You could get rid of her if you wanted to.
Poor old ‘Gene!” she said, beginning to laugh again.
“You always catch it, don’t you?”
“The time draws near the birth of Christ,” said he, piously.
She laughed; then, with abstracted eyes, plucked vaguely at her large chin.
His father spent most of the day staring vacantly into the parlor fire.
Miss Florry Mangle, the nurse, gave him the morbid comfort of her silence: she rocked incessantly before the fire, thirty heel-taps to the minute, with arms tight-folded on her limp breasts.
Occasionally she talked of death and disease.
Gant had aged and wasted shockingly.
His heavy clothes wound round his feeble shanks: his face was waxen and transparent — it was like a great beak.
He looked clean and fragile.
The cancer, Eugene thought, flowered in him like some terrible but beautiful plant.
His mind was very clear, not doting, but sad and old.
He spoke little, with almost comical gentleness, but he ceased to listen almost as soon as one answered.
“How have you been, son?” he asked.
“Are you getting along all right?”
“Yes.
I am a reporter on the paper now; I may be managing editor next year.
I have been elected to several organizations,” he went on eagerly, glad of the rare chance to speak to one of them about his life.
But when he looked up again, his father’s stare was fixed sadly in the fire.
The boy stopped in confusion, pierced with a bitter pain.
“That’s good,” said Gant, hearing him speak no more.
“Be a good boy, son.
We’re proud of you.”
Ben came home two days before Christmas: he prowled through the house like a familiar ghost.
He had left the town early in the autumn, after his return from Baltimore.
For three months he had wandered alone through the South, selling to the merchants in small towns space for advertisements upon laundry cards.
How well this curious business succeeded he did not say: he was scrupulously neat, but threadbare and haggard, and more fiercely secretive than ever.
He had found employment at length upon a newspaper in a rich tobacco town of the Piedmont.
He was going there after Christmas.
He had come to them, as always, bearing gifts.
Luke came in from the naval school at Newport, on Christmas eve.
They heard his sonorous tenor shouting greetings to people in the street; he entered the house upon a blast of air.
Everyone began to grin.
“Well, here we are!
The Admiral’s back!
Papa, how’s the boy!
Well, for God’s sake!” he cried, embracing Gant, and slapping his back.
“I thought I was coming to see a sick man! You’re looking like the flowers that bloom in the Spring.”
“Pretty well, my boy.
How are you?” said Gant, with a pleased grin.
“Couldn’t be better, Colonel
‘Gene, how are you, Old Scout?
Good!” he said, without waiting for an answer.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Old Baldy,” he cried, pumping Ben’s hand.
“I didn’t know whether you’d be here or not.
Mama, old girl,” he said, as he embraced her, “how’re they going?
Still hitting on all six.
Fine!” he yelled, before any one could reply to anything.
“Why, son — what on earth!” cried Eliza, stepping back to look at him.