CHAPTER TWELVE
Harriet laughed at Alexina’s wonder over her. “It took me a time to realize that hospitality means the incidental oftener than the invited,” she confessed. “My guests, you know, Alexina, were formally asked, and the other would have fretted me. That was why, I suppose, I had no intimates.”
Harriet never knew, it would seem, these days, whether the Judge, the Colonel, Father Ryan, the man from the office chatting in the library with the Major, one or all, were going to stay for supper or were not; yet she had come to the place where she could smile in serene and genuine welcome, the while everybody moved up and the coloured housemaid slipped in an extra chair and plate.
And she only laid a hand on the spoon with which little Stevie hammered his plate.
“I’d take it away and spank him myself, you know,” confided Louise, Stevie’s mother, to Alexina; “I do spank William.”
But all of life seemed to be moving for Harriet with serenity. Every trivial happening was swallowed up in the joy that death had spared her her husband. And the Major, whatever the agony, the horror, preceding the acceptation of a maimed life, had not lost the vital grace of humour. Life flowed in and out of the Rathbone home with him for centre as it had used to do in and out of his office. The room where he sat amid his papers and books was a rallying place because the strong will and personality of the man in the wheeled chair made it so.
“He’s been meaning for years to do a series of guerrilla articles a magazine has wanted of him, and now he’s at them,” said Harriet, “and he has given in this far, in his stiff-necked pride, that he’s bought an interest in the paper for me, and it keeps him in touch and absorbed.”
The Major had been watching Alexina. At the end of several days’ observations he leaned back in his chair and addressed her. His eyes were humorous. “There’s an encouraging promise about you, Alexina,” he informed her. Then he caressed his lean chin with his lean, smooth hand. “A promise that gives me hope. You’ve laughed at my jokes since you’ve been here, and not from mere politeness either. Now, Harriet smiles out of the goodness of her heart because she thinks she ought to.”
But he caught at Harriet’s hand even while they all three laughed, for it was patent to everybody that Harriet had no idea what his jokes were about, which was the amusing thing of all, seeing that it was the Major’s humour that she confessed had attracted her.
And yet the eyes of the man often deepened and glowed as he watched her move about the house, for she made even the trivial duties seem beautiful because of her unconscious earnestness and her joy in their doing.