The Second Generation. David Graham Phillips
profoundly that he was right, yet his son's plausibilities—they could only be plausibilities—put him clearly in the wrong. "We'll see," he said; "we'll see. You're wrong in thinking I'm angry, boy." He was looking at his son now, and his eyes made his son's passion vanish. He got up and went to the young man and laid his hand on his shoulder in a gesture of affection that moved the son the more profoundly because it was unprecedented. "If there's been any wrong done," said the old man—and he looked very, very old now—"I've done it. I'm to blame—not you."
A moment after Hiram left the room, Adelaide hurried in. A glance at her brother reassured her. They stood at the window watching their father as he walked up and down the garden, his hands behind his back, his shoulders stooped, his powerful head bent.
"Was he very angry?" asked Del.
"He wasn't angry at all," her brother replied. "I'd much rather he had been." Then, after a pause, he added: "I thought the trouble between us was that, while I understood him, he didn't understand me. Now I know that he has understood me but that I don't understand him"—and, after a pause—"or myself."
CHAPTER III
MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES
As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but Ellen noted the radical change in him. She had brought up her children in the old-fashioned way—her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all day, and one ear open all night. When she no longer had them to guard, she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the passionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age. The years of circumventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no detail of his appearance or actions escaped her.
"There's mighty little your pa don't see," had been one of her stock observations to the children from their earliest days. "And you needn't flatter yourselves he don't care because he don't speak." Now she noted that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out, more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood. She guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different from the actions of the children of her and Hiram's young days—except those regarded by all worth-while people as "trifling and trashy"—had something to do with Hiram's gloom. She decided that Arthur's failure and his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble—this until Hiram's shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face. Then she knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she dismissed the mental causes of the change. "People talk a lot about their mental troubles," she said to herself, "but it's usually three-fourths stomach and liver."
As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be associated in her mind, she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one night, after they had been in bed several hours. "What is it, father?" she asked.
There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular breathing of a sleeper.
"Hiram," she insisted, "what is it?"
"Nothing, Ellen, nothing," he answered; "I must have ate something that don't sit quite right."
"You didn't take no supper at all," said she.
This reminded him how useless it was to try to deceive her. "I ain't been feeling well of late," he confessed, "but it'll soon be over." He did not see the double meaning of his words until he had uttered them; he stirred uneasily in his dread that she would suspect. "I went to the doctor."
"What did he say?—though I don't know why I should ask what such a fool as Milbury said about anything."
"I got some medicine," replied he, evading telling her what doctor.
Instantly she sat up in bed. "I haven't seen you take no drugs!" she exclaimed. Drugs were her especial abhorrence. She let no one in the family take any until she had passed upon them.
"I didn't want to make a fuss," he explained.
"Where is it?" she demanded, on the edge of the bed now, ready to rise.
"I'll show it to you in the morning, mother. Lie down and go to sleep.
I've been awake long enough."
"Where is it?" she repeated, and he heard her moving across the room toward the gas fixture.
"In my vest pocket. It's a box of pills. You can't tell nothin' about it."
She lit the gas and went to his waistcoat, hanging where it always hung at night—on a hook beside the closet door. He watched her fumble through the pockets, watched her take her spectacles from the corner of the mantel and put them on, the bridge well down toward the end of her nose. A not at all romantic figure she made, standing beside the sputtering gas jet, her spectacles balanced on her nose, her thin neck and forearms exposed, and her old face studying the lid of the pill box held in her toil- and age-worn hands. The box dropped from her fingers and rolled along the floor. He saw an awful look slowly creep over her features as the terrible thought crept over her mind. As she began to turn her face toward him, with a motion of the head like that of a machine on unoiled bearings, he closed his eyes; but he felt her looking at him.
"Dr. Schulze!" she said, an almost soundless breathing of the name that always meant the last resort in mortal illness.
He was trying to think of lies to tell her, but he could think of nothing. The sense of light upon his eyelids ceased. He presently felt her slowly getting into bed. A pall-like silence; then upon his cheek, in long discontinued caress, a hand whose touch was as light and soft as the fall of a rose leaf—the hand of love that toil and age cannot make harsh, and her fingers were wet with her tears. Thus they lay in the darkness and silence, facing together the tragedy of the eternal separation.
"What did he say, dearest?" she asked. She had not used that word to him since the first baby came and they began to call each other "father" and "mother." All these years the children had been between them, and each had held the other important chiefly as related to them. Now it was as in their youth—just he and she, so close that only death could come between them.
"It's a long way off," said Hiram. He would not set ringing in her ears that knell which was clanging to him its solemn, incessant, menacing "Put your house in order!"
"Tell me what he said," she urged gently.
"He couldn't make out exactly. The medicine'll patch me up."
She did not insist—why fret him to confess what she knew the instant she read "Schulze" on the box? After an hour she heard him breathing as only a sleeper can breathe; but she watched on until morning. When they were dressing, each looked at the other furtively from time to time, a great tenderness in his eyes, and in hers the anguish of a dread that might not be spoken.
On the day after Mrs. Whitney's arrival for the summer, she descended in state from the hills to call upon the Rangers.
When the front bell rang Mrs. Ranger was in the kitchen—and was dressed for the kitchen. As the "girl" still had not been replaced she answered the door herself. In a gingham wrapper, with her glasses thrust up into her gray hair, she was facing a footman in livery.
"Are Mrs. Ranger and Miss Ranger at home?" asked he, mistaking her for a servant and eying her dishevelment with an expression which was not lost on her.
She smiled with heartiest good nature. "Yes, I'm here—I'm Mrs. Ranger," said she; and she looked beyond him to the victoria in which sat Mrs. Whitney. "How d'ye do, Matilda?" she called. "Come right in. As usual when the canneries are running, I'm my own upstairs girl. I reckon your young man here thinks I ought to discharge her and get one that's tidier."
"Your young man here" was stiffly touching