The questioner had turned then to the older boy, who tactfully divined that a different answer would have pleased the old man better.

"And what do you like best, Allan?"

"Oh, I like this fine and splendid book best of all!"--and he read from the t.i.tle-page, in the clear, confident tones of the pupil who knows that the teacher's favour rests upon him--"'From Eden to Calvary; or through the Bible in a year with our boys and girls; a book of pleasure and profit for young persons on Sabbath Afternoon. By Grandpa Silas Atterbury, the well-known author and writer for young people."

His glance toward his brother at the close was meant to betray the consciousness of his own superiority to one who dallied sensuously with created objects.

But the unspiritual one was riding the new horse at a furious gallop, and the glance of reproof was unnoted save by the old man--who wondered if it might be by any absurd twist that the boy most like the G.o.dless father were more G.o.dly than the one so like his mother that every note of his little voice and every full glance of his big blue eyes made the old heart flutter.

In the afternoon came callers from the next house; Dr. Crealock, rubicund and portly, leaning on his cane, to pa.s.s the word of seasonable cheer with his old friend and pastor; and with him his tiny niece to greet the grandchildren of his friend. The Doctor went with his host to the study on the second floor, where, as a Christmas custom, they would drink some Madeira, ancient of days, from a cask prescribed and furnished long since by the doctor.

The little boy was for the moment left alone with the tiny niece; to stare curiously, now that she was close, at one of whom he had caught glimpses in a window of the big house next door. She was clad in a black velvet cloak and hood, with pink satin next her face inside the hood, and she carried a large closely-wrapped doll which she affected to think might have taken cold. With great self-possession she doffed her cloak and overshoes; then slowly and tenderly unwound the wrappings of the doll, talking meanwhile in low mothering tones, and going with it to the fire when she had it uncloaked. Of the boy who stared at her she seemed unconscious, and he could do no more than stand timidly at a little distance. An eye-flash from the maid may have perceived his abjectness, for she said haughtily at length, "I'm astonished no one in this house knows where Clytie is!"

He drew nearer by as far as he could slowly spread his feet twice.

"_I_ know--now--she went to get two gla.s.ses from the dresser to take to my grandfather and that gentleman." He felt voluble from the mere ease of the answer. But she affected to have heard nothing, and he was obliged to speak again.

"Now--why, _I_ know a doll that shuts up her eyes every time she lies down."

The doll at hand was promptly extended on the little lap and with a click went into sudden sleep while the mother rocked it. He could have ventured nothing more after this p.r.i.c.king of his inflated little speech. A moment he stood, suffering moderately, and then would have edged cautiously away with the air of wishing to go, only at this point, without seeming to see him, she chirped to him quite winningly in a soft, warm little voice, and there was free talk at once. He manfully let her tell of all her silly little presents before talking of his own. He even listened about the doll, whose name Santa Claus had thoughtfully painted on the box in which she came; it was a French name, "Fragile."

Then, being come to names, they told their own. Hers, she said, was Lillian May.

"But your uncle, now--that gentleman--he called you _Nancy_ when you came in." He waited for her solving of this.

"Oh, Uncle Doctor doesn't know it yet, what my _real_ name is. They call me Nancy, but that's a very disagreeable name, so I took Lillian May for my real name. But I tell _very_ few persons," she added, importantly. Here he was at home; he knew about choosing a good name.

"Did you give up the gold-piece you found?" he asked. But this puzzled her.

"'A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches,'" he reminded her.

"Didn't you find a gold-piece like Ben Holt did?"

But it seemed she had never found anything. Indeed, once she had lost a dime, even on the way to spending it for five candy bananas and five jaw-breakers. Plainly she had chosen her good name without knowing of the case of Ben Holt. Then he promised to show her something the most wonderful in all the world, which she would never believe without seeing it, and led her to where the candy cane towered to their shoulders in its corner. He saw at once that it meant less to her than it did to him.

"Oh, it's a candy cane!" she said, _calling_ it a candy cane commonly, with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent by his side, would have known him to be of the brotherhood. Perhaps at the end there would have been respectful wonder expressed as to how long it would stay unbroken and so untasted. Still he was not unkind to her, except in ways requisite to a mere decent showing forth of his now ascertained superiority. He helped her to a canter on the new horse; and even pretended a polite and superficial interest in the doll, Fragile, which she took up often. Being a girl, she had to be humoured in that manner. But any boy could see that the thing went to sleep by turning its eyes inside out, _and its garters were painted on its fat legs_. These things he was, of course, too much the gentleman to point out.

When the Doctor and his host came down stairs late in the afternoon, the little boy and girl were fairly friendly. Only there was talk of kissing at the door, started by the little girl's uncle, and this the little boy of course could not consider, even though he suddenly wished it of all things--for he had never kissed any one but his father and mother. He had told Clytie it made him sick to be kissed. Now, when the little girl called to him as if it were the simplest thing in the world, he could not go. And then she stabbed him by falsely kissing the complacent Allan standing by, who thereupon smirked in sickening deprecation and promptly rubbed his cheek.

Not until the pair were out in the street did his man-strength come back to him, and then he could only burn with indignation at her and at Allan.

He wondered that no one was shocked at him for feeling as he did. But, as they seemed not to notice him, he rode his horse again. No mad gallop now, but a slow, moody jog--a pace ripe for any pessimism.

"Clytie!" he called imperiously, after a little. "Do you think there's a real bone in this horse--like a _regular_ horse?"

Clytie responded from the dining-room with a placid "I guess so."

"If I sawed into its neck, would the saw go right into a real _bone_?"

"My suz! what talk! Well?"

"I know there _ain't_ any bone in there, like a regular horse. It's just a _wooden_ bone."

Nor was this his last negative thought of the day. It came to him then and there with cruel, biting plainness, that no one else in the house felt as he did toward his chief treasure. Allan didn't. He had spent hardly a moment with it. Clytie didn't; he had seen her pick it up when she dusted the sitting-room; there was sacrilege in her very grasp of it; and his grandfather seemed hardly to know of its existence. The little girl who had chosen the good name of Lillian May might have been excused; but not these others. If his grandfather was without understanding in such a matter, in what, then, could he be trusted?

He descended to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even if he had _one_ of them, he would probably never have a whole row, graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now did, that on last Christmas he had received only one pretentious candy rooster, falsely hollow, and a very uninteresting linen handkerchief embroidered with some initials not his own. He fell asleep on a brutal reflection that the cane could be broken accidentally and eaten.

CHAPTER IV

THE BIG HOUSE OF PORTENTS

In this big white house the little boys had been born again to a life that was all strange. Novel was the outer house with its high portico and fluted pillars, its vast areas of white wall set with shutters of relentless green; its stout, red chimneys; its surprises of gabled window; its big front door with the polished bra.s.s knocker and the fan-light above. Quite as novel was the inner house, and quite as novel was this new life to its very center.

For one thing, while the joy of living had hitherto been all but flawless for the little boys, the disadvantages of being dead were now brought daily to their notice. In morning and evening prayer, in formal homily, informal caution, spontaneous warning, in the sermon at church, and the lesson of the Sabbath-school, was their excessive liability to divine wrath impressed upon them "when the memory is wax to receive and marble to retain."

Within the home Clytie proved to be an able coadjutor of the old man, who was, indeed, constrained and awkward in the presence of the younger child, and perhaps a thought too severe with the elder. But Clytie, who had said "I'll make my own of them," was tireless and not without ingenuity in opening the way of life to their little feet.

Allan, the elder, gifted with a distinct talent for memorising, she taught many instructive bits chosen from the sc.r.a.p-book in which her literary treasures were preserved. His rendition of a pa.s.sage from one of Mr.

Spurgeon's sermons became so impressive under her drilling that the aroma of his lost youth stole back to the nostrils of the old man while he listened.

"There is a place," the boy would declaim loweringly, and with fitting gesture, with hypnotic eye fastened on the cowering Bernal, "where the only music is the symphony of d.a.m.ned souls. Where howling, groaning, moaning, and gnashing of teeth make up the horrible concert. There is a place where demons fly swift as air, with whips of knotted burning wire, torturing poor souls; where tongues on fire with agony burn the roofs of mouths that shriek in vain for drops of water--that water all denied. When thou diest, O Sinner--"

But at this point the smaller boy usually became restless and would have to go to the kitchen for a drink of water. Always he became thirsty here.

And he would linger over his drink till Clytie called him back to admire his brother in the closing periods.

--"but at the resurrection thy soul will be united to thy body and then thou wilt have twin h.e.l.ls; body and soul will be tormented together, each brimful of agony, the soul sweating in its utmost pores drops of blood, thy body from head to foot suffused with pain, thy bones cracking in the fire, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, every nerve a string on which the devil shall play his diabolical tune of h.e.l.l's unutterable torment."

Here the little boy always listened at his wrist to know if his pulse rattled yet, and felt glad indeed that he was a Presbyterian, instead of being in that dreadful place with Jews and Papists and Milo Barrus, who spelled G.o.d with a little g.

As to his own performance, Clytie found that he memorised prose with great difficulty. A week did she labour to teach him one brief pa.s.sage from a lecture of Francis Murphy, depicting the fate of the drunkard. She bribed him to fresh effort with every carnal lure the pantry afforded, but invariably he failed at a point where the soul of the toper was going "down--_down_--DOWN--into the bottomless depths of h.e.l.l!" Here he became pitiful in his ineffectiveness, and Clytie had at last to admit that he would never be the elocutionist Allan was. "But, my Land!" she would say, at each of his failures, "if you only _could_ do it the way Mr. Murphy did--and then he'd talk so plain and natural, too,--just like he was a.s.sociating with a body in their own parlour--and so pathetic it made a body simply bawl. My suz! how I did love to set and hear that man tell what a sot he'd been!"

However, Clytie happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy couplets such as:

"Xerxes the Great did die And so must you and I."

"As runs the gla.s.s Man's life must pa.s.s."

"Thy life to mend G.o.d's book attend."

From these it was a step entirely practicable to longer warnings, one of her favourites being:

UNCERTAINTY OF LIFE

"I in the burying-place may see Graves shorter there than I.

From Death's arrest no age is free, Young children, too, may die.