“Step-ones,—mothers.”
Pretty? When they were lean and sharp and shabby! When they kept switches on two nails behind the door,—when they wore ugly clothes pinned together! But Jolly’s eye caught the wistfulness on Morry’s little, peaked, white face, and a lie was born within him at the sight. In a flash he understood things. Pity came to the front and braced itself stalwartly.
“You bet they’re pretty!” Jolly exclaimed, with splendid enthusiasm. “Prettier’n anythin’! You’d oughter see mine!” (Recording Angel, make a note of it, when you jot this down, that the little face across the room was intense with wistfulness, and Jolly was looking straight that way. And remember legs.)
When Ellen came in to put Morry to bed she found wet spots on his cushions, but she did not mention them. Ellens can be wise. She only handled the limp little figure rather more gently than usual, and said rather more cheery things, perhaps. Perhaps that was why the small fellow under her hands decided to appeal in his desperation to her. It was possible—things were always possible—that Ellen might know something of—of step-ones. For Morry was battling with the pitifully unsatisfactory information Jolly had given him before understanding had conceived the kind little lie. It was, of course,—Morry put it that way because “of course” sometimes comforts you,—of course just possible that Jolly’s step-one might be different. Ellen might know of there being another kind.
So, under the skilful, gentle hands, the boy looked up and chanced it. “Ellen,” he said—“Ellen, are they all that kind,—all of ’em? Jolly’s kind, I mean? I thought poss’bly you might know one”—
“Heart alive!” breathed Ellen, in fear of his sanity. She felt his temples and his wrists and his limp little body. Was he going to be sick now, just as his father and She were coming home?—now, of all times! Which would be better to give him, quinine, or aconite and belladonna?
“Never mind,” sighed Morry, hopelessly. Ellens—he might have known—were not made to tell you close things like that. They were made to undress you and give you doses and laugh and wheel your chair around. Jollys were better than Ellens, but they told you pretty hard things sometimes.
In bed he lay and thought out his little puzzles and steeled himself for what was to come. He pondered over the word Jolly had looked up in the dictionary for him. It was a puzzly word,—Rec-om-pense,—but he thought he understood it now. It meant something that made up to you for something you’d suffered,—“suffered,” that was what it said. And Morry had suffered—oh, how! Could it be possible there was anything that would make up for little, limp, sorrowful legs that had never been?
With the fickleness of night-thoughts his musings flitted back to step-ones again. He shut his eyes and tried to imagine just the right kind of one,—the kind a boy would be glad to have come home with his Dadsy. It looked an easy thing to do, but there were limitations.
“If I’d ever had a real one, it would be easier,” Morry thought wistfully. Of course, any amount easier! The mothers you read about and the Holy Ones you saw in pictures were not quite real enough. What you needed was to have had one of your own. Then,—Morry’s eyes closed in a dizzy little vision of one of his own. One that would have dressed and undressed you instead of an Ellen,—that would have moved your chair about and beaten up the cushions,—one that maybe would have loved you, legs and all!