Part 21 (1/2)

I am just where I ought to be. If I had only known I never need have worried.”

Whether it would have troubled either him or my mother very much even had it been otherwise I cannot say, for Life, so small a thing when looked at beside Death, seemed to have lost all terror for them; but be that as it may, I like to remember that Fortune at the last was kind to my father, prospering his adventures, not to the extent his sanguine nature had dreamt, but sufficiently: so that no fear for our future marred the peaceful pa.s.sing of his tender spirit.

Or should I award thanks not to Fate, but rather to sweet Barbara, and behind her do I not detect shameless old Hasluck, grinning good-naturedly in the background?

”Now, Uncle Luke, I want your advice. Dad's given me this cheque as a birthday present. I don't want to spend it. How shall I invest it?”

”My dear, why not consult your father?”

”Now, Uncle Luke, dad's a dear, especially after dinner, but you and I know him. Giving me a present is one thing, doing business for me is another. He'd unload on me. He'd never be able to resist the temptation.”

My father would suggest, and Barbara would thank him. But a minute later would murmur: ”You don't know anything about Argentinos.”

My father did not, but Barbara did; to quite a remarkable extent for a young girl.

”That child has insisted on leaving this cheque with me and I have advised her to buy Argentinos,” my father would observe after she was gone. ”I am going to put a few hundreds into them myself. I hope they will turn out all right, if only for her sake. I have a presentiment somehow that they will.”

A month later Barbara would greet him with: ”Isn't it lucky we bought Argentinos!”

”Yes; they haven't turned out badly, have they? I had a feeling, you know, for Argentinos.”

”You're a genius, Uncle Luke. And now we will sell out and buy Calcuttas, won't we?”

”Sell out? But why?”

”You said so. You said, 'We will sell out in about a month and be quite safe.'”

”My dear, I've no recollection of it.”

But Barbara had, and before she had done with him, so had he. And the next day Argentinos would be sold--not any too soon--and Calcuttas bought.

Could money so gained bring a blessing with it? The question would plague my father.

”It's very much like gambling,” he would mutter uneasily to himself at each success, ”uncommonly like gambling.”

”It is for your mother,” he would impress upon me. ”When she is gone, Paul, put it aside, Keep it for doing good; that may make it clean.

Start your own life without any help from it.”

He need not have troubled. It went the road that all luck derived however indirectly from old Hasluck ever went. Yet it served good purpose on its way.

But the most marvellous feat, to my thinking, ever accomplished by Barbara was the bearing off of my father and mother to witness ”A Voice from the Grave, or the Power of Love, New and Original Drama in five acts and thirteen tableaux.”

They had been bred in a narrow creed, both my father and my mother. That Puritan blood flowed in their veins that throughout our land has drowned much harmless joyousness; yet those who know of it only from hearsay do foolishly to speak but ill of it. If ever earnest times should come again, not how to enjoy but how to live being the question, Fate demanding of us to show not what we have but what we are, we may regret that they are fewer among us than formerly, those who trained themselves to despise all pleasure, because in pleasure they saw the subtlest foe to principle and duty. No graceful growth, this Puritanism, for its roots are in the hard, stern facts of life; but it is strong, and from it has sprung all that is worth preserving in the Anglo-Saxon character.

Its men feared and its women loved G.o.d, and if their words were harsh their hearts were tender. If they shut out the suns.h.i.+ne from their lives it was that their eyes might see better the glory lying beyond; and if their view be correct, that earth's threescore years and ten are but as preparation for eternity, then who shall call them even foolish for turning away their thoughts from its allurements.

”Still, I think I should like to have a look at one, just to see what it is like,” argued my father; ”one cannot judge of a thing that one knows nothing about.”

I imagine it was his first argument rather than his second that convinced my mother.

”That is true,” she answered. ”I remember how shocked my poor father was when he found me one night at the bedroom window reading Sir Walter Scott by the light of the moon.”