“I don't know what I shall do about the boy,” he said at length. “But he will not suffer in the present; Mrs. Landray will care for him. He could not be in better hands.”
“It was the future Steve was thinking about when he wrote to you, Jake; and it will be pretty hard on Mrs. Landray if you leave the child with her until she becomes attached to him, and then take him away.”
“Mrs. Landray's attachments are all traditional. She is probably quite as fond of him this very minute as she will be ten years hence.”
“I'd almost say you were tricky, Jake; one gets damn little satisfaction out of you,” said Gibbs. He made one or two futile efforts after this to bring the lawyer back to the matter he had most at heart, but Benson baffled him, and in the end Gibbs retired to his room considerately helped thither by his host, and quite nonplussed by the other's perverseness.
Gibbs lingered in Benson two days as the lawyer's guest, and on the morning of the third started home to his Julia and the Golden West Saloon. He was satisfied that he had acted rather handsomely in a crisis; and he was cheered and sustained by the conviction that both Benson and Virginia appeared fully sensible of this.
“She's the reason Jake never married; well, in spite of his luck he's wanted one thing he couldn't have;” and the thought gave him no little satisfaction, his feeling toward Benson being then rather one of censure. “He owed it to me to say what he'd do for Steve's boy; it was distinctly my right to know, I wish I'd told him that.”
It might have been an added comfort to Gibbs had he known that his departure left the lawyer rather depressed, and wondering moodily why he should have the feeling he knew he had for Stephen and Stephen's boy. It seemed a long way back to the directness of those motives that had once influenced him for good. He rancorously lived over the past and the days slipped forward while he nursed his grudge. He did not see Virginia, and he made no effort to see the child.
Virginia's feeling of hurt and injury grew as the months passed and he made no sign; then quite unexpectedly he surprised her by calling.
“I suppose you have counted me rather remiss in the matter of Stephen's boy, Virginia,” he began smoothly.
“I don't know why you should think that. Perhaps there was no reason why you should feel any interest in him,” answered Virginia.