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 any one 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 to-day. 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 wakened 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 some one 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.”
