VI
MISS RAMSAY REVOLTS
The last remark Roebuck had made to me—on his doorstep, as I was starting on my mission—was: "Can't you and Lottie hurry up that marriage of yours? You ought to get it over and out of the way." When I returned home with my mission accomplished, the first remark my mother made after our greeting was: "Harvey, I wish you and Lottie were going to marry a little sooner."
A note in her voice made me look swiftly at her, and then, without a word, I was on my knees, my face in her lap and she stroking my head. "I feel that I'm going to—to your father, dear," she said.
I heard and I thought I realized; but I did not. Who, feeling upon him the living hand of love, was ever able to imagine that hand other than alive? But her look of illness, of utter exhaustion,—that I understood and suffered for. "You must rest," said I; "you must sit quiet and be waited on until you are strong again."
"Yes, I will rest," she answered, "as soon as my boy is settled."
That very day I wrote Carlotta telling her about mother's health and asking her to change the date of our wedding to the first week in August, then just under a month away. She telegraphed me to come and talk it over.
She was at the station in her phaeton to meet me. We had not driven far before I felt and saw that she was intensely irritated against me. As I unburdened my mind of my anxieties about mother, she listened coldly. And I had to wait a long time before I got her answer, in a strained voice and with averted eyes: "Of course, I'm sorry your mother isn't well, but I can't get ready that soon."
It was not her words that exasperated me; the lightning of speech from the storm-clouds of anger tends to clear the air. It was her expression.