“They will need as much again to govern what they have.”
“You are prejudiced against anything new, father.”
“Perhaps I am, Antony. I am suspicious of new things, even of new planets. I have read of several lately, but I cannot say I believe in them. I find myself sticking to the old list I learned at school; it began with Mercury, and ended with Georgium Sidus. I believe they have given Georgium Sidus a new name; but I don’t know him by it.”
Antony—who rarely laughed—laughed heartily at his father’s solid conservatism; and then the conversation drifted to and fro about the ordinary events of their daily life—the potting of plants, the village taxes, the shoeing of horses, and so forth. And Yanna’s calm, serious face told Antony nothing of the suffering in her heart; nor did she desire he should know it. Culture teaches the average woman to suppress feeling; and Yanna had a great dislike to discuss matters so closely personal to her. She was not ignorant either of Antony’s love for Rose, and his friendship with Harry had been hitherto without a cloud; why, then, should her private affairs make trouble between lovers and friends?
“At any rate,” she thought, “circumstances alter cases; and Antony in his relationship with Rose and Harry must be permitted to act without any sense of obligation to my rights or wrongs.”
Peter scarcely looked at the matter in the same temperate way; his sense of the family tie was very strong, and he thought if one member suffered injury all the other members ought to suffer with it. Yet he comprehended Yanna’s sensitiveness, her dislike for any discussion of her feelings, her liberal admission that 88 Harry, brought up in a different sphere of life, and under social tenets of special obsequiousness, could not be fairly measured by the single directness of their line and plummet.
She understood from Harry’s awkward attitude in his own home that he was suffering, and that he was likely to make others suffer with him. She had no special resentment against Mrs. Filmer. “Her behavior was natural enough; I might have been just as rude under the same provocation,” she thought. So she said nothing whatever to her father of the little scene between Mrs. Filmer and herself; she was able to understand Mrs. Filmer’s position, and she was satisfied with the way in which she had defended her own. “There is nothing owing between us,” she reflected, “and, therefore, there will be no perpetual sense of injury. We shall forgive—and perhaps forget.”
She busied herself all afternoon about her simple household duties; affecting to Betta a sudden anxiety about the usual preparations for winter; and she compelled herself to sing as she went up and down, putting away, and taking out, or looking carefully for the ravages of the summer moth. Peter heard her voice in one bravura after another; and for a short time he sat still listening and wondering. For effects are chained to causes, and he asked himself what reason Yanna had for music of that particular kind. By-and-by, he smiled and nodded; he had fathomed the secret of Yanna’s mental medicine—though with her it had been a simple instinct accepted and obeyed—and he said softly:
“To be sure! The lifeboat is launched with a shout, and the forlorn hope goes cheering into the breach; so when the heart has a big fight to make, 89 anything that can help it into action is good. Artificial singing will bring the real song; anyway, it helps her to work, and work is the best gospel ever preached for a heartache.”
The evening was brightened by Antony’s metamorphosis into a man of fashion. His late frequent visits to New York were explained when he rather consciously came into the sitting-room. He was in full dress, and looked remarkably handsome; and Peter felt very proud of his son. It is a humbling thing to confess that he had never had such a quick, positive pride in him before. The potent and mysterious power of dress, and of a fine personal presence, jumped to his eyes, and appealed to his heart, with a promptitude Antony’s bravest and most unselfish deeds had never effected. He stood up and looked at his son with a kindling pleasure in his face; and when Yanna sent him off with prodigal compliments, he privately endorsed every one of them.