CHAPTER III

MRS. WHITNEY INTERVENES

As Hiram had always been silent and seemingly abstracted, no one but Ellen noted the radical change in him.  She had brought up her children in the old-fashioned way—­her thoughts, and usually her eyes, upon them all day, and one ear open all night.  When she no longer had them to guard, she turned all this energy of solicitude to her husband; thus the passionate love of her youth was having a healthy, beautiful old age.  The years of circumventing the easily roused restiveness of her spirited boy and girl had taught her craft; without seeming to be watching Hiram, no detail of his appearance or actions escaped her.

“There’s mighty little your pa don’t see,” had been one of her stock observations to the children from their earliest days.  “And you needn’t flatter yourselves he don’t care because he don’t speak.”  Now she noted that from under his heavy brows his eyes were looking stealthily out, more minutely observant than ever before, and that what he saw either added to his sadness or took a color of sadness from his mood.  She guessed that the actions of Adelaide and Arthur, so utterly different from the actions of the children of her and Hiram’s young days—­except those regarded by all worth-while people as “trifling and trashy”—­had something to do with Hiram’s gloom.  She decided that Arthur’s failure and his lightness of manner in face of it were the chief trouble—­this until Hiram’s shoulders began to stoop and hollows to appear in his cheeks and under his ears, and a waxlike pallor to overspread his face.  Then she knew that he was not well physically; and, being a practical woman, she dismissed the mental causes of the change.  “People talk a lot about their mental troubles,” she said to herself, “but it’s usually three-fourths stomach and liver.”

As Hiram and illness, real illness, could not be associated in her mind, she gave the matter no importance until she heard him sigh heavily one night, after they had been in bed several hours.  “What is it, father?” she asked.

There was no answer, but a return to an imitation of the regular breathing of a sleeper.

“Hiram,” she insisted, “what is it?”

“Nothing, Ellen, nothing,” he answered; “I must have ate something that don’t sit quite right.”

“You didn’t take no supper at all,” said she.

This reminded him how useless it was to try to deceive her.  “I ain’t been feeling well of late,” he confessed, “but it’ll soon be over.”  He did not see the double meaning of his words until he had uttered them; he stirred uneasily in his dread that she would suspect.  “I went to the doctor.”

“What did he say?—­though I don’t know why I should ask what such a fool as Milbury said about anything.”

“I got some medicine,” replied he, evading telling her what doctor.

Instantly she sat up in bed.  “I haven’t seen you take no drugs!” she exclaimed.  Drugs were her especial abhorrence.  She let no one in the family take any until she had passed upon them.