His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

life here dull and lonely. Where was she tonight, he wondered. Couldn’t she quit her zoo school for one single afternoon? At last, when the room had grown pitch dark, he heard the maid lighting the gas in the hall. Roger loudly cleared his throat, and at the sound the startled girl ejaculated, “Oh, my Gawd!”

“It’s I,” said Roger sternly. “Did Miss Deborah say when she’d be back?”

“She didn’t go out, sir. She’s up in her room.”

Roger went up and found her there. All afternoon with both the maids she had been setting the house to rights, and now she ached in every limb. She was lying on her bed, and she looked as though she had been crying.

“Where have you been?” she inquired.

“At Edith’s,” her father answered. She reached up and took his hand, and held it slowly tighter.

“You aren’t going to find it too lonely here, with Laura gone?” she asked him. And the wistfulness in her deep sweet voice made something thrill in Roger.

“Why should I?” he retorted. Deborah gave a queer little laugh.

“Oh, I’m just silly, that’s all,” she said. “I’ve been having a fit of blues. I’ve been feeling so old this afternoon⁠—a regular old woman. I wanted you, dearie, and I was afraid that you⁠—” she broke off.

“Look here,” said Roger sharply. “Do you really want to keep this house?”

“Keep this house? Why, father!”

“You think you can stand it here alone, just the two of us?” he demanded.

“I can,” cried Deborah happily. Her father walked to the window. There as he looked blindly out, his eyes were assaulted by the lights of all those titty-tatty flats. And a look of vicious triumph appeared for a moment on his face.

“Very well,” he said quietly, turning back. “Then we’re both suited.” He went to the door. “I’ll go and wash up for supper,” he said.

VIII

It was a relief to him to find how smoothly he and Deborah dropped back into their old relations. It was good to get home those evenings; for in this new stage of its existence, with its family of two, the house appeared to have filled itself with a deep reposeful feeling. Laura had gone out of its life. He glanced into her room one night, and it looked like a guest room now. The sight of it brought him a pang of regret. But the big ship which was bearing her swiftly away to “Paris in June” seemed bearing off Roger’s uneasiness too. He could smile at his former fears, for Laura was safely married and wildly in love with her husband. Time, he thought, would take care of the rest. Occasionally he missed her here⁠—her voice, high-pitched but musical, chatting and laughing at the phone, her bustle of dressing to go out, glimpses of her extravagances, of her smart suits and evening gowns, of all the joyous color and dash that she had given to his home. But these regrets soon died away. The old house shed them easily, as though glad to enter this long rest.

For the story of his family, from Roger’s point of view at least, was a long uneven narrative, with prolonged periods of peace and again with events piling one on the other. And now there came one of those peaceful times, and Roger liked the quiet. The old routine was reestablished⁠—his dinner, his paper, his cigar and then his book for the evening, some good old-fashioned novel or some pleasant book of travel which he and Judith had read aloud when they were planning out their lives. They had meant to go abroad so often when the children had grown up. And he liked to read about it still. Life was so quiet over the sea, things were so old and mellow there. He resumed, too, his horseback rides, and on the way home he would stop in for a visit with Edith and her baby. The wee boy grew funnier every day, with his sudden kicks and sneezes, his waving fists and mighty yawns. And Roger felt drawn to his daughter here, for in these grateful seasons of rest that followed the birth of each of her children, Edith loved to lie very still and make new plans for her small brood.

Only once she spoke of Laura, and then it was to suggest to him that he gather together all the bills his daughter had doubtless left behind.

“If you don’t settle them,” Edith said, “they’ll go to her husband. And you wouldn’t like that, would you?”

Roger said he would see to it, and one evening after dinner he started in on Laura’s bills. It was rather an appalling time. He looked into his bank account and found that Laura’s wedding would take about all his surplus. But this did not dismay him much, for money matters never did. It simply meant more work in the office.

The next day he rose early and was in his office by nine o’clock. He had not been so prompt in months, and many of his employees came in late that morning. But nobody seemed very much perturbed, for Roger was an easy employer. Still, he sternly told himself, he had been letting things get altogether too slack. He had been neglecting his business again. The work had become so cut and dried, there was nothing creative left to do. It had not been so in years gone by. Those years had fairly bristled with ideas and hopes and schemes. But even those old memories were no longer here to hearten him. They had all been swept away when Bruce had made him move out of his office in a dark creaky edifice down close under Brooklyn Bridge, and come up to this new building, this steel-ribbed caravansary for all kinds of business ventures, this place of varnished woodwork, floods of daylight, concrete floors, this building fireproof throughout. That expressed it exactly, Roger thought. Nothing could take fire here, not even a