The Fortunes of Oliver Horn Part 6

"Poor motherkins--and you all alone," he cried. "Why, I thought you and father had gone to bed long ago."

"No, son--I was waiting for you." He laid his fresh young face against hers, insisting that she must go to bed at once; helping her upstairs awkwardly, laughing as he went--telling her she was the sweetest girl he ever knew and his best sweetheart--kissing her pale cheeks as they climbed the steps together to his room.

She had determined, as she sat by the window, to talk to him of what she had overheard him say to Sue, and of her anxiety over Richard's revelations, but his joyous kiss had robbed her of the power. She would wait for another time--she said to herself--not to-night, when he was so happy.

"Anybody at Sue's, Ollie?" she asked, lighting his candle.

"Only the boys and girls--Tom Pitts, Charley Bowman, Nellie Talbot, and one or two others. The Colonel came in just before I left."

"But the Colonel will be home to-morrow, will he not?" she asked, quickly, as if something forgotten had been suddenly remembered.

"Yes--think so--" answered Oliver, taking off his coat and hanging it over the chair--"because he was just up from Pongateague. He and Major Pitts got thirty-seven woodc.o.c.k in two days. Tom wants me to go down with him some day next week."

A shade of anxiety crossed the mother's face.

"What did you tell him, son?" She moved a chair nearer the bureau and sat down to watch him undress, as she had always done since the day she first tucked him into his crib.

"Oh, I said I would ask you." He was loosening his cravat, his chin thrown up, the light of the candle falling over his well-knit shoulders and chest outlined through his white shirt.

"Better not go, Ollie--you've been away so much lately."

"Oh, dearie," he protested, in a tone as a child would have done, "what does a day or two matter? Be a darling old mother and let me go. Tom has a gun for me, and Mr. Talbot is going to lend us his red setter.

Tom's sister is going, too, and so are her cousins. Just think, now, I haven't had a day in the country for a c.o.o.n's age." His arms were round her neck now. He seemed happier over the excuse to caress her than anxious about her possible refusal.

She loosened one of his hands and laid it on her cheek.

"No holidays, son? Why you had two last week, when you all went out to Stemmer's Run," she said, looking up into his face, his hand still in hers.

"Yes, but that was fishing!" he laughed as he waved an imaginary rod in his hands.

"And the week before, when you spent the day at Uncle Tilghman's?" she continued, smiling sadly at him, but with the light of an ill-concealed admiration on her face.

"Ah, but mother, I went to see the Lely! That's an education. Oh, that portrait in pink!" He was serious now, looking straight down into her eyes--talking with his hands, one thumb in air as if it were a bit of charcoal and he was outlining the Lely on an equally real canvas. "Such color, mother--such an exquisite poise of the head and sweep to the shoulder--" and the thumb described a curve in the air as if following every turn of Lely's brush.

Her eyes followed his gestures--she loved his enthusiasm, although she wished it had been about something else.

"And you don't get any education out of the Judge's law-books?"

"No, I wish I did." The joyous look on his face was gone now--his hand had fallen to his side. "It gets to be more of a muddle every day--"

and then he added, with the illogical reasoning of youth--"all the lawyers that ever lived couldn't paint a picture like the Lely."

Mrs. Horn closed her eyes. It was on her tongue to tell him she knew what was in his heart, but she stopped; no, not to-night, she said firmly to herself, and shut her lips tight--a way she had of bracing her nerves in such emergencies.

Oliver in turn saw the expression of anxiety that crossed his mother's face and the thin drawn line of the lips. One word from her and he would have poured out his heart. Then some shadow that crossed her face silenced him. "No, not to-night--" he said to himself. "She has been sitting up for me and is tired--I'll tell her to-morrow."

"Don't go with Tom Pitts, my son," she said, calmly. "I'd rather you'd stay; I don't want you to go this time. Perhaps a little later--" and a slight shiver went through her as she rose from her chair and moved toward him.

He made no protest. Her final word was always law to him--not because she dominated him, but because his nature was always to be in harmony with the thing he loved. Because, too, underneath it all was that quality of tenderness to all women old and young, which forbade him to cause one of them pain. Almost unconsciously to himself he had gone through a process by which from having yielded her the obedience of a child, he now surrendered to her the pleasures of his youth when the old feeling of maternal dominance still controlled her in her att.i.tude to him. She did not recognize the difference, and he had but half-perceived it, but the difference had already transformed him from a boy into a man, though with unrecognized powers of stability as yet.

In obeying his mother, then at twenty-two, or even in meeting the whims and conceits of his sweethearts, this quality of tenderness to the woman was always uppermost in his heart. The surrender of a moment's pleasure seemed so little to him compared to the expression of pain he could see cross their faces. He had so much to make him happy--what mattered it if out of a life so full he should give up any one thing to please his mother.

Patting him on the cheek and kissing him on the neck, as she had so often done when some sudden wave of affection overwhelmed her, she bade him good-night at last.

Once outside in the old-fashioned hall, she stopped for a moment, her eyes fixed on the floor, the light from the hall-lamp shining on her silver hair and the shawl about her shoulders, and said slowly to herself, as if counting each word:

"What--can I do--to save this boy--from--himself?"

CHAPTER V

A MESSAGE OF IMPORTANCE

Richard, when he waked, made no allusion to the mortgage nor to his promise the night before, to take no steps in the matter without her consent, nor could Mrs. Horn see that the inventor had given the subject further thought. He came in to breakfast with his usual serenity of mien, kissed her gallantly on the cheek--in all their married life this dear old gentleman had never forgotten this breakfast kiss--and taking his seat opposite her, he picked up the new Scientific Review, just in by the morning mail, and began cutting the leaves. She tried to draw him into conversation by asking him when the note on the mortgage was due, but his mind was doubtless absorbed by some problem suggested by the Review before him, for without answering--he, of course, had not heard her--he rose from his chair, excused himself for a moment, opened a book in his library, studied it leisurely, and only resumed his seat when Malachi gently touched his elbow and said:

"Coffee purty nigh done sp'ilt, Ma.r.s.e Richard."

Breakfast over, Richard picked up his letters, and with that far-away look in his eyes which his wife knew so well, walked to the closet, took down his long red calico gown, slipped it over his coat, and with a loving pat on his wife's shoulder as he pa.s.sed, and with the request that no one but Nathan should see him that morning, made his way through the damp brick-paved back yard to the green door of his "li'l"

room.

Mrs. Horn watched his retreating figure from the window--his head bent, his soft hair stirred by the morning air, falling about his shoulders.

His serenity; his air of abstraction; of being wrapped in the clouds as it were--borne aloft by the power of a thought altogether beyond her, baffled her as it always did. She could not follow his flights when he was in one of these uplifted moods. She could only watch and wait until he returned again to the common ground of their daily love and companionship.

Brushing a quick tear from her eyes with an impatient sigh, she directed Malachi to go to Oliver's room and tell him he must get up at once, as she wanted him to carry a message of importance. She had herself rapped at her son's door as she pa.s.sed on her way downstairs, and Malachi had already paid two visits to the same portal--one with Oliver's shoes and one on his own account. He had seen his mistress's anxiety, and knowing that his young master had come in late the night before, had mistaken the cause, charging Mrs. Horn's perturbation to Oliver's account. The only response Oliver had made to either of his warnings had been a smothered yawn and a protest at being called at daylight. On his third visit Malachi was more insistent, the hall-clock by that time having struck nine.

"Ain't you out'en dat bed yit, Ma.r.s.e Oliver? Dis yere's de third time I been yere. Better git up; yo' ma's gittin' onres'less."

"Coming, Mally. Tell mother I'll be down right away," called Oliver, springing out of bed. Malachi stepped softly downstairs again, bowed low to his mistress, and with a perfectly straight face said:

"He's mos' ready, mistis. Jes' a-breshin' ob his ha'r when I opened de do'. Spec' Ma.r.s.e Oliver overslep' hisse'f, or maybe n.o.body ain't call him--"

He could not bear to hear the boy scolded. He had begun to shield his young master in the days when he carried him on his shoulder, and he would still shade the truth for him whenever he considered necessity required it.

When Oliver at last came downstairs it was by means of the hand-rail as a slide, a dash through the hall and a bound into the breakfast-room, followed by a joyous good-morning, meeting his mother's "How could you be so late, my boy," without any defence of his conduct, putting one hand under her chin and the other around her neck, and kissing her where her white hair parted over her forehead.

Malachi waited an instant, breathing freer when he found that his statement regarding Oliver's toilet had pa.s.sed muster, and then shuffled off to the kitchen for hot waffles and certain other comforting viands that Aunt Hannah, the cook, had kept hot for her young master, Malachi's several reports having confirmed her suspicions that Oliver, as usual, would be half an hour late.

"What a morning, motherkins," Oliver cried. "Such a sky, all china-blue and white. Oh, you just ought to see how fine the old church looms up behind the trees. I'm going to paint that some day, from my window. Dad had his breakfast?" and he glanced at the empty seat and plate.

"Sausage, eh? Mally, got any for me?" and he dragged up his chair beside her, talking all the time as he spread his napkin and drew the dishes toward him.

He never once noticed her anxious face, he was so full of his own buoyant happiness. She did not check his enthusiasm. This breakfast-hour alone with her boy--he was almost always later than Richard--was the happiest of the day. But her heart was too heavy this morning to enjoy it. Instead of listening with her smile of quiet satisfaction, answering him now and then with a gayety of humor which matched his own, she was conscious only of the waiting for an opportunity to break into his talk with out jarring upon his mood. At last, with a hesitating emphasis that would have alarmed anyone less wrapped in his own content than her son, she said:

"Ollie, when you finish your breakfast I want you, on your way to Judge Ellicott's office, to stop at Colonel Clayton's and ask him to be good enough to come and see me as soon as he can on a little matter of business. Tell him I will keep him but a minute. If you hurry, my son, you'll catch him before he leaves the house."

The die was cast now. She had taken her first step without Richard's hand to guide her--the first in all her life. It was pain to do it--the more exquisite because she loved to turn to him for guidance or relief, to feel the sense of his protection. Heretofore he had helped her in every domestic emergency, his soft, gentle hand soothing and quieting her, when troubles arose. She had wavered during the night between her duty to her family in saving the farm, and her duty to her husband in preserving unbroken the tie of loyal dependence that had always bound them together. Many emotions had shaken her as she lay awake, her eyes fixed on the flutings in the canopy of the high-post bedstead which the night-lamp faintly illumined, Richard asleep beside her, dreaming doubtless of cogs and pulleys and for the hundredth time of his finding the one connecting link needed to complete the chain of his success.

But before the day had broken, her keen, penetrating mind had cut through the fog of her doubts. Come what may, the farm should never be given up. Richard, for all his urgent need of money to perfect his new motor, should not be allowed to sacrifice this the only piece of landed property which they possessed, except the roof that sheltered them all.