Page:The Popular Magazine v72 n1 (1924-04-20).djvu/29

 thing or other. I even remember that you tried to dissuade him from going into the steamship business, although he did seem to make money out of it when you swore he would go broke.”

Lemuel Harnway sniffed, seemed at loss for speech and then chuckled as if amused.

“I believe I did,” he admitted. “But even as great a man as I am can sometimes make mistakes, Jimmy. Sometimes, but not often. Now of course you must get your traps off that fool ship of yours and come here and stop with me—the longer the better. Why don't you sell the blasted thing and come and stay with me for keeps? I'm getting old, Jimmy, and you're the last living being that has Harnway blood in his veins.”

Captain Jimmy was unexpectedly aware that his affection for his uncle was greater than he had conceived. That reference to their kinship brought back, poignantly, the family conditions which time and feud had brought about. He remembered, now, that as a boy he had been fond of this grim uncle, then a harsh and dominant fighting man with hot blood flowing from a courageous heart, and that had not this same uncle become a restless old wanderer after the death of his childless wife, whom Jimmy had never seen; they might have formed a greater affection. He remembered his mother's shocked voice when the news came that his uncle Lemuel at the age of fifty had married a girl of but nineteen. Then again he remembered when, less than a year later, news had come of her sudden death, his mother's long silence, her sigh, and quiet words, “Poor old Lem. Poor, poor old Lem! Always stiff with family pride, marrying too late in the hope of having an heir to carry on the name, and now—this! What will become of him now?”

Then there were the long years when they heard from him but intermittently from strange places—sometimes from the heart of wild continents, sometimes from the heart of civilizations, always on the move, never content, and then the almost final severance of family news when that connecting link of communication, his mother, slipped peacefully away to rest.

Captain Jimmy lifted his eyes from the finely tiled floor, aware that he had not given an answer to this proffer of hospitality so freely tendered. His uncle, too, seemed to have fallen into an old man's reverie. He was seated in a high and severely carved chair in the shadows of the salon as if withdrawn from the afternoon light. He sat erect, white and severe, with his white old hands, still vaguely expressing capability and grasp of affairs, clutched in front of him. Jimmy had not seen him for nearly ten years, and in the interim had learned to better appraise men. He surreptitiously studied him. There was no mistake but that he adequately fitted that ancient, high and carven chair. A doge of old Venice, austere, powerful, and stern, might have some time occupied it, but his possession could have been no more harmonious. Here, thought Jimmy, was an old lion, battered in body but still brave in mind, waiting and perhaps chafing: in the certainty of his inevitable end. But the lion would fight for his own possessions and ambitions and ideals until the very last. That was Uncle Lemuel Harnway!

“I feel I'd like to do what you ask, and come, Uncle Lem, but there are certain reasons why I can't—why it's impossible. I'm still the master of a tramp ship, you know.”

His voice, after the pause, sounded loud in that echoing space where waiting room opened into loggia, and loggia fronted grand staircase, and words reverberated upward through marbled spaces to the great and distant mosaic dome.

“Can't do it, eh?” the old man replied, lifting his leonine head as if he too had been disturbedly aroused from long reviews. “Maybe you don't care to be hampered by hospitality? Um-m-h! To be fair, I've known that feeling too. But I'd like to have you come. I get bored with having to pretend to be interested in a lot of people who don't mean a cussed thing to me. Not a single thing! The trouble with me is that I've always been too damned polite!”

Jimmy put his hand above his lips to conceal the smile that came involuntarily and could not be suppressed. Polite? Why this old fire eater had been distinguished for his lack of form. He had once told the wife of a president that she was his official hostess by a mere accident of politics. That was politeness of the Henry Clay order, and this uncle of his had tried to fashion his senatorial career on the precepts of that bygone statesman.

“Yes, I've always been too polite,” his uncle reiterated, “even when I didn't have