St. Peter asked her whether Tom had ever said how it happened that his mother died in a wagon.
“Well, you see, she was very sick, and they were going West for her health. And one day, when they were camped beside a river, Tom’s father went in to swim, and had a cramp or something, and was drowned. Tom’s mother saw it, and it made her worse. She was there all alone, till some people found her and drove her on to the next town to a doctor. But when they got her there, she was too sick to leave the wagon. They drove her into the O’Briens’ yard, because that was nearest the doctor’s and Mrs. O’Brien was a kind woman. And she died in a few hours.”
“Does Tom know anything about his father?”
“Nothing except that he was a schoolteacher in Missouri. His mother told the O’Briens that much. But the O’Briens were just lovely to him.”
St. Peter had noticed that in the stories Tom told the children there were no shadows. Kathleen and Rosamond regarded his freelance childhood as a gay adventure they would gladly have shared. They loved to play at being Tom and Roddy. Roddy was the remarkable friend, ten years older than Tom, who knew everything about snakes and panthers and deserts and Indians. “And he gave up a fine job firing on the Santa Fe, and went off with Tom to ride after cattle for hardly any wages, just to be with Tom and take care of him after he’d had pneumonia,” Kathleen told them.
“That wasn’t the only reason,” Rosamond added dreamily. “Roddy was proud. He didn’t like taking orders and living on pay cheques. He liked to be free, and to sit in his saddle all day and use it for a pillow at night. You know Tom said that, Kitty.”
“Anyhow, he was noble. He was always noble, noble Roddy!” Kathleen finished it off.
After the first day, when he had walked into the garden and introduced himself, Tom never took up the story of his own life again, either with the Professor or Mrs. St. Peter, though he was often encouraged to do so. He would talk about the New Mexico country when questioned, about Father Duchene, the missionary priest who had been his teacher, about the Indians; but only with the two little girls did he ever speak freely and confidentially about himself. St. Peter used to wonder how the boy could afford to spend so much time with the children. All through that summer and fall he used to come in the afternoon and join them in the garden. In the winter he dropped in two or three evenings a week to play Five Hundred or to take a dancing-lesson.
There was evidently something enchanting about the atmosphere of the house to a boy who had always lived a rough life. He enjoyed the prettiness and freshness and gaiety of the little girls as if they were flowers. Probably, too, he liked being so attractive to them. A flush of pleasure would come over Tom’s face—so much fairer now than when he first arrived in Hamilton—if Kathleen caught his hand and tried to squeeze it hard enough to hurt, crying: “Oh, Tom, tell us about the time you and Roddy found the water hole dry, and then afterward tell us about when the rattlesnake bit Henry!” He would whisper: “Pretty soon,” and after a while, through the open windows, the Professor would hear them in the garden: the laughter and exclamations of the little girls, and that singularly individual voice of Tom’s—mature, confident, seldom varying in pitch, but full of slight, very moving modulations.
He couldn’t have wished for a better companion for his daughters, and they were teaching Tom things that he needed more than mathematics.
Sitting thus in his study, long afterward, St. Peter reflected that those first years, before Outland had done anything remarkable, were really the best of all. He liked to remember the charming groups of three he was always coming upon—in the hammock swung between the linden-trees, in the window-seat, or before the dining-room fire. Oh, there had been fine times in this old house then: family festivals and hospitalities, little girls dancing in and out, Augusta coming and going, gay dresses hanging in his study at night, Christmas shopping and secrets and smothered laughter on the stairs. When a man had lovely children in his house, fragrant and happy, full of pretty fancies and generous impulses, why couldn’t he keep them? Was there no way but Medea’s, he wondered?
XI
St. Peter had come in late from an afternoon lecture, and had just lighted his kerosene lamp to go to work, when he heard a light foot ascending the stairs. In a moment Kathleen’s voice called: “May I interrupt for a moment, Papa?”
He opened the door and drew her in.
“Kitty, do you remember the time you sat out there with your bee-sting and your bottle? Nobody ever showed me more consideration than that, not even your mother.”
Kathleen threw her hat and jacket into the sewing-chair and walked about, touching things to see how dusty they were. “I’ve been wondering if you didn’t need me to come in and clean house for you, but it’s not so bad as they report it. This is the first time I’ve called on you since you’ve been here alone. I’ve turned in from the walk more than once, but I’ve always run away again.” She paused to warm her hands at the little stove. “I’m silly, you know; such queer things make me blue. And you still have Augusta’s old forms. I don’t think anything ever happened to her that amused her so much. And now, you know, she’s quite sentimental about their being here. It’s about Augusta that I came, Papa. Did you know that she had lost some of her savings in the Kinkoo Copper Company?”
“Augusta? Are you sure? What a shame!”
“Yes. She was sewing for me last
