"Fight!" young Hugh threw at him. "What with? We can just about make faces at 'em, father."
The boy's father did not laugh. "We had better get ready to do more than make faces; we've got to get ready." He hammered his hand on the stone balustrade. "I'm going to Plattsburg this summer, Evelyn."
"I'm going with you." Brock's voice was low and his mouth set, and the woman, looking at him, saw suddenly that her boy was a man.
"Well, then, as man power is getting low at Lindow, I'll stay and take care of Mummy. Won't I? We'll do awfully well without them, won't we, Mum? You can drive Dad's Rolls-Royce roadster, and if you leave on the handbrake up-hill, I'll never tell."
Father and son had gone off for the month in camp, and, glad as she was to have the younger boy with her, there was yet an uneasy, an almost subconscious feeling about him, which she indignantly [pg 206] denied each time that it raised its head. It never quite phrased itself, this fear, this wonder if Hugh were altogether as American as his father and brother. Question the courage and patriotism of her own boy? She flung the thought from her as again and yet again it came. People of the same blood were widely different. To Brock and his father it had come easily to do the obvious thing, to go to Plattsburg. It had not so come to young Hugh, but that in good time he would see his duty and do it she would not for an instant doubt. She would not break faith with the lad in thought. With a perfect delicacy she avoided any word that would influence him. He knew. All his life he had breathed loyalty. It was she herself, reading to them night after night through years, who had taught the boys hero worship—above all, worship of American heroes, Washington, Paul Jones, Perry, Farragut, Lee; how Dewey had said, "You may fire now, Gridley, if you are ready"; how Clark had brought the Oregon around the continent; how Scott had gone alone among angry Indians. She had taught [pg 207] them such names, names which will not die while America lives. It was she who had told the little lads, listening wide-eyed, that as these men had held life lightly for the glory of America, so her sons, if need came, must be ready to offer their lives for their country. She remembered how Brock, his round face suddenly scarlet, had stammered out:
"I am ready, Mummy. I'd die this minute for—for America. Wouldn't you, Hughie?"
And young Hugh, a slim, blond angel of a boy, of curly, golden hair and unexpected answers, had ducked beneath the hero, upsetting him into a hedge to his infinite anger. "I wouldn't die right now, Brocky," said Hugh. "There's going to be chocolate cake for lunch."
One could never count on Hugh's ways of doing things, but Brock was a stone wall of reliability. She smiled, thinking of his youth and beauty and entire boyishness, to think yet of the saying from the Bible which always suggested Brock, "Thou shalt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee." It was so with the lad; through [pg 208] the gay heart and eager interest in life pulsed an atmosphere of deep religiousness. He was always "in perfect peace," and his mother, less balanced, had stayed her mind on that quiet and right young mind from its very babyhood. The lad had seen his responsibilities and lifted them all his life. It came to her how, when her own mother, very dear to Brock, had died, she had not let the lads go with her to the house of death for fear of saddening their youth, and how, when she and their father came home from the hard, terrible business of the funeral, they met little Hugh on the drive, rapturous at seeing them again, rather absorbed in his new dog. But Brock, then fourteen, was in the house alone, quiet, his fresh, dear face red with tears, and a black necktie of his father's, too large for him, tied under his collar. Of all the memories of her boys, that grotesque black tie was the most poignant and most precious. It said much. It said: "I also, O, my mother, am of my people. I have a right to their sorrows as well as to their joys, and if you do not give me my place in trouble, I shall do what [pg 209] I can alone, being but a boy. I shall give up play, and I shall wear mourning as I can, not knowing how very well, but pushed by all my being to be with my own in their mourning."
Quickly affection for the other lad asserted itself. Brock and Hugh were different, but Hugh was a dear boy, too—undeveloped, that was all. He had never taken life seriously, little Hugh, and now that this war-cloud hung over the world, he simply refused to look at it; he turned away his face. That was all, a temperament which loved harmony and shrank from ugliness; these things were young Hugh's limitations, and no ignoble quality.
In a long dream, yet much faster than the words have told it, in comprehensive flashes of memory, her elbows on her knees and her face, in her slender hands, looking out over the garden with its arched way of roses, with its high hedge, looking past the loveliness that was home to the city pulsing in summer heat, to the shining zigzag of river beyond the city, the woman reviewed her boys' lives. Boys were [pg 210] not now merely one phase of humanity; they had suddenly become the nation. They stood in the foreground of a world crisis; back of them America was ranged, orderly, living and moving to feed, clothe, and keep happy these millions of lads holding in their hands the fate of the earth. Her boys were but two, yet necessary. She owed them to the country, as other mothers of men.