"I'd pay you fifty dollars, ma'am, if you'd get Belinda to plant anything"—which was not delicately put, perhaps, but was, after all, spoken in the only language that Cyrus knew.
"I thought she was so fond of flowers. She used to be as a girl."
"Humph!" was Cyrus's rejoinder, and then: "Well, what about my nephew, madam?" Clasping his bony hands over his knee, he leaned forward and waited, not without curiosity, for her answer. He did not admire Oliver—he even despised him—but when all was said, the boy had succeeded in riveting his attention. However poorly he might think of him, the fact remained that think of him he did. The young man was in the air as inescapably as if he were the measles.
"I'm worrying about him, Mr. Treadwell; I can't help myself. You know he boards with me."
"Yes'm, I know," replied Cyrus—for he had heard the fact from Miss Priscilla on his way home from church one Sunday.
"And he's not well. There's something the matter with him. He's so nervous and irritable that he's almost crazy. He doesn't eat a morsel, and I can hear him pacing up and down his room until daybreak. Once I got up and went upstairs to ask him if he was sick, but he said that he was perfectly well and was walking about for exercise. I am sure I don't know what it can be, but if it keeps up, he'll land in an asylum before the summer is over."
The look of satisfaction which her first words had brought to Cyrus's face deepened gradually as her story unfolded. "He's wanting money, I reckon," he commented, his imagination seizing upon the only medium in which it could work. As a philosopher may discern in all life different manifestations of the Deity, so he saw in all affliction only the wanting of money under varied aspects. Sorrows in which the lack of money did not bear a part always seemed to him to be unnecessary and generally self-inflicted by the sufferers. Of such people he would say impatiently that they took a morbid view of their troubles and were "nursing grief."
"I don't think it's that," said Mrs. Peachey. "He always pays his bills promptly on the first day of the month, and I know that he gets checks from New York for the writing he does. I'm sometimes tempted to believe that he has fallen in love."
"Love? Pshaw!" said Cyrus, and dismissed the passion.
"But it goes hard with some people, and he's one of that kind," rejoined the little lady, with spirit, for in spite of her wholesome awe of Cyrus, she could not bear to hear the sentiment derided. "We aren't all as sensible as you are, Mr. Treadwell."