“I should have been glad to see the old house before I die, but it is just as well as it is.”
He was dying all the afternoon, peacefully and gently, and at sunset the end came.
CHAPTER XI.
Master Richard Shelton sat at the foot of his sister’s table dispensing its hospitalities chiefly to himself. Through some law unknown to science, all dishes seemed to gravitate toward the main center of Dicky’s trencher, thereby leaving the rest of the table comparatively bare.
For eighteen months Master Shelton had given Mrs. Ponsonby the advantage of his company; not so much through volition—albeit, he was well enough pleased with his quarters—as through submission to paternal authority.
Conventional ideas are apt to wilt under the blight of poverty, and to revive under the fuller harvesting of this world’s goods, and Mr. Shelton, Sr., who had, in the days of his leanness, let Polly run wild with all the college boys of Harmouth, became suddenly particular, as his bank account fattened, in regard to the niceties of conduct in his daughters. His scruples even embraced Deena; he said she was too young a widow to live alone, and a blank sight too handsome, and that either she must return to the protection of his roof or else receive her brother under her own. With the docility of the intelligent, she accepted his fiat, but chose the evil represented by a unit rather than by the sum total of family companionship.
So she and Dicky had lived together since the day when Simeon had been laid to rest beside his mother in the churchyard, and Deena had taken up life with such courage as she could muster in the old house. She had started out with a long illness, as the result of overtaxed nerves, and the nurse who had been engaged for Simeon found ample employment with Simeon’s widow; but a good constitution and a quiet mind are excellent helps toward recovery, and by September she found herself in admirable health.
Stephen’s energies had been absorbed in editing Simeon’s book. He had the assistance of the botanical department of Harmouth, and the book was produced in a manner which would have given poor Ponsonby infinite pleasure. French spared no expense, especially in the color drawings from Simeon’s photographs and specimens, which were exceptionally valuable. The printing was done in Boston, and Stephen was there much of the time. During Deena’s illness he was glad of an excuse to be near enough to get daily reports of her progress, but as she became strong and resumed the routine of living, so that intercourse became unavoidable, he found the strain of silence more than he could bear. He resigned his professorship permanently, and went abroad, making the book his excuse. He wished to see that it was properly heralded by both English and Continental scientific periodicals, and he preferred to attend to it himself. To say that Deena missed him but feebly expresses the void his going made in her life, but, knowing her own heart, and suspecting the state of his, she was glad to be spared his presence in these early days of widowhood, and could not but approve his decision.
Dicky’s society was hardly calculated to stifle her longings for higher things, for his conduct called for constant repression. At first he had nearly driven her wild by his prying interest in what did not concern him, his way of unmasking her secret thoughts, his powers of seeing round corners, if not through sealed envelopes, but as time went on she grew fond of his honest boy-nature, and learned to laugh at his precocious acuteness. Perhaps with Stephen’s departure there were fewer occasions for her to resent the challenge of his intrusive eye. There were, also, alleviations coincident with the school year, for then she was free from his company from the time he slammed the front door, at five minutes to nine, till he returned at two, ravenous for dinner.
On the particular morning indicated at the beginning of the chapter, the season was the late autumn—the clock was pointing ominously near nine—the lady opposite to Master Shelton looked more beautiful than ever in her widow’s weeds. Dicky conveyed half a sausage and a wedge of buttered toast to the sustenance of boyhood before he asked—with some difficulty, if the truth were confessed: