“I don’t know what I can do about it, James. I can not forbid him to accept invitations.”
“I am not so sure,” returned Emmons; “but one thing you certainly can do. You can move out of town. He will find it hard work to accept invitations in Hilltop, and we are justified, I think, in insisting that he shall come out there every night.”
Nellie hesitated. “I could do that,” she said, “and yet I hate to go so early to the country. I shall be very lonely at Hilltop, James.”
“No,” said Emmons, “for I have decided to take a house there myself—the red one, I think, across the ravine from you.”
“Oh, that will be delightful,” said Nellie.
“Besides, you will need my help in keeping an eye on Bob. This way, he and I can go up and down to town together every day.”
“You are very good, James. You think of everything to save me trouble.”
Mr. Lee was delighted at the prospect of an early move to Hilltop. He and his forefathers had been born and bred there. He loved the place; he loved the ugly red brick and stone house which his father had built on high ground to replace the old farmhouse in the valley below. He loved the farm itself—the acres of rolling country spread out on the slopes.
And Vickers, too, was glad to go. A quiet countryside in spring promised happier opportunities for tête-à-têtes with Nellie than New York had afforded him. Every day in the course of the past two weeks he had felt irked and humiliated by his position, and had been strongly tempted to slip away. Perhaps if escape had looked more difficult he would have been more likely to try it, but it was too easy to excite his interest. And, though it seemed always possible to him that the next day would be the last, his reasons for staying grew, without his realizing it, more and more powerful. Not only his feeling for Nellie held him—for indeed there were times when the prospect of putting her once and for all out of his life seemed very desirable to him,—but also old Mr. Lee’s feeling for him. The old man had not commanded Vickers’s attachment, hardly his respect. He was small-minded, irritable, petty, at times beyond endurance. He was ungrateful, almost unkind to Nellie, but there could be no doubt of his passionate, unqualified devotion to his only son. The one and only thing he cared for was the well-being and companionship of the man he supposed to be his boy. The idea of the pain his going would inflict held Vickers more perhaps than anything else. The patience with which the old man hid his eagerness for the younger one’s society, lest he should be a drag upon him, the amount of thought he devoted to Vickers’s plans, the pride he took in Vickers’s popularity were all inexpressibly touching to a man who had never been the object of parental tenderness.
When Nellie and Emmons and his clerkship were more than usually trying, Vickers would tell himself that the whole thing was absurd. Why should he stay for the sake of an old man who had no claim upon him whatsoever? And yet he stayed.