The Gloves of Gregan McAlister

HEY were tan, rather light in shade, and stitched with black. They fastened with clasps instead of buttons, and lay in soft, white, tissue paper, palm to palm, with the uncreated thumbs folded inwards.

Gregan was face downward on the hearthrug, devouring that portion of his school magazine devoted to football, when Mrs. McAlister drew them forth from her silver-clasped shopping bag, and bespoke his attention. He gave it willingly enough, rose to his feet and went over to the table where she sat, his wholesome young face wearing its usual happy expression.

"Well, little Mum?" he said.

His mother did not meet his frank eyes, her gaze lifted itself only to where his young mouth showed lines of firmness lacking in her own. "I have brought you a pair of nice new gloves, Gregan," she said.

Besides the conciliatory tone that helped on the two little adjectives, there was a note of nervous aggression in her voice.

All the light dropped out of the boy's eyes; there came a curious expression to his face, an expression, half of compelled patience, half of despair. "Why did you do that, mother? " he said, his voice low. The delicate prettiness of her face broke up, the mouth grew fretful, little peevish wrinkles marked the forehead.

"I might have known what it would be," she said, "I might have remembered the kind of son I had—always a disappointment to me, thwarting me always, never the comfort some women's boys are to them." Her hand fluttered into her bag for the square of hem-stitched cambric her eyes would presently need.

Gregan flushed with boyish impatience. "What on earth extra comfort can a fellow be by sticking his hands in those fools of things?" he demanded. So great was his swift irritation at her words, he forgot he spoke in the unsoftened tone that invariably shattered his mother's nerves. She dissolved instantly, and sought the comfort of the cambric handkerchief. She spoke, with little sobbing breaths, of his cruelty, his thoughtlessness, his ingratitude, his utter want of affection for her.

Flossie ran over from the window seat, and her doll's kitchen; little, childish, pretty, overdressed Flossie. She put her dear, small arms round her mother and tried to comfort her weeping. "Cwuel Gweg," she said. "Oh! cwuel Gweg, to make mamma cry."

Greg looked away from them both. He put his hands in his pockets and sat own in the arm-chair in front of the fire, with his legs crossed, and the same queer little patient wrinkle on his brow that was so often upon his step-father's. He did not speak at all nor in any way interrupt his mother's broken reproaches; he fixed his eyes on a particularly glowing coal and reviewed various past scenes in his life.

Though he was ten now he remembered, as well as if it had been yesterday, the time when he was seven, and wore loathed curls. Long, light, dangling, girlish things that blew out with the wind when he ran, and got into his eyes, and made the street boys jeer. He remembered a whole year's unhappiness about them, the tears on both sides, the constant quarrelling, and how his step-father, generally so loth to interfere with the domestic government of his home, had shielded him from punishment, carried him off himself to a barber's, and ordered shears and an ordinary little round, boy-like head. Even now, with all the width of years between, he could remember that her tearful voice had sounded then just as it did now.

Further back still was a time that stood clearly out above all the happy jumble of play-days and school-days and sleep time. It had to do with a suit, the material of which was velvet, the trimmings pearl buttons, the collar lace, the sash pale primrose silk, tied at the side in the way the Little Lord Fauntleroy style demands. He was six when he was expected to go abroad in it—six, and a schoolboy—six, and possessed of the sensitive, sturdy, queer little complex soul that belongs to that number of years. There was no such suit in all the school. He used to look at the strong serges and serviceable tweeds of the other boys with a heart bursting with envy. A week he wore it; then he lay deliberately down in a gutter where a wide, muddy stream leapt joyously, and returned with lightened spirit to his home.

He gazed at the coals to-night, and remembered with strangely-clear vision the domestic scene it had evoked. Again the unwilling head of the house had been called in to interfere. Greg remembered he had received a paternal thrashing for destroying the clothes with which he had been provided, but he also remembered through all those years how little it had hurt, and how kind were his step-father's eyes; moreover, that he had never been required to wear fancy costume again. After this there had been a long lapse of untroubled time, for Flossie had considerately come out of long clothes to lend herself, far more delightfully than he had ever done, to picturesque dressing.

But just lately the suburb where they dwelt had seen the advent of a titled lady, who almost always took a yellow-haired little laddie with her when she went visiting. And the little laddie invariably wore gloves, handed round cake-baskets with the grace of a little prince, and bore himself in a way that charmed all hearts.

Mrs. McAlister had conceived the idea of taking Gregan calling, and as a first step had invested in a pair of boy's gloves—Dent's best, size six-and-a-quarter.

"I'll get him to stand by me," Greg said to himself, his thoughts leaping to the grave, strong father who seemed to have picked up the knack of doctoring souls during his long years of doctoring bodies. But Flossie had fallen asleep on the sofa in her little pink dressing-gown, and he himself had been sent off to bed in disgrace before the busy Doctor came in from his rounds.

The little warmed-up dinner was served to the accompaniment of the tale of Greg's insubordination. The very recital induced fresh tears.

The Doctor sighed, sympathised secretly with his unfortunate little step-son, and when he had finished his cutlet, and his wife's tears seemed exhausted, did his best to show her the unnecessary cruelty of the thing. But the tears sprang forth again.

The boy was h«r own, he was reminded, not his at all. Surely she might be allowed some little authority with her own son. The incident of the curls was recalled, of the Fauntleroy suit; was he always going to show the boy her powerlessness?

The only concession he could obtain was that the tan subjects of discoid should not be expected to be worn on any but state occasions, and those only in the holidays.

"Though what earthly use you can find in dragging a shy and awkward schoolboy about with you," said the Doctor, "passes my imagination. He will only knock the tables over and tread on the women's toes. Surely Flossie answers the purpose sufficiently—or there is the poodle I bought you."

He was bidden remember that Flossie's front teeth were lacking, and her beauty spoiled for the present; the poodle suggestion was disdained with scorn, slightly hysterical. He was informed that Lady Featherstone always took Wilhelm with her; and he must own, blind though he usually was to such things, that Greg was a far handsomer lad.

The Doctor went upstairs vanquished, but filled with wonder at the curious intricacies of the feminine mind.

The candle was still burning in Greg's little room. The boy was in bed, blinking manfully at a patch of light on the ceiling in order to keep awake.

"I got a 'touch,' father," was his first speech, excitement in it; "they're thinking of making me quarter-back in the B's."

He had been forced to bottle up the great news till now, knowing there was none other in the house to understand and sympathise. The Doctor sat down on the bed-edge, and talked football as an enthusiast might. He was a thin man, tall to lankiness. His eyes were keen and steadfast, his nose prominent. When he smiled you saw his mouth was out of drawing, but the strongest and sweetest in the world.

Little Greg poured at his feet all the passionate hero-worship of a ten-year-old nature ever flung back on itself.

"There was a fellow I knew," said the Doctor—"a fellow with a physique that made everyone else in the field look like pigmies. I remember in one of the matches, Greg, he—his name was"

"Jenkins, of Magdalen," Greg said softly, his eyes bright. "Go on, I know; he was a stunner."

The Doctor gave a graphic account of this famous match that always made Greg's blood leap. The boy's spirits rose. He thumped the pillows at the exciting parts, he made the spring mattress creak and shiver with the way he kicked out his bare heels when Jenkins, of Magdalen, got that glorious goal. When the story ended he felt so light-hearted and happy it took him a minute to remember that all the sky of his life was darkened by reason of those gloves. He sat upright, and a glow came into his eyes.

"Look here," he said, "look here, that's just the sort of chap I want to be; and look here, father, have I to wear gloves? Oh, it's perfectly sickening just to think about it It!"

But the Doctor upheld his wife. Surely the hardship was not so very terrible just to have those brown, scratched little hands of his covered up while he was in the drawing-rooms of Society (with a capital S).

There was a lump in Greg's throat. "You don't understand," he said, his voice heavy; "it's the fellows—none of them do. Sometimes they say things about that awful suit even yet, and Wilkinson tells all the new fellows I've only just had my curls cut off. They'd see me stalking round in the blessed things, and being taken calling."

But the Doctor could give him no consolation. The gloves must be worn if his mother insisted, "but"—and he smiled the least little bit—"if you do it with a good grace, old fellow, for a few times the mother will soon get tired of the novelty and let you off."

Greg went to sleep miserable, and dreamed of a football match that all the world had come to see, and how, when he fought through a mass of heads and legs and arms, and seized the ball, gloves—light tan with black stitchings—were on his hands, and all the concourse of people saw them, and hissed and shouted "girl."

It was Easter holiday time, and consequently the afternoons were at the disposal of Mrs. McAlister. A new suit came from the tailor's—a particularly fanciful blue serge, with a blouse and anchor buttons; the sailor collar was silk—cream, thick silk. Greg begged, almost pitifully, that it might be removed; there was a serge one underneath. "Only girls and women wear silk," he said, with a flushed, beseeching face. But he was forced to wear it, and if anyone had told Mrs. McAlister that she was unkind to her boy she would have been filled with amazement. She even thought she was a good and patient mother, inasmuch as she hardly scolded him at all when he split beyond remedy two pairs of gloves in the bitter getting on of them, and had to be provided with a third pair. For three afternoons he walked by her side through the fashionable streets of the suburb. For three afternoons he followed after the tail of her dress into big drawing-rooms full of fine ladies, who insisted on kissing him and offering him cakes—with pink icing on—and talking down to him, and making remarks about his beauty, till he felt absolutely sick with the wretchedness of it all.

The third afternoon, returning home, he met a detachment of "the fellows," going off to football practice. He stuck his hated hands into his pockets, tilted his hat to spoil the bran-newness of his appearance, and had cold sensations down his back at the thought of the cream silk collar. But his enemy, Wilkinson, saw every detail, and conveyed the fact that he had done so to the unhappy lad by mincing along in his walk, and laboriously fitting on and buttoning invisible gloves.

Inside the drawing-room of their own house Mrs. McAlister had a feeling of surprise at the sight of her little son's face. He had been silent all the way home, and not having even seen the group of schoolboys, she was unprepared for any fresh disturbance. The lad's eyes blazed, his chest rose and fell, so many words came rushing to his tongue, his lips would pass none through.

"What is it now Gregan?" she said, a strong accent on the now. And Greg's discretion and obedience, and respect, fled away before the torrent of anger that swept over him. He tore off the hateful things; he sprung across the room to the bright leaping fire, and flung them into it; he grasped the twisted brass poker and poked them deep, deep into the heart of it. When he saw the swift shrivelling of them his heart swelled; he felt like a slave who has knocked off his fetters and become free by the act.

"I won't wear them any longer," he said. "I won't, I won't, I won't! I don't care what you say; I don't care what you do. I won't wear them again!"

Colour burnt scarlet on his cheeks and forehead. The excitement and fear of his sudden mutiny had driven him into one of the unreasoning fits of almost hysterical anger to which she gave way with exceeding frequency, but that he, less indulged, seldom had the courage to allow to rise. Long afterwards he used to look back to the quarter of an hour that followed with a kind of incredulous horror at himself. For he cast off all restraints and let himself go completely; he refused to go to bed, with loud defiance; he expressed himself glad when he was threatened with the strictest boarding-school in the colony; he fought the coachman, hurriedly summoned to capture him, fought and kicked him with the frantic energy of desperation. Once he flung himself free from the man's surprised arms, fell against a small table, ornament laden, picked himself up to an accompaniment of shivered glass, and fled away down the hall, instant thoughts of running away to sea in his head. But the cook and the housemaid joined in the coalition against him; one placed her substantial person against the gate, one grasped his cream silk collar with work-strong fingers and held him till the coachman came and bore him vanquished into his bedroom.

Dinner time arrived, two hours later than this. He had grown cool in the interval and fallen to speculating on his punishment, seated on the floor, his head against the bed. The tray placed silently on a chair destroyed one of his expectations; he looked for the bread and water fare of criminals, and the covered plates held curry, potatoes and peas, cabinet pudding and custard. He ate them sighing.

"Then it's going to be worse than this," he muttered. A thrashing was the smallest thing he feared, though there came a little lump in his throat when he remembered who the giver would have to be.

"And, of course, they'll stop me the school sports on Friday," he said, and tried to console himself with the thought that he deserved it, when he buried away the thought of the glorious afternoon he had looked forward to for half a year.

It was nine o'clock before his father's step came down the landing towards his loneliness. Flossie had been twice; once she had called "Naughty Gweg," through the keyhole, the second time she had administered sympathy in the shape of a half-sucked peppermint pushed under the door.

"I'm awfully sorry," he said, his voice low, shame and sorrow in his heart instantly.

He did not need reminding of the first thing that lay before him. He went down to the drawing-room and begged his mother's pardon; begged it humbly, earnestly, lovingly, his eyes suffused.

But she turned away from him coldly, she put aside the hand that caught beseechingly at her sleeve, she bade him go back to his room and think over his wickedness, and, if he dare, pray to be forgiven for it. "Some day," she said, "when she was lying cold and still in her coffin, he would wish he had caused her less unhappiness."

He crept back again, his heart bursting; he felt he had been wicked beyond anyone in the world; there was absolutely no atonement he would not have been glad to make; all the way up the thickly-carpeted staircases he saw a black coffin and his mother lying within—his mother with her beautiful face white as the sheet that shrouded her, and her eyelashes lying motionless against her cheeks.

"I will do anything," he sobbed, his head falling on his father's arm—"anything."

Then he learned his punishment—not a thrashing, not prison fare, not even the deprivation of seeing the sports on Friday. He was to go to them, his mother decreed, stay there to the end, and—wear a pair of gloves the whole of the time. He assented without a murmur.

But when Friday came the bitterness of the trial came upon him with fresh force. He was very quiet at lunch-time; he ate almost nothing, though raspberry tarts and fruit salad made the second course, and the maid waiting brought them round to him pityingly half-a-dozen times. He rose from the table and went to dress, his face oddly pale.

Feminine adornment occupied a longer time than his own; he went into the trim suburban garden and paced the paths, hands in pockets, while Flossie and his mother finished dressing. Quick, light wheels and the banging of the gates made his heart lighter; the busy Doctor had snatched a half-hour from his rounds just for the purpose of fortifying his little step-son for the afternoon's ordeal.

They walked the paths together, Greg taking two steps to his father's slow stride.

"No shirking, old fellow," said the Doctor. "No hiding your hands in your pocket; you must go through with it like a man."

Greg nodded.

"Don't be on the look-out for smiles and sneers—it's your business this—go through it with your head well up, and never mind about what the others are thinking." His hand pressed firmly on the young shoulder, giving courage. His sympathies were with the lad entirely; but he also saw the kind of dent the trial would make in the sweet plastic of his nature.

Then Mrs. McAlister came out, and Flossie followed, almost lost under the frills of her little pink parasol. Greg was handed his new gloves and donned them without a word. He looked back from the gate for a moment to his father—looked back and even tried to smile. His face had the look of a soldier led out to be shot and trying to look gallant.

The school-grounds were in gala dress; bunting floated from the dormitory windows, hung limp against the trees, twisted itself gaily in and out of the respectable brown ironwork of the verandah.

Even the grumpy, time-worn sergeant displayed the school colours in a bright knot on his coat and a suspicion of the school enthusiasm on his face.

Little boys in long ulsters rushed importantly about among the visitors, and flapped back those covering garments with careful carelessness to display the pink, orange, or blue running clothes beneath.

Bigger boys stood in groups near the palings and laid threepenny and sixpenny odds on the favourites, and swore mild schoolboy swears because the masters were thick on the ground, and they couldn't have the smoke they didn't want.

Little girls, with their brothers' and other girls' brothers' colours pinned to their best frocks, trotted up and down on the grass and tried childish 'prentice hands at flirtation.

Mothers, grandmothers and aunts, shabby and careworn, fashionable and smiling, filled the great semicircle of chairs, read the "programme of events" with keenest interest, and watched their own particular bits of boyhood with fondly partial eyes.

To this scene came Gregan—Gregan with a painfully new suit and cream silk collar—Gregan with a speckless straw hat—Gregan with gloves of tan. He walked beside his mother and Flossie, his heart faint with the misery of the thing. When they passed Wilkinson he shrank back behind them for a second. There was a look almost of supplication to his enemy upon his face. But how was Wilkinson to guess it? He merely scented the fun of it, and, with the catholicity of the schoolboy, wanted his compeers to do the same. They minced along beside him, keeping well behind Mrs. McAlister. They stroked his collar; they begged to be allowed to touch his hands; they affected tears because they had no gloves themselves.

sang the impromptu poet of the school, and his wit was received with loudest acclaim and delight, and became as a pebble flung into a quiet pond and making ever-widening circles of ripples. And Mrs. McAlister sailed on in front of it all, calmly unconscious, and Greg followed, a fierce wish in his heart that he was dead and buried ten thousand feet beneath the well-worn grass.

"Don't poke your head forward like that," she said, and he started and flushed with shame to find it was hung down over his chest, after all his father had said. "Are you going to sit down here with Flossie and me, or are you going off with your friends?—What is the matter? Aren't you well?"

Almost he said no, and accepted the momentary refuge the seat beside her offered; then he said nothing was the matter, and moved into the crowd with a lifted head.

All his life the memory of that afternoon burned red in his brain; all his life he remembered just how he felt when the careless eye of the passer dropped from his face to his arms, and thence to his hands. For in his unhappiness he held them in a way that necessarily drew upon him the attention he dreaded. The impulse to pocket them was so strong he had to do battle with it all the time, and the result showed arms hung down his sides with just as much curve as a poker, hands open, and fingers as stiffly apart as those of a wire-worked automaton.

The captain of the cricket eleven, who cherished a liking for him, and was pleased to speak of him as a "promising kid," stopped to laugh as he passed. "Why, Mac," he said, "and I had hopes of your bowling once!"

Greg's hands tingled, but he listened without retort to the chaff that included a recommendation to use vaseline rather than glycerine for promoting whiteness and softness of the skin. Then he moved slowly on, his head held stiffly and his chin up.

Even the master whom he worshipped smiled at him.

"What have they been doing to you?" he said. "Why don't you take off those foolish things and go and enjoy yourself?"

But Greg shook his head—he was incapable of speech—and walked on his miserable course. Even his best friend told him privately, kindly, but firmly, that he was "an awful ass and a goat, you know." While his best enemy made life a thing to be loathed all the long hours of the afternoon.

And in the grand-stand, mortification, quick and complete, had come upon the promoter of his unhappiness.

Some one introduced Lady Featherstone. She sat down by her doctor's wife, and talked with well-bred and charming condescension throughout the whole of the egg-and-spoon race, which was one of the concluding items of the programme.

"Such a beautiful boy, yours, Lady Featherstone," Mrs. McAlister said rapturously, catching sight in the distance of the yellow curls and dainty dressing of the boy she had copied.

But her ladyship's firm lips curled a little.

"Not mine," she said hastily. "Not mine, I beg of you; merely the child of a cousin who is with me."

"But very pretty—such manners," persisted Greg's mother, a little less rapturously, however, for the tone of the other lady was certainly deprecatory.

"Oh, pretty enough—for a girl," she said; "polite enough, also—for a girl. I assure you he is positively unhappy if his dress is disarranged, and would weep if we took him outside the gate without his gloves. Still, he amuses us."

There was a flush on Mrs. McAlister's face.

"Don't you like it?" she said; "don't you think it is a good thing?"

"Oh, excellent!" said her Ladyship. "Most excellent—for a 'buttons'!"

Mrs. McAlister grew warm all over; she was filled with dread that Greg would come up, gloved and carefully dressed, and put her to shame before this personage whom she had so long admired from afar.

"Have you any boys yourself?" she said, and wondered how she could despatch Flossie to tell Greg he might remove his gloves at least.

"That is my son, the brown-haired one near the band-stand; he is at home for his holidays at present," Lady Featherstone returned, her face showing open pride.

And Mrs. McAlister looked and saw a hobbledehoy lad with an honest face, a somewhat battered straw hat, and a suit that had seen active service. The wildest fancy could not picture him in gloves, and her unhappiness increased.

"The boys I like," continued the lady of title, "are genuine boys—rough, hearty, untidy, happy boys—they're the stuff our best men are made of. Wilhelm is a charming little laddie just now, certainly; but I can never help thinking what an admirable footman will be lost to the world if he takes to politics like his father."

Mrs. McAlister smiled in a sickly way. "I quite agree with you " she said feebly. "Boys ought to be boys."

Then a perspiration broke out on her brow for just in front of the stand walked Greg, and she saw with sudden horrible clearness how unlike the other lads he looked.

Her ladyship singled him out for her attention and to illustrate her eloquence.

"Look at that unfortunate little mountebank for instance," she said, "there, in that absurd suit and with light gloves on. He will make an excellent tailor or man-milliner in a few years if they don't put him into a profession."

"Gweg," shouted Flossie joyously, standing up in her place, the idea of a run on the grass being pleasant to her little cramped limbs.

But Mrs. McAlister pulled her back to her seat and held her with a grasp almost desperate till Greg had taken his unhappy little face out of sight and the danger was past. After which the unconscious lady of rank changed the conversation and the boy question was not revived.

There was an interval just before the sack race, designed to be filled with the well-meaning efforts of the band and cups of weak afternoon tea.

But Greg was not amongst the polite handers of cake, nor Wilkinson and his allies, nor Wilhelm, nor young Featherstone, nor six of Greg's stanchest friends.

There was an excited group at the back of the gymnasium shed, and Greg was in the midst of it—Greg, with the fetters of self-control utterly broken once more. For the first moment he remembered his father, and genuinely tried to cement the pieces again, but a voice cried "Sissie!" and they burst recklessly apart once more.

He lowered his head and made a rush at the ring of lads; his hands were clenched, and hard as cricket balls; the fury of a mastiff was in his breast. For one moment the determination of fighting and killing everyone of the ring separately and swiftly seized him; but the next, reason showed him this might not be, and he made a selection.

Not Wilkinson, though the thirst to break his head was hardly to be quenched—not any of the grinning lads who did his bidding. He saw the yellow hair and the pleasant, girl-like face of the boy Wilhelm, who had been the utterly unconscious cause of all his unhappiness.

It was this boy he struck in the face, and dragged into the ring and forced to fight.

The boys gathered closer, cheering, urging, howling softly.

Neither combatant had had time to tear off his gloves; the kid burst violently asunder, the seams split under the fierce young muscles. There was no thought, nor hope, nor ambition in the souls of either of them but that of planting a doubled fist well in each other's eyes.

Twice Wilhelm was thrown to the ground, twice Greg breathed hard and thought the victory was to him.

But somewhere among the yellow-haired laddie's ancestors had been a fighting one, and this sudden onslaught had, for the first time in his life, made his blood remember it. He sprang up again and fell on his assailant, with a fresh sundering of stitched fingers.

But there came a "h'sh" and a "cave," and a quick breaking up of the ring.

Friends' hands dragged them apart, but they rushed together again, closed firmly, and fought with fresh strength.

Again the word was passed. Featherstone dragged his little kinsman aside, Wilkinson held firmly to Greg's spoiled coat.

And among them stood Lady Featherstone and Mrs. McAlister.

There was a gleam of humorous surprise in her ladyship's eyes.

"The tailor and the footman," she said, and laughed amusedly. She took Wilhelm quite kindly by the arm. She could have patted him for his manliness, for she had seen for a moment the amazing flying about of his little fists. But, of course, she scolded him as became a woman and a mother.

Mrs. McAlister was so routed, and her nerves so upset, she made no attempt to claim her son, and merely stood aside waiting for the cab she had sent for.

"Shake hands, you little beggars," Featherstone said as his mother's carriage and the cab came up simultaneously.

They shook hands. Wilhelm looked quite pleased with himself, and smiled through his blood. Greg's face was almost happy again, though his beauty was no longer such as to rejoice his mother's heart.

The ladies parted. Lady Featherstone unconscious to the last of the ownership of the "little tailor." Then the cab went one way and the carriage the other. And in the carriage they laughed all the way, and patted Wilhelm, and made him so proud of himself that he threw his gloves out of the window and yearned for the career of a professional pugilist. But in the cab the silence was unbroken, and the heart of Gregan once more full of oppression.

"Some day," Mrs. McAlister said as she lay back exhausted on her own sofa, "some day, Gregan, when I am lying cold in my grave, you will be sorry you added so to my burdens."

Greg's warm little heart thawed instantly at the grievous spectacle conjured up. He flung his arms round her neck, and in a fit of heroic self-abasement promised never to make a trouble over wearing them again.

"I—I'll even go to school in them if you like," he said in a choked tone, and thought of Cranmer's hand, and tales of the early martyrs. But Mrs. McAlister only looked irritable.

"Where are they?" she said.

He produced the blood-stained remnants.

"Put them in the fire," she said.

He dropped them in one after the other, almost fearfully.

"Take off your collar."

He unfastened the cream silk, marvelling.

"Put it in the same place," she said.

The smell of the burning of it was exquisite to him.

"Now go and play football." Softness was in her voice.

So he kissed her, was kissed, and went.