第18章 CHAPTER VI(1)

Bonaparte Blenkins Makes His Nest

"Ah, what is the matter?" asked Waldo, stopping at the foot of the ladder with a load of skins on his back that he was carrying up to the loft.

Through the open door in the gable little Em was visible, her feet dangling from the high bench on which she sat. The room, once a storeroom, had been divided by a row of mealie bags into two parts--the back being Bonaparte's bedroom, the front his schoolroom.

"Lyndall made him angry," said the girl tearfully; "and he has given me the fourteenth of John to learn. He says he will teach me to behave myself when Lyndall troubles him."

"What did she do?" asked the boy.

"You see," said Em, hopelessly turning the leaves, "whenever he talks she looks out at the door, as though she did not hear him. Today she asked him what the signs of the Zodiac were, and he said he was surprised that she should ask him; it was not a fit and proper thing for little girls to talk about. Then she asked him who Copernicus was; and he said he was one of the Emperors of Rome, who burned the Christians in a golden pig, and the worms ate him up while he was still alive. I don't know why," said Em plaintively, "but she just put her books under her arm and walked out; and she will never come to his school again, she says, and she always does what she says. And now I must sit here every day alone," said Em, the great tears dropping softly.

"Perhaps Tant Sannie will send him away," said the boy, in his mumbling way, trying to comfort her.

"No," said Em, shaking her head; "no. Last night when the little Hottentot maid was washing her feet, he told her he liked such feet, and that fat women were so nice to him; and she said I must always put pure cream in his coffee now. No; he'll never go away," said Em dolorously.

The boy put down his skins and fumbled in his pocket, and produced a small piece of paper containing something. He stuck it out toward her.

"There, take it for you," he said. This was by way of comfort.

Em opened it and found a small bit of gum, a commodity prized by the children; but the great tears dropped down slowly on to it.

Waldo was distressed. He had cried so much in his morsel of life that tears in another seemed to burn him.

"If," he said, stepping in awkwardly and standing by the table, "if you will not cry I will tell you something--a secret."

"What is that?" asked Em, instantly becoming decidedly better.

"You will tell it to no human being?"

"No."

He bent nearer to her, and with deep solemnity said:

"I have made a machine!"

Em opened her eyes.

"Yes; a machine for shearing sheep. It is almost done," said the boy.

"There is only one thing that is not right yet; but it will be soon. When you think, and think, and think, all night and all day, it comes at last," he added mysteriously.

"Where is it?"

"Here! I always carry it here," said the boy, putting his hand to his breast, where a bulging-out was visible. "This is a model. When it is done they will have to make a large one."

"Show it me."

The boy shook his head.

"No, not till it is done. I cannot let any human being see it till then."

"It is a beautiful secret," said Em; and the boy shuffled out to pick up his skins.

That evening father and son sat in the cabin eating their supper. The father sighed deeply sometimes. Perhaps he thought how long a time it was since Bonaparte had visited the cabin; but his son was in that land in which sighs have no part. It is a question whether it were not better to be the shabbiest of fools, and know the way up the little stair of imagination to the land of dreams, than the wisest of men, who see nothing that the eyes do not show, and feel nothing that the hands do not touch.

The boy chewed his brown bread and drank his coffee; but in truth he saw only his machine finished--that last something found out and added. He saw it as it worked with beautiful smoothness; and over and above, as he chewed his bread and drank his coffee, there was that delightful consciousness of something bending over him and loving him. It would not have been better in one of the courts of heaven, where the walls are set with rows of the King of Glory's amethysts and milk-white pearls, than there, eating his supper in that little room.

As they sat in silence there was a knock at the door. When it was opened the small woolly head of a little nigger showed itself. She was a messenger from Tant Sannie: the German was wanted at once at the homestead. Putting on his hat with both hands, he hurried off. The kitchen was in darkness, but in the pantry beyond Tant Sannie and her maids were assembled.

A Kaffer girl, who had been grinding pepper between two stones, knelt on the floor, the lean Hottentot stood with a brass candlestick in her hand, and Tant Sannie, near the shelf, with a hand on each hip, was evidently listening intently, as were her companions.

"What may be it?" cried the old German in astonishment. The room beyond the pantry was the storeroom. Through the thin wooden partition there arose at that instant, evidently from some creature ensconced there, a prolonged and prodigious howl, followed by a succession of violent blows against the partition wall.