The Turn of the Tide. Eleanor H. Porter
there were the children—they, too, were disconcerting. They came, sometimes alone, and sometimes with their parents, but always they stared and seemed afraid of her. There were others, to be sure, who were not afraid of her. But they never “called.” They “slipped in” through the back gate at the foot of the garden, and they were really very nice. They were Nat and Tom and Roxy Trotter, and they lived in a little house down by the river. They never wore shoes nor stockings, and their clothes were not at all like those of the other children. Margaret suspected that the Trotters were poor, and she took pains that her mother should see Nat and Tom and Roxy. Her mother, however, did not appear to know them, which did not seem so very strange to Margaret, after all; for of course her mother had not known there were any poor people so near, otherwise she would have shared her home with them long ago. At first, it was Margaret’s plan to rectify this little mistake immediately; but the more she thought of it, the more thoroughly was she convinced that the first chance belonged by right to Patty’s family and the Whalens in New York, inasmuch as they had been so good to her. She determined, therefore, to wait awhile before suggesting the removal of the Trotter family from their tiny, inconvenient house to the more spacious and desirable Five Oaks.
Delightful as were the Trotters, however, even they did not quite come up to Bobby McGinnis for real comradeship. Bobby lived with his mother and grandmother in the little red farmhouse farther up the hill. It was he who had found Margaret crying in the streets on that first dreadful day long ago when she was lost in New York. For a week she had lived in his attic home, then she had become frightened at his father’s drunken rage, one day, and had fled to the streets, never to return. All this Margaret knew, though she had but a faint recollection of it. It made a bond of sympathy between them, nevertheless, and caused them to become fast friends at once.
It was to Bobby that she went for advice when the standards of Houghtonsville and the Alley clashed; and it was to Bobby that she went for sympathy when grievous mismanagement of the knives and forks or of the folded square of cloth brought disaster to herself and tears to her mother’s eyes. She earnestly desired to—as she expressed it to Bobby—“come up to the scratch and walk straight”; and it was to Bobby that she looked for aid and counsel.
“You see, you can tell just what ’tis ails me,” she argued earnestly, as the two sat in their favorite perch in the apple tree. “You don’t know Patty and the Whalens, ‘course, but you do know folks just like ’em; and mother—don’t you see?—she knows only the kind that lives here, and she—she don’t understand. But you know both kinds, and you can tell where ’tis that I ain’t like ’em here. And I want to be like ’em, Bobby, I do, truly. They’re just bang-up—I mean, beautiful folks,” she corrected hastily. “And mother’s so good to me! She’s just——”
Margaret stopped suddenly. A new thought seemed to have come to her.
“Bobby,” she cried with sharp abruptness, “did you ever know any husbands that was—good?”
“‘Husbands’? ‘Good’? What do ye mean?”
“Did you ever know any that was good, I mean that didn’t beat their wives and bang ’em ‘round? Did you, Bobby?”
Bobby laughed. He lifted his chin quizzically, and gazed down from the lofty superiority of his fourteen years.
“Sure, an’ ain’t ye beginnin’ sort o’ early ter worry about husbands?” he teased. “But, mebbe you’ve already—er—picked him out! eh?”
Margaret did not seem to hear. She was looking straight through a little open space in the boughs of the apple tree to the blue sky far beyond.
“Bobby,” she began in a voice scarcely above a whisper, “if that man should be bad to my mother I think I’d—kill him.”
Bobby roused himself. He suddenly remembered Joe Bagley and the kitten.
“What man?” he asked.
“Dr. Spencer.”
“Dr. Spencer!” gasped Bobby. “Why, Dr. Spencer wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s just bully!”
Margaret stirred restlessly. She turned a grave face on her companion.
“Bobby,” she reproved gently, “I don’t think I’d oughter hear them words if I ain’t ‘lowed to use ’em myself.”
Bobby uptilted his chin.
“I’ve heard your ma say ‘ain’t’ wa’n’t proper,” he observed virtuously. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it, only—well, seein’ as how you’re gettin’ so awful particular——!” For the more telling effect he left the sentence unfinished.
Again Margaret did not seem to hear. Again her eyes had sought the patch of blue showing through the green leaves.
“Dr. Spencer may be nice now, but he ain’t a husband yet,” she said, thoughtfully. “There was Tim Sullivan and Patty’s father and Mike Whalen,” she enumerated aloud. “And they was all—— Bobby, was your father a good husband?” she demanded with a sudden turn that brought her eyes squarely round to his.
The boy was silent.
“Bobby, was he?”
Slowly the boy’s eyes fell.
“Well, of course, sometimes dad would”—he began; but Margaret interrupted him.
“I knew it—I just knew it—I just knew there wasn’t any,” she moaned; “but I can’t make mother see it—I just can’t!”
This was but the first of many talks between Margaret and Bobby upon the same subject, and always Margaret was seeking for a possible averting of the catastrophe. To convince her mother of the awfulness of the fate awaiting her, and so to persuade her to abandon the idea of marriage, was out of the question, Margaret soon found. It was then, perhaps, that the idea of speaking to the doctor himself first came to her.
“If I could only get him to promise things!” she said to Bobby. “If I could only get him to promise!”
“Promise?”
“Yes; to be good and kind, you know,” nodded Margaret, “and not like a husband.”
Bobby laughed; then he frowned and was silent. Suddenly his face changed.
“I say, you might make him sign a contract,” he hazarded.
“Contract?”
“Sure! One of them things that makes folks toe the mark whether they wants to or not. I’ll draw it up for you—that’s what they call it,” he explained airily; and as Margaret bubbled over with delight and thanks he added: “Not at all. ’Tain’t nothin’. Glad ter do it, I’m sure!”
For a month now Bobby had swept the floor and dusted the books in the law office of Burt & Burt, to say nothing of running errands and tending door. In days gone by, the law, as represented by the policeman on the corner, was something to be avoided; but to-day, as represented by a frock coat, a tall hat, and a vocabulary bristling with big words, it was something that was most alluring—so alluring, in fact, that Bobby had determined to adopt it as his own. He himself would be a lawyer—tall hat, frock coat, big words and all. Hence his readiness to undertake this little matter of drawing up a contract for Margaret, his first client.
It was some days, nevertheless, before the work was ready for the doctor’s signature. The young lawyer, unfortunately, could not give all of his time to his own affairs; there were still the trivial duties of his office to perform. He found, too, that the big words which fell so glibly from the lips of the great Burt & Burt were anything but easily managed when he tried to put them upon paper himself. Bobby was ambitious and persistent, however, and where knowledge failed, imagination stepped boldly to the front. In the end it was with no little pride that he displayed the result of his labor to his client, then, with her gleeful words of approval still ringing in his ears, he slipped it into its envelope, sealed, stamped, and posted