Lou shrugged his shoulders. “He doesn’t seem to have done much for himself. Wandering around this way!”
Oscar spoke solemnly, as from the depths of a cavern. “He never was much account.”
Alexandra left them and hurried down to the gate where Annie was rattling on to Carl about her new dining-room furniture. “You must bring Mr. Linstrum over real soon, only be sure to telephone me first,” she called back, as Carl helped her into the carriage. Old Ivar, his white head bare, stood holding the horses. Lou came down the path and climbed into the front seat, took up the reins, and drove off without saying anything further to any one. Oscar picked up his youngest boy and trudged off down the road, the other three trotting after him. Carl, holding the gate open for Alexandra, began to laugh. “Up and coming on the Divide, eh, Alexandra?” he cried gayly.
IV
Carl had changed, Alexandra felt, much less than one might have expected. He had not become a trim, self-satisfied city man. There was still something homely and wayward and definitely personal about him. Even his clothes, his Norfolk coat and his very high collars, were a little unconventional. He seemed to shrink into himself as he used to do; to hold himself away from things, as if he were afraid of being hurt. In short, he was more self-conscious than a man of thirty-five is expected to be. He looked older than his years and not very strong. His black hair, which still hung in a triangle over his pale forehead, was thin at the crown, and there were fine, relentless lines about his eyes. His back, with its high, sharp shoulders, looked like the back of an over-worked German professor off on his holiday. His face was intelligent, sensitive, unhappy.
That evening after supper, Carl and Alexandra were sitting by the clump of castor beans in the middle of the flower garden. The gravel paths glittered in the moonlight, and below them the fields lay white and still.
“Do you know, Alexandra,” he was saying, “I’ve been thinking how strangely things work out. I’ve been away engraving other men’s pictures, and you’ve stayed at home and made your own.” He pointed with his cigar toward the sleeping landscape. “How in the world have you done it? How have your neighbors done it?”
“We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. As for me, you remember when I began to buy land. For years after that I was always squeezing and borrowing until I was ashamed to show my face in the banks. And then, all at once, men began to come to me offering to lend me money—and I didn’t need it! Then I went ahead and built this house. I really built it for Emil. I want you to see Emil, Carl. He is so different from the rest of us!”
“How different?”
“Oh, you’ll see! I’m sure it was to have sons like Emil, and to give them a chance, that father left the old country. It’s curious, too; on the outside Emil is just like an American boy,—he graduated from the State University in June, you know,—but underneath he is more Swedish than any of us. Sometimes he is so like father that he frightens me; he is so violent in his feelings like that.”