If she had been friends with Colin she would have run to show him her presents at once, and they would have looked at the pictures and read some of the gardening books and perhaps tried playing the games, and he would have enjoyed himself so much he would never once have thought he was going to die or have put his hand on his spine to see if there was a lump coming. He had a way of doing that which she could not bear. It gave her an uncomfortable frightened feeling because he always looked so frightened himself. He said that if he felt even quite a little lump some day he should know his hunch had begun to grow. Something he had heard Mrs. Medlock whispering to the nurse had given him the idea and he had thought over it in secret until it was quite firmly fixed in his mind. Mrs. Medlock had said his father’s back had begun to show its crookedness in that way when he was a child. He had never told anyone but Mary that most of his “tantrums” as they called them grew out of his hysterical hidden fear. Mary had been sorry for him when he had told her.
“He always began to think about it when he was cross or tired,” she said to herself. “And he has been cross today.Perhaps—perhaps he has been thinking about it all afternoon. ”
She stood still, looking down at the carpet and thinking.
“I said I would never go back again—” she hesitated,knitting her brows—“but perhaps, just perhaps,I will go and see—if he wants me—in the morning.Perhaps he’ll try to throw his pillow at me again,but—I think—I’ll go.”
CHAPTER XVII. A TANTRUM
She had got up very early in the morning and had worked hard in the garden and she was tired and sleepy, so as soon as Martha had brought her supper and she had eaten it, she was glad to go to bed. As she laid her head on the pillow she murmured to herself:
“I’ll go out before breakfast and work with Dickon and then afterward—I believe—I’ll go to see him.”
She thought it was the middle of the night when she was awakened by such dreadful sounds that she jumped out of bed in an instant. What was it—what was it?The next minute she felt quite sure she knew.Doors were opened and shut and there were hurrying feet in the corridors and someone was crying and screaming at the same time, screaming and crying in a horrible way.
“It’s Colin,” she said.“He’s having one of those tantrums the nurse called hysterics.How awful it sounds.”
As she listened to the sobbing screams she did not wonder that people were so frightened that they gave him his own way in everything rather than hear them. She put her hands over her ears and felt sick and shivering.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,” she kept saying. “I can’t bear it.”
Once she wondered if he would stop if she dared go to him and then she remembered how he had driven her out of the room and thought that perhaps the sight of her might make him worse. Even when she pressed her hands more tightly over her ears she could not keep the awful sounds out. She hated them so and was so terrified by them that suddenly they began to make her angry and she felt as if she should like to fly into a tantrum herself and frighten him as he was frightening her. She was not used to anyone’s tempers but her own. She took her hands from her ears and sprang up and stamped her foot.
“He ought to be stopped!Somebody ought to make him stop!Somebody ought to beat him!” she cried out.
Just then she heard feet almost running down the corridor and her door opened and the nurse came in. She was not laughing now by any means. She even looked rather pale.
“He’s worked himself into hysterics,” she said in a great hurry. “He’ll do himself harm.No one can do anything with him. You come and try,like a good child. He likes you.”
“He turned me out of the room this morning,” said Mary,stamping her foot with excitement.
The stamp rather pleased the nurse.The truth was that she had been afraid she might find Mary crying and hiding her head under the bed-clothes.
“That’s right,” she said. “You’re in the right humor.You go and scold him.Give him something new to think of. Do go, child,as quick as ever you can.”
It was not until afterward that Mary realized that the thing had been funny as well as dreadful—that it was funny that all the grown-up people were so frightened that they came to a little girl just because they guessed she was almost as bad as Colin himself.
She flew along the corridor and the nearer she got to the screams the higher her temper mounted. She felt quite wicked by the time she reached the door. She slapped it open with her hand and ran across the room to the four-posted bed.
“You stop!” she almost shouted. “You stop!I hate you!Everybody hates you!I wish everybody would run out of the house and let you scream yourself to death!You _will_ scream yourself to death in a minute,and I wish you would!”
A nice sympathetic child could neither have thought nor said such things,but it just happened that the shock of hearing them was the best possible thing for this hysterical boy whom no one had ever dared to restrain or contradict.
He had been lying on his face beating his pillow with his hands and he actually almost jumped around, he turned so quickly at the sound of the furious little voice. His face looked dreadful, white and red and swollen, and he was gasping and choking; but savage little Mary did not care an atom.
“If you scream another scream,” she said,“I’ll scream too—and I can scream louder than you can and I’ll frighten you, I’ll frighten you!”
He actually had stopped screaming because she had startled him so.The scream which had been coming almost choked him.The tears were streaming down his face and he shook all over.
“I can’t stop!” he gasped and sobbed. “I can’t—I can’t!”
“You can!” shouted Mary. “Half that ails you is hysterics and temper—just hysterics—hysterics—hysterics!” and she stamped each time she said it.
“I felt the lump—I felt it,” choked out Colin.“I knew I should. I shall have a hunch on my back and then I shall die,” and he began to writhe again and turned on his face and sobbed and wailed but he didn’t scream.
“You didn’t feel a lump!” contradicted Mary fiercely.“If you did it was only a hysterical lump.Hysterics makes lumps.There’s nothing the matter with your horrid back—nothing but hysterics!Turn over and let me look at it!”
She liked the word “hysterics” and felt somehow as if it had an effect on him.He was probably like herself and had never heard it before.
“Nurse,” she commanded,“come here and show me his back this minute!”
The nurse, Mrs. Medlock and Martha had been standing huddled together near the door staring at her, their mouths half open. All three had gasped with fright more than once. The nurse came forward as if she were half afraid. Colin was heaving with great breathless sobs.
“Perhaps he—he won’t let me,” she hesitated in a low voice.
Colin heard her, however,and he gasped out between two sobs:
“Sh-show her!She-she’ll see then!”
It was a poor thin back to look at when it was bared.Every rib could be counted and every joint of the spine,though Mistress Mary did not count them as she bent over and examined them with a solemn savage little face. She looked so sour and old-fashioned that the nurse turned her head aside to hide the twitching of her mouth. There was just a minute’s silence, for even Colin tried to hold his breath while Mary looked up and down his spine, and down and up, as intently as if she had been the great doctor from London.
“There’s not a single lump there!” she said at last. “There’s not a lump as big as a pin—except backbone lumps,and you can only feel them because you’re thin.I’ve got backbone lumps myself,and they used to stick out as much as yours do,until I began to get fatter,and I am not fat enough yet to hide them.There’s not a lump as big as a pin!If you ever say there is again, I shall laugh!”