"Dav-id!" cried my mother.
"Yes, sir," I said, looking right at Mr. Pound. "I promised the
Professor that I would take care of her—always."
CHAPTER VI
It was well for me that in my hours of absence fear had brought my parents to a just estimate of my character and to a truer appreciation of my essentiality to their happiness. My mother had long been haunted by a conviction that I should meet an early death by drowning or an accidental gunshot, and this very morning she had awakened from a dream in which she saw her only child floating on the murky waters of the mill-dam. Rushing to my room and finding me gone, she had had her worst fears confirmed, and at the moment of my reappearance Mr. Pound was endeavoring to console her for her loss and to bring her to a state of Christian resignation. So all was forgotten in the joy of my unexpected return, and though in the eyes of the minister, Miss Spinner, and the others I was just a small black sheep about whose absence an unnecessary pother had been raised, there was only rejoicing in the home fold. Even my father did not humiliate me with forgiveness, but took me in his arms silently and held me there, as he might have held me had he just rescued me from the depths of the mill-dam. To follow such a greeting with chastisement, however well merited, was quite out of the question. In the seclusion of my own room I did meet with gentle chiding for the anguish I had caused, but my mother remembered her dream, and my father his hours of futile searching, and I knew that the hands which pressed mine would not be raised against me in harsh reproof. Below us, I was sure, ears were strained to hear some real evidence that I was receiving my deserts, for there was a silence there like that outside of the prison wall when the crowd waits for the doleful tidings tolled by the prison bell. Perhaps the listeners were disappointed. I remember that Mr. Pound looked rather nonplussed as he saw us coming down-stairs, my father leading the way, smiling gravely, my mother following, clutching my hand as though she would never release it.
I had told them everything then. The story I had tried in vain to tell them at dinner on the previous day was now listened to with eagerness, and my father, knowing the truth of James's fall from grace, was outspoken in his declaration that an injustice had been done the Professor. In a solemn conference in the parlor, with Mr. Pound and the squire, Doctor Pearl, Mr. Smiley, and all the other important men of the neighborhood, he decried the attack on Henderson Blight as an outrage; he found solace alone in the fact that the constable had been more frightened than hurt, for it seemed that the bullet had only clipped the flesh of his leg; he took upon himself all the blame for the affair, on the ground that he, at least, should have known better. Squire Crumple heartily agreed with my father, and pointed out that on his part he had only allowed the warrant to issue under protest; henceforth he would rely on his own judgment and would not interpret the law to suit the whims of his friends. Mr. Pound was contrite, but he took comfort in the thought that they had acted for the best in the light of their knowledge of the circumstances, but now, knowing the facts, he advised that the whole matter be allowed to simmer down quietly. He still took issue with his respected friend the squire on the illegality of the means used to rid the community of a most undesirable member. The squire replied with heat, referring to the case of The Commonwealth versus Hodgins, and the subsequent action of Hodgins versus The Commonwealth for damages. It was very evident that he would be relieved in mind if the case of The Commonwealth versus Blight did simmer down. But there was one obstacle to this programme of forgetting. It was not the constable. Lukens could be quieted easily. It was Penelope. Even the gentlest ministrations of Miss Spinner had failed to bring the small girl to a realization of the happy change in her lot. Even Mr. Pound was touched by her grief and so troubled that he offered amends in a home under the parsonage roof. He realized now that the reason he had never been blessed with a child of his own was that when the time came there might be a place at his board and a nook in his heart for this abandoned little girl. On the strength of her husband's offer Mrs. Pound was claiming Penelope as her own, and very soon was complaining that she had a most troublesome child to deal with. Penelope had divined that Mr. Pound was her father's arch-enemy, and she met his most benign approach with her head tilted defiantly and her eyes flashing, so that now, in a quandary, he asked: "What shall we do with the child?"
The question was a sign that he surrendered her. He had shown an honest desire to take her under his roof, and no one could say that if he had fired the train which had wrecked her home, he was not willing to make atonement.
"What shall we do with the child?" my father repeated. He rose to show that the conference was ended and the question settled. "David has already answered that," he said, laying a hand upon my shoulder. "My boy promised Henderson Blight to take care of her until he returned. They have settled it among themselves, and I shall do nothing to interfere with them."
He spoke so firmly that no one dared to remonstrate, and so it came that I kept my promise to the Professor as far as it was in my power. He must have said himself that Penelope had a home better than any he could have given her. She had a mother's care—a care so loving that I should have grown jealous had I not found a certain compensation in the fact that the watchfulness over me relaxed and I was less hampered in my comings and goings. Before a month had passed my mother was confessing a dread that the Professor might return and claim the child; she was pleading with my father to abandon what she called a useless and an expensive search. Chance had left the door open, and chance had brought me into the hall, so I stopped and stood as silently as I could that I might not disturb their conference. I was frightened by the sternness in my father's voice. He spoke of his duty. To him duty summed up life. He had his duty, even in the matter of so worthless a creature as this Henderson Blight. Declaring this, he stamped the floor in emphasis.
Often in the weeks that followed, when Penelope and I roamed over the fields, when her merriment rang out the highest, and her laughter was so free that it seemed she was forgetting the clearing and the days when her sole companion was the gaunt and bitter-tongued Professor—often then I would hear again the stamp of my father's foot and his stern avowal, and to me it was as though he were conspiring against me in seeking to send away the only comrade I had ever known, and would leave me to pass my days in the wake of James. I abhorred James now. I had come to know the pleasure of real companionship, and looked back to the old days wondering how I had endured them, and with dread to those that seemed to lie ahead. Penelope was a girl, to be sure, but she was not like the insipid creatures of the village who were held in such contempt by boys of my age. Where I dared to go she followed. Did I climb to the highest girder in the barn and balance myself on the dizzy height, she was with me. Did I venture to run the wildest rapids of the creek in the clumsy box which I called my canoe, she trusted her newest frock and ribbons to my seamanship. And better than all was the respect and admiration in which she held me. To her I was no longer the frightened, shivering boy of the mountain brook. I was in a land I knew and followed its familiar ways without fear. One day she saw me tumble from the bridge into the deep swimming-hole, and while she cried out in fright I swam nonchalantly ashore, a full dozen strokes, and as I dried myself in the sun I reproved her for her little faith in me. On another I presented her to old Jerry Schimmel, sitting, a brown, dishevelled heap on his cobbler's bench, and from my accustomed seat by his stove, in a voice cast into the echoing hollows of my chest, I commanded him to tell us how he had fought in the battle of Gettysburg. From my familiarity with the stirring incidents of the fight as Jerry described them, Penelope thought that I must have had a part in it too, and my modest disclaimer hardly convinced her that I had not been a companion-in-arms of this battle-worn veteran.
What days those were! Even the fear that my father would find the missing Professor grew less. They drifted into weeks, and weeks into months, and there was no sign of the fugitive. I found myself looking into the future as though in the quiet evening I were turning my eyes over the valley to the west and the golden clouds hovering there. I dealt only with results. I crossed mountains without climbing them, and always Penelope shared my glory with me. I look back now smiling at that boyish self-reliance. Mountains have been crossed, but with what heart-breaking struggles? Battles have been won, but with what a toll of suffering?