Upon that, he struck both arms of his chair decisively with the palms of his hands, and, as a continuation of this action, rose and turned to the window, his back to his parents. They glanced nervously at each other, each knowing that the other had the same hope and the same doubt; the glance they exchanged meaning, “You speak to him about it!” Mr. Oliphant yielded and coughed uncomfortably as a prelude, but his wife impulsively decided to begin the task for him.
“Harlan, dear,” she said, “your father and I both know you’ve always acted conscientiously in everything you’ve ever done; and of course what mother’s given you ought to be regarded as a sacred trust. You’re right to say you’ll take care if it, but we feel—I mean your father and I feel——” She faltered, and appealed to her husband: “You do feel that perhaps—perhaps under the circumstances—perhaps——”
“Yes,” Mr. Oliphant said as she came to a helpless stop;—“I think under the circumstances Harlan might—might properly see fit to——” But here he, too, hesitated and seemed unable to continue.
Their son, however, understood them perfectly, and turned sharply to face them. “Of course I knew you’d ask it,” he said, and an old bitterness, long held down within him, came to the surface. “I knew you wanted me to let Dan have even that twenty-five thousand dollars grandfather left me. You really wanted me to let him throw it away along with his own, though you never spoke out and asked me to do it. Martha Shelby did, though. She spoke out plainly enough! The fact that grandfather gave it to me never entered her head. She only thought I was miserly for not putting it into Dan’s hands to be squandered. That’s what she thought, and I’ve understood all along that my mother and my father had a great deal the same feeling.”
“No, no,” his mother protested, for the bitterness in his voice had increased as he spoke. “We never reproached you, dear.”
“No, not in words maybe.”
“No, not in any way,” she said. “It was right of you to take care of it, and you’d be right now to take care of what you’ll have. Your father and I only mean that now you have so much——”
“Now that I have so much,” Harlan echoed, “I ought to throw away part of it, even though grandma’s trusted me to save it from just this very wastage and to take care of every bit of it?”
“No, no; it isn’t that,” Mrs. Oliphant said; and with pathetically naïve artfulness she changed the basis of her appeal. “But you know, dear, you were just telling us how much Martha had wanted you to help Dan—she’s always been such a devoted friend of his—and you said that after she hears about mother’s bequest to you, she may take it as a kind of supplanting your brother, and it would be harder than ever for you to make her fond of you; so don’t you see—don’t you see what a splendid effect it would have on her now, when you’ve got so much, dear, and could spare it—don’t you see, if you’d—if you’d——”
“Yes, I see,” Harlan said grimly. “You think Martha might even admire me enough to marry me, if I’d say to Dan: ‘Here! I won’t accept all this that should have been yours. Here’s half of it.’ ”