XVI
His attitude had not changed, fifteen minutes later, when there came a light tapping upon that mishandled door of his; and at the sound he rose quickly, said, “Yes, mother,” and tried to regain his usual cheerfulness of aspect as Mrs. Oliphant came in noiselessly. She was smiling, and he was able to construct a smile in return, telling her she looked “mighty pretty” in her rose-coloured negligee—a compliment not exaggerated. Serenity, a good faith, and a cheerful disposition bring beauty in time even where it has not been; and, where beauty has always been, as it had with Mrs. Oliphant, white hair is only that crowning prettiness so knowingly sought by the ladies of the eighteenth-century when they powdered their blonde or brunette ringlets.
“I just thought I’d slip in for a minute,” she said apologetically. “I was afraid you might forget you had to be up so early tomorrow morning, and get to thinking about something and not go to bed at all.”
“Oh, no; don’t worry. I’ll not do that again,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good, I know. I suppose you heard her?”
She patted his cheek, smiling up at him and resolutely withholding from expression the compassion that had brought her to him. “I just wanted to tell you not to be troubled. You’ll have to give her a little more time to get adjusted, Dan. A great many young couples don’t manage all these little adjustments until after the first few years of marriage; and I think my own father and mother didn’t manage it even that soon;—I’m afraid I remember their having some rather troubled times when I was a pretty old little girl. You mustn’t let yourself be discouraged, dear. Lena really tries to get the best of herself, and though she fails sometimes—”
“It isn’t that,” he interrupted. “At least it seemed to be something more definite than usual this time. You see, I didn’t stop to think about consulting her, and asked Martha to be Henry Daniel’s godmother.”
“I heard Fred Oliphant say so, but I thought perhaps he was only trying to tease Lena.” For a moment Mrs. Oliphant looked disturbed, but brightened with a quickly reassuring second thought. “Well, that would be lovely, and I’m glad you did it; but Martha’ll decline.”
“She didn’t, though, when I asked her.”
“What did she say?”
Dan rubbed his forehead. “Well, I don’t remember that she said anything.”
“No?” His mother laughed. “You won’t have to withdraw your invitation, if that’s what’s troubling you, Dan.”
“It is troubling me,” he admitted despondently. “I just couldn’t go over there and tell her—”
“No,” Mrs. Oliphant said. “And Martha’d never let you.”
“You mean you’d tell her—”
“No. Nobody’ll say a word to her about it. Don’t you know Martha well enough yet to understand that she won’t expect to be Henry’s godmother?”
“But she must.”
“No. If she did, she’d have spoken of it to me.”
“That does look like it a little,” he said with some relief; then frowned again. “But I want her to be the godmother; and she ought to be. Lena hasn’t any great friend of her own that she wants for it; and Martha’s the best friend I ever—”
“No, no,” his mother interrupted hurriedly. “It wouldn’t do, Dan.”
“But why?”
“Well—” she hesitated, sighed, and went on: “We all love Martha—except Lena. I’m afraid that’s reason enough. You must give it up.”
“I’m afraid so,” he agreed gloomily. “Oh, lordy!”
“Now, now! Martha knows you wanted her, and that’s all she’ll care about. She—” Mrs. Oliphant paused with the bothered air of one who fears to elaborate an indiscretion already committed. Then she continued nervously: “There was something else I wanted to speak to you about. Your father and I—we’ve been a little afraid—” She hesitated again.
“Afraid of what, mother?”
“Well, we were talking over this long struggle of yours to make a success of the Addition, Dan; and of course we’ve seen how hard you’ve been pressed from the very first, and yet you’ve always kept the thing a little alive and held on to it when time after time everybody said you’d just have to let go.”
“Yes, mother?”
“Well, it seems your father heard downtown today that this time you’d—you’d—”
“This time I’d what, mother?”
She put her arms about him and, in spite of her resolution, the compassion she felt for him was evident in her voice and in her eyes. “Oh, Dan, if this time you can’t hold on to it any longer, you mustn’t feel too badly, please!”
He had bent over her as she embraced him; but now he threw back his shoulders and laughed. “So that’s what father heard today,” he said. “You tell him he was listening to the wrong crowd, mother!” He moved her gently toward the door, his arm about her. “You go to bed, and so will I.” He laughed again, not grimly or bitterly, but with deep and hearty mirth. “Why, there isn’t any more chance of my not keepin’ hold of Ornaby than there is of this house fallin’ off the earth onto the moon! They can’t foreclose on me for anyhow two weeks more, and by that time I’ll show ’em what’s what! I sold a lot only last month, and there’ve been three more men out there already to look at locations. Two weeks is plenty of time for things to happen, mother. Don’t you worry.”
He kissed her good night, and as she smiled back at him from the hall and told him she wouldn’t worry if he’d get some sleep, he went on: “Why, they haven’t any more chance to get Ornaby away from me than they have to—than they have to”—he paused, searching for a sufficient comparison, and, finding it, finished with cheery explosiveness—“than they have to get Henry Daniel Oliphant himself away from me!”
Upon this she went to her own door down the hall, where she nodded and whispered back to him a smiling good night, and disappeared, glad to see him so abundantly recovered from his brief depression. “Somehow I believe he will manage to keep on going, even this time,” she told her husband. “He’s so sure failure’s an absolute impossibility that I do think maybe—”
“No, I don’t see even a ‘maybe’ in it for him,” Mr. Oliphant said, and shook his head. “Not this time, I’m afraid.”
But the Earl of Ornaby was in the field by sunrise the next morning, and armoured in convictions so strong that he began the day with plans, not for the retention of the threatened domain, but for an extension of it; he went to see a farmer who owned sixty acres north of Ornaby and got an option on them before keeping his appointment with a contractor to select a site for the airily projected automobile factory.
Not until the afternoon did he go downtown to see about raising a little money on a note to fend off the impending foreclosure; and he was still undiscouraged when he came home that evening without having succeeded. There were thirteen long days left, he told his mother, in the hall near the front door, where she met him when he came in; and she responded sunnily that thirteen was a lucky number, then gave him a note of a kind different from the one he had spent the afternoon trying to negotiate.
“You see I was right,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you she’d understand? Their housemaid brought it in this morning after breakfast.”
Martha had written to Mrs. Oliphant:
We’re in such a rush of packing I won’t have time to come in and say goodbye, as I’d like to. Papa has to go to New York, and I’ve decided I ought to go with him, because there are so many automobiles there now, and he hasn’t learned that they’re getting even worse than the bicycle “speeders” about running over people.
We’ll be there two or three weeks and I’ve almost persuaded him to let me show him Quebec and the Saguenay—and he says he might be willing to take the boat from Montreal for a little run to England after that!
Please give my love to Mr. Oliphant and Harlan for me, and of course to Dan, whom I haven’t seen since his great evening after the baby was born. He was so funny and delightful, and he talked with such really true wisdom, too! I wanted to remember everything he said, but the trouble was that he talked so fast and said so much that the next day I couldn’t remember any of it at all!
Please say goodbye for us to Mrs. Savage. Tell her when we get home we expect to find her downstairs again and enjoying the view from that big window of hers where she’s always loved to sit. Tell her papa wants to come with me to see her. He wants to talk with her about the old days when this was a little town. There aren’t so many left now he can do that with, though I know Mrs. Savage regards him as a mere youth, comparatively! He asks me to say goodbye to Mr. Oliphant and all of you for him—and for myself I close with goodbye to you and send you my best love, always.
“Lordy!” Dan said, staring at this missive when he had finished reading it. “She is goin’ to be gone a long while! I don’t get to see her often, but it’s always mighty satisfactory to know she’s there—just next door. That house’ll look pretty empty for a while, won’t it?” He sighed. “Well, I suppose I’d better go and let Lena know there’s nothin’ to disturb her now about the christening.”
Mrs. Oliphant told him lightly that she had already informed her daughter-in-law of Martha’s departure, and that it would be better for him not to mention the subject again;—Lena had selected his aunt Olive as a proper godmother. Dan looked rueful, but muttered an unenthusiastic consent and went into the library to consult his father upon the best way to raise money in thirteen days.
Mr. Oliphant was unable to offer him either the money itself or practical advice how to get it. “I’m afraid it looks like pretty hard luck this time, Dan, old fellow,” he said. “It’s funny a man with as good a practice as mine can’t ever seem to be able to lay his hands on a little cash that doesn’t have to go right out on some old debt. If I just didn’t have to meet that confounded note I went on for poor old Tom Vertrees I—”
“No, no,” his son protested;—“I wouldn’t let you, if you could. My conscience’d trouble me about what I did let you do for me if I wasn’t so sure you’ll get paid back with seven percent interest as soon as I begin to get these lots to sellin’ off a little faster.”
“What about the three men your mother tells me have been out there looking at lots since you sold the first one? Couldn’t you offer them a reduction in the price for a little cash in hand?”
“I did,” Dan replied. “I did that the first thing with each of ’em. But one of ’em told a darkey I’ve got workin’ out there he thought he could get what he wanted still cheaper after the mortgage is foreclosed; and I guess maybe the other two thought the same way about it. I guess that’s the way those seven people felt that came when I tried to auction off some lots awhile back.”
“I’m afraid so. I hope you aren’t going to take it too hard, Dan.”
“Take what too hard, sir?”
“There are other things you can go into, my boy. You’ve shown you’ve got immense energy and perseverance. They may laugh at you, but you can be sure they like the grit you’ve shown, and if you do have to give up the idea—”
“What idea, sir?”
“I mean the idea of this Addition,” his father explained. “If the time’s come when you have to let it go—”
“Ornaby?” Dan interrupted with an incredulity wholly untouched by the facts confronting him. “Why, you just put any such notion out of your mind, sir.” And he repeated the extreme comparison he had made the night before. “Why, I’m not goin’ to let Ornaby go any more than I am our little namesake upstairs in his cradle! I’m goin’ to keep it this time and every time! I’ve got thirteen days left and I’ll find some way!”
He kept Ornaby “this time,” but in spite of his determined prophecy and all he did to fulfil it, six of his thirteen days passed and he had not found the way. Indeed, he did not find the way at all; for it was found through none of his seeking. On the seventh of the thirteen days his grandmother sent for him to come to talk to her in the evening; and when he sat down beside her and for a moment covered the ghostly hand on the coverlet with his own, he told her truthfully that she was looking better.
“Why, a great deal better!” he said. “I guess you’re goin’ to do what Martha said in her message, grandma, and get downstairs again before she comes home.”
“Do you think so?” she said in a voice a little stronger than it was when he had last talked with her. “You think I might fool that doctor after all?”
“But doesn’t he say you’re better, grandma?”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled faintly. “But he doesn’t think so. Told me this morning I was better and then came three times during the day! He doesn’t fool anybody.”
“But you’re goin’ to get well,” her grandson assured her. “What I want to know is: When are you goin’ to let me bring that baby to see you? Mother says you don’t—”
“No, no,” she interrupted peevishly. “I don’t want to see any babies.”
“But, grandma, you’ve never seen any baby like—”
“No, no!”
“But you don’t understand what a baby can be like,” he persisted. “I don’t know I ever thought much of babies generally, either; but I’ve found out there’s just as much difference between ’em as there is between people. Think of this, for instance: one day I was bendin’ down over him, just lookin’ at him—and this was before he was even four weeks old, remember—and all at once he took the notion I must be kind of funny. He broke right out in a laugh! He did! It was a real laugh, too, though a good many people might think I imagined it; because I’ve asked everybody I know, pretty near, and not one of ’em said they ever heard of a baby only four weeks old that could—”
“Stop!” she protested. “I didn’t send for you to talk about your baby.”
“But, grandma, if you’d just let me bring him to see you—”
“I don’t want to hear anything about him, and I’ve only got one thing to say about him myself. You better not let him listen to his mother when he learns to talk, or to Harlan either—not if you want to save him from that affected Eastern way of talking. You’ve had enough to do with Eastern people, young man! You take care of yourself and have as little to do with ’em after this as you can manage. They may seem mighty fine and highty-tighty, and let you think it’s a great thing to be in with ’em, but all they’re after is to get something out of you; and after they’ve got it, they’ll give you the go-by quick enough! Now I haven’t got strength enough to talk very long, and I don’t want to talk any more about your baby.”
“All right,” he said submissively. “What do you want to talk about, grandma?”
She turned her head on the pillow to look at him; and it seemed to him that her eyes were vague, as if they found him indistinct;—she frowned plaintively in an effort to see him more clearly, and was silent for a time.
“It’s Dan, is it?” she said finally.
“Why, yes, grandma,” he answered in surprise. “We’ve just been talkin’ about the baby, grandma; and how much better you are and everything.”
“I know,” she returned with a feeble petulance. “I know what we’re talking about. I wanted you to come tonight because I want to tell you something.”
“Yes, grandma?”
“It’s this,” she said; then closed her eyes, and when she opened them, asked again: “Is it Dan?”
“Why, yes, of course, grandma! You just said—”
“I know what I said! I wanted to tell you—to tell you—”
“Yes, grandma,” he said, and added indulgently, “Tell me anything you like to.”
“I wanted to tell you not to mind,” she went on. “You mustn’t mind anything that happens. I mean anything I have to do with.”
“No; of course,” he returned without any idea of what she might mean. “Of course I won’t. I won’t mind it.”
“You must be sure not to,” she insisted. “You won’t understand, but you mustn’t let it make you feel hurt with me. You mustn’t—”
“Of course I won’t. Why, I’d never dream of feelin’ hurt with you about anything in the world, grandma.”
“Listen, Dan. I’ve always liked you best since you were a little boy. If you don’t understand something that happens, you remember I said this, will you? What may happen is for your own good and to help you, though it may seem just the other way to you. Will you promise to remember?”
“Of course,” he returned promptly; but she was not satisfied.
“No; I want you to think what you’re saying. You speak too quickly to make me sure you’ll remember. Say it slower, Dan. Say, ‘I promise to remember.’ ”
“I promise to remember,” he repeated slowly, to indulge this whim of hers; and then asked, “To remember what, grandma?”
“What I’ve just told you. That’s all I have to say, Dan.”
“All right, grandma;—I hope I haven’t stayed long enough to tire you,” he said, and patted her hand as he rose. “I expect you want to drowse a little now. Good night, grandma.”
“Goodbye,” she said. And her cold and bent fingers feebly clasped his hand, giving it an impulse which he allowed it to follow until he found it resting against her cheek. “Dear boy!” she said faintly; and he was touched by this, the first caress she had given him since he was a child. She retained his hand, keeping it against her cheek a moment longer; then relinquished it gently and said “Goodbye” again.
“Not ‘goodbye,’ grandma,” he protested heartily. “ ‘Good night,’ not ‘goodbye.’ You are better, and the doctor himself says so. Why, by next week—”
“Next week?” she said in the faintest voice in the world and with the remotest shadow of an elfin smile to herself. “Next week? Yes. You can—you can bring the baby to see me—next week.”
She just reached the end of that permission, her voice was so infinitely small and so drowsy; and her eyes closed before the last word;—she seemed to fall asleep even while she spoke. Dan tiptoed out, nodding to the nurse, who had been close at hand in the hall and came into the room as he left it.
Downstairs he found the courteous Nimbus waiting, as always, to unlatch the front door. But tonight the elderly servitor was solemn and unloquacious beyond his custom. “Goo’-ni’, suh,” he said. “I reckon you’ grammaw ’bout ready to let that big door swing. Yes, suh. Goo’-ni’, suh.”
Dan walked home, wondering what door Nimbus conceived himself to be talking about, and wondering more what his grandmother had meant him to remember. But at his own door he was abruptly enlightened upon Nimbus’s meaning about a “big” one. Harlan met him there and told him that the nurse had just telephoned.
Mrs. Savage would never explain what she had asked him to remember; she would never explain anything—never, forever.