“They’ll come; they’ll come,” said the old man. “It’s tryin’ to wait, I know, seein’ I’m doin’ some of the waitin’ myself; but ‘the tryin’ of your faith worketh patience,’ an’ ‘let patience have her perfect work,’ you remember.”
“More Scripture!” sighed the wife. “You’re gettin’ through a powerful sight of New Testament this mornin’, Reuben, an’ I s’pose I deserve it, seein’ the way I feel like fightin’ it. But s’pose this company speculation don’t come to anythin’? then Phil’ll be a good deal wuss off than he is now, won’t he? You remember the awful trouble Deacon Trewk got into by bein’ the head of that new-fangled stump-and-stone-puller company, that didn’t pull any to speak of. Everybody came down on him, an’ called him all sorts of names, an’ said he’d lied to ’em, an’ they would go to the poor-house because of the money they’d put in it on his advice, an’——”
“Phil won’t have any such trouble,” said the farmer, “for nobody took stock on his advice. Tramlay got up the company, before we knew anythin’ about it, an’ all the puffin’ of the land was done by him. Besides, there’s nobody in it that’ll suffer much, even if things come to the wust. Except one or two dummies,—clerks of Tramlay’s,—who were let in for a share or two, just to make up a Board of Directors to the legal size, what shares ain’t held by Phil and Tramlay an’ that feller Marge belongs to a gal.”
“What? Lucia?”
“No, no,—another gal: mebbe I ought to call her a woman, seein’ she’s putty well along, although mighty handsome an’ smart. Her name’s Dinon, an’ Tramlay joked Phil about her once or twice, makin’ out she was struck by him, but of course that’s all nonsense. She’s rich, an’ got money to invest every once in a while, an’ Tramlay put her up to this little operation.”
“You’re sure she ain’t interested in Phil?” asked Mrs. Hayn. “I’ve seen no end of trouble made between young folks by gals that’s old enough to know their own minds an’ smart enough to use ’em.”
“For goodness’ sake, Lou Ann!” exclaimed the old farmer. “To hear you talk, anybody would s’pose that in the big city of New York, where over a million people live and a million more come in from diff’rent places every week, there wasn’t any young man for folks to get interested in but our Phil. Reelly, old lady, I’m beginnin’ to be troubled about you; that sort of feelin’ that’s croppin’ out all the time in you makes me afeard that you’ve got a kind o’ pride that’s got to have a fall,—a pride in our son, settin’ him above all other mortal bein’s, so far as anythin’s concerned that can make a young man interestin’.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Hayn, after apparently thinking the matter over, “if it’s so I reckon it’ll have to stay so. I don’t b’lieve there’s any hope of forgiveness for anythin’ if heaven’s goin’ to hold an old woman to account for seein’ all the good there is in her first-born. I hain’t been down to York myself, but some of York’s young sprigs have been down here, one time an’ another, an’ if they’re fair samples of the hull lot, I should think a sight of our Phil would be to all the city gals like the shadder of a great rock in a weary land.”
“Who’s a-droppin’ into Scripture now?” asked the old farmer, moving to where he could look his wife full in the face.
“Scripture ain’t a bit too strong to use freely about our Phil,—my Phil,” said the old woman, pushing her spectacles to the top of her head and beginning to walk the kitchen floor. “All the hopin’, an’ fearin’, an’ waitin’, an’ nursin’, an’ teachin’, an’ thinkin’, an’ prayin’, that that boy has cost comes hurryin’ into my mind when I think about him. If there’s anythin’ he ought to be an’ isn’t, I don’t see what it is, an’ I can’t see where his mother’s to blame for it. Whatever good there is in me I’ve tried to put into him, an’ whatever I was lackin’ in I’ve tried to get for him elsewhere. You’ve been to him ev’rythin’ a father should, an’ he never could have got along without you. You’ve been lots to him that I never could be, he bein’ a boy, an’ I never cease thankin’ heaven for it; but whenever my mind gets on a strain about him I kind o’ get us mixed up, an’ feel as if ’twas me instead of him that was takin’ whatever happened, an’ the longer it lasts the less I can think of him any other way. There!”