Hagar laughed. "No, grandmother—unless you except Ralph."
"Ha!" said Old Miss in grim triumph; "I knew you wouldn't!"
Miss Serena came to the door. "Father's awake and he wants to see Hagar."
But when Hagar went down and into the big room and up to the great bed, the Colonel declared her to be Maria, grew excited, and said that she shouldn't keep his grandchild from him. "I tell you, woman, Medway and I are going to use authority! The child's Medway's—Medway's next of kin by every law in the land! He can take her from you, and, by God! he shall do it!"
"Father," said Miss Serena, "this is Hagar, grown up."
But the Colonel grew violently angry. "You are all lying!—a man's family conspiring against him! That woman's my daughter-in-law—my son's wife, dependent on me for her bread and shelter and setting up her will against mine! And now she's all for keeping from me my grandchild—she's hiding Gipsy in closets and under the stairs—You have no right. It's not your child, it's Medway's child! That's law. You ought to be whipped!"
"Grandfather," said Hagar, "do you remember Alexandria and the mosques and the Place Mahomet Ali?"
"Why, exactly," said the Colonel. "Well, Gipsy, we always wanted to travel, didn't we? That dragoman seems to know his business—we're going down to Cairo to-day and out to see the pyramids. Want to come along?"
Day followed day at Gilead Balm. Sometimes the Colonel's mind wandered over the seas of creation, with the pilot asleep at the helm; sometimes the pilot suddenly awoke, though it was not apt to be for long. It was eerie when the pilot awoke; when he suddenly sat there, gaunt, with a parchment face and beak-like nose and straying white hair, and in a cool, drawling voice asked intelligent questions about the hour and the season and the plantation happenings.
At such times, if Hagar were not already in the room, he demanded to see her. She came, sat by him in the great chair, offered to read to him. He was not infrequently willing for her to do this. She read both prose and verse to him this winter. Sometimes he did not wish her to read; he wanted to talk. When this was the case—the pilot being awake—it was her life away from Gilead Balm that he oftenest chose to comment upon. That he knew the content of her life hardly at all mattered, as little to the Colonel as it mattered to Old Miss and Miss Serena. They were going to let fly their arrows; if there was no target in the direction in which they shot, at least they were in sublime ignorance of the fact. Hagar let them talk. Not only the Colonel—Gilead Balm was dying.... In the middle of a sarcastic sentence the pilot would drop asleep again; in a moment the barque was at the mercy of every wandering wind. Hagar became Maria and he gibbered at her.