CHAPTER XI.
FIVE DOLLARS.
Dear old Mrs. Yorke had improved rapidly under the care of the specialist who was treating her case; but she was ill at ease in her city quarters, partly because she was unaccustomed to her surroundings, partly because she was never certain, when the captain was away from her, that he was not doing some unheard-of thing which might bring him into a serious predicament. And now here was this trouble between Jim, of whom she and the captain were so proud and so fond, and her grandson, and the disgrace of the latter; so that just now her bed was not one of roses, and she longed for the quiet and peace of her simple seaside home.
"If Adam would but go home, and take the boy with him," she sighed to Mammy one day, "I could be easy in my mind, for I know that Jabez and Matilda Jane and Mary would look after him well, and he would be out of harm's way; but now I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some day he turned up in the police-court, just for doin' something he thought was no harm, but that is against city rules. His ways and city folks' ways ain't alike. An' there's the boy, an' what he's done; all the school learnin' in the world ain't goin' to pay for such a shame. No, you needn't say it was on'y a boyish trick; you on'y say that to make me more easy like; an' with thanks all the same to Governor Rutherford, I'd a sight rather he'd left Theodore down to the Point, an' out of the way of such temptations as he gets here. An' when they once begin that way as boys, you never know where they'll end. No, no; I wish Adam and the boy were home."
Poor Mrs. Yorke! She had, indeed, too much reason to dread the after results of "once beginning that way;" for Theodore seemed likely to follow in the footsteps of his good-for-nothing father.
Uncle Rutherford, of course, heard of the peanut episode, and expressed a fitting censure on Theodore's conduct, both to our family and to the boy himself; but we said among ourselves, that he not only appeared to endorse, but to enjoy, Jim's swift, passionate punishment of Theodore, and he escaped with a very slight reproof, if, indeed, the few words he said to him concerning the matter could be called reproof; and Milly felt no fear that he had lost ground with uncle Rutherford.
Fortunately the captain, knowing little or nothing of the streets, was given, when by himself, to haunting our neighborhood and the park opposite; so that he came much under the notice and patronage of the friendly policeman, whose daily beat was in that quarter, and who kept him on many an occasion from going astray, or making a spectacle of himself.
The captain had sought out Rob Stevens, insisted that he should tell him just how many times he had seen Theodore steal peanuts from Matty, and, so far as he could judge, to what amount each time; then counting up what he supposed them to be worth, which he put at an enormously high valuation—the honest old man!—that he might be sure to err on the right side, he forced Theodore to go with him to the stand, and pay Matty for the stolen fruit. He endeavored, too, to make him apologize to Jim, both for the theft of his property, and also for his contemptible meanness in keeping silent on the occasion of Jim's attack on the playground. But here he was powerless: Theodore absolutely and doggedly refused to do it; and his grandfather was obliged to content himself with relieving his own feelings, and further expressing his sentiments on the boy's conduct, by giving him a severe flogging.
Spring was upon us now; an early, mild, and beautiful spring. Day after day of sunny delicious weather succeeded one another; the children came home from their walks or drives in the Central Park, in ecstasies over the robins, blue-birds, and squirrels they had seen. In the woods at Oaklands,—whither father went once or twice a week to have an eye upon his improvements and preparations for the summer,—spring-beauties, hepaticas, and anemones, and even a few early violets, were showing their lovely faces; and all young things—ah, and the older ones too—were rejoicing that the "winter was past and gone."