He laughed, and instinctively his eyes sought those of the girl who waited on the table. Somehow he felt that she was the only one who could understand.
She came back at him with a question: "What have you done?"
She shook her head, and there were little sparks of light in her eyes. "I don't believe that was what your grandfather meant," she said, slowly.
They stared at her--three of the brothers with their knives and forks uplifted, the fourth, a blond Titanic youngster, with his elbows on the table, his face turned up to her, as to the sun.
"I don't believe he meant something done with your brains, but something fine, heroic--" There was a hint of scorn in her voice.
Van Alen flushed. He was fresh from the adulation of his bookish world.
"I should not have come," he explained, uncomfortably, "if my mother had not desired that I preserve the tradition of the family."
"It is a great thing to write a book"--she was leaning forward, aflame with interest--"but I don't believe he meant just that--"
He laughed. "Then I am not to sleep in the canopy bed?"
The girl laughed too. "Not unless you want to be haunted by his ghost."
With a backward flashing glance, she went into the kitchen, and Van Alen, lighting a cigarette, started to explore the old house.
Except for the wing, occupied by the caretaker, nothing had been disturbed since the family, seeking new fortunes in the city, had left the old homestead to decay among the desolate fields that yielded now a meagre living for Mrs. Brand and her four strapping sons.
In the old parlor, where the ancient furniture showed ghostlike shapes in the dimness, and the dead air was like a tomb, Van Alen found a picture of his great-grandfather.
The little man had been painted without flattery. There he sat--Lilliputian on the great charger! At that moment Van Alen hated him--that Hop-o'-my-Thumb of another age, founder of a pigmy race, who, by his braggart will, had that night brought upon this one of his descendants the scorn of a woman.
And even as he thought of her, she came in, with the yellow flare of a candle lighting her vivid face.
"I thought you might need a light," she said; "it grows dark so soon."
As he took the candle from her, he said abruptly: "I shall not sleep in the canopy bed; there is a couch in the room."