The Bad Seed Read Online Free PDF Page B

“Don’t you think it would be a lovely little gesture if you went over and offered your congratulations? If you told him that since you didn’t win the medal, you’re most happy that he did?” She took the child’s hand, as if to guide her toward the gate, butRhoda pulled back and said, “No! No!” She shook her head with determination, and added, “I’m not glad he won it. It was mine. The medal was mine, but he got it.”
    Mrs. Breedlove was startled at the cold intensity of the child’s voice, but she laughed after a moment and said, “Oh, I wish my instincts were as natural as yours, my dear.” She turned, as though for verification, to Christine, and said gaily, “A child’s mind is so wonderfully innocent. So lacking in guile or deceit.” But Mrs. Penmark had already moved away to speak to Miss Octavia Fern, who had nodded and beckoned to her.
    They stood together beside the small side porch where the star jasmine bushes were, and Miss Octavia said, “My sisters and I are so disappointed that Mr. Penmark didn’t come with you today. We’ve never met him, although we’re anxious to do so, since we’ve heard so many pleasant things about him. Everyone says he’s such a capable young man. Actually, we’d hoped to see him yesterday at the closing exercises, but I suppose he was too busy to get away.”
    Christine explained that, at this period of his career, her husband’s work kept him away from home much of the time. Currently, he was in South America to make a survey of port facilities along the West Coast. He’d embarked only the week before; the only news she’d had of him thus far was the cable that announced his arrival. She missed him, of course; but she’d resigned herself to the inevitable fact that this time he’d be gone all summer. Had it been possible, he most certainly would have come to the closing exercises of the day before, as he, in turn, had heard much about the Misses Fern, and had often expressed a wish to know them personally.
    They seated themselves in rockers on the porch, and after a time Miss Octavia, long used to the unasked questions of parents, said, “Are you interested in what we think of Rhoda, and of what she’s accomplished since she’s been with us?”
    Mrs. Penmark said that she was, adding that the child, almost from babyhood, had been something of a riddle both to herself and her husband. It was a thing difficult to isolate, or identify, but there was a strangely mature quality in the child’s character which they found disturbing. Both she and her husband had thought that a school like their own, a school whose accent fell on discipline and the old-fashioned virtues, would be the ideal school for Rhoda—would eliminate, or at least modify, some of the upsetting factors of her temperament.
    Miss Fern nodded to a new arrival, pressed one hand against her forehead, as though marshaling her thoughts, and said that, in some ways, Rhoda was one of the most satisfactory pupils the school had ever had. She’d never been absent a single day; she’d never once been tardy; she was the only child in the history of the school who’d made a hundred in deportment, each month, in the classrooms, and a hundred in self-reliance and conservation, each month, on the playgrounds, for a full school year; and if Mrs. Penmark had dealt with as many children as Miss Fern had in her long career as a teacher, she’d realize what a remarkable record that was. She put on her tattered straw hat, and adjusted it over her eyes as protection against the strong morning sun which was now sifting itself insistently through the lifting leaves of the camphor tree. “Rhoda is a conservative, thrifty child,” she went on, “and she’s perhaps the
neatest
little girl I’ve ever encountered.”
    Christine laughed and said, “Rhoda is certainly neat. My husband says he doesn’t know where she gets her tidiness—certainly not from either of us.”
    Miss Burgess Fern came up, sat in