“There are some pears in there on the shelf, Will.
I put them there last week to mellow.”
He went into the big closet and returned in a moment with a large yellow pear; he came back to the hearth and opened the smaller blade of his knife.
“I’ll vow, Will,” she said quietly after a moment.
“I’ve had all I can put up with.
I don’t know what’s got into him.
But you can bet your bottom dollar I won’t stand much more of it.
I know how to shift for myself,” she said, nodding her head smartly.
He recognized the tone.
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.