XV
His father noticed his timidity and seemed to view it with a sense of humiliation. Once, in the presence of company, he threatened to put him into skirts "like any other girl." Keith had played too little with other children to have acquired the usual male consciousness of superiority, but his father's words cut him to the quick nevertheless, because he knew them to be meant for an insult. He resolved then and there to show his mettle in some striking way, and promptly be began to dream of such ways, but chance being utterly lacking for even a normal display of boyish daring, it merely served to plunge him more deeply into the sham life of his books.
Yet he was not without courage, and it was not physical pain, or the fear of it, that brought the tears so quickly into flowing. Once, when returning home with an uncovered bowl full of molasses from the grocery, he stumbled at the foot of the stairs and fell so his forehead struck the edge of the lowest step and his scalp was cut open to the width of nearly an inch. The blood blinded him so that he could barely make his way upstairs. When he reached the kitchen at last, his mother was scared almost out of her wits, and her fright was augmented by the manner in which he sobbed as if his heart were breaking. When at last the flow of blood was partly stenched and his crying still continued, his mother tried to tell him that there was no cause to be scared.
"I am not scared," he sputtered to her surprise. "I didn't know I was hurt, but ... but ... I spilled all the molasses."
That night his father gave him a shining new silver coin without telling him why, and the boy couldn't guess it at the time, though later he learned the reason from his mother.
A favourite method employed by the father to test and to develop his courage was to send him alone after dark on some errand into the cellar or up into the attic, and the boy went without protest, no matter how much he might dread the task at heart. Even the servant girls felt reluctant about visiting the cellar at night, and the occasional discovery of a drunken man asleep in front of the cellar door made the danger far from imaginary.
Going down to the cellar, Keith was permitted to bring a candle along, but the danger of fire made this out of the question when the attic was his goal. One night on his way up there, he discovered a white, fluttering shape by the square opening in the outer wall. He stopped on the spot, and his heart almost stopped, too--but only for a moment. Driven by some necessity he could not explain to himself, he picked himself together and pushed on, only to find that the intimidating spectre consisted of some white clothing hung for drying on the iron rod of the shutter and kept moving by a high wind. It was a lesson that went right home and stuck.
During that one moment of hesitation, the idea of a ghost tried to take form in his more or less paralysed consciousness. He had read of ghosts, and overheard stories told by the servant girls in apparent good faith, and that whitish, almost luminous thing in front of him, stirring restlessly with a faint hissing sound, looked and acted the part of a ghost to perfection. But the idea was rejected before it had taken clear shape and without any reasoning, instinctively, automatically. His father always became scornful at the mere mention of ghosts, and that settled it.
When it was all over, and he was safe within the kitchen door once more, he told no one what had happened. He thought that, in spite of his initial scare, he had acted decidedly well, and he was eager for approval, but he was kept from telling by an uneasy feeling that his father would laugh at him if he did.