Lucinda let her sentence die off unfinished in a rattle of knives and spoons in the dish-pan. Her mind was sorely perplexed.
“Well, Cindy,” said Ben, in the frankness of despair, “I’m dot-rotted if I know what you are talking about.” He grew pathetic as he went on: “I’m your father and I’m her father, and there ain’t neither of you got a better friend on earth than I be; but you never tell me anything, any more’n as if I was a last year’s bird’s-nest.”
Lucinda’s reserve yielded to this appeal. “Well, dad,” she said, with unwonted graciousness of tone, “Jess has gone to Tecumseh to bring back—to bring her little boy. She hasn’t told me so, but I know it.”
The father nodded his head in comprehension, and said nothing. He had vaguely known of the existence of the child, and he saw more or less clearly the reason for this present step. The shame and sorrow which were fastened upon his family through this grandson whom he had never seen, and never spoken of above a whisper, seemed to rankle in his heart with a new pain of mingled bitterness and compassion.
He mechanically took out his pipe, filled it from loose tobacco in his pocket, and struck a match to light it. Then he recalled that the absent daughter! objected to his smoking in the house, on account of the wares in her shop, and let the flame burn itself out in the coal-scuttle. A whimsical query as to whether this calamitous boy had also been named Benjamin Franklin crossed his confused mind, and then it perversely raised the question whether the child, if so named, would be a “hustler” or not. Ben leaned heavily against the door-sill, and surrendered himself to humiliation.
“What I don’t understand,” he heard Lucinda saying after a time, “is why she took this spurt all of a sudden.”
“It’s all on account of that Gawd-damned Hod Boyce!” groaned Ben.
“Yes; you told her something about him. What was it?”
“Only that they all say that he’s going to marry that big Minster girl—the black-eyed one.”
Lucinda turned away from the sink, threw down her dish-cloth with a thud, and put her arms akimbo and her shoulders well back. Watching her, Ben felt that somehow this girl, too, took after her grandfather rather than him.