“Don’t look so, dear grandmother, darling grandmother! Did I do so very, very wrong? Do b’lieve me, I didn’t mean to. An’—my! Wait, Grandmother! If you don’t want it, please don’t cry on poor Judge Courtenay’s check, ’cause Papa says—Oh, Grandmother! Will you? Will you?”
The pantomime was more intelligible than the words. For the first time the stately head was bent slightly,—even under the relaxation of these unprecedented circumstances it had been held upright,—and a sudden smile broke over the tear-wet face, making it beautiful as proud.
Proud it had always been, but not as now, proud with an unutterable tenderness, proud—even that paradox—in a new, sweet, and reverent humility, as the thin hands gently dropped upon the child’s curly head, and the tremulous lips found voice: “Steenie, Steenie! My brave, precious one! Hush! There is no reproach for you; there is nothing but love and obligation. You have humbled me as I have never been humbled in my life; and you have made me proud as I have never been proud. You have conquered your grandmother, now come to her.”
Steenie leaped, joyfully, into the arms opened to receive her, but the words which had fallen from the Madam’s lips mystified her, and she was still clinging about the speaker’s shoulders, looking doubtfully upon the narrow white check, which had fallen to the carpetless floor, when Bob’s resonant voice cut into a scene which was becoming “too all-fired watery round the eyes for him,” and cleared the mystery.
“Which means, my Little Un, begging your pardon, Ma’am, an’ everybody’s pardon, that our ‘Little Lady of the Horse’ hain’t won her ticket for nothin’. Which bein’ the case—I say, old feller? You Unresolved old Puritan, you, I think I know a cure for your lumbago. Want to hear it?”
“Yes, yes,” answered Mr. Tubbs, eagerly.
“Here ’tis. Price nothin’. Turn to an’ fetch a hammer an’ nails, an’ unroll that strip o’ carpet thar. I don’t relish the sound o’ my own boots on hard oak floors like this un, an’ the sooner we get the carpet back into place, the sooner I shall feel to hum. Lively, now. We’ll get it down afore pitch-dark, even in this region o’ short days.”
To picture Mr. Tubbs’s disgust is impossible. Then, even to his selfish heart, crept a warm, tender, human feeling, and he cast a sidelong glance at the mistress he had served so long, if not so well.
Observing which, Bob, that clear-sighted translator of people’s emotions, gave friendly encouragement. “That’s the fust step. Second—look! See here? Look at this vial? Know what it is? Ever see anything so fine?”
“Eh? No. What is it?” demanded Resolved, who had a keen eye and ear for anything in the shape of “medicine.”