I chose this evening because somehow all the world lay tranquillized. Gusts of wind and plumps of April rain during the day gave way to a great stillness even over this suburban countryside, where the rumble of the trains is never absent; but the humid smell of the newly stirring earth was still in my nostrils and our little lawn was already green with young grass. One could almost hear the sap mounting in the trees. There was a vernal feeling of peace and hope in the house—in my very nerves.
We were in particular good humor moreover under the influence of Jimmie's table talk. That boy is a source of constant delight and bubbles vitality like a fountain. His presence in a room positively gives the effect of added light. He is just now in love with long words and announced that he "would give me a composition on how to tie a necktie." He meant a demonstration and we all laughed heartily.
"Never mind," murmured Jimmie cheerfully to himself. "Demonstration—I won't forget that one."
Griselda declares he is exactly as I was at his age. But I am certain I never was half so delightful.
Laura was not with us. She is at a boarding-school at Rye this year and comes home only upon alternate week-ends. Laura, sweet and grave-faced like her mother, is never as hilarious as the rest of us often are. My nephew Randolph was also absent. He, I suppose, was dining at his eternal "frat house."
It occurred to me how happy we could be, just the three of us, Alicia, Jimmie and I—plus, of course, Griselda. Alicia is beautiful now with a tender coloring and movements of exuberant gayety that are like wine to the heart. When her face is animated and her eyes flashing with merriment, the house seems charged with the very elixir of delight. Of late, however, I have seen little of her gayety and more of her pensive, silent mood and that has been depressing. But to-night Alicia was her old lovely self of the days before the engagement and I seized the occasion to discover what I could about that puzzle.
Alone in my study, puffing at a cigarette which might have been a string of hemp for all the taste I discerned in it, I feasted my mental eyes for the nth time upon the picture of Alicia married to me, greeting me as a wife upon my home-coming at night, nestling in my arms for the delicious intimate fragmentary talk of the day lived through, of the myriad little threads that take their place in the woof of life only after the beloved has touched them with her love. The long quiet evenings of intimacy and the nights which, in Goethe's phrase, become a beautiful half of the life span.
Am I immoral, O Randolph of seventy? Then I dismally fear I am immoral. For these are the pictures, old man, and these the thoughts that produce them—bad as they certainly are for me. For Alicia is my ward—my child. And whatever happens she must not suspect them. With an effort and a corrugated brow I dismissed them as I heard Alicia's step on the doorway. Very straight and demure she was as she entered, bringing with her that aura of infinitude which always quickens my foolish pulses.
"Sit down, Alicia," I waved her to a chair with an attempt at a smile.
"Is anything the matter, Uncle Ranny?"