His mother did not move. Her gray head was bent over her sewing. The light of the lamp made her hair glisten; he heard the sound of her thread as she pulled her darning-needle regularly out to arm’s length. Presently, as he ventured to look at her, he thought of how his father had toiled to put this little roof over her head before the disease which he knew was hastening his end should bear him away; he thought of the comfort she had always taken, during the long years she had worked to keep him in school, in the thought that whatever else came, she had a home, an asylum for every stress and storm of life. She sewed on in the silence, and he did not speak again, but waited for her. And after awhile she spoke, without raising her head:
“You know, dear”—he could not remember when she had permitted herself the tender word before—“what I promised your father before he went away.”
Garwood leaned toward her with his elbows on his knees.
“I know, mother,” he said, “but this really isn’t serious, not that serious; it would be a small one, and I’m sure to be elected, and then I’ll have a good salary as congressman—five thousand a year—just think! Why, it would only be for a couple of months; I’d get a sixty-day loan. I could easily pay it off then; you’d never know the difference.” He smiled in his own hopefulness. “It seems a pity to lose such a good chance as I’ve got now for a little thing like that.”
She did not raise her eyes.
“But your father said, Jerome,” she faltered, and then he saw a tear fall on the pile of hose in her lap, and, strangely enough, in such a moment, he saw a pair of their servant girl’s stockings—he knew them because their splendor of color told that they never belonged to his mother. “And I,” she went on, “I—promised.”
“But, mother, just look here a minute—I wouldn’t ask anything out of the way of you, would I?”
“You’ve always been a good son to me, Jerome, and a good provider.”
“Well, it isn’t as if you were going to get a big sum on it, or as if we had no chance of paying it off right away. It won’t be breaking your promise, don’t you see?”
He went on with his smiling, specious reasoning, reassuring himself every minute, and finally seeming to make an impression upon her, for she said at last: