Polly — Thomas Nelson Page

IT was Christmas Eve. I remember it just as if it was yesterday. The Colonel had been pretending not to notice it, but when Drinkwater Torm[A] knocked over both the great candlesticks, and in his attempt to pick them up lurched over himself and fell sprawling on the floor, he yelled at him. Torm pulled himself together, and began an explanation, in which the point was that he had not teched a drap in Gord knows how long, but the Colonel cut him short.Get out of the room, you drunken vagabond! he roared.Torm was deeply offended. He made a low, grand bow, and with as much dignity as his unsteady condition[2] would admit, marched very statelily from the room, and passing out through the dining-room, where he stopped to abstract only one more drink from the long, heavy, cut-glass decanter on the sideboard, meandered to his house in the back-yard, where he proceeded to talk religion to Charity, his wife, as he always did when he was particularly drunk. He was expounding the vision of the golden candlestick, and the bowl and seven lamps and two olive-trees, when he fell asleep.The roarer, as has been said, was the Colonel; the meanderer was Drinkwater Torm. The Colonel gave him the name, because, he said, if he were to drink water once he would die.As Drinkwater closed the door, the Colonel continued, fiercely:Damme, Polly, I will! I'll sell him to-morrow morning; and if I can't sell him I'll give him away.Polly, with troubled great dark eyes, was wheedling him vigorously.No; I tell you, I'll sell him.—'Misery in his back!' the mischief! he's a drunken, trifling, good-for-nothing nigger! and I have sworn to sell him a thousand—yes, ten thousand times; and now I'll have to do it to keep my word.[3]This was true. The Colonel swore this a dozen times a day—every time Torm got drunk, and as that had occurred very frequently for many years before Polly was born, he was not outside of the limit. Polly, however, was the only one this threat ever troubled. The Colonel knew he could no more have gotten on without Torm than his old open-faced watch, which looked for all the world like a model of himself, could have run without the mainspring. From tying his shoes and getting his shaving-water to making his juleps and lighting his candles, which was all he had to do, Drinkwater Torm was necessary to him. (I think he used to make the threat just to prove to himself that Torm did not own him; if so, he failed in his purpose—Torm did own him.) Torm knew it as well as he, or better; and while Charity, for private and wifely reasons, occasionally held the threat over him when his expoundings passed even her endurance, she knew it also.Thus, Polly was the only one it deceived or frightened. It always deceived her, and she never rested until she had obtained Torm's reprieve for just one more time. So on this occasion, before she got down from the Colonel's knees, she had given him in bargain just one more squeeze, and received in[4] return Torm's conditional pardon, only till next time.Everybody in the county knew the Colonel, and everybody knew Drinkwater Torm, and everybody who had been to the Colonel's for several years past (and that was nearly everybody in the county, for the Colonel kept open house) knew Polly. She had been placed in her chair by the Colonel's side at the club dinner on her first birthday after her arrival, and had been afterward placed on the table and allowed to crawl around among and in the dishes to entertain the gentlemen, which she did to the applause of every one, and of herself most of all; and from that time she had exercised in her kingdom the functions of both Vashti and Esther, and whatever Polly ordered was done. If the old inlaid piano in the parlor had been robbed of strings, it was all right, for Polly had taken them. Bob had cut them out for her, without a word of protest from anyone but Charity. The Colonel would have given her his heartstrings if Polly had required them.She had owned him body and soul from the second he first laid eyes on her, when, on the instant he entered the room, she had stretched out her little chubby hands to him, and on his taking her had, after a few[5] infantile caresses, curled up and, with her finger in her mouth, gone to sleep in his arms like a little white kitten.Bob used to wonder in a vague, boyish way where the child got her beauty, for the Colonel weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and was as ugly as a red head and thirty or forty years of Torm's mint-juleps piled on a somewhat reckless college career could make him; but one day, when the Colonel was away from home, Charity showed him a daguerreotype of a lady, which she got out of the top drawer of the Colonel's big secretary with the brass lions on it,