George met him at the station, as he had done a year before. But at once
Roger noticed a difference. In the short time since his father's death
certain lines had come in the boy's freckled face, and they gave him a
thoughtful, resolute look. George's voice was changing. One moment it was
high and boyish, again a deep and manly bass. As he kept his eyes on the
horses and talked about his mother, his grandfather from time to time threw
curious side glances.
"Oh, yes," George was saying, "mother's all right, she's doing fine. It was
pretty bad at first, though. She wouldn't let me sit up with her any--she
treated me like a regular kid. But any fellow with any sense could see how
she was feeling. She'd get thinking of the accident." George stopped short
and clamped his jaws. "You know, my dad did a wonderful thing," he
continued presently. "Even when he was dying, and mother and I were there
by his bed, he remembered how she'd get thinking alone--all about the
accident. You see he knew mother pretty darned well. So he told her to
remember that he was the one to blame for it. If it hadn't been for him, he
said, they would have gone home in the taxi. That's a pretty good point to
keep in her mind. Don't you think so?" he inquired. And Roger glanced
affectionately into the anxious face by his side.
"Yes," he said, "it's a mighty good point. Did you think of it?"
"Yes, sir," George replied. "I've told it to her a good many times--that
and two other points I thought of."
"What are they, son?" asked Roger.
"First," the boy said awkwardly, "about how good she was to him. And
second, that she let him buy the new car before he died. He had such a lot
of fun out of that car--"
On the last words the lad's changing voice went from an impressive bass to
a most undignified treble. He savagely scowled.
"Those three points," he continued, in more careful measured tones, "were
about all I could think of. I had to use 'em over and over--on mother when
things got bad, I mean." A flush of embarrassment came on his face. "And
hold her and kiss her," he muttered. Then he whipped his horses. "We've had
some pretty bad times this month," he continued, loud and manfully. "You
see, mother isn't so young as she was. She's well on in her thirties." A
glimmer of amusement appeared in Roger's heavy eyes. "But she don't cry
often any more, and with you here we'll pull her through." He shot a quick
look at his grandfather. "Gee, but I'm glad you're here!" he said.
"So am I," said Roger. And with a little pressure of his hand on George's
shoulder, "I guess you've had about your share. Now tell me the news. How
are things on the farm?"
With a breath of evident relief, the lad launched into the animal world.
And soon he was talking eagerly.
* * * * *
In the next few days with his daughter Roger found that George was right.
She had been through the worst of it. But she still had her reactions, her
spells of emptiness, bleak despair, her moods of fierce rebellion or of
sudden self-reproach for not having given Bruce more while he lived. And in
such hours her father tried to comfort her with poor success.
"Remember, child, I'm with you, and I know how it feels," he said. "I went
through it all myself: When your mother died--"
"But mother was so much older!" He looked at his daughter compassionately.
"How old are you?" he inquired.
"Thirty-six."
"Your mother was thirty-nine," he replied. And at that Edith turned and
stared at him, bewildered, shocked, brought face to face with a new and
momentous fact in her life.
"Mother only my age when she died?"
"Yes," said Roger gently, "only three years older." With a twinge of pain
he noticed two quite visible streaks of gray in his daughter's soft blonde
hair. "And she felt as you do now--as though she were just starting out.
And I felt the same way, my dear. If I'm not mistaken, everyone does. You
still feel young--but the new generation is already growing up--and you can
feel yourself being pushed on. And it is hard--it is very hard." Clumsily
he took her hand. "Don't let yourself drop out," he said. "Be as your
mother would have been if she had been left instead of me. Go straight on
with your children."
To this note he could feel her respond. And at first, as he felt what a
fight she was making, Roger glorified her pluck. As he watched her with her
children at table, smiling at their talk with an evident effort to enter
in, and again with her baby snug in her lap while she read bedtime stories
to Bob and little Tad at her side, he kept noticing the resemblance between
his daughter and his wife. How close were these two members of his family
drawing together now, one of them living, the other dead.
But later, as the weeks wore on, she began to plan for her children. She
planned precisely how to fit them all into the house in town, she planned
the hours for their meals, for their going alone or with the nurse or a
maid to their different private schools, to music lessons, to dancing
school and uptown to the park to play. She planned their fall clothes and
she planned their friends. And there came to her father occasional moods of
anxiety. He remembered Bruce's grim remarks about those "simple" schools
and clothes, the kind that always cost the most. And he began to realize
what Bruce's existence must have been. For scarcely ever in their talks did
Edith speak of anything outside of her family. Night after night, with a
tensity born of her struggle with her grief, she talked about her children.
And Roger was in Bruce's place, he was the one she planned with. At moments
with a vague dismay he glimpsed the life ahead in his home.
George was hard at work each day down by the broken dam at the mill. He had
an idea he could patch it up, put the old water-wheel back into place and
make it run a dynamo, by which he could light the house and barn and run
the machines in the dairy. In his new rôle as the man of his family, George
was planning out his career. He was wrestling with a book entitled "Our New
Mother Earth" and a journal called "The Modern Farm." And to Roger he
confided that he meant to be a farmer. He wanted to go in the autumn to the
State Agricultural College. But when one day, very cautiously, Roger spoke
to Edith of this, with a hard and jealous smile which quite transformed her
features, she said,
"Oh, I know all about that, father dear. It's just a stage he's going
through. And it's the same way with Elizabeth, too, and her crazy idea of
becoming a doctor. She took that from Allan Baird, and George took his from
Deborah! They'll get over it soon enough--"
"They won't get over it!" Roger cried. "Their dreams are parts of something
new! Something I'm quite vague about--but some of it has come to stay!
You're losing all your chances--just as I did years ago! You'll never know
your children!"
But he uttered this cry to himself alone. Outwardly he only frowned. And
Edith had gone on to say,
"I do hope that Deborah won't come up this summer. She's been very good and
kind, of course, and if she comes she'll be doing it entirely on my
account. But I don't want her here--I want her to marry, the sooner the
better, and come to her senses--be happy, I mean. And I wish you would tell
her so."
Within a few days after this Deborah wrote to her father that she was
coming the next week. He said nothing to Edith about it at first, he had
William saddled and went for a ride to try to determine what he should do.
But it was a ticklish business. For women were queer and touchy, and once
more he felt the working of those uncanny family ties.
"Deborah," he reflected, "is coming up here because she feels it's selfish
of her to stay away. If she marries at once, as she told me herself, she
thinks Edith will be hurt. Edith won't be hurt--and if Deborah comes,
there'll be trouble every minute she stays. But can I tell her so? Not at
all. I can't say, 'You're not wanted here.' If I do, _she'll_ be hurt. Oh
Lord, these girls! And Deborah knows very well that if she does get married
this month, with Laura abroad and Edith up here and only me at the wedding,
Edith will smile to herself and say, 'Now isn't that just like Deborah?'"
As Roger slowly rode along a steep and winding mountain road, gloomily he
reflected to what petty little troubles a family of women could descend, so
soon after death itself. And he lifted his eyes up to the hills and decided
to leave this matter alone. If women would be women, let them settle their
own affairs. Deborah was due to arrive on the following Friday evening. All
right, let her come, he thought. She would soon see she was in the way, and
then in a little affectionate talk he would suggest that she marry right
off and have a decent honeymoon before the school year opened.
So he dismissed it from his mind. And as he listened in the dusk to the
numberless murmuring voices of living creatures large and small which rose
out of the valley, and as from high above him the serenity of the mountains
there towering over thousands of years stole into his spirit, Roger had a
large quieting sense of something high and powerful looking down upon the
earth, a sense of all humanity honeycombed with millions upon millions of
small sorrows, absorbing joys and hopes and fears, and in spite of them all
the Great Life sweeping on, with no Great Death to check its course, no
immense catastrophe, all these little troubles like mere tiny specks of
foam upon the surface of the tide.
Deborah's visit, the following week, was as he had expected. Within an hour
after her coming he could feel the tension grow. Deborah herself was tense,
both from the work she had left in New York where she was soon to have five
schools, and from the thought of her marriage, only a few weeks ahead. She
said nothing about it, however, until as a sisterly duty Edith tried to
draw her out by showing an interest in her plans. But the cloud of Bruce's
death was there, and Deborah shunned the topic. She tried to talk of the
children instead. But Edith at once was on the defensive, vigilant for
trouble, and as she unfolded her winter plans she grew distinctly brief and
curt.
"If Deborah doesn't see it now, she's a fool," her father told himself.
"I'll just wait a few days more, and then we'll have that little talk."