第45章

Amy was nice to all men, and to Amy all men were nice. Could she have married a dozen, she might have settled down, with only occasional regrets concerning those left without in the cold. But to ask her to select only one out of so many "poor dears" was to suggest shameful waste of affection.

We had meant to keep our grim secret to ourselves; but to hide one's troubles long from Amy was like keeping cold hands from the fire.

Very soon she knew everything that was to be known, drawing it all from my mother as from some overburdened child. Then she put my mother down into a chair and stood over her.

"Now you leave the house and everything connected with it to me, mum," commanded Amy; "you've got something else to do."

And from that day we were in the hands of Amy, and had nothing else to do but praise the Lord for His goodness.

Barbara also found out (from Washburn, I expect), though she said nothing, but came often. Old Hasluck would have come himself, I am sure, had he thought he would be welcome. As it was, he always sent kind messages and presents of fruit and flowers by Barbara, and always welcomed me most heartily whenever she allowed me to see her home.

She brought, as ever, sunshine with her, making all trouble seem far off and shadowy. My mother tended to the fire of love, but Barbara lit the cheerful lamp of laughter.

And with the lessening days my father seemed to grow younger, life lying lighter on him.

One summer's night he and I were walking with Barbara to Poplar station, for sometimes, when he was not looking tired, she would order him to fetch his hat and stick, explaining to him with a caress, "I like them tall and slight and full grown. The young ones, they don't know how to flirt! We will take the boy with us as gooseberry;" and he, pretending to be anxious that my mother did not see, would kiss her hand, and slip out quietly with her arm linked under his. It was admirable the way he would enter into the spirit of the thing.

The last cloud faded from before the moon as we turned the corner, and even the East India Dock Road lay restful in front of us.

"I have always regarded myself," said my father, "as a failure in life, and it has troubled me." I felt him pulled the slightest little bit away from me, as though Barbara, who held his other arm, had drawn him towards her with a swift pressure. "But do you know the idea that has come to me within the last few months? That on the whole I have been successful. I am like a man," continued my father, "who in some deep wood has been frightened, thinking he has lost his way, and suddenly coming to the end of it, finds that by some lucky chance he has been guided to the right point after all. I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to me.

"What is the right point?" asked Barbara.

"Ah, that I cannot tell you," answered my father, with a laugh. "I only know that for me it is here where I am. All the time I thought I was wandering away from it I was drawing nearer to it. It is very wonderful. I am just where I ought to be. If I had only known I never need have worried."

Whether it would have troubled either him or my mother very much even had it been otherwise I cannot say, for Life, so small a thing when looked at beside Death, seemed to have lost all terror for them; but be that as it may, I like to remember that Fortune at the last was kind to my father, prospering his adventures, not to the extent his sanguine nature had dreamt, but sufficiently: so that no fear for our future marred the peaceful passing of his tender spirit.

Or should I award thanks not to Fate, but rather to sweet Barbara, and behind her do I not detect shameless old Hasluck, grinning good-naturedly in the background?

"Now, Uncle Luke, I want your advice. Dad's given me this cheque as a birthday present. I don't want to spend it. How shall I invest it?"

"My dear, why not consult your father?"

"Now, Uncle Luke, dad's a dear, especially after dinner, but you and I know him. Giving me a present is one thing, doing business for me is another. He'd unload on me. He'd never be able to resist the temptation."

My father would suggest, and Barbara would thank him. But a minute later would murmur: "You don't know anything about Argentinos."

My father did not, but Barbara did; to quite a remarkable extent for a young girl.

"That child has insisted on leaving this cheque with me and I have advised her to buy Argentinos," my father would observe after she was gone. "I am going to put a few hundreds into them myself. I hope they will turn out all right, if only for her sake. I have a presentiment somehow that they will."

A month later Barbara would greet him with: "Isn't it lucky we bought Argentinos!"

"Yes; they haven't turned out badly, have they? I had a feeling, you know, for Argentinos."

"You're a genius, Uncle Luke. And now we will sell out and buy Calcuttas, won't we?"

"Sell out? But why?"

"You said so. You said, 'We will sell out in about a month and be quite safe.'"

"My dear, I've no recollection of it."

But Barbara had, and before she had done with him, so had he. And the next day Argentinos would be sold--not any too soon--and Calcuttas bought.

Could money so gained bring a blessing with it? The question would plague my father.

"It's very much like gambling," he would mutter uneasily to himself at each success, "uncommonly like gambling."

"It is for your mother," he would impress upon me. "When she is gone, Paul, put it aside, Keep it for doing good; that may make it clean.

Start your own life without any help from it."

He need not have troubled. It went the road that all luck derived however indirectly from old Hasluck ever went. Yet it served good purpose on its way.

But the most marvellous feat, to my thinking, ever accomplished by Barbara was the bearing off of my father and mother to witness "A Voice from the Grave, or the Power of Love, New and Original Drama in five acts and thirteen tableaux."

They had been bred in a narrow creed, both my father and my mother.