“She’s — she’s — saved his life — time after time,” said Barton slowly, flicking his cigar ash carefully away, and looking down deeply, searching for a word.
“He’d — he’d — have been a dead man long ago — if it hadn’t been for her.”
“Yeah — I know she has,” George Pentland drawled agreeably. “I know you’ve sure stuck by Uncle Will — I guess he knows it, too.”
“It’s not that I mind it, George — you know what I mean?” she said eagerly. “Good heavens! I believe I could give away a dozen lives if I thought it was going to save his life! . . . But it’s the STRAIN of it. . . . Month after month . . . year after year . . . lying awake at night wondering if he’s all right over there in that back room in Mama’s house — wondering if he’s keeping warm in that old cold house —”
“Why, no, child,” the older woman said hastily. “I kept a good fire burnin’ in that room all last winter — that was the warmest room in the whole place — there wasn’t a warmer —”
But immediately she was engulfed, swept aside, obliterated in the flood-tide of the other’s speech.
“— Wondering if he’s sick or needs me — if he’s begun to bleed again — oh! George, it makes me sick to think about it — that poor old man left there all alone, rotting away with that awful cancer, with that horrible smell about him all the time — everything he wears gets simply STIFF with that rotten corrupt matter — Do you know what it is to wait, wait, wait, year after year, and year after year, never knowing when he’s going to die, to have him hang on by a thread until it seems you’ve lived forever — that there’ll never be an end — that you’ll never have a chance to live your own life — to have a moment’s peace or rest or happiness yourself? My God, does it always have to be this way? . . . Can I never have a moment’s happiness? . . . Must they ALWAYS come to me? Does EVERYTHING have to be put on my shoulders? . . . Will you tell me that?” Her voice had risen to a note of frenzied despair. She was glaring at her cousin with a look of desperate and frantic entreaty, her whole gaunt figure tense and strained with the stress of her hysteria.
“That’s — that’s the trouble now,” said Barton, looking down and searching for the word. “She’s . . . She’s . . . made the goat for every one. . . . She . . . she has to do it all. . . . That’s . . . that’s the thing that’s got her down.”
“Not that I mind — if it will do any good. . . . Good heaven’s, Papa’s life means more to me than anything on earth. . . . I’d keep him alive at any cost as long as there was a breath left in him. . . . But it’s the strain of it, the STRAIN of it — to wait, to wait year after year, to feel it hanging over you all the time, never to know when he will die — always the STRAIN, the strain — do you see what I mean, George?” she said hoarsely, eagerly, and pleadingly. “You see, don’t you?”
“I sure do, Helen,” he said sympathetically, digging at his thigh, and with a swift, cat-like grimace of his features. “I know it’s been mighty tough on you. . . . How is Uncle Will now?” he said. “Is he any better?”
“Why, yes,” the mother was saying, “he seemed to improve —” but she was cut off immediately.
“Oh, yes,” the daughter said in a tone of weary dejection. “He pulled out of this last spell and got well enough to make the trip to Baltimore — we sent him back a week ago to take another course of treatments. . . . But it does no real good, George. . . . They can’t cure him. . . . We know that now. . . . They’ve told us that. . . . It only prolongs the agony. . . . They help him for a little while and then it all begins again. . . . Poor old man!” she said, and her eyes were wet. “I’d give everything I have — my own blood, my own life — if it would do him any good — but, George, he’s gone!” she said desperately. “Can’t you understand that? . . . They can’t save him! . . . Nothing can save him! . . . Papa’s a dead man now!”
George looked gravely sympathetic for a moment, winced swiftly, dug hard fingers in his thigh, and then said:
“Who went to Baltimore with him?”
“Why, Luke’s up there,” the mother said. “We had a letter from him yesterday — said Mr. Gant looks much better already — eats well, you know, has a good appetite — and Luke says he’s in good spirits. Now —”
“Oh, Mama, for heaven’s sake!” the daughter cried. “What’s the use of talking that way? . . . He’s not getting any better. . . . Papa’s a sick man — dying — good God! Can no one ever get that into their heads!” she burst out furiously. “Am I the only one that realizes how sick he is?”
“No, now I was only sayin’,” the mother began hastily —“Well, as I say, then,” she went on, “Luke’s up there with him — and Gene’s on his way there now — he’s goin’ to stop off there tomorrow on his way up north to school.”
“Gene!” cried George Pentland in a high, hearty, bantering tone, turning to address the boy directly for the first time. “What’s all this I hear about you, son?” He clasped his muscular hand around the boy’s arm in a friendly but powerful grip. “Ain’t one college enough for you, boy?” he drawled, becoming deliberately ungrammatical and speaking good-naturedly but with a trace of the mockery which the wastrel and ne’er-do-well sometimes feels towards people who have had the energy and application required for steady or concentrated effort. “Are you one of those fellers who needs two or three colleges to hold him down?”
The boy flushed, grinned uncertainly, and said nothing.
“Why, son,” drawled George in his hearty, friendly and yet bantering tone, in which a note of malice was evident, “you’ll be gettin’ so educated an’ high-brow here before long that you won’t be able to talk to the rest of us at all. . . . You’ll be floatin’ around there so far up in the clouds that you won’t even see a roughneck like me, much less talk to him”— As he went on with this kind of sarcasm, his speech had become almost deliberately illiterate, as if trying to emphasize the superior virtue of the rough, hearty, home-grown fellow in comparison with the bookish scholar.
“— Where’s he goin’ to this time, Aunt Eliza?” he said, turning to her questioningly, but still holding the boy’s arm in his strong grip “Where’s he headin’ for now?”
“Why,” she said, stroking her pursed serious mouth with a slightly puzzled movement, “he says he’s goin’ to Harvard. I reckon,” she said, in the same puzzled tone, “it’s all right — I guess he knows what he’s about. Says he’s made up his mind to go — I told him,” she said, and shook her head again, “that I’d send him for a year if he wanted to try it — an’ then he’ll have to get out an’ shift for himself. We’ll see,” she said. “I reckon it’s all right.”
“Harvard, eh?” said George Pentland. “Boy, you ARE flyin’ high! . . . What you goin’ to do up there?”
The boy, furiously red of face, squirmed, and finally stammered:
“Why . . . I . . . guess . . . I guess I’ll do some studying!”
“You GUESS you will!” roared George. “You’d damn well BETTER do some studying — I bet your mother’ll take it out of your hide if she finds you loafin’ on her money.”
“Why, yes,” the mother said, nodding seriously, “I told him it was up to him to make the most of this —”
“Harvard, eh!” George Pentland said again, slowly looking his cousin over from head to foot. “Son, you’re flyin’ high, you are! . . . Now don’t fly so high you never get back to earth again! . . . You know the rest of us who