left to him, tom saw nothing in the duty but to do it. he was confirmed in this resolution by quidmore's gentleness throughout the evening. it was a new thing in tom's experience of the house. as always with those in the habit of inflicting pain, merely to stop inflicting it seemed kindness. supper passed without a single incident that made mrs. quidmore wince. on her part she played up with an almost brilliant vivacity in making none of her impotent complaints. anything he could do to further this accord the boy felt he ought to do.
he hung back only from the deed. that made him shudder. he was clear on the point that it made him shudder because of its association in his mind with the thing which had happened years before; and that, he knew, was foolish. if it would please his father he should make the attempt. he should make it perhaps the more heartily since he was free not to make it if he chose.
it was the freedom that troubled him. so long as he did only what he was told he had nothing on his conscience. now he must be sure that he was right; and he was not sure. once more he didn't question the fact that the medicine would do his mother good. the right and wrong in his judgment centered round doing her good against her own will.
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with no finespun theories concerning the rights of the individual, he was pretty certain as to what they were.
a divine beauty came over the evening when, after he had gone to bed about half-past eight, his mother, in the new blossoming of her affection, came to tuck him in, and kiss him good night. no such thing had happened to him since mrs. crewdson had last done it. mrs. tollivant went through this endearing rite with all her own children; but him she left out. many a time, when from his bed beneath the eaves he heard her making her rounds at night, he had pressed his face into the pillow to control the trembling of his lips. true, he had come to regard the attention as too babyish for a man of twelve; but now that it was shown him he was touched by it.
it brought to his memory something mrs. crewdson had said, and which he had never forgotten. "god's wherever there's love, it seems to me, dear. i bring a little bit of god to you, and you bring a little bit of god to me, and so we have him right here." mrs. quidmore, too, brought a little bit of god to him, and he brought a little bit of god to mrs. quidmore. they showed god to each other, as if without each other they were not quite able to see him. the fact suggested the thought that in the matter of the secret administration of the medicine he might pray.
one thing he had learned with some thoroughness while in the tollivant family, and that was religion. both in sunday school and in domestic instruction he had studied it conscientiously, and conscientiously accepted it. if he sometimes admitted to bertie
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tollivant, the cripple, that he "didn't see much sense in it," the confession applied to his personal inabilities. bertie was the cynic and unbeliever in the tollivant household. "there's about as much sense in it," he would declare secretly to tom, "as there is in those old yarns about pilgrim's progress and jack and the beanstalk. only don't say that to ma or pop, because the poor dears wouldn't get you." on tom this skepticism only made the impression that he and bertie didn't understand religion any more than they understood sex, which was also a theme of discussion. they would grow to it in time, by keeping ears and eyes open.
now that he was away from the tollivants, in a world where religion was never spoken of, he dismissed it from his mind. that is, he dismissed its intricacies, its complicated doctrines, its galloping through prayers you were too sleepy to think of at night, and too hurried in the morning. here he was admittedly influenced by bertie. "if god loves you, and knows what you want, what's the good of all this now i lay me? it'd be a funny kind of god that wouldn't look after you anyhow." tom had given up saying now i lay me, partly because that, too, seemed babyish, but mainly on account of bertie's reasoning. "it's more of a compliment to god," was his way of explaining it to himself, "to know that he'll do right of his own accord, than to suppose he'll do it just because i pester him." so every night when he got into bed he took a minute to say to himself that god was taking care of him, making this confidence serve in place of more explicit peti
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tion. when he had anything special to pray about, he said, he would begin again.
and now something special had arisen. he got out of bed. he didn't kneel down because, being anxious not to mislead god by giving him wrong information, he had first to consider what he ought to say. stealing softly across the floor, lest the creaking of the boards should betray the fact that he was up, he went to the open window, and looked out.
it was one of those mystic nights which, to a soul inclined to the mystical, seem to hold a spiritual secret. the air, scented by millions of growing things, though chiefly with the acrid perfume of the blue spruces on which he looked down, had a pungent, heavenly odor such as he never caught in the daytime. there was a tang of salt in it, too, as from the direction of the sound came the faintest rustle of a breeze. the rustle was so faint as not to break a stillness, which was more of the nature of a holy suspense because of the myriads of stars.
seeking a formula in which to couch his prayer, he found a phrase of mr. tollivant's often used in domestic intercession. "and, o heavenly father, we beseech thee to act wisely in the matter of our needs." what constituted wisdom in the matter of their needs would then be pointed out by mr. tollivant according to the day's or the season's requirements. accepting this language as that of high inspiration, and forgetting to kneel down, the boy began as he stood, looking out on the sanctified darkness:
"and, o heavenly father, i beseech thee to act
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wisely in the matter of my needs." hung up there for lack of archaic grandiloquence, he found himself ending lamely: "and don't let me give it to her if i oughtn't to, for jesus christ's sake, amen."
with his effort he was disappointed. not only had the choice of words not taken from mr. tollivant been ludicrously insufficient, but he had forgotten to kneel down. he had probably vitiated the whole prayer. he thought of revision, of constructing a sentence that would balance mr. tollivant's, and beginning again with the proper ceremonial. but bertie's way of reasoning came to him again. "i guess he knows what i mean anyhow." he recoiled at that, however, shocked at his own irreverence. the thought was a blasphemous liberty taken with the watchful and easily offended deity of whom mr. and mrs. tollivant had begged him always to be afraid. he was wondering if by approaching this god at all he hadn't made his plight worse, when the rising of the wind diverted his attention.
it rose suddenly, in a great soft sob, but not of pain. rather, it was of exultation, of cosmic joyousness. coming from the farthest reaches of the world, from the atlantic, from africa, from remote islands and mountain tops, it blew in at the boy's window with a strong, and yet gentle, cosmic force.
"and suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind."
tom quidmore had but one source of quotation, but he had that at his tongue's end. the learning by heart of long passages from the bible had been part of his education at the hands of mr. and mrs.
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tollivant. rightly or wrongly, he quoted the scriptures, and rightly oftener than not. he quoted them now because, all at once, his room seemed full of the creative breath. he didn't say so, of course; but, confusedly, he felt it. all round the world there was wind. it was the single element in nature which you couldn't see, but of which you received the living invigoration. it cooled, it cleansed, it strengthened. wherever it passed there was an answer. the sea rose; the snows drifted; the trees bent; men and women strove to use and conquer it. a rushing mighty wind! a sound from heaven! that it might be an answer to his prayer he couldn't stop to consider because he was listening to the way it rose and fell, and sighed and soughed and swelled triumphantly through the plantation of blue spruces.
by morning it was a gale. the tall things on the property, the bush peas, the scarlet runners, the sweet corn, were all being knocked about. in spots they lay on the earth; in other spots they staggered from the perpendicular. all hands, in the words of old diggory, had their work cut out for them. tom's job was to rescue as many as possible of the ears of sweet corn, in any case ready for picking, before they were damaged.
but at half-past two he dragged himself out of the corn patch to fulfill the dreaded duty. nothing had answered his prayer. he had not so much as seen his father throughout the day, as the latter had gone to the markets and had not returned. the gale was still raging, and he might be waiting for it to go down.
since the scene by the roadside on the previous
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afternoon he had taken a measure of his father not very far from accurate. he, quidmore, wanted something of which he was afraid. he was too much afraid of it to press for it urgently; and yet he wanted it so fiercely that he couldn't give it up. what it was the boy could not discover, except that it had something to do with them all. when he said with them all he included the elusive bertha; though why he included her he once more didn't know.
in god he was disappointed; that he did not deny. in spite of the shortcomings of his prayer, he had clung to the hope that they might be overlooked. he argued a little from what he himself would have done had anyone come with a request inadequately phrased. he wouldn't think of the manners or the words in his eagerness to do what lay within his power. with god apparently it was not so.
there was, of course, the other effect of his prayer. he had only asked to be stopped if the thing was not to be done. if he was not stopped the inference was obvious. he was to go ahead. it was in order to go ahead that he left the corn patch.
the kitchen when he got to it was empty. both the windows, that in the south wall and that in the west, were open to let the wind sweep out the smell of cooking. creeping halfway up the stairs, he saw that his mother had closed her bedroom door, a sign that she was really lying down. there was no help now for what he had to do.
he stole back to the kitchen again. on the dresser he saw the brown teapot in which she would presently make her tea. he would only have to take it down,
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and spill the powder into it. the powder was in his waistcoat pocket. he drew it out. it was small and flat, in a neatly folded paper. opening the paper, he saw something innocent and white, not unlike the sugar you spread on strawberries. laying it in readiness on the table by the west window, at which his mother baked, he turned to take down the teapot.
the gale grew fiercer. it was almost a tornado. with the teapot in his two hands he paused to look out of the south window at the swaying of the blue spruces. they moaned, they sobbed, they rocked wildly. you might have fancied them living creatures seized by a madness of despair. the fury of the wind, even in the kitchen, blew down a dipper hanging on the wall.
there was now no time to lose. the noise of the falling dipper might have disturbed his mother, so that at any minute she might come downstairs. with the teapot again in his hands he turned to the table where he had left the thing which was to do her good.
it was not there.
dismayed, startled, he looked for it on the floor; but it was not there. it was not anywhere in the kitchen. he searched and searched.
going outside, he found the paper caught in a rosebush under the window, but the something innocent and white had been blown to the four corners of the world.
the rushing mighty wind had done its work; and yet it was not till two or three years later, when the quidmores had passed from his life, that he wondered if after all his prayer had not been answered.
