on them terms, even for
Keith. I know I hain't earned any the other way, yet, but I hain't
tried all the magazines. There's more--lots more." Her voice faltered,
and almost broke. "I'll do it yet some way, you see if I don't. But I
won't take this. Why, Mis' Colebrook, do you think I'd leave NOW, with
that poor boy blind, an' his father so wrought up he don't have even
his extraordinary common sense about his flannels an' socks an' what
to eat, an' no money to pay the bills with, either? An' him bein'
pestered the life out of him with them intermittent, dunnin' grocers
an' milkmen? Well, I guess not! You couldn't hire me to go, Mis'
Colebrook."
"Daniel, are you going to stand there and permit me to be talked to
like this?" appealed Mrs. Colebrook.
"What can I do?" (Was there a ghost of a twinkle in Daniel Burton's
eyes as he turned with a shrug and a lift of his eyebrows?) "If YOU
haven't the money to hire her--" But Mrs. Colebrook, with an indignant
toss of her head, had left the room.
"Mr. Burton!" Before the man could speak Susan had the floor again.
"Can't you do somethin', sir? Can't you?"
"Do something, Susan?" frowned the man.
"Yes, with your sister," urged Susan. "I don't mean because she's so
haughty an' impious. I can stand that. It's about Keith I'm talkin'
about. Mr. Burton, Keith won't never get well, never, so's he can have
that operator on his eyes, unless he takes some exercise an' gets his
strength back. The nurse an' the doctor--they both said he wouldn't."
"Yes, yes, I know, Susan," fumed the man impatiently, beginning to
pace up and down the room. "And that's just what we're trying to
do--get his strength back."
"But he ain't--he won't--he can't," choked Susan feverishly. "Mr.
Burton, I KNOW you don't want to talk about it, but you've got to. I'm
all Keith's got to look out for him." The father of Keith gave an
inarticulate gasp, but Susan plunged on unheeding. "An' he'll never
get well if he ain't let to get up an' stand an' walk an' eat an' sit
down himself. But Mis' Colebrook won't let him. She won't let him do
anything. She keeps sayin', 'Don't do it, oh, don't do it,' all the
time,--when she ought to say, 'Do it, do it, do it!' Mr. Burton,
cryin' an' wringin' your hands an' moanin', 'Oh, Keithie, darling!'
won't make a boy grow red blood an' make you feel so fine you want to
knock a man down! Mr. Burton, I want you to tell that woman to let me
take care of that boy for jest one week--ONE WEEK, an' her not to come
near him with her snivelin' an'--"
But Daniel Burton, with two hands upflung, and a head that ducked as
if before an oncoming blow, had rushed from the room. For the second
time that day Daniel Burton had fled--to the attic.
CHAPTER XI
NOT PATS BUT SCRATCHES
Mrs. Colebrook went home the next day. She wore the air of an injured
martyr at breakfast. She told her brother that, of course, if he
preferred to have an ignorant servant girl take care of his poor
afflicted son, she had nothing to say; but that certainly he could not
expect HER to stay, too, especially after being insulted as she had
been.
Daniel Burton had remonstrated feebly, shrugged his shoulders and
flung his arms about in his usual gestures of impotent annoyance.
Susan, in the kitchen, went doggedly about her work, singing,
meanwhile, what Keith called her "mad" song. When Susan was
particularly "worked up" over something, "jest b'ilin' inside" as she
expressed it, she always sang this song--her own composition, to the
tune of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home":
"I've taken my worries, an' taken my woes,
I have, I have,
An' shut 'em up where nobody knows,
I have, I have.
I chucked 'em down, that's what I did,
An' now I'm sittin' upon the lid,
An' we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marchin' home.
I'm sittin' upon the lid, I am,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
I'm tryin' to be a little lamb,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
But I'm feelin' more like a great big slam
Than a nice little peaceful woolly lamb,
But we'll all feel gay when Johnny comes marchin' home."
When Daniel Burton, this morning, therefore, heard Susan singing this
song, he was in no doubt as to Susan's state of mind--a fact which
certainly did not add to his own serenity.
Upstairs, Keith, wearily indifferent as to everything that was taking
place about him, lay motionless as usual, his face turned toward the
wall.
And at ten o'clock Mrs. Colebrook went. Five minutes later Daniel
Burton entered the kitchen--a proceeding so extraordinary that Susan
broke off her song in the middle of a "Hurrah" and grew actually pale.
"What is it?--KEITH? Is anything the matter with Keith?" she faltered.
Ignoring her question the man strode into the room.
"Well, Susan, this time you've done it," he ejaculated tersely.
"Done it--to Keith--ME? Why, Mr. Burton, what do you mean? Is
Keith--worse?" chattered Susan, with dry lips. "It was only a little
hash I took up. He simply won't eat that oatmeal stuff, an'--"
"No, no, I don't mean the hash," interrupted the man irritably. "Keith
is all right--that is, he is just as he has been. It's my sister, Mrs.
Colebrook. She's gone."
"Gone--for good?"
"Yes, she's gone home."
"Glory be!" The color came back to Susan's face in a flood, and frank
delight chased the terror from her eyes. "Now we can do somethin'
worthwhile."
"I reckon you'll find you have to do something, Susan. You know very
well I can't afford to hire a nurse--now."
"I don't want one."
"But there's all the other work, too."
"Work! Why, Mr. Burton, I won't mind a little work if I can have that
blessed boy all to myself with no one to feed him oatmeal mush with a
spoon, an' snivel over him. You jest wait. The first elemental thing
is to learn him self-defiance, so he can do things for himself. Then
he'll begin to get his health an' strength for the operator."
"You're forgetting the money, Susan. It costs money for that."
Susan's face fell.
"Yes, sir, I know." She hesitated, then went on, her color deepening.
"An' I hain't sold--none o' them poems yet. But there's other
magazines, a whole lot of 'em, that I hain't tried. Somebody's sure to
take 'em some time."
"I'm glad your courage is still good, Susan; but I'm afraid the dear
public is going to appreciate your poems about the way it does--my
pictures," shrugged the man bitterly, as he turned and left the room.
Not waiting to finish setting her kitchen in order, Susan ran up the
back stairs to Keith's room.
"Well, your aunt is gone, an' I'm on,
An' here we are together.
We'll chuck our worries into pawn,
An' how do you like the weather?"
she greeted him gayly. "How about gettin' up? Come on! Such a lazy
boy! Here it is away in the middle of the forenoon, an' you abed like
this!"
But it was not to be so easy this time. Keith was not to be cajoled
into getting up and dressing himself even to beat Susan's record.
Steadfastly he resisted all efforts to stir him into interest or
action; and a dismayed, disappointed Susan had to go downstairs in
acknowledged defeat.
"But, land's sake, what could you expect?" she muttered to herself,
after a sorrowful meditation before the kitchen fire. "You can't put a
backbone into a jellyfish by jest showin' him the bone--an' that's
what his aunt has made him--a flappy, transparallel jellyfish. Drat
her! But I ain't goin' to give up. Not much I ain't!" And Susan
attacked the little kitchen stove with a vigor that would have brought
terror to the clinkers of a furnace fire pot.
Susan did not attempt again that day to get Keith up and dressed; and
she gave him his favorite "pop-overs" for supper with a running fire
of merry talk and jingles that contained never a reference to the
unpleasant habit of putting on clothes, But the next morning, after
she had given Keith his breakfast (not of toast and oatmeal) she
suggested blithely that he get up and be dressed. When he refused she
tried coaxing, mildly, then more strenuously. When this failed she
tried to sting his pride by telling him she did not believe he could
get up now, anyhow, and dress himself.
"All right, Susan, let it go that I can't. I don't want to, anyhow,"
sighed the boy with impatient weariness. "Say, can't you let a fellow
alone?"
Susan drew a long breath and held it suspended for a moment. She had
the air of one about to make a dreaded plunge.
"No, I can't let you alone, Keith," she replied, voice and manner now
coldly firm.
"Why not? What's the use when I don't want to get up?"
"How about thinkin' for once what somebody else wants, young man?"
Susan caught her breath again, and glanced furtively at the
half-averted face on the pillow. Then doggedly she went on. "Maybe you
think I hain't got anything to do but trespass up an' down them stairs
all day waitin' on you, when you are perfectly capacious of waitin' on
yourself SOME."
"Why, SUSAN!" There was incredulous, hurt amazement in the boy's
voice; but Susan was visibly steeling herself against it.
"What do you think?--that I'm loafin' all day, an' your aunt gone now,
an' me with it all on my hands?" she demanded, her stony gaze
carefully turned away from the white face on the pillow. "An' to have
to keep runnin' up here all the mornin' when I've got to do the
dishes, an' bake bread, an' make soap, an'--"
"If you'll get my clothes, Susan, I'll get up," said Keith very
quietly from the bed.
And Susan, not daring to unclose her lips, wrested the garments from
the hooks, dropped them on to the chair by the bed, and fled from the
room. But she had not reached the hall below when the sobs shook her
frame.
"An' me talkin' like that when I'd be willin' to walk all day on my
hands an' knees, if't would help him one little minute," she choked.
Barely had Susan whipped herself into presentable shape again when
Keith's voice at the kitchen door caused her to face about with a
startled cry.
"I'm downstairs, Susan." The boy's voice challenged hers for coldness
now. "I'll take my meals down here, after this."
"Why, Keith, however in the world did you--" Then Susan pulled herself
up. "Good boy, Keith! That WILL make it lots easier," she said
cheerfully, impersonally, turning away and making a great clatter of
pans in the sink.
But later, at least once every half-hour through that long forenoon,
Susan crept softly through the side hall to the half-open living-room
door, where she could watch Keith. She watched him get up and move
slowly along the side of the room, picking his way. She watched him
pause and move hesitating fingers down the backs of the chairs that he
encountered. But when she saw him stop and finger the books on the
little table by the window, she crept back to her kitchen--and rattled
still more loudly the pots and pans in the sink.
Just before the noon meal Keith appeared once more at the kitchen
door.
"Susan, would it bother you very much if I ate out here--with you?" he
asked.
"With me? Nonsense! You'll eat in the dinin'-room with your dad, of
course. Why, what would he say to your eatin' out here with me?"
"That's just it. It's dad. He'd like it, I'm sure," insisted the boy
feverishly. "You know sometimes I--I don't get any food on my fork,
when I eat, an' I have to--to feel for things, an' it--it must be
disagreeable to see me. An' you know he never liked disagreeable--"
"Now, Keith Burton, you stop right where you are," interrupted Susan
harshly. "You're goin' to eat with your father where you belong. An'
do you now run back to the settin'-room. I've got my dinner to get."
Keith had not disappeared down the hall, however, before Susan was
halfway up the back stairs. A moment later she was in the studio.
"Daniel Burton, you're goin' to have company to dinner," she panted.
"Company?"
"Yes. Your son." "KEITH?" The man drew back perceptibly.
"There, now, Daniel Burton, don't you go to scowlin' an' lookin' for a
place to run, just because you hate to see him feel 'round for what he
eats."
"But, Susan, it breaks my heart," moaned the man, turning quite away.
"What if it does? Ain't his broke, too? Can't you think of him a
little? Let me tell you this, Daniel Burton--that boy has more
consolation for your feelin's than you have for his, every time.
Didn't he jest come to me an' beg to eat with me, 'cause his dad
didn't like to see disagreeable things, an'--"
The man wheeled sharply.
"Did Keith--do that?"
"He did, jest now, sir."
"All right, Susan. I--I don't think you'll have to say--any more."
And Susan, after a sharp glance into the man's half-averted face, said
no more. A moment later she had left the room.
At dinner that day, with red eyes but a vivacious manner, she waited
on a man who incessantly talked of nothing in particular, and a boy
who sat white-faced and silent, eating almost nothing.
CHAPTER XII
CALLERS FOR "KEITHIE"
And so inch by inch Susan fought her way, and inch by inch she gained
ground. Sometimes it was by coaxing, sometimes by scolding; perhaps
most often by taunts and dares, and shrewd appeals to Keith's pride.
But by whatever it was, each day saw some stride forward, some new
victory that Keith had won over his blindness, until by the end of the
week the boy could move about the house and wait upon himself with a
facility almost unbelievable when one remembered his listless
helplessness of a week before.
Then one day there entered into the case a brand-new element, a dainty
element in white muslin and fluttering blue ribbons--Mazie Sanborn and
Dorothy Parkman.
"We heard Keithie was lots better and up and dressed now," chirped
Mazie, when Susan answered her ring; "and so we've brought him some
flowers. Please can't we see him?"
Susan hesitated. Susan had not forgotten Keith's feverish retreat from
Mazie's greeting called up to the veranda the month before. But then,
for that matter, had he not retreated from everything until she
determinedly took him in hand? And he must some time begin to mingle
with the world outside the four walls of his house!
Why not now? What better chance could she hope to have for him to
begin than this? Where could she find two more charmingly alluring
ambassadors of that outside world than right here on the door-step
now?
Susan's lips snapped together with a little defiant nod of her head,
then parted in a cordial smile.
"Sure, you may see him," she cried, "an' it's glad that I am to have
you come! It'll do him good. Come in, come in!" And with only a
heightened color to show her trepidation as to the reception that
might be accorded her charges, she threw open the sitting-room door.
"Well, Keith, here's company come on purpose to see you. An' they've
brought you some flowers," she announced gayly.
"No, no, Susan, I--I don't want to see them," stammered the boy. He
had leaped to his feet, a painful red flooding his face.
"Well, I like that!" bridled Mazie, with playful indignation; "and
when Dorothy and I have taken all this trouble to come and--"
"Is Dorothy here, too?" interrupted the boy sharply.
"Yes, Keith I am--here." Dorothy was almost crying, and her voice
sounded harsh and unnatural.
"And we brought you these," interposed Mazie brightly, crossing the
room to his side and holding out the flowers. Then, with a little
embarrassed laugh, as he did not take them, she thrust them into his
fingers. "Oh, I forgot. You can't see them, can you?"
"Mazie!" remonstrated the half-smothered voice of Dorothy.
But it was Susan who came promptly to the rescue.
"Yes, an' ain't they pretty?" she cried, taking them from Keith's
unresisting fingers. "Here, let me put 'em in water, an' you two sit
down. I always did love coronation pinks," she declared briskly, as
she left the room.
She was not gone long. Very quickly she came back, with the flowers in
a vase. Keith had dropped back into his chair; but he was plainly so
unwilling a host that Susan evidently thought best to assist him. She
set the vase on a little stand near Keith's chair, then dropped
herself on to the huge haircloth sofa near by.
"My, but I don't mind settin' myself awhile," she smiled. "Guess I'm
tired."
"I should think you would be." Mazie, grown suddenly a bit stiff and
stilted, was obviously trying to be very polite and "grown up." "There
must be an awful lot to do here. Mother says she don't see how you
stand it."
"Pooh! Not so very much!" scoffed Susan, instantly on her guard.
"Keith here's gettin' so smart he won't let me do anything hardly for
him now."
"Oh, but there must be a lot of things," began Mazie, "that he can't
do, and--"
"Er--what a lovely big, sunny room," interrupted Dorothy hastily, so
hastily that Susan threw a sharp glance into her face to see if she
were really interrupting Mazie for a purpose. "I love big rooms."
"Yes, so do I," chimed in Mazie. "And I always wanted to see the
inside of this house, too."
"What for?" Keith's curiosity got the better of his vexed reticence,
and forced the question from his lips.
"Oh, just 'cause I've heard folks say 'twas so wonderful--old, you
know, and full of rare old things, and there wasn't another for miles
around like it. But I don't see--That is," she corrected herself,
stumbling a little, "you probably don't keep them in this room,
anyway."
"Why, they do, too," interfered Dorothy, with suddenly pink cheeks.
"This room is just full of the loveliest kind of old things, just like
the things father is always getting--only nicer. Now that, right there
in the corner, all full of drawers--We've got one almost just exactly
like that out home, and father just dotes on it. That IS a--a highboy,
isn't it?" she appealed to Susan. "And it is very old, isn't it?"
"A highboy? Old? Lan' sakes, child," laughed Susan. "Maybe 'tis. I
ain't sayin' 'tisn't, though I'm free to confess I never heard it
called that. But it's old enough, if that's all it needs; it's old
enough to be a highMAN by this time, I reckon," chuckled Susan. "Mr.
Burton was tellin' me one day how it belonged to his great-grand-mother."
"Kind of funny-looking, though, isn't it?" commented Mazie.
"Father'd love it, so'd Aunt Hattie," avowed Dorothy, evidently not
slow to detect the lack of appreciation in Mazie's voice. "And I do,
too," she finished, with a tinge of defiance.
Mazie laughed.
"Well, all right, you may, for all I care," she retorted. Then to
Keith she turned with sudden disconcerting abruptness: "Say, Keith,
what do you do all day?"
It was Susan who answered this. Indeed, it was Susan who answered a
good many of the questions during the next fifteen minutes. Some she
answered because she did not want Keith to answer them. More she
answered because Keith would not answer them. To tell the truth, Keith
was anything but a polite, gracious host. He let it be plainly
understood that he was neither pleased at the call nor interested in
the conversation. And the only semblance of eagerness in his demeanor
that afternoon was when his young visitors rose to go.
In spite of Keith's worse than indifference, however, Susan was
convinced that this call, and others like it, were exactly what was
needed for Keith's best welfare and development. With all her skill
and artifice, therefore, she exerted herself to make up for Keith's
negligence. She told stories, rattled off absurd jingles, and laughed
and talked with each young miss in turn, determined to make the call
so great a success that the girls would wish to come again.
When she had bowed them out and closed the door behind them, she came
back to Keith, intending to remonstrate with him for his very
ungracious behavior. But before she could open her lips Keith himself
had the floor.
"Susan Betts," he began passionately, as soon as she entered the room,
"don't you ever let those girls in again. I won't have them. I WON'T
HAVE THEM, I tell you!
"Oh, for shame, Keith!--and when they were so kind and thoughtful,
too!"
"It wasn't kindness and thoughtfulness," resented the boy. "It was
spying out. They came to see how I took it. I know 'em. And that
Dorothy Parkman--I don't know WHY she came. She said long ago that she
couldn't bear--to look at 'em."
"Look at them?"
"Yes--blind folks. Her father is a big oculist--doctors eyes, you
know. She told me once. And she said she couldn't bear to look at
them; that--"
"An eye doctor?--a big one?" Susan was suddenly excited, alert.
"Yes, yes. And--"
"Where's he live?"
"I don't know. Where she does, I s'pose. I don't know where that is.
She's here most of the time, and--"
"Is he a real big one?--a really, truly big one?"
"Yes, yes, I guess so." Keith had fallen wearily back in his chair,
his strength spent. "Dad said he was one of the biggest in the
country. And of course lots of--of blind people go there, and she sees
them. Only she says she can't bear to see them, that she won't look at
them. And--and she shan't come here--she shan't, Susan, to look at me,
and--"
But Susan was not listening now. With chin up-tilted and a new fire in
her eyes, she had turned toward the kitchen door.
Two days later, on her way to the store, Susan spied Dorothy Parkman
across the street. Without hesitation or ceremony she went straight
across and spoke to her.
"Is it true that your father is a big occultist, one of the biggest
there is?" she demanded.
"A--what?" Dorothy frowned slightly.
"Occultist--doctors folks' eyes, you know. Is he? I heard he was."
"Oh! Y-yes--yes, he is." Miss Dorothy was giggling a bit now.
"Then, listen!" In her eagerness Susan had caught the girl's sleeve
and held it. "Can't you get him to come on an' see you, right away,
quick? Don't he want to take you home, or--or something?"
Dorothy laughed merrily.
"Why, Susan, are you in such a hurry as all that to get rid of me? Did
I act so bad the other day that--" A sudden change crossed her face.
Her eyes grew soft and luminous. "Was it for--Keith that you wanted
father, Susan?"
"Yes." Susan's eyes blurred, and her voice choked.
"Well, then I'm glad to tell you he is coming by and by. He's coming
to take me home for Christmas. But--he isn't going to stay long."
"That's all right--that's all right," retorted Susan, a little
breathlessly. "If he'd jest look at the boy's eyes an' tell if--if he
could fix 'em later. You see, we--we couldn't have it done now, 'cause
there ain't any money to pay. But we'll have it later. We'll sure have
it later, an' then--"
"Of course he'll look at them," interrupted Dorothy eagerly. "He'll
love to, I know. He's always so interested in eyes, and new cases.
And--and don't worry about the other part--the money, you know,"
nodded Dorothy, hurrying away then before Susan could protest.
As it happened Keith was more "difficult" than usual that afternoon,
and Susan, thinking to rouse him from his lassitude, suddenly
determined to tell him all about the wonderful piece of good fortune
in store for him.
"How'd you like to have that little Miss Dorothy's daddy see your
eyes, honey," she began eagerly, "an' tell--"
"I wouldn't let him see them." Keith spoke coldly, decisively.
"Oh, but he's one of the biggest occultists there is, an'--"
"I suppose you mean 'oculist,' Susan," interrupted Keith, still more
coldly; "but that doesn't make any difference. I don't want him."
"But, Keith, if he--"
"I tell you I won't have him," snapped Keith irritably.
"But you've got to have somebody, an' if he's the biggest!" All the
eager light had died out of Susan's face.
"I don't care if he is the biggest, he's Dorothy Parkman's father, and
that's enough. I WON'T HAVE HIM!"
"No, no; well, all right!" And Susan, terrified and dismayed, hurried
from the room.
But though Susan was dismayed and terrified, she was far from being
subdued. In the kitchen she lifted her chin defiantly.
"All right, Master Keith," she muttered to herself. "You can say what
you want to, but you'll have him jest the same--only you won't know
he's HIM. I'll jest tell him to call hisself another name for you. An'
some time I'll find out what there is behind that Dorothy Parkman
business. But 'tain't till Christmas, an' that's 'most two months off
yet. Time enough for trouble when trouble knocks at the door; an' till
it does knock, jest keep peggin' away."
CHAPTER XIII
FREE VERSE--A LA SUSAN
And persistently, systematically Susan did, indeed, keep "peggin'
away." No sooner had she roused Keith to the point of accomplishing
one task than she set for him another. No sooner could he pilot
himself about one room than she inveigled him into another. And when
he could go everywhere about the house she coaxed him out into the
yard. It was harder here, for Keith had a morbid fear of being stared
at. And only semi-occasionally would he consent at all to going out.
It was then that with stern determination Susan sought Daniel Burton.
"Look a-here, Daniel Burton," she accosted him abruptly, "I've done
all I can now, an' it's up to you."
The man looked up, plainly startled.
"Why, Susan, you don't mean--you aren't--GOING, are you?"
"Goin' nothin'--shucks!" tossed Susan to one side disdainfully. "I
mean that Keith ain't goin' to get that good red blood he's needin'
sittin' 'round the house here. He's got to go off in the woods an'
walk an' tramp an' run an' scuff leaves. An' you've got to go with
him. I can't, can I?"
The man shifted his position irritably.
"Do you think that boy will let me lead him through the streets,
Susan? Well, I know he won't."
"I didn't say 'lead him.' I said go WITH him. There's an awful lot of
difference between leadin' an' accommodatin'. We don't none of us like
to be led, but we don't mind goin' WITH folks 'most anywheres. Put
your arm into his an' walk together. He'll walk that way. I've tried
it. An' to see him you wouldn't know he was blind at all. Oh, yes, I
know you're hangin' back an' don't want to. I know you hate to see him
or be with him, 'cause it makes you KNOW what a terrible thing it is
that's come to you an' him. But you've got to, Daniel Burton. You an'
me is all he's got to stand between him an' utter misery. I can feed
his stomach an' make him do the metaphysical things, but it's you
that's got to feed his soul an' make him do the menial things."
"Oh, Susan, Susan!" half groaned the man. There was a smile on his
lips, but there were tears in his eyes.
"Well, it's so," argued Susan earnestly. "Oh, I read to him, of
course. I read him everything I can get hold of, especially about men
an' women that have become great an' famous an' extinguished, even if
they was blind or deaf an' dumb, or lame--especially blind. But I
can't learn him books, Mr. Burton. You've got to do that. You've got
to be eyes for him, an' he's got to go to school to you. Mr.
Burton,"--Susan's voice grew husky and unsteady,--"you've got a chance
now to paint bigger an' grander pictures than you ever did before, only
you won't be paintin' 'em on canvas backs. You'll be paintin' 'em on
that boy's soul, an' you'll be usin' words instead of them little
brushes."
"You've put that--very well, Susan." It was the man who spoke
unsteadily, huskily, now.
"I don't know about that, but I do know that them pictures you're
goin' to paint for him is goin' to be the makin' of him. Why, Mr.
Burton, we can't have him lazin' behind, 'cause when he does get back
his eyes we don't want him to be too far behind his class."
"But what--if he doesn't ever get his eyes, Susan?"
"Then he'll need it all the more. But he's goin' to get 'em, Mr.
Burton. Don't you remember? The nurse said if he got well an' strong
he could have somethin' done. I've got the doctor, an' all I need now
is the money. An'--an' that makes me think." She hesitated, growing
suddenly pink and embarrassed. Then resolutely she put her hand into
the pocket of her apron and pulled out two folded papers.
"I was goin' to tell you about these, anyhow, so I might as well do it
now," she explained. "You know, them--them other poems didn't sell
much--there was only one went, an' the man wouldn't take that till
he'd made me promise he could print my letter, too, that I'd wrote
with it--jest as if that was worth anything!--but he only paid a
measly dollar anyhow." Susan's voice faltered a little, though her
chin was at a brave tilt. "An' I guess now I know the reason. Them
kind of poems ain't stylish no longer. Rhymes has gone out.
Everything's 'free verse' now. I've been readin' up about it. So I've
wrote some of 'em. They're real easy to do--jest lines chopped off
free an' easy, anywheres that it happens, only have some long, an'
some short, for notoriety, you know, like this." And she read:
"A great big cloud
That was black
Came up
Out of the West. An' I knew
Then
For sure
That a storm was brewin'.
An' it brewed."
"Now that was dead easy--anybody could see that. But it's kind of
pretty, I think, too, jest the same. Them denatured poems are always
pretty, I think--about trees an' grass an' flowers an' the sky, you
know. Don't you?"
"Why, er--y-yes, of course," murmured the man faintly.
"I tried a love poem next. I don't write them very often. They're so
common. You see 'em everywhere, you know. But I thought I would try
it--'twould be different, anyhow, in this new kind of verses. So I
wrote this:
Oh, love of mine,
I love
Thee.
Thy hair is yellow like the
Golden squash.
Thy neck so soft
An' slender like a goose,
Is encompassed in filtered lace
So rich an'
Rare.
Thy eyes in thy pallid face like
Blueberries in a
Saucer of milk.
Oh, love of mine,
I love
Thee."
"Have you sent--any of these away yet, Susan?" Daniel Burton was on
his feet now, his back carefully turned.
"No, not yet; but I'm goin' to pretty quick, an' I guess them will
sell." Susan nodded happily, and smiled. But almost instantly her face
grew gravely earnest again. "But all the money in the world ain't
goin' to do no good Mr. Burton, unless we do our part, an' our part is
to get him well an' strong for that operator. Now I'm goin' to send
Keith in to you. I ain't goin' to TELL him he's goin' to walk with
you, 'cause if I did he wouldn't come. But I'm expectin' you to take
him, jest the same," she finished severely, as she left the room.
Keith and his father went to walk. It was the first of many such
walks. Almost every one of these crisp November days found the two off
on a tramp somewhere. And because Daniel Burton was careful always to
accompany, never to lead, the boy's step gained day by day in
confidence and his face in something very like interest. And always,
for cold and stormy days, there were the books at home.
Daniel Burton was not painting pictures--pigment pictures--these days.
His easel was empty. "The Woodland Path," long since finished, had
been sent away "to be sold." Most of Daniel Burton's paintings were
"sent away to be sold," so that was nothing new. What was new,
however, was the fact that no fresh canvas was placed on the easel to
take the place of the picture sent away. Daniel Burton had begun no
new picture. The easel, indeed, was turned face to the wall. And yet
Daniel Burton was painting pictures, wonderful pictures. His brushes
were words, his colors were the blue and gold and brown and crimson of
the wide autumn landscape, his inspiration was the hungry light on a
boy's face, and his canvas was the soul of the boy behind it. Most
assuredly Daniel Burton was giving himself now, heart and mind and
body, to his son. Even the lynx-eyed, alert Susan had no fault to
find. Daniel Burton, most emphatically, was "doing his part."
CHAPTER XIV
A SURPRISE ALL AROUND
The week before Christmas Dorothy Parkman brought a tall,
dignified-looking man to the Burtons' shabby, but still beautiful,
colonial doorway.
Dorothy had not seen Keith, except on the street, since her visit with
Mazie in October. Two or three times the girls had gone to the house
with flowers or fruit, but Keith had stubbornly refused to see them,
in spite of Susan's urgings. To-day Dorothy, with this evidently in
mind, refused Susan's somewhat dubious invitation to come in.
"Oh, no, thank you, I'll not come in," she smiled. "I only brought
father, that's all. And--oh, I do hope he can do something," she
faltered unsteadily. And Susan saw that her eyes were glistening with
tears as she turned away.
In the hall Susan caught the doctor's arm nervously.
"Dr. Parkman, there's somethin'--"
"My name is Stewart," interrupted the doctor.
"What's that? What's that?" cried Susan, unconsciously tightening her
clasp on his arm. "Ain't you Dorothy Parkman's father?"
"I'm her stepfather. She was nine when I married Mrs. Parkman, her
mother."
"Then your name ain't Parkman, at all! Oh, glory be!" ejaculated Susan
ecstatically. "Well, if that ain't the luckiest thing ever!"
"Lucky?" frowned the doctor, looking thoroughly mystified, and not
altogether pleased.
Susan gave an embarrassed laugh.
"There, now, if that ain't jest like me, to fly off on a tandem like
that, without a word of exploitation. It's jest that I'm so glad I
won't have to ask you to come under a resumed name."
"Under a what, madam?" The doctor was looking positively angry now.
Moreover, with no uncertain determination, he was trying to draw
himself away from Susan's detaining fingers.
"Oh, please, doctor, please, don't be mad!" Susan had both hands hold
of his arm now. "'Twas for Keith, an' I knew you'd be willin' to do
anything for him, when you understood, jest as I am. You see, I didn't
want him to know you was Dorothy's father," she plunged on
breathlessly, "an' so I was goin' to ask you to let me call you
somethin' else--not Parkman. An' then, when I found that you didn't
have to have a resumed name, that you was already somebody else--that
is, that you was really you, only Keith wouldn't know you was you, I
was so glad."
"Oh, I see." The doctor was still frowning, though his lips were
twitching a little. "But--er--do you mind telling me why I can't be I?
What's the matter with Dorothy's father?"
"Nothin' sir. It's jest a notion. Keith won't see Dorothy, nor Mazie,
nor none of 'em. He thinks they come jest to spy out how he looks an'
acts; an' he got it into his head that if you was Dorothy's father, he
wouldn't see you. He hates to be pitied an' stared at."
"Oh, I see." A sympathetic understanding came into the doctor's eyes.
The anger was all gone now. "Very well. As it happens I'm really Dr.
Stewart. So you may call me that with all honesty, and we'll be very
careful not to let the boy know I ever heard of Dorothy Parkman. How
about the boy's father? Does he--know?"
"Yes, sir. I told him who you was, an' that you was comin'; an' I told
him we wasn't goin' to let Keith know. An' he said 'twas absurd, an'
we couldn't help lettin' him know. But I told him I knew better an'
'twas all right."
"Oh, you did!" The doctor was regarding Susan with a new interest in
his eyes.
"Yes, an' 'tis, you see."
"Where is Mr. Burton?"
"In his studio--shut up. He'll see you afterwards. I told him he'd GOT
to do that."
"Eh? What?" The doctor's eyes flew wide open.
"See you afterwards. I told him he'd ought to be in the room with you,
when you was examplin' Keith's eyes. But I knew he wouldn't do that.
He never will do such-like things--makes him feel too bad. An' he
wanted ME to find out what you said. But I told him HE'D got to do
that. But, oh, doctor, I do hope--oh, please, please say somethin'
good if you can. An' now I'll take you in. It's right this way through
the sittin'-room."
"By Jove, what a beauty!" Halfway across the living-room the doctor
had come to a pause before the mahogany highboy.
"THAT?"
"Yes, 'that'!" The whimsical smile in the doctor's eyes showed that he
was not unappreciative of the scorn in Susan's voice. "By George, it
IS a beauty! I've got one myself, but it doesn't compare with that,
for a minute. H-m! And that's not the only treasure you have here, I
see," he finished, his admiring gaze roving about the room. "We've got
some newer, better stuff in the parlor. These are awful old things in
here," apologized Susan.
"Yes, I see they are--old things." The whimsical smile had come back
to the doctor's eyes as he followed Susan through the doorway.
"Keith's upstairs in his room, an' I'm takin' you up the back way so's
Mr. Burton won't hear. He asked me to. He didn't want to know jest
exactly when you was here."
"Mr. Burton must be a brave man," commented the doctor dryly.
"He ain't--not when it comes to seein' disagreeable things, or folks
hurt," answered the literal Susan cheerfully. "But he'll see you all
right, when it's over." Her lips came together with a sudden grimness.
The next moment, throwing open Keith's door, her whole expression
changed. She had eyes and thoughts but for the blind boy over by the
window.
The doctor, too, obviously, by the keen, professional alertness that
transfigured his face at that moment, had eyes and thoughts but for
that same blind boy over by the window.
"Well, Keith, here's Dr. Stewart to see you boy."
"Dr.--Stewart?" Keith was on his feet, startled, uncertain.
"Yes, Dr. Stewart.'" Susan repeated the name with clear emphasis. "He
was in town an' jest came up to look at you. He's a big, kind doctor,
dear, an' you'll like him, I know." At the door Susan turned to the
doctor. "An' when--when you're done, sir, if you'll jest come down
them stairs to the kitchen, please--TO THE KITCHEN," she repeated,
hurrying out before Keith could remonstrate.
Down in the kitchen Susan took a pan of potatoes to peel--and when,
long hours later, after the doctor had come downstairs, had talked
with Mr. Burton, and had gone, Susan went to get those potatoes to
boil for dinner, she found that all but two of them had been peeled
and peeled and peeled, until there was nothing left but--peelings.
Susan was peeling the next to the last potato when the doctor came
down to the kitchen.
"Well?" She was on her feet instantly.
The doctor's face was grave, yet his eyes were curiously alight. They
seemed to be looking through and beyond Susan.
"I don't know. I THINK I have good news, but I'm not--sure."
"But there's a chance?"
"Yes; but-" There was a moment's silence; then, with an indrawing of
his breath, the doctor's soul seemed to come back from a long journey.
"I think I know what is the matter." The doctor was looking at Susan,
now, not through her. "If it's what I think it is, it's a very rare
disease, one we do not often find."
"But could you--can you--is it possible to--to cure it?"
"We can operate--yes; but it's six to half a dozen whether it's
successful or not. They've just about broken even so far--the cases
I've known about. But they've been interesting, most interesting." The
doctor was far away again.
"But there's a chance; and if there is a chance I'd want to take it,"
cried Susan. "Wouldn't you?"
There was no answer.
Susan hesitated, threw a hurried glance into the doctor's preoccupied
face, then hurried on again feverishly.
"Doctor, there's somethin' I've got to--to speak to you about before
you see Mr. Burton. It--it--it'll cost an awful lot, I s'pose."
There was no answer.
Susan cleared her throat.
"It--it'll cost an awful lot, won't it, doctor?" she asked in a louder
voice.
"Eh? What? Cost? Oh, yes, yes; it is an expensive operation." The
doctor spoke unconcernedly. He merely glanced at Susan, then resumed
his fixed gaze into space.
"Well, doctor." Susan cleared her throat again. This time she caught
hold of the doctor's sleeve as if to pull him bodily back to a
realizing sense of her presence. "About the money--we haven't got it.
An' that's what I wanted to speak to you about. Mr. Burton hain't got
any. He's already spent more'n he's got--part of next year's annual, I
mean. Some day he'll have more--a whole lot more--when Mis' Holworthy,
his third cousin, dies. 'Twas her husband that gave him the annual,
you understand, an' when she dies it'll come to him in a plump sum.
But 'tain't his now, an' 'course it won't be till she goes; an'
'course 'tain't for us to dodge her footsteps hopin' she'll jest
naturally stop walkin' some day--though I'm free to confess she has
lost most all her facilities, bein' deaf an' lame an' some blind; an'
I can't exactly see the harm in wishin' she had got 'em all back--in
Heaven, I mean. But 'course I don't say so to him. An' as I said
before, we hain't got money now--not any.
"An'--an' his last pictures didn't sell any better than the others,"
she went on a little breathlessly. "Then there was me--that is, I WAS
goin' to get some money; but--but, well MY pictures didn't sell,
either." She paused to wet her lips. "But I've thought it all out, an'
there's a way."
"You--you'd have to have Keith with you, somewheres, wouldn't you?"
"To operate? Oh, yes, yes."
"A long time?"
"Eh? What? Oh, yes, we would have to have him a long time, probably.
In fact, time is one of the very biggest factors in such cases--for
the after-treatment, you know. And we must have him where we can watch
him, of course."
"Oh! Then that's all right, then. I can manage it fine," sighed Susan,
showing by the way her whole self relaxed how great had been the
strain. "Then I'll come right away to work for you."
"To what?" The doctor suddenly came back to earth.
"To work for you--in your kitchen, I mean," nodded Susan. "I'll send
Mr. Burton to his sister's, then I'll come to you, an' I'll come
impaired to stay till I've paid it up--every cent."
"Good Heavens, woman!" ejaculated the man. "What are you talking
about?"
"Oh, please, please don't say that I can't," besought Susan, her
fearful eyes on his perturbed face. "I'll work real well--truly I
will. An' I'm a real good cook, honest I am, when I have a
super-abundance to do it with--butter, an' eggs, an' nice roasts. An' I
won't bother you a mite with my poetry. I don't make it much now,
anyhow. An'--oh, doctor, you've GOT to let me do it; it's the only way
there is to p-pay." Her voice choked into silence. Susan turned her
back abruptly. Not even for Keith could Susan let any one see her cry.
"Pay! And do you think you'd live long--" Just in time the doctor
pulled himself up short. Thrusting his hands into his pockets he took
a nervous turn about the kitchen; then sharply he wheeled about. "My
dear woman, let us talk no more about the money question. See here, I
shall be glad to take that boy into my charge and take care of him for
the sheer love of it--indeed, I shall!"
"Do you mean without ANY pay?" Susan had drawn herself up haughtily.
"Yes. So far as money goes--it is of no consequence, anyway. I'm glad--"
"Thank you, but we ain't charitable folks, Dr. Stewart," cut in Susan
coldly. "Maybe it is infinitesimal to you whether we pay or not, but't
ain't to us. We don't want--"
"But I tell you it's pay enough just to do it," interrupted the doctor
impatiently. "It's a very rare case, and I'm glad--"
A door banged open.
"Susan, hasn't that doctor--" a new voice cut in, then stopped short.
The doctor turned to see a pallid-faced, blond-bearded man with
rumpled hair standing in the doorway.
"Mr. Burton?" hazarded the doctor crisply.
"Yes. And you-"
"Dr. Stewart. And I'd like a little talk with you, please--if you can
talk sense." This last was added under his breath; but Daniel Burton
was not listening, in any case. He was leading the way to the studio.
In the studio the doctor did not wait for questions, but plunged at
once into his story.
"Without going into technical terms, Mr. Burton, I will say that your
son has a very rare trouble. There is only one known relief, and that
is a certain very delicate operation. Even with that, the chances are
about fifty-fifty that he regains his sight."
"But there's a chance?"
"Yes, there's a chance. And, anyway, it won't do any harm to try. It
is the only thing possible, and, if it fails--well, he'll only be
blind, as he is now. It must be done right away, however. Even now it
may be too late. And I may as well tell you, if it DOESN'T fail--there
is a strong probability of another long period of treatment and a
second operation, before there's a chance of ultimate success!"
"Could--could that time be spent here?" Daniel Burton's lips had grown
a little white.
"No. I should want the boy where I could see him frequently--with me,
in fact. And that brings me to what I was going to propose. With your
permission I will take the boy back with me next week to Chicago, and
operate at once. And let me say that from sheer interest in the case I
shall be glad to do this entirely without cost to you."
"Thank you; but of course you must understand that I could not allow
that for a moment." A painful color had flamed into Daniel Burton's
face.
"Nonsense! Don't be foolish, man. I tell you I'm glad to do it. It'll
be worth it to me--the rarity of the case--"
"How much--would it cost?" interposed Daniel Burton peremptorily, with
an unsteadiness of voice that the doctor did not fail to read aright.
"Why, man, alive, it would cost--" With his eyes on Daniel Burton's
sternly controlled face, the doctor came to an abrupt pause. Then,
turning, he began to tramp up and down the room angrily. "Oh, hang it
all, man, why can't you be sensible? I tell you I don't want any--"
Once again his tongue stopped. His feet, also, had come to an abrupt
pause. He was standing before an old colonial mirror. Then suddenly he
wheeled about. "By Jove, there IS something I want. If you'll sell me
two or three of these treasures of yours here, you will be more than
cancelling your debt, and--"
"Thank you," interrupted the other coldly, but with a still deeper red
staining his face. "As I happen to know of the unsalability of these
pictures, however, I cannot accept your generosity there, either."
"Pictures!" The doctor, turning puzzled eyes back to the mirror, saw
now that a large oil painting hung beside it on the wall. "I wasn't
talking about your pictures, man," he scoffed then. "I was looking at
that mirror there, and I'd like the highboy downstairs, if I could
persuade you to part with them, and--WOULD you be willing to part with
them?"
"What do you think!" (So marvelous was the change, and so great was
the shining glory in Daniel Burton's face, that the doctor caught
himself actually blinking.) "Do you think there's anything, ANYTHING
that I wouldn't part with, if I thought I could give that boy a
chance? Make your own selection, doctor. I only hope you'll
want--really WANT--enough of them to amount to something."
The doctor threw a keen glance into his face.
"Amount to something! Don't you know the value of these things here?"
Daniel Burton laughed and shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, I suppose they
are--valuable. But I shall have to confess I DON'T know very much
about it. They're very old, I can vouch for that."
"Old! Humph!" The doctor was close to the mirror now, examining it
with the appreciative eyes of the real lover of the antique. "I should
say they were. Jove, that's a beauty! And I've got just the place
that's hungering for it."
"Good! Suppose we look about the house, then, a little," suggested
Daniel Burton. "Perhaps we'll find some more things--er--good for a
hungry stomach, eh?" And with a light on his face such as had not been
there for long months past, Daniel Burton led the way from the studio.
CHAPTER XV
AGAIN SUSAN TAKES A HAND
That evening Daniel Burton told Susan. "Keith is to go home with Dr.
Stewart next week. The doctor will operate as soon as possible. Keith
will live at the sanatorium connected with the doctor's home and be
under his constant supervision."
Susan tried to speak, but instead of speaking she burst into tears.
"Why, Susan!" exclaimed the man.
"I know, I know," she choked, angrily dashing the drops from her eyes.
"An' me cryin' like this when I'm gettin' jest what I want, too!"
"But there's no certainty, Susan, that it'll be successful; remember
that," warned the man, his face clouding a little. "We can only--hope."
"An' there's the--the pay." Susan looked up, her voice vibrating with
fearful doubts.
"Oh, that's all right." The man lifted his head with the air of one
who at last has reached firm ground after a dangerous crossing on thin
ice. "The doctor's going to buy the highboy and that mirror in the
studio, and--oh, several other things."
"You mean that old chest of drawers in the settin'-room?" scorned
Susan openly.
"Yes." Daniel Burton's lips twitched a little.
"But will he PAY anything for 'em? Mr. Burton, you can't get nothin',
hardly, for second-hand furniture. My mother had a stove an' a real
nice bedstead, an' a red-plush parlor set, an' she sold 'em. But she
didn't get anything--not hardly anything, for 'em; an' they was 'most
new, some of 'em, too."
"That's the trouble, Susan--they were too new, probably," laughed the
man. "It's because these are old, very old, that he wants them, I
suspect.
"An' he'll really pay MONEY for 'em?" Plainly Susan still had her
doubts.
"He certainly will. I'd be almost ashamed to tell you HOW much he'll
pay, Susan," smiled the man. "It seemed to me sheer robbery on my
part. But he assures me they are very valuable, and that he's more
than delighted to have them even at that price."
"Lan' sakes! An' when I'd been worryin' an' worryin' so about the
money," sighed Susan; "an' now to have it fall plump into your lap
like that. It jest shows you not to hunt for bridges till you get your
feet wet, don't it? An' he's goin' jest next week?"
"Yes. The doctor and his daughter start Tuesday."
"You don't mean that girl Dorothy's goin' too?" Susan had almost
bounced out of her chair.
"Why, yes, Dr. Stewart SAID she was. What's the matter?"
"Matter? Matter enough! Why, if she goes--Say, why IS she taggin'
along, anyhow?" demanded Susan wrathfully.
"Well, I shouldn't exactly call it 'taggin' along' to go home with her
father for the Christmas vacation," shrugged the man. "As I understand
it, Dorothy's mother died several years ago. That's why the girl is
here in the East so much with her relatives, going to school. The
doctor's home has become practically a sanatorium--not the most
desirable place in the world to bring up a young daughter in, I should
say. Let's see, how old is Miss Dorothy?"
"Sixteen, Keith says. I asked him one day. She's about his age."
"Hm-m; well, however that may be, Susan, I don't see how we can help
ourselves very well. I fancy Miss Dorothy'll still--tag along," he
finished whimsically.
"Maybe, an' then maybe not," mumbled Susan darkly, as she turned away.
For two days after this Susan's kitchen, and even Keith himself,
showed almost neglect; persistently and systematically Susan was
running "down street" every hour or two--ostensibly on errands, yet
she bought little. She spent most of her time tramping through the
streets and stores, scrutinizing especially the face of every young
girl she met.
On the afternoon of the second day she met Dorothy Parkman coming out
of the post-office.
"Well, I've got you at last," she sighed, "though I'm free to confess
I was beginnin' to think I never would see you."
"Oh, yes, about Keith," cried the girl joyously. "Isn't it splendid!
I'm so glad! And he's going home with us right away, you know."
"Yes, I know. An' that's what--that is, I wanted--" stammered Susan,
growing red in her misery. "Oh, Miss Dorothy, you WOULD do anything
for that poor blind boy, wouldn't you?"
"Why, y-yes, of course," faltered Dorothy, stammering in her turn.
"I knew you would. Then please don't go home with your father this
time."
"Don't go home--with--my father!" exclaimed the girl, in puzzled
wonder.
"No. Because if you do--That is--Oh, I know it's awful for me to say
this, but I've got to do it for Keith. You see, if you go,--Keith
won't."
"If I go, he--I don't think--I quite understand." The girl drew back a
little haughtily. Her face showed a painful flush.
"No, no, of course you don't! An' please, PLEASE don't look like
that," begged Susan. "It's jest this. I found out. I wormed it out of
him the other day--why he won't let you come to see him. He says that
once, long ago, you said how you couldn't bear to look at blind
people, an'--"
"Oh, I never, never could have said such a cruel thing to--to a blind
boy," interposed the girl.
"He wasn't blind then. He said he wasn't. But, it was when he was
'fraid he was goin' to be blind; an' he see you an' Mazie Sanborn at
the foot of Harrington Hill, one day. It was just after the old man
had got blind, an' Keith had been up to see him. It seems that Keith
was worryin' then for fear HE was goin' to be blind."
"He WAS?"
"Yes--things blurred, an' all that. Well, at the foot of the hill he
see you an' Mazie, an' you shuddered at his goin' up to see Mr.
Harrington, an' said how could he bear to look at folks that was
blind. That YOU couldn't. An' he never forgot it. Bein' worried for
fear he himself was goin' blind, you see, he was especially acceptable
to anything like that."
"Oh, but I--I--At home I always did hate to see all the poor blind
people that came to see father," she stammered. "But it--it was only
because I felt so bad--for them. And that's one reason why father
doesn't keep me at home any more. He says--But, about Keith--I--I
didn't mean to--" Dorothy came to a helpless pause.
"Yes, I know. You didn't mean to hurt him," nodded Susan. "But it did
hurt him. An' now he always thinks of it, if he knows you're 'round.
You see, worse'n anything else, he hates to be stared at or to have
folks think he's different. There ain't anything I can ever say to him
that makes him half so happy as to act as if he wa'n't blind."
"Yes, I--see," breathed Dorothy, her eyes brimming.
"An' so now you won't go, will you? Because if you go, he won't."
Miss Dorothy frowned in deep thought for a moment.
"I shall have to go," she said at last, slowly. "Father is just
counting on my being there Christmas, and he is so lonely--I couldn't
disappoint him. But, Keith--I won't have to see much of him, anyway.
I'll explain it to father. He won't mind. He's used to his patients
taking notions. It'll be all right. Don't worry," she nodded, her face
clearing.
"But you'll have to be with Keith--some."
"Oh, yes, a little. But he won't know who I am. I'm just Dr. Stewart's
daughter. Don't you see?"
"But--he'll know your voice."
"I shan't talk much. Besides, he never did hear me talk much. It was
always Mazie that talked most. And he hasn't heard me any for a year
or more, except that little bit that day at the house."
"But your name, Dorothy," still argued Susan dubiously.
"Father never calls me that. I'm always 'Puss' to him. And there won't
be anybody else with us on the journey. Don't you worry. You just send
Keith right along, and trust me for the rest. You'll see," she nodded
again brightly, as she turned away.
Susan went home then to her neglected work. There seemed really
nothing else that she could do. But that she was far from following
Miss Dorothy's blithe advice "not to worry" was very evident from her
frowning brow and preoccupied air all the rest of the time until
Tuesday morning when Keith went--until, indeed, Mr. Burton came home
from seeing Keith off on his journey. Then her pent-up perturbation
culminated in an onslaught of precipitate questions.
"Was he all right? Was that girl there? Did he know who she was? Do
you think he'll find out?"
"One at a time, Susan, one at a time," laughed the man. "Yes, he was
all right. He went off smiling, with the doctor's arm about his
shoulders. Yes, the young lady was there, but she kept well away from
Keith, so far as I could see. Friends had come evidently to see her
off, but I noticed she contrived to keep herself and them as far away
from Keith as possible. Of course, on the journey there'll be just the
three of them. The test will come then. But I wouldn't worry, Susan.
Remember your own advice about those bridges of yours. He's started,
and he's with the doctor. I don't think he'll turn back now."
"No, I s'pose not," sighed Susan. "But I wish I could really KNOW how
things are!" she finished, as she took up her work again.
Thirty-six hours later came the telegram from the doctor telling of
their safe arrival, and a week later came a letter from Keith himself
to Susan. It was written in lead-pencil on paper that had been
carefully perforated so as to form lines not too near together.
At the top of the page in parentheses were these words:
DEAR SUSAN: If you think dad would like it you may read him a part or
the whole of this letter. I was afraid I wouldn't write very well and
that he wouldn't like to see it. So I write to you instead. I know you
won't mind.
Below came the letter.
DEAR SUSAN: How do you and dad do? I am well and hope you are the
same.
This is an awfully pretty place with trees and big lawns all around
it, and walks and seats everywhere in the summer, they say. We aren't
sitting outdoors to-day, though. It's only four below!
We had a jolly trip out. The doctor's great. He spent half his time
talking to me about the things we were seeing out the window. We went
through a wonderful country, and saw lots of interesting things.
The doctor's daughter was along, too. But she didn't have much to say
on the trip. I've seen quite a lot of her since we've been here,
though, and she's ALL RIGHT. At first I didn't like her very well. It
was her voice, I guess. It reminded me of somebody I didn't like to be
reminded of. But after I got used to it I found she was really very
nice and jolly. She knows lots of games, and we play together a lot
now. She's so different from that girl she sounded like that I don't
mind her voice now. And I don't think she minds (here a rather
unsuccessful erasure showed that "playing with me" had been
substituted for "being with blind folks").
She gave me this paper, and told me the folks at home would like a
letter, she knew. That's why I'm writing it. And I guess that's enough
for this time.
Love to all. KEITH BURTON
P.S. I'm going to have the operation to-morrow, but they won't know
for quite a while whether it's successful or not, the doctor says.
KEITH
Susan read this letter, then took it at once to the studio and read it
again aloud.
"Now ain't that great?" she crowed, as soon as she had finished.
"Y-yes, but he didn't say much about himself or his treatment,"
demurred the man.
Susan made an impatient gesture.
"Why, yes, he did, too! Lan' sakes, Mr. Burton, he didn't talk about
nothin' else but himself an' his treatment, all the way through. Oh, I
know he didn't say anything about his occultist treatment, if that's
what you mean. But I didn't do no worryin' about that part. It was the
other part."
"The other part!"
"Yes. They're treatin' him as if he wa'n't different an' queer. An'
didn't you notice the way he wrote? Happy as a king tellin' about what
he SAW on the way out, an' the wonderful country they went through.
They're all right--them two are. I shan't do no more worryin' about
Keith. An' her fixin' that paper so cute for him to write on--I
declare I'm that zealous of her I don't know what to do. Why couldn't
_I_ 'a' thought of that?" she sighed, as she rose to leave the room.
Two days later came a letter from the doctor. The operation had been
performed and, so far as they could judge, all was well, though, as
Keith had written, the real results would not show until the bandages
were removed some time later.
When the schools opened again in January, Dorothy Parkman came back to
Hinsdale. Susan had been counting the days ever since Christmas, for
she knew Dorothy was coming, and she could scarcely wait to see her.
This time, however, she did not have to tramp through the streets and
stores looking for her, for Miss Dorothy came at once to the house and
rang the bell.
"I knew you'd want to hear all about Mr. Keith," she smiled brightly
into Susan's eyes. "And I'm glad to report that he's doing all right."
"Be them bandages off yet? Do you mean--he can see?" demanded Susan
excitedly, leading the way to the sitting-room.
"Oh, no--no--not that!" cried the girl quickly. "I mean--he's doing
all right so far. It's a week yet before the bandages can be removed,
and even then, he probably won't see much--if at all. There'll have to
be another one--later--father says--maybe two more."
"Oh!" Susan fell back, plainly disappointed. Then, suddenly, a new
interest flamed into her eyes.
"An' he ain't sensed yet who you are?" she questioned.
Miss Dorothy blushed, and Susan noticed suddenly how very pretty she
was.
"No. Though I must confess that at first, when he heard my voice, he
looked up much startled, and even rose from his seat. But I told him
lots of folks thought I talked like Dorothy Parkman; and I just
laughed and turned it off, and made nothing of it. And so pretty quick
he made nothing of it, too. After that we got along beautifully."
"I should say you did!" retorted Susan, almost enviously. "An' you
fixin' up that paper so fine for him to write on!"
Miss Dorothy blushed again--and again Susan noticed how very charming
was the combination of brown eyes and yellow-gold hair.
"Yes, he did like that paper," smiled the young girl. "He never
mentioned the lines, and neither did I. When I first suggested the
letter home he was all ready to refuse, I could see; but I wouldn't
give him the chance. Before he could even speak I had thrust the paper
into his hands, and I could see the wonder, interest, and joy in his
face as his fingers discovered the pricked lines and followed their
course from edge to edge. But he didn't let ME know he'd found them--not
much! 'Well, I don't know but they would like a letter,' was all
he said, casually. I knew then that I had won."
"Well, I should say you had. But HOW did you know how?" cried Susan.
"Oh, you told me first that I must talk to him as if he were not
blind. Then father told me the same thing. He said lots of his
patients were like that. So I always tried to do it that way. And it's
wonderful how, when you give it a little thought, you can manage to
tell them so much that they can turn about and tell somebody else,
just as if they really had seen it."
"I know, I know," nodded Susan. "An'--Miss Dorothy"--her voice grew
unsteady--"he really IS goin' to see by an' by, ain't he?"
The girl's face clouded.
"They aren't at all sure of that."
"But they can't tell YET?" Susan had grown a little white.
"Oh, no, not sure."
"An' they're goin' to give him all the chances there is?"
"Certainly. I only spoke because I don't want you to be too
disappointed if--if we lose. You must remember that fully half of the
cases do lose."
Susan drew a long sigh. Then, determinedly she lifted her chin.
"Well, I like to think we ain't goin' to belong to that half," she
said.
CHAPTER XVI
THE WORRY OF IT
There was a letter from the doctor when the bandages were removed.
Daniel Burton began to read the letter, but his eyes blurred and his
hand shook, so that Susan had to take it up where he had dropped it.
Yet the letter was very short.
The operation had been as successful, perhaps, as they could expect,
under the circumstances. Keith could discern light now--faintly, to be
sure, but unmistakably. He was well and happy. Meanwhile he was under
treatment for the second operation to come later. But that could not
be performed for some time yet, so they must not lose their patience.
That was all.
"Well, I s'pose we ought to be glad he can see light even a little,"
sighed Susan; "but I'm free to confess I was hopin' he could do a
little more than that."
"Yes, so was I," said Daniel Burton. And Susan, looking at his face,
turned away without another word. There were times when Susan knew
enough not to talk.
Then came the days when there were only Keith's letters and an
occasional short note from the doctor to break the long months of
waiting.
In the Burton homestead at Hinsdale, living was reduced to the
simplest formula possible. On the whole, there was perhaps a little
more money. Dunning tradesmen were not so numerous. But all luxuries,
and some things that were almost necessities, were rigorously left
out. And the money was saved always--for Keith. A lodger, a young law
student, in Keith's old room helped toward defraying the family
expenses.
Susan had given up trying to sell her "poems." She had become
convinced at last that a cruel and unappreciative editorial wall was
forever to bar her from what she still believed was an eagerly
awaiting public. She still occasionally wrote jingles and talked in
rhyme; but undeniably she had lost her courage and her enthusiasm. As
she expressed it to Mrs. McGuire, she did not feel "a mite like a
gushing siphon inside her now."
As the summer came and passed, Susan and Mrs. McGuire talked over the
back-yard fence even more frequently. Perhaps because Susan was lonely
without Keith. Perhaps because there was so much to talk about.
First there was Keith.
Keith was still under treatment preparatory to the second operation.
He had not responded quite as they had hoped, the doctor said, which
meant that the operation must be postponed for perhaps several months
longer.
All this Susan talked over with Mrs. McGuire; and there was always,
too, the hushed discussion as to what would happen if, after all, it
failed, and Keith came home hopelessly blind.
"But even that ain't the worst thing that could happen," maintained
Susan stoutly. "I can tell you Keith Burton ain't goin' to let a
little thing like that floor him!"
Mrs. McGuire, however, did not echo Susan's optimistic prophecies. But
Mrs. McGuire's own sky just now was overcast, which perhaps had
something to do with it. Mrs. McGuire had troubles of her own.
It was the summer of 1914, and the never-to-be-forgotten August had
come and passed, firing the match that was destined to set the whole
world ablaze. Mrs. McGuire's eldest son John--of whom she boasted in
season and out and whom she loved with an all-absorbing passion--had
caught the war-fever, gone to Canada, and enlisted. Mrs. McGuire
herself was a Canadian by birth, and all her family still lived there.
She was boasting now more than ever about John; but, proud as she was
of her soldier boy, his going had plunged her into an abyss of doubt
and gloom.
"He'll never come back, he'll never come back," she moaned to Susan.
"I can just feel it in my bones that he won't."
"Shucks, a great, strong, healthy boy like John McGuire! Of course,
he'll come back," retorted Susan. "Besides, likely the war'll be all
over with 'fore he gets there, anyhow. An' as for feelin' it in your
bones, Mis' McGuire, that's a very facetious doctrine, an' ain't no
more to be depended upon than my flour sieve for an umbrella. They're
gay receivers every time--bones are. Why, lan' sakes, Mis' McGuire, if
all things happened that my bones told me was goin' to happen, there
wouldn't none of us be livin' by now, nor the sun shinin', nor the
moon moonin'. I found out, after awhile, how they DIDN'T happen half
the time, an' I wrote a poem on it, like this:
Trust 'em not, them fickle bones,
Always talkin' moans an' groans.
Jest as if inside of you,
Lived a thing could tell yo
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/5874