He had managed it, of course. He was always tactful, and could on occasions be tender and persuasive. These qualities, added to the authority he exerted in his capacity of American child, had in time overcome his mother’s objections to the background, properties, pose, coiffure, and, most difficult of all, the costume he had insisted on—had, in fact, even achieved a sublime finishing touch by having, instead of an ordinary gilt advertisement, the pliable photographer’s name scrawled carelessly in pencil across the margin of his print. Mrs. Dawson had been exceedingly shocked at the result, and had, not unnaturally, failed to recognise herself in the gracious, self-possessed personage who gave one the impression of having sunk into that picturesque seat for a moment, until her carriage should be called. She had speedily regretted, what she from time to time referred to as her “weakness,” and had hastened to exhibit the strength she still retained by breaking the negative with her own hands—not, however, before Dickey had procured some striking proofs of it. The very success of the picture was what made it such a disturbing addition to Dawson’s room. In the appreciation of his friends it had furnished him with precisely the sort of mother to which his eclectic and exotic inclinations seemed to entitle him. He himself, in his more placid moods, derived an indefinable satisfaction from the thing, and was in the habit of sitting before it, musing contentedly on his perfect adaptability to the people and surroundings he had never been used to at home—an adaptability that sometimes caused him to wonder whether he were not, after all, illegitimate or adopted. Ordinarily, however, this fanciful parent of his appeared to him in the light of a cunningly devised, automatic lie that kept on telling itself to make him miserable.
Charlie Bolo carefully returned the photograph to its place. His back had been turned to the room and he was, perhaps, the only one of the four men who did not realise the direction every one’s thoughts had taken.
“I think I shall have to get rid of that libel on my mother,” mused Dawson, brazenly.
“I was so sorry not to find Mrs. Dawson in the afternoon I called,” said Charlie Bolo, passing on to a silver candlestick. “Is she to be long in town?”
“So was I,” murmured Bigelow; “Bolo and I went together.”
“You must give her a tea,” suggested Tommy, getting up. When he had on his frock coat, he sat intermittently.
“I should like to, tremendously,” lied Dawson, with a pleasant smile; “but you see she’s going away to-morrow. She was awfully cut up about missing you fellows—I think she was at a luncheon, or some such thing.” He courageously took the chances of any one’s having seen her naïvely admiring the Washington Elm and the Longfellow House on the afternoon in question. “She’s going to be here such a very short time”—this was a detail, but it seemed just as well to dwell on it—“that you can fancy how I feel about being laid up like this.”
Bigelow said, “rotten,” or some equally piquant idiom of assent, and Charlie Bolo, by commenting technically on a Dutch tile he had come across, was on the point of giving an entirely new turn to the talk, when something happened.
It has often been told how little Dickey Dawson, once upon a time, saved somebody or other’s life by coolly dangling himself to the bridle of a big, runaway horse. The occasion on which he drew red hot poker sketches where a dog had bitten the calf of his leg, has likewise had its historians. But no one has ever described what took place when, in the midst of Charlie Bolo’s exposition of tile painting, Dickey called, “Come in!” to a doubting knock at the door, and Mrs. Dawson advanced two steps into the study and then stopped.
For a moment no one, with the exception of Dawson, grasped the situation. He had grasped it and was wrestling with it as he threw off the rug that covered him where he lay on the sofa—as he stepped across the room—as he placed his hands on his mother’s shoulders and kissed her lightly on the cheek. He had grasped the situation, but he was utterly at a loss to know what to do with it.