“You and Eugene Morgan and that rascally old Sheridan and your Jew friends are doing an awful thing,” he said to Dan at a family dinner. “You’re ruining the one decent thing the city possessed—a splendid, dignified old street. It’s happening all over the country—one doesn’t need half an hour in New York to see that Fifth Avenue is ruined; but I did think we might have escaped here. I doubt if it would ever have occurred to Morgan to put up his awful sales building—with a repair shop in it!—on National Avenue, if you hadn’t done it first. Then the others thought they had to follow; and if something isn’t done to stop you fellows, the whole avenue will be nothing but a mile row of motor-car sales buildings and pneumatic tire warehouses and garages—a market!—and with hundred-foot smoke-stacks! It may reach even here to our old house and the Shelbys’; and already you’ve made the peaceful neighbourhood around my house horrible. I’d like to know what grandma Savage would have said about the things you people have done to this town! Why, you’ve made National Avenue begin to look like an old pipe-smoking hag’s mouth with every other tooth missing and the rest sticking up all black in the smoke.”
Dan laughed absent-mindedly, but remained impervious. Like the ardent Sheridan, he loved the smoke, called it “Prosperity,” and drew his lungs full of it, breathing in it the glory of his city. More and more, the city became his city, and with all his juggling and tight-rope dancing he found time to be mayor of it for a year, and to begin the “Park System” that was afterwards to bring so much beauty to it. One day he drove his father over the ground he had planned to include in this chain of groves and meadows; and he was glad afterwards that they had made the excursion together.
“It’ll be a great thing for the city,” his father said, as Dan’s car turned homeward with them. “It’s a great thing for you to do and to be remembered by. You were a good boy, Dan; and you’re a good man and a good citizen. You serve your fellow-men well, I think.”
Dan laughed, a little embarrassed by this praise; but although Mr. Oliphant perceived his son’s embarrassment, he had more to say, and went on with something like timidity, yet with a gentle persistence: “I’d like to tell you another thing, Dan. It’s something your mother and I never felt we ought to talk about to you, but I believe I’ll mention it to you to-day. We—you see your mother and I have always thought there’s a danger sometimes in letting a person see that you sympathize with him, because it might make him feel that he’s unhappy, or in trouble, whereas, if you just leave him to himself he may go on cheerfully enough and never think about it. But I would like to tell you—I’d like to say——”
He paused, and Dan asked: “You’d like to say what, sir?”
“Well—I’d like just to tell you that your mother and I think you’ve always been as kind as you could to Lena.”
Surprised, Dan stared at him; and Mr. Oliphant gravely and affectionately returned his look. “Yes, sir,” the son said awkwardly. “I hope so. Thank you, sir.” And he thought that the handsome, kind old face seemed whiter and more fragile than usual.
That was natural, Dan told himself; people couldn’t help growing old, and they grew whiter and thinner as age came upon them; but age didn’t necessarily mean ill-health. For that matter, his father hadn’t nearly reached a really venerable old age; he was more than a decade younger than old-hickory Shelby, who still never missed a day’s work. Nevertheless, there had been something a little disquieting in Mr. Oliphant’s manner; it was as if he had thought that perhaps he might never have another chance to say what he had said;—and that night, on the train to which he had hurried after their drive, Dan thought about his father often.
He thought about him often, too, the next day, in New York; and during the conferences there with the landscape architects who were designing the new parks, his thoughts went uneasily westward;—not to the green stretches of grove and sward that were to be, but to the quiet old man who had walked so slowly between the tall white gateposts after bidding his son good-bye. Recalling this, it seemed to Dan that he had never before seen him walk so slowly; and he went over in his mind, for the fiftieth time, his father’s manner in speaking of Lena—the slight, timid insistence, as if there might never be another opportunity to say something he had always wished to say. It had given what he said the air of a blessing bestowed—and of a valedictory.
Thus Dan’s vague uneasiness grew, and although he scolded himself for it, and told himself he was imaginative beyond reason, he could not be rid of it. That was well for him; since such uneasiness may be of help when life is like a path whereon tigers leap from nowhere, as it is, sometimes;—the wayfarer will not avoid wounds, but may better survive them for having been in some expectance of them.