The President's Daughter (Britton)/Chapter 129
When finally, after discussing my problem, Daisy Harding went off to sleep, I lay there thinking, trying to recall anything of importance that I had failed to relate to her. I heard Miss Harding in her sleep mutter the word "child" several times, and I knew that the subject-matter of our conversation had drifted into slumberland with her, and wondered what she was dreaming. I was sorry, too, very sorry, that I had been obliged to tell her, for I knew the whole thing was worrying her tremendously. She had said to me that she had not known good health for quite some time, and I confess she did look tired. I felt so sorry for her and I loved her deeply; but I loved my daughter far more. In the shadows, as she lay there sleeping, she looked so much like her brother, more perhaps than any of the others in the family save the father, Dr. Harding, in whom I have more than once seen Mr. Harding so strongly that I could just hug him.
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the President's father
It was in fact during that very visit to Marion that I had gone over to the Dr. Harding home on East Center Street one afternoon to join Mrs. Votaw, and be there so Mrs. Mouser could pick us both up and take us for a drive. Passing through the house out to the garden I had come across Dr. Harding, lying down on the couch in the living-room. I had not seen him before on that particular visit, and I went over and leaned down and kissed him on the cheek and spoke to him. His eyes were closed but I knew he was not asleep. He opened them and recognized me immediately. I doubt very much whether I have ever encountered Dr. Harding even in passing greeting that he did not remark in the same exclamatory fashion, "Oh, yes,—Nan, Nan! Yes, I remember how your father used to tell me how you stood up for Warren! He said you thought Warren was the finest man in the country—yes, your father used to say . . ." And I have known Daisy Harding to interrupt more than once and say, "Yes, dad, you've told Nan that before," or, "Yes, dad, Nan knows." And when I bent and touched his cheek with my lips and took his dear old wrinkled hand in mine, he spoke to me immediately of his son Warren. But now the voice was the far-away voice of a grief-stricken aged man, and so pitifully weak that I bent over him and listened intently to catch the words. Bless him! He was trying to recall to me my father's words to him about my love for his son. But the feeble voice trailed off and I felt more than heard his whispered heart-cry, "Too bad Warren had to die!" My heart was so full of love and sympathy for him whose son I worshipped that something which must have been the maternal in me longed to stoop and take the snow-white head on my arm and mingle my tears with his against the wrinkled cheek. But, instead, I stood looking down upon him and seeing in the deep-set faded eyes of the father the eyes of the other, the younger man, his son and my beloved.
I have yet to see, however, except in the eyes of my baby, who is the soul of Warren Harding, the spiritual lights of understanding, gladness, and sorrow that shone from the eyes of him whose gaze was ever fixed beyond the pale of the material. I recall how one time Mr. Harding and I were motoring in New York, in a car hired by him for the purpose by the hour, and were passing under the elevated bridge at Broadway and 64th Street, when I said to him, "Darling, you have such beautiful eyes. Somehow I never can really see into them." And he smiled and answered, "Aren't they too sad, Nan?" Yes, I told him, they were sad, but beautifully and spiritually sad.
He, in turn, seemed to delight in telling me how he loved my eyes, my lips, my teeth, my woman's body, my voice, and my nose. It was when he said he loved my nose that I would interrupt him. "Oh, now I know you must be fooling," I would say, "because I have always heard from my family how big my nose is!" But he would shake his head and smile and plant a kiss right upon the end of that emphasized feature and swear over and over again, "I love your nose!"