The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories/The Only Child

by Booth Tarkington

 

THE ONLY CHILD

THE little boy was afraid to go into the dark room on the other side of the hall, and the little boy’s father was disgusted with him. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, Ludlum Thomas?” the father called from his seat by the library lamp. “Eight years old and scared! Scared to step into a room and turn the light on! Why, when I was your age I used to go out to the barn after dark in the winter-time, and up into the loft, all by myself, and pitch hay down to the horse through the chute. You walk straight into that dining-room, turn on the light, and get what you want; and don’t let’s have any more fuss about it. You hear me?”

Ludlum disregarded this speech. “Mamma,” he called, plaintively, “I want you to come and turn the light on for me. Please, mamma!”

Mrs. Thomas, across the library table from her husband, looked troubled, and would have replied, but the head of the house checked her.

“Now let me,” he said. Then he called again: “You going in there and do what I say, or not?”

“Please come on, mamma,” Ludlum begged. “Mamma, I lef’ my bow-an’-arry in the dining-room, an’ I want to get it out o’ there so’s I can take it up to bed with me. Mamma, won’t you please come turn the light on for me?”

“No, she will not!” Mr. Thomas shouted. “What on earth are you afraid of?”

“Mamma——”

“Stop calling your mother! She’s not coming. You were sitting in the dining-room yourself, not more than an hour ago, at dinner, and you weren’t afraid then, were you?”

Ludlum appeared between the brown curtains of the library doorway—the sketch of a rather pale child-prince in black velvet. “No, but——” he said.

“But what?”

“It was all light in there then. Mamma an’ you were in there, too.”

“Now look here!” Mr. Thomas paused, rested his book upon his knee, and spoke slowly. “You know there’s nothing in that dining-room except the table and the chairs and the sideboard, don’t you?”

Ludlum’s eyes were not upon his father but upon the graceful figure at the other side of the table. “Mamma,” he said, “won’t you please come get my bow-an’-arry for me?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy replied, with eyes still pleadingly upon his mother.

“Well, then, what is there to be afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” said Ludlum. “It’s dark in there.”

“It won’t be dark if you turn on the light, will it?”

“Mamma——”

“Now, that’s enough!” the father interrupted testily. “It’s after eight. You go on up to bed.”

Ludlum’s tone began to indicate a mental strain. “I don’t want to go to bed without my bow-an’-arry!”

“What do you want your bow and arrow when you’re in bed for?”

“I got to have it!”

“See here!” said Mr. Thomas. “You march up to bed and quit talking about your bow and arrow. You can take them with you if you go in there right quick and get them; but whether you do that or not you’ll march to bed inside of one minute from now!”

“I got to have my bow-an’-arry. I got to, to go upstairs with?”

“You don’t want your bow and arrow in bed with you, do you?”

“Mamma!” Thus Ludlum persisted in his urgent appeal to that court in whose clemency he trusted. “Mamma, will you please come get my bow-an’——”

“No, she won’t.”

“Then will you come upstairs with me, mamma?”

“No, she won’t! You’ll go by yourself, like a man.”

“Mamma——”

Mrs. Thomas intervened cheerily. “Don’t be afraid, dearie,” she said. “Your papa thinks you ought to begin to learn how to be manly; but the lights are lit all the way, and I told Annie to turn on the one in your room. You just go ahead like a good boy, and when you’re all undressed and ready to jump in bed, then you just whistle for me——”

“I don’t want to whistle,” said Ludlum irritably. “I want my bow-an’-arry!”

“Look here!” cried his father. “You start for——”

“I got to have my bow-an’——”

“You mean to disobey me?”

“I got to have my——”

Mr. Thomas rose; his look became ominous. “We’ll see about that!” he said; and he approached his son, whose apprehensions were expressed in a loud cry.

“Mamma!”

“Don’t hurt his feel——” Mrs. Thomas began.

“Something’s got to be done,” her husband said grimly, and his hand fell upon Ludlum’s shoulder. “You march!”

Ludlum muttered vaguely.

“You march!”

“I got to have my bow-an’-arry! I can’t go to bed ’less mamma comes with me! She’s got to come with me!”

Suddenly he made a scene. Having started it, he went in for all he was worth and made it a big one. He shrieked, writhed away from his father’s hand, darted to his mother, and clung to her with spasmodic violence throughout the protracted efforts of the sterner parent to detach him.

When these efforts were finally successful, Ludlum plunged upon the floor, and fastened himself to the leg of a heavy table. Here, for a considerable time, he proved the superiority of an earnest boy’s wind and agility over those of a man: as soon as one part of him was separated from the leg of the table another part of him became attached to it; and all the while he was vehemently eloquent, though unrhetorical.

The pain he thus so powerfully expressed was undeniable; and nowadays few adults are capable of resisting such determined agony. The end of it was, that when Ludlum retired he was accompanied by both parents, his father carrying him, and Mrs. Thomas following close behind with the bow-an’-arry.

They were thoughtful when they returned to the library.

“I would like to know what got him into such a state,” said the father, groaning, as he picked up his book from the floor. “He used to march upstairs like a little man, and he wasn’t afraid of the dark, or of anything else; but he’s beginning to be afraid of his own shadow. What’s the matter with him?”

Mrs. Thomas shook her head. “I think it’s his constitution,” she said. “I don’t believe he’s as strong as we thought he was.”

“‘Strong!’” her husband repeated incredulously. “Have I been dreaming, or were you looking on when I was trying to pry him loose from that table-leg?”

“I mean nervously,” she said. “I don’t think his nerves are what they ought to be at all.”

“His nerve isn’t!” he returned. “That’s what I’m talking about! Why was he afraid to step into our dining-room—not thirty feet from where we were sitting?”

“Because it was dark in there. Poor child, he did want his bow and arrow!”

“Well, he got ’em! What did he want ’em for?”

“To protect himself on the way to bed.”

“To keep off burglars on our lighted stairway?”

“I suppose so,” said Mrs. Thomas. “Burglars or something.”

“Well, where’d he get such ideas from?”

“I don’t know. Nearly all children do get them.”

“I know one thing,” Mr. Thomas asserted, “I certainly never was afraid like that, and none of my brothers was, either. Do you suppose the children Ludlum plays with tell him things that make him afraid of the dark?”

“I don’t think so, because he plays with the same children now that he played with before he got so much this way. Of course he’s always been a little timid.”

“Well, I’d like to know what’s at the root of it. Something’s got into his head. That’s certain, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Thomas said musingly. “I believe fear of the dark is a sort of instinct, don’t you?”

“Then why does he keep having it more and more? Instinct? No, sir! I don’t know where he gets this silly scaredness from, nor what makes it, but I know that it won’t do to humour him in it. We’ve got to be firmer with him after this than we were to-night. I’m not going to have a son of mine grow up to be afraid!”

“Yes; I suppose we ought to be a little firmer with him,” she said dreamily.

However, for several days and nights there was no occasion to exercise this new policy of firmness with Ludlum, one reason being that he was careful not to leave his trusty bow and arrow in an unlighted room after dark. Three successive evenings, weapon in hand, he “marched” sturdily to bed; but on the fourth he was reluctant, even though equipped as usual.

“Is Annie upstairs?” he inquired querulously, when informed that his hour had struck.

“I’m not sure, dearie,” said his mother. “I think so. It’s her evening out, but I don’t think she’s gone.”

Standing in the library doorway, Ludlum sent upward a series of piercing cries: “Annie! Annee! Ann-ee! Oh, Ann-nee-ee!”

“Stop it!” Mr. Thomas commanded fiercely. “You want to break your mother’s ear-drums?”

“Ann-nee-eeee!”

“Stop that noise!”

“Ann——”

“Stop it!” Mr. Thomas made the gesture of rising, and Ludlum, interrupting himself abruptly, was silent until he perceived that his father’s threat to rise was only a gesture, whereupon he decided that his vocalizations might safely be renewed.

“Ann-nee-ee!”

“What is the matter with him?”

“Ludlum, dear,” said Mrs. Thomas, “what is it you want Annie for?”

“I want to know if she’s upstairs.”

“But what for?”

Ludlum’s expression became one of determination. “Well, I want to know,” he replied. “I got to know if Annie’s upstairs.”

“By George!” Mr. Thomas exclaimed suddenly. “I believe now he’s afraid to go upstairs unless he knows the housemaid’s up there!”

“Martha’s probably upstairs if Annie isn’t,” Mrs. Thomas hurriedly intervened. “You needn’t worry about whether Annie’s up there, Luddie, if Martha is. Martha wouldn’t let anything hurt you any more than Annie would, dear.”

“Great heavens!” her husband cried. “There’s nothing up there that’s going to hurt him whether a hundred cooks and housemaids are upstairs or downstairs, or in the house or out of it! That’s no way to talk to him, Jennie! Ludlum, you march straight——”

“Ann-nee-ee!”

“But, dearie,” said Mrs. Thomas, “I told you that Martha wouldn’t let anything hurt——”

“She isn’t there,” Ludlum declared. “I can hear her chinkin’ tin and dishes around in the kitchen.” And, again exerting all his vocal powers of penetration, “Oh, Ann-ee-ee!” he bawled.

“By George!” Mr. Thomas exclaimed. “This is awful! It’s just awful!”

“Don’t call any more, darling,” the mother gently urged. “It disturbs your papa.”

“But, Jennie, that isn’t the reason he oughtn’t to call. It does disturb me, but the real reason he oughtn’t to do it is because he oughtn’t to be afraid to——”

“Ann-ee-EE!”

Mr. Thomas uttered a loud cry of his own, and, dismissing gestures, rose from his chair prepared to act. But his son briskly disappeared from the doorway; he had been reassured from the top of the stairs. Annie had responded, and Ludlum sped upward cheerfully. The episode was closed—except in meditation.

There was another one during the night, however. At least, Mr. Thomas thought so, for at the breakfast table he inquired: “Was any one out of bed about half-past two? Something half woke me, and I thought it sounded like somebody knocking on a door, and then whispering.”

Mrs. Thomas laughed. “It was only Luddie,” she explained. “He had bad dreams, and came to my door, so I took him in with me for the rest of the night. He’s all right, now, aren’t you, Luddie? Mamma didn’t let the bad dream hurt her little boy, did she?”

“It wasn’t dreams,” said Ludlum. “I was awake. I thought there was somep’m in my room. I bet there was somep’m in there, las’ night!”

“Oh, murder!” his father lamented. “Boy nine years old got to go and wake up his mamma in the middle of the night, because he’s scared to sleep in his own bed with a hall-light shining through the transom! What on earth were you afraid of?”

Ludlum’s eyes clung to the consoling face of his mother. “I never said I was afraid. I woke up, an’ I thought I saw somep’m in there.”

“What kind of a ‘something’?”

Ludlum looked resentful. “Well, I guess I know what I’m talkin’ about,” he said importantly. “I bet there was somep’m, too!”

“I declare I’m ashamed,” Mr. Thomas groaned. “Here’s the boy’s godfather coming to visit us, and how’s he going to help find out we’re raising a coward?”

“John!” his wife exclaimed. “The idea of speaking like that just because Luddie can’t help being a little imaginative!”

“Well, it’s true,” he said. “I’m ashamed for Lucius to find it out.”

Mrs. Thomas laughed, and then, finding the large eyes of Ludlum fixed upon her hopefully, she shook her head. “Don’t you worry, darling,” she reassured him. “You needn’t be afraid of what Uncle Lucius will think of his dear little Luddie.”

“I’m not,” Ludlum returned complacently. “He gave me a dollar las’ time he was here.”

“Well, he won’t this time,” his father declared crossly. “Not after the way you’ve been behaving lately. I’ll see to that!”

Ludlum’s lower lip moved pathetically and his eyes became softly brilliant—manifestations that increased the remarkable beauty he inherited from his mother.

“John!” cried Mrs. Thomas indignantly.

Ludlum wept at once, and between his gulpings implored his mother to prevent his father from influencing Uncle Lucius against the giving of dollars. “Don’t let him, mamma!” he quavered. “An’ ’fif Uncle Lucius wuw-wants to give me a dollar, he’s got a right to, hasn’t he, mamma? Hasn’t he got a right to, mamma?”

“There, dearie! Of course!” she comforted him. “Papa won’t tell Uncle Lucius. Papa is sorry, and only wants you to be happy and not cry any more.”

Papa’s manner indicated somewhat less sympathy than she implied; nevertheless, he presently left the house in a condition vaguely remorseful, which still prevailed, to the extent of a slight preoccupation, when he met Uncle Lucius at the train at noon.

Uncle Lucius—Lucius Brutus Allen, attorney-at-law of Marlow, Illinois, population more than three thousand, if you believed him—this Uncle Lucius was a reassuring sight, even to the eyes of a remorseful father who had been persecuting the beautiful child of a lovely mother.

Mr. Allen was no legal uncle to Ludlum: he was really Mrs. Thomas’s second cousin, and, ever since she was eighteen and he twenty-four, had been her favoured squire. In fact, during her young womanhood, Mrs. Thomas and others had taken it as a matter of course that Lucius was in love with her; certainly that appeared to be his condition.

However, with the advent of Mr. John Thomas, Lucius Brutus Allen gave ground without resistance, and even assisted matters in a way which might have suggested to an outsider that he was something of a matchmaker as well as something of a lover. With a bravery that touched both the bride and bridegroom, he had stood up to the functions of Best Man without a quaver—and, of course, since the day of Ludlum’s arrival in the visible world, had been “Uncle Lucius.”

He was thirty-five; of a stoutish, stocky figure; large-headed and thin-haired; pinkish and cheerful and warm. His warmth was due partly to the weather, and led to a continuous expectancy on the part of Ludlum, for it was the habit of Uncle Lucius to keep his handkerchief in a pocket of his trousers. From the hour of his arrival, every time that Uncle Lucius put his hand in his pocket and drew forth a handkerchief to dry his dewy brow, Ludlum suffered a disappointment.

In fact, the air was so sticky that these disappointments were almost continuous, with the natural result that Ludlum became peevish; for nobody can be distinctly disappointed a dozen or so times an hour, during the greater part of an afternoon, and remain buoyantly amiable.

Finally he could bear it no longer. He had followed his parents and Uncle Lucius out to the comfortable porch, which gave them ampler air and the pretty sight of Mrs. Thomas’s garden, but no greater coolness; and here Uncle Lucius, instead of bringing forth from his pocket a dollar, produced, out of that storage, a fresh handkerchief.

“Goodness me, but you got to wipe your ole face a lot!” said Ludlum in a voice of pure spitefulness. “I guess why you’re so hot mus’ be you stuff yourself at meals, an’ got all fat the way you are!”

Wherewith, he emitted a shrill and bitter laugh of self-applause for wit, while his parents turned to gaze upon him—Mrs. Thomas with surprise, and Mr. Thomas with dismay. To both of them his rudeness crackled out of a clear sky; they saw it as an effect detached from cause; therefore inexplicable.

“Ludlum!” said the father sharply.

“Dearie!” said the mother.

But the visitor looked closely at the vexed face. “What is it you’ve decided you don’t like about me, Luddie?” he asked.

“You’re too fat!” said Ludlum.

Both parents uttered exclamations of remonstrance, but Mr. Allen intervened. “I’m not so very fat,” he said. “I’ve just realized what the trouble between us is, Luddie. I overlooked something entirely, but I’ll fix it all right when we’re alone together. Now that I’ve explained about it, you won’t mind how often I take my handkerchief out of my pocket, will you?”

“What in the world!” Mrs. Thomas exclaimed. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s all right,” said Lucius.

Ludlum laughed; his face was restored to its serene beauty. Obviously, he again loved his Uncle Lucius, and a perfect understanding, mysterious to the parents, now existed between godfather and godson. In celebration, Ludlum shouted and ran to caper in the garden.

“By George!” said John Thomas. “You seem to understand him! I don’t. I don’t know what the dickens is in his mind, half the time.”

Mrs. Thomas laughed condescendingly. “No wonder!” she said. “You’re down-town all the daytime and never see him except at breakfast and in the evenings.”

“There’s one thing puzzles me about it,” said John. “If you understand him so well, why don’t you ever tell me how to? What made him so smart-alecky to Lucius just now?”

Again she laughed with condescension. “Why, Luddie didn’t mean to be fresh at all. He just spoke without thinking.”

But upon hearing this interpretation, Mr. Allen cast a rueful glance at his lovely cousin. “Quite so!” he said. “Children can’t tell their reasons, but they’ve always got ’em!”

“Oh, no, they haven’t,” she laughed. And then she jumped, for there came a heavy booming of thunder from that part of the sky which the roof of the porch concealed from them. The sunshine over the pink-speckled garden vanished; all the blossoms lost colour and grew wan, fluttering in an ominous breeze; at once a high wind whipped round the house and the row of straight poplars beyond the garden showed silver sides.

“Luddie!” shrieked Mrs. Thomas; and he shrieked in answer; came running, just ahead of the rain. She seized his hand, and fled with him into the house.

“You remember how afraid they are of lightning,” said John apologetically. “Lightning and thunder. I never could understand it, but I suppose it’s genuine and painful.”

“It’s both,” the visitor remarked. “You wouldn’t think I’m that way, too, would you?”

“You are?”

“Makes me nervous as a cat.”

“Did you inherit it?”

“I don’t think so,” said Lucius; and he waved his host’s silent offer of a cigar. “No, thanks. Never want to smoke in a thunder-storm. I—Whoo!” he interrupted himself, as a flare of light and a catastrophe of sound came simultaneously. “Let’s go in,” he said mildly.

“Not I. I love to watch it.”

“Well——” Lucius paused, but at a renewal of the catastrophe, “Excuse me!” he said, and tarried no longer.

He found Mrs. Thomas and Ludlum in the centre of the darkened drawing-room. She was sitting in a gilt chair with her feet off the floor and upon a rung of the chair; and four heavy, flat-bottomed drinking-glasses were upon the floor, each of them containing the foot of a leg of the gilt chair. Ludlum was upon her lap.

“Don’t you believe in insulation, Lucius?” she asked anxiously. “As long as we sit like this, we can’t be struck, can we?”

He put on his glasses and gave her a solemn stare before replying. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Of course John is safer out on the porch than we are in here.”

“Oh, no, no!” she cried. “A porch is the most dangerous place there is!”

“I don’t know whether or not he’s safe from the lightning,” Lucius explained. “I mean he’s safe from being troubled about it the way we are.”

“I don’t call that being safe,” his lady-cousin began. “I don’t see what——”

But she broke off to find place for a subdued shriek, as an admiral’s salute of great guns jarred the house. Other salutes followed, interjected, in spite of drawn shades and curtains, with spurts of light into the room, and at each spurt Mrs. Thomas shivered and said “Oh!” in a low voice, whereupon Ludlum jumped and said “Ouch!” likewise in a low voice. Then, at the ensuing crash, Mrs. Thomas emitted a little scream, and Ludlum emitted a large one.

“Ouch! Ow!” he vociferated. “Mamma, I want it to stop! Mamma, I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it!”

“It’s odd,” said Lucius, during an interregnum. “The thunder frightens us more than the lightning, doesn’t it?”

“They’re both so horrible,” she murmured. “I’m glad they affect you this way, too, Lucius. It’s comforting. Do you think it’s almost over?”

“I’ll see,” he said; and he went to a window, whither Ludlum, having jumped down, followed him.

“Don’t open the curtains much,” Mrs. Thomas begged, not leaving her chair. “Windows are always dangerous. And come away from the window, Luddie. The lightning might——”

She shrieked at a flash and boom, and Luddie came away from the window. Voiceless—he was so startled—he scrambled toward his mother, his arms outstretched, his feet slipping on the polished floor; then, leaping upon her lap, he clung to her wildly; gulped, choked, and found his voice. He howled.

“That was about the last, I think,” observed Lucius, from the window. “It’s beginning to clear already. Nothing but a shower to make things cooler for us. Let’s go play with old John again. Come on, Luddie.”

But Ludlum clung to his mother, remonstrating. “No!” he cried. “Mamma, you got to stay in the house. I don’t want to go out there. It might begin again!”

She laughed soothingly. “But Uncle Lucius says it’s all over now, darling. Let’s go and——”

“I d’wawn’ to! I won’t go out of the house. You tell me a story.”

“Well,” she began, “once upon a time there was a good fairy and there was a bad fairy——”

“Where’d they live?”

“Oh, in a town—under some flowers in a garden in the town.” “Like our garden?”

“I suppose so,” she assented. “And the good fairy——”

“Listen, mamma,” said Ludlum. “If they lived in the garden like those fairies you were tellin’ me about yesterday, they could come in the windows of the house where the pretty little boy lived, couldn’t they?”

“I suppose so.”

At this Ludlum’s expression became apprehensive and his voice peevish. “Well, then,” he complained, “if there was a window open at night, or just maybe through a crack under the door, the bad fairy could slip up behind the pretty little boy, or into the pretty little boy’s bedroom, an’——”

“No, no!” his mother laughed, stroking his head. “You see, the good fairy would always be watching, too, and the good fairy wouldn’t let the bad fairy hurt the pretty little boy.”

The apprehensive expression was not altogether soothed from the pretty little boy’s face. However, he said: “Go on. Tell what happened. Did the pretty little boy——”

“Lucius!” Mrs. Thomas exclaimed, “don’t stay here to be bored by Luddie and me. I’ve got to tell him this story——”

“Yes,” Ludlum eagerly agreed. “An’ then afterward she has to read me a chapter in our book.”

“So you go and make John tell you a story, Lucius. I have to be polite to Luddie because he’s had such a fright, poor blessed child!”

Lucius was obedient: he rejoined John upon the porch, and the two men chatted for a time.

“What book is Jennie reading to the boy?” Mr. Allen inquired, after a subsequent interval of silence.

“I don’t know just now. Classic fiction of some sort, probably. She’s great on preparing his mind to be literary; reads an hour to him every day, and sometimes longer—translations—mythology—everything. All about gods and goddesses appearing out of the air to heroes, and Medusa heads and what not. Then standard works: Cooper, Bulwer, Scott, Hugo—some of the great romances.”

“I see,” said Lucius. “She always did go at things thoroughly. I remember,” he went on, with a musing chuckle, “I remember how I got hold of Bulwer’s ‘Zanoni’ and ‘Strange Story’ when I was about ten years old. By George! I’ve been afraid to go home in the dark ever since!”

“You have?” John smiled; then sent a serious and inquiring glance at the visitor, who remained placid. “Of course Jennie doesn’t read ‘Zanoni’ to Ludlum.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” said Lucius. “Not till he’s older. She’d read him much less disturbing things at his age, of course.”

His host made no additional comment upon the subject, but appeared to sit in some perplexity.

Mr. Allen observed him calmly; then, after a time, went into the house—to get a cigar of his own, he said.

In the hall he paused, listening. From the library came Mrs. Thomas’s voice, reading with fine dramatic fire:

“‘What! thou frontless dastard, thou—thou who didst wait for opened gate and lowered bridge, when Conrad Horst forced his way over moat and wall, must thou be malapert? Knit him up to the stanchions of the hall-window! He shall beat time with his feet while we drink a cup to his safe passage to the devil!’

“‘The doom was scarce sooner pronounced than accomplished; and in a moment the wretch wrestled out his last agonies, suspended from the iron bars. His body still hung there when our young hero entered the hall, and, intercepting the pale moonbeam, threw on the castle-floor an uncertain shadow, which dubiously yet fearfully intimated the nature of the substance which produced it.

“‘When the syndic——’”

Ludlum interrupted. “Mamma, what’s a stanchion?” His voice was low and a little husky.

“It’s a kind of an iron bar, or something, I think,” Mrs. Thomas answered. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, does it mean—mamma, what does it mean when it says ‘he wrested out his last annogies?’”

“‘Agonies,’ dear. It doesn’t mean anything that little boys ought to think about. This is a very unpleasant part of the book, and we’ll hurry on to where it’s all about knights and ladies, and pennons fluttering in the sunshine and——”

“No; I don’t want you to hurry. I like to hear this part, too. It’s nice. Go on, mamma.”

She continued, and between the curtains at the door, Lucius caught a glimpse of them. Sunlight touched them through a window; she sat in a high-backed chair; the dark-curled boy, upon a stool, huddling to her knee; and, as they sat thus, reading “Quentin Durward,” they were like a mother and son in stained glass—or like a Countess, in an old romance, reading to the Young Heir. And Lucius Brutus Allen had the curious impression that, however dimly, both of them were conscious of some such picturesque resemblance.

Unseen, he withdrew from the renewed sound of the reading, and again went out to sit with John upon the porch, but Mrs. Thomas and Ludlum did not rejoin them until the announcement of dinner. When the meal was over, Lucius and his hostess played cribbage in the library; something they did at all their reunions—a commemoration of an evening habit of old days. But to-night their game was interrupted, a whispering in the hall becoming more and more audible as it increased in virility; while protests on the part of a party of the second part punctuated and accented the whispering:

“I d’wawn’ to!” … “I won’t!” … “I will ast mama!” … “Leggo!”

The whispering became a bass staccato, though subdued, under the breath; protests became monosyllabic, but increased in passion; short-clipped squealings and infantile grunts were heard—and then suddenly, yet almost deliberately, a wide-mouthed roar of human agony dismayed the echoing walls.

The cavern whence issued the horrid sound was the most conspicuous thing in the little world of that house, as Ludlum dashed into the library. Even in her stress of sympathy, the mother could not forbear to cry: “Don’t, Luddie! Don’t stretch your mouth like that! You’ll spoil the shape of it.”

But Ludlum cared nothing for shape. Open to all the winds, he plunged toward his mother; and cribbage-board, counters, and cards went to the floor.

“Darling!” she implored. “What has hurt mamma’s little boy so awfully? Tell mamma!”

In her arms, his inclement eyes salting his cheeks, the vocal pitch of his despair rose higher and higher like the voice of a reluctant pump.

“Papa twissud my wrist!” he finally became coherent enough to declare.

“What!”

“He did!” All in falsetto Ludlum sobbed his version of things. “He—he suss-said I had to gug-go up to bed all—all alone. He grabbed me! He hurt! He said I couldn’t interrup’ your ole gug-game! ’N’ he said, ‘I’ll show you!’ ’N’ then—then—then—he twissud my wrist!”

At that she gathered him closer to her, and rose, holding him in her arms. Her face was deeply flushed, and her shining eyes avoided her husband, who stood near the doorway.

“Put him down, Jennie,” he said mildly. “I——”

Straightway she strode by him, carrying her child. She did not pause, nor speak aloud, yet Lucius and John both heard the whispered word that crumpled the latter as the curtains waved with the angry breeze of her passing. “Shame!”

Meanwhile, Lucius, on his knees—for he never regarded his trousers seriously—began to collect dispersed cards and pegs. “What say?” he inquired, upon some gaspings of his unfortunate friend, John.

“She believed it!” (These stricken words came from a deep chair in the shadows.) “She thought I actually did twist his wrist!”

“Oh, no,” said Lucius. “She didn’t believe anything of the kind. Darn that peg!” With face to the floor and in an attitude of Oriental devotion, he appeared to be worshipping the darkness under a divan. “She was merely reacting to the bellow of her offspring. She knew he invented it, as well as you did.”

“It’s incredible!” said John. “The cold-blooded cunning of it! He was bound to have his way, and make her go up with him; and I’d turned him toward the stairway by his shoulders, and he tried to hold himself back by catching at one of those big chairs in the hall. I caught his wrist to keep him from holding to the chair—and I held him a second or two, not moving. The little pirate decided on the thing then and there, in his mind. He understood perfectly well he could make it all the more horrible because you were here, visiting us. I swear it appals me! What sort of a nature is that?”

“Oh,” said Lucius, “just natural nature. Same as you and me.”

“I’d hate to believe that!”

“You and I got ashamed long ago of the tricks that came in our minds to play,” said Lucius, groping under the divan. “We got ashamed so often that they don’t come any more.”

“Yes, but it ought to be time they stopped coming into that boy’s mind. He was eight last month.”

“Yes—darn that peg!—there seems to be something in what you say. But of course Luddie thought he was in a fix that was just as bad to him as it would be to me if somebody were trying to make me walk into Pancho Villa’s camp all alone. I’d make a fuss about that, if the fuss would bring up the whole United States Army to go with me. That’s what it amounted to with Luddie.”

“I suppose so,” groaned the father. “It all comes down to his being a coward.”

“It all comes down to the air being full of queer things when he’s alone,” said Lucius.

“Well, I’d like to know what makes it full of queer things. Where does his foolishness come from?”

“And echo answers——” Lucius added, managing to get his head and shoulders under the divan, and thrusting with arms and legs to get more of himself under.

But a chime of laughter from the doorway answered in place of echo. “What are you doing, Lucius?” Mrs. Thomas inquired. “Swimming lessons? I never saw anything——” And laughter so overcame her that she could speak no further, but dropped into a chair, her handkerchief to her mouth.

Lucius emerged crabwise, and placed a cribbage-peg upon the table, but made no motion to continue the game. Instead he dusted himself uselessly, lit a cigar, and sat.

“Luddie’s all right,” said the lady, having recovered her calmness. “I think probably something he ate at dinner upset him a little. Anyhow, he was all right as soon as he got upstairs. Annie’s sitting with him and telling him stories.”

“I wonder if that lightning struck anything this afternoon,” Lucius said absently. “Some of it seemed mighty near.”

“It was awful.”

“Do you remember,” Lucius asked her, “when you first began to be nervous about it?”

“Oh, I’ve always been that way, ever since I was a little child. I haven’t the faintest idea how it got hold of me. Children just get afraid of certain things, it seems to me, and that’s all there is to it. You know how Luddie is about lightning, John.”

John admitted that he knew how Luddie was about lightning. “I do,” was all he said.

Mrs. Thomas’s expression became charmingly fond, even a little complacent. “I suppose he inherits it from me,” she said.

“My mother has that fear to this day,” Lucius remarked. “And I have it, too, but I didn’t inherit it from her.”

“How do you know?” his cousin asked quickly. “What makes you think you didn’t inherit it?”

“Because my father used to tell me that when I was three and four years old he would sit out on the porch during a thunder-storm, and hold me in his lap, and every time the thunder came both of us would laugh, and shout ‘Boom!’ Children naturally like a big noise. But when I got a little bit older and more imaginative, and began to draw absurd conclusions from things, I found that my mother was frightened during thunder-storms—though she tried her best to conceal it—and, of course, seeing her frightened, I thought something pretty bad must be the matter. So the fear got fastened on me, and I can’t shake it off though I’m thirty-five years old. Curious thing it is!”

Mrs. Thomas’s brilliant eyes were fixed upon her cousin throughout this narrative with an expression at first perplexed, then reproachful, finally hostile. A change, not subtle but simple and vivid, came upon her face, while its habitual mobility departed, leaving it radiantly still, with a fierce smoldering just underneath. How deep and fast her breathing became, was too easily visible.

“Everything’s curious, though, for the matter o’ that,” Lucius added. And without looking at his cousin—without needing to look at her, to understand the deadliness of her silence—he smoked unconcernedly. “Yes, sir, it’s all curious; and we’re all curious,” he continued, permitting himself the indulgence of a reminiscent chuckle. “You know I believe my father and mother got to be rather at outs about me—one thing and another, goodness knows what!—and it was years before they came together and found a real sympathy between them again. Truth is, I suspect where people aren’t careful, their children have about twice as much to do with driving ’em apart as with drawing ’em together—especially in the case of an only child. I really do think that if I hadn’t been an only child my father and mother might have been——”

A sibilant breath, not a word and not quite a hiss, caused Lucius to pause for a moment, though not to glance in the direction of the lips whence came the sound. He appeared to forget the sentence he had left incomplete; at all events he neglected to finish it. However, he went on, composedly:

“Some of my aunts tell me I was the worst nuisance they ever knew. In fact, some of ’em go out of their way to tell me that, even yet. They never could figure out what was the matter with me—except that I was spoiled; but I never meet Aunt Mira Hooper on the street at home, to this day, that she doesn’t stop to tell me she hasn’t learned to like me, because she got such a set against me when I was a child—and I meet her three or four times a week! She claims there was some kind of a little tragedy over me, in our house, every day or so, for years and years. She blames me for it, but Lord knows it wasn’t my fault. For instance, a lot of it was my father’s.”

“What did he do?” asked John.

Lucius chuckled again. “The worst he did was to tell me stories about Indians and pioneer days. Sounds harmless enough, but father was a good story-teller, and that was the trouble. You see, the foundation of nearly all romance, whether it’s Indian stories or fairy-stories—it’s all hero and villain. Something evil is always just going to jump out of somewhere at the hero, and the reader or the listener is always the hero. Why, I got so I wouldn’t go into a darkened room, even in the daytime! As we grow older we forget the horrible visions we had when we were children; and what’s worse, we forget there’s no need for children to have ’em. Children ought to be raised in the real world, not the dream one. Yes, sir, I lay all my Aunt Mira Hooper’s grudge against me to my father’s telling me stories so well and encouraging me to read the classics and——”

“Lucius,” Mrs. Thomas spoke in a low voice, but in a tone that checked him abruptly.

“Yes, Jennie?”

“Don’t you think that’s enough?”

“I suppose it is tiresome,” he said. “Too much autobiography. I was just rambling on about——”

“You meant me!” she cried.

“You, Jennie?”

“You did! And you meant Ludlum was a ‘nuisance’; not you. And I don’t think it’s very nice! Do you?”

“Why, I nev——”

But his cousin’s emotions were no longer to be controlled. She rose, trembling. “What a fool I was this afternoon!” she exclaimed bitterly. “I didn’t suspect you; yet I never remembered your being nervous in a thunder-storm before. I thought you were sympathetic, and all the time you were thinking these cruel, wicked things about Luddie and me!”

Lucius rose, too. “You know what I think about you, all the time, Jennie,” he said genially. “John, if you can remember where you put my umbrella when we came in, it’s about time for me to be catching a street-car down to the station.”

She opposed him with a passionate gesture. “No!” she cried fiercely. “You can’t say such things to me and then slip out like that! You tell me I’ve taught my child to be a coward and that I’ve made a spoilt brat of him——”

“Jennie!” he protested. “I was talking about me!”

“Shame on you to pretend!” she said. “You think I’m making John hate Luddie——”

“Jennie!” he shouted in genuine astonishment.

“You do! And you come here pretending to be such a considerate, sympathetic friend—and every minute you’re criticizing and condemning me in your heart for all my little stories to my child—all because—because—” suddenly she uttered a dry sob—“because I want to raise my boy to be a—a poet!”

“John,” said Lucius desperately, “do you think you can find that umbrella?”

With almost startling alacrity John rose and vanished from the room, and Lucius would have followed, but the distressed lady detained him. She caught a sagging pocket of his coat, and he found it necessary to remain until she should release him.

“You sha’n’t!” she cried. “Not till you’ve taken back that accusation.”

“But what accusa——”

“Shame on you! Ah, I didn’t think you’d ever come here and do such a thing to me. And this morning I was looking forward to a happy day! It’s a good thing you’re a bachelor!”

With which final insult she hurled his pocket from her—at least that was the expression of her gesture—and sank into a chair, weeping heart-brokenly. “You don’t understand!” she sobbed. “How could any man understand—or any woman not a mother! You think these hard things of me, but—but John doesn’t always love Luddie. Don’t you get even a little glimpse of what that means to me? There are times when John doesn’t even like Luddie!”

“Take care,” said Lucius gently. “Take care that those times don’t come oftener.”

She gasped, and would have spoken, but for a moment she could not, and was able only to gaze at him fiercely through her tears. Yet there was a hint of fear behind the anger.

“You dare to say such a thing as that to a mother?” she said, when she could speak.

Lucius’s eyes twinkled genially; he touched her upon the shoulder, and she suffered him. “Mother,” he said lightly, “have pity on your child!” Somehow, he managed to put more solemnity into this parting prayer of his than if he had spoken it solemnly; and she was silent.

Then he left the room, and, on his way, stumbled over a chair, as he usually did at the dramatic moments in his life.

John was standing in the open doorway, Lucius’s umbrella in his hand. “I think I hear a car coming, old fellow,” he said.

“Got to get my hat,” Mr. Allen muttered. He had been reminded of something; a small straw hat, with a blue ribbon round it, was upon the table, and he fumbled with it a moment before seizing his own and rushing for the door at the increasing warning of a brass gong in the near distance. Thus, when he had gone, a silver dollar was pocketed within the inside band of the small straw hat with the blue ribbon. … John Thomas, returning in sharp trepidation to the lovely, miserable figure in the library, encountered one of the many surprises of his life.

“He never could tell the truth to save his life!” she said. “He doesn’t know what truth means! Did you hear him sitting up there and telling us he was ‘an only child’? He has a brother and four sisters living, and I don’t know how many dead!”

“You don’t mean it!” said John, astounded. “That certainly was pecu——”

He lost his breath at that moment. She rose and threw her arms round him with the utmost heartiness. “He’s such an old smart Aleck!” she cried, still weeping. “That’s why I married you instead of him. I love you for not being one! If you want to spank Luddie for telling that story about his wrist I wish you’d go and wake him up and do it!”

“No,” said John. “Lucius called to me as he was running for the car that he’s going to be married next week. I’ll wait and spank one of his children. They’ll be the worst spoiled children in the world!”