what untoward working of the law of atavistic reversion Old Man Conlon ever came to have a son who combined the qualities of miser, braggart, coward, and bully, no one could ever determine. Old Man Conlon was himself the most generous of souls, the gentlest, bravest, must considerate. But the sight of Tom Conlon, big, ruddy, swaggering, was enough to give grave doubts as to the person and disposition of his father's late wife.
They lived together, the old man, Tom, Tom's wife, and two children, in one of the back streets of Heronside. The back streets of Heronside were not unsightly or crowded. The air from the buy blew salt and vigorous through them, and in the dooryards of their little houses bloomed those bright-colored blossoms which the villagers of the Eastern coast love—bits of brief, flaming defiance to the gray gloom of the sea and the fogs.
The Conlon place in particular rioted with color. Beneath the windows of the weather beaten cottage there was a border of nasturtiums. In an incapacitated dory, painted a more vivid green than any waters through which it had ever cut its way, were the pink and white and red of geraniums, the cheerful blue of bachelors' buttons, and the cloudier azure of forget-me-nots. Behind the house, hedges of sunflowers hid the patch of earth divided into more utilitarian strips—rows of beets, tomatoes, cabbages, and onions. And all this efflorescence and vegetation was the result of Old Man Conlon's industry.
"Sure, what would I be doin'—nothin' at all but twiddlin' me thumbs in the house?" he used to ask when the doctor in passing, or Father Joseph on a pastoral visit—yes, or even the Rev. Cotton Mather Putnam of the Old South Church of Heronside, on an errand in the neighborhood—would pause to admire the show and to comment upon his activity.
Tom Conlon heartily concurred in his father's sentiment.
"He'd be a nice one, he would," Tom was accustomed to remark, "to sit an' eat an' drink an' keep warm by the fire, an' never do a hand's turn for the whole of it! One more mouth to fill counts, I can tell you, an' I ain't no Rothschild nor no Astor."
"I hear the old man set you up in business, Tom," an adventurous listener would sometimes say. The conversation generally took place in Tom's waterside grocery shop, patronized by the poorer folk of the town for supplies, and used by the loungers as a poor man's club.
"Aw, you hear a great deal," Tom would snarl in reply.
Hut his repartee never went beyond that. For it was true that, at his son's earnest solicitation. Old Man Conlon had raised the money to start the boy in business. A "back pension" was the foundation of their fortunes. Old Man Conlon had been one of Heronside's volunteers during the Civil War; but it had taken a quarter of a century to convince him that there was enough connection between a bullet wound at Antietam and his lameness to justify him in applying for a pension. His son had finally made him see reason in the matter, and it was the two or three thousand dollars resulting that had set Tom up as a grocer. Whereupon he had made a thrifty and provident marriage with the only daughter of the village barber, who was also the village usurer, and the pair took Old Man Conlon to live with them.
"We might as well have that eight dollars a month as anybody else," said Tom.
"It's little enough," added his wife.
She was a thoroughly consistent woman, and she never changed her attitude even when she discovered that the old man could he made useful in varied ways; that he could turn the wringer on wash days, do the marketing, mend the window glass, manage a garden, tend a cow, and take care of the children as they came. And when people said to her: "My, ain't your father-in-law grown old an' quiet-like all of a sudden?" she answered curtly: "Old? That man'll live forever. They always do that's livin' on others."
Now, the labors that the old man performed doubtless served to keep his strength and health. His sad, sunken, blue eyes were clear; his brown, wrinkled skin had a look of vigor. He was almost as straight as on the day, forty years before, when he, with all the county volunteers, had marched from Heronside to the squealing of a fife and the beating of a drum, and a woman on the roadside had smiled and smiled and waved her hand until he had passed, and had then fallen in a faint. But he did not talk much now, and he did not laugh. He had given up his pipe and his plug—"filthy things," his daughter-in-law called them, and "expensive in hard times," his son.