I learned a lesson in those days—to know how other people estimated my father. Of course, I had seen Dennis Deventer drinking in the knowledge he felt the lack of, as from a fountain. I knew what Professor Renard and the Bey thought of him. Yet, after all, these were men of Gordon Cawdor's own age and stamp.
But when I saw the fine sweet house-motherliness of Mrs. Deventer sitting at my father's feet and talking confidentially yet with respect, the thing seemed to me strange. I have seen her finish the review and arrangement of a series of china and napery closets, the laying down of fresh papers in chests of drawers, or the ordering of knick-knacks gathered in the Bey's campaigns. Then she would throw a fold of black Spanish lace over her pretty grey hair, always shining and neat—and so, without explanation or apology, hie herself out to find my father.
"A talk with him is my refreshment!" she said once when she came back and laid the folded lace scarf down beside the work she was next to attack. More than once I had passed them speaking low and earnestly, and I am sure she was consulting him about some intimate affairs of which she had spoken to no one else.
Or it was the turn of Rhoda Polly and her procedure was different. She would remove the provision of tin-tacks, French nails, or whatnot from her mouth, her habitual ready receptacle, throw a wisp or two of rebellious ripe-corn hair back from her brow, and demand to be told if there were any very bad smuts on her face! When she presented her handkerchief or the hem of her apron to me I knew from long experience what was expected of me. I was to remove the offending smuts from Rhoda Polly's face with the oldest and most natural of cleansers, exactly as we had done to one another when the dinner bell or the voice of authority called us from some extra grubby tree-climbing or mud-pie making experiment in the days when the world was young.
"Spell ho!" Rhoda Polly would cry; "had enough this one time. I am off to talk to your father. He does me good."
And now when the other Deventer girls, the stately swan-necked Hannah and the Dresden shepherdess of a dainty Liz, being expelled for "shameless slacking" and "getting in everybody's way," took their road with happy expectant faces to the bench by the sundial, I knew in my heart for the first time that I would never so add to the happiness of humanity as that gentle refined scholarly man who was my father.
To my shame I took a cast about the garden, and from the top of a ladder looked down upon the trio in an unworthy and wholly ungentlemanly way. I did not mean to overhear—of course not—but I overheard. My only excuse is that I was in a quandary. I knew that I had somehow been all wrong about my father, and I wanted to find out how I could put matters right. Hannah was seated on the bench beside him, listening and looking down, making diagrams meanwhile in the gravel with the point of her en-tout-cas, a sort of long-handled parasol sent from Paris.
Liz had characteristically pulled one of the little stools called "banquettes" from under the sundial, and had seated herself between my father's knees. She had taken her hat off and now leaned her elbow on his knee looking up into his face.
He was telling them about maidens of old times, how the Lesbia of Catullus looked and dressed, how he and she idled the day by the length a-dream in a boat in the bays about Sirmio. He quoted Tennyson's delicious verses to them, and they promised to look them up that night.
"If it were not that Rhoda Polly knows so much, I should begin Latin this very day," said Liz; "but she is such a swell that she can always come down on a fellow. She thinks we know nothing!"