An Old Chester Secret

by Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

"Yes, sir," said Johnny.

"But of course I don't approve of fighting. Only bad boys fight. Remember that!"

"Yes, sir," said Johnny, and scraped his plate loudly to attract the attention of old Alfred, his grandfather's man, who, familiar and friendly from thirty years' service, said, as he brought the desired flannel cakes, "The little man holds his fork just as you do, sir!" At which Mr. Smith stopped laughing, and said:

"Miss Sampson ought to teach him better manners."

He did not invite Johnny to supper again, which would have been a relief to Mary if she had known it; and was just as well, anyhow, for Miss Lydia, quaking at her own supper table (while Johnny was "holding his fork" in his grandfather's fashion!) had said to herself, "I'll tell him to say, 'No, thank you, sir,' if Mr. Smith ever asks him again."

It was about this time that Miss Lydia's landlord softened toward her sufficiently to bow to her as he passed her house. Once he even stopped her in the street to ask the particulars of one of Johnny's escapades: It appeared that a boy—one of the Mack boys, as it happened, who was always in hot water in Old Chester—got the credit of a smashed sash in Mr. Steele's greenhouse, which was really Johnny's doing; and in spite of sniffling denials, the (for once) innocent Mack boy was just about to get what the irate owner of the sash called a walloping, when Johnny Smith, breathless, and mad as a hatter, rushed into the greenhouse to say, "It was me done it!"—upon which the richly deserved walloping was handed over to the real culprit. Later, for some private grudge, Johnny paid it all back to young Mack, but for the moment—"I take my medicine," said Johnny, showing his teeth. "I don't hide behind another feller. But you bet I'll smash Andy Steele's hotbed sashes every chance I get!" Poor little Miss Lydia was frightened to death at such a wicked remark, and prayed that God would please forgive Johnny; and she was very bewildered to have Mr. Smith, listening to this dreadful story, chuckle with delight: "He'll come to a bad end, the scoundrel! Tell him I say I expect he'll be hanged. I'll give him a quarter for every pane he broke." After this interview Mr. Smith used to call on Miss Lydia occasionally just to inquire what was Johnny's latest crime, and once he invited his tenant to supper, "with your young scamp," his invitation ran. She went, and wore her blue silk, and sat on the edge of her chair, watching the grandfather and grandson, while the vein on her thin temple throbbed with fright. But it took another year of longing for his own flesh and blood before the new Mr. Smith reached an amazing, though temporary, decision.

"I'll have him," he said to himself; "I will have him! I'll swallow the wet hen, if I can't get him any other way. I'll—I'll marry the woman." . . . But he hesitated for still another month or two, for, though he wanted his grandson, he did not hanker to make a fool of himself; and a rich man in the late seventies who marries an impecunious spinster in the fifties looks rather like a fool.

But when he finally reached the point of swallowing Miss Lydia he lost no time in walking out from his iron gates one fine afternoon and banging on her front door with his stick. When she opened it he announced that he had something he wanted to say. In his own mind, the words he proposed to speak were to this effect: "I'm going to marry you—to get the boy." To be sure, he would not express it just that way—one has to go round Robin Hood's barn in talking to females! So he began:

"I have been planning more comfortable quarters for you, ma'am, than this house. More suitable quarters for my—for the boy; and I—" Then he stopped. Somehow or other, looking at Miss Lydia, sitting there so small and frightened and brave, he was suddenly ashamed. He could not offer this gallant soul the indignity of a bribe! "If I can't get the boy by fair means, I won't by foul," he told himself; so instead of offering himself, he talked about the weather; "and—and I want you to know that Johnny shall be put down for something handsome in my will. It won't be suspicious. Everybody in Old Chester knows that I like him—living here at my gates; though he has the devil of a temper! Bad thing. Very bad thing. He should control it. I've always controlled mine."

Miss Lydia felt a sudden wave of pity; he was so helpless, and she was so powerful—and so lucky! All she said, in her breathless voice, was that he "was very kind—about the will."