"And—and—" Mary said, crying, "he said, 'I like Aunty without any presents.' You see? Influence! The idea of her daring to say we mustn't give him a gun. He's ours!"
"No, he's hers," Johnny's father said, sadly; "she has the whip hand, Mary—unless we tell the truth."
"Of course we can't do that," she said, sobbing.
But after that Philadelphia experience Miss Lydia—a fragile creature now, who lived and breathed for her boy—was obliged every winter to let Johnny visit these people who had disowned him, cast him off, deserted him!—that was the way she put it to herself. She had to let him go because she couldn't think of any excuse for saying he couldn't go. She even asked Doctor Lavendar for a reason for refusing invitations, which the appreciative and frankly acquisitive Johnny was anxious to accept. With a present of a bunch of lamplighters in her hand she went to the rectory, offering, as an explanation of her call, the fact that Johnny had got into a fight with the youngest Mack boy and rubbed his nose in the gutter, and Mrs. Mack was very angry, and said her boy's nose would never be handsome again; and she, Miss Lydia, didn't know what to do because Johnny wouldn't tell her what the fight was about and wouldn't apologize.
"Johnny's fifteen and the Mack boy is seventeen; and a boy doesn't need a handsome nose," said Doctor Lavendar. "I'd not interfere, if I were you."
Then she got the real question out: Didn't Doctor Lavendar think it might be bad for Johnny to visit Mr. and Mrs. Robertson? "They're very rich, you know," Miss Lydia warned him, piteously.
"They've taken a fancy to him, have they?" Doctor Lavendar asked. She nodded. The old man meditated. "Lydia," he said at last, "you are so rich, and they're so poor, I'd be charitable, if I were you."
So she was charitable. And for the next three or four years Johnny went away for his good times, and old Miss Lydia stayed at home and had very bad times for fear that Mr. and Mrs. Robertson might suddenly turn into Johnny's father and mother! Then the father and mother would come to Old Chester in the summer and have their bad times, for fear that Miss Lydia would "influence" Johnny against Mr. and Mrs. Robertson. (We got to quite like the Robertsons, though we didn't see much of them. "Pity they had no children," said Old Chester; "all that Smith money going begging!")
The Smith money certainly went begging, so far as Johnny was concerned. Every time his father and mother tried to spend it on him Miss Lydia put her little frightened will between the boy and his grandfather's fortune. "Boys can't accept presents, Johnny, except from relations, you know," she would tell him; "it isn't nice." And Johnny, thinking of the gun or the pony or what not, would stick out his lips and sigh and say no, he "s'posed not." As a result of such remarks he developed as healthy a pride as one could hope for in a lad, and by the time he was eighteen he was hot with embarrassment when Mrs. Robertson tried to force things upon him.
"No, ma'am," he would say, awkwardly. "I—I can't take any presents."