All these things had their place in his mind as he followed Bingham through the new house, scuffing over the plaster-encrusted floors, watching the adjustment of window-weights, or drawing back before the long, thin strips of moulding brought in by carpenters. No, his children did not love him. There was Rosy, who had learned her lesson of selfishness from the world all too early, and who now, in her preoccupations for the future, had less thought of him than ever. There was Alice, who saw him often enough if she saw him half a dozen times a year, and whose infrequent comings always disclosed some petty motive of domestic finance and economics. There was Truesdale, a flippant and insolent egotist, who had neither affection nor respect for his own parents, his own family, his own birthplace. There was Roger, who hewed roughly his own independent course, and who did not scruple to turn his powers against his own father if crossed in his desires or balked in his ambitions. And there was—
No; not Jane. "She is the only one of them all who really loves me," he said. He was standing in one of the upper rooms under the crude light of a northern window. On the yellow ground beneath him a workman was stacking up sheets of blue slate in regular piles, and from some remote quarter of the place came the sharp, metallic hammerings of the last remaining plumbers. The searching daylight lit up cruelly the hollows of the old man's eyes, and brought out from his whitened chin and cheeks the last few threads of dim and dulling red. His tall, thin figure shrank away from its loose coverings; never before had he seemed so detached, so impersonal, so slightly poised on any mere physical basis.
He turned to Bingham. "This will be her room—Jane's room. It must be right, whatever the others are. Jane—cares for me. She has always been a dutiful daughter; never a trial, never a disappointment—nothing but a comfort. There must be no shortcoming here, Bingham."
Bingham, standing beside him at the window, fixed an intent regard upon the sheets of shifting slate. There was a moist smile in his eyes, and a warm glow of sympathetic appreciation permeated his whole being.
"There won't be," he said.
And Jane's chamber took on shape and finish in the minds of the two men who stood there side by side overlooking the slate piles and saying no word further; and neither recognized in her the first cause of all these changes and of the many trials and difficulties proceeding from them.
XX
The approaching completion of the new house did little towards diminishing the rigors of the daily routine within the old one; no greater insistence upon detail could be encountered at Gibraltar or at Ehrenbreitstein than that which prevailed under the direction of Eliza Marshall, to whom the near breaking of camp was no reason for the slightest break in discipline. Nor was there any relaxation because the garrison happened to be on a mere peace footing; it made little difference that both Rosamund and Truesdale were spending the better part of the summer in Wisconsin. Rosy had resumed her round among the country-houses of her friends; she expected to repay these attentions in the near future by an elegant and lavish hospitality, whose time, place, and method still remained more or less indeterminate. Truesdale, too, had made a second and longer excursion northward—Waukesha, Geneva, Oconomowoc, and again, Madison. Jane alone remained at home, and it was she who helped her mother through the thirtieth and last of the annual jelly-makings. For the first time in all these years the entire supply of currants had come from outside; the last of their own bushes, which had put on faintly its customary greenness in May, had peaked and dwindled through June, and had died at last in the early days of July.
"That reconciles me, Jane," said Eliza Marshall, as she viewed the dead bush while flapping one of her ensanguined cloths from the kitchen window; "I shall be ready to move when the time comes."
Jane sighed softly for reply; she was beginning to realize what all this change might mean.