“I ought to have told before why I came home, but I hated to spoil the Thanksgiving. You must not take it too hard, grandma, there are others to do honor to—to grandpa and the old name”—now the young voice shook—“but I—I have been expelled from college.”
A great shock is always more or less benumbing. We stared at him incredulously. There was even a feeble smile upon grandma’s face. She did not seem to understand at all. Since Dave was speaking it must be something pleasant to hear. If anything had happened to Dave at college it must be something that would make us proud. She looked over her glasses inquiringly at the faces around the table, and what she saw there made the faint pink color waver in her cheeks.
“What were you saying, Davy dear? Rob isn’t worse? You didn’t come home to bring ill news? If—if they haven’t treated you well at college——”
Uncle Horace coughed, the hard, dry cough that spoke volumes and was his most characteristic utterance. It was a kind of résumé and reminder of all the dismal prophecies he had ever uttered. There was even a faint smile flickering about his thin mouth, as if he enjoyed the situation.
I flashed an irate glance at him, but what did he care? He cracked an almond between his long, powerful fingers, and continued to smile in the dead, oppressive silence that followed Dave’s confession. I positively did not dare to look at Cyrus.
“It’s more than you think, grandma. They have sent me away from the college. I can never go back. I wish—I wish I could have kept you from feeling so!”
He said it with a boyish stammering and I recalled the day when Miss Raycroft and the committee had sent him home from the Palmyra school.
Poor Dave! would he always be a boy? I did not yet realize that it must be a serious offense that he had committed, a far more serious one than the drawing of Miss Raycroft on the blackboard in the guise of the old woman who was going to sweep the cobwebs from the sky!
“It was a pity not to think of that before,” said Cyrus in a cold, hard voice.
“I have been a disgrace to you; whatever you choose to say to me is all right,” said Dave, and his own voice was a little hard. “Perhaps it would have been better for me to go away somewhere, far enough for you never to hear of me again. But it seemed to me more the part of a man, and for grandma’s sake, too, for me to face the music. Perhaps there will be something that a fellow of my brawn and muscle can do in the shipyard. At least I am not weak physically.”