The Story of Dago

Chapter 4

THE TALE THE MIRROR-MONKEY HEARD ON THURSDAY.

The day that Phil was able to go back to school was an unlucky one for me. It was so dolefully quiet everywhere. After he had gone, I slipped down-stairs on the banister, but the blinds were drawn in the parlour and dining-room, and it was so still that the only sound to be heard was the slow ticking of the great clock in the hall. When it gave a loud br-r-r and began to strike, I was so startled by the sudden noise that I nearly lost my balance and turned a somersault over the railing.

Then I saw Miss Patricia pass through the hall with her bonnet on, going out for a morning walk, and I thought it would be a fine time for me to explore her room. It is full of interesting things that I had never been permitted to touch, for when the boys were allowed to take me into Miss Patricia's room, it was always on condition that I should be made to play little Jack Horner and sit in some corner under a chair or table.

So as soon as the door closed behind her I hurried up-stairs to her room. I had the best time that morning. There were all sorts of little bottles on her wash-stand with good-smelling stuff in them. I pulled out the corks and emptied some of the bottles into the bowl to make that smell good, too. Then I washed my teeth with her little silver-handled toothbrush, just as Phil does every morning, and put the sponges to soak in the water-pitcher.

After awhile I found the cut-glass vinaigrette that Miss Patricia carries around with her. I have seen her use it a hundred times at least, tipping back the silver lid, taking out the little glass stopper, and holding it to her nose with the remark that she never smelled more refreshing salts. I have wanted very much to try it myself. So now that I had the chance I did just as she does,--tipped back the lid, pulled out the stopper, and took a long, deep smell. Whew! It almost upset me. I thought it must be fire and brimstone that she had bottled up in there. It brought the tears to my eyes, and took my breath for a minute so I had to sit and gasp. Then I dropped the vinaigrette in the slop-jar and jumped down from the wash-stand.

Her high, old-fashioned bureau tempted me next. There were rows and rows of pins in a big blue pincushion, put in as evenly as if it had been done by a machine. I pulled them out, one by one, and dropped them down behind the bureau. It took some time to do that, but at last the blue cushion was empty, and I sat down on it to examine the jewel-case at my leisure. I found the prettiest things in it; an open-faced locket, set around with pearls, with the picture of a beautiful young girl in it; a string of bright coral beads, and a little carnelian ring, and a gold dollar hung on a faded ribbon.

I forgot to tell you that Miss Patricia's bay window is full of flowers, and that she has a mocking-bird hanging in a cage above the wire stand that holds her ferns and foliage plants. The mocking-bird's name is d**k. Now d**k hadn't paid any attention to me until I opened the jewel-case. As I did so I knocked a hairbrush off the bureau to the floor, which must have frightened him, for he began to cry out as if something had caught hold of him. Then he whistled, as if he were calling a dog. You have no idea what a racket he made. I was afraid that some of the servants might hear him and come to see what was the matter. Then, of course, I would be turned out of the room before I had finished examining all the pretty things. I turned around and shook my fist at him and chattered at him as savagely as I knew how, but he kept on, first making that hoarse cry and then whistling as if calling to a dog.

I determined to stop him in some way or another, so, not waiting to put down the gold dollar or the little carnelian ring, which were tightly clenched in one hand, I sprang down from the bureau. Running up the wire flower-stand below the cage, I shook my fist directly under his beak. It only made him noisier than ever, and he flew about the cage like something crazy.

"Be still, won't you? you silly thing!" I shrieked, and in my desperation I made a grab through the bars at his tail-feathers. A whole handful came out, and that seemed to make him wilder than before. He beat himself against the top of the cage and screamed so loud that I thought it would be better to leave before any one heard him and came in.

So I jumped across to the cabinet near the window, where the big blue dragon sat. Then I remembered the sugar-plums inside and stopped for just one taste. I lifted off the dragon's ugly head and was reaching my hand down inside for one of those delicious sweetmeats, when in walked Miss Patricia. My! I was scared! I hadn't expected her back so soon.

I dropped the dragon's old blue head on the floor and was out of the window like a shot. There was a cedar-tree reaching up past the window, and I ran out on one of the limbs and hid myself among its thick branches. I could see her but she couldn't see me. She walked all around the room, and looked at the wash-stand and the bureau and at d**k's tail-feathers scattered among the window-plants and then at the blue dragon's head, smashed all to bits on the floor. Then she picked up the locket, lying face downwards on the rug, and began searching for the other things that had been in the jewel-case. I suppose it was the carnelian ring and the gold dollar with the hole in it that she missed. I opened my hand, remembering that I had had them when I went to hush up that noisy mocking-bird. I must have dropped them when I jumped from the window into the cedar-tree. While I was hanging over the limb, peering down to see if I could catch a glimpse of them on the ground below, the housemaid, Nora, came into the room in answer to Miss Patricia's ring. A few minutes after, Doctor Tremont followed.

Nora and the doctor walked around and around the room, looking at everything, as Miss Patricia had done, and hunting for the things that were missing, but Miss Patricia sat down in a high-backed chair against the wall, and cried.

"I cannot stand it any longer," she sobbed. Her old face was quivering, there was a bright red spot on each cheek, and her side-curls were trembling with excitement. "I have put up with that little beast until I can endure it no longer. Patience has ceased to be a virtue. Either it must go, or I shall. Look at d**k! His heart is beating itself almost out of his poor little body, he is so frightened. And there's that china dragon, that has been a family heirloom for generations,--all broken! And my precious little keepsakes, that I have cherished since childhood, all scattered or lost! Oh, Tom, you do not know how cruelly it hurts me!"

I felt sorry, then. I wanted to cry out, as Stuart had done when he shot his great-great-grandfather's portrait, "Oh, Aunt Patricia, I'm so sorry! It was an accident. I didn't mean to do it, truly I didn't mean to!" But she couldn't understand monkey language, and man's speech has been denied us, so I only hugged the limb closer and watched in silence.

I stayed in that tree all day. The boys came home from school, and called and called me, but I kept as still as a mouse. It was not until long after dark that I crawled up the lightning-rod and slipped through the window into my room in the attic. Phil found me there the next morning when he began his search again. He squeezed me until I ached, he was so glad to see me. Then he and Elsie brought me my breakfast and sat on the floor, half crying as they watched me eat, for the order had gone forth that I must be sent away. The doctor could forgive his boys when they did wrong, but he couldn't make any allowance for me.

"I think it's too bad that we have to give up the very nicest pet we ever had, just because Aunt Patricia don't like him," exclaimed Phil, mournfully. "Dago didn't do much mischief that can't be mended. Carnelian rings are as cheap as anything. Nora said so. It would be easy enough to get her another one as good as the one Dago lost, and I'd be only too glad to give her my big silver dollar in place of the gold one. That would be better than the one she had before, for mine hasn't any hole in it. d**k's tail-feathers will grow out again, and everything could be fixed as good as new except the old blue dragon, and he was too ugly to make a fuss about, anyhow!"

"He always had good sugar-plums in him, though," said little Elsie, who had had her full share of them, and who had so many sweet memories of the dragon that she looked upon it as a friend.

"I don't care! I love Dago a thousand times more than she could possibly love an old piece of china or a gold dollar with a hole in it. I wouldn't take a hundred dollars for Dago, and Aunt Patricia is a mean old thing to make papa say that we have to give him up. I wished I dared tell her so. I should like to stand outside her door and holler at the top of my voice:

"Old Aunt Pat

You're mean as a rat!"

"Why, Philip Tremont!" cried Elsie, in a shocked voice. "Something awful will happen to you if you talk that way. She isn't just your aunt, she's your great-aunt, too, in the bargain, and she's an old, old lady."

"Well, I would!" insisted Phil. "I don't care what you say." Just then a faint sound of music, far-away down the street, but steadily coming nearer, floated up the attic stairs. The children ran to the window to listen, hanging recklessly out over the sill.

"It's a grind-organ man!" cried Elsie, "and he's got a monkey."

"I wonder how Dago would act if he were to see one of his own family," said Phil. "Come on, let's take him down and see."

He grabbed me up excitedly, regardless of the fact that I had not finished my breakfast, and was still clinging to a half-eaten banana. Tucking me under his arm, he went clattering down the steep attic stairs, calling Elsie to follow. Running across the upper hall, he slid down the banister of the next flight of stairs, that being the quickest way to reach the front door and the street. Elsie was close behind. She slid down the banister after him, her chubby legs held stiffly out at each side, and the buttons on her jacket making a long zigzag scratch under her, as she shot down the dark, polished rail.

A crowd of children had stopped on the curbstone in front of the house, shivering a little in the pale autumn sunshine, but laughing and pushing each other as they gathered closer around the man with the hand-organ. As the wheezy notes were ground out, the man unwound the rope that was coiled around his wrist, and bade the monkey at the other end of it step out and dance.

"Come on, Dago! Come shake hands with the other monkey!" the children cried. But I shrank back as far as possible, clinging to Phil's neck. Not for a fortune would I have touched the miserable little animal crouching on the organ. She might have been Matches's own sister, from her resemblance to her. She belonged to the same species, I am sure, and whenever they held me near her I shrieked and scolded so fiercely that Phil finally said that I shouldn't be teased.

The man who held the string was a hard master. One could plainly see that. He had a dark, cruel face, and he jerked the rope and swore at her in Italian whenever she stopped dancing, which she did every few seconds. He had started on his rounds early, in order to attract as many children as possible before school-time, and I doubt if the poor little thing had had any breakfast. She was sick besides. She would dance a few steps and then cower down and tremble, and look at him so appealingly, that only a brute could have had the heart to strike her as he did. When he found that all his jerking was in vain, he gave her several hard blows with the other end of the rope. At that she staggered up and began to dance again, but it was not long until she was huddled down on the curbstone as before, shaking as if with a chill.

Oh, how I wished that I could be a human being for a few minutes! A big strong man with a rope in my hands, and that fellow tied to one end of it. Wouldn't I make him dance? Wouldn't I jerk him and scold him and beat him, and give him a taste of how it feels to be a helpless animal, sick and suffering, in the power of a great ugly brute like himself?

Maybe he would not have been so rough if he had known that any one besides the children was looking on. He did not see the gentleman standing at the open front door across the street, watching him with a frown on his face. He did not see him, as I did, walk back into the hall and turn the crank of an alarm-signal. But in less than two minutes, it seemed to me, that same gentleman was coming across the street with the policeman he had summoned. A few words passed between them, and almost before the children knew what was happening, the policeman had the organ-grinder by the arm, and was marching him off down the street. The gentleman who had caused the arrest followed with the poor trembling monkey.

"That's the president of the society for preventin' you bein' cruel to animals," explained one of the larger boys to the crowd of children. "You dasn't hurt a fly when he is around. Lucky for the monk that the man happened to stop in front of his house this mornin'. Come on, lets see what they do with it."

The children trooped off after him, and Phil and Elsie watched them down the street until they were out of sight, pushing and tripping at each other's heels in their eagerness to follow.

Then Phil climbed up on one of the gate-posts with me in his arms, and Elsie promptly scrambled up to the other.

"That's what might happen to Dago any day, sister," Phil said, in a solemn voice, as he hugged me tight. If we give him up, some old organ-grinder may get him, and beat him and beat him, and be cruel to him, and I'm just not going to let anybody have him. I'll hide him somewhere so nobody can find him."

"Trouble is he won't stay hid," answered Elsie, with a mournful look in her big blue eyes. "We'll have to think of some other plan."

It was a cold morning, but there they perched on the gate-posts, and thought and thought until the school-bell began to ring.