Page:The little blue devil (IA littlebluedevil00mackiala).pdf/26

concluding ceremony that clinched a bargain. They shook solemnly and walked towards Smyrna. The long rays of the setting sun made the native town on the hill dazzlingly white, but the European quarter along the shore was already blue and violet in the shadow. Agatha tried hard to make the odd little boy talk, he interested her; she had never seen anything quite like him in all her twenty-three years. But Tony was very silent. He had plenty to think about as they walked along, and Agatha was only an incident in his thoughts—a pleasant, brown-haired incident that was to help him on in the world. For nothing had gone so deeply into his mind as the conviction that his father wanted him to sink; being past shame himself, Ste. Croix had wished to shame his wife’s family, who could still feel. “He wants me to be a beggar,” thought Tony. “I won’t beg. I’ll be as different from him as ever I can. And he doesn’t care if I starve, so I won’t starve. . . . I hope the patron will let me go . . . this woman could teach me things . . . it’s not like lessons really, not like being a schoolchild—it’s learning how to work. He wouldn’t care if I knew nothing—I’ll know as much as he does by the time I’m grown up. . . . Mother taught me some, but I was little then. . . . If he had been good she wouldn’t have died—I heard the porter of the Imperial saying so to the head-waiter . . . but I knew before. . . . She—she . . . I wonder what these people are like—I never knew any missionaries, except some we saw on boats, and they always kept away from us. . . . They pray a lot, I suppose, and go to church lots of times besides Sunday. I haven’t been to church for more than three years, and then it was the English Church in Yokohama, the Sunday before mother died . . . the kneeling made her faint. . . . Oh! . . . I—I hope the patron will be on board, and I won’t have to wait to tell him. I feel shaky inside when I think about it, and I want to do it quickly. . . .”