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

“It is troubling me,” he admitted despondently. “I just couldn’t go over there and tell her⁠—”

“No,” Mrs. Oliphant said. “And Martha’d never let you.”

“You mean you’d tell her⁠—”

“No. Nobody’ll say a word to her about it. Don’t you know Martha well enough yet to understand that she won’t expect to be Henry’s godmother?”

“But she must.”

“No. If she did, she’d have spoken of it to me.”

“That does look like it a little,” he said with some relief; then frowned again. “But I want her to be the godmother; and she ought to be. Lena hasn’t any great friend of her own that she wants for it; and Martha’s the best friend I ever⁠—”

“No, no,” his mother interrupted hurriedly. “It wouldn’t do, Dan.”

“But why?”

“Well⁠—” she hesitated, sighed, and went on: “We all love Martha⁠—except Lena. I’m afraid that’s reason enough. You must give it up.”

“I’m afraid so,” he agreed gloomily. “Oh, lordy!”

“Now, now! Martha knows you wanted her, and that’s all she’ll care about. She⁠—” Mrs. Oliphant paused with the bothered air of one who fears to elaborate an indiscretion already committed. Then she continued nervously: “There was something else I wanted to speak to you about. Your father and I⁠—we’ve been a little afraid⁠—” She hesitated again.

“Afraid of what, mother?”

“Well, we were talking over this long struggle of yours to make a success of the Addition, Dan; and of course we’ve seen how hard you’ve been pressed from the very first, and yet you’ve always kept the thing a little alive and held on to it when time after time everybody said you’d just have to let go.”

“Yes, mother?”

“Well, it seems your father heard downtown today that this time you’d⁠—you’d⁠—”

“This time I’d what, mother?”

She put her arms about him and, in spite of her resolution, the compassion she felt for him was evident in her voice and in her eyes. “Oh, Dan, if this time you can’t hold on to it any longer, you mustn’t feel too badly, please!”

He had bent over her as she embraced him; but now he threw back his shoulders and laughed. “So that’s what father heard today,” he said. “You tell him he was listening to the wrong crowd, mother!” He moved her gently toward the door, his arm about her. “You go to bed, and so will I.” He laughed again, not grimly or bitterly, but with deep and hearty mirth. “Why, there isn’t any more chance of my not keepin’ hold of Ornaby than there is of this house fallin’ off the earth onto the moon! They can’t foreclose on me for anyhow two weeks more, and by that time I’ll show ’em what’s what! I sold a lot only last month, and there’ve been three more men out there already to look at locations. Two weeks is plenty of time for things to happen, mother. Don’t you worry.”

He kissed her good night, and as she smiled back at him from the hall and told him she wouldn’t worry if he’d get some sleep, he went on: “Why, they haven’t any more chance to get Ornaby away from me than they have to⁠—than they have to”⁠—he paused, searching for a sufficient comparison, and, finding it, finished with cheery explosiveness⁠—“than they have to get Henry Daniel Oliphant himself away from me!”

Upon this she went to her own door down the hall, where she nodded and whispered back to him a smiling good night, and disappeared, glad to see him so abundantly recovered from his brief depression. “Somehow I believe he will manage to keep on going, even this time,” she told her husband. “He’s so sure failure’s an absolute impossibility that I do think maybe⁠—”

“No, I don’t see even a ‘maybe’ in it for him,” Mr. Oliphant said, and shook his head. “Not this time, I’m afraid.”

But the Earl of Ornaby was in the field by sunrise the next morning, and armoured in convictions so strong that he began the day with plans, not for the retention of the threatened domain, but for an extension of it; he went to see a farmer who owned sixty acres north of Ornaby and got an option on them before keeping his appointment with a contractor to select a site for the airily projected automobile factory.

Not until the afternoon did he go downtown to see about raising a little money on a note to fend off the impending foreclosure; and he was still undiscouraged when he came home that evening without having succeeded. There were thirteen long days left, he told his mother, in the hall near the front door, where she met him when he came in; and she responded sunnily that thirteen was a lucky number, then gave him a note of a kind different from the one he had spent the afternoon trying to negotiate.

“You see I was right,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you she’d understand? Their housemaid brought it in this morning after breakfast.”

Martha had written to Mrs. Oliphant:

We’re in such a rush of packing I won’t have time to come in and say goodbye, as I’d like to. Papa has to go to New York, and I’ve decided I ought to go with him, because there are so many automobiles there now, and he hasn’t learned that they’re getting even worse than the bicycle “speeders” about running over people.

We’ll be there two or three weeks and I’ve almost persuaded him to let me show him Quebec and the Saguenay⁠—and he says he might be willing to take the boat from Montreal for a little run to England after that!

Please give my love to Mr. Oliphant and Harlan for me, and of course to Dan, whom I haven’t seen since his great evening after the baby was born. He was so funny and delightful, and he talked with such really true wisdom, too! I wanted to remember everything he said, but the trouble was that he talked so fast and said so much that the next day I