A FILIAL REBUKE
"Father!"
Judge Blair turned and saw Lavinia standing in the wide front door. Her
face was red, her eyes were flashing, her arms hung straight and tense
at her sides.
The judge stirred uneasily in his chair.
"Oh!" she cried, rigidly clenching her little fists. "What have you
done! You have sent him away!"
"Come here, my daughter," he said.
Lavinia moved toward him, halting each moment, then taking a few nervous
steps forward. At last she stood before him, challenging, defiant.
"Sit down, Lavinia, and listen," implored the judge.
"You have sent him away!" she repeated. "You were harsh and cruel and
unkind to him!"
"Lavinia!" cried the judge, flushing with the anger parents call by
different names. There was now a peremptory quality in his tone. But the
girl did not heed him.
"Oh, how could you!" she went on, "how could you! Think how you must
have wounded him! You not only reproached him with being poor, but you
discouraged him as to his prospects! Do you think I cared for that? Do
you think I couldn't have waited? Do you think I can't wait anyhow? What
had you when you proposed to mama? You were poor--you had no prospects;
you had no more right--"
"Lavinia! Lavinia!" the judge commanded, grasping the arms of his chair
in an effort to rise. "You are beside yourself! You don't know what you
are saying!"
"And you pretended to be doing it all for my happiness, too! Oh! oh!
oh!" Her anger vented itself impotently in these exclamations, and then
her mother, white and alarmed, appeared in the doorway behind her.
"Lavinia," she said quietly.
The girl trembled violently, then whirled about, pressed her hands to
her face, and ran in, brushing by her mother in the doorway. Mrs. Blair
glanced after her irresolutely. Then she went to her husband.
"Be calm, dear," she said.
The judge sank back in his chair and looked at her in amazement.
"What has happened?" She drew the empty chair up and sat down in it. She
leaned forward and took one of his hands, and pressed it between both of
her own. She waited for the judge to speak.
"I hardly know," he began. "I never heard Lavinia break out so."
"You must remember how excited and overwrought she is," Mrs. Blair
exclaimed. "You must make allowances."
"I didn't know the girl had such spirit," he continued.
Mrs. Blair smiled rather wanly, and stroked her husband's hand. It was
very cold and moist, and it trembled.
"I had no idea it was so serious," he went on, as if summing up the
catalogue of his surprises.
"Tell me how it all came about," said Mrs. Blair.
"Marley was here, first," the judge began. He had to pause, for he
seemed to find it difficult to catch his breath. "It was a great
surprise to me; it was very painful."
The judge withdrew his hand and wiped his brow. Then he gazed again as
he had done before, across the street. Mrs. Blair, though eying him
closely and with concern, waited patiently.
"I didn't wish to wound him," the judge resumed, speaking as much to
himself as to her. "I hope I said nothing harsh; he really was quite
manly about it."
He paused again.
"I presume I may have seemed cold, unfeeling, unsympathetic," he went
on; and then as if he needed to reassure and justify himself, he added,
"but of course it was impossible, utterly impossible."
After another pause, he drew a deep breath, and as if he had already
outlined his whole interview with Marley, continued:
"And then Lavinia appeared; she must have heard it all, standing there
in the hall."
The judge leaned heavily against the back of his big chair; his face was
drawn, his wrinkles were deeper than they had been, and he wore an
aspect of weariness and pain. His form, too, seemed to have shrunk, and
he sat there in an almost helpless mass, limp and inert.
"I am only afraid, dear," Mrs. Blair said quietly, "that we have taken
this thing too seriously."
"Possibly," he said. "But it is serious, very serious. I don't know what
is to be done."
"We must have patience," Mrs. Blair counseled. "It will require all our
delicacy and tact, now."
"Perhaps you had better go in to her," the judge said presently. "Poor
little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act
only for her interest and happiness."
Mrs. Blair arose.
"She will see that, dear, in time."
"I hope so," said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia's room, and
listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and
indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell
from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and
console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily,
going on tiptoe.
The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and
never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in
his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The
Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied
from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment
of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the
coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into
his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his
manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths
had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their
laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.
He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia's love
calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley's visit,
trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went
over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise
at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish,
should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always
said that she had her mother's disposition. He could see her, all the
time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known
her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that
was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes,
certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was
exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile
Lavinia's mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days
of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and
illusions. They seemed a long way off.
He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could
not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl,
with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her
starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden,
irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of
the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in
fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had
wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old.
He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that
had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child,
the loss of his own youth.
He glanced across at the Chenowiths again, and they seemed remote from
him, of another generation in fact, though but a few moments before he
had looked on them as contemporaries. And then suddenly there came to
him the fear that Mr. Chenowith might run over to chat with him, as was
his habit, and the judge hastily rose, and almost surreptitiously went
off the end of the porch and around into the side yard. Under the new
impression of age that he had grown into, he walked slowly, with a
senile stoop, and dragged his feet as he went. He wandered about in the
yard for a long while, looking at the shrubs and bushes and trees he had
planted himself so long ago, when he was young. It occurred to him that
here in this garden he would potter around, and pass his declining
years.
He remained in the yard until his wife came to call him in to the supper
she had prepared, in the Sunday evening absence of the hired girl, and
with an effort he brought himself back from the future to the present.
"How is she?"
"Oh, she's all right," said Mrs. Blair, in her usual cheery tone. "I
didn't go to her, I thought it best to leave her alone."
The judge looked at his wife, with her rosy face, and her full figure
still youthful in the simple summer gown she wore. He looked at her
curiously, wondering why it was she seemed so young; a width of years
seemed all at once to separate them. Mrs. Blair noted this look of her
husband's. She noted it with pity for him; he looked older to her.
"I think it would be nice for you to take Lavinia with you when you go
to Put-in-Bay to the Bar Association meeting," she said.
It seemed strange and anomalous to Judge Blair that he should still be
attending Bar Association meetings.
"I'll see," he said; and then he qualified, "if I go."
"If you go?" his wife exclaimed. "Why, you're down for a paper!"
"So I am," said the judge.
They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife's arm, leaning
rather heavily on it.
"Will!" she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. "What
is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!"
She shook his arm off, and said:
"Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold."
Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come
down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short
skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge's heart,
and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the
girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the
judge felt utterly deserted.
Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she
would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen
stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the
judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.
After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the
judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up
there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He
went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his
head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from
his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in
the door. She came straight to him, and said:
"Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind."
He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and
he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:
"My little girl! My little girl!"