National Avenue · Chapter 16 (2/2)

“Listen, Dan. I’ve always liked you best since you were a little boy. If you don’t understand something that happens, you remember I said this, will you? What may happen is for your own good and to help you, though it may seem just the other way to you. Will you promise to remember?”

“Of course,” he returned promptly; but she was not satisfied.

“No; I want you to think what you’re saying. You speak too quickly to make me sure you’ll remember. Say it slower, Dan. Say, ‘I promise to remember.’ ”

“I promise to remember,” he repeated slowly, to indulge this whim of hers; and then asked, “To remember what, grandma?”

“What I’ve just told you. That’s all I have to say, Dan.”

“All right, grandma;⁠—I hope I haven’t stayed long enough to tire you,” he said, and patted her hand as he rose. “I expect you want to drowse a little now. Good night, grandma.”

“Goodbye,” she said. And her cold and bent fingers feebly clasped his hand, giving it an impulse which he allowed it to follow until he found it resting against her cheek. “Dear boy!” she said faintly; and he was touched by this, the first caress she had given him since he was a child. She retained his hand, keeping it against her cheek a moment longer; then relinquished it gently and said “Goodbye” again.

“Not ‘goodbye,’ grandma,” he protested heartily. “ ‘Good night,’ not ‘goodbye.’ You are better, and the doctor himself says so. Why, by next week⁠—”

“Next week?” she said in the faintest voice in the world and with the remotest shadow of an elfin smile to herself. “Next week? Yes. You can⁠—you can bring the baby to see me⁠—next week.”

She just reached the end of that permission, her voice was so infinitely small and so drowsy; and her eyes closed before the last word;⁠—she seemed to fall asleep even while she spoke. Dan tiptoed out, nodding to the nurse, who had been close at hand in the hall and came into the room as he left it.

Downstairs he found the courteous Nimbus waiting, as always, to unlatch the front door. But tonight the elderly servitor was solemn and unloquacious beyond his custom. “Goo’-ni’, suh,” he said. “I reckon you’ grammaw ’bout ready to let that big door swing. Yes, suh. Goo’-ni’, suh.”

Dan walked home, wondering what door Nimbus conceived himself to be talking about, and wondering more what his grandmother had meant him to remember. But at his own door he was abruptly enlightened upon Nimbus’s meaning about a “big” one. Harlan met him there and told him that the nurse had just telephoned.

Mrs. Savage would never explain what she had asked him to remember; she would never explain anything⁠—never, forever.