The men looked at each other and nodded, as in the presence of something known of old, something to be smiled at, and yet reverenced. The fierce maternal impulses of his wife were divine to Rivers, he loved her the more for her foolishness; it seemed fitting, and all he could expect, that the children should be her passion, as she was his. If he had once dreamed that it would be otherwise, he knew better now. Women were to be taken care of and loved for their very limitations, even if one bore a little sense of loss and soreness forever in one’s own heart. What could they know?
“Why don’t you take a vacation, Mr. Rivers?” asked Mrs. Weir later as the others had fallen into general conversation. “You look as if you needed it. Mr. Nichols says it was dreadful in town to-day; forty-seven heat prostrations.”
“Oh, I can’t get off,” said Rivers with unconscious weariness in his voice. “It makes an awful lot of difference when you’re running the business yourself. If I were working for somebody else I’d take my little two weeks the way my own clerks do, without caring a hang what became of the concern in my absence. I thought I was going to get up to Maine over the Fourth, and after all I couldn’t leave in time. It’s quite a journey, you know. Bess and the boys were as disappointed as I was,” he added conscientiously. “But they’re getting along finely. Sam and Jack are learning to swim, she says—pretty good for little shavers of five and six! They’re as brown as Indians. She says—” he began to laugh as he repeated confidentially some anecdotes of their prowess to which Mrs. Weir apparently listened with the deeply interested attention that is balm to the family exile, only asking him after a while irrelevantly, as he pushed back the hair from his forehead,
“How did you get that ugly cut on your temple?”
Even in the moonlight she could see his face flush.
“Oh, come, Rivers,” said Atwood, who was passing, “make up some story, for the credit of mankind.”
“Then you might as well have the truth, I suppose,” said Rivers, laughing, yet embarrassed. “It’s really nothing, though; I felt dizzy and queer when I went to bed last night. I suppose it was just the heat, and I have had a good deal to carry in a business way lately. I found myself at daylight this morning lying on the floor with my head by the edge of the bureau, and I don’t know in the least how I got there. I have a faint memory that I started to go for some water. I’m all right to-day, though; it hasn’t bothered me a bit.”
“No, of course not,” said Mrs. Weir encouragingly. “And you don’t mind staying alone?” she dropped her voice.
“Oh, no, not at all. Only—I don’t mind telling you—” he looked at her with strange eyes—“I hate the house! It’s got all the plagues of Egypt in it. And all the hours I’ve spent alone there are shut up in it too. I know just how it’s going to be when I open that front door and walk in.”
“Stay here to-night,” said Mrs. Weir smoothly. “Stay here with Mr. Atwood; Mrs. Callender will be delighted to have you.”