He knew that Betty was being kept after school every night as a punishment, but had no idea what her fault had been. His sister had come to him when Betty had refused to explain to her and asked him to compel her to do so, reminding him that when they were children and had been punished at school, they had been punished again at home. But he had bidden Sarah leave the girl alone. He hadn’t felt like being stern with the child. Betty was a good girl. Over and over during this first year of her going to school at Paulding, he had himself been impressed by her sweetness and goodness; and his old friend Bob Harrow had come to him more than once with tears in his eyes to dwell upon her wonderful kindness to his little, afflicted Rosy. Her Aunt Sarah, he had realized, had always been hard on Betty, and he feared he had rather backed her up in it. But he hadn’t done it of late, and certainly he wouldn’t now. He hardly knew what he ought to do. Had the girl’s mother lived, she would have known—though quite likely had Bess been alive it would never have happened.
It hurt him to see how the girl grieved over her punishment, and on the night when she was hanging about to get a chance to ask him for the money, he spoke to her. They had finished tea, and Miss Pogany went into the pantry to mix bread.
“Betty, my child,” he said with awkward kindness, “I am afraid you are taking your medicine pretty hard. Now see here, don’t you mind it any more. Whatever you did is over and done with and can’t be helped. I shouldn’t wonder at all if Mr. Meadowcroft had been a mite too particular and severe. He’s a fine man and we’re all proud to have him in our midst and hope he will remain; but I don’t suppose he knows much about boys and girls. And then, people that have always been rich and used to being waited on can hardly help being rather high and mighty and overbearing. But the term is almost over now, and Mr. Appleton will be back and everything will be merry again. And I want my little girl to be merry. I want you to cheer up right away. I’m going to give you five dollars to get you something gay and pretty. You can go over to Paulding to spend it any day you like in your holidays and meanwhile you can be planning what you’ll buy.”
Betty tried to speak. Then she went to her father, dropped her head on his shoulder, and wept silently.
“There, there, cry if you like, child,” he murmured, drawing her to his knee and stroking her hair gently with his big bony hand. “Cry it out and then put your mind on the pretty thing you can buy with your money.”
“By the way, George,” Miss Pogany began before she reached the dining room. And Betty, slipping down, fled precipitately. But her father followed her to the stair, tucked a five-dollar note into her hand, squeezed it, and returned to his sister.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE last day of the term had come and the last day of Mr. Meadowcroft’s incumbency; for the principal of the school had fully recovered and would return to his duty after the Easter holidays. Despite their affection for Mr. Appleton, the greater number of the pupils were very loath to part with the man who had filled his place temporarily. For, even apart from his impressive elegance and the finer flavor of his scholarship, they recognized in Humphrey Meadowcroft a rare personality. The fact that he demanded rather more of them had acted rather as a stimulant; and they had found him quite as kind as Mr. Appleton and perhaps more understandingly sympathetic.
As for Mr. Meadowcroft himself—for him the day was very different from what it might have been. He was relieved when the day was over, though not with an healthful, wholesome relief. After the last straggler had finally departed, as he gathered his personal belongings together and set the desk in order, depression seized and settled upon him. On a sudden this whole experience, which started as a succession of red-letter days, seemed to have been signal failure.
He sat for some time with his brow in his hand. Then, realizing that he must be getting to the station, he raised his head and glanced around the big room in farewell review, seeing phantom forms with pleasant, eager faces filling the long rows of empty seats. His heart warmed. He had certainly been happy for those first three weeks—as happy as he had ever been in his life. That wasn’t a slight thing. He recalled a passage in Gibbon he had recently come upon in reading for one of his history classes which spoke of a mighty potentate who, at the end of a rarely successful reign over a prosperous kingdom, counted up the really happy days he had known in the fifty years. They had amounted to fourteen! And he had had twenty-one!