The Shoulders of Atlas. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
said. “I suppose they are dresses she had when she was young.”
Sylvia colored. She tossed her head and threw back her round shoulders. Feminine vanity dies hard; perhaps it never dies at all.
“I don't know,” she said, defiantly. “Three are colors I used to wear. I have had to wear black of late years, because it was more economical, but you know how much I used to wear pink. It was real becoming to me.”
Henry continued to regard his wife's face with perfect love and a perfect cognizance of facts. “You couldn't wear it now,” he said.
“I don't know,” retorted Sylvia. “I dare say I don't look now as if I could. I have been working hard all day, and my hair is all out of crimp. I ain't so sure but if I did up my hair nice, and wasn't all tuckered out, that I couldn't wear a pink silk dress that's there if I tone it down with black.”
“I don't believe you would feel that you could go to meeting dressed in pink silk at your time of life,” said Henry.
“Lots of women older than I be wear bright colors,” retorted Sylvia, “in places where they are dressy. You don't know anything about dress, Henry.”
“I suppose I don't,” replied Henry, indifferently.
“I think that pink silk would be perfectly suitable and real becoming if I crimped my hair and had a black lace bonnet to wear with it.”
“I dare say.”
Henry took his place at the supper-table. It was set in the kitchen. Sylvia was saving herself all the steps possible until Horace Allen returned.
Henry did not seem to have much appetite that night. His face was overcast. Along with his scarcely confessed exultation over his good-fortune he was conscious of an odd indignation. For years he had cherished a sense of injury at his treatment at the hands of Providence; now he felt like a child who, pushing hard against opposition to his desires, has that opposition suddenly removed, and tumbles over backward. Henry had an odd sensation of having ignominiously tumbled over backward, and he missed, with ridiculous rancor, his sense of injury which he had cherished for so many years. After kicking against the pricks for so long, he had come to feel a certain self-righteous pleasure in it which he was now forced to forego.
Sylvia regarded her husband uneasily. Her state of mind had formerly been the female complement of his, but the sense of possession swerved her more easily. “What on earth ails you, Henry Whitman?” she said. “You look awful down-in-the-mouth. Only to think of our having enough to be comfortable for life. I should think you'd be real thankful and pleased.”
“I don't know whether I'm thankful and pleased or not,” rejoined Henry, morosely.
“Why, Henry Whitman!”
“If it had only come earlier, when we had time and strength to enjoy it,” said Henry, with sudden relish. He felt that he had discovered a new and legitimate ground of injury which might console him for the loss of the old.
“We may live a good many years to enjoy it now,” said Sylvia.
“I sha'n't; maybe you will,” returned Henry, with malignant joy.
Sylvia regarded him with swift anxiety. “Why, Henry, don't you feel well?” she gasped.
“No, I don't, and I haven't for some time.”
“Oh, Henry, and you never told me! What is the matter? Hadn't you better see the doctor?”
“Doctor!” retorted Henry, scornfully.
“Maybe he could give you something to help you. Whereabouts do you feel bad, Henry?”
“All over,” replied Henry, comprehensively, and he smiled like a satirical martyr.
“All over?”
“Yes, all over—body and soul and spirit. I know just as well as any doctor can tell me that I haven't many years to enjoy anything. When a man has worked as long as I have in a shoe-shop, and worried as much and as long as I have, good-luck finds him with his earthworks about worn out and his wings hitched on.”
“Oh, Henry, maybe Dr. Wallace—”
“Maybe he can unhitch the wings?” inquired Henry, with grotesque irony. “No, Sylvia, no doctor living can give medicine strong enough to cure a man of a lifetime of worry.”
“But the worry's all over now, Henry.”
“What the worry's done ain't over.”
Sylvia began whimpering softly. “Oh, Henry, if you talk that way it will take away all my comfort! What do you suppose the property would mean to me without you?”
Then Henry felt ashamed. “Lord, don't worry,” he said, roughly. “A man can't say anything to you without upsetting you. I can't tell how long I'll live. Sometimes a man lives through everything. All I meant was, sometimes when good-luck comes to a man it comes so darned late it might just as well not come at all.”
“Henry, you don't mean to be wicked and ungrateful?”
“If I am I can't help it. I ain't a hypocrite, anyway. We've got some good-fortune, and I'm glad of it, but I'd been enough sight gladder if it had come sooner, before bad fortune had taken away my rightful taste for it.”
“You won't have to work in the shop any longer, Henry.”
“I don't know whether I shall or not. What in creation do you suppose I'm going to do all day—sit still and suck my thumbs?”
“You can work around the place.”
“Of course I can; but there'll be lots of time when there won't be any work to be done—then what? To tell you the truth of it, Sylvia, I've had my nose held to the grindstone so long I don't know as it's in me to keep away from it and live, now.”
Henry had not been at work since Abrahama White's death. He had been often in Sidney Meeks's office; only Sidney Meeks saw through Henry Whitman. One day he laughed in his face, as the two men sat in his office, and Henry had been complaining of the lateness of his good-fortune.
“If your property has come too late, Henry,” said he, “what's the use in keeping it? What's the sense of keeping property that only aggravates you because it didn't come in your time instead of the Lord's? I'll draw up a deed of gift on the spot, and Sylvia can sign it when you go home, and you can give the whole biling thing to foreign missions. The Lord knows there's no need for any mortal man to keep anything he doesn't want—unless it's taxes, or a quick consumption, or a wife and children. And as for those last, there doesn't seem to be much need of that lately. I have never seen the time since I came into the world when it was quite so hard to get things, or quite so easy to get rid of them, as it is now. Say the word, Henry, and I'll draw up the deed of gift.”
Henry looked confused. His eyes fell before the lawyer's sarcastic glance. “You are talking tomfool nonsense,” he said, scowling. “The property isn't mine; it's my wife's.”
“Sylvia never crossed you in anything. She'd give it up fast enough if she got it through her head how downright miserable it was making you,” returned the lawyer, maliciously. Then Sidney relented. There was something pathetic, even tragic, about Henry Whitman's sheer inability to enjoy as he might once have done the good things of life, and his desperate clutch of them in flat contradiction to his words. “Let's drop it,” said the lawyer. “I'm glad you have the property and can have a little ease, even if it doesn't mean to you what it once would. Let's have a glass of that grape wine.”
Sidney Meeks had his own small amusement in the world. He was one of those who cannot exist without one, and in lieu of anything else he had turned early in life toward making wines from many things which his native soil produced. He had become reasonably sure, at an early age, that he should achieve no great success in his profession. Indeed, he was lazily conscious that he had no fierce ambition to do so. Sidney Meeks was not an ambitious man in large matters.