CHAPTER X.
A week later Creepy was as quietly domesticated in the doctor’s house as if he had been left among the inside finishings by the builder; and instead of the shrinking from everybody and everything that would once have made it impossible to him, the warm glow in his veins, that he had thought must be like spring to the earth, kept on, as warm and as life-giving as ever; his own old “All but me” seemed to have fled away, and the doctor’s “Why not you?” to have made some little hold for itself at last.
And there was still one more change that covered up, if it did not eclipse, all others: a new suit from the tailor’s, which, though not “worried out” by Mrs. Ganderby’s “wits and patience,” smoothed away so much from the queer figure, and showed to so much advantage the delicacy of face and form there really was, that Joan was actually proud to have them appear at the front door.
But the books were the great thing, after all. A whole new set, and the doctor to hear his lessons, though the doctor did not think as much of that as Creepy did.
“Well enough for a while,” he said to himself, “till I can bring him up to the mark, but I don’t want him moping at home with an old fellow like me; I want to get him into that schoolhouse over yonder, and let him get his blood stirred among boys like himself.”
“Like himself!” he repeated, with a smile; “well, no, not exactly that, that’s a fact. They’ve got better backs than he has, but he’s got a head that will beat any half dozen of them together, if they don’t look sharp. If I saw other people putting a boy of his health over the ground he’s making, in the same time, I should say they were a set of fools, but it seems nothing more than play to him. I believe I could get him admitted there in another six weeks, and he’ll make a steady run through, if I can only keep up his health, and then—”
The doctor glanced with a look quite like fatherly pride at Creepy, where he sat with his hair pushed back from his forehead, his slender fingers buried in the pages of his book, and the brown eyes devouring what lay before them.
“And then,” he went on, “I don’t know about trusting him at college. I’m not sure he’ll have strength for that; but we’ll make a doctor of him yet, and one that knows what he’s about too, if I’m not very much mistaken.”
And so the time slipped away; long, velvety grass made one forget the snow had ever lain in the fields, the willow-buds had burst and were swinging like long, gray plumes over the brook, and Creepy and the doctor had been trouting along its shore. That was a day that bewildered him as much as the sight of Nelly Halliday’s flowers, but the doctor was not afraid this time; the cool, fresh air and the quiet rests under the old trees with the picnic-baskets were a balance on the other side, and Creepy’s quiet laughs breaking out now and then told that everything was going right.