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

in her mind. Don’t you think so?” he inquired. And Roger glanced affectionately into the anxious face by his side.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s a mighty good point. Did you think of it?”

“Yes, sir,” George replied. “I’ve told it to her a good many times⁠—that and two other points I thought of.”

“What are they, son?” asked Roger.

“First,” the boy said awkwardly, “about how good she was to him. And second, that she let him buy the new car before he died. He had such a lot of fun out of that car⁠—”

On the last words the lad’s changing voice went from an impressive bass to a most undignified treble. He savagely scowled.

“Those three points,” he continued, in more careful measured tones, “were about all I could think of. I had to use ’em over and over⁠—on mother when things got bad, I mean.” A flush of embarrassment came on his face. “And hold her and kiss her,” he muttered. Then he whipped his horses. “We’ve had some pretty bad times this month,” he continued, loud and manfully. “You see, mother isn’t so young as she was. She’s well on in her thirties.” A glimmer of amusement appeared in Roger’s heavy eyes. “But she don’t cry often any more, and with you here we’ll pull her through.” He shot a quick look at his grandfather. “Gee, but I’m glad you’re here!” he said.

“So am I,” said Roger. And with a little pressure of his hand on George’s shoulder, “I guess you’ve had about your share. Now tell me the news. How are things on the farm?”

With a breath of evident relief, the lad launched into the animal world. And soon he was talking eagerly.

In the next few days with his daughter Roger found that George was right. She had been through the worst of it. But she still had her reactions, her spells of emptiness, bleak despair, her moods of fierce rebellion or of sudden self-reproach for not having given Bruce more while he lived. And in such hours her father tried to comfort her with poor success.

“Remember, child, I’m with you, and I know how it feels,” he said. “I went through it all myself: When your mother died⁠—”

“But mother was so much older!” He looked at his daughter compassionately.

“How old are you?” he inquired.

“Thirty-six.”

“Your mother was thirty-nine,” he replied. And at that Edith turned and stared at him, bewildered, shocked, brought face to face with a new and momentous fact in her life.

“Mother only my age when she died?”

“Yes,” said Roger gently, “only three years older.” With a twinge of pain he noticed two quite visible streaks of gray in his daughter’s soft blonde hair. “And she felt as you do now⁠—as though she were just starting out. And I felt the same way, my dear. If I’m not mistaken, everyone does. You still feel young⁠—but the new generation is already growing up⁠—and you can feel yourself being pushed on. And it is hard⁠—it is very hard.” Clumsily he took her hand. “Don’t let yourself drop out,” he said. “Be as your mother would have been if she had been left instead of me. Go straight on with your children.”

To this note he could feel her respond. And at first, as he felt what a fight she was making, Roger glorified her pluck. As he watched her with her children at table, smiling at their talk with an evident effort to enter in, and again with her baby snug in her lap while she read bedtime stories to Bob and little Tad at her side, he kept noticing the resemblance between his daughter and his wife. How close were these two members of his family drawing together now, one of them living, the other dead.

But later, as the weeks wore on, she began to plan for her children. She planned precisely how to fit them all into the house in town, she planned the hours for their meals, for their going alone or with the nurse or a maid to their different private schools, to music lessons, to dancing school and uptown to the park to play. She planned their fall clothes and she planned their friends. And there came to her father occasional moods of anxiety. He remembered Bruce’s grim remarks about those “simple” schools and clothes, the kind that always cost the most. And he began to realize what Bruce’s existence must have been. For scarcely ever in their talks did Edith speak of anything outside of her family. Night after night, with a tensity born of her struggle with her grief, she talked about her children. And Roger was in Bruce’s place, he was the one she planned with. At moments with a vague dismay he glimpsed the life ahead in his home.

George was hard at work each day down by the broken dam at the mill. He had an idea he could patch it up, put the old waterwheel back into place and make it run a dynamo, by which he could light the house and barn and run the machines in the dairy. In his new role as the man of his family, George was planning out his career. He was wrestling with a book entitled “Our New Mother Earth” and a journal called “The Modern Farm.” And to Roger he confided that he meant to be a farmer. He wanted to go in the autumn to the State Agricultural College. But when one day, very cautiously, Roger spoke to Edith of this, with a hard and jealous smile which quite transformed her features, she said,

“Oh, I know all about that, father dear. It’s just a stage he’s going through. And it’s the same way with Elizabeth, too, and her crazy idea of becoming a doctor. She took that from Allan Baird, and George took his from Deborah! They’ll get over it soon enough⁠—”

“They won’t get over it!” Roger cried. “Their dreams are parts of something new! Something I’m quite vague about⁠—but some of it