The Torch Bearer Part 8

"Of course. Do you think I'd have done it without her permission?

Peter, don't neglect your manners with your grandchildren."

"I deserve the rebuke, Mrs. Caldwell. But if Sheila wants me to see her poems, why hasn't she brought them to me herself?"

"Too shy! Peter, poets are _very_ sensitive. It's an awful thing to have one in your family!"

"Oh, you won't find it so bad."

"Yes, I shall. I always told you it would happen. And I always told you, too, that I couldn't cope with such a--calamity."

"Well, there's still hope that this may be a case of 'sweet sixteen'

instead of genius. I'll take a peep and give you a verdict."

"She's a _poet_," insisted Mrs. Caldwell, obstinately convinced of the worst. And she fixed her eyes on Peter's face, as he read, with an eagerness that, save for her lamentations, might have seemed anxiety to have her opinion confirmed.

Presently Peter chuckled.

"What are you laughing at, Peter?"

"Have you read the 'Ode to the Evening Star'?"

"Yes, I've read them all."

"Well, then----"

"Well, then--_what_?"

"You know why I'm laughing."

"You think it's _funny_?" And there was an unmistakable note of indignation in the question.

"Of course I think it's funny! Don't you?"

There was no reply, and Peter looked up from the note-book. "_Don't_ you think it's funny?" he repeated. And then he stared at her. Her cheeks were pink with excitement, her eyes were glittering with angry tears. "Why, I thought--" he began.

But she interrupted him: "I certainly don't think it's funny. I think it's a _lovely_ poem! I think they're _all_ lovely poems! I expected you to appreciate them, but as you don't--" And she put out a peremptory hand for the book. But as Peter continued to stare at her, she perceived his amus.e.m.e.nt, and her resentment gave way to mirth.

"Oh, Peter, do forgive me for being cross to you, but you see----"

"I see that you're proud of these poems!" he exclaimed, his own eyes twinkling merrily.

"Yes," she admitted, "I am proud of them. I really do think they're the loveliest poems ever written!" And she met his laughing gaze quite shamelessly.

"And you're glad--yes, _glad_--that she's turned out a poet!" he accused.

"Yes," confessed Mrs. Caldwell again, "I'm glad!" And she leaned earnestly toward him: "_Oh, Peter, isn't she wonderful_?"

But Peter regarded her severely. "Ah, the deceit of woman! And I believed you when you claimed to be distressed! I sympathized with you!"

But Mrs. Caldwell was not to be abashed: "I've been a shocking hypocrite, haven't I? But you're so clever, Peter, that I expected you to see through me."

"I trusted you!" he mourned.

"Oh, Peter! Peter! That's the way a man always seeks to excuse his stupidity when a woman gets the best of him! But you can trust my sincerity now. And you can sympathize with me if Sheila's _not_ a poet. You seem to doubt her being one!"

"She isn't a poet--yet. She may become one. I can't tell about that.

What I am sure of is that she has a remarkable mind--as I told you long ago. She has things to express, and evidently the time has come when she wants to express them. That's the hopeful point."

"Then she is promising--for all your laughter?"

"Indeed she is! These poems are funny--but every now and then there's a flash of light through them. Mrs. Caldwell, I believe in the _light_. I don't know what Sheila will do with it, but it's there--and it's wonderful!"

The tears were in Mrs. Caldwell's eyes again, not the bright tears of anger, but the soft mist that rises from a heart profoundly moved. As Peter spoke, the drops overflowed and rolled slowly down her cheeks, but she was unconscious of them. "You don't know what this means to me!" she said.

"I didn't know you would feel like this about it. You deceived me so thoroughly! But now I wonder why I didn't realize, in spite of all your protestations, that you'd care just this deeply. I should have understood what things of the mind are to you--you were my grandfather's friend!"

"Yes, I was your grandfather's friend. And he was a marvellous man, Peter. It's the proudest thing I can say of myself--that I was his friend." Then, quickly, as if she had closed a treasure box, she turned from the subject of her old friends.h.i.+p--which Peter knew might have been more--to that of Sheila.

"What shall I do with my poet, Peter? I'm as much afraid of her as I said I should be--and as unfit to help her."

"Let me help her! Will you let me train her?"

"Oh, my dear, I hoped you'd ask to do it!"

"Then it's a bargain--not only for the present, but for the future--after she graduates--as long as she needs me?"

Mrs. Caldwell flashed a keen glance at him: "As long as you will, Peter! I'll trust her to you gratefully."

But if there was any deeper significance in her words than her acceptance of the present compact, Peter failed to catch it. As he stood in the seminary doorway a few moments later, watching Mrs.

Caldwell's retreating figure up the shady street, there came to him, however, a sense of having something to work for at last.

"What was it Mrs. Caldwell once said?" he murmured to himself. "That she wasn't wise enough to 'trim the wick of a star'? Yes, that was it.

Well," he added whimsically, "I don't suppose I'm fit for the job either, but I'm going to undertake it. It'll be worth while staying here--it'll be worth while living--if I can trim the wick of a star and help it to s.h.i.+ne!"

CHAPTER VI

There was nothing spectacular or startlingly precocious about Sheila's development during the next few years.

On her seventeenth birthday, her frocks were lowered to her slender ankles; on her eighteenth, she permanently a.s.sumed the dignity of full length skirts; on her nineteenth, she lifted her hair from its soft, girlish knot on her neck to a womanly coronet upon the top of her head.

But despite her regal coiffure, she remained very much of a child.

Mrs. Caldwell had achieved the apparently impossible; she had eliminated the role of the "young lady" from Sheila's _repertoire_. At nineteen the girl was ready, at the touch of fate, to merge the child in the woman; but there was nothing of the conventional young lady about her, though she led the same life as other girls in Shadyville, a life that abounded in parties---in town through the winter and at the country houses in the summer--and little s.e.x vanities and love affairs.

Sheila herself had never had a love affair. She was a charming young person--not quite pretty, but more alluring in her shy, wistful fas.h.i.+on, than handsomer girls--so it followed that susceptible youths sued for her favor. But they sued in vain. She smiled upon them until they said some word of love, and then she was on the wing like a wild bird.

Whatever ardor there was in her she had expended thus far upon her ambition to write. Under Peter's restraining tutelage, she had long since foresworn odes to the evening star for prose fantasies, and these were in turn being superseded by what promised to become a clean-cut, brilliant gift for narrative. She had a rich imagination, an unusual facility for characterization, a certain quaint, whimsical humor--that she never displayed in her speech; all of which raised her work, crude though it still was, distinctly above the level of the commonplace.