CHAPTER VII.
The hum of Tom’s schoolroom had gone steadily on all this time, and was busier than ever, if possible just now, looking forward to the few days’ vacation just at hand, after which would come the short closing term of the year, followed by examination-day, the culmination of all excitement to the graduating class. Aleck was at the head of that, and Tom tried not to think of the day when he would go; it seemed to him school would be like a boxing-match without gloves after that; he wondered if he ever should get used to rubs and knocks so as to go on comfortably through the world. As for a world where people did not like giving them well enough to keep you in much danger, he never dreamed of such a possibility. If he could only pluck up enough not to mind it more than other boys! And yet he was sure, if the truth were told, they didn’t like snubbing and being crowed over much better than he, but they had a way of getting over it as he couldn’t.
However, if he stopped for more reflections, his arithmetic examples would not be done, and he plunged in among them with such zeal, that the last one was soon unravelled, and stopping to breathe a moment before taking up his Latin, he caught sight of a little performance going on between two of his neighbors, Carter, the catcher who had retrieved fortunes for Tom the afternoon when luck was so against him on the ball-ground, and Davis, who sat just behind him, and at Tom’s elbow. They were in a class higher than Tom’s, and had some pretty tough knots come in their way, as he very well knew, and they were at work at them just now, but each very much in his own fashion. Carter sat with one hand drawn through his hair, and pressing it tight with all his fingers as if that would help pull through his difficulties, and with knotted brow was working away like a Trojan, with no eyes or ears for anything off the battle-field, while Davis behind him shuffled over his pages for some rules or example that should throw a little light, frowned, put down a few figures, rubbed them out again, and pushed his slate impatiently aside.
At last, happening to peep over Carter’s shoulder, he saw the result of his toil. Every example but the last done to a fraction, and lying in neat figures in its own corner of the slate. A gleam of satisfaction spread over his face, and drawing a little closer, he quietly and with rapid strokes, transferred every one to his own slate. All but the last. Carter was still at work upon that, but it wouldn’t come. Over and over again the figures were erased, and the example begun again at the beginning.
“Pshaw!” exclaimed Davis under his breath, “time’s nearly up;” and writing a note to one of the older boys who sat near, he quietly passed it over to him, and in a few moments received it again, with the example clear as daylight on the back, and requiring but a moment to transfer it to his slate.
None too soon, however, for the bell rang as he put down the last figure, and the class was called to the blackboard.
Carter was at the head, a place he had held for some time by persistent, hard work, and accordingly explained the first example with a precision that showed it lay clear-cut in his own mind. Others followed rapidly, and the last fell to Davis.
“Have you the last, Davis?” asked the professor.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let us have it, then.”
He made his proposition and began, but there seemed to be some trouble. He was not apt to get confused, but this certainly made hodge-podge.
“Where is that example?” asked the professor.
“There, sir,” said Davis, handing up his slate.
He ran his eye rapidly over it, and returned it.
“That is all right,” he said, “and very well done, and so are all the rest. You must learn to keep what you know a little more at your command, Davis. How many of you have the example?”
How they had managed poor Carter could not imagine, but every hand except his own went up.
“You haven’t it, Carter?”
“No, sir, I couldn’t get it.”
“I shall have to send you down, I’m sorry to say.”
The boys made a great deal more haste than was necessary, he thought, to let him pass down and change places with Davis, adding one or two very expressive winks to remind him that his hope for a star on the record of that term was gone.
But the reminders came in much plainer language at recess.
“Here we go up, up, up, and here we go downy, downy!” cried a voice, followed by a chorus.
“I can’t help it,” said Carter. “I couldn’t get it, and I don’t see how you did.”
“Don’t you wish you knew?” sneered Davis.
“Isn’t he game, to flunk at a straw like that?” shouted one of the boys, who had had the example comfortably done for him the night before under the gaslight at home.
“Never mind, Carter; perhaps the professor will let you go back to long-division next term.”
Carter looked so distressed that Tom, though furious at the whole affair, began to take a little courage that he wasn’t so much more of a fool about such things, after all, than some other fellows, when Aleck’s voice was heard to come to the rescue.
“What’s that about long-division? If it’s anything that wants a long head, and a sure one too, Carter is the right one to take it. I’ve watched him all the term, and he’s had more of those tough examples right than I ever did when I went over them, and works them out on his own hook, too, without as much cribbing as some fellows want for a single lesson. Come round this afternoon, can’t you, Carter? I’m going to unrig my iceboat, and you can handle a tool much better than I can.”
Off scattered the mousers, the bell rang, and it was every man looking out for his own again, till the exercises were ended and the tide poured outward once more.
Aleck walked on very busy with his thoughts, but this time they had nothing to do with lessons, nor even with examination-day, unless as an event that was to knock away his stays and launch him forth to make such headway as he might out of the quiet harbor of his schooldays. He had no fear of breasting contrary winds, or of ploughing the rough waves of life with a stout heart; the only trouble was to decide on the port he wished to clear for; and this question, though it would have been easy enough if he had had only himself to consult, seemed balanced and counterbalanced whichever way he turned. But Carter never had a suspicion that anything worried him as they worked away on the iceboat that afternoon; he only thought Aleck was the handsomest fellow and the best company in the world, and wondered how it was everything went so smoothly where he was, the rough places always melting down, as the ice and snow were vanishing outside under the shining of the March sun.
He couldn’t help telling him so at last, and Aleck laughed.
“Do they?” he said, “I didn’t know they did; but there’s something in one’s way of looking at things, I suppose. If the sun were to pull a cloud of disgust over his face every time he saw a hummock of ice, they’d be likely to hold on a little longer. Looking straight at an ugly thing, with a bright face of your own, works pretty well generally, I think;” but when Carter was gone, and lessons pretty well out of the way, Aleck had need to try his own maxim, for the question that had been on his own mind in the morning came up again in full force, and didn’t look any smoother or rounder for its brief absence.
It wasn’t a brown-stone front, like Hal Fenimore’s, in the library of which Aleck sat, but a bit of a gothic cottage slipped in between two large brick houses, with a clear sunset outlook from the rear, and a bay-window trailing with vines in front, while a tiny wing, that had begged room for itself on one side, formed a conservatory, from the windows of which flowers of every hue had refreshed the eyes of the passers-by through all the long, dreary winter months. If Creepy could but once have rested his eyes upon them! His most gorgeous dreams of what this world might be would have paled into gray twilight before their unimagined beauty.
The brick houses on either side stood guard over the cottage, as if they had taken it up for a pet, and inside its walls everything seemed to be petted as well. In every nook and corner stood some delicate, graceful thing, and every article of furniture, every picture on the walls, and every ornament about the room, seemed chosen to be loved. But the fairest ornament of all to Aleck’s eyes was the sister from whom everything else had taken its coloring and its tone, and he glanced involuntarily up from his book now and then to watch the graceful movements of her white fingers as they followed the pattern of her embroidery.
“I don’t believe there’s a fellow in the city that’s got anything to compare with her,” he thought as his eye rested on the poise of the beautiful head, the golden hair drawn back in waves and ripples from her forehead, the soft eyes drooped over their work, and the half-smile with which she followed her thoughts, whatever they might be. “I know there isn’t,” and down he plunged again into syntax, roots, and terminations.
The brown eyes were raised at him just then, and let the embroidery wait a moment, while their owner thought what a manly, handsome fellow Aleck was, and how like his father, and how proud she should be some day when she should see him taking his father’s place in his profession, his father’s old friends welcoming him, and new ones of his own rising up on every side. There were a good many sacrifices to be made, and a good deal of waiting to be done, before that day should come, but it would repay them all a thousand times.
Aleck lost all this, deep in the mazes of an irregular verb, but he was out again by the time the eyes had gone back to their embroidery, and snatched a minute for another look and thought of his own.
“Poor old Nell!” he said to himself, “she has set her heart on making a lawyer of me, and I—” up and down went the balances again, and then the lesson would have attention once more.
“Yes, yes, I see; it’s irregular, and it works under Rule 53. I’ll make a note of that.” Another glance at Nelly, and down went the balance again. “And if she does, what is it going to cost? Four years at college, three at law studies, and as many more, if not twice as many, before anybody’ll give me enough to do to keep soul and body together; and by that time, where will she be? All the bloom of her life brushed off while she’s waiting for me to come to something! Pshaw!” and in he went again among the Ps and the Qs of the dictionary.
The lesson was done at last; he was master of every word, and closed the book, but that was only to open the discussion of the future again.
“And I know very well how it’s to be done, too,” he went on. “There’s just enough, as things are now, to keep up the house for her, if I were to take care of myself; but when it comes to pulling me through those seven or eight years, there’s only one way to do it. Think of selling out everything here, and letting her follow me about in some ugly boardinghouse or other, with only the chance of my being able to make things up to her by-and-by!” and for once Aleck seemed to have found something he could not melt down by looking at it.
“Finished, Aleck?”
“Yes, Nelly, and to-morrow finishes the week, and next week finishes the term; then three days holiday, then ten weeks more.”
“And then?” said Nelly, and the half-smile brightened into something radiant.
Aleck hesitated. He knew the picture she was drawing; how was he going to rub it out, and drag her into all the bothers of a new decision? But he couldn’t put it off much longer. Perhaps it had better come at once.
“Never mind about then,” he said gayly, “let’s talk about now a little while. I never thought I should get ahead of you in anything, Nelly; but I don’t believe you had your first offer before you were sixteen, and I had mine day before yesterday.”
Nelly laughed.
“I hope you didn’t vow secresy,” she said.
“On the contrary, Uncle Ralph wished me particularly to consult you.”
“Uncle Ralph! What is it, Aleck? I don’t understand.”
“He wants me to go into the store with him, and offers to teach me all he knows, and to give me a share in the business as soon as I am ready for it.”
The smile vanished, and a shade of pity came over the beautiful face.
“Poor Uncle Ralph! He is alone in the world, and I suppose he longs to have some of his own kith and kin with him every day. I am sorry he asked you, it will be so hard to refuse him.”
“You don’t think I had better go, then?”
“Why, Aleck!”
That was all she said, but the tone and the look said a thousand times more.
Aleck laughed in his turn.
“Do you say why? Well, I say, why not? I don’t believe I shall ever make such a prodigy of a lawyer, sister mine, and it’s a horribly long pull ahead before I show whether I do or not, and here is a chance to take care of myself right away, instead of dragging on you a dozen years; and I tell you, Nelly, it would take all the man out of a better fellow than I am to do that.”
“Hush, Aleck! You know how much papa wished you to have a profession, and his own above all others.”
“I know it, Nelly,” said Aleck, gently; “but perhaps,” and he glanced questioningly in her face, “perhaps he sees some things differently now. At any rate,” he added more lightly, “there are more professions in these days than there used to be, and I’m sure a druggist’s, or at least a chemist’s, is counted among the most respectable of them. And as for Uncle Ralph, every one knows that he makes a profession of his work. Why, what do you think came to him from England the other day? A certificate of fellowship in the Royal Academy of Sciences! Imagine me in that place! Wouldn’t that shine brighter than being called a brother by the members of some county bar?”
“Aleck, why will you trouble me by talking so?”
“Trouble you, Nelly! I wouldn’t for the world; but Uncle Ralph wants his answer day after to-morrow.”
“Well, it is ready for him; he need not have waited as long as that. Tell him we both love him with all our hearts, for his own sake and dear papa’s, and if he is lonely nothing would give us greater joy than to have him come right here with us, but that it was papa’s wish you should study.”
Aleck had left his seat and stood behind his sister’s chair, bending caressingly over the knot of golden curls.
“Nelly,” he said, in low earnest tones, “papa did not know how little there would be left; he did not know how it would have to be done. He was a gentleman himself, every inch, and he wanted me to be one; but which would he say was most worthy of the name, to take the little that belongs to my beautiful sister, and use it up, on the chance of returning it after years and years, or to go into an honorable place where I can be of more use in a month, saving life and health, than I could in a year of settling quarrels and splitting hairs? Nelly, I can’t do it! I can’t take what belongs to you! If I ever get a profession, I must wait till I can earn the money, and that will put the happy day so far off that you will be a tired-out old lady, waiting for it,” and he laughed again, for Aleck never looked on the gloomy side many minutes at a time.
“And if money were as thick as blackberries,” he went on, “I’d rather be a doctor, anyhow; and this comes next door to it, and I’m not sure but a little above, for the doctors can’t move hand or foot without the druggists. I tell you, Nelly, there’s more in it than you think, and I might come out so scientific, and such a wise man, that you wouldn’t venture to speak to me except in the most respectful manner. It isn’t as it was in old times, when doctors took a spoonful of almost anything out of their pockets for a patient! I wish you could just see them come to Uncle Ralph with some difficult, delicate thing that they want done, and that they can’t do themselves with all their wisdom, to save their lives and their patients’ too! And I promise you it’s a place where the greenbacks come in! And I should get my share of them, instead of starving to death, waiting in my office like a spider in his web, to catch my first unlucky fly!”
He waited for an answer, but Nelly did not speak. “Nelly,” he began again, very softly, “I believe papa can see into Uncle Ralph’s heart now, and if he can, I know what he would say. I only got a glimpse, just one peep through his eyes, and it almost brought the tears into mine. They plead pretty hard, Nelly!”
Nelly’s lips were pressed tightly together, and then parted suddenly. “Day after to-morrow, did you say, Aleck? Don’t speak of it again till then. I will tell you when that time comes.”
When it came, “Aleck, dear,” she said, with a smile, “do whatever you like best, and whatever you think best. I shall be satisfied, whatever it is.”
“All right,” said Aleck, with his gayest glow in his face; “I’ll go and see Uncle Ralph.”
So it was settled: and Aleck never knew the pang it cost her to give up the long-cherished plan for his future, or how thankfully she would have made any sacrifice necessary to its accomplishment; and she had no suspicion that he had sacrificed the darling dream of his life, rather than feel himself a weight upon her, and say No to the lonely heart that was craving what only he could give it.