Tomorrow About This Time (20 page)

“It makes no difference what I sound like,” crisped the father, “nor by what names your school friends choose to call things. I am telling you certain facts that must be acted upon by you as long as you are under my care. They are the only basis upon which you and I can have any dealings whatever. You cannot carry things with a high hand, ignore everybody else, and overturn systems. You are not the ruler here, and you must understand it from the beginning.”

He paused and eyed her, but she gave no sign, just let her smoldering eyes rest on him sullenly, unflinchingly, the slow contempt in the upper lip continuing to grow.

“Those things being thoroughly understood and complied with on your part willingly,” he went on hurriedly, determined not to give her an opportunity to demur, “I am entirely willing to talk over your future with you and try to arrange, as far as is possible and best for you, to make such plans as will be agreeable to you. As to the school you will attend, I shall be glad to send for catalogs and let you have a part in the selection of your—”

She raised her hand imperiously.

“Stop right there!” she demanded sharply. “If you’re banking on me being a good little girl and going to school you might as well understand that I won’t! I came here to live with you. The court said I was to be under your care, and here I’m going to stay. If you try to send me away anywhere I’ll simply run away and make you more trouble. I’d drown myself before I’d go to another boarding school. I’ve lived in boarding schools all my life and I’m
done
with them! You can’t shut me off that way for it can’t be done!”

A glance into her eyes showed that she fully meant every word she said, and something in her tone reminded her stubborn father that she had inherited his power of sticking to a decision. Remembering last evening, it seemed fully likely that she would carry out any threat that she might choose to make. He shuddered inwardly and began to weaken.

“Of course, if I found that you were entirely submissive and obedient it might be possible to arrange a school not far away—” Athalie arose abruptly.

“Is that all you have to say to me?” she asked in a businesslike tone. “Because I’ve got some letters to write.”

“Athalie, sit down,” he thundered, entirely unnerved, feeling that his work was all undone again.

“Not when you speak to me in that tone,” said the girl, shrugging her shoulders and raising her chin. “I suppose you call that kind of talk up to the standards of your respectable family.”

The crimson swept over her white sensitive face. Her voice was so perfectly like Lilla’s, the reply so entirely what she would have given.

“I beg your pardon, Athalie. It was not. I am very much upset this morning. I will endeavor to control my voice. Will you kindly be seated? Now, I want to ask whether you are going to be willing to be subject to my authority. If not, I must begin to take immediate steps to place you where you will be looked after in the right way. I cannot have such scenes recurring. I may as well say I
will
not have them. I am a busy man with important work to do, and this is utterly upsetting. Will you be a good girl and try to do right?”

His child regarded him coolly. “I don’t know whether I will or not,” she answered calmly. “It depends on how you behave. If you let me have my own way and have a good time I presume I shall—depends on what you call good. I don’t intend to be goody-goody. But if you try to bully me you’ll wish you hadn’t, that’s all. That’s what I told Lilla when I left her. I said, ‘Lilla, he may have bullied you, but he’s not going to bully me. It isn’t being done.’”

A sudden startled wonder came to him as she spoke of her mother that made him forget to listen to the arrogant ending of her sentence.

“Athalie,” he said, suddenly changing the subject, “are you aware that your mother has sailed for Europe?”

The girl gave him a look as if he had unexpectedly stabbed her, and her eyes filled up with tears, her lips trembled. She struggled for an instant with a sob, gave a slight nod of assent with her chin, and broke down with a heartrending little cry, sinking her head on her arms, her whole gaudily attired body shaking with suppressed sobs, as if the thought was too deep for sound.

Patterson Greeves stared at her for a moment uncomprehending, unable to meet this amazing phase of his most mysterious daughter, resenting her change of combat as if she had broken some rule of the game. She was not being true to type. How could he meet such an antagonist? Lilla used to cry prettily, pettedly, outrageously, to order, when she found all other weapons useless; but this was grief, genuine, deep, terrible. The grief of an uncontrolled nature. Grief of the kind he always had felt in his own troubles. Was it possible that something in his heart was stirring toward her, yearning? No. This child of Lilla deserved all she was getting—ah! but child of himself, too. Could it be possible that Lilla loved the child? If so, why had she sent her away from her? It seemed impossible that Lilla could love anything but herself. Could it be possible that the child loved Lilla? She did not seem like a loving child. But those sobs were not angry, they were hurt, stricken cries. Had Lilla been unkind to the girl? His sense of justice roused toward her. He put out a vague hand and touched her shoulder.

“Athalie, haven’t you had a—
happy
—life? Hasn’t your mother been good to you?” he asked hesitatingly.

She lifted a tear-stained face from behind which fires flashed in her eyes and shook his groping hand off.

“That’s none of your business,” she said. “You never tried to make it any happier, did you?”

The father sat and saw a few more of his shortcomings marched out before him in the open and swallowed hard on the sight. He, Patterson Greeves, of a respected family, had contrived to do some of the most contemptible things a man can do on earth! It was unbelievable, and yet he was beginning to believe it.

He stared at her a moment with that dazed expression coming again. It dazes most souls to really look in their own eyes and see how different they are from their fancied selves. Then he drew a deep sigh and rose, going to the window to stare out across the meadow.

“No. I don’t suppose I ever did,” he said reluctantly at last. The sobs ceased as suddenly as they had begun. There ensued a prolonged silence. Then the father added as though to himself: “I had no intention of overlooking any duty, I simply did not realize.”

Finally the girl raised her head and in quite a controlled voice said: “That’s all right, Pat, I’m here now. Forget it! We aren’t getting anywhere, and I’m going up and wash my face. If you change your mind about that golf just send me word.”

She was at the door when he wheeled around and said hesitatingly: “There’s one thing, Athalie. I wish you wouldn’t call me Pat. I don’t like it. It sounds disrespectful. It makes me ashamed. I—”

“All right, Dad, since you ask it that way, I won’t. But I like you a lot more when you’re Pat. It seems to make you more homey and understandable. Well, so long! You know where to find me!” and she flashed away like a bright-throated, naughty blue jay.

The father sat down in a chair and covered his face with his hands. The interview for which he had been all night preparing was over, and he had gone nowhere. Nothing had been accomplished, except that perhaps he himself had weakened. A sense of his own forgotten responsibility and a certain wistful turn of her voice had undone him. How was he ever to do anything with his unmanageable child?

The door suddenly opened without warning, and Athalie’s head flashed in again. “I just wanted to say, Dad, that if you take that other girl along you needn’t count me in. She and I are two people. I hate her. So don’t go to bunching us up for it won’t work, and don’t give me any more of that line about getting advice from her about clothes, see? I won’t stand for it, that’s all. If you want me to live up to your standards you’ve got to live up to mine! Understand?”

She was gone. And if she had suddenly hurled a leaden weight on her father’s heart the world could not have turned darker or his heart been more heavy. How was such a state of things ever to work out?

A soft knock on the door broke in on these thoughts, and Silver stepped inside the room dressed in coat and hat and gloves, with her suitcase in her hand.

Chapter 16

W
henever Silver came into his vision again she gave her father a start, her appearance was so much like his lost Alice.

There was something exquisite and spiritlike in her face that rested and soothed him. It was curious that the word “blessed” flitted through his mind when he thought of how she made him feel. He lifted a troubled face to greet her now, and a sick dismay stole over him as he saw the suitcase in her hand.

She put it down and came quickly over to him, her lips smiling although her eyes were grave. Her voice had a lilt of sorrow in it though she tried to make it cheerful.

“Father, I’ve thought it all out in the night,” she said, perching on the arm of his chair and putting her arm softly around his neck—just as her mother used to sit and touch his hair lightly with her fingers. He had not thought of it in a long, long time.

“You see, I’ve sort of promised this man that I would take this position, and he has held it for me already for several days while I was getting packed up. I feel that I ought to go back right away and get to work.”

She was talking rapidly, trying to stem the tide of emotion she evidently felt, and the stricken look on his face made it no easier.

“I didn’t tell you this morning at breakfast because I didn’t want you to be disturbed by any other question till you had had your talk with Athalie. It wasn’t fair to her. But I saw her just now as she came upstairs, and I feel sure you have come to some understanding.

“Now Father, dear, please don’t try to change me.” She took the hand that he put out in protest and held it close. “Listen to me. It isn’t at all the way you are thinking. I’m not being driven away or anything. I am simply going away because I feel that is my duty. No, you’re not to talk, please, till I’m through. Listen, Father, Athalie is younger than I am, and she needs you more. You must get acquainted with her and teach her to love you. She hasn’t ever had anybody real to love her, I am sure, and I have, you know. And it isn’t as though I didn’t have you, too. It’s quite, quite different from what it was before I came. I have a father now, and I know he loves me. And we can write to each other, and that will be wonderful! And I’ll have someone to advise me—”

“Stop!” cried Patterson Greeves springing to his feet, his tortured nerves refusing to hear more. “Stop! Don’t speak of it again! I tell you I have withstood enough. You shall not go away, Silver, my Silver-Alice! I need you! I want you! You remember your grandmother told you to find out if I needed you. Well,
I do!
God knows I do! Do you suppose for an instant I would let the welfare of that other strange child come between us? She is nothing to me, never can be. Her mother was a viper, and she is going to be just like her! I will send her—”

Suddenly both of them became aware of the opening of the door, and there on the threshold stood Athalie, attired in giddy sports clothes with a golf club in her hand, but the bright smile with which she had entered had died on her lips, and her face was white as death, her eyes like two blazing coals.

For an instant she stood there facing her father, her eyes wide with sorrow, consternation, something terrible and inscrutable. Then she turned with a quick glance of hate toward Silver and exclaimed:

“Oh, heck!”

The slam with which she emphasized her exit from the door reverberated through the house like thunder as she stormed upstairs again. Anne Truesdale hurried in from the back hall with her apron wrapped around her hands and over her heart and stood like an old gray squirrel, her head on one side perking her ears, watching, listening. But Athalie’s sobs were smothered in the pillow for the hurt had gone deep, deep!

The two left in the library white and shaken looked at one another.

Silver’s eyes said sadly: “Father, don’t you see I must go?”

But the man’s lips spoke the answer: “It would be impossible, Silver. I could not endure her.”

It was an hour before they arrived at a compromise. Silver was to remain for a time, was to send for her trunk and to be allowed to follow her own course about keeping out of Athalie’s way, on condition that the father was to make an honest effort to win Athalie to a better way of behavior and to try to cultivate a little love between them, though that Patterson Greeves declared was an impossibility.

To this end he had agreed to keep his feelings in the background and try to show Athalie a good time, that being the thing that seemed to be uppermost in her mind and the most likely to make her amenable to reason.

When Silver left him to go back to her room it was with the satisfaction of seeing Anne Truesdale precede her up the stairs to tap at Athalie’s door with the message that her father was now ready to go with her to the golf links if she would come down at once.

How had the slip of a girl learned to wind one round her finger? Just as her mother used to do. Always able to make one see the sensible, sane thing to do, always willing to give up herself and stand in the background while someone else was being helped. Oh, why, why could that mother not have lived? He wondered all these things as he waited for the other daughter to present herself, half hoping she would declare not to go.

Athalie came slowly down with a gloomy air. Her eyes looked heavy and her mouth slouched at the corners. She carried her bag of clubs slung over her shoulder, and she had taken care to wear a bright skirt in place of the knickers that she would have chosen, obviously trying to please him if he had but known it, trying to respect that vague respectable family standard of which he had spoken.