“What shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down again.
“Do the dishes,” said Thaddeus. “Wouldn’t, anyhow.... Won’t hurt the house.... Care a damn if it does.... Time we had a funeral here.” He dozed off for a minute, chortled in his depths, and spoke again with his eyes closed.
“Put it on you, didn’t he? Guess he did. Guess yes. Damn smart.... Want to see him when he comes back.... Knew his father.”
When John Breakspeare returned, the clerk, now very civil, took him down to Thaddeus.
They talked until long after the bar closed. Thaddeus was surprised to discover how little the young man knew of his pre-natal history and proceeded to restore him to his background. The picture was somewhat blurred in the romantic passages, from a feeling of delicacy. That loss was more than compensated by high lights elsewhere. He told him in turgid, topical, verbless sentences what the old Woolwine Mansion was like in that other time, how Enoch and Aaron founded the iron industry together, how they prospered, how strange it was that they got along so well, how they parted suddenly when Esther, the banker’s daughter, who was engaged to Enoch, changed her mind suddenly and married Aaron instead, and finally of Aaron’s failure with steel and how he changed all over after Esther’s death.
The narrative had form and drama and a proper ending, very unexpected to the young man. The parlor room in which the body of his father then lay and the one adjoining in which he himself would spend the night were rooms he had lived in once before. They were the rooms his father took when he closed the Woolwine Mansion, unable to live there without Esther, and came to this inn with nurse and infant. That infant was himself.
It came two o’clock. With no premonitory sign Thaddeus heaved himself out of the hickory chair and called for the porter to put out the lights.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“I haven’t thought of it,” said the young man.
“Stay with us,” said Thaddeus. “Long as you like.”