Blue Magic/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
WHILE FEN SLEPT
"BET you can't get where I am!" crowed Larry, from a very precarious perch, to which he had scrambled by means of every possible foothold.
"Bet I can so!" cried Sally, not to be outdone by one so young as her brother, and she started at full speed to climb up beside him.
As Fen watched them he wondered vaguely what it could be like to be able to climb up things that way. Or what it would be like to run—or even to walk, quite slowly and soberly. Very dimly he remembered walking, holding his nurse's hand and walking down a street in Baltimore,—but one vague memory is hardly enough to counteract so long a time of utter helplessness. It was not really Mammy's fault that it happened. She thought he was there beside her, but instead he had run after his ball, which had bounced into the parkway, and the automobile was going so fast that it couldn't stop in time. That had been four years ago—four years that seem like your whole life, if you are only seven. And because he was still not mending as much as they had hoped, the doctor had said this fall, "Absolute change of air—sea voyage if possible—Mediterranean, perhaps." So they went away, and Father had refitted the yacht and met them. And he was stronger. He could sit up really straight for half an hour every day, now, without his back hurting too much. The doctor said that some day he would be able to walk a little, and that was something very wonderful to look forward to.
Sally had reached the place beside Larry, and they sat swinging their legs and looking down at Fen. Larry fetched a cooky from his pocket. They broke it in half and munched it contentedly.
For convention's sake it is only fair to state that Siddereticus, clad in a perfectly civilized grass-cloth suit and Panama hat, made a proper call on the elder Norvells one night after the children had gone to bed.
As he stood by the rail, ready to take his leave, Mrs. Norvell said, "I think it's very kind of you to be so good to my little boy, Mr. Thornton."
The young man turned and looked at her for an instant. His face was inscrutable in the dusk.
"I think I asked you to call me Siddereticus?" he said. "The thing is, if you don't do it all the time, you might make a slip some time when it mattered." He left the rail suddenly, saying, "Might I take a look at Fen?"
"Why—if you want to—yes. Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Norvell, a little perplexed. "Show him the way, Hal."
At the head of the companionway Siddereticus paused. "Don't bother to come, Norvell," he said, "I can perfectly well find my way. Which is his cabin?"
"Well—all right," said Mr. Norvell, "it's aft—port side, second door."
With a little nod, Siddereticus vanished into the companionway. He made his way to the cabin and entered silently. In one berth, Larry slept robustly, with arms and legs flung haphazard; and opposite, under the port-hole, was Fen's bed. The young man bent close over it, gazing through the faintly luminous dusk.
Sleep had extinguished that light which Thornton had been accustomed to see in the child's face. The will power which kept him in his waking hours eager and brave, was relaxed, and one saw more plainly how much he had suffered. Somehow he looked smaller than Siddereticus had remembered him, and very tired and helpless. His hand had loosed its clasp on the amulet and lay limply near it, where it gleamed against the pillow. The young man glanced behind him, and, stooping, kissed the small hand. As he slipped from the cabin. Fen sighed and stirred a little.
"A most singular chap," said Mr. Norvell, when Siddereticus had taken his final departure. He sank into a deck-chair and lit a cigar.
"A most singular chap! What an idea, to be cruising all over creation in that absurd knockabout, with that outlandish Mohammedan servant, or whatever he is. And Thornton, senior, as I remember him, was a most practical man—an eminent physician, I think."
"Why do you suppose he takes up his time playing with Fen?" said Mrs. Norvell. "And why in the world did he want to go and look at him to-night? One certainly wouldn't fancy a young man's caring to look at a child asleep."
Mr. Norvell blew smoke rings into the darkness and shook his head.
"A most singular chap, altogether," he observed.
A little later Mrs. Norvell went in, herself, to look at Fen asleep—a thing she rarely did. She noticed the amulet which lay beside his cheek and wondered where it had come from, as she knew she had never seen it before. "Something that odd young man has given him, I dare say," she thought. Half unconsciously she smoothed the tumbled covers before she turned away. But she came back from the door and kissed his hair with a little sigh.
She was a proud woman, and she had hoped to see her son as distinguished a naval officer as his grandfather had been. The sudden destruction of her ambition was a greater grief than she confessed even to herself, and she had unconsciously allowed her shattered pride to change her attitude toward the child. In seeing closed before him the doors of the active career she had planned, she quite failed to perceive that it was she who should have come to him in his need, to open for him the wide, enchanted gates of resources which might still be his.
Now, as she bent above him in the dim cabin, the old disappointment rushed fiercely over her, and the kiss she gave him was from her lips, not from her heart.
Fen did not lose faith in his talisman, though it brought him no Siddereticus the next day. To be sure, it fulfilled its promise after a fashion, for Sally and Larry were in evidence most of the time, and Fen had to admit to himself that no one had said with whose company the amulet was to provide him. And Sally, who had a kindly heart after all, read to him most of the morning, with frequent interruptions from Larry. The story she read—with a good deal of stumbling over long words—was about a Djinn who came out of a bottle, thereby astounding an honest fisherman and bringing him both good and bad luck. Fen, you may be sure, was only too glad to hear about any variety of genie, though he was of the private opinion that his own Siddereticus was much
nicer than the personage who came out of the bottle.
Larry still refused to believe in the existence of "any a such thing," in spite of Sally's graphic account of the blue-robed apparation which had "magicked" her and then vanished over the rail, "in a cloud of blue smoke," Sally insisted—which might well have been, as Siddereticus was smoking a cigarette at the time.