“Forget it!” said Helen.
“It’s Christmas.
Let’s try to have a little peace and quiet once a year.”
When they had left him, the boy tried to picture them lulled in the dulcet tranquillity they so often invoked.
Its effects, he thought, would be more disastrous than any amount of warfare.
In the darkness, everything around and within him swam hideously.
But presently he slid down into a pit of distressed sleep.
Every one had agreed on a studious forgiveness.
They stepped with obtrusive care around his fault, filled pleasantly with Christmas and mercy.
Ben scowled at him quite naturally, Helen grinned and prodded him, Eliza and Luke surrendered themselves to sweetness, sorrow, and silence.
Their forgiveness made a loud noise in his ears.
During the morning his father asked him to come for a walk.
Gant was embarrassed and hang-dog; a duty of gentle admonishment devolved upon him — he had been counselled to it by Helen and Eliza.
Now, no man in his time could carry on in the big, Bow-wow style better than Gant, but none was less fitted to scatter the blossoms of sweetness and light.
His wrath was sudden, his invective sprang from the moment, but he had for this occasion no thunder-bolts in his quiver, and no relish for the business before him.
He had a feeling of personal guilt; he felt like a magistrate fining for intoxication a culprit with whom he has been on a spree the night before.
Besides — what if the Bacchic strain in him had been passed on to his son?
They walked on in silence across the Square, by the rimmed fountain.
Gant cleared his throat nervously several times.
“Son,” said he presently,
“I hope you’ll take last night as a warning.
It would be a terrible thing if you let whiskey get the best of you.
I’m not going to speak harshly to you about it: I hope you’ll learn a lesson by it.
You had better be dead than become a drunkard.”
There!
He was glad it was over.
“I will!” Eugene said.
He was filled with gratitude and relief.
How good every one was.
He wanted to make passionate avowals, great promises.
He tried to speak.
But he couldn’t.
There was too much to be said.
But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum.
They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, “now, we are like all other families”; but they were timid and shy and stiff, like rustics dressed in evening-clothes.
But they could not keep silence.
They were not ungenerous or mean: they were simply not bred to any restraint.
Helen veered in the wind of hysteria, the strong uncertain tides of her temperament.
At times when, before her own fire, her vitality sank, and she heard the long howl of the wind outside, she almost hated Eugene.
“It’s ridiculous!” she said to Luke.
“His behaving like this.
He’s only a kid — he’s had everything, we’ve had nothing!
You see what it’s come to, don’t you?”
“His college education has ruined him,” said the sailor, not unhappy that his candle might burn more brightly in a naughty world.
“Why don’t you speak to her?” she said irritably.
“She may listen to you — she won’t to me!
Tell her so!
You’ve seen how she’s rubbed it in to poor old papa, haven’t you?
Do you think that old man — sick as he is — is to blame?
‘Gene’s not a Gant, anyway.