"What is that!"--Page 118.
The child did not move.
"Do you hear, you little booby?" she repeated angrily. "Get up and be off before I give you something to remember me by!" As she spoke, she advanced a step nearer to him and raised her hand to strike him.
Still the child did not move: and the woman's hand fell harmless by her side. The peculiar pallor of the boy's face, a pallor heightened by the shade in which he sat, his immobility, the strangeness of his attitude and position, above all the fixed glare of his eyes, had their effect upon her, scared and impressed as she already was by his unexplained delivery from the closet. She hesitated and fell back a step.
The butler, who knew nothing of the closet episode, attributed the move to prudence. "Soft and easy," he muttered approvingly, "or he may suspect something. It is odd he should be here."
"Suspect!" the woman answered with a shiver; for when a strong nature gives way to panic, the rout is complete. "I doubt he knows. The child is not canny," she added, staring at him in an odd, shrinking fashion.
The butler was at all times a coward, and without understanding the woman's reasons he felt the influence of her fear. "Not canny!" he said uneasily; "why, what is the matter with him? Hi, Jack, my boy, what are you doing here?" he continued, addressing the lad with a poor attempt at good-fellowship. "Are you ill, or what is it?"
The boy did not move.
Gridley advanced gingerly towards him, as a timid man approaches a strange dog. When he came near, however, and saw that it really was the boy, little Jack Patten whom he had known from his birth, the assurance made him laugh at the woman's fears. "Come, get up, lad," he said roughly; "get up and go and play!"
He seized Jack by the collar and raised him to his feet. "Jump, lad, jump!" he said. "Be off! You will get the ague here. Go into the sun and play!"