“You gave him the rest! How were you able to do that?”
“Oh, I have a pittance in the City Bank.”
The rival concern. Even Hildegarde gaped with astonishment at this revelation. Mrs. Mar had not trusted any one to know of this nest-egg—savings out of the “house money,” the inadequacy of which had been so often deplored. She seemed to be torn now between regret that its existence should have been revealed, and pride that she had wrung it out of conditions so unpromising.
“Yes,” she said, with a spark of anger in her eye, “and you’ll be kind enough, Nathaniel, not to break your arm, or get yourself disabled in any way, for there’s nothing left now for a rainy day. Unless you have looked ahead as I’ve struggled to—”
He knew that she knew he had not “looked ahead” in her sense of laying by a secret hoard, but the form of her mandate pricked him.
He glanced at the desk for comfort. He had, after all, “looked ahead” in another fashion—as Harry would see. But—again he fell back before the check of an outfit already bought for another purpose. And Harry was talking all the time that he was eating—telling his mother about his prospects and about the letter he had written in answer to Trenn’s.
Already he had written! Without an hour’s hesitation, or an instant’s consultation with his natural adviser. Ah, no, his true “natural adviser” had obviously been invoked, and had responded by offering him the sinews of war. Mar, looking down into his plate, or for occasional refreshment of the spirit into Hildegarde’s soft, young face, was nevertheless intensely conscious of the vivid alert personality at the other end of the table. His wife was, as usual, not content to contemplate with idle tranquillity the fruit of some achievement in the past. Strange contrast to her daughter’s faculty for extreme stillness, Mrs. Mar presented the stirring spectacle of a person who was always “getting something done,” and commonly getting a number of things done at once. If it was only while the plates were being changed, she would pull out of the yellow bag suspended at her belt, a postcard, and with an inch length of pencil would briskly write an order to some tradesman, or she would jump up to straighten a picture or set the clock on three minutes, or “catch any odd job on the fly,” as Trenn used disrespectfully to say in private. Even on this important and exciting occasion, she was not content merely to eat her supper, listen to Harry’s outpouring, and throw in shrewd responses from time to time.
Her handsome features wore that look of animation the spectacle of “getting on” ever inspired in the lady, her eyes glittered like pieces of highly polished, brown onyx, and while she put food into her mouth with the right hand, the left, by a common practice, executed five-finger exercises up and down the cloth, between her plate and the end of the table. But to-night she broke into a fantasia—the pliant little finger curled and tossed its tip in air, playing a soundless pæon to celebrate Harry’s entrance into the business of life.
For Mar, in circumstances like these, to hold wide a different door—had there ever been a moment less propitious?