Part 33 (1/2)

”Why, you darned old copy-cat,” I taunted. ”It was Miss Hubert who rated him as a 'splendid fool.'”

”Oh,” said Sagner.

”Oh, yourself,” said I.

Involuntarily we turned and watched the two bright figures skirting the field. Almost at that instant they stopped, and the girl reached up with all her clinging, cloying coquetry and fastened a great, pink wild rose into the lapel of the man's coat. Sagner groaned. ”Why can't she keep her hands off that man?” he muttered; then he shrugged his shoulders with a grim little gesture of helplessness. ”If a girl doesn't know,” he said, ”that it's wrong to chase another woman's man she's too ignorant to be congenial. If she does know it's wrong, she's too--vicious. But never mind,” he finished abruptly, ”Lennart's foolishness will soon pa.s.s. And meanwhile Mary has her boy. Surely no lad was ever so pa.s.sionately devoted to his mother. They are absolutely inseparable. I never saw anything like it.” He began to smile again.

Then, because at a turn of the road he saw a bird that reminded him of a beast that reminded him of a reptile, he left me unceremoniously and went back to the laboratory.

Feeling a bit raw over his desertion, I gave up my walk and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon at the library.

At the edge of the reading-room I found Madge Hubert brandis.h.i.+ng a ferocious-looking paper-knife over the perfectly helpless new magazines.

With a little cry of delight she summoned me to her by the wave of a _Science Monthly_. Looking over her shoulder I beheld with equal delight that the canny old Science paper had stuck in Sagner's great, ugly face for a frontispiece. At arm's length, with opening and narrowing eyes, I studied the perfect, clever likeness: the convict-cropped hair; the surly, aggressive, relentlessly busy features; the absurd, overwrought, deep-sea sort of eyes. ”Great Heavens, Miss Hubert,” I said, ”did you ever see such a funny-looking man?”

The girl winced. ”Funny?” she gasped. ”Funny? Why, I think Bertus Sagner is the most absolutely fascinating-looking man that I ever saw in my life.” She stared at me in astonishment.

To hide my emotions I fled to the history room. Somewhat to my surprise Mrs. Lennart and her little lad were there, delving deep into some thrilling grammar-school problem concerning Henry the Eighth. I nodded to them, thought they saw me, and slipped into a chair not far behind them. There was no one else in the room. Maybe my thirst for historical information was not very keen. Certainly every book that I touched rustled like a dead, stale autumn leaf. Maybe the yellow bird in the acacia tree just outside the window teased me a little bit. Anyway, my eyes began only too soon to stray from the text-books before me to the little fluttering wisp of Mrs. Lennart's hair that tickled now and then across the lad's hovering face. I thought I had never seen a sweeter picture than those two cuddling, browsing faces. Surely I had never seen one more entrancingly serene.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”Oh, I wish I had a sister,” fretted the boy]

Then suddenly I saw the lad push back his books with a whimper of discontent.

”What is it?” asked his mother. I could hear her words plainly.

”Oh, I wish I had a sister,” fretted the boy.

”Why?” said the mother in perfectly happy surprise.

The lad began to drum on the table. ”Why do I want a sister?” he repeated a trifle temperishly. ”Why, so I could have some one to play with and walk with and talk with and study with. Some one jolly and merry and frisky.”

”Why--what about _me_?” she quizzed. Even at that moment I felt reasonably certain that she was still smiling.

The little lad looked bluntly up into her face. ”Why you are--_so old_!”

he said quite distinctly.

I saw the woman's shoulders hunch as though her hands were bracing against the table. Then she reached out like a flash and clutched the little lad's chin in her fingers. If a voice-tone has any color, hers was corpse-white. ”I never--let--_you_--know--that--you--were--too--_young_!”

she almost hissed.

And I shut my eyes.

When I looked up again the woman was gone, and the little lad was running after her with a queer, puzzled look on his face.

Life has such a strange way of foreshortening its longest plots with a startling, snapped-off ending. Any true story is a tiny bit out of rhetorical proportion.

The very next day, under the railroad trestle that hurries us back and forth to the big, neighboring city, we found Mrs. Lennart's body in a three-foot pool of creek water. It was the little lad's birthday, it seems, and he was to have had a supper party, and she had gone to town in the early afternoon to make a few festive purchases. A package of tinsel-paper bonbons floated safely, I remember, in the pool beside her.

For some inexplainable reason she had stepped off the train at the wrong station and, realizing presumably how her blundering tardiness would blight the little lad's pleasure, she had started to walk home across the trestle, hoping thereby to beat the later train by as much as half an hour. The rest of the tragedy was brutally plain. Somehow between one safe, friendly embankment and another she had slipped and fallen. The trestle was ticklish walking for even a person who wasn't lame.

Like a slim, white, waxen altar candle snuffed out by a child's accidental, gusty pleasure-laugh, we brought her home to the sweet, green, peaceful library, with its resolute, indomitable hearthstone.

Out of all the crowding people who jostled me in the hallway I remember only--Lennart's ghastly, agonized face.