But, as the children dispersed, he cut off one small straggler—a brown-faced boy with flaxen hair—and said to him:
“Come here, little one. Tell me, whose house is that?”
The child, with one swarthy arm held up across his eyes, half in shyness, and half ready for defence, said from behind the inside of his elbow:
“Phoebe’s.”
“And who,” said Barbox Brothers, quite as much embarrassed by his part in the dialogue as the child could possibly be by his, “is Phoebe?”
To which the child made answer: “Why, Phoebe, of course.”
The small but sharp observer had eyed his questioner closely, and had taken his moral measure. He lowered his guard, and rather assumed a tone with him: as having discovered him to be an unaccustomed person in the art of polite conversation.
“Phoebe,” said the child, “can’t be anybobby else but Phoebe. Can she?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Well,” returned the child, “then why did you ask me?”
Deeming it prudent to shift his ground, Barbox Brothers took up a new position.
“What do you do there? Up there in that room where the open window is. What do you do there?”
“Cool,” said the child.
“Eh?”
“Co-o-ol,” the child repeated in a louder voice, lengthening out the word with a fixed look and great emphasis, as much as to say: “What’s the use of your having grown up, if you’re such a donkey as not to understand me?”
“Ah! School, school,” said Barbox Brothers. “Yes, yes, yes. And Phoebe teaches you?”
The child nodded.
“Good boy.”
“Tound it out, have you?” said the child.
“Yes, I have found it out. What would you do with twopence, if I gave it you?”
“Pend it.”
The knock-down promptitude of this reply leaving him not a leg to stand upon, Barbox Brothers produced the twopence with great lameness, and withdrew in a state of humiliation.
But, seeing the face on the window-sill as he passed the cottage, he acknowledged its presence there with a gesture, which was not a nod, not a bow, not a removal of his hat from his head, but was a diffident compromise between or struggle with all three. The eyes in the face seemed amused, or cheered, or both, and the lips modestly said: “Good-day to you, sir.”
“I find I must stick for a time to Mugby Junction,” said Barbox Brothers with much gravity, after once more stopping on his return road to look at the Lines where they went their several ways so quietly. “I can’t make up my mind yet which iron road to take. In fact, I must get a little accustomed to the Junction before I can decide.”
So, he announced at the Inn that he was “going to stay on for the present,” and improved his acquaintance with the Junction that night, and again next morning, and again next night and morning: going down to the station, mingling with the people there, looking about him down all the avenues of railway, and beginning to take an interest in the incomings and outgoings of the trains. At first, he often put his head into Lamps’s little room, but he never found Lamps there. A pair or two of velveteen shoulders he usually found there, stooping over the fire, sometimes in connection with a clasped knife and a piece of bread and meat; but the answer to his inquiry, “Where’s Lamps?” was, either that he was “t’other side the line,” or, that it was his off-time, or (in the latter case) his own personal introduction to another Lamps who was not his Lamps. However, he was not so desperately set upon seeing Lamps now, but he bore the disappointment. Nor did he so wholly devote himself to his severe application to the study of Mugby Junction as to neglect exercise. On the contrary, he took a walk every day, and always the same walk. But the weather turned cold and wet again, and the window was never open.
III
At length, after a lapse of some days, there came another streak of fine bright hardy autumn weather. It was a Saturday. The window was open, and the children were gone. Not surprising, this, for he had patiently watched and waited at the corner until they WERE gone.
“Good-day,” he said to the face; absolutely getting his hat clear off his head this time.
“Good-day to you, sir.”
“I am glad you have a fine sky again to look at.”
“Thank you, sir. It is kind if you.”
“You are an invalid, I fear?”
“No, sir. I have very good health.”
“But are you not always lying down?”
“Oh yes, I am always lying down, because I cannot sit up! But I am not an invalid.”
The laughing eyes seemed highly to enjoy his great mistake.
“Would you mind taking the trouble to come in, sir? There is a beautiful view from this window. And you would see that I am not at all ill—being so good as to care.”
It was said to help him, as he stood irresolute, but evidently desiring to enter, with his diffident hand on the latch of the garden-gate. It did help him, and he went in.
The room upstairs was a very clean white room with a low roof. Its only inmate lay on a couch that brought her face to a level with the window. The couch was white too; and her simple dress or wrapper being light blue, like the band around her hair, she had an ethereal look, and a fanciful appearance of lying among clouds. He felt that she instinctively perceived him to be by habit a downcast taciturn man; it was another help to him to have established that understanding so easily, and got it over.
There was an awkward constraint upon him, nevertheless, as he touched her hand, and took a chair at the side of her couch.
“I see now,” he began, not at all fluently, “how you occupy your hand. Only seeing you from the path outside, I thought you were playing upon something.”
She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it, as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted.
“That is curious,” she answered with a bright smile. “For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work.”
“Have you any musical knowledge?”
She shook her head.
“I think I could pick out tunes, if I had any instrument, which could be made as handy to me as my lace-pillow. But I dare say I deceive myself. At all events, I shall never know.”
“You have a musical voice. Excuse me; I have heard you sing.”
“With the children?” she answered, slightly colouring. “Oh yes. I sing with the dear children, if it can be called singing.”
Barbox Brothers glanced at the two small forms in the room, and hazarded the speculation that she was fond of children, and that she was learned in new systems of teaching them?
“Very fond of them,” she said, shaking her head again; “but I know nothing of teaching, beyond the interest I have in it, and the pleasure it gives me when they learn. Perhaps your overhearing my little scholars sing some of their lessons has led you so far astray as to think me a grand teacher? Ah! I thought so! No, I have only read and been told about that system. It seemed so pretty and pleasant, and to treat them so like the merry Robins they are, that I took up with it in my little way. You don’t need to be told what a very little way mine is, sir,” she added with a glance at the small forms and round the room.
All this time her hands were busy at her lace-pillow. As they still continued so, and as there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs, Barbox Brothers took the opportunity of observing her. He guessed her to be thirty. The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence.