CHAPTER XXI

DAN did not go next day to bid the returned neighbour welcome home—he thought it better to postpone the call of greeting he should have made at once. He knew he should have made it, if even out of no more than mere neighbourliness; but gradually it became postponed into the indefiniteness that means never, a postponement not without parallel when old friends of husbands return. Meanwhile, Martha was not again mentioned by either Lena or her husband; though this is only to say that she was not orally mentioned between them, but continued to be the subject of their silences. Dan did not dare to go to see her; and his own silence, when he was with his wife, was doggedly protestive, while Lena’s was inscrutable, though she sometimes gave him evidences of a faintly amused contempt. She permitted him to perceive that she despised him, but not to understand whether she despised him because he wanted to see Martha or because he was afraid to do what he wanted.

Once or twice, when he came from his long day’s work, he caught a glimpse of a white figure in the twilight of the Shelbys’ veranda, and waved his hat, and thought a hand waved to him in return; but weeks passed and limp midsummer was almost upon the town before he had speech again with the slighted lady, though the slight was always upon his conscience.

Upon a hot Sunday noon, when his father and mother returned from church, he took them to see the “carpenter shop” he had spent the morning making in the old summer-house for young Henry—Henry Daniel no longer, at the boy’s own vehement request. The grandparents praised the “carpenter shop” but chided their son for staying away from church to construct it, and their grandson for missing Sunday-school. Dan laughed; he had not been to church in a year; and Henry distorted the cherubic rotundities of his small face into as much ferocity as he could accomplish. “I hate Sunday-school,” he declared; and, as his mother joined them just then, he seized her hand. “I don’t haf to go ’lessen I want to. You’ll never get me in that ole hole again!”

“My gracious!” Dan laughed. “It isn’t as bad as all that. You and I might decide to begin goin’ again sometime, Henry.”

“I won’t,” Henry said stoutly, and as the group moved across the lawn, returning toward the house, he clung to his mother’s hand and repeated that he didn’t “haf to.” He appealed to Lena piercingly: “I don’t haf to if I don’t want to, do I, mamma?”

“Why, no,” his father assured him. “Of course you don’t. It wouldn’t do you much good, I expect, if you don’t like it. You needn’t fret, Henry. I guess you’ll be a good enough boy without Sunday-school.”

“I expect so, maybe,” Mr. Oliphant agreed, chuckling at his grandson’s vehemence. “It’s a good thing your grandmother Savage can’t hear you, though, Dan. I never did know what she really believed; in fact, I rather suspect she was an agnostic in her heart—but she’d have been shocked to hear you letting your offspring out of Sunday-school—or anything else—merely because he doesn’t like it.”

“I expect she would, sir,” Dan said. “But all that’s changed since her day. People don’t believe in——” He stopped speaking and moving simultaneously, and stood staring out at the sidewalk where his brother and Martha Shelby, walking slowly, were returning from church.

“People don’t believe in what?” Mr. Oliphant inquired, stopping also.

“I—I don’t know, sir,” Dan said vaguely, and he began to grow red. Harlan and Martha had turned in at the gate and were coming across the lawn to them.

Martha went first to Lena. “I haven’t had a chance to say ‘Howdy-do’ to you since I came back,” she said easily. “I’m ever so glad to see you again.” Then she turned to Dan, and gave him her hand with a cordial emphasis of gesture. “It’s fine to see you again, too, Dan. I want to congratulate you about Ornaby Addition. You’ll have to look out, though.”

“I will?” Dan said and added awkwardly, “Well—well, the—the truth is, I’m mighty glad to see you. I mean we’re all glad you’re back home again, Martha.” He was visibly in a state of that almost certain contagion, embarrassment, and so flounderingly that he was embarrassing. He dropped Martha’s cordial hand almost as soon as he touched it, and at the same instant turned upon his wife a look of helpless apprehension that would have revealed everything, if revelation were needed. But Lena showed herself as little disconcerted as the steady Martha was; and the look she sent back to her husband held in it something of the hostile examination that had come into her eyes on the evening after Martha’s return, though now it was accompanied by a bright glint almost hilariously jeering. It was strikingly successful in effect. Dan gulped, then he stammered: “How—how do you—how do you mean I must look out, Martha?”

She laughed cheerfully. “I mean you must look out for some of those wicked old men downtown. You tried to get them to come in with you at the start, but they wouldn’t, and pretty soon they’re going to be furious that they let the chance slip. They’ll try to get Ornaby away from you, Dan.” She turned to the little boy, who had been silenced for a moment by the arrival of this stranger. “I ought to know you,” she said. “That’s why I stopped on my way home: I wanted to meet you. I live next door. Will you shake hands?”

“No,” Henry replied, because his momentary shyness had passed and he felt that this refusal would help to restore the conspicuousness he had been enjoying as the owner of a new “carpenter shop” and a rebel against Sunday-school. “I don’t want to. I don’t want to shake hands.”

“Why, Henry dear!” Mrs. Oliphant intervened, touching her grandson lightly upon the shoulder. “You don’t mean that! This is our dear friend that lives next door and likes little boys. You must——”

“I won’t!” Henry shouted. “I don’t care who she likes, I don’t want to shake hands.” He intended no discourtesy; he merely wished to be distinguished, and in continuance of that desire immediately doubled himself, placing the top of his head upon the ground. “I can turn a summerset,” he said. “Want to see me do it? Watch me! Look!”

He failed to accomplish the proposed feat, but at once attempted it again. “Watch me!” he shouted. “Look at me! Why don’t you watch me?”

He went on with his attempts, more and more shrilly demanding the public attention that had wandered from him. Martha had begun to talk to Mrs. Oliphant; and Lena came close to Harlan for a moment. “Didn’t leave her accent in Italy!” she murmured in her little voice; and passed on toward the house, displaying daintily upon the short grass pretty white slippers that a girl of twelve might have worn.

Harlan shrugged his shoulders, and his thought was, “Parisian doll!” as it usually was when his sister-in-law irritated him. Certainly, if there were a Parisienne present it was Lena and not the unchanging Martha in her Paris clothes.

The little boy shouted louder and louder, since attention was still denied him;—he tugged at his father’s coat, wailing shrilly, “Look at me, papa! Oh, my goodness, can’t you watch me?”

Meanwhile Martha, beaming down upon Mrs. Oliphant, nevertheless sent an impersonal glance over that amiable lady’s head to where the child thus besieged his father, who seemed to be in a temporary stupor. Dan looked much older, Martha thought, than when she had gone away; and, though she had not expected him to retain for ever an unlined face and his fine figure, she felt a little dismay at finding him settling into what was strikingly like middle-age. He was older and heavier than he need have been, she thought, and a stranger might well have guessed Harlan to be ten years the younger of the two.

Nowhere in Dan, with his broadened, preoccupied, and lined face, his heavy, careless figure and his middle-aged careless clothes, could she discover the jolly boy she had known, or the youth she had danced with in college holidays, or the jaunty young man so dashingly clad who had come home from New York engaged to be married, and told her so on a February walk she would always remember. What was more to her, nowhere in this almost middle-aged man of business, now beginning to be successful, could she discover signs of the spirit that once would have brought him instantly to welcome home an old friend, even if a wife did threaten. Yet he was a man who would have swept Lena aside if she had attempted to interfere with his business, Martha thought—and it was not a thought that made her happier. She moved to depart.

But at this, the insistent Henry, irritated beyond measure by the general indifference to his acrobatics, flung himself upon her, pulling fiercely at her dress. “My goodnuss! Can’t you watch me? What’s the matter with you? You got to watch me!”

There was a sound of tearing as he pulled at her;—Mr. Oliphant sprang to him and removed him, but Martha picked up the lace flounce partly torn from her skirt, and laughed at the mutilation of her finery. “No harm at all,” she said, as both Mr. and Mrs. Oliphant began to apologize for Henry; but their apologies and her reassurances were not distinctly audible; nor were her words of departure as she turned toward the gate with Harlan. Henry had instantly squirmed from his grandfather’s grasp and was shriller and louder than ever.

“Now I guess you’ll watch me!” he shrieked. “Look at me, gran’pa! Look at me, everybody!” He appealed also to his mother, who had paused near the front steps and stood there, laughing. “Look at me, mamma! Watch me, now! I’m goin’ to turn a summerset!” He charged into his father’s legs, yelling, “You’re not lookin’ at me, papa! My goodnuss! Can’t you watch me?” And he continued to be overwhelmingly vociferous, but Dan, for the moment, paid no attention.

He was wondering how it had happened that Martha had been so long at home and he had not taken the few steps—just to next door—to tell her he was glad she had come back. What if Lena had made a fuss? It would have been right to go. And there came to him faintly, faintly, the ghost of a recollection of a starry night when he and Martha stood not far from where they were now in this glaring noon. It had strangely seemed to him then that he had had a gift from her, something made of no earthly stuff, something enriching and ineffable. He had forgotten it; but now he remembered, and at the very moment of remembering, it seemed to him that the gift was gone.

He stared blankly at her as she passed through the open gateway, holding her torn dress and chatting with Harlan; while against Dan’s legs the vehement Henry was battering himself and shrieking, “Look at me, papa! My goodnuss! Can’t you look at me!”

Dan consented, and when Martha and Harlan entered the Shelbys’ gate, beyond, they saw that the acrobat, still piercingly vociferous, had collected the attention of all of his audience but one. His mother still stood near the stone front steps, laughing, not looking at him; but his grandparents and his father were applauding him. He was insatiable, however; keeping them in the hot sun while he performed other athletic feats. “You shan’t go in the house, gran’ma!” he screamed. “I’m goin’ to hop on one leg all across the yard. You got to watch me. You watch me, gran’ma!”

Mrs. Oliphant obediently returned, and the new entertainment began.

“Isn’t it awful?” Harlan groaned. “Isn’t it dismaying to think what children are coming to nowadays? I’d hoped you’d let me sit on the veranda a little while with you, Martha; but I can’t ask you to stay out in an air made hideous by all this squawking and squealing.”

“Then you might come in with me,” she laughed. “Our walls are pretty thick.”

The walls of the big old house were as she said, but open windows brought the shrill, incessant “Watch me!” indoors, and the annoyed Harlan complained further of his nephew. “It makes one respect the Chinese,” he said. “They at least pay some attention to ancestors. Only certain tribes biologically very low worship children, I understand; but that seems to be our most prevalent American habit to-day. We’re deliberately making this the age of the abject worship of children—and I wish my grandmother could have lived to give her opinion of it!”

“What do you think she’d say, Harlan?”

“Isn’t hard to guess! She’d have said we’re heading the children straight for perdition. In fact, she thought that about our own generation; she thought father and mother were heading Dan and me that way; yet we were under heavy discipline compared to the way this terrible little Henry’s being brought up. Lena’s family were severe with her, I understand, and she doesn’t believe in discipline. As for Dan, he’s always been just the child’s slave.”

Martha looked compassionate. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I suppose he had to have something he could worship.”

“Well, he’s got Ornaby Addition,” Harlan suggested dryly.

“No. He had to have something besides. I think he’d have worshipped his wife, if she had ever let him, but I suppose she——”

“No,” Harlan said, breaking the indefinite pause into which Martha had absently strayed. “But she’s always capable of being jealous.” And he looked at Martha from the side of his eye.

“Jealous of me?”

“You’ve certainly been made well enough aware of it from the very day he brought her home, Martha.”

“Oh, yes,” she assented cheerfully. “She’s never doubted that I’ve always cared for Dan, but she knows that he wasn’t in love with me. She must have always been sure of that, because—well, here I was—he had only to step over next door and ask me, but he asked her, instead. And yet, as you say, she disliked me from the start. She certainly saw I wasn’t the sort to take him away from her, even if I’d thought I could—and I knew I couldn’t. Yet it’s true she was jealous. Do you know what I think really made her so, Harlan? I think almost the principal reason was because I’m so tall.”

“What?”

“Yes, I do believe it,” Martha insisted. “Someone told me she used to be called ‘French doll’ in New York, and was very sensitive about it. She wanted to be thought a temperamental and romantic opera heroine, and would never stand near a tall woman because she was afraid of being made to look more like a French doll. I think she couldn’t endure the thought of her husband’s having a woman friend as big as I am.”

“No doubt she’s never wanted to be near you herself,” Harlan said. “But I think her feeling isn’t quite so much on the physical plane as that.”

“Oh, yes, it was. A man mightn’t understand it, but——”

“A man might, though,” he interrupted. “Lena’s always been afraid that you’re just what she’d call the type of big Western woman Dan ought to have married in order to be happy.”

“What?” Martha cried, but her colour deepened, and there was agitation in her voice, though she laughed. “Why, what nonsense!”

“Is it?” Harlan said, and now agitation became evident in his own voice, though he controlled it manfully. “It’s what I’ve always been afraid of, myself.”

“No, no!” she cried, her colour still deepening. “That’s just nonsense!”

“Is it?” he repeated grimly. “My grandmother Savage didn’t think so. She cut Dan off with a shilling because she hoped Lena would leave him and give him a chance to marry you—eventually!”

“Harlan Oliphant! What on earth are you talking about?”

“I think you understand me,” he said. “Grandmother was a shrewd old lady, and as good a judge of character as one often sees; but sometimes she overshot the mark, as most of us do, no doubt, when we think we understand other people so thoroughly that we can manipulate their destinies. She thought a good deal that was true about Lena; but she despised her too much, and made the mistake of thinking her purely mercenary. That’s why I was the residuary legatee, Martha.”

“Of all the nonsense!” she protested, and continued to protest. She’d never heard anything so far-fetched in all her life, she declared—people didn’t put such Machiavellian subtleties into their wills; and Harlan was a creative romanticist instead of the critic she’d always believed him to be. But his romancing wasn’t successful; it was too incredible.

He listened, skeptically marking the difference between the vehemence of the words she used and the lack of conviction in the voice that uttered them. “Never mind, Martha,” he said at last. “I see you believe it and agree with me.”

“I don’t,” she still protested; but her tone was now so feeble that it only proved her determined never to make the open admission of what she denied. “It would be too tragic.”

“Why?”

“To think of that poor old woman——”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I’m afraid it must irritate her now if she knows.”

“To think of her——” Martha said. “Poor thing! I mean it would be too tragic to think of her hoping and planning such—such preposterousness!”

At this Harlan looked at her so sharply, so gravely, that he seemed to ask much more than appeared upon the surface of his question: “But would it be preposterous? Suppose Lena and Dan should——”

“Separate?” she said, as he stopped at the word. “They never will.”

“But I asked you, if they should?”

Martha shook her head, smiling faintly; and she looked away from him—far away, it seemed—as she spoke. “People don’t stay ardently in love forever, Harlan. I don’t suppose anybody stays in love with anybody—forever. I think I used to believe I’d always be in love with Dan, and in a way that was true—whatever is left in me of the girl I used to be will always be in love with the boy he used to be. But I don’t know where that boy is any more. Do you understand?”

Harlan looked melancholy, as he nodded. “I suppose so.”

“I mean I’m true to my memory of him, perhaps. I’m afraid I don’t know just what I do mean.”

“I’m afraid I do, though,” he said. “I’m afraid it’s only that you’re hurt with him because Lena frightened him into keeping from even stepping over here for a minute to say, ‘Welcome home.’ ”

“No; it didn’t hurt—not exactly,” she returned. “But he does seem changed.” She frowned. “Do you think he’s lost something, Harlan? Is it something—something fine about him—that’s lost? It seems to me—it seems to me there must be. How could anybody expect a man to go through such a struggle for success as the one he’s been through and not bear the marks of it? Or maybe is it only his youthfulness he’s lost?”

“I don’t see anything missing,” Harlan replied. “He’s certainly not lost his optimistic oratory; he can still out-talk any man in town on the subject of Our Glorious Future. In fact, I think he’s even more that way than he used to be. Years ago he may have shown a few very faint traces of having been through a university, but you could sandpaper him to powder now and not find them: I don’t believe he could translate the first sentence of Cæsar, or ‘Arma, virumque cano!’ The only things he ever talks about are his business and his boy and local politics. I think that’s all he can talk about.”

“Whereas,” Martha said, with a flash of the old championing, “the learned Mr. Harlan Oliphant has only to open his mouth in order to destroy a lonely woman’s whole joy in the Italian Renaissance.”

He lifted his hands, protesting, then dropped them in despair. “So I’ve lost it already!” he said. “And lost it in the old, old way!”

“Lost what?”

“Hope,” he explained. “You see I’m years and years older than Freddie Oliphant, and he was complaining to me the other day;—he’s now considered so much ‘one of the older men’ that some of the pretty young things one sees at the Country Club were leaving him out of their festivities. You see where that puts me. So I hoped that when you came home——”

“Yes?”

“Well, I hoped that maybe you and I shouldn’t quarrel any more, and——”

“Quarrel? No; we mustn’t, indeed!” she said. “What else is there left for left-overs to do but to make the best of each other?”

“Nothing else, I’m afraid.”

“And I’d hoped,” he went on a little nervously;—“I’d hoped maybe you’d let me see you a good deal—that you’d let me take you places and——”

“Good gracious!” Martha cried; and she laughed and blushed. “Haven’t you just taken me to church? Aren’t you already taking me places, Harlan?”

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