Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/382

356 back to town, amused, but, somehow, warmed about his heart. When you are a bachelor, and fifty-five, pretty and serious young women do not often concern themselves with your quinine pills. He was housed for a day or two, and when he went back to report himself cured, she was very stern with him about the care of his health.

"What does Augustine do without his head nurse?" he said, kindly.

Dora sighed. "I often worry a good deal about him. Mamma doesn't know anything about sickness; and, of course, Augustine is just a man. But I gave him a little medicine-case, and wrote out directions as to what he was to do if he took cold or anything. But I do worry."

She used to talk to this kind old friend very simply and intimately of her husband and his goodness and his greatness. And sometimes, after such a talk, he would hear her sigh.

"I don't know anything about art, Mr. Austin," she said, humbly, "but I know Augustine is wonderful."

"Yes, he is wonderful," he would assure her heartily. "But it's hard for him to have to be away from you and Amy so much. I know that must be a great trial to him."

She would look at him when he said things like this, with wistful eyes, and say, "Yes, of course."

Dora did not know many people, though her mother's circle was very large. She was too shy to make acquaintances readily; and as for making friends, she did not want any; Amy and Amy's father filled her little heart. But by and by she made room in it for Henry Austin. Indeed, she could hardly help it, for the silent elderly man, with those amused eyes, somehow would not be denied; he came to see her, and sat by her fireside like a faithful, grizzled old dog. His regularity in calling began about the middle of January, during Mrs. Wharton's first absence. He had dropped in after dinner one night, and found Amy half asleep, in her mother's arms.

"I ought to have put her to bed," she said, rather shamefacedly, "but the evenings are so long."

After that Henry Austin came certainly four nights out of seven.

And so the winter slipped away, and the girl and the baby sat by the fire and thought and talked of the husband and father's triumphs. The little wife carried Augustine's letters about with her in a small gray bag lined with pink silk and sweet with orris; she would take them out and read them over and over; when it was too dark to see to read, just before the lamps were lighted, she would bend down to catch the firelight on the brief pages, or else repeat them to herself out of her heart. He told her in every letter how much he owed her mother; and he kept Mrs. Wharton so constantly with him that she told his manager she belonged to the troupe, and should presently begin to draw her salary. Then, in April, the company came back to town for a month's engagement. But long before that Henry Austin had grown to feel a great tenderness for Dora—the little, lonely mother, hearing in the silent winter days the echoes of the extraordinary applause that followed her husband's progress through the country. Sometimes Austin had felt a vague anger at his old love; yet when she came back from the East in the spring, a week or two before her son-in-law, and took her pleasant place in her little world, he forgot his anger. Why should he be angry? She took so seriously and nobly her great responsibility; she knew, without any false flutter of negations, that Augustine Ware would probably have been in his barn-yard yet if she had not divined his genius—and now, here he was, a man truly great in his profession, a man of real moment in his world. She spoke of him often to Henry Austin, yet not so often that Austin felt himself forgotten, or his own possibilities overlooked. And as there was always the compliment of severity and displeasure at his indolence, he felt, somehow or other, as if he were as important to her as was her famous son-in-law. And in spite of Dora's lonely little face, those scars, quiescent during the winter, stung very perceptibly.

In the fortnight before Augustine's return, Mrs. Wharton was busy making plans for his London season, certain arrangements for which had been left in her hands. She spoke of these plans, but only very briefly, to Dora. "Not yet," she would say, with shining eyes. "Wait