XXIII
HARKNESS gained steadily for a week, and then he began to grow restless and intractable. His whims and exactions exhausted Emily’s strength, and when he could think of nothing else for her to do, he at last demanded that she read to him, and she had to settle to this labor, though her spirits wholly lacked that sense of leisure and repose so necessary to the enjoyment of such a task. He chose his old favorite, Scott, and for hours each afternoon, until the early twilight gathered in the room, she read to him from the novels he had loved so long. It was a test of her devotion, for she had long since outgrown Scott, as she had been fond of declaring, but he would not hear to Howells, nor Meredith, nor Hardy, nor any of the moderns.
One afternoon the doctor entered the room in the midst of the reading. He heard Emily’s low, placid voice as he noiselessly approached the room upstairs where his patient lay:
“‘At length the Norman received a blow which, though its force was partly parried by his shield, for otherwise nevermore would De Bracy have again moved limb, descended yet with such violence on his crest that he measured his length on the paved floor.’”
Emily closed the book upon her finger as he entered and stood just inside the door with thesmell of the cold air and his own cigar upon him, but her father reared himself on his elbow, and, shaking his tousled gray head, said:
“We’re just storming a castle, Doc. You sit down and wait, and then I’ll attend to you.”
The doctor smiled.
“I guess you’re getting along all right without me any more,” he said. And Emily took up her tale:
“‘“Yield thee, De Bracy,” said the Black Champion, stooping over him, and holding against the bars of his helmet the fatal poniard—’”
He was bolstered up in a big chair by the time Christmas drew on, and Emily was bustling happily about the house hanging wreaths of holly in the windows, and striving to draw out of all the uncertainties of the time a spirit of holiday warmth and cheer. She wrote Jerome all the details of the little celebration she was planning, and warned him to be home in time to hang up the baby’s stocking for Christmas. By way of further inducement she said she had many things to tell him, though they could hardly have piqued his curiosity, for she straightway proceeded to relate them. She had had, for instance, a long letter from Dade, announcing dramatically that she and her mother were coming home. They were tired of Europe, and her engagement with the German baron was broken. She felt, after all, so she wrote, that she would rather marry an American—as if marriage were the whole duty of woman.
The ugly stories about Pusey’s appointment aspostmaster, and of the dire results to follow, had reached Emily, penetrating even to that shaded sick room, but of these she did not write. She had too many perplexities already, and with a power she could command in certain mental crises she put this subject aside, awaiting Jerome’s coming and his explanation, and resolutely setting her heart toward the happier aspect of things she was always seeing in the future.
Congress adjourned for the holidays on Wednesday, but it was not until the following Monday that Garwood reached Grand Prairie. Emily had expected him Friday; the Chicago congressmen, as she had read in the newspapers of that city, had reached home on that day, been duly interviewed, and allowed to lapse into their customary obscurity, but Jerome delayed and no word came. When he did drive up to the house Monday evening, tired and worn with traveling, he explained that a conference had detained him. Emily did not display her usual interest in politics by pressing for details of the conference. There were things, she was slowly learning, that it were better to let pass.
She had kept his supper warm for him, and as soon as he had cleansed himself of the stains of travel, and had a look at the baby sleeping rosily in his crib, she had it laid in the dining-room. She sat across the table from him with the coffee urn before her.
“How’s father?” he asked.
“He’s better—but weak. He must not go out this winter. His heart’s affected,” she whispered,turning about with the soft-voiced mystery of a secret. “He mustn’t know it. He’s in low spirits, and the doctor says I’ll have to stay more closely with him and watch him.” Her voice fell as she repeated this judgment.
“Hm-m-m,” Garwood mused. He stirred the sugar into his coffee, and then, as if seeking livelier topics, he said:
“So Dade’s coming home, is she?”
“Yes; isn’t it too bad about her engagement?”
“No, I think not—those foreigners are mostly a bad lot.”
“She says she’ll have to marry an American.”
“Does she have to get married?”
Emily smiled faintly.
“She seems to think so.”
“Mother well?” Garwood asked.
“Yes—you must go right over and see her.”
“I’m pretty tired to-night.”
“Yes, I know, Jerome, but it wouldn’t do. You must go right away when you have done your supper.”
Having thus disposed of all the necessary topics, Garwood rather hesitatingly approached the subject that lay on the hearts of both.
“How does the post-office appointment seem to strike them?”
He kept his eyes downward on the cigarette he was pinching.
“I don’t hear much about it,” Emily answered. And she colored. “You read the papers, of course.”
“Of course,” he answered, “but you can’t tellanything from them. What did you think of it?”
“I was surprised.”
“Surprised?”
“Yes.”
“What at?”
“At you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
A heavy silence fell, and Emily sat there, her eyes on the silver sugar bowl she slowly fitted to a design in the tablecloth. Her lips, though, were set, and Garwood, stealing a glance at them, moved uneasily. Here was the first of his constituents he must reckon with.
“Well, Pusey’ll make a good postmaster,” he ventured at last, seeing that she was not likely to speak.
“Doubtless,” she replied. “I hardly thought, though, that political appointments were a question of fitness nowadays.”
“I thought you were a civil service reformer,” Garwood answered, trying to laugh. But her lips remained obdurately tight, and he saw what her conscience would hold him to.
“I had supposed Mr. Rankin was to be appointed postmaster.”
Garwood did not reply at once.
“Rankin seems to have become quite a protégé of yours,” he ventured at last.
“I used to feel,” she promptly replied, “that we were in some sort protégés ofhis.”
Garwood could not contain himself longer.
“Well, I’m getting tired of having people talk as if Jim Rankin owned me! I’ll show ’em!” he ended stubbornly.
“But, Jerome,” she said, raising her eyes at last, and fixing them on his, “you promised him—didn’t you?”
He wadded his napkin and flung it petulantly on the table.
“There it goes!” he said, as he scraped back his chair. “I supposed some such story would get out.”
“But, didn’t you?” she persisted.
Under her insistence he arose from the table irascibly. He stood looking at her while a hard smile rose to his lips.
“You’re deeply concerned for Rankin, aren’t you?”
“Jerome,” she said quietly, looking at him with wide, unwinking eyes, “it is not Mr. Rankin I am concerned for—not for him half so much as for you.”
He was led into sarcasm for a moment.
“You are quite solicitous—” he began, and then evidently thinking better of it, he tried to laugh her out of her seriousness.
“It’s no use, Em,” he said patronizingly, as he lighted his cigarette, “you women can never understand politics.”
“We understand honor, though,” she said, “although men, in their personal way of allotting the attributes to the sexes, say we don’t.”
He gave her a reproachful look, and left.
When he had gone, she went to her own room.Her heart was beating wildly. “I never spoke so to him before,” she wailed in her heart. “I never spoke so to him before!” And then she flung herself full length across her bed, and burst into the tears that had long been flooding her heart to the very brim.