Nathan’s weakened condition quickly induced sleep. It was night when he awoke. He was at home and his mother was bending above him.
“My poor, poor boy!” she crooned. And for the instant, groggy and faint with fiery pain as he was, a great up-welling tenderness toward his mother came in Nathan. When she kissed him, his arms went up around her frail shoulders and he clung to her.
But when he awoke the following morning all suggestions of tenderness were missing in the petulant, whining Job’s comfort she gave him.
“You’ve bloodied all my best sheets and pillow cases!” she cried; “besides getting your clothes all ripped and markin’ yourself for life! Oh, you do make it so hard for your dear, dear mother—so bitter, bitter hard!”
Nathan’s father came up during the noon hour and sat down beside the bed. Gravely he looked at his son and admiration lurked in his weak blue eyes.
“Well, I’m glad you’ve shown some starch at last,” he commented. “I’d begun to think I was raising a sissy.”
Thereupon, the seventeenth time for his son’s edification and future emulation, Johnathan launched good-humoredly into a recount of how he (Johnathan) had whipped the town bully at fifteen, against tremendous odds, a brick wall, and a pair of brass knuckles.
It was Johnathan’s way of being kind and showing his appreciation of what his boy had done. The reports about town of Nathan’s prowess had come to the father as sweet music.
Praise of his boy’s artistry, poetic talent and romantic temperament had touched only as the wind which bloweth where it listeth. But that his offspring had gone into a brute encounter, drawn blood, broken teeth, gouged eyes and torn hair—coming off victor though the struggle would mark him for life—was grand and noble and a cause for pride and satisfaction altogether. Johnathan felt that he, too, must not be found wanting.
So he finished off the town bully and then recounted various other deeds of a heroic nature in which he had also played the chief male lead.