A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories | Page 4

about it, and was pushing forward its other affairs as if the war did not exist. Mrs. Elmore felt that the America which she had left had ceased to be. The letters were almost less a pleasure than a pain, but she always tore them open, and read them with eager unhappiness. There were miserable intervals of days and even weeks when no letters came, and when the Reuter telegrams in the Gazette of Venice dribbled their vitriolic news of Northern disaster through a few words or lines, and Galignani's long columns were filled with the hostile exultation and prophecy of the London press.
III.
They had passed eighteen months of this sort of life in Venice when one day a letter dropped into it which sent a thousand ripples over its stagnant surface. Mrs. Elmore read it first to herself, with gasps and cries of pleasure and astonishment, which did not divert her husband from the perusal of some notes he had made the day before, and had brought to the breakfast-table with the intention of amusing her. When she flattened it out over his notes, and exacted his attention, he turned an unwilling and lack-lustre eye upon it; then he looked up at her.
"Did you expect she would come?" he asked, in ill-masked dismay.
"I don't suppose they had any idea of it at first. When Sue wrote me that Lily had been studying too hard, and had to be taken out of school, I said that I wished she could come over and pay us a visit. But I don't believe they dreamed of letting her--Sue says so--till the Mortons' coming seemed too good a chance to be lost. I am so glad of it, Owen! You know how much they have always done for me; and here is a chance now to pay a little of it back."
"What in the world shall we do with her?" he asked.
"Do? Everything! Why, Owen," she urged, with pathetic recognition of his coldness, "she is Susy Stevens's own sister!"
"Oh, yes--yes," he admitted.
"And it was Susy who brought us together!"
"Why, of course."
"And oughtn't you to be glad of the opportunity?"
"I am glad--very glad."
"It will be a relief to you instead of a care. She's such a bright, intelligent girl that we can both sympathize with your work, and you won't have to go round with me all the time, and I can matronize her myself."
"I see, I see," Elmore replied, with scarcely abated seriousness. "Perhaps, if she is coming here for her health, she won't need much matronizing."
"Oh, pshaw! She'll be well enough for that! She's overdone a little at school. I shall take good care of her, I can tell you; and I shall make her have a real good time. It's quite flattering of Susy to trust her to us, so far away, and I shall write and tell her we both think so."
"Yes," said Elmore, "it's a fearful responsibility."
There are instances of the persistence of husbands in certain moods or points of view on which even wheedling has no effect. The wise woman perceives that in these cases she must trust entirely to the softening influences of time, and as much as possible she changes the subject; or if this is impossible she may hope something from presenting a still worse aspect of the affair. Mrs. Elmore said, in lifting the letter from the table: "If she sailed the 3d in the City of Timbuctoo, she will be at Queenstown on the 12th or 13th, and we shall have a letter from her by Wednesday saying when she will be at Genoa. That's as far as the Mortons can bring her, and there's where we must meet her."
"Meet her in Genoa! How?"
"By going there for her," replied Mrs. Elmore, as if this were the simplest thing in the world. "I have never seen Genoa."
Elmore now tacitly abandoned himself to his fate. His wife continued: "I needn't take anything. Merely run on, and right back."
"When must we go?" he asked.
"I don't know yet; but we shall have a letter to-morrow. Don't worry on my account, Owen. Her coming won't be a bit of care to me. It will give me something to do and to think about, and it will be a pleasure all the time to know that it's for Susy Stevens. And I shall like the companionship."
Elmore looked at his wife in surprise, for it had not occurred to him before that with his company she could desire any other companionship. He desired none but hers, and when he was about his work he often thought of her. He supposed that at these moments she thought of him, and found society, as he did, in such thoughts. But he was not a jealous or exacting man, and he said nothing.