The Open Question Part 3

"What are you doing?"

"Just putting this away."

"Leave it on the table. It is the only work of fiction I have ever been able to read. Leave it on the table."

Nevertheless, next day, in a moment of nervousness induced by the news that a strange lady was getting out of a carriage at their door, Miss Hannah dropped _Uncle Tom_ behind the horse-hair sofa-cus.h.i.+on.

"Where is Ethan?" said her father, turning suddenly from the window.

"I'll go and bring him," replied Miss Hannah, and she left the room with haste.

A few moments, and the door opened again. Mrs. Gano came in with an air that seemed to Aaron Tallmadge suspiciously gracious. She paused for just that decisive but infinitesimal moment of first impression, as she took the measure of the spare figure standing on guard in the middle of his prim New England parlor.

"Mr. Tallmadge?" inquired Mrs. Gano, suavely.

"Mrs. Gano?"

He offered his hand, and then pushed a straight-backed horse-hair chair a little nearer the fire. In the mere speaking of her name his tw.a.n.g made instant attack upon the Southerner's nerves. It pa.s.sed through the man's mind presently that Mrs. Gano's voice was disagreeably reminiscent of a runaway slave he had once befriended.

"I have just seen my grandson's face at an upper window." She looked round eagerly. "Ah!"

The door had opened very slowly. One eye and half a little dark head were put doubtfully in.

"Come here, Ethan!" said his grandfather.

The child disappeared altogether.

Mr. Tallmadge went out into the hall, and presently reappeared leading Ethan in. He hung back, dropping his curly head, and shooting an occasional look at the newcomer; but since she did not fly at him in the objectionable way of visitors, he allowed himself to be brought by degrees up to the strange lady's chair.

She did not even say "How do you do?" She stooped and kissed him silently. He stared at her with great melancholy eyes, backed away, and stood by his grandfather's side.

"I am afraid he is not strong," said Mrs. Gano, a little huskily.

"He has been singularly free from childish ailments--an occasional cold--"

"Of course, in this trying climate."

"Oh, we find our climate does very well."

"No doubt, in the case of those to the manner born. This child is singularly like his father."

"He reminds _us_ constantly of his mother."

"Is it possible? I a.s.sure you I feel, as I look at him, that I have dreamed these twenty years, and that my son is standing there before me."

"You don't say!" remarked the child's grandfather, unmoved. "Everybody here considers him so like the Tallmadges."

Mrs. Gano, with unflattering eyes on the head of the house, gave an incredulous cough. She seemed on the point of expressing more indubitably some further thought, looked at the boy, softened suddenly, and smiled at the grave little face.

"You know who I am?"

He shook his brown curls. A shadow crossed the woman's face.

"Is he never told anything of his father or his father's people?"

"He is very young yet to take an interest in folks he hasn't seen."

"He is nearly six."

"What say?"

"I should have thought an intelligent child of six might have been told that his grandmother--"

"Not six _yet_, madam. Of course, when he is older--"

He made a gesture indicating a liberal policy.

"When he is older you will have no objection, I suppose, to his making a visit to his father's people?"

"No objection whatever to a _visit_, madam."

"How soon should you consider such a move expedient?"

"Ah, that depends," replied the wary gentleman--"depends so much on circ.u.mstances."

"What kind of circ.u.mstances?" she inquired, stiffly.

His look and tone said unmistakably, "Depends on your behavior, madam."

"Depends on the child's health and-- Run away and play, Ethan," he said.

As the little boy closed the door: "Then you do admit he is delicate?"

Mrs. Gano spoke more coldly than when Ethan had been there to hear.

"I admit the need to consider the health of _all_ children, and secondary only to that, their education."

"What are your views as to Ethan's schooling?"

"I shall expect him to go through the regular mill, as I did: a good primary school, then the preparatory at Andover, then Harvard."

The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man. It _was_ a "regular mill," and who could tell if the sensitive, fragile little Gano was the stuff to stand these machine-made processes?

"I don't believe, myself," said Mr. Tallmadge, with decision, "in haphazard, s.h.i.+lly-shally ways of raising children, and leaving it to them to see what they'll take to."

"I have little experience of s.h.i.+lly-shally methods," replied his visitor.

"If you leave it to boys to decide, what they take to is mischief nine times out of ten."

"I think you may make your mind easy about my grandson."