he’s—he’s rented places to other people—he’s—he’s—oh, of course not!—Papa is different from men like Ernest Pegram, and Ollie, and Jannadeau and Alec Ramsay—why, they’re just working men—they work with their hands—Ollie’s just an ordinary plasterer—and-and—Mr. Ramsay is nothing but a stone-cutter.”
And a small insistent voice inside her said most quietly: “And your father?”
And suddenly Helen remembered Gant’s great hands of power and strength, and how they now lay quietly beside him on the bed, and lived and would not die, even when the rest of him had died, and she remembered the thousands of times she had gone to his shop in the afternoon and found the stone-cutter in his long striped apron bending with delicate concentration over a stone inscription on a trestle, holding in his great hands the chisel and the heavy wooden mallet the stone-cutters use, and remembering, the whole rich and living compact of the past came back to her, in a rush of tenderness and joy and terror, and on that flood a proud and bitter honesty returned. She thought: “Yes, he was a stone-cutter, no different from these other men, and these men were his real friends.”
And going directly to old Alec Ramsay she grasped his blunt thick fingers, the nails of which were always whitened a little with stone dust, and greeted him in her large and spacious way:
“Mr. Ramsay,” she said, “I want you to know how glad we are that you could come. And that goes for all of you—Mr. Jannadeau, and Mr. Duncan, and Mr. Fogarty, and you, Ernest, and you, too, Ollie—you are the best friends Papa has, there’s no one he thinks more of and no one he would rather see.”
Mr. Ramsay’s brick-red face and brick-red neck became even redder before he spoke, and beneath his grizzled brows his blue eyes suddenly were smoke-blue. He put his blunt hand to his moustache for a moment, and tugged at it, then he said in his gruff, quiet, and matter-of-fact voice:
“I guess we know Will about as well as anyone, Miss Helen. I’ve worked for him off and on for thirty years.”
At the same moment, she heard Ollie Gant’s easy, deep, and powerful laugh, and saw him slowly lift his cigarette in his coarse paw; she saw Jannadeau’s great yellow face and massive domy brow, and heard him laugh with guttural pleasure, saying, “Ah-h! I tell you vat! Dat girl has alvays looked out for her datty—she’s de only vun dat coult hantle him;
