Aladdin OBrien | Page 2

all angel now, for he was being
visited for wrong.
The little girl's lips trembled and got white.
"I'm awful sorry, Margaret."
"What'll we do, 'Laddin?"
"Just sit still, 'n' whatever happens I'll take care of you, Margaret."
They were passing the shipyards with a steady sweep, but the offices
were closed, the men at home, and no one saw the distressed expedition.
The last yard of all was conspicuous by a three-master, finished,
painted, sparred, ready for the fragrant bottle to be cracked on her nose,
and the long shivering slide into the river. Then came a fine square,
chimneyed house with sherry-glass-shaped elm-trees about it. The boy
shouted to a man contorted under a load of wood. The man looked up
and grinned vacantly, for he was not even half-witted. And they were
swept on. Presently woods drew between them and the last traces of
habitation,--gorgeous woods with intense splashes of color, standing
upon clean rocks that emphatically divided the water from the
land,--and they scurried into a region as untroubled by man as was
Eden on the first morning. The little boy was not afraid, but so sorry
and ashamed that he could have cried. The little girl, however, was
even deeper down the throat of remorse, for she had sinned three times
on Sunday,--first, she had spoken to the "inventor's boy"; second, she

had not "come straight home"; third, she had been seduced into a
forbidden boat,--and there was no balm in Gilead; nor any forgiveness
forever. She pictured her grand, dark father standing like a biblical
allegory of "Hell and Damnation" within the somber leathern cube of
his books, the fiercely white, whalebone cane upon which he and old
brother gout leaned, and the vast gloomy centers at the bases of which
glowed his savage eyes. She thought of the rolling bitter voice with
which she had once heard him stiffen the backs of his constituents, and
she was sore afraid. She did not remember how much he loved her, or
the impotence of his principles where she was concerned. And she did
not recollect, for she had not been old enough to know, that the great
bitter voice, with its heavy, telling sarcasm, had been lifted for
humanity--for more humanity upon earth.
"Oh, 'Laddin," she said suddenly, "I daren't go home now."
"Maybe we can get her in farther up," said Aladdin, "and go home
through the woods. That'll be something, anyhow."
Margaret shuddered. She thought of the thin aunt who gave her lessons
upon the pianoforte--one of the elect, that aunt, who had never done
wrong, and whom any halo would fit; who gave her to understand that
the Almighty would raise Cain with any little girl who did not practise
an hour every day, and pray Him, night and morning, to help her keep
off the black notes when the white notes were intended. First there
would be a reckoning with papa, then one with Aunt Marion, last with
Almighty God, and afterward, horribile dictu, pitchforks for little
Margaret, and a vivid incandescent state to be maintained through
eternity at vast cost of pit-coal to a gentleman who carried over his arm,
so as not to step on it, a long snaky tail with a point like a harpoon's.
Meanwhile, Aladdin made sundry attempts to get the boat ashore, and
failed signally. The current was as saucy as strong. Now it swept them
into the very shade of the trees, and as hope rose hot in the boy's heart
and he began to stab the water with the oars, sent them skipping for the
midriver. Occasionally a fish jumped to show how easy it was, and
high overhead an eagle passed statelily in the wake of a cloud. After the
eagle came a V of geese flying south, moving through the treacherous

currents and whirlpools of the upper air as steadily and directly as a
train upon its track. It seemed as if nature had conspired with her
children to demonstrate to Margaret and Aladdin the facility of precise
locomotion. The narrow deeps of the river ended where the shore rolled
into a high knob of trees; above this it spread over the lower land into a
great, shallow, swiftly currented lake, having in its midst a long
turtlebacked island of dense woods and abrupt shores. Two currents
met off the knob and formed in the direction of the island a long curve
of spitting white. Aladdin rowed with great fervor.
"Do it if you can, 'Laddin," said the little girl.
It seemed for one moment as if success were about to crown the boy's
effort, for he brought the boat to an exciting nearness to the shore; but
that was all. The current said: "No, Aladdin, that is not just the place to