“Where’s your Ma?”
Marsden thought he knew: “She’s shopping with the machine.”
“She is not!” replied Josiah, emphatic through his own importance, rather than by virtue of the subject. “I had the car. Farrel said she’d dismissed him at four o’clock until the time to call for me.”
“Well, then I don’t know.” Marsden raised his brow to show that also he did not care.
Josiah stood pondering. “That’s funny,” he said. And once more, he espied Quincy, unobtrusively lost in his great chair.
The thought of not knowing his wife’s whereabouts distressed him; again, out of his need of knowing everything, rather than by virtue of any warm solicitude. He felt strongly ill-at-ease, there in his own room, before his children, who paid no attention to him. He had already been reprimanded by his daughter. And now, it seemed that he was generally misinformed. Sarah’s absence was of no significance. It was not late. But the smug posture of his children, seated, while he stood—first scolded, then found ignorant—heightened his sense of umbrage. It had been a close, busy day. And his head had ached. Moreover, there was Quincy, snug in his chair—on his face a look of supreme unconcern.
“Quincy,” he called out in a voice unnecessarily loud, “suppose you go down and asked Farrel where your Ma is. I think he’s waitin’.”
Quincy jumped up again. Fatally, he caught the spirit behind his father’s words and his father’s tone. Unmistakably, he knew that he was being used, that moment, as a release for his father’s mood, for his father’s aches and for his father’s uncomfortable, silly sense of humiliation. All this hurt—this seeing clear. But none the less, he moved stiffly to the door in order to comply. His legs moved laggardly. Something within him repelled this motion of obedience. It was not fair to be exploited as a release for an old man’s aches and tempers and sense of limitation! And in addition, he felt the cold eyes of the company upon him, indifferently watching him on his way, ignorant of his misery, careless of its cause. But now, he was at the door. He opened it. And then, the impulse that said “Nay!” moved something in him, something perverse, ineffectual, foolish, so that he spoke. He knew the folly of this compromise between his sense of duty and of justice. But it was too late. The words came:—
“Suppose the chauffeur doesn’t know?”
For the moment, there was a pause. Marsden, Jonas and Rhoda turned in gleeful expectation toward their glowering father. They knew the outburst such inanity must occasion. And Adelaide, who alone felt fear and pain in this lull of fever, broke into a nervous giggle which Quincy totally misunderstood.