Lost Farm Camp

by Henry Herbert Knibbs

Miss Ross hung up the telephone receiver and sat for a moment at the alcove desk in her living-room. She reached forward and taking a number of letters and papers from a pigeon-hole, ran them over carefully, and tremblingly replaced them. Then she called her maid and told her to order the carriage for half-past five. “Master David is coming home this evening,” she explained. “We will have dinner at seven, as usual.”

After the maid had gone, Elizabeth Ross sat for a long time with her hands folded on her lap and her eyes fixed on the darkened window where a keen ray of August sunshine pierced a chink in the shutters and ran slanting across the interior twilight to the opposite wall. She was thinking of her nephew’s accident and the consequences which had so unexpectedly overwhelmed him. The operation had been successful and there would be no recurrence of the disastrous effects due to the original unskilled treatment of the wound.

The doctor had advised rest and freedom from excitement and worry. She wondered, now that David was coming back home, how long he would be satisfied with such a regimen, especially as he had of late expressed annoyance at his detention in the hospital, assuring his aunt that he was not only in fine fettle, but also there were business matters that required his immediate attention. It fretted him to think of the idle weeks that had slipped past since that June evening when he had stepped from the curb to cross the street to his aunt’s house, had almost reached the opposite curb when he grew blind in the dusk....

She sighed as she recalled her first visit to the hospital, where that unnatural face had lain so expressionless, so dully indifferent and white, looking up at her but seeing nothing. He was all she had in the world—had been virtually her son since his childhood. Never had his nearness to her heart, his large share in all that she thought or did, been so forcibly apparent to her. Her affection for him had no subtlety. It was as sterling, as unbending as her love for truth, and the name of Ross. She realized a lack in herself of certain superficial qualities of grace and subtlety, and immediately prepared herself to anticipate his slightest wish, as though she had not been unconsciously doing that since he was a youngster in knickerbockers.

The sun-ray through the shutters swung higher in the room. It touched a brass ornament and wavered in a tangent to the ceiling, where it shimmered and changed like moving water. She gazed dreamily toward the window, then nodded, recovered herself as a carriage rolled easily past, the hoof-beats of the horses muffled by the over-heated asphalt pavement. She nodded again, and finally her eyes closed in sleep.

The maid’s tap at the door awakened her suddenly. “The carriage is here, Miss Ross.”

“Gracious me! I had no idea it was so late.”

A half-hour later David was in the carriage with her, as they drove homeward.

“Why, Davy, you act as though I hadn’t seen you for a fortnight,” she exclaimed, as he kissed her. “The idea of kissing me right on the street with those two nurses and the doctor grinning on the steps.”

“Well, auntie, they can’t see us now,” he exclaimed, as he kissed her again. “Tell William to drive as slowly as he likes. I don’t want to see a bed again for ages.”