IV
EMILY put the child to bed and then went down into the library to join her father, who sat with his book in the mellow circle of the reading lamp. She entered the room softly from the habit that had grown upon her in the hours when the baby might be wakened, and she sank into a chair and folded her hands with a sigh. Her father slowly glanced at her tired, thin face, but did not move his head. He seemed to be reading on, but presently he said, still without moving:
“Tired?”
Emily lifted her head from the back of the chair on which she had been resting it, fastened a lock of her hair, smiled and said:
“Oh, no.”
“You let that young John E., or whatever his name is, wear you out,” her father insisted, taking his glasses from his nose and marking his place in his book after his old custom.
“Poor child!” the mother said. “He’s not well. I dread the summer so.”
“He seems fretful,” said the father, with a shade of his original resentment lingering in his tone.
“Oh, it’s not that, father,” Emily replied. “He’s so active and full of energy. Mother Garwood says Jerome was just so when he was a baby.”
“Been over there?”
“Yes, I ran over to-day to ask her some things about baby. She knows all about them.”
“Well, you ought to have a nurse,” he said.
“We can’t afford it,” the mother replied.
“Can’t afford it! He gets enough!”
“I know it, but it’s so expensive living, as Jerome must, at a hotel in Washington. And he’s in debt, with another campaign coming on. That’ll cost, you know.”
The old man raised himself in his chair.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that with five thousand a year, he might—”
The daughter also raised herself in her chair and her dull eyes caught back some of their old brightness.
“You know, father, that Jerome does the best he can—”
She stopped; and so did he. They had sounded that note several times of late. The truth was, that the presence of Garwood in the house was already beginning to have its effect on his father-in-law. When Garwood was in Washington Harkness felt a pride in him, but after he had been at home for awhile, his various characteristics one after another got on the old man’s nerves, until he could scarcely treat him civilly. He detested Garwood’s lazy habits, his lying abed in the mornings, his afternoon naps, though Harkness took naps himself, and he distrusted his long absences at night. More than all he inwardly raged at Garwood’s extravagance, though he dared not complain of it, for Emily had been firm in her insistence that they pay for their board, knowing, as she did, her father’s punctiliousness in matters of money, a disposition likely to be cultivated by those who have money enough to gratify it. Harkness would doubtless have preferred that the Garwoods keep house, as Jerome was always threatening to do, but he could not bear the thought of the loneliness Emily’s absence would add to his idleness. Restrained therefore from complaining of Garwood, his discontent expressed itself in complaints of himself, and he shuffled about the house with a martyr’s patient suffering written in his face, lowering himself carefully into his chair whenever he sat down, with a prolonged, senile “Ah-h-h-h” that heralded, as he meant it to do, the encroachments of age.
And then the baby worried him. They had given the boy his name, Ethan, but they prefixed it with the other name of John, which had belonged to Garwood’s father. Garwood had mildly protested against the name of Ethan because he didn’t care for biblical names, though Emily had insisted that Ethan was not a biblical name. The argument had been settled, at least to Garwood’s satisfaction, for he claimed to have found the name in the Old Testament, but with a firmness for which Emily said the name itself stood, she insisted that the mere mention of it in Holy Writ did not constitute it a biblical name. But though young John Ethan kept his grandfather’s name he never found a way to his grandfather’s graces, at least he had not done so yet, and this only added another complication to the many in which Emily found her life enmeshed.
And so this evening Harkness took refuge in his senility and his troubles.
“Well,” he ventured with a sigh that he knew was pathetic, “if I could only afford it I’d take you and the boy away for the summer, but I’m poor now and old.”
“I couldn’t leave Jerome just now, father, but this talk about your being poor and old is absurd, absurd—and I want you to quit it. Why don’t you go away this summer? Go back to New Hampshire for a rest. It would do you a world of good, and you’ve always said you were going as soon as you could get away from the bank.”
She checked herself, perceiving that she had hit on an unfortunate subject, but her father replied with a return of his old dry humor:
“Yes, the bank was the principal obstacle, and that’s been removed now.”
He set his lips bitterly, and picked up his book again. There was silence in the library, and Emily rested. Now and then her father glanced at her, but she did not move. She lay back in her chair, relaxed in every fiber. He stood her inaction as long as any man could, and then demanded:
“Why don’t you do something? Ain’t you going to read?”
She did rouse herself, obedient to his whims, but she made an excuse:
“I must go up and see how the baby’s getting along.”
“Coming down again?”
“No; leave the door open for Jerome when you come up, will you?”
And then he was left to the expectant silence that oppresses a household when it awaits the coming of one of its members before it can settle down for the night. It was after midnight when Garwood came. He threw the reeking end of his cigar into the yard and toiled up the stairs breathing heavily.
“Where have you been?” Emily asked when he entered their rooms.
“Down town; where’d you suppose?” he answered.
“Is there any news?”
“News? What of?”
“Why, of politics.”
“Well, I’ve got a fight on my hands, that’s the news.” He spoke as if she were responsible for the fact, and she felt it.
“You know how interested the baby and I are, Jerome. We’ve been waiting here to hear.”
He softened at the mention of his child, and bent over his cradle.
“Don’t waken him,” the mother said, as he put forth his big hand. And then she resumed her questioning.
“Did you see Mr. Rankin?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said hopefully, with the faith they had always held in Rankin, “he can bring it around all right, can’t he?”
“He!” said Garwood. “He’s a back number!”
She drew the story out of him, and when she had done so, she said:
“Well, you don’t forget, Jerome, that you once said to me that we must be good to Jim Rankin.”
He made no reply for a long time, and she followed him with eyes that looked large in her thin face. After awhile, he paused in trying to unbutton his collar, and turned his head around, his chin thrust pointedly out over his hands.
“If I were out of debt,” he said, “I’d quit the whole business and open a law office in Chicago, and let politics alone.”
It was a common threat with him when he was discouraged. And she had long since learned that the threat to leave politics was common to all politicians, just as the threat to leave the sea is common to all sailors, or the threat to leave newspaper work to all newspaper men. She felt herself the fascination of the life, and so knew the insincerity of the threat.
“Oh, you always say that when you’re blue. Don’t worry any more to-night.”