Tomorrow About This Time (17 page)

She was a tiny, wiry little woman with bright beads of eyes and the quick restless motions of a bird. She perched on the edge of her chair and looked quickly from one to another as she talked.

“Girl,” said Grandma pursing her lips and looking over her spectacles. “It was a girl. He gave it to its mother’s parents. I heard they didn’t have much to do with one another.”

“Well, I should think not!” said Ruby Philips. “A man that would marry again!” Mrs. Philips didn’t believe in second marriages.

“And then get divorced!” reminded Grandma.

“Well, poor thing. I hope she hasn’t suffered from her father’s sins,” said Maria righteously.

“Now Maria,” reproved Mother, “you’re going a little far. You don’t really
know
that her father sinned.”

“Well, he got divorced, didn’t he?”

“Yes, but Maria, he might uv
had
to—you know, it isn’t
always
the
men’s
fault.”

“It’s pretty generally the men’s fault, I guess,” declared Maria, tossing her chin. “I thank goodness I never got tied up to one.”

“Well, Maria, I don’t think you’re very polite to Arden,” said Mrs. Arden, rising with a flame in each cheek.

“Oh, Arden’s Arden of course. Besides he’s my third cousin. And present company is always excepted, you know,” laughed Maria sharply.

Mrs. Arden drew her cape around her briskly and stepped toward the door. There was still a stiffness in her voice. She pursed her thin lips as if her mouth shut with a drawstring like a bag of marbles.

“Well, I must say I don’t like insinuations, even when it’s a joke,” she said coldly. “Come Arden, we’ll be late to that meeting. You’d think if there
was
a wedding he’d invite someone from the town, just for old time’s sake, wouldn’t you? Of course the minister; but he’s a comparative stranger, and he
has
to have him. Well, I suppose we’ll know sometime. Good night.”

Arden, drab and homely with blue eyes and light eyelashes, followed her obediently out with an air of getting in the way of his own feet. She tripped along down the walk like a sparrow, and Arden loped behind, a long-limbed, disproportionate man who never seemed to be quite inhabiting all the room in his garments. They crossed the street and passed the Silver house, looking closely and walking slowly. The street lights twinkled over their heads as they passed.

Before long a shadow passed along the street, with something low trailing after, but there was no sound of footsteps, though Grandma had her window open a trifle. A moment later the front door of the Silver house opened, letting out a stream of light, and shut again before they could see who had gone in. There seemed to be a dog around. He howled once from near the Silver gate.

At ten o’clock someone came out, perhaps two. It almost seemed like a group. Was one the minister? Was that a dog or only a speck in the eyes that had strained so long through the darkness?

Lights appeared upstairs across the street, went out, and the Silver house remained a white shape against the velvet blue of the night sky. Little stars blinked distantly, and the tree toads sang uninterruptedly in the meadow and down by the brook. Grandma was snoring gently in her downstairs bedroom, and Pristina lay in her narrow bed up in the roof bedroom and wondered why life had seemed to pass her by.

Chapter 14

T
o the right of the Silver house and almost directly across from Vandemeeter’s stood a neat gray house with wide verandas and white trimmings. There were tall trees of great age in front of the place that gave it a retired look, and the fine lace curtains at the front windows were always immaculate. The fence was gray with square fat gateposts, and a row of blue and yellow and white crocuses were picketed on either side of the gravel path. It was one of those places that you always feel you can depend on, and the people who lived in it were the same way.

Joshua Truman was the Silver Sands banker, and the fact that the whole neighborhood called him Josh, and that he had a hearty handshake and a smile for everybody, in no way detracted from his dignity. He seemed to have been an honest banker and beloved by everybody. He had shaggy overhanging gray eyebrows, but they hid a twinkle in the mild blue eyes. Mrs. Truman was plain with sweet eyes, wore her hair in close satin ripples above her ears as she had done ever since she was married, and kept always a neat brown silk with touches of velvet trimmings for her best dress. She was president of the missionary society in the Presbyterian church. There were two children, David, a lump of activity aged ten, and Mary, a tall lank girl of fifteen with a heavy braid of yellow hair down her back and big dreamy eyes.

“I think Patterson Greeves has come back,” Mrs. Truman announced at the breakfast table next morning. “I didn’t notice anyone coming in, but Hetty says she saw some trunks arrive. I thought perhaps you’d want to run in and see if there is anything we can do—”

“Oh, why, yes of course,” said the banker heartily. “I forgot to speak about it, those men coming in and staying so long after supper last night. He did come. I met the minister, and he told me. It seems he has brought his two daughters home. One is about Mary’s age. I think she had better arrange to run in today sometime and show a little attention, perhaps offer to take the girl to school or something just to make her feel at home.”

“Oh, Mother!” said Mary in dismay. “I can’t call on a strange girl!
You go.”

“Is his—? Did he—? Well—what about his wife, Joshua? Isn’t he
—married
now?”

“Oh, well—no—I believe not. That is—” he glanced at the children, “I should think that was all the more reason why we should show some courtesy to those motherless girls.”

“Yes, of course,” said his wife with a look of relief that the matter was settled. “Certainly, Mary, you run in after school this afternoon and visit. You can take some of our strawberries and a bunch of daffodils and just run in without any formality.”

“Oh, Mother!” said Mary aghast. “I promised Roberta I’d play duets with her this afternoon.”

“Well, take Roberta along,” said her mother crisply. “The Moffats were always good friends of the Silvers.”

“Yes, certainly,” spoke up the father. “Get some of the other girls to go, too. It will be a pleasant thing for a stranger to feel that she is welcomed into a community the first day. Talk to some of the girls and make it
work
, Mary.”

“All right,” said Mary reluctantly, with a speculative glance over at the Silver house, which she could see from her place at the table. “I might ask her to go to Christian Endeavor,” she suggested. “We girls are on the Lookout committee. We all promised to try and get some new members. What’s her name?”

“Well, that I didn’t discover. I guess it’s up to you to find out, daughter,” said her father with a pat on her shoulder as he got up and went to kiss his wife good-bye for the morning.

“Do I have to dress up, Mother?” asked Mary, still thinking of her prospective visit. “I don’t mind going if I can wear my school dress, but I hate to waste the time dolling up. Besides, I always feel so embarrassed in my best clothes.”

“I don’t think it will be necessary to dress up,” said her mother with a quick inspection of the neat blue gingham with its sheer white ruffles and the crisp dark-blue hair ribbon that tied the heavy braid of hair. “Little girls don’t have to bother about their clothes. She’ll probably like you far better if you go just as you come from school. Be sure your hands are clean of course.”

Mary brightened and went off to school quite full of her plans for the afternoon. Her grade was in the old brick schoolhouse up beyond the Truman house. She did not pass the Silver place. She would have been surprised to know that the girl she was proposing to visit was still in bed asleep. Mary had been up for two hours, had practiced an hour and a half, and helped her mother get the breakfast on the table because Hetty, the maid of all work, had a lame foot and was being spared. Mary glanced back at the Silver place and felt a warm spot around her heart. It was going to be nice to have a girlfriend living there. They could go to school together. Living next door she naturally would be “best friend.” The Silver place would be an awfully nice house to have a Christian Endeavor social in sometime. Would Mr. Greeves be willing? She would suggest this to the girls. This would make them eager to go and see her. She could hear the first bell ringing as she hurried along. She started to run to have more time to talk before school began. Her eyes were bright with the new idea when she entered the schoolyard. She decided that she would ask the new girl over to make fudge that evening if all went well.

On the other side of the Silver mansion, the side where Athalie’s room faced, there was an old brown wooden house. It hadn’t been painted in years and was not likely to be painted in years to come if it lasted so long. It was built in the days of scrollwork and rejoiced in a cupola, lofty and square, with alternate lights of red and blue and yellow glass bordering a large clear one, two on each side. The front gable was ornamented with a fretwork of ancient wood, faded brown like the rest, which had somehow, either in a storm or in consequences of the mending of the roof, become detached from the ridgepole on one side and fallen out of plumb. The result was rakish, like a woman with her bonnet on cockeyed. The windows of the house were gothic and latticed, and the doors all sagged. The Weldons lived there, and they sagged, too. Uri Weldon usually did his sagging down in the lobby of the one hotel, sunk deep in a worn-out leather chair with his heels above his head on another and a large sagging cigar in one corner of his mouth. He kept up the hallucination that he was thus conducting business, which consisted in trying to get someone to patent some of his inventions, but his business sagged, too, and never came to anything. Lizette Weldon, his wife, was spare with little black gimlet eyes. When she walked she was the shape of rain in a driving storm, but nothing ever escaped her vision whichever way she was going. The property was theirs for life, entailed so that they could not sell it and would pass to a nephew now residing in China when they no longer had need for it. They had been there for years, however, and seemed likely to outlast the nephew in China. Gentle Aunt Lavinia had had her trials with Lizette, and young Patterson Greeves owed many a sound thrashing to her sharp eyes and ready tongue.

A long stretch of ill-kept wire grass constituted the lawn in front of the Weldons, ending abruptly in a row of somber pine trees behind which the house retired as if aware of its hopeless shabbiness. Had it not been for these pines the whole place would have been a sorry contrast to the well-kept Silver estate. There was something shielding, almost dignifying, in the pines.

But the side windows had no row of pines and looked across a clear space straight to the side of the Silver house; and Athalie’s window presented a liberal view for any interested eye.

On the first afternoon of her arrival Lizette was mounting the stairs for her daily nap when she happened to notice a curious figure climbing from the window. Having been occupied in the kitchen during the morning she was as yet unaware of the arrivals, although she had seen a light in the front room the night before, but the shades were drawn almost immediately, and the light remained only about five minutes so she thought nothing of it. But this was startling.

Lizette hurried to get an old pair of binoculars, which she kept handy and with which she had often settled uncertainties in the neighborhood in times past, and brought it to bear upon the object of her interest. She applied the binoculars to her eyes and screwed them hastily into focus then withdrew them and stared with her naked eyes.

“Oh, my!” she said aloud. “Ain’t that awful!” She lifted the binoculars once more and gazed. “Pants!” she ejaculated wildly, a kind of triumph in her tone, “Well, now I guess they’re coming down a peg! What would the old Silvers say to that! A girl in pants! Of course the papers advertise them, but the Silvers never were that kind. And look at her hair! My soul! How does she get it to stay out so. Ain’t it redickilus! Where’s she going? My good father’s! If she isn’t going to climb down! Well, that beats everything! Who is she?”

Lizette hurried down the stairs and rushed to the front window to get a closer view between the pines, then noting the stranger’s general direction toward the town she hastened to the telephone, calling up a friend who lived farther down the street.

“That you, Miz Hoskins? Well, go to your front window and see that girl in pants coming down the street. She just climbed down off the old Silver pergola out the side bedroom window. Hurry and I’ll hold the phone.”

Mrs. Hoskins had a hot loaf of bread in a pan, holding it with a wet towel in one hand when she picked up the receiver, but she hurried to the window, hot pan and all. There succeeded a pause during the passing of Athalie, then steps and a voice.

“My, ain’t that scandalous? And all those young boys down around town! Not that I mind the pants so much if everybody wore ‘em. It’s sensible, you know. But the way she walks and all. And her face. Did you see how it was made up? Why those girls that sang at the minstrel show weren’t half so coarse looking. And the air of her. You said she came from Silvers? Well, I guess there’s going to be some doings there from all I hear. My husband took the express over with the trunks. Say, you oughta have seen those trunks. Seven of ‘em I think there was, and not one could be lifted without four men. Just to think such goings on in this respectable town!” “But who is she?”