“No,” Harlan said, with satire. “I should say it wasn’t!”
“It’s a great change,” the old lady continued. “I don’t suppose my mother could have believed how beautiful it would come to be.”
“No,” Harlan said, with a short laugh. “I don’t believe she could!”
She overlooked his sarcasm, or was unaware of it, for she went on: “I don’t suppose I could believe how wonderful everything will be when my grandson gets to be as old as you are, Harlan.” But this thought made her wander from the subject. “I wish Lena would let him come home some day; I do want to see him;—I don’t want to go till I’ve seen him again.” Her voice became querulous, and then, with a habit she had formed in her old age, she began to talk more to herself than to her son and daughter-in-law, but for the most part in indistinct whispers. Her subject was still Henry, who had done well in the war, had been twice “decorated,” and now lived in Paris with his mother. The old lady murmured of him and of Lena for a little time; then fell into a reverie.
Harlan joined his wife at the terrace wall. “Well, you’ve got a supporter in mother. She seems to think it’s beautiful.” He pointed upward to where an opening through the foliage of tall beech trees left a vista of the sky; and there, against the evening blue, the thinning end of a plume of smoke, miles long, was visible. “Do you, really? Even that?” he asked.
“Dan must have thought so,” she said. “I think he felt something in it that neither you nor I can understand.”
“I think maybe he did,” Harlan agreed. “Then why couldn’t he at least have lived to see the fruition of what he planted, since he loved it and it was beautiful to him? Why should he be ‘dead and forgotten?’ ”
“Listen!” Martha said. She was still looking up at the smoke against the sky, so far above the long masses of flowering bridal-wreath that bordered the terrace where she and her husband stood. “Listen! That murmur of the city down yonder—why, it’s almost his voice!”
THE END