A moment, too, of grisly fear.
Sixty-four.
“I couldn’t have loved her more,” said Elizabeth, “if she’d been one of my own.
A young girl like that, with all her life before her.”
“It’s pretty sad when you come to think of it,” he said.
“By God, it is.”
“And she was such a fine girl, Mr. Gant,” said Elizabeth, weeping softly.
“She had such a bright future before her.
She had more opportunities than I ever had, and I suppose you know”— she spoke modestly —“what I’ve done.”
“Why,” he exclaimed, startled, “you’re a rich woman, Elizabeth — damned if I don’t believe you are.
You own property all over town.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she answered, “but I’ve got enough to live on without ever doing another lick of work.
I’ve had to work hard all my life.
From now on I don’t intend to turn my hand over.”
She regarded him with a shy pleased smile, and touched a coil of her fine hair with a small competent hand.
He looked at her attentively, noting with pleasure her firm uncorseted hips, moulded compactly into her tailored suit, and her cocked comely legs tapering to graceful feet, shod in neat little slippers of tan.
She was firm, strong, washed, and elegant — a faint scent of lilac hovered over her: he looked at her candid eyes, lucently gray, and saw that she was quite a great lady.
“By God, Elizabeth,” he said, “you’re a fine-looking woman.”
“I’ve had a good life,” she said.
“I’ve taken care of myself.”
They had always known each other — since first they met.
They had no excuses, no questions, no replies.
The world fell away from them.
In the silence they heard the pulsing slap of the fountain, the high laughter of bawdry in the Square.
He took a book of models from the desk, and began to turn its slick pages.
They showed modest blocks of Georgia marble and Vermont granite.
“I don’t want any of those,” she said impatiently.
“I’ve already made up my mind.
I know what I want.”
He looked up surprised.
“What is it?”
“I want the angel out front.”
His face was shocked and unwilling.
He gnawed the corner of his thin lip.
No one knew how fond he was of the angel.
Publicly he called it his White Elephant.
He cursed it and said he had been a fool to order it.
For six years it had stood on the porch, weathering, in all the wind and the rain.
It was now brown and fly-specked.
But it had come from Carrara in Italy, and it held a stone lily delicately in one hand.
The other hand was lifted in benediction, it was poised clumsily upon the ball of one phthisic foot, and its stupid white face wore a smile of soft stone idiocy.
In his rages, Gant sometimes directed vast climaxes of abuse at the angel.
“Fiend out of Hell!” he roared.
“You have impoverished me, you have ruined me, you have cursed my declining years, and now you will crush me to death, fearful, awful, and unnatural monster that you are.”
But sometimes when he was drunk he fell weeping on his knees before it, called it Cynthia, and entreated its love, forgiveness, and blessing for its sinful but repentant boy.
There was laughter from the Square.
“What’s the matter?” said Elizabeth.
“Don’t you want to sell it?”
“It will cost you a good deal, Elizabeth,” he said evasively.
“I don’t care,” she answered, positively.