Sir!
* * *
“It’s a most remarkable case altogether,” said Billings, who had got back to his normal self, and had brought out the champagne. “When that boy came here he was just as you described him—just like his poor father in the days when we first knew each other. He brooded a little too much, and seemed discontented; but, considering his disappointment at college, that was natural enough. Well, do you know, I believe it’s he that’s doing the whole thing, and that he is effecting the substitution for his own ends, though I don’t know what they are.”
“Perhaps,” I suggested, “he wants his Ghoollah to get the job away from Mitch’s Ghoollah.”
“Ahem!” said Billings, looking a little embarrassed; “I—in fact, I’ve discovered that the best Pundits do not use that word. It ought to be—”
Here Billings gave me the correct word; but I draw the line at Ghoollah, and Ghoollah it stays while I am telling this story.
“He hadn’t been here a week before I noticed that he kept his eyes fixed on Mitch all the time they were together. He looked at him as though he were actually trying to absorb him. Before long, I saw that Mitch began to be troubled under that steady gaze. He seemed at first angry, then distressed, and he had long fits of silence. His boisterousness has been vanishing steadily; but it is not sullenness that he displays—on the contrary, I have never known him so gentle. He is just as efficient in his duties, without being so extremely—demonstrative as he used to be. And as for that other boy, who probably had never uttered a profane word in his life, or spoken rudely to any human being—well, you heard him to-day!”
I made up my mind to try to drink fifty dollars’ worth of Billings’s champagne before the end of the week to even up on my bet; and, as the days went on, each new development only served to urge me to greater assiduity in the task. The spirit of Big Mitch looked out of little Arthur Penrhyn’s insolent eyes, spoke out of his foul mouth, and showed itself even in tricks of gesture and carriage, and in lines of facial expression. And Big Mitch, though his huge, uncouth frame and coarse lineaments lent themselves but ill to the showing of it, carried within him a new spirit of gentleness and humility. We saw little of him, for after work hours he kept persistently to his room. But once, late at night, seeing him, through his open door, asleep over a book, I stepped softly in and looked over his big shoulders at the half-dozen volumes that littered his table. They were college text-books, and on the fly-leaf of each one was the name of Arthur Penrhyn.
* * *
I had packed my valise, and was looking for Billings to pay him his fifty dollars, when Big Mitch came out of his room—it was the noon hour—and he asked me for the favor of a few words.