Paradise Garden | Page 6

he was making the best of a bad job. After the preliminaries of introduction, amid which Mr. Radford, the steward of the estate, appeared, I managed to get the boy aside.
"I feel a good deal like the Minotaur, Jerry. Did you ever hear of the Minotaur?"
He hadn't, and so I told him the story. "But I'm not going to eat you," I laughed.
I had broken the ice, for a smile, a genuine joyous smile, broke slowly and then flowed in generous ripples across his face.
"You're different, aren't you?" he said presently, his brown eyes now gravely appraising me.
"How different, Jerry?" I asked.
He hesitated a moment and then:
"I--I thought you'd come all in black with a lot of grammar books under your arms."
"I don't use 'em," I said. "I'm a boy, just like you, only I've got long trousers on. We're not going to bother about books for awhile."
He still inspected me as though he wasn't quite sure it wasn't all a mistake. And then again:
"Can you talk Latin?"
"Bless you, I'm afraid not."
"Oh!" he sighed, though whether in relief or disappointment I couldn't say.
"But you can do sums in your head and spell hippopotamus?"
"I might," I laughed. "But I wouldn't if I didn't have to."
"But I'll have to, won't I?"
"Oh, some day."
"I'm afraid I never can," he sighed again.
I began to understand now. His mind was feminine and at least three years backward. There wasn't a mark of the boy of ten about him. But I liked his eyes. They were wide and inquiring. It wouldn't be difficult to gain his confidence.
"Are you sorry Miss Redwood is going?" I asked him.
"Yes. She plays games."
"I know some games, too--good ones."
He brightened, but said nothing for a moment, though I saw him stealing a glance at me. Whatever the object of his inspection, I seemed to have passed it creditably, for he said rather timidly:
"Would you like to see my bull pup?"
It was the first remark that sounded as though it came from the heart of a real boy. I had won the first line of entrenchments around Jerry's reserve. When a boy asks you to see his bull pup he confers upon you at once the highest mark of his approval.
I only repeat this ingenuous and unimportant conversation to show my first impression of what seemed to me then to be a rather commonplace and colorless boy. I did not realize then how strong could be the effect of such an environment. Miss Redwood, as I soon discovered, was a timid, wilting individual, who had brought him successfully through the baby diseases and had taught him the elementary things, because that was what she was paid for, corrected his table manners and tried to make him the kind of boy that she would have preferred to be herself had nature fortunately not decided the matter otherwise, and chameleon-like, Jerry reflected her tepor, her supineness and femininity. She recounted his virtues with pride, while I questioned her, hoping against hope to hear of some prank, the breaking of window-panes, the burning of a haystack or the explosion of a giant cracker under the cook. But all to no purpose.
So far as I could discover, he had never so much as pulled the tail of a cat. As old John Benham had said, of original sin he had none.
But my conviction that the boy had good stuff in him was deepened on the morrow, when, banishing books, I took him for a breather over hill and dale, through wood and underbrush, three miles out and three miles in. I told him stories as we walked and showed him how the Indians trailed their game among the very hills over which we plodded. I told him that a fine strong body was the greatest thing in the world, a possession to work for and be proud of. His muscles were flabby, I knew, but I put him a brisk pace and brought him in just before lunch, red of cheek, bright of eye, and splashed with mud from head to foot. I had learned one of the things I had set out to discover. He would do his best at whatever task I set him.
I have not said that he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early photographs may show, at least they gave no sign of the remarkable beauty of feature and lineament which developed in his adolescence. Perhaps it was that I was more interested in his mind and body and what I could make them than in his face, which, after all, was none of my concern.
That