Helen of the Old House

by Harold Bell Wright

And then, suddenly, to the consternation of her companion, her eyes filled with tears.

The Interpreter looked away toward the beautiful country beyond the squalid Plats, the busy city, the smoke-clouded Mill.

There was a sound of some one knocking at the front door of the hut.
Through the living room Helen saw her chauffeur.

"Yes, Tom," she called, "I am coming."

To the Interpreter she said, hurriedly, "I have really stayed longer than I should. I promised mother that I would be home early. She is so worried about father, I do not like to leave her, but I felt that I must see you. I—I haven't said at all the things I—wanted to say. Father—" She looked at the man in the wheel chair appealingly, as she hesitated again with the manner of one who feels compelled to speak, yet fears to betray a secret. "You feel sure, don't you, that father's condition is nothing more than the natural result of his nervous breakdown and his worry over business?"

The Interpreter thought how like the look in her eyes was to the look in the eyes of timid little Maggie. And again he waited, before answering, "Yes, Helen, I am sure that your father's trouble is all caused by the Mill. Is there anything that I can do, child?"

"There is nothing that any one can do, I fear," she returned, with a little gesture of hopelessness. Then, avoiding the grave, kindly eyes of the old basket maker, she forced herself to say, in a tone that was little more than a whisper, "I sometimes think—at tines I am almost compelled to believe that there is something more—something that we—that no one knows about." With sudden desperate earnestness she went on with nervous haste as if she feared her momentary courage would fail. "I can't explain—but it is as if he were hiding something and dreaded every moment that it would be discovered. He is so—so afraid. Can it be possible that there is something that we do not know—some hidden thing?" And then, before the Interpreter could speak, she exclaimed, with a forced laugh of embarrassment, "How silly of me to talk like this—you will think that I am going insane."

When he was alone, the Interpreter turned again to his basket making. "Yes, Billy," he said aloud as his deaf and dumb companion appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, "yes, Billy, she will find her jewel of happiness. But it will not be easy, Billy—it will not be easy."

To which, of course, Billy made no reply. And that—the Interpreter always maintained—was one of the traits that made his companion such a delightful conversationalist. He invariably found your pet arguments and theories unanswerable, and accepted your every assertion without question.

Helen Ward could not feel that her father's condition—much as it alarmed and distressed her—was, in itself, the reason of her own unrest and discontent. She felt, rather, in a vague, instinctive way, that the source of her parent's trouble was somehow identical with the cause of her own unhappiness. But what was it that caused her father's affliction and her own dissatisfied and restless mental state? The young woman questioned herself in vain.