that some day I’d be married to him I’d have laughed at them—I’d have considered that I was marrying an old man—and that’s just exactly what a lot of people thought, sir, when the news got out that I was goin’to marry him—I know Martha Patton came running to me, all excited and out of breath—said,’Eliza! You’re not going to marry that old man—you know you’re not!’—you see, his ways were old, he looked old, dressed old, acted old—everything he did was old; there was always, it seemed, something strange and old-like about him, almost like had he been born that way.”
And it was at this time that Eliza met him, saw him first—“Mr. Gant”—an immensely tall, gaunt, cadaverous-looking man, with a face stern and sad with care, lank drooping moustaches, sandy hair, and cold-grey staring eyes—“not so old, you know—he was only thirty-three—but he looked old, he acted old, his ways were old—he had lived so much among older people he seemed older than he was—I thought of him as an old man.”
This, then, was “Mr. Gant” at thirty-three, and since then, although his fortunes and position had improved, his character had changed little. And now Helen, faced by all these working men, who had known, liked, and respected him, and had now come to see him again before he died—suddenly knew the reason for his loneliness, the reason so few people—least of all, his wife—had ever dared address him by his first name. And with a swift and piercing revelation, his muttered words, which she had heard him use a thousand times when speaking of his childhood—“We had a tough time of it—I tell you what, we did!”—now came back to her with the unutterable poignancy of discovery. For the first time she understood what they meant. And suddenly, with the same swift and nameless pity, she remembered all the pictures which she had seen of her father as a boy and a young man. There were a half-dozen of them in the big family album, together with pictures of his own and Eliza’s family: they were the small daguerreotypes of fifty years before, in small frames of faded plush, with glass covers, touched with the faint pale pinks with which the photographers of an earlier time tried to paint with life the sallow hues of their photography. The first of these pictures showed Gant as a little boy; later, a boy of twelve, he was standing in a chair beside his brother Wesley, who was seated, with a wooden smile upon his face. Later, a picture of Gant in the years in Baltimore, standing, his feet crossed, leaning elegantly upon a marble slab beside a vase; later still, the young stone-cutter before his little shop in
