Mr. Wicker's Window Part 8

What fun this was! Chris gave a chuckle out loud. What a chance--to see what once had been! He was enjoying himself increasingly as he glanced down at the activity along the riverbanks.

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So close to noon, the sailors and stevedores had vanished to eat their meal, and pa.s.sers-by were few. The street was nearly deserted when along the hardened muddy ruts of Water Street Chris heard a wailing cry: "Pity the blind! Pity the pore blind!" The boy looked down, and the drop below him to the road made his head swim, until he refused to think of it. He saw below him a grotesque figure making its way, turning its head toward the houses as it made its cry.

It was a hunchbacked man with a wooden peg leg and a crutch. Tied crisscross over his snarled hair were two black eye patches. He was unshaven and in a rare state of filth, his coat green with age and speckled with greasy stains, the stocking on his one good leg wrinkling down into his shoe, and his hands gnarled with long-nailed fingers. Chris gave an involuntary shudder, but the sight of the man held his gaze, for he had never seen anyone quite like him before.

As the cripple advanced slowly past the few houses of Water Street, here and there a window was opened and a coin tossed out, which the cripple held his cap for, or grubbed with his filthy hands where he heard it fall. Watching his progress, Chris became fascinated with the accuracy with which the blind man caught the coins or found them in the road. After a pa.s.sing gentleman on horseback had tossed a silver piece in his direction, the hunchback made off around the corner of the stables beyond Mr. Wicker's garden.

The boy hung out even farther and craned his neck to see what the blind man would do, for from his determined gait he seemed to have a purpose. Feeling along the side of the barn to guide himself, when he came to the back of it the cripple darted around, and then, to Chris's amazement, lifted the corner of one black eye patch and peered out from under it! Seeing no one, and thinking himself un.o.bserved, the cripple nonchalantly pushed both eye patches onto his forehead, fished in his pocket, and began examining the silver piece he had just retrieved. It appeared to satisfy his scrutiny, turn it over and over though he did, but to be quite sure of its value he bit tentatively on it with his back teeth. This seemed to be the final test, for the cripple grinned from ear to ear, disclosing even fewer teeth than Master Cilley.

Next, the hunchback sat down upon a heap of straw, laying his crutch beside him, and with a quick movement, wriggled himself out of not only his jacket but his humpback too!

Chris could scarcely believe his eyes, but he now saw that a false hump had been cleverly sewn into the jacket from inside. The cripple untied a patch that formed a trap door in the hump, and putting his hand inside the hollow, drew from its hiding place in the false hump a small bag tied at the neck with a string. Then, as Chris watched, he counted the contents of the bag, pieces of money that winked in the sun, and added to his horde those pieces he had begged that morning.

The bag was then retied, replaced, and the jacket and hump put back on its wearer with evident satisfaction.

But the cripple had not yet completed his work. Holding the silver piece between the blackened stubs of his front teeth, with difficulty he managed to hoist his peg leg over his good knee. Then, after darting many a sly look all about him, he unstrapped the wooden peg off the stump of his leg.

First, from the interior of the stump he pulled out an a.s.sortment of rags used for stuffing, and to cus.h.i.+on the weight of his stump. Then, after spreading a torn bandanna handkerchief near him, he tipped up the stump and from its hollow peg, out rained a shower of coins!

Chris looked, and looked again. Gold and silver money flashed on the crumpled handkerchief, and adding to it the last silver piece he had held in his teeth, the loathsome cripple stirred the heap around and around with one dirty forefinger, his mouth stretched in a cackle of greed.

After a while he caught up the coins, counting them over not once but many times, and at last let them fall slowly one by one into the hollow peg of his stump, strapping it back securely. Finally, after looking about with his face close to the ground to make sure that no smallest coin had escaped him, the cripple replaced his eye patches and heaved himself up with his crutch under his arm, turning to make his way once more toward the docks and the s.h.i.+ps. His wailing cry lagged behind him like a cur dog: "Pity the blind! Pity the pore crippled blind!" Yet Chris now noticed that his head was tilted back to enable him to see under the patches as he went.

The boy was straining to see him out of sight when a resounding bellow from Becky Boozer let him know that dinner was ready. Hastily shutting the window and running downstairs, Chris could think of only one thing.

"Becky!" he cried, bursting out at the bottom of the stairs, "Who is the blind man that just went by--the hunchback?"

Becky never even turned from the plate she was preparing. "Oh, him?

That would be Simon Gosler, one of Claggett Chew's men. How he can be a sailor beats me, but Claggett Chew has hired him for years, plague take him! Now," and she came toward the sunny table with a beaming smile, "eat up, young man, or I shall think my cooking does not please you!"

Chris hurriedly set about proving his appreciation.

CHAPTER 10

The learning of magic was by no means easy. The days went by with Chris's mornings and afternoons spent in Mr. Wicker's study, reading books too heavy for him to lift, learning incantations by heart, and how to blend simple formulae over the fire. He had told his master at once about Simon Gosler, his horde of money and his hiding places for it. Mr. Wicker though interested and attentive, gave Chris the impression that what he had been told was not new to him. At times Chris was allowed to run about the large vegetable garden and climb the orchard trees, but he was told that the moment had not yet come when he could wander at will in early Georgetown.

Chris had tried it once, rebellious and bored at the now familiar ground, but it was as if an invisible wall kept him in the confines of Mr. Wicker's land, a slippery gla.s.s wall he could feel but not see, and in which he could discover no c.h.i.n.k in which to put his toe to find the height of it. So there was nothing left to do but to work as fast and as well as he could. "There are rumors," Mr. Wicker had told him quietly, too quietly, "that Claggett Chew is preparing his s.h.i.+p, the _Venture_, for a voyage East. There is much activity about his s.h.i.+p, and he is laying in stores, so I am informed. We must get forward with all haste, for his s.h.i.+p is a fast one--faster than the _Mirabelle_."

Chris therefore threw himself into all the preliminaries of his task.

His head swam when he laid it on his pillow at night, and Becky Boozer would stand with her hands on her barrel-sized hips, shaking her hat until its plumes and roses waved madly, over "her boy's" shadowed eyes and weary air.

For Chris was now as accepted a member of the household as Mr. Wicker himself, and had it not been for the robust guffaws of Ned Cilley, and the ministrations of the now devoted Becky, Chris's days would have been tedious indeed.

One afternoon when he returned, after a rest, to Mr. Wicker's study, he saw that there was something new in the room. A bowl with a goldfish in it stood on the table, but Mr. Wicker was not to be seen.

Now, however, Chris was not the boy he had been a few weeks before. He went straight to the bowl and addressed the fish.

"Sir," he said to the goldfish, "I am here. What shall I do first?"

The goldfish might almost have been said to have changed its expression and smiled, before, brus.h.i.+ng a drop of water from his sleeve, Mr. Wicker stood beside the table smiling.

"How you have improved, my boy!" he exclaimed. "It is now time for you to try, and this is as good a change as any."

All at once, at the imminent prospect of really changing himself into some other form, Chris became frightened and his hands grew cold.

"Oh, sir! Do you really think I know how?" he cried, gazing up into the face of his master. "Suppose I change and can't change back?"

Mr. Wicker shook his head with a smile.

"Never fear, Christopher. You know enough to start, and I feel reasonably sure that you will be quite able to change back again. If you get stuck I can help you. Come now," he said, putting out his hand to touch Chris's shoulder in a rea.s.suring way, "here you go. Remember Incantation Seventy-three, Book One."

Chris stared at the fishbowl, empty now. He remembered Incantation 73, Book One, quite well, but his knees began to tremble and he stood as if paralyzed. Mr. Wicker waited patiently beside him for a few moments for Chris to get up his courage.

Then as nothing happened, with a voice like a whip Mr. Wicker said: "Start at once!"

Chris was so startled at his usually gentle master's tone that without further thought or effort on his part, he began intoning to himself the words and sounds of Incantation 73, Book One. As he went on, concentrating on becoming a goldfish in the bowl on the table, he became aware of a humming sensation in his head. This grew until it seemed that all his body was filled with the strange new vibration, tingling from his feet to the crown of his head. The sensation spread, faster and faster. His head swam and he felt faint and a little sick, but he persisted through the final words. Somewhere deep inside him there seemed a sudden lurch, and then a wonderfully cool, liquid sensation. He felt buoyant and rested and looked about, only to get a wavery, enlarged glimpse of Mr. Wicker, looking more like a reflection in a circus mirror than himself. With a light twist of his body Chris floated over, to see that the room looked the same, and rolling back, could see that Mr. Wicker was peering in at him from above and smiling broadly.

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"Good Lord--I'm a fis.h.!.+" Chris said, and he heard the words m.u.f.fled as they came back to him through the water of his bowl. Well, what do you know? he thought, not without a feeling of pride, and commenced experimenting with his tail and fins with such enthusiasm and delight that some little time elapsed before Mr. Wicker's voice boomed close by.

"Better come back now. Take it slowly, son. Seventy-four, Book One: The Return."

The same strange sensations flooded Chris as he made the change back to his own shape, but when he stood once more on his own two feet on the carpet in Mr. Wicker's study, he was pleased and happy despite his weakness. Mr. Wicker took hold of his arm and helped him to a chair, and taking a small vial from the cupboard at the end of the room, he dropped a pellet into it and handed it to Chris.

"This will seem to smoke. Sniff the smoke and drink the liquid that remains," he said.

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Chris did as he was told, and his momentary weakness vanished, leaving him quieted and as strong as usual.

"There now," Mr. Wicker said, rubbing his hands with immense satisfaction, "that was not so bad, was it? A peculiar feeling, but as you come to do it more often and more quickly, the change will come more rapidly and in time you will be scarcely aware of the sensations at all." He looked at his pupil with pride. "You will do famously, my boy. In another moment, when you have rested, we shall try another one."

From that time, Chris became increasingly proficient, and as his ability grew he began to find magic a wonderful game, which he and Mr.

Wicker played together. They played this new and unique form of hide-and-seek, each one taking a new shape, turn by turn, as a challenge to the other's powers of imagination and detection. Soon Chris could turn himself into a limited number of things, for even Mr.

Wicker's magic had a limit: a singing bird in a cage, a part of the pattern in the brocaded curtains, or a section of the design in the Indian rug. The bluebottle fly or the goldfish became as easy as saying "Eureka!" and on one occasion Chris turned himself into the chair on which Mr. Wicker was sitting, and then walked across the room on his four wooden legs carrying Mr. Wicker, who laughed more heartily than he had in years at this display on the part of his student.

One day Chris wandered alone into the dusty shop. The time had nearly come when he could walk about in early Georgetown and know that it would still be the Georgetown of the past, and not the one into which he had been born. This afternoon, a rainy one, he had tired of changing himself into and out of objects. Mr. Wicker was busy, and Becky Boozer had gone off to market accompanied by Ned Cilley. Chris felt somewhat forlorn and lonely, as any boy might, and kicked an old piece of wood ahead of him into the darkness of the shop.

Going up to the shop window, he stood with his hands thrust into his pockets staring glumly first out the window and then, idly, at the three objects he had once loved to contemplate, the _Mirabelle_ in her bottle, the coil of heavy rope, and the carved wooden figure of the Nubian boy.

Without interest at first, Chris stared at the little Negro boy, so gaily dressed in full red trousers, gilded jacket and white turban.

The figure's shoes, carved in some Eastern style, had curved up-pointing toes. Then all at once the idea came to Chris. If he was to be a magician, could he make this boy come to life?