And Malahide, with a smirk of satisfaction, would produce the sanguine relic.
On and on for sixteen days, sparing the intervening Sundays, till she owned no tooth in her head! She and Boney sat together, he on her shoulder, rubbing his arched beak against hers.
“Dilkhoosa … Dilkhoosa …” he murmured caressingly; then, “Nur mahal … Mera lal.”
“Love names!” she would exclaim. “Beautiful Eastern love names! Ah, they know how to make love to a woman in the East!”
She was toothless and triumphant. She looked forward to having the dental plates installed in time for the wedding. They loomed before the family equally with Meggie’s trousseau. She revelled in the thought of the good food she would eat then. Now she was reduced to little more than pap. But she did not starve. She unearthed from the depths of a chest of old-fashioned silver a marrowbone holder. A marrowbone was ordered and simmered for hours. Three times she descended the stairs to the kitchen to test its progress. She could scarcely endure the waiting till it was served at table. Then, with it thrust firmly into the holder, she dug out spoonfuls of the smooth dark meat.
“It’s good,” she declared. “It’s very good. It will help to sustain me till I have my plates.”
She called Eden from his place and thrust a spoonful into his mouth. “This will be good for him,” she said. “It will give him bone and muscle.”
But the little boy made a grimace of distaste and spat out the morsel to the floor, whence it was snapped up by Philip’s spaniel, which sat up in front of Adeline and barked for more.
“No more, you disgraceful fellow!” she said, delving deep with her spoon, “but when I have finished, you may have the bone.”
The new teeth were a miracle of efficiency. It was a brilliant day when Malahide and she drove home with them. If ever they caused her discomfort, she denied it. The teeth were strong, well shaped, and of a colour neither too light nor too dark. She spent well-nigh an hour grinning before her glass. But this display of them came near being disastrous, for Boney, seeing the unaccustomed glitter in her mouth, flew suddenly to her shoulder to investigate, and gave one of the front incisors such a peck that he almost dislodged it. For a moment she was afraid to look, afraid to probe the spot with her tongue, but when she discovered the tooth safe and sound she was overjoyed and said: “Thank God for that!”
She felt that she should make a present to Malahide in recognition of his support through the long ordeal. She went over the contents of her jewel box and selected an earring from an ornate pair long unworn. She gave him this, and he had the diamond taken out and set into a cravat pin for himself.
He would have liked to keep the gift a secret, but Adeline was not one to hide her light under a bushel. At his first appearance wearing the pin she drew the attention of the family to it with: “Well, now, and what do you think of that? That is what I gave Mally for standing by me when I needed it. And, let me tell you, he has no cause to be ashamed of that diamond!”
The family swallowed the new abbreviation of his name, but they could not swallow the pin.
Sir Edwin nibbled at his lower lip and then said: —
“It is very handsome of you, dear Mrs. Whiteoak, but surely, — really, you know —”
“Did the pin belong to my papa?” boomed Augusta.
“No, no,” put in Ernest. “It is obviously a new one.”
“The stone,” said their mother, “came from one of my old earrings — the ones shaped like banners. The diamond hung from the tip of the banner.”
“Upon my word,” growled Nicholas, “I think it is a great shame to have broken them up. Surely you might have found something for Cousin Malahide without doing that.”
“Beautiful, beautiful earrings,” said Ernest. “I always admired them. Only the other day I wondered why you no longer wore them.”
“Such workmanship,” continued Augusta, “is not found nowadays.”
“The day will come,” said Sir Edwin pompously, “when it will again be appreciated. People will seek for just such ornaments.”
Philip murmured: “If I had known that it was a case for diamond tie pins, I’d have toed the scratch myself.”
Adeline turned to him. “Speak up! I can’t hear a word you say. Am I getting deaf, d’ye think?”
Philip raised his voice. “I said I would have taken you myself if —”
“Of course you would! So would you all! You’d have gone with me in a body — carried me there and back — if you’d thought there was anything in it for you! But I didn’t let you know. It was a test, if you like. Malahide had no notion I would make him a present, had you, Mally?”
“I hadn’t a thought in my head,” said Malahide, fingering the pin.
“Sixteen times he went with me to the dental surgeon’s, with no thought of gain in his head.” Adeline vigorously nodded her own in emphasis.
“But I really think, Granny,” put in Meg, “that, as I’m going to be married, I might have been given any jewels you didn’t want.”
“Didn’t want? Didn’t want? Who said I didn’t want? I wanted it very much indeed. That’s why I gave it to Malahide.”
“Just the same,” persisted Philip, “it wasn’t fair to the rest of us.” He began to pull burrs from the tail of his spaniel and conceal them beneath the chair he sat on.
“Look what you’re doing!” fumed Adeline. “It’s disgraceful! If your father were here, he’d give you a piece of his mind.”
“No, he wouldn’t!” returned Philip tranquilly. “Dear old Dad thought everything I did was perfect.”
Renny had come in, just in time to hear this much. He went behind his father’s chair and put a hand on his shoulder. Philip turned up his face to his son’s and they exchanged a look of affectionate intimacy.
VI
The Child
Robert Vaughan, though he was seventy-three, woke with a sense of youthful pleasure in the summer morning. He was an early riser, but he lay still a little while in order to savour his contentment with life. Things were going as he had so long hoped they would, and feared they might not. Maurice, his only child, was an earnest youth, moderately studious, deeply interested in the affairs of the Province. It was certain that he would become a great man in his country, a leader in patriotic Liberalism. He was a trifle arrogant, but that was a natural attribute of his youth and his position. In a few weeks he was to marry Meg Whiteoak, the only young girl of the few neighbouring families which Robert Vaughan considered the social equals of his own.
From the time Maurice and Meg had been children, their parents had hoped for this; the Whiteoaks, on their side, with an acquisitive eye on the thousand acres, bought from the government by the first Vaughan, and the income of ten thousand dollars a year, mostly from good mining stocks, that went with it.
It was the first Vaughan, Robert’s father, a retired Anglo-Indian colonel, who had persuaded Captain Whiteoak to settle on this fertile southern shore of Ontario more than fifty years ago. “Here,” he wrote, “the winters are mild. We have little snow, and in the long fruitful summer the