A Brace of Boys | Page 7

ready to see him plunge headlong the moment that he read the signboard at the head of the stairs. When he paused and hesitated there, not seeming at all anxious to go down till he saw the pretty girl and the child following after--a sudden intuition flashed across me. Could it be possible that Billy was caught in that vortex which whirled me down at ten years--a little boy's first love?
We were lingering about the elliptical basin, and catching occasional glimpses between bubbles of a vivified hair trunk of monstrous compass, whose knobby lid opened at one end and showed a red morocco lining, when the pretty girl, in leaning over to point out the rising monster, dropped into the water one of her little gloves, and the swash made by the hippopotamus drifted it close under Billy's hand. Either in play, or as a mere coincidence, the animal followed it. The other children about the tank screamed and started back as he bumped his nose against the side; but Billy manfully bent down and grabbed the glove, not an inch from one of his big tusks, then marched around the tank and presented it to the lady with a chivalry of manner in one of his years quite surprising.
"That's a real nice boy--you said so, didn't you, Lottie? And I wish he'd come and play with me," said the little fellow by the young lady's side, as Billy turned away, gracefully thanked, to come back to me with his cheeks roseate with blushes.
As he heard this, Billy sidled along the edge of the tank for a moment, then faced about and said:
"P'rhaps I will some day--where do you live?"
"I live on East Seventeenth Street with papa--and Lottie stays there too now--she's my cousin: where d'you live?"
"Oh, I live close by--right on that big green square where I guess the nurse takes you once in a while," said Billy patronizingly. Then, looking up pluckily at the young lady, he added, "I never saw you out there."
"No, Jimmy's papa has only been in his new house a little while, and I've just come to visit him."
"Say, will you come and play with me some time?" chimed in the inextinguishable Jimmy. "I've got a cooking stove--for real fire--and blocks and a ball with a string."
Billy, who belonged to a club for the practice of the great American game, and was what A. Ward would call the most superior battest among the I. G. B. B. C, or "Infant Giants," smiled from that altitude upon Jimmy, but promised to go and play with him the next Saturday afternoon.
Late that evening, after we had got home and dined, as I sat in my room over Pickwick, with a sedative cigar, a gentle knock at the door told of Daniel. I called "Come in!" and, entering with a slow dejected air, he sat down by my fire. For ten minutes he remained silent, though occasionally looking up as if about to speak, then dropping his head again to ponder on the coals. Finally I laid down Dickens, and spoke myself.
"You don't seem well to-night, Daniel?"
"I don't feel very well, uncle."
"What's the matter, my boy?"
"Oh--ah--I don't know. That is, I wish I knew how to tell you."
I studied him for a few moments with kindly curiosity, then answered: "Perhaps I can save you the trouble by cross-examining it out of you. Let's try the method of elimination. I know that you are not harassed by any economical considerations, for you've all the money you want; and I know that ambition doesn't trouble you, for your tastes are scholarly. This narrows down the investigation of your symptoms--listlessness, general dejection, and all--to three causes: Dyspepsia, religious conflicts, love. Now is your digestion awry?"
"No, sir, good as usual. I'm not melancholy on religion and--"
"You don't tell me you're in love?"
"Well--yes--I suppose that's about it, Uncle Teddy."
I took a long breath to recover from my astonishment at this unimaginable revelation, then said:
"Is your feeling returned?"
"I really don't know, uncle. I don't believe it is. I don't see how it can be. I never did anything to make her love me. What is there in me to love! I've borne enough for her--that is, nothing that could do her any good--though I've endured on her account, I may say, anguish. So, look at it any way you please, I neither am, do, nor suffer anything that can get a woman's love."
"Oh, you man of learning! Even in love you tote your grammar along with you, and arrange a divine passion under the active, passive, and neuter!"
Daniel smiled faintly.
"You've no idea, Uncle Teddy, that you are twitting on facts; but you hit the truth there; indeed you do. If she were a Greek or Latin woman I could talk Anacreon or Horace