“What did you come here for?” he cried, as he had once before so long ago; “what does any one come to me for? I came here to be alone! No one must come to me again! No one must ever look at me until I die!”
The doctor stooped and lifted Creepy gently but firmly in his arms.
“Yes, they must,” he said, “I must come and take you away from here this very moment. Don’t you know you might die, lying on such a bed as that all this time?”
“Oh, I wish I could! I wish I were dead, dead, dead!” and then suddenly raising his head, he looked almost fiercely in the doctor’s face.
“No I don’t! I don’t wish it, for then the angels would cry out, ‘Look at Humpy!’ when they saw me coming! Oh, where shall I go? Where will no one ever come?”
What the doctor would have said at that moment, if he could have reached the right people to say it to, and how much more terrible than even the professor’s his words would have been, there was no opportunity to know. He clenched his teeth together for a moment as if he were fighting a terrible battle with something, and then spoke in tenderer tones than even Creepy had ever heard from him, but with the same ring in them that had always brought comfort to the lame child.
“Where shall you go? I hope you don’t want to go anywhere away from me; don’t you know you are all I have in the world, little man?”
Once more Creepy opened his eyes and looked at him. All through the long hour that he had lain there, an hour that had seemed like a year of agony sweeping through his life, the same evil voice that had whispered to him on the playground, had brought up every such word the doctor had ever spoken, and thrown them at him like cruel taunts! He had been mocking him with all the rest! It was not true there was a place in the world and a share in it for him, as well as other people! He had never meant it, he had known better all the time! How dared he ever tell him so!
But he was here again, he had come to find him, he did care! He had not meant to mock him, it was not all a vanished dream!
With a low cry he threw his arms around the doctor’s neck and clung convulsively there, and in another moment Jet looked wonderingly over his shoulder again while the doctor, one arm still holding the crippled child, stepped into the chaise and gathered up the reins with his free hand.