National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

for all of us. Take a good look at me, because I’m Henry Daniel Oliphant, ladies and gentlemen, the son and heir to Ornaby Addition!”

There was cheering and applause; then the company sat down; the nurse took the little lacy white bundle from the protesting father’s arms; and Henry Daniel Oliphant was borne away amid the customary demonstrations, and carried upstairs to his cradle.

Dan, at the head of the table, held forth in the immemorial manner of young fathers: the baby had laughed his first laugh that very morning;⁠—Dan was sure it was neither an illusion of his own nor a chance configuration of the baby’s features. It was absolutely an actual human laugh, although at first the astounded parent hadn’t been able to believe it, because he’d never heard of any baby’s laughing when it was only a month old. But when Henry Daniel laughed not once, but twice, and moreover went on laughing for certainly as long as thirty-five seconds, the fact was proven and no longer to be doubted. “No, sir, I just had to believe my own eyes when he kept right on laughin’ up at me that way, as if he thought I was a mighty funny lookin’ old thing to be his daddy. My, but it does seem like a miracle to have your son look up at you that way and laugh! I hope he’ll keep doin’ it his whole life long, too. I’m certainly goin’ to do all I can to keep him from ever havin’ anything happen he can’t laugh at!”

He continued, becoming jovially oratorical upon his theme, while down at the other end of the long table, sitting between the baby’s grandfather and grandmother, Lena now and then gave him a half-veiled, quick glance that a chance observer might have defined as inscrutable.

Her pretty black-and-white dress of fluffy chiffon was designed with a more revealing coquetry than the times sanctioned; so that her amiable father-in-law, though not himself conscious of any disapproval, withheld from expression his thought that it was just as well that Mrs. Savage could not be of the company. The ruthless old lady might have supplemented her “lesson” to Lena, although it had produced somewhat pointedly the reverse of its intended effect. The young mother was “painted” more dashingly than the bride had been, and her lips as well as her cheeks were made so vivid that probably her friends in New York would have found her more than ever the French doll⁠—a discontented French doll, they might have said.

Yet, to her credit, if she was discontented, she made an effort not to seem so; she chattered gayly to her mother-in-law and Mr. Oliphant, laughed with them about Dan’s bragging of his offspring, and coquetted demurely with one or two elderly cousins-in-law. A young one, Mr. Frederic Oliphant, seemed genuinely to amuse her, which was what led to misfortune. He found her laughter a sweet fluting in his ears, and, wishing to hear more of it, elaborated the solemn-mannered waggeries that produced it.

“It’s a great thing to be the only father in the world,” he said. “I suppose it’s even greater than being an earl.”

“Why than an earl particularly?” she asked.

“Didn’t you know? At the club and downtown nowadays they speak of your husband as the ‘Earl of Ornaby.’ You may not have noticed it, but he sometimes mentions a place called Ornaby Addition. Now that he’s got another subject though, I suspect his title ought to be changed to ‘Father of the Heir to Ornaby.’ Doesn’t that seem more intriguing, if I may employ the expression?”

“Most intriguing!” she agreed. “But since my husband’s the ‘Earl,’ am I called the ‘Countess of Ornaby’?”

“No; they leave you out of it, and I’m afraid you’ll be left out of it again if the new title’s conferred on him. No one would get an idea from his orations that the Heir to Ornaby has a mother. A father would seem to be Henry Daniel’s sole and total ancestry.” Then, as she laughed again, Fred added his unfortunate afterthought. “No; I forgot. I believe he does include a godmother as a sort of secondary necessity.”

“Does he? We haven’t talked about who’s to be the godmother yet. We haven’t selected one.”

“ ‘We?’ ” Fred repeated, affecting surprise. “You seem to think you have something to do with it! Perhaps when the father of the Heir to Ornaby gets around to it, he may condescend to inform you that the godmother was selected the very night after the heir was born.”

“Was she?” Lena laughed. “Where? At the club?”

“Goodness, no! Don’t you know where Dan went that night?”

“Just to the club, didn’t he?” Lena said cheerfully, a little surprised. “That’s all I heard mentioned about it afterwards, at least.”

“Ah, they cover up these things from you, I see. It’s time somebody warned you of what’s going on.” And Fred was inspired to add: “Haven’t you realized yet there’s an enchantress living right next door to you?”

From the young man’s own point of view, this was foolery altogether harmless: Martha Shelby was almost “one of the family”⁠—so near to being one of them, in fact, that he would not have been at all surprised to find her included in this family party⁠—and the episode of his call upon her, with his cousin, upon the night after the baby’s birth, seemed to him of no other than a jocose significance. Like Dan’s “speech” to Martha, it merely illustrated the harebrained condition of a new-made father, and in that light was handy material for a family dinner-table humorist.

In this capacity, therefore, he blundered on. “Yes, indeed⁠—right next door! Old Dan may look like the steady, plodding homebody sort of husband, but when that type really breaks out it’s the wildest of all.”

Lena gave the farceur a sidelong glance the sobriety of which he failed to perceive; but at once she seemed to fall in with the spirit of his burlesquing, and, assuming a mock solemnity herself, “This is terrible news!” she said.