Indeed, all the three inmates of the house were heavy at heart that
night, each with some especial knowledge not shared by the others. The
night grew sultry, too, and when the morning came, it was the first day
of real summer, hot and still. It was a day to make any one jaded who
had not slept well.
Geordie was down first, and walking up and down the veranda; smoking,
too, his aunt noticed.
“You shouldn’t, before breakfast!” she admonished him, cheerfully. “And
you can’t smell the flowers, either, if you do.”
He smiled, a forced, strained sort of smile, but civil enough,
considering how unwelcome the sight of her was. He stopped walking up
and down, too, and, after a moment, said, in a perfunctory voice:
“It’s going to be a hot day.”
“Geordie!” said she. “Let me talk to you!”
As much as his mother, did he hate and dread that note of fervor, of
intimacy. He moved his shoulders restlessly, and smiled again.
“About time for breakfast,” he murmured evasively.
“No, it’s not. Geordie, you won’t mind if I stay here with you and your
mother for a little while, will you?”
He turned scarlet.
“No. Of course not,” he replied. “Very glad.”
“I want to stay--ever so much. But only if it can be my way. Because I’m
a frightfully obstinate creature, Geordie; absolutely unmanageable. And
I can’t bear not to be independent. I’m going to find myself a job--”
“No!” he interrupted, with a frown. “Please don’t.”
She seated herself on the rail of the veranda, a most undignified
attitude for one of her years, and yet, as always, there was a debonair
grace about her; something unconquerably girlish.
“I will get a job, Geordie!” she announced. “That’s settled. No matter
where I live, I’ll do that. But I want so much to stay here, if you’ll
let me stay on my own terms. Let me pay my board and feel like a nice,
independent business woman!”
“No!” he said, again. “I--it can’t be that way.”
“But why, Geordie?” she asked, smiling a little.
And he couldn’t endure her smile; he couldn’t endure her proposal; it
was the final straw for his already mutinous and unhappy spirit. If she
had any faint idea of what he already suffered from this talk about
being “an independent business woman”; if she had imagined what a sore
subject that was.
“No!” he said. “If you want to stay here and make mother a visit, you’re
more than welcome. But--I don’t approve of women going out to work.”
“What!” she cried. “Oh, but my dear boy!”
There was something in her good-humored protest that made him hot with
resentment. She wasn’t laughing at him--and yet, she might as well have
been; she couldn’t have pointed out more plainly the absurdity of his
words and his attitude. Just by some little inflection of the voice, she
made him the youngest twenty-five that ever lived--a boy, a child, a
silly, pompous, impertinent young ass.
“I won’t have it!” he said.
She saw her mistake then--she was always quick to recognize her
failures--but it was too late to remedy it.
“I’m sorry you feel like that, George,” she said, gravely. “Because, you
see, I couldn’t stay here unless it could be that way.”
“Suit yourself!” he answered, briefly.
But he regretted the words as soon as they were spoken.
“I only meant--” he began, but when he turned he found her gone,
vanished in her own quick, quiet way. He hurried into the house to find
her, and looked for her everywhere, but in vain.
And it seemed to him that he could not go off to the city with this new
burden upon his conscience. It was bad enough that he should have hurt
his mother the evening before; bad enough to endure the other
harassments that had tried him so sorely, for so long, without this new
misery. He thought of his aunt’s sprightliness; her gay and touching
friendliness toward him; he remembered how grave her face had become.
“She might have known I didn’t mean that,” he thought, dismayed. “I
don’t like her, and she’ll be a bore and a nuisance; but I didn’t mean
to offend her.”
And all the time he was perfectly aware that she wasn’t “offended,” any
more than a clover blossom is offended if you tread it underfoot. It was
he who had been offended at the idea of his mother’s sister going out to
work every day from under his roof--of any woman doing so, in whom he
was interested. Come to think of it, he was glad he had said he
“wouldn’t have it”; he meant that. He had told Nell also that he
wouldn’t have it.
“Still,” he admitted, “I might have been a little more--well, more
cordial to her. Because I can see that she’s another one of those
people.”
For lately the poor fellow had been learning something about that other
sort of people--people not sensible and restrained, but full of fancies
and notions and feelings; people who needed careful handling, unless you
were willing to see that look of pain and disappointment in their eyes.
Mrs. Russell thought that her son looked pale and jaded that morning,
and noticed, with a heavy heart, how little he ate.
“I suppose he’s working too hard,” she said to herself. “Wearing himself
out, and wasting all his youth--to take care of me. I suppose what he
wants is--”
But she couldn’t quite imagine what he might want.
“Perhaps he’d rather go off and live in the city with one of his
friends, like Dick Judson,” she thought. “I wonder if I couldn’t--” So
there she sat, calm and composed as ever, making the most absurd plans
for living on her own private income of thirty dollars a month.
“Perhaps Louie and I together might manage something,” she thought.
“Louie knows more than I do about things of that sort. I’ll speak to
her.”
Geordie went off, and still Mrs. Russell sat at the breakfast table,
waiting for her sister, and silently condemning this sloth that kept her
so late abed.
As a matter of fact, Louie was half a mile away from the house, picking
daisies in a wide, sunny field. Seen from the road, you might have
thought that tall and slender creature with fair hair shining in the sun
was a care-free young girl; she moved so lightly, and now and then she
sang a snatch of song.
But all this was mere bravado, her own especial method of preparing
herself for a painful ordeal. She had something to do that morning which
she dreaded, and instead of taking an extra cup of coffee, or anything
of that sort, the silly creature forgot all about breakfast and wandered
off into a daisy field. No wonder she was such a failure!
She had peculiar compensations, though. The fierce hot sun, and the
rank, sweet smell of the humble little field flowers and weeds, even the
troublesome insects that crawled out from the daisies onto her hands,
and the little winged nuisances that flew in her face, amused and
solaced her, and did her, or so she fancied, more good than ten
breakfasts.
And after a time she felt strong and tranquil enough to face her day.
From a pocket in her skirt she drew out a bit of paper--one of those
dropped by her nephew the evening before, and she looked at it
carefully.
It was a pawn ticket, marked: