After watching the children for an hour, the stranger slipped out quietly. Mistress Mary followed him to the door, abashed at her unintentional discourtesy in allowing him to go without a good morning. She saw him stand at the foot of the steps, look first up, then down the street, then walk aimlessly to the corner. There, with hands in pockets, he paused again, glancing four ways; then, with a shrug and a gait that seemed to say, ‘It makes no difference,’ he slouched away.
‘He is simply a stranger in a strange city, pining for his home,’ thought Mary, ‘or else he is a stranger in every city, and has nowhere a home.’
He came again a few days later, and then again, apologising for the frequency of his visits, but giving no special reason for them. The neophytes called him ‘the Solitary,’ but the children christened him after a fashion of their own, and began to ask small favours of him. ‘Thread my needle, please, Mr. Man!’ ‘More beads,’ or ‘More paper, Mr. Man, please.’
It is impossible to keep out of relation with little children. One of these mites of humanity would make a man out of your mountain hermit, resist as he might. They set up a claim on one whether it exists or not, and one has to allow it, and respond to it at least in some perfunctory fashion. More than once, as Mr. Man sat silently near the circle, the chubby Baker baby would fall over his feet, and he would involuntarily stoop to pick her up, straighten her dress, and soothe her woe. There was no hearty pleasure in his service even now. Nobody was certain that he felt any pleasure at all. His helpfulness was not spontaneous; it seemed a kind of reflex action, a survival of some former state of mind or heart; for he did his favours in a dream, nor heard any thanks: yet the elixir was working in his veins.
‘He is dreadfully in the way,’ grumbled Edith; ‘he is more ever-present than my ardent Russian.’
‘So long as he insists on coming, let us make him supply the paternal element,’ suggested Rhoda. ‘It may be a degrading confession, but we could afford to part with several women here if we could only secure a really fatherly man. The Solitary cannot indulge in any day-dreams or trances, if we accept him as the patriarch of the institution.’
Whereupon they boldly asked him, on his subsequent visits, to go upon errands, and open barrels of apples, and order intoxicated gentlemen off the steps, and mend locks and window-fastenings, and sharpen lead-pencils, and put on coal, and tell the lady in the rear that her parrot interfered with their morning prayers by shrieking the hymns in impossible keys. He accepted these tasks without protest, and performed them conscientiously, save in the parrot difficulty, in which case he gave one look at the lady, and fled without opening the subject.
It could not be said that he appeared more cheerful, the sole sign of any increased exhilaration of spirits being the occasional straightening of his cravat and the smoothing of his hair—refinements of toilet that had heretofore been much neglected, though he always looked unmistakably the gentleman.
He seemed more attracted by Lisa than by any of the smaller children; but that may have been because Mary had told him her story, thinking that other people’s stories were a useful sort of thing to tell people who had possible stories of their own.
Lisa was now developing a curious and unexpected facility and talent in the musical games. She played the tambourine, the triangle, the drum, as nobody else could, and in accompanying the marches she invented all sorts of unusual beats and accents. It grew to be the natural thing to give her difficult parts in the little dramas of child life: the cock that crowed in the morn to wake the sleeping birds and babies, the mother-bird in the nest, the spreading willow-tree in the pond where the frogs congregated,—these rôles she delighted in and played with all her soul.