Dennison Grant: A Novel of To-day

by Robert J. C. Stead

“Huh, you don’t know much,” the child commented, and glibly quoted the remaining lines. “And God bless Daddy and Mamma and teddy-bear and Uncle Man-on-the-Hill and the pig. Amen,” he concluded, accompanying the last word with a jump which landed him fairly in Grant’s lap. His little arms went up about his friend’s neck, and his little soft cheek rested against a tanned and weather-beaten one. Slowly Grant’s arms closed about the warm, lithe body and pressed it to his in a new passion, strange and holy. Then he led him to the whim-room, turned down the white sheets in which no form had ever lain and placed the boy between them, snuggled his teddy down by his side and set his knife properly in view upon the dresser. And then he leaned down again and kissed the little face, and whispered, “Good night, little boy; God keep you safe to-night, and always.” And suddenly Grant realized that he had been praying....

He withdrew softly, and only partly closed the door; then he chose a seat where he could see the little figure lying peacefully on the white bed. The last shafts of the setting sun were falling in amber wedges across the room. He picked up a book, thinking to read, but he could not keep his attention on the page; he found his mind wandering back into the long-forgotten chambers of its beginning, conjuring up from the faint recollections of infancy visions of the mother he had hardly known.... After a while he tip-toed to the whim-room door and found that Wilson, with his arms firmly clasped about his teddy-bear, was deep in the sleep of childhood.

“The dear little chap,” he murmured. “I must watch by him to-night. It would be unspeakable if anything should happen him while he is under my care.”

He felt a sense of warmth, almost a smothering sensation, and raised his hand to his forehead. It came down covered with perspiration.

“It’s amazingly close,” he said, and walked to one of the French windows opening to the west. The sun had gone down, and a brooding darkness lay over all the valley, but far up in the sky he could trace the outline of a cloud. Above, the stars shone with an unwonted brightness, but below all was a bank of blue-black darkness. The air was intensely still; in the silence he could hear the wash of the river. Grant reflected that never before had he heard the wash of the river at that distance.

“Looks like a storm,” he commented, casually, and suddenly felt something tighten about his heart. The storms of the foothill country, which occasionally sweep out of the mountains and down the valleys on the shortest notice, had no terror for him; he had sat on horseback under an oilskin slicker through the worst of them; but to-night! Even as he watched, the distant glare of lightning threw the heaving proportions of the thundercloud into sharp relief.

He turned to his chair, but found himself pacing the living-room with an altogether inexplicable nervousness. He had held the line many a bad night at the Front while Death spat out of the darkness on every hand; he had smoked in the faces of his men to cover his own fear and to shame them out of theirs; he had run the whole gamut of the emotion of the trenches, but tonight something more awesome than any engine of man was gathering its forces in the deep valleys. He shook himself to throw off the morbidness that was settling upon him; he laughed, and the echo came back haunting from the silent corners of the house. Then he lit a lamp and set it, burning low, in the whim-room, and noted that the boy slept on, all unconcerned.

“Damn Linder, anyway!” he exclaimed presently. “I believe he shook me up more than I realized. He charged me with insincerity; me, who have always made sincerity my special virtue.... Well, there may be something in it.”

A faint, indistinct growling, as of the grinding of mighty rocks, came down from the distances.

“The storm will be nothing,” he assured himself. “A gust of wind; a spatter of rain; perhaps a dash of hail; then, of a sudden, a sky so calm and peaceful one would wonder how it ever could have been disturbed.” Even as he spoke the house shivered in every timber as the gale struck it and went whining by.