"Perhaps she feels that it would be better for David to be-in
different surroundings."
"But Willy! Wednesday night she told me that I must be sure and bring
him back to her on Saturday. What has happened between Wednesday and
Saturday?"
"Very likely nothing has happened between Wednesday and Saturday. But
perhaps she has just made up her mind."
"Ho!" said Dr. Lavendar; and after a while he added, "'Um."
Monday morning he went up to the Stuffed Animal House. But Mrs. Richie
sent word down-stairs that she wasn't well; would he be so kind as to
excuse her and to keep David a little longer. Sarah, when she gave the
message, looked as mystified as Dr. Lavendar felt. "I always thought
she was just wrapped up in that there boy," she told Maggie; "and yet
she lets him stay away two days after he gets home!" Dr. Lavendar,
poking on with Goliath up the hill to Benjamin Wright's, had very much
the same feeling: "Queer! I wish Willy wasn't bottled up; of course he
knows what it means. Well; if I wait, she'll explain it herself."
But many days were to pass before Helena made any effort to explain.
And meantime Dr. Lavendar's mind was full of something else: old
Benjamin Wright was running down-hill very rapidly.
In certain ways he seemed better; he could talk--and swear--quite
fluently. "He sayed to me, this mawnin'," Simmons told Dr. Lavendar,
"'Simmons, you freckled nigger,' he sayed, 'in the name of Lot's wife,
who salted my porridge?' He spoke out just as plain!" Simmons detailed
this achievement of the poor dulled tongue, with the pride of a mother
repeating her baby's first word. Then he simpered with a little vanity
of his own: "He was always one to notice my freckles," he said.
Benjamin Wright, lying in his bed with his hat on noticed other things
than Simmons's freckles, and spoke of them, too, quite distinctly. "My
boy, S-Sam, is a good boy. He comes up every day. Well, Lav-Lavendar,
sometimes I think I was--at fault?"
"I know you were, Benjamin. Have you told him so?"
"Gad-a-mercy! N-no!" snarled the other. "He would be too puffed up.
Won't do to make young people v-vain."
He "took notice," too, Simmons said, of the canaries; and he even
rolled out, stammeringly, some of his favorite verses. But, in spite
of all this, he was running down-hill; he knew it himself, and once he
told Dr. Lavendar that this business of dying made a man narrow. "I
th-think about it all the time," he complained. "Can't put my mind on
anything else. It's damned narrowing."