He almost forgot himself: “See here, Eliza,” he began, “if you were thinking of building somewhere, I”— but he recovered himself in time —“I’ll make you the best price you can get on the material,” he concluded. He thrust a slice of pear quickly into his mouth.
She pursed her mouth rapidly for some moments.
“No,” she said. “I’m not ready for that yet, Will. I’ll let you know.” The loose wood-coals crumbled on the hearth.
“I’ll let you know,” she said again. He clasped his knife and thrust it in a trousers pocket.
“Good night, Eliza,” he said. “I reckon Pett will be in to see you. I’ll tell her you’re all right.”
He went down the stairs quietly, and let himself out through the front door. As he descended the tall veranda steps, Duncan and Jannadeau came quietly down the yard from the sitting-room.
“How’s W. O.?” he asked.
“Ah, he’ll be all right now,” said Duncan cheerfully. “He’s fast asleep.”
“The sleep of the righteous?” asked Will Pentland with a wink.
The Swiss resented the implied jeer at his Titan. “It is a gread bitty,” began Jannadeau in a low guttural voice, “that Mr. Gant drinks. With his mind he could go far. When he’s sober a finer man doesn’t live.”
“When he’s sober?” said Will, winking at him in the dark. “What about when he’s asleep.”
“He’s all right the minute Helen gets hold of him,” Mr. Duncan remarked in his rich voice. “It’s wonderful what that little girl can do to him.”
“Ah, I tell you!” Jannadeau laughed with guttural pleasure. “That little girl knows her daddy in and out.”
The child sat in the big chair by the waning sitting-room fire: she read until the flames had died to coals — then quietly she shovelled ashes on them. Gant, fathoms deep in slumber, lay on the smooth leather sofa against the wall. She had wrapped him well in a blanket; now she put a pillow on a chair and placed his feet on it. He was rank with whisky stench; the window rattled as he snored.
Thus, drowned in oblivion, ran his night; he slept when the great pangs of birth began in Eliza at two o’clock; slept through all the patient pain and care of doctor, nurse, and wife.
4
The baby was, to reverse an epigram, an unconscionable time in getting born; but when Gant finally awoke just after ten o’clock next morning, whimpering from tangled nerves, and the quivering shame of dim remembrance, he heard, as he drank the hot coffee Helen brought to him, a loud, long lungy cry above.
“Oh, my God, my God,” he groaned. And he pointed toward the sound. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
“I haven’t seen it yet, papa,” Helen answered. “They won’t let us in. But Doctor Cardiac came out and told us if we were good he might bring us a little boy.”
There was a terrific clatter on the tin roof, the scolding country voice of the nurse: Steve dropped like a cat from the porch roof to the lily bed outside Gant’s window.
“Steve, you damned scoundrel,” roared the manor-lord with a momentary return to health, “what in the name of Jesus are you doing?”
The boy was gone over the fence.
“I seen it! I seen it!” his voice came streaking back.
“I seen it too!” screamed Grover, racing through the room and out again in simple exultancy.
“If I catch you younguns on this roof agin,” yelled the country nurse aloft, “I’ll take your hide off you.”
Gant had been momentarily cheered when he heard that his latest heir was a male; but he walked the length of the room now, making endless plaint.
“Oh my God, my God! Did this have to be put upon me in my old age? Another mouth to feed! It’s fearful, it’s awful, it’s croo-el,” and he began to weep affectedly. Then, realizing presently that no one was near enough to be touched by his sorrow, he paused suddenly and precipitated himself toward the door, crossing the dining-room, and, going up the hall, making loud lament:
“Eliza! My wife! Oh, baby, say that you forgive me!” He went up the stairs, sobbing laboriously.
“Don’t you let him in here!” cried the object of this prayer sharply with quite remarkable energy.
“Tell him he can’t come in now,” said Cardiac, in his dry voice, to the nurse, staring intently at the scales. “We’ve nothing but milk to drink, anyway,” he added.
Gant was outside.
“Eliza, my wife! Be merciful, I beg of you. If I had known —”
“Yes,” said the country nurse opening the door rudely, “if the dog hadn’t stopped to lift his leg he’d a-caught the rabbit! You get away from here!” And she slammed it violently in his face.
He went downstairs with hang-dog head, but he grinned slyly as he thought of the nurse’s answer. He wet his big thumb quickly on his tongue.
“Merciful God!” he said, and grinned. Then he set up his caged lament.
“I think this will do,” said Cardiac, holding up something red, shiny, and puckered by its heels, and smacking it briskly on its rump, to liven it a bit.
The heir apparent had, as a matter of fact, made his debut completely equipped with all appurtenances, dependences, screws, cocks, faucets, hooks, eyes, nails, considered necessary for completeness of appearance, harmony of parts, and unity of effect in this most energetic, driving, and competitive world. He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age and, what’s more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with these blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with glory.
“Well, what are you going to call it?” inquired Dr. Cardiac, referring thus, with shocking and medical coarseness, to this most royal imp.
Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck’s Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means “well born,” but which, as any one will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, “well bred.”
This chosen incandescence, to whom a name had already been given, and from whose centre most of the events in this chronicle must be seen, was borne in, as we have said, upon the very spear-head of history. But perhaps, reader, you have already thought of that? You HAVEN’T? Then let us refresh your historical memory.
By 1900, Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler had almost finished saying the things they were reported as saying, and that Eugene was destined to hear, twenty years later; most of the Great Victorians had died before the bombardment began; William McKinley was up for a second term, the crew of the Spanish navy had returned home in a tugboat.
Abroad, grim old Britain had sent her ultimatum to the South Africans in 1899; Lord Roberts (“Little Bobs,” as he was known affectionately to his men) was appointed commander-inchief after several British reverses; the Transvaal Republic was annexed to Great Britain in September 1900, and formally annexed in the month of Eugene’s birth. There was a Peace Conference two years later.
Meanwhile, what was going on in Japan? I will tell you: the first parliament met in 1891, there was a war with China in 1894–95, Formosa was ceded in 1895. Moreover, Warren Hastings had been impeached