“Pshaw! You scared, Silas Lapham?” cried his wife proudly. “I should like to see the thing that ever scared you; or the knockdown that you couldn’t pick up from!”
“Is that so, Persis?” he asked, with the joy her courage gave him.
In the middle of the night she called to him, in a voice which the darkness rendered still more deeply troubled: “Are you awake, Silas?”
“Yes; I’m awake.”
“I’ve been thinking about those English parties, Si—”
“So’ve I.”
“And I can’t make it out but what you’d be just as bad as Rogers, every bit and grain, if you were to let them have the mills—”
“And not tell ’em what the chances were with the G.L. & P.? I thought of that, and you needn’t be afraid.”
She began to bewail herself, and to sob convulsively: “O Silas! O Silas!” Heaven knows in what measure the passion of her soul was mired with pride in her husband’s honesty, relief from an apprehended struggle, and pity for him.
“Hush, hush, Persis!” he besought her. “You’ll wake Pen if you keep on that way. Don’t cry any more! You mustn’t.”
“Oh, let me cry, Silas! It’ll help me. I shall be all right in a minute. Don’t you mind.” She sobbed herself quiet. “It does seem too hard,” she said, when she could speak again, “that you have to give up this chance when Providence had fairly raised it up for you.”
“I guess it wa’n’t Providence raised it up,” said Lapham. “Any rate, it’s got to go. Most likely Rogers was lyin’, and there ain’t any such parties; but if there were, they couldn’t have the mills from me without the whole story. Don’t you be troubled, Persis. I’m going to pull through all right.”
“Oh, I ain’t afraid. I don’t suppose but what there’s plenty would help you, if they knew you needed it, Si.”
“They would if they knew I didn’t need it,” said Lapham sardonically.
“Did you tell Bill how you stood?”
“No, I couldn’t bear to. I’ve been the rich one so long, that I couldn’t bring myself to own up that I was in danger.”
“Yes.”
“Besides, it didn’t look so ugly till today. But I guess we shan’t let ugly looks scare us.”
“No.”
XXII
The morning postman brought Mrs. Lapham a letter from Irene, which was chiefly significant because it made no reference whatever to the writer or her state of mind. It gave the news of her uncle’s family; it told of their kindness to her; her cousin Will was going to take her and his sisters ice-boating on the river, when it froze.
By the time this letter came, Lapham had gone to his business, and the mother carried it to Penelope to talk over. “What do you make out of it?” she asked; and without waiting to be answered she said, “I don’t know as I believe in cousins marrying, a great deal; but if Irene and Will were to fix it up between ’em—” She looked vaguely at Penelope.
“It wouldn’t make any difference as far as I was concerned,” replied the girl listlessly.
Mrs. Lapham lost her patience.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you what, Penelope!” she exclaimed. “Perhaps it’ll make a difference to you if you know that your father’s in real trouble. He’s harassed to death, and he was awake half the night, talking about it. That abominable Rogers has got a lot of money away from him; and he’s lost by others that he’s helped,”—Mrs. Lapham put it in this way because she had no time to be explicit—“and I want you should come out of your room now, and try to be of some help and comfort to him when he comes home tonight. I guess Irene wouldn’t mope round much, if she was here,” she could not help adding.
The girl lifted herself on her elbow. “What’s that you say about father?” she demanded eagerly. “Is he in trouble? Is he going to lose his money? Shall we have to stay in this house?”
“We may be very glad to stay in this house,” said Mrs. Lapham, half angry with herself for having given cause for the girl’s conjectures, and half with the habit of prosperity in her child, which could conceive no better of what adversity was. “And I want you should get up and show that you’ve got some feeling for somebody in the world besides yourself.”
“Oh, I’ll get up!” said the girl promptly, almost cheerfully.
“I don’t say it’s as bad now as it looked a little while ago,” said her mother, conscientiously hedging a little from the statement which she had based rather upon her feelings than her facts. “Your father thinks he’ll pull through all right, and I don’t know but what he will. But I want you should see if you can’t do something to cheer him up and keep him from getting so perfectly downhearted as he seems to get, under the load he’s got to carry. And stop thinking about yourself a while, and behave yourself like a sensible girl.”
“Yes, yes,” said the girl; “I will. You needn’t be troubled about me any more.”
Before she left her room she wrote a note, and when she came down she was dressed to go out-of-doors and post it herself. The note was to Corey:—
“Do not come to see me any more till you hear from me. I have a reason which I cannot give you now; and you must not ask what it is.”
All day she went about in a buoyant desperation, and she came down to meet her father at supper.
“Well, Persis,” he said scornfully, as he sat down, “we might as well saved our good resolutions till they were wanted. I guess those English parties have gone back on Rogers.”
“Do you mean he didn’t come?”
“He hadn’t come up to half-past five,” said Lapham.
“Tchk!” uttered his wife.
“But I guess I shall pull through without Mr. Rogers,” continued Lapham. “A firm that I didn’t think could weather it is
