Greeves stopped suddenly by the window, staring out with unseeing eyes, and his voice was husky with feeling when he spoke after an instant of silence.
“She had the best grandmother in the world, I think—but—her mother was wonderful!” There was reverence and heartbreak in his tone.
“Ah!” said the minister earnestly. “Then she will be like her mother!”
“I could not bear it—if she were like her mother!” breathed the man at the window with a voice almost like a sob and flung himself away from the light, pacing excitedly back to the shadowed end of the room.
“But you say you have written her not to come?” interrupted the minister suddenly, glancing thoughtfully at the letter in his hand. “Why did you do that? I should think from the letter she might be a great help. Why not let her come?”
The father wheeled around sharply again, kicking a corner of the rug that almost tripped him as if it had personality and were interfering with his transit.
“Let her come! Let her come here and meet that other girl? Not on any account. I—could not bear it!“ Again that tortured wistfulness in his voice like a half sob.
The minister watched him curiously with a sorrowful glance at the letter in his hand.
“I don’t quite see —how you can bear not to!” he said slowly. “After reading that appeal for your love—!”
“Appeal? What appeal? I don’t know what you mean?”
He took the letter hurriedly and dashed himself into his desk chair with a deep sigh, beginning to read with hurried, feverish eyes.
“Man! I didn’t read all this before! I was so upset! And then the other girl came!”
There was silence for an instant while he read. Then his eyes lifted with a look of almost fear in them. “Man alive!” he gasped. “She’s coming this morning! My letter will be too late!” He picked up the envelope he had so recently addressed and looked at it savagely as if somehow it were to blame. “Too late!” He flung it angrily on the floor, where it slid under the edge of the desk and lay. The tortured man jerked himself out of his chair again and began his walk up and down.
“What shall I do? You’re a minister. You ought to know. She’s on her way now. She’ll be here in a few minutes, and I can’t have her. She mustn’t meet that other girl! I can’t have Alice’s child see her! What would you do? Oh, why did God let all this come about?” He wheeled around impatiently and stamped off again. “I’ll have to get the other one off to school somewhere, I suppose. You wouldn’t be willing to meet that train and say I was called away, would you? Get her to go to a hotel in the city somewhere and wait? I could hire an automobile and take Athalie away. Perhaps there’s a school near her old home. Wait! I know a woman on the Hudson—I wonder—Give me long distance, central.” He had picked up the phone and began to tap the floor with his foot, glancing anxiously toward the clock that was giving a warning whir before striking. “What time does that train get in, Bannard? Have you a timetable?”
Bannard glanced at the clock.
“Why! You haven’t much time,” he said in a startled tone. “It gets here at eleven ten. Would you like my car?” He stepped to the window, glanced out, gave a long, low musical whistle, and in a moment Blink appeared, darting up the front walk warily, with eyes on the front window.
The minister leaned out of the window and called: “Blink, can you get my car here from the garage in five minutes? I want to meet that train.”
Blink murmured a nonchalant “Sure!” and was gone. The minister turned back to the frantic father, who was foaming angrily at the telephone operator and demanding better service.
“Mr. Greeves,” he said placing his hand on the other’s arm affectionately, “my car will be here in a moment. I think you had better take it and meet your daughter. It will be embarrassing for her to have to meet a stranger—”
Patterson Greeves shook his head angrily.
“No, no! I can’t meet her! I can’t help it! She’ll have to be embarrassed then. She got up the whole trouble by coming, didn’t she? Well, she’ll have to take the consequences. I have to stay here and get this other one off somewhere. I’ll send her back to her mother if I can’t do anything else! I won’t be tormented this way. I know. You’re thinking this is no way for a father to act, but I’m not a father! I’ve never had the privileges of a father, and I don’t intend to begin now. If my wife had lived it would have been different! But she had to be taken away! Central! Central! Can’t you give me long distance?”
Down the long flight of polished mahogany stairs heavy, reluctant footsteps could be heard approaching.
Patterson Greeves hung up the receiver with a click and wheeled around in his chair with an ashen look, listening.
“She’s coming now!” he exclaimed nervously. “I’ll have to do something. Bannard, if you’d just take that car of yours and go meet that train, I’ll be everlastingly obliged to you. If you don’t want to do it, let her get here the best way she can. It will give us that much more time. I’ve got to do something with Athalie at once!” He rose and went anxiously toward the door, opening it a crack and listening. The steps came on, slowly, and yet more slowly. The minister pitied his new friend from the bottom of his heart, and yet there was a humorous side to the situation. To think of a man of this one’s attainments and standing being afraid of a mere girl, afraid of two girls! His own children!
It was a simple matter, of course, to meet a train and tell the girl her father had been occupied for the time. The car slid briskly up to the curb in the street on time to the dot, and the minister turned pleasantly and picked up his hat.
“I’ll go. Certainly. What do you wish me to say to her?”
“Oh! Nothing. Anything! You’ll have to bring her here, I suppose! Make it as long a trip as possible, won’t you? I’ll try to clear the coast somehow!” He glanced down at the baggage of his younger daughter with a troubled frown. “There’s a carriage here—The servants will—Well, I’ll see what can be done. You’d better go quickly, please!” He looked nervously toward the door, and Bannard opened it and hurried out to his car, Athalie entering almost as he left, her eyes upon the departing visitor.
“Who was that stunning-looking man, Dad? Why didn’t you introduce me? You could have just as well as not, and I don’t want to waste any time getting to know people. It’s horribly dull in a new place till you know everybody.”
Chapter 5
Athalie entered with nonchalance and no sign of the recent tears. Her face had perhaps been washed and a portion of her makeup removed, but she still had a vivid look and her hair was more startling than ever, now that her rakish hat was removed. It stood out in a fluffy puffball, like a dandelion gone to seed, and gave her an amazing appearance. Her father stared at her with a fascinated horror and was speechless.
She had changed her traveling clothes for an accordion-pleated outfit of soft jade-green silk with an expansive neckline and sleeves that were slit several times from the wrist to shoulder and swung jauntily in festoon-like serpentine curves around her plump pink arms. She had compromised on a pair of black chiffon-silk stockings with openwork lace and black satin sandals with glittering little rhinestone clasps. A plantinum wristwatch and a glitter of jewels attended every movement of her plump pink hands with their pointed seashell fingertips, and a long string of carved ivory beads swung downward from her neck and mingled with the clutter of a clattering, noisy little girdle. No wonder he stared. And she had done all that while he was talking with the minister.
He stared, and her dimples began to come like a reminder of her mother in the old luring way, filling him with pain and anger and something worse than helplessness. Her mother’s face was not as full as hers, but the dimples went and came with such familiar play!
“Dad, you needn’t think you can keep me shut up away from things,” she said archly. “I’m going to know all your men friends and be real chummy with them. The men always like me. I’m like Lilla in that! They bring me stacks of pr
esents and slews of chocolates. I’ve got a lot of going-away boxes in my trunks. Some of them are real jim-dandies. This watch is a present from Bobs. You know who Bobs is, don’t you? Bobs Farrell. He was dead gone on Lilla. He gave me this watch on my last birthday. It’s platinum and diamond. Isn’t it great? He brought me out in his car this morning or I would have had to wait two hours. When I found out what time this little old train started, I just called up his apartment, and he came right down and got me and took me up to his place for breakfast. He has the darlingest apartment all by himself with a servant to wait on him and the most wonderful meals! And he’s going to have a theater party for me some night with a dinner afterward at his apartment. Won’t that be simply great? I’m to ask any two girls from school I like, and he will get the men. And by the way, Daddy, I’ve invited a house party for the first week in June. You don’t mind, do you? There are ten of the girls in my class, and I’ve promised them the time of their life. The fellows will be here only at the weekend. They have to be back at prep Monday morning. Their old school doesn’t close for another two weeks after ours.”
His most amazing child had rattled on without letup thus far, and this was the first period he had been able to grasp. He hurried to make use of it, meanwhile glancing nervously at the clock. “School!
Yes. School! May I ask why you are not in school yourself?”
“Oh!” she wreathed the dimples coquettishly around her lips. “Why, didn’t you know I had been expelled?” She dimpled charmingly as though it were something to be proud of. “I suppose Lilla didn’t tell you because she was afraid you’d be shocked, but you might as well know all about it at the start. It saves misunderstandings. You see, we had a pajama party!”
“A pajama party!” cried the horrified father.
“Oh now, Daddy Pat! You needn’t pull a long face and make out you never did such things. You know you had jazzy times when you went to school, and you can’t be young but once. There isn’t anything so terrible in a pajama party! You see the whole trouble was I got caught out on the fire escape in mine and all the rest got away, so I had to be expelled, but it was fun. I don’t care. I’d do it all over again just to see how Guzzy Foster—that’s the math prof—looked when that ice and salt went down his back. You see it was this way. One of the girls had a box of treats from home, and she happened to tell one of the boys from the military prep that she had it, and he coaxed to get some of the things. So May Beth told him if he and some of his friends would come under the fire escape at exactly midnight she’d drop down a box of cake for them. Well, everything went all right till the party was almost over and the girls had eaten all they could stuff, and they had the box for the boys all packed and I was to go out and throw it down to them because May Beth had an awful cold and her pajamas were just thin silk and she was all of a shiver anyway from eating so much cold ice cream. So I said I didn’t mind even if it was cold. I thought it would be fun, and I went out with the box and whistled softly for the boys, and they answered once, and then it was all very still. It was moonlight, and I could see them lined up among the bushes on the campus. I swung the box over the railing and whispered, ‘Here she comes,’ and just as I did it I somehow caught my toe in the burlap that came off the ice-cream freezer—I had on Tillie Irvin’s pink satin slippers with forget-me-nots on them, and she was sore as a boil at me about that, too—and then before I knew what was happening, I somehow hit the ice-cream freezer and knocked it over, and slosh! Out went all the sloppy ice and salt water through the iron grating on the fire escape, and I looked down and there was Guzzy Foster—he and his wife have their apartment right under my room, and we thought they were away for the weekend, that’s why we chose my room for the party. He was just inside his window with his head stuck out of an old red bathrobe looking up—the old ferret. He was always snooping round to stop any fun that was going—and he caught the whole stream of icy salt water full in his face and down his old mathematical back, and I hope he gets pneumonia from it. He’s the limit! Well, I heard him gasp and splutter and draw in his head, and I heard the boys snicker down in the bushes and scatter out to the street—they got the cake all right. I called one of ‘em up on the phone at the station before I left and found out—and I just danced up and down in those pink satin slippers with the forget-me-nots and howled for a minute, it was so funny. And then all of a sudden I realized it had got very still behind me, and I looked in the window and the lights were out. There wasn’t a sound of a girl to be heard, and down the hall I could hear hard steps that sounded like Mrs. Foster, so I tried to get in the window, but it was fastened! Babe Heath did that because she thought if the window was locked they wouldn’t think to look out. But there I was in thin silk pajamas and the wind blowing up from the river like ice! It was grand skating the next day so you may know it was pretty fierce! But I stuck it out till she found me, and they expelled me so quick Lilla didn’t have a chance to come and see what was the matter. They just sent me home that night chaperoned by Guzzy Foster himself. His name’s Augustus Charles, but we call him Guzzy, and I had a horrid, horrid time, so it’s up to you to be good to me!”
Patterson Greeves gasped and grasped the arms of the big chair into which he had dropped as Athalie entered, looking at his child in abject helplessness. The distant sound of an approaching train stirred him to nervous action once more.
“I certainly cannot approve of your outrageous conduct,” he began, in a tone such as he might have used in his classroom. “It was inexcusable, impossible, indecent! I cannot think how a girl could bring herself to so demean herself. And the first thing you must do will be to write a humble acknowledgment and apology to the principal of the institution and promise that for the future your conduct shall be irreproachable. I will see at once about your reinstatement, and I cannot accept in future any disregard of the rules of the school or of the rules of good breeding.”
But the girl broke in with a boisterous laugh: “What’s that you say? Me go back to that school? Well, I guess anyhow not. Not on your life, I don’t! You couldn’t drag me within sight of the old dump. I’m done with it forever, and I’ll tell the world I’m glad! Why? Don’t you like me? Doesn’t this dress suit you any better? I’ve got some stunners in my trunks. When do you think they will bring them out from the city? Can’t we get a car and go after them? I’m just dying to show you some of my things and the big portrait of Lilla she had taken for the general!”
Greeves arose, white and angry.
“Get on your traveling things at once!” he almost shouted. “We are going back to your school. It is impossible for you to stay here. I am a very busy man. I have important work to do.” He glanced wildly at his watch and then gave a quick look out of the window as he strode to the bell and touched it, flinging open the hall door and looking up the stairs.
“But I am not going back to school!” declared Athalie with a black look. “I’m going to stay right here! I won’t be the least trouble in the world. I’ll have my friends, and you can have yours. I’ll go my way, and you can go yours. That’s the way Lilla and I always did. Only, Daddy Pat, have we got to have that old limb of a housekeeper around? I hate her! I couldn’t get on with her a day. I’m sure I’d shock her. She’s a pie-faced hypocrite, and you’d better fire her. I’ll run the house. I know how! Daddy Pat—may I call you Pat?”
“No!” thundered the scientist. “You may not. You may say ‘Father’ if it’s necessary to call me anything!” He glared at her. “And you may go to your room at once and stay there until I send for you!” he added suddenly, as he glanced once more out of the window and saw an automobile draw up before the door. Then both of them became aware that Anne Truesdale stood in the open door, her face as white as her starched apron, a look of consternation upon her meek face, and her hands clasped nervously at her belt.
Chapter 6
It had not occurred to the minister until he came within sight of the station and heard the whistle of the approaching train that he had
come on a most embarrassing errand.
It had appeared to him as he talked with her father and read her letter that the girl he was about to escort to her home might be anywhere between twelve and fifteen years old. His information concerning Patterson Greeves’s history had been vague and incomplete. He looked like a young man for all this experience, and the minister had jumped to the conclusion that both girls were quite young.
But when the train drew up at the station and the only stranger who got out proved to be a lovely young woman dressed with quiet but exquisite taste and with an air of sweet sophistication, he became suddenly aware that the errand he had come upon was one of an exceedingly delicate nature, and he wished with all his soul he had not undertaken it.
She carried a small suitcase in her hand and walked with an air of knowing exactly where she was going. She paused only an instant to glance around her and then went straight to the station waiting room and checked her suitcase. She did it with so much apparent forethought, as if she had been there before and knew exactly what she had to do, that the young man hesitated and looked around for a possible other arrival who might be the girl he had come to meet. But the train snorted and puffed its way slowly into motion and started on, and no other passengers appeared. As she turned away from the checking desk he came hesitantly up to her, and their eyes met.
She was slight and small with a well-formed head poised alertly and delicate features that gave one the sense of being molded and used by a spirit alive to more than the things of this earth. The impression was so strong that he hesitated, with hat lifted in the very act of introducing himself, to look again with startled directness into a face that was so exactly a counterpart of what he had dreamed a girl someday might be that he had the feeling of having been thrust with appalling unreadiness into her presence.
Tomorrow About This Time Page 5