“I've took no risks. Here was my home. He give me the chance and he showed me how. And—he's your father. I don't like to talk about his money, nor about my own, to you.”
“Oh, you are good, good! Nobody knows! But it's all wasted if you haven't got any push—anything inside of yourself that makes people know what you are. I wish I could put into you some of my fury that I feel when things get in my way! You have held yourself in too long. You can't—can't love a girl, and be so careful—like a mother. Don't you understand?”
“Stop right there, Emmy! You needn't push no harder. I can let go whenever you say so. But—do you understand, little girl? Man and wife it will have to be.”
Emmy did not shrink at the words. Her face grew set, her dark eyes full of mystery fixed themselves on the slow-moving ice-floe grinding along the shore.
“I know,” she assented slowly.
“I can't give you no farm, nor horses and carriages, nor help in the kitchen. It's bucklin' right down with our bare hands—me outside and you in? And you only eighteen. See what little hands—If I could do it all!”
“Your promise is broken,” she whispered. “I made you break it. You will have to tell him now, or—we must go.”
“So be!” said Adam solemnly. “And God do so to me and more also, if I have to hurt my little girl,—Emmy—wife!”
He folded her in his great arms clumsily—the man she had said was like a mother. He was almost as ignorant as she, and more hopeful than he had dared to seem, as to their worldly chances. But the love he had for her told him it was not love that made her so bold. The first touch of such love as his would have made her fear him as he feared her. And the subtle pain of this instinctive knowledge, together with that broken promise, shackled the wings of his great joy. It was not as he had hoped to win the crown of life.
Paul, it may be supposed, had never liked to think of his mother's elopement. It had been the one hard point to get over in his conception of his father, but he could never have explained it by such a scene as this. It would have hampered him terribly in his tale had he dreamed of it. He passed over the unfortunate incident with a romancer's touch, and dwelt upon his grandfather's bitter resentment which he resented as the son of his mother's choice. The Van Eltens and Brodericks all fared hardly at the hands of their legatee.