The Return of Peter Grimm by David Belasco (chrysanthemum read aloud txt) 📕

He--thought he saw _me_."

Willem, reassured, laid his burning cheek against the frosted, icy side of the pitcher. A smile of utter bliss overspread his face.

"My, but it feels good!" sighed the boy.

The Dead Man continued to look down at him with an infinite pity.

"Willem," said he, stroking the tousled head and smoothing away its stabbing pain, "there are some little soldiers in this world who are handicapped when they come into Life's battlefield. Their parents haven't fitted them for the fight. Poor little moon-moths! They look in at the lighted windows. They beat at the panes. They see the glow of happy firesides,--the lamps of bright homes. But they can never get in. You are one of those little wanderers, Willem. And children like you are a million times happier when they are spared the truth. So it's the most beautiful thing that can happen for you, that before your playing time is over--before you begin a man's bitterly hard, grinding toil,--all the care--all the tears, all the worries, all the sorrows are going to pass you by forever. God is going to lay His dear hand on your head. There is always a place for such little children as you at His side. There is none in this small, harsh, unpitying old world. If people knew--if they understood--I don't think they could be so cruel as to bring such children into the world, to carry terrible burdens. They _don't_ know. But God does. And that is why He is going to take you to Him. It will be the most wonderful--the most beautiful thing that could happen to you."

Willem smiled dreamily. Then he took a long, ecstatic drink out of the pitcher itself, set it down, and rose to his feet. He felt suddenly better. For the time the water had cooled him. The racking headache was smoothed away. And, child-like, he had no desire whatever to cut short his surreptitious good time by going to bed. He looked about him for new objects of interest.

"Willem," went on the Dead Man, "of all this whole household, you are the only one who really feels I am here. The only one who can almost see me. The only one who can help me. I have a little message for you to give Katje, and I've something to show you."

He pointed toward the desk, where lay the fragments of the picture. The firelight was strong enough now to make them plainly visible. Willem's eyes followed the direction of the pointing hand. But his glance, as it reached the desk, fell upon something infinitely more attractive than any mere photograph. He saw the tray placed there by Marta and left untouched by Frederik.

"I'm awful hungry!" observed the boy.

"H'm!" commented Peter Grimm, as Willem started across the room to investigate the mysteriously alluring tray. "I see I can't get any help from a youngster as long as his stomach is calling."

"Good!" ejaculated Willem as he spied the plate of cakes.

"Help yourself!" invited Peter Grimm.

The boy obeyed the suggestion before it was made. Already his mouth was full of cake and his jaws were working rapturously.

"_Das is lecker!_" he murmured, biting into another of the cakes.

He picked a large and obese raisin from a third, swallowed it, then reached for the sugar bowl. Two lumps of sugar went the way of the raisin. After which a handful of sugar lumps were stuffed into his night-clothes' pocket for future delectation in bed. The cream pitcher next met the forager's eye. Willem looked at it longingly.

"Take it," said Peter Grimm. "It's good, thick, sweet cream. Drink it down. That's right. It won't hurt you. Nothing can hurt you now."

"I haven't had such a good time," Willem confided to his inner consciousness, "since Mynheer Grimm died. Why"--he broke off, his roving gaze concentrating on the hat-rack--"there's his hat! It's--he's _here_! Oh, Mynheer Grimm!" he wailed aloud in utter longing. "Take me back with you!"

"You know I'm here?" asked the Dead Man joyously. "Can you see me?"

"No, sir," came the answer without a breath of hesitation or any hint of misunderstanding.

"Here," ordered Peter Grimm, his face alight, "take my hand. Have you got it?"

He placed his right hand around the boy's groping palm.

"No, sir," replied Willem.

"Now," urged Peter Grimm, enclosing the boy's hand in both his own, "do you feel it?"

"I--I feel _something_," returned Willem, in doubt. "Yes, sir. But where is your hand? There's--there's nothing there!"

"But you _hear_ me?" asked the Dead Man anxiously.

"I--I can't _really_ hear you. It's some kind of a dream, I suppose. Isn't it? Oh, Mynheer Grimm!" he pleaded brokenly. "Take me back with you!"

"You're not quite ready to go with me, yet," said the Dead Man in gentle denial. "Not till you can _see_ me."

The boy reached out for another cake. Still looking straight ahead where he imagined his unseen protector might be, he asked:

"What did you come back for, Mynheer Grimm? Wasn't it nice where you went?"

"Oh, yes! Beyond all belief, dear lad. But I had to come back. Willem, do you think you could take a message for me? Listen very carefully now. Because I want you to remember every word of it. I want you to try to understand. You are to tell Miss Kathrien----"

"It's too bad you died before you could go to the circus, Mynheer Grimm," broke in Willem, munching the cake.

"Willem," persisted the Dead Man, patiently starting his plan of campaign all over again from another angle, "there must be a great many things you remember,--things that happened when you lived with your mother. Aren't there?"

"I was very little," hesitated Willem, echoing a phrase he had once heard Marta use in speaking of his earlier days.

"Still," pursued the Dead Man, "you remember?"

"I--I was afraid," replied the boy, groping back in the blurred past for a fact and seizing on a gruesomely prominent one.

"Try to think back to that time," urged Peter Grimm. "You loved--_her_?"

"Oh, I _did_ love Anne Marie!" exclaimed the child.

"Now," pointed out the Dead Man, "through that one little miracle of love you can remember many things that are tucked away in the back of your baby brain. Hey? Things that a single spark could kindle and light up and make clear to you. It comes back? Think! There were you--and Anne Marie----"

"And the Other One," suggested Willem on impulse.

"So! And who was the 'Other One'?"

"I'm afraid----" babbled the child.

And again the Dead Man shifted the form of his questions to quiet the nervous dread that had sprung into the big eyes.

"Willem," said he, "what would you rather see than anything else in all this world? Think. Something that every little boy loves?"

"I--I like the circus," hazarded Willem, setting his tired wits to work at this possible conundrum, "and the clowns, and----"

He hesitated. Peter Grimm motioned toward the photograph's fragments on the desk.

"----and my mother," finished the boy.

Then, his gaze following the Dead Man's gesture, he caught sight of part of a pictured face, torn diagonally across. With a cry he picked it up.

"Why," he exclaimed, "there she is! There's her face,--part of it. And," fumbling among the torn bits of cardboard, "there's the other part. It's a picture of Anne Marie. All torn up."

"It would be fun to put it together," suggested Peter Grimm, "the way you did with those picture puzzles I got you once. Suppose we try?"

The idea caught the child's fancy. With knitted brows and puckered lips he bent over the desk and began the task of piecing the scraps into a whole.

"That's right," approved the Dead Man. "Put it all together until the picture is all perfect.--See, there's the bit you are looking for to finish off the shoulder,--and then we must show it to everybody in the house, and set them all to thinking."

With an apprehensive glance over his shoulder toward the front door Willem proceeded more hurriedly with his work of joining the strewn pieces.

"I must get it put together before _he_ comes back," he muttered.

"Ah!" mutely rejoiced the Dean Man, "I'm making you think about _him_ at last! I'll succeed in getting your mind to connect him with Anne Marie by the time the others----"


"'Uncle Rat has gone to town! Ha.-_H'M!_'"


chanted Willem under his breath as his fingers moved from part to part of the nearly completed picture. "'_To buy his niece a wedding gown._'--There's her hand!" he interrupted himself as an elusive scrap of the photograph was at last discovered and put into place.

Peter Grimm's eyes were fixed on the door of Kathrien's room in a compelling stare.

"Her other hand!" mused Willem. "'_What shall the wedding breakfast be? Ha-H'M! What shall the----?_' Where's--here's the last two parts. There! It's _done_! Oh, Anne Marie! Mamma! I----"

The door of Kathrien's room opened. The girl, under a spell of the Dead Man's will, came out to the banisters.


CHAPTER XVI


THE "SENSITIVE"

Kathrien, looking down into the firelit room, saw the white-clad boy starting up in triumph with his work.

"Why, Willem!" she cried, dumfounded at sight of the invalid out of bed at such an hour. "What are you doing down there? You ought to----"

"Oh, Miss Kathrien!" exclaimed the child, pointing toward the picture. "Come down, quick!"

"You mustn't get out of bed like this when you're ill," gently reproved Kathrien. "I had a feeling that you weren't in your room. That is why I came out to look. Come----"

"But, look!" insisted Willem, pointing again at the picture puzzle he had so painstakingly pieced together. "Look, Miss Kathrien!"

"Come, dear!" admonished Kathrien. "You must not play down there. Wait a minute, and I'll make your bed again. It will be more comfortable for you if it's made over. Then you must come right upstairs."

She went to the sick room and set to work with deft speed rearranging the tumbled sheets and smoothing the rumpled pillows. Willem looked down at his disregarded picture and his lip trembled. He gazed about the room in the hope of seeing Peter Grimm. He strained his keen ears for sound of the Dead Man's gentle, comforting voice.

But Peter Grimm was looking fixedly toward the dining-room door. And in a moment it opened and Mrs. Batholommey bustled in.

"I thought I heard some one call," observed the rector's wife for the benefit of any one who might be in the half-lighted room.

Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she espied Willem.

"_Why!_" she cackled. "Of all things! You naughty, _naughty_ child! You ought to be in bed and asleep!"

Willem shrank under the rebuke, but a touch of Peter Grimm's hand and a whispered word of encouragement braced him to reply:

"Old Mynheer Grimm's come back."

In the midst of her tirade Mrs. Batholommey stopped, open-mouthed. She stared at the boy in dismay. His face, as well as his voice, was unperturbed. He had stated merely what seemed to him a perfectly natural but very welcome truth. He had supposed she would be pleased, not petrified. He had told her the news in the hope of averting a scolding. But she did not seem to take it in the sense of his simple declaration. So he repeated it.