"Oh, I don't say that. I was--I was--just wondering."
"Whether it's fair play to anyone to give them medicine when they don't know they're taking it."
"But ought we to do good to people against their wills?"
"Why, sure! What you thinking of? Still if you don't want to...."
"Say I will, _father_. Why don't you call me that? Don't I call you son?"
He braced himself to an effort. "All right, father; I will."
"Good! Then here's the powder." He drew one from the packet. "Don't let none of it fall. You'll steal into the kitchen this afternoon--she generally lays down after she's washed the dinner things--and just empty the paper into the little brown teapot she always makes her tea in. Then burn the paper in the stove--there's sure to be a fire on--so that she won't find nothing lying around to make her suspicious. You understand, don't you?"
He said he understood, though in his heart of hearts he wished that he hadn't been charged with the duty.
If you had asked the boy who was now legally Tom Quidmore why he was reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would have been unable to explain his hesitation. Reason, in the main, was in favor of his doing it. In the first place, he had promised, and he had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid stress on keeping his word. Not to keep his word had come to seem an offense of the nature of personal defilement.
Then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority higher than himself. The child mind, like the childish mind at all times, is under the weight of authority. The source of the authority is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. It is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right to it.
In the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a knowledge of his insufficiency. The man who provides food, clothing, shelter, is invested with the right to speak. The child mind is logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline. Except on severe provocation it does not rebel. Tom Quidmore felt no impulse to rebellion, even though his sense of right and wrong was, for the moment, mystified.