II.
In the gray of the Christmas morning, he woke to his disillusionment; but he woke also to the thought that he must not tell Frankie; and he woke, in fact, no longer an infant, but an elder brother, desperately sophisticated and, beside Frankie's enthusiasm, even blasé. Thereafter, his make-believes were conscious always; and he began to play with his imagination for a game.
Being exiled from the nursery to escape the scarlet fever, he was on a visit to an aunt who lived at the other end of the town; and on an eventful morning, he woke, alone in his cot, to hear his two cousins whispering together within their high spindle palisade on the opposite side of the room. He opened one sleepy eye to see that they were playing "Mammoth Cave," a game which he had taught them. (It required that you cover yourself with the bed-clothes, turn flat on your face, and wriggle down through the suffocation of "between sheets" until your head came out at the foot of the bed.) He did not rouse himself; for the three children had formed an agreement that no one of them should rise before the others, so that if one wished to take an extra forty winks while breakfast waited, they all lay in bed together, and the wrath of the powers of the household spent itself in a general thunder that did not strike.
But their restlessness continued; and when he heard a sly chuckle, he asked thickly: "What're you doing?" The over-prompt "Nothing!" of their answer wakened him. He rose on his elbow. Their wriggling ceased, and their two stolid faces stared blandly at him out of the bed-clothes.
One of them said, with a blink: "Who can make the highest cant'lever bridge?" (This was another of his inventions. To do it you stretched yourself out on your back, and then, with your elbows, raised an arch of body supported on neck and heels.) But while the elder cousin was getting himself up, he lifted the corner of his coverlet accidentally, and Don saw the black sleeve of his jacket. He cried, "You're dressing!"
They were already dressed. The playing "cant'lever bridge" had been a ruse by which they covered an attempt to draw up their knickerbockers to their waists. And all their other contortions had covered similar treasons.
They ran away to breakfast, shouting; and Don almost wept with chagrin and disappointment. It was so low a betrayal of his confidence—so treacherous a misuse of his beloved make-believes—that he felt he never would forgive them. He sulked through a cold breakfast, and went out alone to the lawn, refusing to speak to either of them, though his aunt attempted to placate him with a candy stick.
He took a picture book with him to console himself in solitude; but he found the hired man cutting the grass; and on his neighbour's veranda, a very young lady with a doll was watching the work. Don also watched.
"He—he's cutting the grass," she explained. "And when he has it all cut, he—he puts water on it to—to make it grow again— so—so he can cut it again."
He accepted the explanation in the spirit in which it was offered; she introduced herself as "Miss Margaret," a title which she had taken from the family servants; and in a few moments he was seated on the front steps beside her, their heads together over the picture book, and each sucking a share of the candy stick. And Miss Margaret's share was the larger.
Between bites, he explained the pictures. When there was a castle in the background, he could tell exactly in what room of it the princess was locked. On demand, he described the ogre, who was her gaoler, to the very wart on the knob-end of his nose; and he pictured every article of the gold and silver furnishings of the palace with a realistic detail that made Miss Margaret gasp. Before the book was finished, they had became such friends that she let him wipe his sticky fingers on her handkerchief. "You haven't remembered yours," she apologized for him.
"Oh," he said, "boys don't ever have them."
She thought the matter over. She said: "You can always borrow mine."
It was so delicately put that, with a masculine obtuseness, he did not get her meaning. It was Miss Margaret's surrender.
She was visiting the next-door neighbours; and Don and she, during the two weeks that followed their meeting, were together constantly. He deserted his cousins, and she left the youngsters with whom she had been playing. She learned to storm block-forts with battalions of coloured marbles that were cavalry at one moment and cannon balls at the next; to make siege guns of cuts of elderberry bush bored of their pith; and to lay out a national cemetery for lead soldiers with dominoes for gravestones. When she came to the game of imprisoned princess, she was already more than a pupil, and she dictated the behaviour of the regal beauty in a way which Don could not follow. She insisted that the prince should die of his wounds—after he had killed ten dragons and the ogre—and leave the princess to weep out the eyes of her youth beside his tomb. Don could see no right fun in that, and her contempt was galling. They compromised by agreeing to give the game a tragic ending every third time they played it; and he consented to the substitution of a little china doll for the "Noah's wife," shaped like a blue hourglass, which he had always used as the imprisoned beauty.
Their friendship thickened until he distinguished himself by climbing up the pillar of a side veranda to call "good-morning" through the window to her while she was still in bed; and she, at dinner, refused to eat stewed corn, a dish of which she was ravenously fond, because he had told her that it had once made him ill. She was a most unusual young lady, especially in affairs of the heart: she was impulsively positive in her likes and her dislikes, and she expressed either always unreservedly. She treated Don's elder cousin, Conroy, with a coldness which the boy demanded an explanation of: and she explained simply, "I don't like your face." She crossed the veranda to a visitor—to whom she had not been introduced—and sat herself on his knee, smiling the frankest admiration; and when she was asked to excuse her abruptness, she replied, "He's nice." She flattered Don with an adoration that went to his head.
She had already given him a handkerchief worked with her monogram in pale blue silk—for his sticky fingers, though she did not say so—and she came one afternoon to their playroom in the broken "summer-house" with a photograph of herself in her winter furs. He was busy making preparations for the burial of a lead hero who had been killed in the wars. He accepted the picture with a brief condescension, and directed her to line up, in funeral procession, the wooden animals from his Noah's ark. She obeyed him silently, but not with her usual enthusiasm; and when the last strain of martial music had died away, and Don had fired the last "Boom" of imaginary cannon over the soldier's grave, she said abruptly: "You ought to give me one."
"One what?"
"Picture. A picture of yourself."
He shook his head. "Haven't any." He was erecting a tomb of building-blocks over the grave. She watched him moodily. When he came to put on the roof, he found himself in difficulties; he had no blocks long enough to reach from wall to wall. He looked around him for a substitute and saw her photograph. He tried it; it could be made to fit exactly if the back wall were moved in an inch.
She snatched it from him. "No!"
He caught at it. "Give me that."
She shook her head, her doll's eyes big with indignation. "No!"
"I want it," he said angrily.
"No." She backed away from him. "No. You shan't. No!" She stamped her foot to stop him as he got up from his knees. When he clutched at her arm, impatiently, she turned and ran, screaming, "You shan't! You shan't!"
Well, there were other building materials as good as her old photograph. There was the cover of the tin box in which he kept his marbles. He tried it, and broke down a side of his mausoleum. He brushed the ruins away and began a towering monument of solid blocks.
But Miss Margaret did not come back, and he began to miss her. He went nonchalantly around the house to where the other children were playing "fire-engine"; but she was not there. He inquired next door from the maid-of-all-work, and she told him that Miss Margaret's mother had arrived and taken her down town.
Even then he did not suspect what was in store for him. He thought to make all right by finding a picture of himself to give her; and the only picture that he had was one of his Sunday-school, in which he stood in the front row of a group of little girls. He wrapped it up complacently in a newspaper and left it with the servant for her.
He learned next morning that she had gone away to her home. He learned also that she had not liked the photograph; the servant returned it to him in small pieces—pieces which she had swept out from behind a bureau when she was cleaning the guest-chamber. He gathered from his aunt that Miss Margaret had been jealous of the twenty-odd little girls who were in the picture with him. She had left him without even saying good-bye.