The Little Blue Devil/The Capitulation of Tony

Alison, very much ashamed of herself, went downstairs to lunch. The Professor was there, and marked the drooping corners of her mouth.

"What’s the matter, Kitten?"

"Oh, Winthrop, I’ve been so tactless—such an idiot. I really don’t think I can tell you about it. You see, I was so sorry for him."

"Yes, my dear. I seem to have heard that beginning before."

"Don’t be horrid, dear! And this time it really was my fault, for he’s only a baby, and so helpless, but I’m afraid I’ll have ever so much more difficult a time now, and I’ve only myself to blame, which makes things so much harder."

"Hadn’t you better explain things a little?" said the Professor, who, knowing his wife, understood matters pretty well as it was.

"Yes, I will, of course. . . . You see, Winthrop, he was well enough to talk a little to-day, so we talked for a bit; and oh, by the way, dear, he’s still harping about owing us so much—it’s no use arguing with him, so I told him you would think of some way of his earning a little money—you’ll have to, Winthrop, he’s so worried about it. And he’s had a dreadful life, poor darling; he didn’t tell me much, but he’s always had to look after himself, and he has no relations, and hasn’t been long here, and altogether I was so sorry for him that I—well, I kissed him and petted him for a moment, as I’ve been longing to all the time; ​but, of course, I shouldn’t have, and he’s really furious with himself and me, and now I shall have to begin all over again, and have a much harder time of it.”

Thus Alison, rather incoherent, and genuinely distressed.

“If he’s going to bear you a grudge for kissing and petting him, all I can say is that he’s an ungrateful little wretch,” remarked the Professor consolingly.

“Yes; but, Winthrop, you couldn’t expect him to like it.”

“You mean he’s not old enough to appreciate it? Pass me the salad, dear.”

“Of course—I wish he had been! No, I don’t, though, because it’s his being such a baby really that I love so. I really was perfectly horrid about it, and most unfair. Besides, he’ll get such a wrong idea of me, for I’m not usually tactless, you must admit that, Winthrop.”

Winthrop admitted it, and added that he wished his wife would eat some luncheon.

“You’re particularly concerned about this small urchin we’ve picked up,” he remarked, as she abstractedly buttered a biscuit.

“Yes, I am, dear—he really is extraordinarily interesting. To begin with he’s not—well, not a common boy. Even nurse saw that, and she’s not a person of perception—things have positively to run into her before she sees them. He’s quite a most mysterious small boy, Winthrop, and I’m going to be friends with him before I’ve finished; only I shall go warily now.”

She did go warily. For the next week or so she held as much aloof as she possibly could—paid rather fleeting visits to the invalid, and sat well away from him, reading aloud or talking on without waiting for answers; and if there were hands to be washed or hair to be brushed, she did it all with the most business-like air, hoping she was restoring confidence.

​She was. Gradually the memory of that humiliating moment of weakness faded, and Tony, ungrateful small wretch that he was, though outwardly still adamant, began to listen for her footstep and regret the moment when she folded her work or shut the book, and said:

“There’s the Professor: I must go.”

She prevailed upon Winthrop to sit with the boy for half an hour in the evenings after dinner—a real self-sacrifice, this, for the evening spent with her husband was the crown of the whole day, and she would have loved to make a third in the little room upstairs, but resolutely stayed away. Tony grew to love these half-hours, and the Professor enjoyed them too. Boys had quite as much attraction for him as they had for Alison, and his manner with them was charming. His classes adored him, and night by night Tony thawed and expanded, little by little. The boy’s own nameless attraction, which had so often stood him in good stead before, had its effect upon Winthrop too. He laughed when his wife insisted on a mystery surrounding their protégé, but he granted that the boy was really interesting. Their first conversation established a close bond. Tony had repeated his desire to earn something, and the Professor considered the matter seriously for a moment or two, then suggested:

“Do you think you could manage to do some copying for me? I think we could arrange a sort of writing-table for you, now you’re partly propped up like that. What sort of a hand do you write?”

Pretty fair, Tony thought—quite legible, anyway.

“That’s the main thing. I write pretty well for a Professor, my wife tells me, but the notes I make for my lectures are too haphazard to send to the typist, so I might set you to making decent copies of them, if you like. . . . That’s all right, then. You won’t find it such uninteresting work either, if you care for books at all.”

​“I do, but I haven’t read very much.”

“Well, now’s your chance,” the Professor pointed out. "I was going to ask you, now you’re fit for it, if you wouldn’t like some books up here. What do you like?—history? travels? biography?”

“History, please. And biography. And———” (He was tremendously shy about this, and did not quite know how to put it.)

“Yes? What else?”

“I would like—have you any books of plays and that sort of thing—not prose exactly, you know.”

“Poetry? Why yes—what about Shakespeare?—would you like him?”

“Yes, I think so. I’ve only read two—King Lear and The Tempest.”

“Well, you’ve struck two of the best,” said the Professor, “but you may as well have the others too. I’ll look around and see what I can find that I think you’d like, and you shall read all you want to.”

But it was a slightly surprised Professor who returned to his wife a little later.

“What do you think the little beggar wants to read, Alison? Poetry, if you please! Take him up the little Shakespeares to-morrow—they’re light to hold.”

“Didn’t I always say he was an interesting boy, Winthrop?” cried Alison, delighted.

“I’m not dreaming of contradicting you, my dear,” said the Professor, kissing his wife’s flushed cheek. “I shall be able to try my lectures on him presently. He reads French too,” he added. “Does that surprise you?”

“French! Why, he looks French himself, Winthrop. And his name is, of course.”

“He calls himself Saint Croy,” remarked the Professor.

“That needn’t mean anything. Did you ask him about his people?”

​“Not I! I leave such delicate questions to persons of your tact and penetration, dear.”

“I know you’re trying to be horrible, but I simply refuse to take any notice of you,” declared his wife, adding in a tone of anguish, “Oh, Winthrop, why will you wear those detestable collars? Really, I often wonder why on earth I married you!”

The question of Tony’s extraction was shelved for the moment, for Alison was still “going warily,” and conversation meant chiefly discussions of the books which Tony now devoured eagerly. Alison reported progress to the Professor every evening. She had come to regard the sickroom rather as a battlefield where she and the invalid fought a prolonged fight; and in spite of Winthrop’s advice to “leave the ungrateful young wretch alone—he doesn’t deserve you!” she went valiantly on, confident of final victory. She had many rebuffs, and some which really hurt, for Tony, conscious that he was being won over in spite of himself, still despised this gentle bondage, and sometimes made a sudden struggle after freedom, hurting the soft hand which held the cords.

One day, for instance, as Alison finished reading aloud some modern story, he burst forth with his verdict of “That’s rot! Stupid!”

“Why is it stupid?” Alison asked. “I can imagine people capable of just as much generosity and self-sacrifice as that.”

“Not out in the world! They’re all on the make—they’re all looking out for themselves. Do you think I don’t know?” (Tony was decidedly out of temper. His leg ached; his head too; it was hot, and he was dead sick of bed and patronage.) He continued deliberately:

“Everyone wants to get the better of someone else. I expect you and the Professor would do me if you could— ​only, of course, you’ve nothing to get out of me. That saves people often.”

“Tony!” Alison was too hurt to continue for a moment. She gazed at the small cynic in bed, who, extremely ashamed of himself though he was, hardened his heart and stared back at her. Then pity, never far from Alison’s soft heart, welled up and overflowed as she thought what life must have been to have taught a child such lessons. She said, after a little pause, very gently and slowly:

“You don’t really believe that, Tony. And listen to me. Even if your experience of life has shown you that people are often very selfish, very cruel, very ready to ‘do’ other people, don’t let it colour all your point of view. It is very much better and wiser and happier to go on believing in everybody than expecting always to find people false. People are often so much kinder and nicer than you think; and even if you are hurt and taken in a thousand times, anything is better than suspecting your friends. Suspicion kills everything that makes life beautiful, Tony.”

Tony had no reply to make to this, and the conversation was never referred to again, but the boy remembered it all his life; at unexpected times it would come back to him. Unwillingly he was convinced; he would have been a fool, a bad judge of character—and Heaven knew it was important enough for him to be a good one!—if he had continued to doubt the Straines.

It was some time after this that he, in a rarely expansive moment, unfolded most of his story to Alison. He told her more than he had ever told anyone—more than he had meant to tell; but somehow it was easy to talk, once he had made the start, and Alison was the best of listeners. He had never talked so much about himself before, and paid really very little heed to the cager listener beside him; but afterwards he recalled how her eyes had darkened with anger at the recital of his father’s treatment—grown dewy ​at the hints of hunger and ill-usage—glowed as she scented romance and mystery in his vague allusions to his mother’s people. She broke in here, tactics forgotten, all eager interest.

“But their name, Tony! You must remember their name.”

“No, I can’t. It was never mentioned. It was only when I was going that he said it, and I didn’t pay much attention then. Afterwards when I thought about it I couldn’t remember.”

“Try very hard—it’s so important.”

“I can’t get it. I only know that it went like this.”

He beat with one hand on the bed. “There!—like that—one beat, and then three more. I can hear it like that.”

“It may be a title, Tony.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know. It’s no good.”

“Then I think you should advertise. You couldn’t help finding them if you advertised in all the English papers. Since your father has behaved like this, they would be certain to do something for you—your mother’s own people.”

“I don’t think they would. I don’t want to find them anyway, whoever they are.”

“You don’t want to find them, when it might make such a big difference to you?”

“No.” Then, much lower: “They practically cut my mother off when she married my father. I don’t want to have anything to do with them, even if they should own me.”

Alison said no more then, but she had a great deal to say to Winthrop that night.

“It’s a real live romance, Winthrop, going on right here, under our own roof! Isn’t it delightful? Only I’ll never be happy till the mystery’s cleared up. Just think!—he may be heir to a title and a beautiful English property, and all sorts of things.”

​“It happens to be his mother who was English,” the Professor calmly reminded her.

“Never mind, Winthrop. His relations certainly ought to be found, anyway. It’s too dreadful to think of the awful life that mere child has had for the last six years—drifting about, half starved, ill-treated—oh, Winthrop! And his wretched relations are probably living like lords—probably are lords, with castles and things!”

“Probably not quite all of them, my dear.”

“Anyway, Winthrop, I think something ought to be done. I think you ought to do something about it.”

But the Professor declined to interfere.

“I’ll have a talk with the boy, if you like,” he conceded, “but you must remember that since his mother’s people disowned her, they are not likely to admit that he has any claims on them—indeed, he has no claims while his father is still alive. Of course, if he could be found he could be forced to provide for the boy.”

“Then he ought to be found, Winthrop.”

“It might be a difficult matter, and in my opinion he was a parent of whom Tony was well rid.”

“But, Winthrop, he’s only fifteen, and he’s earned his own living since he was ten—ten, Winthrop! Oh, he ought to be helped! How is he to be properly educated? I think it’s dreadful.”

“Don’t you worry about Tony, my child,” said the Professor. “He’ll get through all right every time, you’ll see it won’t hurt him, any of this up and down business.”

“You don’t seem to consider that it’s been pretty nearly all ‘down.’. . . Well, I’ll look after him myself. I don’t want him ever to leave us.”

“He shall certainly stay as long as he wants,” Winthrop agreed. “As for education, he’s better informed than most boys of his age, whenever and however he has picked it ​up. He began some Greek yesterday,” he added, a little guiltily.

“Greek? Oh, Winthrop! Well, I’m glad, for now I know you’ll never be content to let him go till you’ve taught him all you know. It will make up to you, too, for my having been so stupid about it.”

“A poor Kitten!” The Professor laughed and kissed her, his attempts to interest her in the language which absorbed him having been singularly fruitless.

Tony meanwhile, upstairs alone in the little room which was now called his, with several volumes of Shakespeare strewn on top of him and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall propped up on the reading-stand, forgot to read while he tried to recall his outpourings of the afternoon.

“I don’t know what was wrong with me to-day, I chattered so to that woman.” (Poor Alison!) “I don’t think I ever told anybody so much before. She gets it out of you. . . . Does she really like me a little, or is she only sorry because I’m ill? Oh, I wish I owned someone who had to like me! . . . She has a ripping smile.”

Gibbon was neglected for the rest of that evening, and Tony lay and stared at the ceiling till the Professor came for his nightly chat.

Nearly two months of life in the room he seemed always to have known, with its bookshelf where lived all the books which had become his friends, except for the half-dozen which lay within reach of his hand; with its pictures brought from somewhere downstairs and hung so that his eyes had something good to rest on wherever they turned—good prints of Rembrandt’s “Man in Armour,” Meissonier’s “Cavalier,” a Velasquez or two—nearly two months, whose evenings brought the Professor, his half-hour lengthening to an hour before every question had been asked and answered—whose days brought Alison, her fleeting visits ​gradually crystallising into a whole solid morning or afternoon—how was Tony to hold out against such influences as these, when each and all meant something very like home?

“Do you know how I begin to think of you now, Tony-boy?” Alison asked him one day. “As my little brother —do you mind? You see, I never had a brother of my own—no sister either—and you don’t know how I’m loving having someone I can play elder sister to.”

She looked at him a little wistfully, this persistent fighter, not quite sure if the battle were won yet. It was. He smiled back at her, grey eyes and stern lips soft and responsive at last; indeed she might have kissed him then and not have endangered her position. She did not, she only smiled in return, well rewarded for her patience, and told him delightedly, “Why, Tony, how nice you look when you smile like that! Don’t you ever dare to look at me in that very naughty, horrid way you used to again!”

“Was I horrid?”

“Very horrid; but now you shall smile at me every day, and you don’t know how becoming it is—little brother!”

“All the same,” Tony thought after she had gone, “I don’t feel in the least like her little brother! I don’t feel very little in any way, except when I’m reading . . . I feel more like . . . the fox and the grapes. . . .”

It was the night after this capitulation that Alison dared to do what she had never dared before. Tip-toeing in on her way to bed, as she always did, to see whether the patient needed anything, she stood for a moment looking down on the sleeping boy. He looked the merest child asleep—the lines smoothed out, the mouth relaxed—one hand curled up on the counterpane, almost like a baby’s. She stooped and kissed him very lightly, then drew back, half afraid; but the even breathing continued, the boy slept on ​undisturbed. But the next night there was a difference, though Alison did not know of it. The creak of the opening door awakened Tony, but he lay motionless, half dreaming still. The light from the passage fell across his face: Alison studied it carefully, but no, not an eyelash flickered—all was safe. She bent, and the boy felt her warm lips on his forehead; then the door closed again behind her, and for an hour he lay wide-eyed in the darkness.

No night after that brought him sleep till her light step had paused beside him and passed on again, but not till months afterwards did Alison learn that it was a wide-awake Tony who lay and listened for her last good night.