The word woke a train of dormant associations, and Paul saw himself seated on a dingy carpet, between two familiar taciturn old presences, while he rummaged in the depths of a bag stuffed with strips of newspaper.
He found Mrs. Heeny sitting in a pink arm-chair, her bonnet perched on a pink-shaded electric lamp and her numerous implements spread out on an immense pink toilet-table. Vague as his recollection of her was, she gave him at once a sense of reassurance that nothing else in the house conveyed, and after he had examined all her scissors and pastes and nail-polishers he turned to the bag, which stood on the carpet at her feet as if she were waiting for a train.
"My, my!" she said, "do you want to get into that again? How you used to hunt in it for taffy, to be sure, when your Pa brought you up to Grandma Spragg's o' Saturdays! Well, I'm afraid there ain't any taffy in it now; but there's piles and piles of lovely new clippings you ain't seen."
"My Papa?" He paused, his hand among the strips of newspaper. "My Papa never saw my Grandma Spragg. He never went to America."
"Never went to America? Your Pa never—? Why, land alive!" Mrs. Heeny gasped, a blush empurpling her large warm face. "Why, Paul Marvell, don't you remember your own father, you that bear his name?" she exclaimed.
The boy blushed also, conscious that it must have been wrong to forget, and yet not seeing how he was to blame.
"That one died a long long time ago, didn't he? I was thinking of my
French father," he explained.
"Oh, mercy," ejaculated Mrs. Heeny; and as if to cut the conversation short she stooped over, creaking like a ship, and thrust her plump strong hand into the bag.
"Here, now, just you look at these clippings—I guess you'll find a lot in them about your Ma.—Where do they come from? Why, out of the papers, of course," she added, in response to Paul's enquiry. "You'd oughter start a scrap-book yourself—you're plenty old enough. You could make a beauty just about your Ma, with her picture pasted in the front—and another about Mr. Moffatt and his collections. There's one I cut out the other day that says he's the greatest collector in America."
Paul listened, fascinated. He had the feeling that Mrs. Heeny's clippings, aside from their great intrinsic interest, might furnish him the clue to many things he didn't understand, and that nobody had ever had time to explain to him. His mother's marriages, for instance: he was sure there was a great deal to find out about them. But she always said: "I'll tell you all about it when I come back"—and when she came back it was invariably to rush off somewhere else. So he had remained without a key to her transitions, and had had to take for granted numberless things that seemed to have no parallel in the experience of the other boys he knew.