Part 37

Anthony was surrounded by people--the room was half full of them, elbowing each other about.

"Paint the walls," advised Lockwood.

"There are imitation-leather papers," said Cathcart, with the air of one condescending to lower a high standard for the sake of those who could not live up to it.

"I suppose so," admitted Anthony, "at four dollars a roll. I saw a simple thing on that order that struck me the other day at Heminways'. I thought it might be about forty cents a roll. It was a dollar a square yard. I told them I would think it over. I haven't got through thinking it over yet."

"You want a plate-rail," said Wayne Carey.

"What for?"

"Why, to put plates, and steins, and things on."

"Haven't a plate--or a stein. Baby has a silver mug. Would that do?"

Cathcart smiled in a superior way. "You had a lot of mighty fine stuff in your Yale days," he remarked. "Pity you let it all go."

"I shouldn't have cared for that truck now," Anthony declared easily, though he deceived nobody by it. Most of them remembered, if Cathcart had forgotten, how the college boy had sacrificed all his treasures at a blow when the news of his family's misfortunes had come. It had yielded little enough, after all, to throw into the abyss of their sudden poverty, but the act had proved the spirit of the elder son of the house.

"You certainly will want plenty of rugs and hangings of the right sort," Cathcart pursued.

Anthony looked at him good-humouredly. "I can see that you have got to be suppressed," he said, with a hand on Stevens's collar. "I can tell you in a breath just what's going into this room at present. The floor is to have a matting, one of those heavy, cloth-like mattings. Auntie Dingley has presented me with one fine old Persian rug from the Marcy library, which she insists is out of key with the rest of the stuff. I'm glad it is--it'll furnish the key to my decorations. Then I've a splendid old desk I picked up in a place where they temporarily forgot themselves in setting a price on it. That's going by the window. I've a little Dürer engraving, and a few good foreign photographs Juliet has put under glass for me. For the rest I have--what I like best--clear space, pipe-and-hearth room, the bamboo chairs off the porch with some winter cushions in, my books--and that."

He pointed to the windows, outside which lay a long country vista stretching away over fields and river to the woods in the distance, turning rich autumn tints now under the late October frosts.

"It's enough," said Carey, with the suppressed sigh which usually accompanied any allusion of his to Anthony's environment. "Dens are too stuffy, as a rule. Fellows try to see how much useless lumber they can accumulate in altogether inadequate space."

"But you ought to have a couch," said Judith.

"Oh, yes, I'm going to have a couch," assented Anthony, laughing across her head at Juliet. "A gem of a couch--we're making it ourselves. You're not to see it till it's done. It'll be no brickbat couch, either--it'll be a flowery bed of ease--or, if not flowery, invitingly covered with some stunning stuff Juliet has fished out of a neighbour's attic."

"Now, come and see the nursery," Juliet proposed, and the party crowded through the door into the living-room, around to the one by its side which opened into an attractive room behind the den, all air and sunshine.

"I refuse to suggest," said Cathcart instantly, "the decorations for this place."

"That's good," remarked Anthony cheerfully. "So much verbiage out of the way."

"It'll be pink and white, I suppose," said Judith. "Pink is the colour for boys, I'm told."

Behind all their backs Anthony glanced at his wife, affection and amusement in his face. She read the look and smiled back. It was no part of their plan to let the boy grow up alone. And as a mother she seemed to him far more beautiful than she had ever been.

"We are going to have a little paper with nursery-rhyme pictures all over it," explained Juliet. "There are all sorts of softly harmonising colours in it. And just a matting on the floor with a rug to play on, his white crib, and some gay little curtains at the windows."

"Have you made the partition double-thick, old man?" asked Lockwood. "This den-nursery combination strikes me as a little dubious."

"It's no use explaining to a fiendish old bachelor," said Anthony, leading the way out of the place, "that I'd think I was missing a good deal if I should get so far away that I couldn't hear little Tony laugh--or cry. Julie, where's the boy? May I bring him down?"

He disappeared upstairs, whence sounds of hilarity were at once heard. Presently he reappeared on the stairs, bearing aloft upon his shoulder a rosy cherub of a baby, smiling and waving a chubby fist at the company. The beauty in his face was an exquisite mixture of that belonging to both father and mother. Anthony and his son together made a picture worth seeing.

Once more Wayne Carey smothered a sigh. But Judith hardened her heart. Since Baby Anthony had come Wayne had been difficult to manage.

* * * * *

Lockwood stayed after the others had gone. Sitting smoking before the fire with Anthony after Juliet had left them alone he brought the conversation around to a point which Anthony had expected.