XVI
WHEN Garwood turned into the gate of his home that night a weird feeling of detachment came over him. As he looked around the familiar yard every black bush, every tree tossing its thinned boughs hopelessly in the wind that blew the rain in sheets against the front of the house, seemed to belong to some past toward which he yearned, as an exiled identity. Half way to the low stoop, the light in the sitting room moved, the shadow of the drenched syringa bush under the window wheeled across the yard, and then the light disappeared, leaving the window black. He knew his mother had heard his step, for in another moment the hall transom leaped bright, the door opened, a great golden beam streamed out on the walk and he saw his mother’s gaunt figure standing in the doorway. She held the lamp over her head and bent forward, shading her old eyes to peer out into the darkness, and in another instant he was beside her, and she was slamming the door behind him, shutting out the rain and the night.
“My, you’re drenched to the skin, Jerome!” she exclaimed. “Run right up and change your clothes!”
“Whew!” he said, “what a night!” He whisked out his handkerchief and wiped his face, wet withthe rain and moist with perspiration, for the whisky and the rapid walk had heated him.
“And how hoarse you are!” the mother said, wheeling his big body about and pushing him toward the stairs. “You’ve got your death of cold! Haven’t you been doing anything for it?”
“I took a little quinine and whisky a while ago.”
“Yes, I smelt it on your breath, Jerome,” his mother said rather severely. She was “temperance,” as she would have put it.
Garwood risked an uneasy laugh. He had never been able, grown man that he was, to overcome what he considered a boyish fear of his mother’s knowing he drank.
“But don’t stand there!” the mother said. “Go right upstairs and take those wet duds off this minute! Have you had any supper?”
“No; is supper over?” he replied.
“Yes, I just got the table cleared and the dishes washed. But I’ll get you something, by the time you’re into dry clothes.”
“Oh, don’t bother to get anything, mother,” he said.
She gave the lamp to her son, and as he went up the stairs he heard her raking up the coals in the kitchen stove.
“Mother!” he called, peremptorily. “Don’t make any fire; just something cold—that’ll do for me.”
“You go get your clothes off as I tell you!” his mother called in the tone of command mothers love to use with children for whom they are continually making sacrifices. When she had revived the dyingfire, she hastened upstairs and laid out clean under-garments for her son, and dry hose, and then, forever busy, left him with an injunction “just to dress comfortable and not fix up.”
Garwood, warm, dry and refreshed, felt a glow of comfort as he went downstairs in his slippers. His mother had the fire crackling, and the tea-kettle rocking briskly on the stove, puffing its little spouts of steam importantly. Beside it stood a pan, with water almost boiling, and she had a skillet heating. She was in the dining-room; Garwood could hear the clatter of plates, and when she came bustling with her tireless, wiry energy out into the kitchen, he remained there, walking up and down, gossiping with her in a way which, while she was always undemonstrative, she entirely loved. As the fire grew hotter and the kettle began to sing, the kitchen became warm and cozy, and the man and the mother felt a confidential charm in their surroundings that they never found so much anywhere as in the kitchen.
Garwood told his mother of his meetings during the week, of the meals he had been compelled to endure at the little country hotels, of his long rides by night. But he did not talk to her of Emily, and the old woman warily avoided the girl’s name and all topics that even by the remotest association might suggest her. Mrs. Garwood was proud of Emily, and while she gloried in that pride before the women of her acquaintance she never let her son see it; she rather distrusted her own footing in the presence of the girl or of her name. More thanall she longed that night to keep her son at home with her, and she strained every nerve to do so.
The fragrance of the steaming coffee was filling the room. She put some slices of bacon in the skillet to fry—broiling did not form any part of her culinary accomplishments—and after she had dropped two eggs into the tin pan where the water had long been bubbling, she commanded him to hold his watch on them, as if they were about to run a race. She cut the bread in great white slices; she opened a glass of her jelly, a concession she seldom made before winter, and she even found for his dessert the half of an apple pie. When she had poured her coffee off, she whisked the supper on to the table; and before Garwood could stop her she had run bareheaded out of the kitchen door and was grinding up a pitcher of fresh water from the old chain-pump in the yard. He called to her to let him get it, though he made no move to deter her, and as she rinsed out the pitcher and whirled the rattling crank of the pump again, she called out of the rainy darkness:
“Don’t you come out here! You’ve got your slippers on.”
He scolded her as she came stamping back into the kitchen, the rain drops showing on her gray hair, but she stilled his scoldings by reproaches of her own for standing in the open door on such a night and with such a cold.
The son repaid his mother’s efforts by declaring that he did not know how hungry he was until he smelled her cooking again, and he made the eyesthat looked fondly across the table glisten with a brightness that seldom glowed in their dim depths, by eating all the bacon she had fried, and both the eggs, and then by sending her to cut more bread. He urged her to share his meal, though he warned her that if she did she would have to cook him more bacon and boil him another egg. She refused, though she implored him to let her fry more bacon and boil the other egg, but she did consent finally to drink a cup of coffee, in the readiness American women always evince for their national beverage. She said it did her good to see him eat. “Feed a cold and starve a fever,” she quoted. When he had eaten, he threatened to help her wash the dishes, as he used to do when he was a boy, but she declined this assistance also, saying she was going to leave them for the hired girl to do up in the morning. She had fears of his escaping when he had eaten, but he pacifically lighted a cigar and she allowed him to stroll out of her sight into the sitting room.
Though she had said she was not going to wash the dishes he heard her scrape the skillet and a moment later, knock the coffee pot on the sink outside the kitchen door, and he called to upbraid her for breaking her promise to him. Under his admonitions she hastened through her work, and when she joined him in the sitting room she glanced at his feet, as she entered, to reassure herself by finding him still in slippers. He gave her a pang of fear by observing, in the moment when their conversation lagged, that he supposed he ought to goover and see Emily, but she said, appealing to his affection by speaking of herself in the third person:
“Oh, stay with mother to-night; it’s been so long since you were at home.”
She got out her sewing basket for her never idle hands and as Garwood stretched himself in the wooden rocking-chair his father had loved, he said:
“Oh, well, all right; she doesn’t know I’m here anyhow.”
Then she was content to sit and darn his socks and look at him in the great silence of a mother’s love.
They sat there for a long time. She did not know how to make conversation, and, remembering the dislike for questions he had inherited from his silent father, she feared to disturb him by asking any. She was satisfied to have him with her.
Garwood remained silent until he had finished his cigar, disliking to interrupt his own pleasure in it by opening the subject that then was on his heart. But at length he began to talk to her about his campaign, and it was a stimulant to her pride to hear his confidences. She was more pleased than distressed when he spoke in a discouraged tone of his prospects. She knew he was of a desponding temperament, another heritage from his father, and it pleased her to try to cheer him.
“Oh, you’ll be ’lected,” she insisted. “Your mother’s prayin’, my son, and she has faith in her prayers.”
Garwood laughed, with a touch of the harsh skepticism she was always combating in him.
“I’m afraid we need money just now, as much as prayers,” he said.
“Money?” she asked, pausing in her darning, and looking up at him inquiringly.
“Yes,” he said. “There are legitimate expenses in a campaign you know, that a candidate has to meet.” And then he told her what the legitimate expenses were.
“Some of the boys—Jim Rankin and some others—suggested that I ought to go to Mr. Harkness,” he said, when he had finished. He had adroitly calculated the effect this suggestion would have upon her, and he was certain of her reply.
“Go to Mr. Harkness, would they? Humph!” Her eyes blazed as she almost snorted this. “I’d have them know if we are poor we’re not goin’ to be beholden to the Harknesses in any such way as that!”
“That’s just what I told them,” said the son, quietly.
“An’ you told ’em just right!” she added. She returned to her darning, holding up the sock, stretched over her extended fingers, before the lamp.
“But I don’t know whom to go to,” Garwood said presently, “and I’ve got to go to somebody.”
“Can’t you possibly get along somehow?” she asked. “Tell ’em you just ain’t got any money to give ’em.”
Garwood gave a contemptuous “Humph!” andthen, made impatient by her utter failure to comprehend the grim necessity of a candidate’s position with election but a week away, he said:
“Didn’t I just say I’d got to have some?”
“Well, mother don’t pretend to know about politics. Your pa never had anything to do with ’em, you know.” She hastened to say this in her mild voice, to conciliate his petulance with her.
“Oh, I know, mother,” he rejoined; “but it’s a ground-hog case with me. I’ve got to meet my assessments some way. It wouldn’t be honourable not to.”
He stretched out his long legs and gazed into the grate.
“I’ll have to borrow of some one, I don’t know who.”
He slid farther down into his chair and crowded his hands into his trousers’ pockets, a physical posture at one with his mental attitude.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
He was scowling, his face was long, and he said this with the deep tone of a final and absolute despair.
“Some one will lend it to you,” the mother said. “You mustn’t get so down-hearted.”
“Well, I’d like to know who!” he said, casting a challenge at her from his eyes.
“Why, some o’ the banks—they loan money.”
He laughed aloud, harshly, angrily.
“The banks!” he said, mocking her tone. “The banks! They’d be likely to lend me any without security, wouldn’t they?”
“Well, Jerome, don’t get mad with mother,” she said. “She’d help you if she could.”
He was silent; silent for a long time. She looked up at him now and then, cautiously, but she understood his humor, and she thought by the knitting of his brows that he was deep in thought. Out of his cogitations he came after a time, and then to say, with a mild, hesitating approach to their result:
“I can think of only one thing, mother, I might do.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I might borrow a little from the bank—and we give a mortgage on the house.”
His mother did not move. Her gray head was bent over her sewing. The light of the lamp made her hair glisten; he heard the sound of her thread as she pulled her darning-needle regularly out to arm’s length. Presently, as he ventured to look at her, he thought of how his father had toiled to put this little roof over her head before the disease which he knew was hastening his end should bear him away; he thought of the comfort she had always taken, during the long years she had worked to keep him in school, in the thought that whatever else came, she had a home, an asylum for every stress and storm of life. She sewed on in the silence, and he did not speak again, but waited for her. And after awhile she spoke, without raising her head:
“You know, dear”—he could not remember when she had permitted herself the tender wordbefore—“what I promised your father before he went away.”
Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.
“I know, mother,” he said, “but this really isn’t serious, not that serious; it would be a small one, and I’m sure to be elected, and then I’ll have a good salary as congressman—five thousand a year—just think! Why, it would only be for a couple of months; I’d get a sixty-day loan. I could easily pay it off then; you’d never know the difference.” He smiled in his own hopefulness. “It seems a pity to lose such a good chance as I’ve got now for a little thing like that.”
She did not raise her eyes.
“But your father said, Jerome,” she faltered, and then he saw a tear fall on the pile of hose in her lap, and, strangely enough, in such a moment, he saw a pair of their servant girl’s stockings—he knew them because their splendor of color told that they never belonged to his mother. “And I,” she went on, “I—promised.”
“But, mother, just look here a minute—I wouldn’t ask anything out of the way of you, would I?”
“You’ve always been a good son to me, Jerome, and a good provider.”
“Well, it isn’t as if you were going to get a big sum on it, or as if we had no chance of paying it off right away. It won’t be breaking your promise, don’t you see?”
He went on with his smiling, specious reasoning,reassuring himself every minute, and finally seeming to make an impression upon her, for she said at last:
“Well, Jerome, you’re a man now, and you know best about such things. You’ll have to take care of your old mother before long, anyway, till she—”
She took off her spectacles and wiped away their moisture on the stocking she was darning, and then she raised her eyes, their pale depths dim with tears, and through them she smiled at him. He got up and kissed her, and she held him to her, pressing his cheek close to her withered one, patting his hands clumsily, awkwardly, for she had never had time to cultivate the luxurious graces of affection.
She did not, however, give way long to her emotion. She urged him to go to bed, because of his cold, and in the new burst of affection the evening had developed in his heart, he obeyed. She tucked him in his bed as if he had been a little boy again, and said good night.
He lay there a long time, warm, perspiring, comfortable, his election as he felt at last assured. But he could not get to sleep. For from his mother’s room there came to him the sound of her quavering, aged voice, in hoarse whispers, and he knew that she was kneeling by her bed, praying.