His Family | Page 3

old house. And they
had looked happily far ahead. What a woman she had been for plans. It
had not been all smooth sailing. There had come reverses in business,
and at home one baby, a boy, had died. But on they had gone and the
years had swept by until he had reached his forties. Absorbed in his
growing business and in his thriving family, it had seemed to Roger
still as though he were just starting out.
But one day, quite suddenly, the house had become a strange place to
him with a strange remote figure in it, his wife. For he had learned that
she must die. There had followed terrible weeks. Then Judith had faced
their disaster. Little by little she had won back the old intimacy with
her husband; and through the slow but inexorable progress of her
ailment, again they had come together in long talks and plans for their
children. At this same chessboard, in this room, repeatedly she would
stop the game and smiling she would look into the future. At one such
time she had said to him,
"I wonder if it won't be the same with the children as it has been with
us. No matter how long each one of them lives, won't their lives feel to
them unfinished like ours, only just beginning? I wonder how far they
will go. And then their children will grow up and it will be the same
with them. Unfinished lives. Oh, dearie, what children all of us are."
He had put his arm around her then and had held her very tight. And
feeling the violent trembling of her husband's fierce revolt, slowly
bending back her head and looking up into his eyes she had continued
steadily:

"And when you come after me, my dear, oh, how hungry I shall be for
all you will tell me. For you will live on in our children's lives."
And she had asked him to promise her that.
But he had not kept his promise. For after Judith's dying he had felt
himself terribly alone, with eternity around him, his wife slipping far
away. And the universe had grown stark and hard, impersonal,
relentless, cold. A storm of doubts had attacked his faith. And though
he had resisted long, for his faith in God had been rooted deep in the
mountains of New England, in the end it had been wrenched away, and
with it he had lost all hope that either for Judith or himself was there
any existence beyond the grave. So death had come to Roger's soul. He
had been deaf and blind to his children. Nights by the thousand spent
alone. Like a gray level road in his memory now was the story of his
family.
When had his spirit begun to awaken? He could not tell, it had been so
slow. His second daughter, Deborah, who had stayed at home with her
father when Laura had gone away to school, had done little things
continually to rouse his interest in life. Edith's winsome babies had
attracted him when they came to the house. Laura had returned from
school, a joyous creature, tall and slender, with snapping black eyes,
and had soon made her presence felt. One day in the early afternoon, as
he entered the house there had burst on his ears a perfect gale of
laughter; and peering through the portières he had seen the dining-room
full of young girls, a crew as wild as Laura herself. Hastily he had
retreated upstairs. But he had enjoyed such glimpses. He had liked to
see her fresh pretty gowns and to have her come in and kiss him
good-night.
Then had come a sharp heavy jolt. His business had suffered from long
neglect, and suddenly for two anxious weeks he had found himself
facing bankruptcy. Edith's husband, a lawyer, had come to his aid and
together they had pulled out of the hole. But he had been forced to
mortgage the house. And this had brought to a climax all the feelings of
guiltiness which had so long been stirring within him over his failure to
live up to the promise he had made his wife.

And so Roger had looked at his children.
And at first to his profound surprise he had had it forced upon him that
these were three grown women, each equipped with her own peculiar
feminine traits and desires, the swift accumulations of lives which had
expanded in a city that had reared to the skies in the many years of his
long sleep. But very slowly, month by month, he had gained a second
impression which seemed to him deeper and more real. To the eye they
were grown women all, but inwardly they were children