The Second Generation Part 47

Only those who have had experience of the older generation out West would have suspected the pride, the affection, the delight hiding behind Martha Skeffington's prim and formal welcome, or that it was not indifference but the unfailing instinct of a tender heart that made her say, after a very few minutes: "Adelaide, don't you think Dory'd like to look at the rooms?"

Del led the way, Dory several feet behind her--deliberately, lest he should take that long, slender form of hers in his arms that he might again feel her bosom swelling and fluttering against him, and her fine, thick, luminous hair caressing his temple and his cheek. Miss Skeffington had given them the three large rooms on the second floor--the two Dory used to have and one more for Del. As he followed Del into the sitting room he saw that there had been changes, but he could not note them. She was not looking at him; she seemed to be in a dream, or walking with the slow deliberate steps one takes in an unfamiliar and perilous path.

"That is still your bedroom," said she, indicating one of the doors.

"A stationary stand has been put in. Perhaps you'd like to freshen up a bit."

"A stationary stand," he repeated, as if somewhat dazed before this practical detail. "Yes--I think so."

She hesitated, went into her room, not quite closing the door behind her.

He stared at it with a baffled look. "And," he was thinking, "I imagined I had trained myself to indifference." An object near the window caught his eye--a table at which he could work standing. He recalled that he had seen its like in a big furniture display at Paris when they were there together, and that he had said he would get one for himself some day.

This hint that there might be more than mere matter in those surroundings set his eyes to roving. That revolving bookcase by the desk, the circular kind he had always wanted, and in it the books he liked to have at hand--Montaigne and Don Quixote, Shakespeare and Sh.e.l.ley and Swinburne, the Encyclopedia, the statistical yearbooks; on top, his favorites among the magazines. And the desk itself--a huge spread of cleared surface--an enormous blotting pad, an ink well that was indeed a well--all just what he had so often longed for as he sat cramped at little desks where an attempt to work meant overflow and chaos of books and papers. And that big inlaid box--it was full of his favorite cigarettes; and the drop-light, and the green shade for the eyes, and the row of pencils sharpened as he liked them--

He knocked at her door. "Won't you come out here a moment?" cried he, putting it in that form because he had never adventured her intimate threshold.

No answer, though the door was ajar and she must have heard.

"Please come out here," he repeated.

A pause; then, in her voice, shy but resolute, the single word, "Come!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE DEAD THAT LIVE

On the green oval within and opposite the entrance to the main campus of the great university there is the colossal statue of a master workman.

The sculptor has done well. He does not merely show you the physical man--the ma.s.s, the strength, of bone and sinew and muscle; he reveals the man within--the big, courageous soul. Strangers often think this statue a personation of the force which in a few brief generations has erected from a wilderness our vast and splendid America. And it is that; but to Arthur and Adelaide, standing before it in a June twilight, long after the events above chronicled, it is their father--Hiram.

"How alive he seems," says his daughter.

And his son answers: "How alive he _is_!"