It was some minutes before he could quite recover from the astonishment of finding himself the direct progenitor of two young people who knew nothing of that worthy Gileadite whose state in old age formed such a striking contrast to his own. Probably he would have delivered a little homily, then and there, on the importance of reading the Bible, had not a turn in the road at the top of a long steep hill brought them suddenly into sight of the old Saxon homestead.
“There ’tis! There’s the old place! Should you know it?” he demanded of his granddaughters.
Esther leaned forward from the back seat where she was sitting with Stella and gazed for a moment, almost holding her breath. Then she lifted a pair of moist shining eyes to her grandfather. “I should know it anywhere,” she said, with a thrill in her voice. “It looks just as I have dreamed of it all these years.”
Indeed it was a picture which might easily hold its place in a loving memory; an old white house, with a wide stone chimney rising in the middle of a square old-fashioned roof, standing in the shelter of a cluster of elms, so tall, so noble, and so gracious in their bearing that the special guardianship of Heaven seemed resting on the spot.
Kate had been looking at it steadily too, but she shook her head as she glanced away. “No,” she said, “I shouldn’t know that I’d ever seen it before; but if you had handed me the reins, grandfather, and told me to find it somewhere on this road, I don’t think I should have turned in at the wrong place.”
They talked of nothing else as they drove slowly toward it. The motion Ruel Saxon had made—a most unusual one—to apply the lash to Dobbin had been checked by Esther, who declared she wanted to take in the details one by one, and begged him, with feeling, not to go too fast, a request which threw Stella into a state of inward convulsion from which she barely recovered in time to prevent the old gentleman from monopolizing the whole distance with an account of the various improvements he had made on the house, notably the last shingling and the raising of the door-sills.
“You might tell the girls how you didn’t change the windows,” she said slyly; but if he was inclined to do this, Esther’s exclamation just then prevented.
“Oh, those dear little old-fashioned windows!” she cried. “They’re blinking in the sunshine just as they used to. Grandfather dear, I’m so glad you haven’t had them changed into something different.”
He winced a little at this, and Stella said magnanimously, “It was really my mother’s idea. She does complain sometimes of the trouble it is to keep all those tiny little window-panes clean, and so grandfather thought one spring that he’d have some new sashes put in, with a single pane of glass above and below. They had it all fixed up between them, but I came home just in time to prevent.” She gave a shudder, then added: “I’ve always believed in special providences since then. Why, the change would have been ruinous, simply ruinous! You know if you can’t have a lovely new house with everything graceful and artistic, the next best thing is to have one that’s old and quaint. I wouldn’t have a thing changed about our house for any consideration. I’ve set my foot down about that.” (With all her daintiness she looked as if she could do it with effect.) “But mother and grandfather understand now, and have given their solemn promise never to make the smallest alteration without consulting me.”
The old gentleman had been listening to this with his mouth pulled down to an expression of resignation which was clearly not natural to him. “Well,” he said, when she had reached her triumphant conclusion, “I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s best to let women-folks have their way about things in the house. It pacifies ’em, and makes ’em willing to let the men manage things of more consequence. You know Solomon says ‘it is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious woman.’”