If ever a girl had need of courage, it was Jean during the spring of
1916, for her father sat by the hour staring at that old haircloth sofa,
and sometimes at a tiny gunboat made of wood, a piteous perfect thing
that Horatio had whittled out as a child. So she had to do most of the
planting herself, and tend the garden until it picked up its green and
grew lusty.
But when the day’s work was done and the supper dishes were washed, she
would steal away to the Tarpeian, and bathe her aching soul in stars.
She knew that her mother was safe, but she was trying to make sure that
God loved her brother.
The inquiry is an old one. Sisters made it long ago beside the Aegean,
looking out from the hill of Pelion and the white Magnesian shore,
remembering brothers slain across the sea. And out of sad longings they
built up their own hero, the swift-footed Achilles, whose mother tried
to hide him from the military draft. She strove to render him
invulnerable with holy water and immortal with holy fire. Like all the
rest he fell, but they pictured him as living on. He survived in a white
island with an immortal girl more fair than the rosy slave he had lost.
Jean was too much of a Christian to believe that there is marriage in
heaven, and yet her mind lingered on Achilles safe in the white island
at the mouth of Danube, there married to sweet Iphigenia. Horatio was
not like that, but was as the angels, perchance as those who came with
Lancelot to the vision of the bishop.
She did not distrust God, for her star still hung in heaven, and God was
taking care of it. But had God intended to end the line of the Riches?
Horatio had gone to war to help make the world safe for babies, but that
meant having no wife and babies himself. This was the thing called
sacrifice, and she should have to think about it. She was eighteen now,
and some day someone might possibly ask her to marry him.
One very important fact she had to begin with. She knew from her
mother’s dying lips that up to the age of forty-six her father had not
intended to marry. And one June evening she mustered up courage to ask
him about that. He merely smiled and said, “I’m very thankful that I
married your mother, but can any man say why he’s a laggard in love?”
Ambrose Rich was a wise man, but even the wisest make mistakes. He did
not know that he was driving his darling to theft. Nor did he miss from
his library certain works that he no longer had a use for, such as
Malthus on Population.