At first he felt a slight grudge against the mother. She had disappointed him for one thing, and there was an inclination besides to hold her responsible for his misfortune. By degrees, however, he began to see his own part in its true light, and he wondered how he could have been such a blind fool. It was this understanding that brought him comparative peace and enabled him to work. He had been so harassed by the question of guilt in regard to actions which his own mind would never have classed as wrong that the sense of facing punishment clearly deserved came as a genuine relief.
The monotony of the season was only broken by a visit to the summer home of Aunt Agda at Laurel Grove, where he stayed a whole week and made a lot of friends. She had served with the Wellanders as a nurse girl when Keith was only a baby. Then she was plain Agda, and Keith's mother often spoke of how crazy she had been about him. Then she disappeared, and when the Wellanders next heard of her, she was the wife of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived. Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda's phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn't care for anything except her continued inclination to spoil him.
There was a lot of children at Laurel Grove, boys and girls, and most of them matched Keith in age. They took him in, and in that one week he had a glimpse of the kind of life he would have liked to live. There was in particular one boy, Arnold Kruse, for whom Keith formed a warm attachment. This feeling was additionally cemented by Arnold's choice of Keith as a confidant. Arnold was in love with the prettiest girl in the place, Gurlie Norlin, and so was every other boy within reach of Laurel Grove. But Arnold was the favourite, and he told Keith that he and Gurlie had agreed to wait for each other and to marry as soon as they were of age.
It was like a fairy tale to Keith--a wonderful tale like no one he had ever read. And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it. His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love between Oscar's father and mother. Here was love again, mystically beautiful, so that it brought a new light into the faces of those it touched. And Keith's heart grew lonely and wistful within him. But strangely enough, he never thought of connecting Arnold's love for Gurlie with what he had read in the book found in his father's book case. That was quite a different thing, he felt.
XII
The presiding genius of the examinations was Lector Booklund, teacher of Latin in Lower and Upper Sixth. He was short and stocky and gnarled by gout. Instead of speaking, he emitted a series of verbal explosives, and the boy whose answers didn't come quick enough became the object of withering scorn. Most of his life seemed concentrated in his eyes where twinkling merriment and blazing anger alternated with bewildering rapidity. He posed as a tyrant, but the boys who knew him well said that at heart he was as kind as he was just, and that his nervous impatience and bursts of rage were merely the results of severe physical sufferings.
The moment he caught sight of Keith among the boys up for examination, most of whom hailed from other schools, he became interested and began to draw him out. And Keith was able to respond with some of his old-time quickwittedness. His ambition had been stirred into a semblance of life through the shock of his failure, while the summer's rest and peace had brought back some of his natural vivacity. The inner conflict was still a source of trouble, but it did not seem quite so much a matter of life and death. He had not yet passed the crisis, but he had reached a point where a little tactful nursing might put him on the right path again for good. What he needed above all was encouragement, and that was what he got for a while from the new class principal.
He passed the examinations with ease. Then the sense of being a favoured pupil once more made him throw himself into the studies with considerable zest. Little by little, however, his zest slacked off. More and more frequently he became the object of blame or ridicule instead of praise. By and by Lector Booklund found it hard to ask him a question or give him a direction without open display of irritation. It was evident that he felt disappointed in Keith, and he did not hesitate to show it.
Many causes combined to produce the slump in Keith's aspirations that in its turn produced the changed attitude of the teacher. The latter's impatience had probably as much to do with it as anything else, while his splenetic manners and speech intimidated the boy's already overwrought sensitiveness. The subjects taught and the form of the teachings did their share, too. Grammar and rules and dry data seemed to play a greater part than ever. In Latin, for instance, they were reading Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and the colourful old legends might easily have been used to arouse the boy's interest, if attention had merely been concentrated on the stories told and the life revealed by them. But the teacher was first and last a grammarian, and he would wax frantically enthusiastic over some subtle syntactic distinction which left Keith peevishly indifferent. And Lector Booklund was positively jealous on behalf of his own subject, so that once he flung a bitingly sarcastic remark at the boy because his attention had flared up at the quoting of a phrase in English.