"Getting to be an old, old man!" he said wearily, and Margaret hated herself because she had to quell an impatient impulse to tell him he was merely tired and cross and hungry, before she could say, in the proper soothing tone, "Don"t talk that way, Dad darling!" She had to listen to a long account of the "raise," wincing every time her father emphasized the difference between her own position and that of her employer. Dad was at least the equal of any one in Weston! Why, a man Dad"s age oughtn"t to be humbly asking a raise, he ought to be dictating now. It was just Dad"s way of looking at things, and it was all wrong.
"Well, I"ll tell you one thing!" said Rebecca, who had come in with a br.i.m.m.i.n.g soup plate of milk toast, "Joe Redman gave a picnic last month, and he came here with his mother, in the car, to ask me. And I was the scornfullest thing you ever saw, wasn"t I, Ted? Not much!"
"Oh, Beck, you oughtn"t to mix social and business things that way!"
Margaret said helplessly.
"Dinner!" screamed the nine-year-old Robert, breaking into the room at this point, and "Dinner!" said Mrs. Paget, wearily, cheerfully, from the chair into which she had dropped at the head of the table. Mr.
Paget, revived by sympathy, milk toast, and Rebecca"s attentions, took his place at the foot, and Bruce the chair between Margaret and his mother. Like the younger boys, whose almost confluent freckles had been brought into unusual prominence by violently applied soap and water, and whose hair dripped on their collars, he had brushed up for dinner, but his negligee shirt and corduroy trousers were stained and spotted from machine oil. Margaret, comparing him secretly to the men she knew, as daintily groomed as women, in their spotless white, felt a little resentment that Bruce"s tired face was so contented, and said to herself again that it was all wrong.
Dinner was the same old haphazard meal with which she was so familiar; Blanche supplying an occasional reproof to the boys, Ted ignoring his vegetables, and ready in an incredibly short time for a second cutlet, and Robert begging for corn syrup, immediately after the soup, and spilling it from his bread. Mrs. Paget was flushed, her disappearances kitchenward frequent. She wanted Margaret to tell her all about Mr.
Tenison. Margaret laughed, and said there was nothing to tell.
"You might get a horse and buggy from Peterson"s," suggested Mrs.
Paget, interestedly, "and drive about after dinner."
"Oh, Mother, I don"t think I had better let him come!" Margaret said.
"There"s so many of us, and such confusion, on Sunday! Ju and Harry are almost sure to come over."
"Yes, I guess they will," Mrs. Paget said, with her sudden radiant smile. "Ju is so dear in her little house, and Harry"s so sweet with her," she went on with vivacity. "Daddy and I had dinner with them Tuesday. Bruce said Rebecca was lovely with the boys,--we"re going to Julie"s again sometime. I declare it"s so long since we"ve been anywhere without the children that we both felt funny. It was a lovely evening."
"You"re too much tied, Mother," Margaret said affectionately.
"Not now!" her mother protested radiantly. "With all my babies turning into men and women so fast. And I"ll have you all together to-morrow--and your friend I hope, too, Mark," she added hospitably. "You had better let him come, dear. There"s a big dinner, and I always freeze more cream than we need, anyway, because Daddy likes a plate of it about four o"clock, if there"s any left."
"Well--but there"s nothing to do," Margaret protested.
"No, but dinner takes quite a while," Mrs. Paget suggested a little doubtfully; "and we could have a nice talk on the porch, and then you could go driving or walking. I wish there was something cool and pleasant to do, Mark," she finished a little wistfully. "You do just as you think best about asking him to come."
"I think I"ll wire him that another time would be better," said Margaret, slowly. "Sometime we"ll regularly arrange for it."
"Well, perhaps that would be best," her mother agreed. "Some other time we"ll send the boys off before dinner, and have things all nice and quiet. In October, say, when the trees are so pretty. I don"t know but what that"s my favorite time of all the year!"
Margaret looked at her as if she found something new in the tired, bright face. She could not understand why her mother--still too heated to commence eating her dinner--should radiate so definite an atmosphere of content, as she sat back a little breathless, after the flurry of serving. She herself felt injured and sore, not at the mere disappointment it caused her to put off John Tendon"s visit, but because she felt more acutely than ever to-night the difference between his position and her own.
"Something nice has happened, Mother?" she hazarded, entering with an effort into the older woman"s mood.
"Nothing special." Her mother"s happy eyes ranged about the circle of young faces. "But it"s so lovely to have you here, and to have Ju coming to-morrow," she said. "I just wish Daddy could build a house for each one of you, as you marry and settle down, right around our house in a circle, as they say people do sometimes in the Old World. I think then I"d have nothing in life to wish for!"
"Oh, Mother--in Weston!" Margaret said hopelessly, but her mother did not catch it.
"Not, Mark," she went on hastily and earnestly, "that I"m not more than grateful to G.o.d for all His goodness, as it is! I look at other women, and I wonder, I wonder--what I have done to be so blessed!
Mark--" her face suddenly glowed, she leaned a little toward her daughter, "dearie, I must tell you," she said; "it"s about Ju--"
Their eyes met in the pause.
"Mother--really?" Margaret said slowly.
"She told me on Tuesday,." Mrs. Paget said, with glistening eyes.
"Now, not a word to any one, Mark,--but she"ll want you to know!"
"And is she glad?" Margaret said, unable to rejoice.
"Glad?" Mrs. Paget echoed, her face gladness itself.
"Well, Ju"s so young,--just twenty-one," Margaret submitted a little uncertainly; "and she"s been so free,--and they"re just in the new house! And I thought they were going to Europe!"
"Oh, Europe!" Mrs. Paget dismissed it cheerfully. "Why, it"s the happiest time in a woman"s life, Mark! Or I don"t know, though," she went on thoughtfully,--"I don"t know but what I was happiest when you were all tiny, tumbling about me, and climbing into my lap.... Why, you love children, dear," she finished, with a shade of reproach in her voice, as Margaret still looked sober.
"Yes, I know, Mother," Margaret said. "But Julie"s only got the one maid, and I don"t suppose they can have another. I hope to goodness Ju won"t get herself all run down!"
Her mother laughed. "You remind me of Grandma Paget," said she, cheerfully; "she lived ten miles away when we were married, but she came in when Bruce was born. She was rather a proud, cold woman herself, but she was very sweet to me. Well, then little Charlie came, fourteen months later, and she took that very seriously. Mother was dead, you know, and she stayed with me again, and worried me half sick telling me that it wasn"t fair to Bruce and it wasn"t fair to Charlie to divide my time between them that way. Well, then when my third baby was coming, I didn"t dare tell her. Dad kept telling me to, and I couldn"t, because I knew what a calamity a third would seem to her!
Finally she went to visit Aunt Rebecca out West, and it was the very day she got back that the baby came. She came upstairs--she"d come right up from the train, and not seen any one but Dad; and he wasn"t very intelligible, I guess--and she sat down and took the baby in her arms, and says she, looking at me sort of patiently, yet as if she was exasperated too: "Well, this is a nice way to do, the minute my back"s turned! What are you going to call him, Julia?" And I said, "I"m going to call her Margaret, for my dear husband"s mother, and she"s going to be beautiful and good, and grow up to marry the President!"" Mrs. Paget"s merry laugh rang out. "I never shall forget your grandmother"s face."
"Just the same," Mrs. Paget added, with a sudden deep sigh, "when little Charlie left us, the next year, and Brucie and Dad were both so ill, she and I agreed that you--you were just talking and trying to walk--were the only comfort we had! I could wish my girls no greater happiness than my children have been to me," finished Mother, contentedly.
"I know," Margaret began, half angrily; "but what about the children?"
she was going to add. But somehow the arguments she had used so plausibly did not utter themselves easily to Mother, whose children would carry into their own middle age a wholesome dread of her anger.
Margaret faltered, and merely scowled.
"I don"t like to see that expression on your face, dearie," her mother said, as she might have said it to an eight-year-old child. "Be my sweet girl! Why, marriage isn"t marriage without children, Mark. I"ve been thinking all week of having a baby in my arms again,--it"s so long since Rob was a baby."
Margaret devoted herself, with a rather sullen face, to her dessert.
Mother would never feel as she did about these things, and what was the use of arguing? In the silence she heard her father speak loudly and suddenly.
"I am not in a position to have my children squander money on concerts and candy," he said. Margaret forgot her own grievance, and looked up.
The boys looked resentful and gloomy; Rebecca was flushed, her eyes dropped, her lips trembling with disappointment.
"I had promised to take them to the Elks Concert and dance," Mrs.
Paget interpreted hastily. "But now Dad says the Bakers are coming over to play whist."
"Is it going to be a good show, Ted?" Margaret asked.
"Oh," Rebecca flashed into instant glowing response. "It"s going to be a dandy! Every one"s going to be there! Ford Patterson is going to do a monologue,--he"s as good as a professional!--and George is going to send up a bunch of carrots and parsnips! And the Weston Male Quartette, Mark, and a playlet by the Hunt"s Crossing Amateur Theatrical Society!"
"Oh--oh!"--Margaret mimicked the eager rush of words. "Let me take them, Dad," she pleaded, "if it"s going to be as fine as all that!
I"ll stand treat for the crowd."
"Oh, Mark, you darling!" burst from the rapturous Rebecca.
"Say, gee, we"ve got to get there early!" Theodore warned them, finishing his pudding with one mammoth spoonful.
"If you take them, my dear," Mr. Paget said graciously, "of course Mother and I are quite satisfied."
"I"ll hold Robert by one ear and Rebecca by another," Margaret promised; "and if she so much as dares to look at George or Ted or Jimmy Barr or Paul, I"ll--"
"Oh, Jimmy belongs to Louise, now," said Rebecca, radiantly. There was a joyous shout of laughter from the light-hearted juniors, and Rebecca, seeing her artless admission too late, turned scarlet while she laughed. Dinner broke up in confusion, as dinner at home always did, and everybody straggled upstairs to dress.
Margaret, changing her dress in a room that was insufferably hot, because the shades must be down, and the gas-lights as high as possible, reflected that another forty-eight hours would see her speeding back to the world of cool, awninged interiors, uniformed maids, the clink of iced gla.s.ses, the flash of white sails on blue water. She could surely afford for that time to be patient and sweet.