About half past two Silver and her father went out together down the street. Athalie watched them from the shelter of the window curtain, frowning and noting the amicable footing on which they seemed to be.
They went to the station and reclaimed the girl’s suitcase. On the way back they stopped at the old church and walked slowly through the graveyard, the father pointing out the names on the white stones of those who would be of interest to her among her unknown kin, the girl’s face kindling with tender emotions as she read the records mossy with age. While they were gone the village delivery man arrived with four immense trunks and three wooden boxes. Athalie arose with alacrity from her bed of pain and superintended their installment in the house.
“You can bring the two wardrobe trunks right in here and unpack them at once,” she informed Anne Truesdale haughtily. “I shall need more closet room. I think I’ll take that room across the hall. You might put the other two trunks and the boxes there till we get them unpacked. I shall probably use that for my dressing room.”
“That is the spare bedroom,” said Anne coldly but firmly. “There is a trunk room in the attic where your trunks can be stored.” Athalie gave her a withering look, but such looks had no effect on Anne. She went her way and called the faithful servant, Joe. He managed an extra hand from the street, to help the delivery man, and Athalie’s mammoth trunks were carried slowly up the stairs. Nothing so huge in the way of a trunk had ever entered that house before, and Anne stood aghast as the first one hovered in sight and cast a quick and calculating eye toward the attic stairs. But when she saw how heavy they all were she changed her mind. They should go no farther until they were unpacked. So the first was placed in the back hall for further consideration, while the remaining three proved to be so enormous that Anne demanded the key, and down in the wide old front hall Athalie’s frivolous possessions were brought to light and carried up in the abashed and indignant arms of the three old-fashioned servants, who looked upon the trifles of lingerie with averted gaze and felt that the daring evening frocks of scarlet and silver and turquoise were little short of blasphemies. They hastened them up to the oblivion of the second floor before the master should return, and Anne stood for a full minute gazing out of the hall window across the sunny meadow and pondering whether she ought not perhaps to have left them all down on the back porch where the boxes had been sent, until the return of the master. Such doings! And for a young girl, too. Four trunks! What would Miss Lavinia have said!
Athalie meanwhile was rummaging among her brilliant clothes, pulling out this and that, deciding what she would wear next after she had sufficiently cowed that hard-hearted father of hers, and finally burrowed her way among silks and organdies to her chocolates and her pillow again, deciding not to put anything away until that objectionable “Anne” person came to do her bidding. She felt she must make it understood from the start that she would be waited upon. Anne wasn’t much like her mother’s maid, but such as she was she must be reduced to obedience. Perhaps she could coax her father to let her have a French maid all her own, a young girl about her own age. That would be rather fun.
Chapter 9
While Athalie was thus engaged her father and Silver were wandering through the quiet graveyard, talking of the past. The man found himself telling his child about his own boyhood, his aunt, his uncle, the old minister, the long sweet services in the quaint old church. There was no bitterness in his voice now as he spoke of the religion of those who had brought him up. Something softening had come over him. He hardly understood himself.
And then suddenly they had come upon the young minister, stooping over a little newly made grave, working with some violet plants in full bloom, planting them in the mellow soil until the little mound became a lovely bed.
They did not see him until they were almost upon him, and then he rose quickly, his hands covered with dirt, his hat on the back of his head, his dark hair curling in little moist waves around his white forehead, and a light of welcome in his face.
“I’m just fixing up this place a bit before the mother comes,” he explained. “It looked so desolate and bare, and this was her only child!” He stooped again and pressed the earth firmly around the violets, with strong capable fingers, arranging the plants as he talked till the whole little mound was one mass of lovely bloom. Then he rose, dusted the dirt away from his hands, and strolled along with them.
“Would you like a glimpse of the old church?” He flashed a smile at Silver.
“Oh, I would!” she exclaimed eagerly. “Grandmother used to tell me stories of my father’s home, all she knew, and she always told about the old church. Mother was here—once—wasn’t she?” She looked up shyly at her father who was walking absentmindedly, sadly beside the young people, his hands clasped behind him as if his thoughts were far in the past. He started as she asked the question, and a pain seemed to stab into his eyes like one who is suddenly brought to view something long lost and very dear.
“Yes, yes! Your mother was here! On our wedding trip! We went to church. We sat in the old pew. She wore a little white hat with white flowers on it and a thin blue dress!” It was as if he were musing over a beloved picture. The minister and the girl exchanged swift understanding glances.
“We will go in,” said the young man. “I have the key.”
He unlocked the old oaken door and the sunshine poured behind them into the ancient hall, lighting up the well-kept red ingrain carpet and meeting the sunshine that poured down from a stained-glass window above in curious blended dancing colors like the pattern of some well-remembered hymn sacred to many services held within those holy courts.
Patterson Greeves walked beside the young Alice as he had walked beside her mother up those stairs to the chapel above, so many years ago, and saw again in imagination the eager friends of his youth leaning over the grained oak railing to get the first glimpse of the bride. Felt again the swell of the pride in the girl he had chosen, remembered the look of pleasure in the eyes of his uncle Standish as he met them at the head of the stairs and escorted them down the aisle to the pew, and Alice’s smile as she looked up at him. Ah! That he had thought was to be the beginning of life! And only one short year it lasted! They all turned to bitterness and night! Fool that he had been that he had thought anything so heavenly could have lasted on this earth! That he had believed there existed a God who cared for him and planned for him! Ah! Well! Bitterness!
The blood rolled through his veins in a sickly, prickly, smothering wave, and he mopped his brow with his handkerchief and wondered why he had let himself in for this sort of thing after all these years. Why had he come down to the old church so full of memories?
Then he lifted his eyes to his girl who stood in the open doorway of the chapel now, framed in all her girlish beauty against the background of the rich coloring of the church, its jeweled windows casting rich fantastic lights in a rainbow flood of beauty, glancing away from the cluster of gilt organ pipes, glinting the gold fringe of the pulpit Bible bookmark, focusing on the blood red of the bright old carpet and beating it into a tessellated aisle of precious gems, mellowing the age-worn woodwork of the square high pews and the carvings of the pulpit and red plush pulpit chairs. There was something in the look of his girl as she stood there against that background with all the heritage of her grandfather’s and grandmother’s religion behind her that took away the pain again and made him watch her breathlessly and trace out every likeness to the mother who was gone, made him glad that she had come in spite of all the pain. Even glad of the pain, if it brought this vision.
The minister was explaining about the organ. “Not a wonderful organ and a bit old, but one of the good old makes, and with two or three beautiful stops.” Did she play? She did. He was sure she did.
Wouldn’t she try the organ?
“Her mother could play! Oh, she could play!”
Greeves had spoken without intending, but the other two gave no sign that they had seen the emotion in his face.
“Yes, I know,” the girl said quietly. “I studied with her teacher for two years. He was an old man, but he was wonderful. After he died Grandfather sent me away to study for a while.”
They lingered nearly an hour in the church, the girl drawing sweet harmonies from the old yellow keys, the minister lingering near, calling for this and that favorite, while Greeves sat long in the old family pew and read without seeing them the old familiar texts twined among the fresco, “THE LORD Is IN His HOLY TEMPLE: LET ALL THE EARTH KEEP SILENCE BEFORE HIM.” Even now after the years it sent a certain note of awe through his soul, an echo of the old days when God was real and life a rare vista before him. There were the same old windows. He used to count the medallions in the border when the sermon was unusually long. There was the shepherd and the lambs and the first verse of the twenty-third Psalm. There was the storm one, purple clouds driven hard across an iron sky, trees and shrubs bowing before it, and the inscription, “FOR IN THE TIME OF TROUBLE HE SHALL HIDE ME IN His PAVILION: IN THE SECRET OF His TABERNACLE SHALL HE HIDE ME.”
How firmly he used to believe in that when he was a child! How truly he expected to take refuge in that tabernacle if any storm overtook him! And how far he was now from any refuge. What a farce it had been! Beautiful while it lasted. But a farce! He drew himself up with a shudder of disgust at it all, and the tones of the organ caught him as Silver’s fingers trailed over the keys while she talked in low tone with the minister:
“Nearer my God to Thee, Nearer to Thee—”
It had been Aunt Lavinia’s favorite, and it stung its way into his soul in spite of his intention otherwise. He could hear her singing it, evenings in the nursery when she held him on her lap, his earliest remembrance, while her eyes watched the sky grow red and gray and deepen into starry blue, and the look about her mouth told him even in his baby days that there was something sad back somewhere in her life, something that she might have given up, possibly for him.
“Nearer my God to Thee, E’en though it be a cross—”
He could hear the gentle murmur of her timid voice in that very pew as he had sat beside her many years. Ah! The tears stung into his eyes unaccountably after all these years. And he? His song had been:
“Farther my God from Thee,
Farther from Thee—!”
How Aunt Lavinia would have agonized in prayer before her deep old wing chair if she could have known! He had seen her kneeling once like that, in her decorous high-necked, long-sleeved nightdress with the little tatted ruffles round her throat and wrists, her eyes closed, her gentle face illuminated with a wistful joy that had awed him, her lips murmuring softly words of pleading for him: “Oh God, bless our little Pat. Make him grow up a good man, loving God more than all else in life! Make him sorry for his sins! Make him love righteousness and hate wrong—”
The words were indelibly graven on his soul. He had not thought of them in years, but they were there just as sharply discernible as when that day he stole into her room to ask some trivial request for the next day’s pleasure and came upon her unawares and stood breathless as in the presence of the Most High, stealing away on tiptoe not to disturb her, lying wakeful in his bed till far into the night! Ah! He turned sharply toward the two, and his voice jarred a discord as he spoke to break the spell of solemnity.
“Come home with us and take dinner, Bannard!”
He had not intended to give that invitation. It had been the furthest from his thoughts only a moment before, but his tongue had spoken without leave. Now that it was given he found ease in the thought of a guest. Why not? He liked the young man. A guest more or less made little difference in the strange makeup of his sudden family. Perhaps it might even help out the embarrassing situation. But he was not prepared for the quick lighting of the young man’s face.
“That would be great!” he responded. “But—” and his eyes sought the girl’s face for the flicker of a glance, “are you quite sure you want—guests this first evening?”
“Oh, yes, come along!” said Greeves impatiently, half sorry now he had asked him, yet determined not to go back on his invitation. And Silver’s eyes gave him a pleasant impersonal welcome.
“I’ll be there at five o’clock,” he said looking at his watch. “I must meet the little mother out in the cemetery first, and there’s an old man who is dying—I must drop in there a few moments. I think I can make it by five. Will that be too soon? There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk over with you ever since I knew you were coming. Will you have a few minutes to spare?”
“Make it by five and we’ll have tea in the garden. Silver-Alice, can you make tea?” His tone was a shy attempt at playfulness, but it brought a great light into the girl’s eyes as she turned a sparkling face.
“Oh, surely!”
“Then make it five. I acquired a foreign habit of drinking tea in the afternoon while I was over there. We’ll have plenty of time for a talk then. We dine at seven.” Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had another daughter awaiting him and that the prospect was anything but pleasant, so with an almost brusque manner he left hurriedly. Turning back at the door he said to the minister: “Oh, by the way. What has become of that young person, Blink, I think you called him? We had an engagement with him this morning, hadn’t we? I had completely forgotten it. Do you know where I could find him to make my apologies?”
“He is washing my car at present,” laughed the minister. “I shall see him before long and can deliver your message. You needn’t worry about Blink. He is very wise for his years.”
“Well, suppose you tell him to drop in to dinner at seven. Tell him we’ll talk over bait after dinner.”
Terrence Bannard’s eyes registered appreciation.
“Thank you,” he said. “I doubt if he’ll come. He’s shy and proud among ladies, but he’ll appreciate the invitation.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” said the older man not in the least realizing that he was getting a large party on his hands but determined to discharge his obligations to the young friend of the evening before. “Tell him to come. I liked him.”
They were gone down the maple-shaded street, and the minister stood for an instant in the doorway watching the graceful girl as she walked beside her father, with a look in his eyes that would have brought the spyglasses of his congregation on him if any had been there to tell the tale.
Meanwhile, Athalie, never long content at a time, grew restless with her book, and wriggling out from the finery on the bed, stole to the door and listened. All was quiet downstairs except a distant subdued kitchen sound somewhere off toward the back. That impudent housekeeper was away about her business. Now was Athalie’s time to pry.
Removing her shoes and substituting blue satin slippers she stole cautiously down the hall and tried her father’s door, the front room on the same side of the hall with her own but separated by deep closets, one belonging to her room, the other to his.
She stood curiously staring around. It was a boy’s room, with college photographs and pennants and lacrosse sticks being its chief adornings. Only a bag filled with toiletries and a locked suitcase gave evidence of the entrance of the owner after the years of absence. Patterson Greeves had been too weary and too perturbed to unpack or make any changes since his arrival the night before. Athalie made very sure that there was nothing among his belongings to give any clue to his present character. She went stealthily from bag to suitcase, even opened bureau drawers, but no picture or letter or anything was brought to light that might be of possible interest, though she conducted her search with the manner and wisdom of a young detective.
Coming out she closed the door again and stole across the hall to the room that had been Aunt Lavinia’s.
Her eyes took in the details sharply, the old-fashioned neatness and comfort, and quiet beauty of the room, and the fact that the other girl had been taken there rather than herself, the front room, that best room in the house, with the big sunny windows to the street and at the si
de! Jealousy filled her heart, and her full, petulant lips came out in ugly lines. She walked quickly to the bed, snatched Silver’s hat and gloves, and flung them across the room behind a chair. She picked up her handbag and went through it carefully, ruthlessly tearing in half and restoring to its silken pocket a small photograph of a woman, the woman whose portrait was downstairs she felt sure. Then she went over to the closet and flung wide the door. After a moment’s survey of two or three shrouded dresses of outdated design that hung there, she gathered them up and flung them on a chair. Then she went back to her own room and selected an armful of her clothes and returning began to hang them on the hooks.
All at once she became aware that someone was near, and turning, her arms still half full of finery, she found herself facing Silver.
Not in the least abashed she looked her up and down contemptuously a full second before either spoke. Then Athalie asked rudely: “Well! Who are you?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Silver hesitating on the threshold, “am I intruding? Have I made a mistake? I was told this was my room—”
“Well it isn’t,” said Athalie roughly. “I’m going to take it myself! I don’t like the room that old frump gave me so I’m moving over here. You can have my room when I get out if you’re going to stay overnight. I’m Athalie Greeves, and this is my father’s house, so what I say goes!”
Silver stood quite still for an instant, the smile frozen on her lips, her eyes taking in the details of this impossible sister, her ears trying to refuse the evidence of the sounds they had heard. Something seemed to flicker and go out in her face, a stricken look flitted over it, succeeded by a sweet dignity and a lifting of her chin that in another might have amounted to haughtiness. Then she said quietly: “I see. Well, I will not trouble you.”
She walked over to the other side of the bed, recovered her hat and gloves, took up her handbag, and went out and down the stairs. Athalie did not stop to notice where she went nor care. She went on arranging her garments on the hooks, an ugly expression on her heavy young brow.
Tomorrow About This Time Page 8