“Ah, the thing is to make it yourself.” Mrs. Locke spoke with the accent of one who makes the wider application.
“Of course.” Hildegarde nipped the generalization in the bud. “Well, he learned very early that if he was to have even a little Fourth of July he had to save up for it. And he did. When he got a nickel or two he wouldn’t waste it on candy, and he didn’t even buy chewing-gum. Just saved up for July. The year he was seven his mother had to give up trying to live in part of their nice big house. They moved into a very small cottage on the other side of the garden. But Louis and his cousins, and the rest of the little boys of the neighborhood, were going to have the greatest and most glorious Fourth they’d any of them ever known. The others had toy pistols and rockets and little cannon. Louis had saved up and had got some fire-crackers and two little flags, and he was going to make things hum. Well, there was a man who had just moved into the Cheviots’ big house and nobody liked him, but I expect they wouldn’t have liked anybody who lived in that house without being a Cheviot. And he had a little boy about Louis’s age. And the little boy was very ill. Scarlet fever. Well, on the evening of the third (you know they never can wait till the Fourth), the boys all over town began to celebrate, but they were going to celebrate most just in front of Louis’s house, for that was where the great fight was to be—the battle, you know, where they were going to beat the British all over again. It was always more fun, and lots more noise and slaughter if Louis was one of the generals. So they came trooping down the street after supper, letting off torpedoes by the way. And when Louis heard them he tore out with his flags and his crackers, wild with excitement. And he lined the boys up and told them where the red-coats were in ambush behind the wood house. Louis had lit some punk, and the new neighbor came rushing out just as a big cracker went off with a bang. Barbara Cheviot was on her side of the laurel and she saw the man throw up his hands as though he’d been shot, and then make for Louis exactly as if he meant to strike him. Barbara was scared for a moment. But by the time the new neighbor got to where the boys were he was holding himself down pretty well. Barbara heard him speaking quite kindly. What were they going to do, and that kind of thing. And when they told him, Barbara says a sound like a little groan came out of his tight lips, and he looked up at the window where the curtains were drawn. But he asked the boys how many more crackers they had. And when he saw what a lot there were, he only said that was fine to have so many. When he was a little boy he had to share one pack with three brothers. And he said he hoped they knew what the Fourth of July meant and why they had a right to be proud and make a noise. Louis answered up and told him. The man said ‘Good, good!’ He didn’t want to put a stop to the fun, he said. He was only thinking about the little boy up in that room there, who wasn’t having any Fourth of July at all this year. He was ill. So ill he might never see another July. Yes, he was probably dying, and Barbara says, he couldn’t go on for a minute. He had to wait. And all the little boys looked down at the ground. ‘There’s just a chance, I think,’ the father said, ‘if he sleeps to-night, just a little chance—if you boys would celebrate on the other side of the town. And I’d be very much obliged to you,’ he said. As he was going off he turned to Louis and asked him if he’d tell all the boys he saw, and try to keep them from coming into this street. Louis said, Yes, he would, and the man went back to his child. But he didn’t go to bed—just sat in the sick-room and watched. The oddest thing about that third of July was that Mrs. Cheviot and the girls slept the whole night through. It was the only year of their lives that ever happened. There wasn’t a sound in their street. But the man in the big house was too anxious and miserable about the sick child to notice or remember anything outside that room where they were all watching. Just before sunrise the crisis was passed, and the doctor, who’d been sent a long way for, and had been watching, too, said the fever had gone down and the boy was saved. The father came out for a breath of air. In the grayness he saw something moving down by the fence. ‘Who’s that?’ he called out, and when he got close up he saw a little figure patroling the dim street. ‘Why, aren’t you the boy—’ he began to say. ‘Yes,’ Louis told him, ‘I’m doin’ what I said.’ ‘What you said?’ The man didn’t remember even then. ‘Yes,’ Louis said, ‘I’m bein’ a sort o’ watchman to see the boys don’t make a noise just here.’ And he had a bunch of fire-crackers in his hand and two little flags in his hat.”
With suffused eyes the girl looked out across the shining water. The old story had a new significance for her, if none at all for Mrs. Locke.
“It was, as I began by saying, more exactly like the Louis Cheviot I know than a whole book of biography might be. It’s because he’s precisely like that to this day that I was so surprised when he let me go off without a word, because, you see, he’d been ‘sort o’ watchman’ for us, too. It’s easier to believe that nothing else will do for him but just to see you through.” She turned her head, and her grasp on the railing tightened—nothing else had done! For that figure outlined against the sky—no use any longer that he turns his collar up above his ears, no efficient mask any more the arctic cap. That was the “watchman” yonder on the bridge, standing guard over the fortunes of Hildegarde Mar!
“What’s the matter? What is it?” asked Mrs. Locke.
“Only—only that the most wonderful thing that ever happened is happening right now.”
“What’s happening?”
“The man I’ve been telling you about—he’s there!”
“Not that one on the bridge!”
“Hush. ’Sh. Don’t stir. I must be very quiet.”