Fran Part 14

"You'll regret this, Miss," declared Clinton, in a threatening tone.

"You sit down. Do you want the name of being expelled?"

"I don't care very much about the names of things," said Fran coolly; "there are lots of respectable names that hide wickedness." Her tone changed: "But yonder's another wild animal for you to train; did you come to see him beaten?" She darted to the corner, and seated herself beside Jakey.

"Say, now," Bob remonstrated, pulling his mustache deprecatingly, "everybody knows I wouldn't see a dog hurt if it could be helped. I'm Jakey's friend, and I'd be yours, Fran--honestly--if I could. But how's a school to be run without authority? You ain't reasonable. All we want of you is to be biddable."

"And _you!"_ cried Fran to Abbott, beginning to give way to high pressure, "I thought you were a school-teacher, not _just_, but _also_--a something very nice, also a teacher. But not you. Teacher's all you are, just rules and regulations and authority and chalk and _a-b-c_ and _d-e-f."_

Abbott crimsoned. Was she right? Was he not something very nice plus his vocation? He found himself desperately wis.h.i.+ng that she might think so.

Fran, after one long glowing look at him, turned to the lad in disgrace, and placed her hand upon his stubborn arm. "Have you a mother?" she asked wistfully.

"Yeh," mumbled the lad, astonished at finding himself addressed, not as an ink-stained husk of humanity, but as an understanding soul.

"I haven't," said Fran softly, talking to him as if unconscious of the presence of two listening men, "but I had one, a few years ago--and, oh, it seems so long since she died, Jakey--three years is a pretty long time to be without a mother. And you can't think what a fault- blindest, spoilingest, candiest mother she was. I'm glad yours is living, for you still have the chance to make her proud and happy,...

No matter how fine I may turn out--do you reckon I'll ever be admired by anybody, Jakey? Huh! I guess not. But if I were, mother wouldn't be here to enjoy it. Won't you tell Professor Ashton that you are sorry?

"Fran--" Abbott began.

Fran made a mouth at him. "I don't belong to your school any more,"

she informed him. "Mr. School-Director can tell you the name of what he can do to me; he'll find it cla.s.sified under the E's."

After this explosion, she turned again to the lad: "I saw you punch that boy, Jakey, and I heard you say you didn't, and yet it was a good punch. What made you deny it? Punches aren't bad ideas. If I could strike out like you did, I'd wait till I saw a man bullying a weaker one, and I'd stand up to him--" Fran leaped impulsively to her feet, and doubled her arm--"and I'd let her land! Punching's a good thing, and, oh, how it's needed....Except at school--you mustn't do anything human here, you must be an oyster at school."

"Aw-right," said Jakey, with a glimmering of comprehension. He seemed coming to life, as if sap were trickling from winter-congealment.

Bob Clinton, too, felt the fresh breeze of early spring in his face.

He removed his spectacles.

"The first thing I knew," Fran said, resuming her private conversation with Jakey, "I had a mother, but no father--not that he was dead, oh, bless you, he was alive enough--but before my birth he deserted mother. Uncle turned us out of the house. Did we starve, that deserted mother and her little baby? I don't look starved, do I? Pshaw! If a woman without a cent to her name, and ten pounds in her arms can make good, what about a big strong boy like you with a mother to smile every time he hits the mark? And you'd better believe we got more than a living out of life. Mother taught me geography and history and the Revolutionary War--you know history's one thing, and the Revolutionary War is another--and every lesson she gave me was soaked with love till it was nearly as sweet as her own brave eyes. Maybe I wouldn't have liked it, if I'd had to study on a hard bench in a stuffy room with the world shut out, and a lid put on my voice--but anything's good that's got a mother in it. And tell these gentlemen you're sorry for punching that boy."

"Sorr'," muttered Jakey shamefacedly.

"I am glad to hear it," Abbott exclaimed heartily. "You can take your cap to go, Jakey."

"Lemme stay," Jakey pleaded, not budging an inch. Fran lifted her face above the tousled head to look at Abbott; she sucked in her cheeks and made a triumphant oval of her mouth. Then she seemed to forget the young man's presence.

"But when mother died, real trouble began. It was always hard work, while she lived, but hard work isn't trouble, la, no, trouble's just an empty heart! Well, sir, when I read about how good Mr. Hamilton Gregory is, and how much he gives away--to folks he never sees--here I came. But I don't seem to belong to anybody, Jakey, I'm outside of everything. People wouldn't care if I blew away with the dead leaves, and maybe I will, some fine morning--maybe they'll go up to my room and call, 'Fran! Fran!'--and there'll be no Fran. Oh, oh, how happy they'll be _then!_ But you have a home and a mother, Jakey, and a place in the world, so I say 'Hurrah!' because you belong to somebody, and, best of all, you're not a girl, but a boy to strike out straight from the shoulder."

Jakey was dissolved; tears burst their confines.

One may shout oneself hoa.r.s.e at the delivery of a speech which, if served upon printed page, would never prompt the reader to cast his hat to the ceiling. No mere print under bold head-lines did Abbott read, but rather the changing lights and shadows in great black eyes.

It was marvelous how Fran could project past experiences upon the screen of the listener's perception. At her, "When mother died,"

Abbott saw the girl weeping beside the death-bed. When she sighed, "I don't belong to anybody," the school-director felt like crying, "Then belong to me!" But it was when she spoke of blowing away with the dead leaves--looking so pathetic and so full of elfish witchery--that the impression was deepest. It almost seemed possible that she might fade and fade to an autumn leaf, and float out the window, and be lost-- Clinton had an odd impulse to hold her, lest she vanish.

Fran now completed her work. She rose from the immovable Jakey and came over to Abbott Ashton, with meekly folded hands.

He found the magic of the moonlight-hour returning. She had mellowed-- glowed--softened--womanized--Abbott could not find the word for it.

She quivered with an exquisiteness not to be defined--a something in hair, or flesh, or glory of eye, or softness of lips, altogether lacking in his physical being, but eagerly desired.

"Professor Ashton," she spoke seriously, "I have been horrid. I might have known that school is merely a place where young people crawl into books to worm themselves from lid to lid, swallowing all that comes in the way. But I'd never been to school, and I imagined it a place where a child was helped to develop itself. I thought teachers were trying to show the pupils the best way to be what they were going to be. I've been disappointed, but that's not your fault; you are just a system.

If a boy is to be a blacksmith after he's grown, and if a girl in the same cla.s.s is to be a music-teacher, or a milliner, both must learn about _a-b-c_ and _d-e-f_. So I'm going away for good, because, of course, I couldn't afford to waste my time in this house. I know the names of the bones and the distances of the planets are awfully nice, but I'm more interested in Fran."

"But, Fran," Abbott exclaimed impulsively, "don't you see that you are holding up ignorance as a virtue? Can you afford to despise knowledge in this civilized age? You should want to know facts just because-- well, just because they are facts."

"But I don't seem to, at all," Fran responded mildly. "No, I'm not making fun of education when I find fault with your school, any more than I show irreverence to my mother's G.o.d when I question what some people call 'religion'. I want to find the connection--looks like it's lost--the connection between life and--everything else. It's the connection to life that makes facts of any value to me; and it's only in its connection to life that I'd give a pin for all the religion on earth."

"I don't understand," Abbott faltered.

She unfolded her hands, and held them up in a quaint little gesture of aspiration. "No, because it isn't in a book. I feel lost--so out in s.p.a.ce. I only ask for a place in the universe--to belong to somebody..."

"But," said Abbott, "you already belong to somebody, since Mr. Gregory has taken you into his home and he is one of the best men that ever--"

"Oh, let's go home," cried Fran impatiently. "Let's all of us skip out of this chalky old bas.e.m.e.nt-smelly place, and breathe the pure air of life."

She darted toward the door, then looked back. Sadness had vanished from her face, to give place to a sudden glow. The late afternoon sun shone full upon her, and she held her lashes apart, quite unblinded by its intensity. She seemed suddenly illumined, not only from without, but from within.

Abbott seized his hat. Robert Clinton had already s.n.a.t.c.hed up his.

Jakey squeezed his cap in an agitated hand. All four hurried out into the hall as if moved by the same spring.

Unluckily, as they pa.s.sed the hall window, Fran looked out. Her eyes were caught by a group seated on the veranda of the Clinton boarding- house. There were Miss Sapphira Clinton, Miss Grace Noir, and several mothers, sipping afternoon tea. In an instant, Fran had grasped the plot. That cloud of witnesses was banked against the green weather- boarding, to behold her ignominy.

"Mr. Clinton," said Fran, all sweetness, all allurement, "I am going to ask of you a first favor. I left my hat up in Miss Bull's room and--"

"I will get it," said Abbott promptly.

"Lem _me!"_ Jakey pleaded, with fine admiration.

"Well, I rather guess not!" cried Bob. "Think I'll refuse Fran's first request?" He sped upstairs, uncommonly light of foot.

"Now," whispered Fran wickedly, "let's run off and leave him."

"I'm with you!" Abbott whispered boyishly.

They burst from the building like a storm, Fran laughing musically, Abbott laughing joyously, Jakey laughing loudest of all. They sallied down the front walk under the artillery fire of hostile eyes from the green veranda. They continued merry. Jakey even swaggered, fancying himself a part of it; he regretted his short trousers.

When Robert Clinton overtook them, he was red and breathless, but Fran's beribboned hat was clutched triumphantly in his hand. It was he who first discovered the ambuscade. He suddenly remembered, looked across the street, then fell, desperately wounded. The shots would have pa.s.sed unheeded over Abbott's head, had not Fran called his attention to the ambuscade.

"It's a good thing," she said innocently, "that you're not holding my hand--" and she nodded toward the boarding-house. Abbott looked, and turned for one despairing glance at Bob; the latter was without sign of life.

"What shall we do?" inquired Fran, as they halted ridiculously. "If we run for it, it'll make things worse."

"Oh, Lord, yes!" groaned Bob; _"don't_ make a bolt!"

Abbott pretended not to understand. "Come on, Fran, I shall go home with you." His fighting blood was up. In his face was no surrender, no, not even to Grace Noir. "Come," he persisted, with dignity.

"How jolly!" Fran exclaimed. "Shall we go through the grove?--that's the longest way."