For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that
his patient might slip through his hands, do what he
might. But she did not. On the contrary, after that she
recovered very rapidly. As her father remarked, she must
have inherited the "constitution" which he was never tired
of admiring in her mother.
One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the
doctor found Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed
in the parlor. The sunlight was pouring in over her shoulders,
the baby was asleep on a pillow in a big rocking-chair beside
her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand and rocked
him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy fore-
head and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The
door into her mother's room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg
was sitting up in bed darning stockings. She was a short,
stalwart woman, with a short neck and a determined-looking
head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm and unwrinkled,
and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl's. She was a woman whom
Dr. Archie respected; active, practical, unruffled; good-
humored, but determined. Exactly the sort of woman to
take care of a flighty preacher. She had brought her hus-
band some property, too,--one fourth of her father's broad
acres in Nebraska,--but this she kept in her own name.
She had profound respect for her husband's erudition and
eloquence. She sat under his preaching with deep humility,
and was as much taken in by his stiff shirt and white neck-
ties as if she had not ironed them herself by lamplight the
night before they appeared correct and spotless in the pul-
pit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his adminis-
tration of worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning
prayers and grace at table; she expected him to name the
babies and to supply whatever parental sentiment there
was in the house, to remember birthdays and anniver-
saries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals.
It was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and
their conduct in some sort of order, and this she accom-
plished with a success that was a source of wonder to her
neighbors. As she used to remark, and her husband ad-
miringly to echo, she "had never lost one." With all his
flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact,
punctual way in which his wife got her children into the
world and along in it. He believed, and he was right in
believing, that the sovereign State of Colorado was much
indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.
Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was
decided in heaven. More modern views would not have
startled her; they would simply have seemed foolish--
thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built the tower
of Babel, or like Axel's plan to breed ostriches in the chicken
yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her
opinions on this and other matters, it would have been
difficult to say, but once formed, they were unchangeable.
She would no more have questioned her convictions than
she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even-
tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong pre-
judices, and she never forgave.
When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg
was reflecting that the washing was a week behind, and de-
ciding what she had better do about it. The arrival of a
new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic schedule,
and as she drove her needle along she had been working out
new sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor
had entered the house without knocking, after making
noise enough in the hall to prepare his patients. Thea
was reading, her book propped up before her in the sun-
light.
"Mustn't do that; bad for your eyes," he said, as Thea
shut the book quickly and slipped it under the covers.
Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: "Bring the baby
here, doctor, and have that chair. She wanted him in there
for company."
Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow
paper bag down on Thea's coverlid and winked at her.
They had a code of winks and grimaces. When he went in
to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag cautiously,
trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch
of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they
had been packed still clinging to them. They were called
Malaga grapes in Moonstone, and once or twice during the
winter the leading grocer got a keg of them. They were
used mainly for table decoration, about Christmas-time.
Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.
When the doctor came back she was holding the almost
transparent fruit up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green
skins softly with the tips of her fingers. She did not thank
him; she only snapped her eyes at him in a special way
which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand,
put it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were
trying to do so without knowing it--and without his
knowing it.
Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. "And how's
Thea feeling to-day?"
He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a
third person overheard his conversation. Big and hand-
some and superior to his fellow townsmen as Dr. Archie
was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter Kronborg
he often dodged behind a professional manner. There
was sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self-
consciousness all over his big body, which made him awk-
ward--likely to stumble, to kick up rugs, or to knock over
chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot himself, but he
had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.
Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with
pleasure. "All right. I like to be sick. I have more fun then
than other times."
"How's that?"
"I don't have to go to school, and I don't have to prac-
tice. I can read all I want to, and have good things,"--
she patted the grapes. "I had lots of fun that time I
mashed my finger and you wouldn't let Professor Wunsch
make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then.
I think that was mean."
The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger,
where the nail had grown back a little crooked. "You
mustn't trim it down close at the corner there, and then it
will grow straight. You won't want it crooked when you're
a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts."
She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his
new scarf-pin. "That's the prettiest one you ev-ER had.
I wish you'd stay a long while and let me look at it. What
is it?"
Dr. Archie laughed. "It's an opal. Spanish Johnny
brought it up for me from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it
set in Denver, and I wore it to-day for your benefit."
Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted
every shining stone she saw, and in summer she was always
going off into the sand hills to hunt for crystals and agates
and bits of pink chalcedony. She had two cigar boxes full
of stones that she had found or traded for, and she imagined
that they were of enormous value. She was always plan-
ning how she would have them set.
"What are you reading?" The doctor reached under the
covers and pulled out a book of Byron's poems. "Do you
like this?"
She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly,
and pointed to "My native land, good-night." "That,"
she said sheepishly.
"How about `Maid of Athens'?"
She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. "I like
'There was a sound of revelry,'" she muttered.
The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily
bound in padded leather and had been presented to the
Reverend Peter Kronborg by his Sunday-School class as
an ornament for his parlor table.
"Come into the office some day, and I'll lend you a nice
book. You can skip the parts you don't understand. You
can read it in vacation. Perhaps you'll be able to under-
stand all of it by then."
Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano.
"In vacation I have to practice four hours every day, and
then there'll be Thor to take care of." She pronounced it
"Tor."
"Thor? Oh, you've named the baby Thor?" exclaimed
the doctor.
Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly,
"That's a nice name, only maybe it's a little--old-
fashioned." She was very sensitive about being thought a
foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her
father always preached in English; very bookish English,
at that, one might add.
Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter
Kronborg had been sent to a small divinity school in
Indiana by the women of a Swedish evangelical mission,
who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and
begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth
through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swed-
ish to exhort and to bury the members of his country
church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moon-
stone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he
had learned out of books at college. He always spoke
of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc. The
poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech. If
he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticu-
late. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due
to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book-
learned language, wholly remote from anything personal,
native, or homely. Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her
own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial
English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather sensitive
ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in
monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was
tongue-tied. She was still inept in speech for a child so
intelligent. Her ideas were usually clear, but she seldom
attempted to explain them, even at school, where she
excelled in "written work" and never did more than mutter
a reply.
"Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day
and asked me how you were," said the doctor, rising.
"He'll be sick himself, trotting around in this slush with
no overcoat or overshoes."
"He's poor," said Thea simply.
The doctor sighed. "I'm afraid he's worse than that.
Is he always all right when you take your lessons? Never
acts as if he'd been drinking?"
Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly. "He knows a
lot. More than anybody. I don't care if he does drink;
he's old and poor." Her voice shook a little.
Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room. "He's a
good teacher, doctor. It's good for us he does drink. He'd
never be in a little place like this if he didn't have some
weakness. These women that teach music around here
don't know nothing. I wouldn't have my child wasting
time with them. If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea'll
have nobody to take from. He's careful with his scholars;
he don't use bad language. Mrs. Kohler is always present
when Thea takes her lesson. It's all right." Mrs. Kronborg
spoke calmly and judicially. One could see that she had
thought the matter out before.
"I'm glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg. I wish we could
get the old man off his bottle and keep him tidy. Do you
suppose if I gave you an old overcoat you could get him to
wear it?" The doctor went to the bedroom door and Mrs.
Kronborg looked up from her darning.
"Why, yes, I guess he'd be glad of it. He'll take most
anything from me. He won't buy clothes, but I guess he'd
wear 'em if he had 'em. I've never had any clothes to give
him, having so many to make over for."
"I'll have Larry bring the coat around to-night. You
aren't cross with me, Thea?" taking her hand.
Thea grinned warmly. "Not if you give Professor
Wunsch a coat--and things," she tapped the grapes sig-
nificantly. The doctor bent over and kissed her.
Read next: PART I - FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD#Chapter 3
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