“What on earth!”
Some one rose from a chair so hurriedly that it toppled over. Then the same voice exclaimed in a glad tone, “Why, it’s the shrimp!”
His father’s arms were about him, lifting him up. Teddy buried his face against the velvet jacket. Though he had been deaf and blind, he would have recognized his father by the friendly smell of tobacco and varnish. Because of that smell he felt that his father was unaltered.
“Turned you out, old chap, did they? I didn’t know you were coming. Perhaps Jane told me. I’ve been having one of my inspirations, Teddy—hard at it every moment while the light lasted. I’d be at it now, if this infernal fog hadn’t stopped me.” He tried to raise the boy’s face from his shoulder. “Want to see what I’ve been doing?”
Teddy felt himself a traitor. His father had had an inspiration—that accounted for Jane’s suspicions and for anything awkward that had occurred. It was always when his father’s soul groped nearest heaven that his earthly manners were at their worst. Odd! Teddy couldn’t understand it; a person like Jane, who wasn’t even related, could understand it still less. But he had let himself sink to Jane’s level. If he had wanted to confess, he couldn’t have told precisely what it was that he had dreaded. So in reply to all coaxing he hid his face deeper in the shoulder of the velvet jacket. Its smoky, varnishy, familiar smell gave him comfort: it seemed to forgive him without words.
“Frightened?” his father questioned. “You were always too sensitive, weren’t you? I oughtn’t to have forgotten you like that. But—I say, Teddy, look up, old man. I really had something to make me forget.”
“I think he’ll look up for me.”
At sound of that voice, before the sentence was ended, he had looked up.
“There!”
Her laughter rang through the raftered room like the shivering of silver bells.