Have you no that? — he was cradled in their rhythm.
No, ma’am.
We’ve run out of honor today, but we have a nice fresh lot of self-respect.
“Ah, be quiet,” Ben muttered.
“No one’s dead, you know.”
“Go heat some water,” said Gant professionally, “he’s got to get it off his stomach.”
He no longer seemed old.
His life in a marvellous instant came from its wasting shadow; it took on a hale sinew of health and action.
“Save the fireworks,” said Helen to Luke, as she left the room.
“Close the door.
For heaven’s sake, try to keep it from mama, if you can.”
This is a great moral issue, thought Eugene.
He began to feel sick.
Helen returned in a very few minutes with a kettle of hot water, a glass, and a box of soda.
Gant fed him the solution mercilessly until he began to vomit.
At the summit of his convulsion Eliza appeared.
He lifted his sick head dumbly from the bowl, and saw her white face at the door, and her weak brown eyes, that could take on so much sharpness and sparkle when her suspicion was awakened.
“Hah?
Huh?
What is it?” said Eliza.
But she knew, of course, instantly, what it was.
“What say?” she asked sharply.
No one had said anything.
He grinned feebly at her, tickled, above his nausea and grief, at the palpable assumption of blind innocence which always heralded her discoveries.
Seeing her thus, they all laughed.
“Oh, my Lord!” said Helen.
“Here she is.
We were hoping you wouldn’t get here till it was over.
Come and look at your Baby,” she said, with a good-humored snicker, keeping his head comfortably supported on the palm of her hand.
“How do you feel now, son?” Gant asked kindly.
“Better,” he mumbled, discovering, with some elation, that his vocal paralysis was not permanent.
“Well, you see!” Helen began, kindly enough, but with a brooding satisfaction. “It only goes to show we’re all alike.
We all like it.
It’s in our blood.”
“That awful curse!” Eliza said.
“I had hoped that I might have one son who might escape it.
It seems,” she said, bursting into tears, “as if a Judgment were on us.
The sins of the fathers —”
“Oh! for heaven’s sake!” Helen cried angrily.
“Stop it!
It’s not going to kill him: he’ll learn a lesson from it.”
Gant gnawed his thin lip, and wetted his great thumb in the old manner.
“You might know,” he said, “that I’d get the blame for it.
Yes — if one of them broke a leg it would be the same.”
“There’s one thing sure!” said Eliza.
“None of them ever got it from my side of the house.
Say what you will, his grandfather, Major Pentland, never in his life allowed a drop in his house.”
“Major Pentland be damned!” said Gant.
“If you’d depended on him for anything you’d have gone hungry.”
Certainly, thought Eugene, you’d have gone thirsty.