Faced with this abrupt question, Harlan was somewhat disturbed. “Well, possibly not,” he replied honestly, after a moment. “No, I can’t say I do.”
“I thought not. And does she like any of you?”
“Well, she’s evidently rather fond of mother—and of father, too.”
“Who on earth could help liking them?” Mrs. Savage cried, and, in her vehemence, seemed about to rise from her bed. “Do you think that’s to her credit? She hates everybody and everything else here, and she nags Dan. That means she thought he had money, and she married him for it, and now she’s disappointed. Well, she’ll keep on being disappointed a good while, so far as my property is concerned! Then maybe she’ll have sense enough to leave him and give him a chance to get the woman he ought to’ve married in the first place.”
Harlan looked a little startled as his grandmother sank back, panting with exhaustion; the spirit within her was too high and still too passionate for the frail material left to it. The self of her was indeed without age, unaltered, and as dominant as it had ever been, though the instrument through which it communicated, her strengthless body, was almost perished out of any serviceableness. To her grandson there came an odd comparison: it seemed to him that she was like a vigorous person shouting through an almost useless telephone that could make only the tiniest, just perceptible sounds; and he had an odder thought than this: When the telephone was entirely broken and silent would she still be trying to shout through it? She would be shouting somewhere, he felt sure. But what he said, rather sadly, was, “Martha? I suppose you mean Martha Shelby?”
“Of course! Martha could make something out of Dan, and she’s never looked at anybody but him, and she never will. You needn’t expect her to, either, young man.”
Harlan’s colour heightened at this, and some shadows of sensitiveness about his mouth became quickly more visible. “Oh, no; of course I don’t,” he said quietly.
“She’ll never marry you,” the terrible old lady went on. “I know what you’ve been up to—I’ve had my eyes about me—but you’ll never get her to quit thinking of Dan. And if this painted-up photograph girl takes her baby and goes away some day, things might have a chance to come out right. But you, young man——” She stopped, beset by a little cough as feeble as a baby’s, yet enough to check her; and upon this the professional nurse who now took care of her appeared in the doorway and gave Harlan the smiling glance that let him know his call had lasted long enough.
He rose from his chair by the bedside, murmuring the appropriate cheering phrases;—he was sure his grandmother would be stronger the next time he came, and she would soon “get downstairs again,” he said; while she looked up at him with a strange contemplation that he sometimes remembered afterwards; she had so many times in her life said to others what he was saying to her now. But she let him thus ease his departure, and responded with only a faintly gasped, “We’ll hope so,” and “Good-night.”
Though he bent over her, her voice was almost inaudible against the sound of the rain spitefully hammering the windows; and in the light of the single green-shaded bulb that hung above the table of tonics and medicines at the foot of the bed, the whiteness of her face was almost indistinguishable from the whiteness of the pillow. She was so nearly a ghost, indeed, that as he touched the cold hand in farewell, it seemed to him that if there were ghosts about—his grandfather, for instance—she might almost as easily be communing with them as with the living. She was of their world more than of this wherein she still wished to linger.