“Fall into the Eddy? Why, woman dear, he will scarcely look into it when I try to make him. Just shivers in a silly way, and makes up all sorts of queer yarns about it. The Eddy fascinates him but scares him, too. He believes that bad fairies live in it and if he should go too near they’d come out and drag him down with them to destruction. Oh! you needn’t worry about Tony’s Eddy.”
Alas! for her peace of mind, now that Saint Augustine had disappeared, “The Eddy!” was her first and only thought.
Jim searched in an opposite direction.
“I believe he’s gone to find the monkeys. He was talking of them almost the last thing. Horrid things! I wish they’d never been heard of. They’ve made more trouble than human beings could, try their best! Or, maybe, child like, he’s gone to dig that wonderful ‘treasure’ out of the ground and to buy you the silk dress he’d heard about. Dear little kid! He was as earnest as a man, almost!” said Jim, trying to comfort the mother-heart that suffered so.
“You look. I’ll look. He must be found. I can’t meet Corny’s eyes and tell him that our boy is lost,” she had answered quietly enough, but with agony in her expression.
When they had gone Gerald got up and dressed. He was rather shaky in the knees but felt far better than when lying on the hard bed which had been given up to his use. How his hostess had managed he had not even thought, until that moment Jim had lain on the bench across the room, upon a bag of fern leaves he had gathered for himself in the woods near-by, with his rag-carpet blanket to cover him. He hadn’t complained and Gerald had given no thought to his comfort, his own being his first concern as it had always been.
Now the house seemed desolate. Saint Anne came timidly in with his light supper and started back in affright. He looked like a stranger to her in his own clothes, having seen him only as “the sick one” in bed. But he called her and she dared not disobey her mother’s command to give him his supper. Somehow, for the first time, the child’s face appealed to him and he thanked her for her attention. This was more astonishing than to see him fully dressed in his white duck suit, that had been laundered by Lucetta on the day after his arrival.
In a flutter of excitement, Saint Anne retreated to the inner room and the safe presence of her family; and when, after a moment she regained courage enough to open the door between—the lad was gone.
“He was here and he isn’t here. He was all in white, like mamma says the angels wear, and Dr. Jabb’s little Eunice. She had on clothes all flyey-about and thin—looked like moonlight. She had a hump in her shoulders where mamma thinks maybe her wings are starting to grow. Mamma knows her mamma a right smart while, and she says Eunice is a perfectly angelic child. Mamma wouldn’t say that if she didn’t know. Maybe the sick boy’s turned into a angel, too, or is turning! Just supposing! Maybe God sent him to stay with us, because papa and mamma had to go away. Maybe!”