From time to time the troubled parents tried other diplomacies of increasing feebleness, until finally it seemed best to mention the subject, even indirectly, no more. In the evenings the silences in the library were charged with feeling withheld from expression; though Dan enlivened the room when he came in, and made it boisterous if he brought the baby with him. Certainly no depression could be recorded against either of this pair; Henry Daniel glowed with health and became livelier with every month of increasing age and weight. As for Lena, after her outburst upon the reading of Mrs. Savage’s will, she was another of this household who was surcharged with repressed feeling; but her repression became a habit;—weeks went by when she did not slam a door. She appeared to become more tolerant of her husband at this period than she had ever been; and when she spoke to him at all, it was in a tone suggesting that her tolerance had in it something of compassion.
She devoted herself to her baby, perhaps finding a refuge in her devotion; but she declined to accompany Dan on Sunday afternoons when he went for a sidewalk excursion with the perambulator. This was an established custom in the town, she observed: every Sunday, early in the afternoon, the young fathers and mothers began to appear upon the sidewalks, the fathers pushing the baby-carriages and the mothers strolling a little way behind with the toddlers, if there were any of these, or perhaps lingering for a moment of gossip with friends encountered by the way, then scurrying on to overtake the perambulator.
High and low followed the custom; it was as well observed by the South Side, where lived most of the followers of handicrafts, as it was upon National Avenue and Amberson Boulevard. The perambulators of these two thoroughfares were the more luxurious; fine lace was to be seen upon the occupants, and the accompanying parents were well dressed; though Lena, looking from her window, sometimes shivered to see one of the passing young husbands wearing a Derby hat as a complement to the long frock coat that appeared to be a regalia garment necessary to this occasion.
By four o’clock, which was Dan’s favourite hour for his weekly perambulator stroll, most of the pedestrian families were on their way homeward from “Sunday dinner at grandpa’s and grandma’s,” the grandma and grandpa being almost invariably the parents of the young mother. Lena objected to the parade as “publicly provincial,” and pointed out that Dan lacked any plausible reason for joining it;—if the baby needed air he could be taken for a drive in the family carriage; and if Dan insisted on pushing him in the perambulator, the Oliphants’ back yard was “twice the size of Madison Square,” she said with elaborate exaggeration; but Henry Daniel’s father only laughed and continued to follow the custom of his fellow-townsmen.
The Sunday-afternoon excursion with the perambulator gave him his greatest happiness, and all through his bustling week days of work he looked forward to it, chuckling as he thought of it. And when the rewarding hour arrived, he went forth wheeling his son before him and cheerily unconscious that he was the only father in sight not accompanied (even at a distance) by a second parent for the occupant of the perambulator. He was proud to exhibit Henry Daniel and loved nothing better than to lift him out of the little carriage and talk uproarious baby-talk to him, and tickle him to make him laugh, and in every other possible manner show him off to other young parents—or to anybody who had time to listen to these hilarious paternal banalities. If other parents bragged of their own young, showing them off in turn, Dan’s manifestations with Henry Daniel would become but the louder; and if the other parents, being two to one, succeeded in drowning him out, he would restore his child to the perambulator tenderly and move on, sorry for people who had so little to make such a fuss about.
Sunday, he said, was the only day when he had a chance to get really acquainted with the baby; for all the rest of the week Dan was out hustling so early and so late that opportunities for making the acquaintance more intimate were few. A great part of his activity at this time was in the chase of possible buyers of Ornaby ground; and a driven life was led by those three men who had thought they might buy lots after the foreclosure. The Earl of Ornaby gave them little rest; and although he sometimes remained away from one or another of them for days at a time—perhaps upon the ardent request, “Well, for heaven’s sakes can’t you even give me a chance to think it over?”—he would write frequent letters to the pursued creature in the interval. Incessantly he persuaded, argued, and prophesied; seldom has a half-accepted, half-rejected lover shown such hot persistence in convincing his lady; and probably never have three dismal men in moderate circumstances been so urgently courted into the buying of lots.
They were not friends, these men; they had gone separately to Ornaby and had no knowledge of one another when the pursuit of them began; but they knew one another well before it was over. The vehement salesman had so quoted them to one another, making such glorifying use of their every admission not actually condemning Ornaby, that a conference of the quoted seemed to be a necessity. They thought to meet in secret; but within ten minutes found the hunter upon them.
“Gentlemen,” he began, “you wish to be alone, and I will not interrupt you”—and talked until two of them went home.
He went with them, and then returned to talk some more to the man at whose house the conference had been called.
Such deadly persistence finally prevailed upon a majority of the three and two more lots were sold in the Addition upon the liberal terms of nothing down and little more than nothing to be paid in periodical installments. Nevertheless, here were three actual sales, and if there ever lived a salesman who knew how to make three appear to be a hundred, because he himself believed three to be a hundred, that multi-visioned salesman was Daniel Oliphant.