"I don't know, but I'll ask him." She repeated the words with a strained look on her thin little face, because they were hard words to remember. "Did she give you a peach? Mamma thinks a brandied peach is good for a pain."
"No, she wasn't sure I needed one. They are good, aren't they?"
"I think," Jenny Blair replied for Memoria's benefit, as she returned the pink saucer, "that, if anything, they are better than Mamma's." Cautiously slipping off the sofa, she steadied herself before she took an experimental step into the room. "I'm much obliged to you, Memoria," she said, for she lacked politeness only to her superiors, "but I'd better be going home, or Mamma will send out to look for me." Removing the bandage from her forehead, she laid it aside on the table. "I'm not bleeding now, am I?"
"No, you're not bleeding," Mr. Birdsong replied, glancing in the most careless way at Memoria, who stood in silent dignity at the foot of the sofa, "but are you sure you're all right? If you are all right, we might help each other along. You won't mind my leaning on you now and then, will you?"
"I don't mind, but I'm afraid I'm not big enough. P'raps"--there were some words she could never pronounce, no matter how hard she tried--"Memoria might lend you a stick."
"She hasn't one. I've already asked her. But I think I'll be able to manage. Anyhow, there won't be any difficulty about your leaning on me. I'm big enough. How about taking my arm?"
It seemed a strange way of leaning on a person to offer her your arm; but Jenny Blair knew that the intentions and the behaviour of grown-up people seldom accorded completely, and that asking questions when you are in doubt is one of the very worst ways of finding out the truth about things. Though she had never heard of watchful waiting, she was as familiar as other children with the process involved.
"Good-bye, Memoria. Thank you very much," she said slowly and distinctly as they left the room; for she hoped this would be a tactful reminder to Mr. Birdsong that, after all Memoria's kindness, he was leaving without a word of acknowledgment. As he appeared still forgetful, she whispered while they descended the steps, "You've forgotten to tell Memoria goodbye."
"Is that so? Well, good-bye, Memoria, we're both much obliged to you," he called back so indifferently that Jenny Blair wondered if improving the manners of men was always as hopeless as she had found it to be. Then, glancing up at the look of tender protection in his face, she yielded completely to the charm of the moment. Even if nothing really exciting ever happened to her in the future, this one day would be always brimming over with thrills. To have an accident more interesting than painful in front of Memoria's house; to discover that Mr. Birdsong, for all his strength and bigness, had had the same, or almost the same, mishap a few minutes before; to be carried into Memoria's room, which her mother would never have allowed her to enter; to eat a delicious brandied peach in tiny tastes from a pink saucer while she was recovering on Memoria's horsehair sofa; and having come safely through all these adventures, to be walking away from Canal Street at sunset, with Mr. Birdsong's gay voice in her ear and Mr. Birdsong's arm encircling her shoulders,--surely life could never be the same again when she had such recollections stored up for rainy afternoons, or for the middle of the night when she awoke and began to tremble with fear.
Suddenly, in the midst of her pleasant agitation, her companion stopped beside a pile of lumber in a place where a house was torn down, and waved with his free hand to a comfortable seat on one end of a plank. They had reached the top of a gradual ascent, and from where they sat, hand-in-hand, she could look over Penitentiary Bottom and see the dark wings of pigeons in the burnished glow of the sunset.
CHAPTER 6
"Let me see, how old are you, Jenny Blair?" Mr. Birdsong asked, with flattering interest, while he settled himself beside her on the pile of lumber.
"Going on ten. I'll be ten years old the twenty-first of September."
"You're old for your age, and you get better looking, too, every day. It won't surprise me if you grow up to be one of the prettiest girls in Queenborough. You have the eyes and hair of a wood-nymph, and when you have eyes and hair, it doesn't matter a bit if God has forgotten your nose and chin. You may take my word for it, I've seen many a beauty who had worse points than yours."
A beauty! She drew in her breath sharply, as if all her thoughts were whistling a tune. Never before had any one held out the faintest hope that she might grow up to be pretty. "Handsome is as handsome does," her mother had replied only yesterday to a charitable visitor, who had remarked in the child's presence that she was becoming more attractive in feature as she grew older. And now Mr. Birdsong (who was one of the most adorable persons she had ever seen) really and truly thought that she might be a beauty. With her enraptured gaze on his face, she nodded as vacantly as a doll, because she felt her heart would burst if she spoke a single word of the torrent of gratitude raging within her.
"So you're nine years old," he said very slowly, as if he were counting.
"Going on ten. I'm nine years and seven months and three weeks." She corrected him as patly as if she were reciting a lesson.
"Well, that's getting on. That's getting on in life."
"Yes, that's getting on," she assented switching one of her plaits over her shoulder and tying the bow of plaid ribbon. Down in Penitentiary Bottom the shadows were thickening. From beneath the fire-coloured sunset, rays of light were spreading like an open fan above a drift of violet-blue smoke.
"I should think," he continued gravely, "that nine years and seven months and three weeks would be old enough to keep a secret."
She looked round quickly, her pride touched. "Oh, I can keep secrets. I've always had to keep secrets of my own. You can't get far in this world," she added, repeating a phrase of Aunt Etta's, "if you tell everything that you know."
With a gay and tender laugh, he leaned over and patted her hand. "If you've found out that, you may go as far as you please. But how about this idea? Don't you think it would be more fun if we kept all this—I mean everything we've done this afternoon—a secret between us?"
What a surprise! What an adventure to fall back upon! "Do you mean everything?" she asked in a whisper of ecstasy. Never had she dreamed of having a secret that belonged to her and Mr. Birdsong and nobody else.
"Everything." His accent was so firm and grave that for an instant she wondered if she could have mistaken his meaning.
"The whole afternoon?" she inquired eagerly.
"The whole afternoon," he repeated even more firmly. "Everything that has happened from the minute you left Washington Street. It has just occurred to me," he explained, "that it would be great fun for us to have a secret between us."
"Oh, great fun!" she echoed.
"Of course," he said, looking more closely at the cut on her forehead, "you will have to tell your mother you had a fall. I suppose you could have a fall anywhere."
"Oh, anywhere." Then she glanced down uneasily. "But I've left my skates at Memoria's."
"You did, eh? Well; I'll bring them up to my yard. I'm going to drive down this way to-morrow, and I'll get your skates and leave them—Where shall I leave them?"
She thought a moment. "You might put them down by Old Mortality's pool. Are you sure," she asked abruptly, "that you aren't doing it all just to shield me? Mamma says Grandfather shields me too much."
"You needn't bother about that. But it's better not to tell your mother that you had a fall in Canal Street. It might make her feel worse, you know, and I've never found it did any good to make people feel worse. They usually feel bad enough as it is."