Tomorrow About This Time (39 page)

Patterson Greeves slammed the receiver and stared at the wall. What was he to do next? She had taken a car to the city probably. He called up the garage. No, they had not even seen her. Bannard? Perhaps Bannard had taken her. He would find out if Aunt Katie knew.

But as he picked up the receiver to phone, Bannard himself walked into the room having been let in by Anne, an open letter in his hand, his face white and questioning.

“Has something happened, Greeves? I just found this in the post office. Has Sil—has Miss Greeves gone back to her former home? What’s the matter?”

Patterson Greeves turned a white, anxious face to the minister. “Upon my soul, Bannard, I don’t know what’s the matter! I just got this myself,” and he handed over his letter. “I suppose it’s another outbreak of that other devilish child of mine!’

“Perhaps Anne will know.”

He rang and Anne appeared.

“Did Silver say anything about going out, Anne?”

“No, Master Pat. I think she’s in her room! I heard her there a little while back.”

“She’s not in her room, Anne. She’s gone!”

“Gone, Master Pat! Gone! Oh, that can’t be! Why, it’s not over an hour since she called to me something about a package she’d left in my room, a collar she promised to give me.”

“Well, she’s gone. Did anything happen, Anne? Anything especially out of the way?”

“Miss Athalie,” Anne had her hand over her heart. “I heard her crying and carrying on in one of her tantrums,” she said anxiously.

“That’s it! I thought so! Silver has gone because she thinks Athalie would be happier with her out of the house. She wanted to go once before, and I wouldn’t let her. Oh, my God!”

“Oh, Master Pat, don’t be a-swearin’ now, please. She was that sweet a Christian. Surely she’ll come back.”

“Why, certainly,” said Bannard eagerly. “We must find her and bring her back.
I
will find her. Let me phone for Barry to bring my car. He can take his car, too. It can’t surely take long to find her. She can’t have gone far in this short time. What time did you say she spoke to you, Anne?”

Suddenly they all became aware of Athalie standing in the door, her face stained with tears and white with recent emotion. A letter in her hand, a frightened look in her eyes.

“Is—Silver—here?” she asked in a scared little voice as she looked around the room.

Athalie had been growing taller lately and had really lost a good deal of flesh. And now as she stood and watched them all, as if she had heard what had been going on, she looked fairly fragile. Her father turned on her with fury in his eyes.

“No, your sister is not here. You have driven her away, you little devil! Get out of my sight. I never want to look on your face again!”

With an awful cry like the tearing of soul from body, a continued cry that screeched through the house as the scream of a moving locomotive through the night, Athalie regarded her father for an instant and then turning tore up the stairs screaming as she went. She flung herself with a mighty thud upon her bed and went into raving hysterics, but nobody paid the slightest attention to her. Bannard and Greeves had gone out of the house to meet the car, and Anne Truesdale was doing some telephoning for which the master had left orders, a message to Silver’s lawyer, another to the city station where she was to be paged, a discreet word to the chief of police.

Barry met the two men half a block from the house and, waiting only for a brief explanation of what he was wanted to do, went down the street on a dead run after his own car. The Silver house grew silent as the dead everywhere except in Athalie’s room where loud cries and sobs continued to ring out, until Grandma called: “Come here, Pristina, don’t you hear something strange? It sounds like some animal in distress.”

Lizette Weldon hurried up the five stairs to her bay window landing and turned her head from side to side to try each ear and identify the voice. An hour later, Aunt Katie, unable to stand it any longer quietly slipped through the hedge with her smelling salts and asked Anne Truesdale, who was slamming things around in the dining room with pursed angry lips and streaming eyes, if she might go up.

“Please yerself!” said Anne, jerking a chair into place. “She’s not worth it, the nasty little tyke! Let her cry herself sick if she wants. She and I are two people!”

So Aunt Katie went up with her smelling salts and talked kindly in a low, soothing tone, but Athalie knocked the bottle across the room and took on more wildly than ever, and finally Aunt Katie departed with a sigh, saying to Anne in the kitchen as she went out: “The poor thing! The poor willful thing!”

The weeping kept steadily on for an hour longer. Then Anne’s patience gave out, and she went up with a glass of ice water and threw it in Athalie’s face, but the girl only strangled and choked and cried on the harder, so Anne went down, half frightened, and wondered if she ought not to call the doctor.

But at last the sounds died away, and Lizette and the Vandemeeters were able to get a little rest. It was growing very late, but Greeves and Bannard had not returned. Anne sent Molly and Joe to bed, with instructions not to undress but be ready for any call, and herself put out the lights and took up her watch by the front drawing room window. Once she thought she saw a face peering round the lilac bush, but she knew it must be her eyes after all the excitement, so she put the thought away. Before long she dozed off, and the town slept.

When the morning dawned and the sun finally penetrated the lilacs and shot into the drawing room window Anne Truesdale sat up and blinked.

“I must have dozed off,” she said shamedly to herself. “I wonder if the master has come. I’ll just slip up and see if that tyke is asleep.”

But when she reached Athalie’s room there was nobody on the bed. With a growing fear she hurried from room to room, thinking perhaps she had changed her bed as once before, but found no sign of her, and on the pillow in her father’s room was a little blistered note, dramatically left open, written large:

Dear Dad: I’ve gone to find my sister. I won’t come back without her. I’m sorry. Athalie
.

When Greeves read that, a few minutes later, having come in with Bannard after an all-night fruitless search, he sank his haggard face in his hands and dropped into the nearest chair.

“My God! What have I done to deserve this?”

“Dearie, dearie,” said Anne to Molly, “he’s swearin’ again. I guess mebbe there’s a pair of ‘em. Mebbe she mightn’t to be so much to blame after all, takin’ after him as she does.”

In the library the tray of breakfast that Anne had brought stood untouched.

“What shall I do, Bannard? What shall I do? I have lost them both—”

“I tell you, man, you must pray! If you ever prayed you must pray now. Get down on your knees quick and tell the Lord you’re a sinner. He’s the only One can straighten this out.”

And Patterson Greeves dropped down on his knees and prayed: “Lord, I have sinned! I have sinned against Thee and against both my children. It is right I should be punished, but don’t let them suffer. O Lord, forgive and help and save!”

And while he prayed, the telephone rang. Bannard answered it.

“Is that you, Father?” a sweet voice called that thrilled him with its familiarity.

“Oh, Silver, is that you? Are you all right?” said Bannard, his whole soul in his voice, and did not notice that he had called her by her dear name.

“Yes, your father is here. We have searched all night for you. Your father is quite broken by anxiety. Is Athalie with you? Yes, she’s gone. She apparently went sometime in the night. She left a note saying she had gone to find you and would not come home without you.”

“Oh, the dear child! I’ll come right home. I just got the message Father phoned to the lawyer. I’m sorry I’ve caused so much trouble.”

“Where are you now? The city? Good. There’s a train in a few minutes that doesn’t come through. You take it, and I’ll meet you at the junction with the car.”

Barry had come in while the conversation was going on, and he turned a startled face to Anne in the doorway.

“Athalie gone?” he asked. “Aw,
gee!”

Anne handed him the note that Greeves had dropped on the floor. He read it with softening eyes then turned to Anne and said in a low tone: “Say, you get me a shoe or something of hers. I’ve got the dog here. He’s good on following a scent. I’ll see what I can do.”

Anne obeyed, and Barry departed with instructions for Anne to tell Bannard when he had finished telephoning.

Greeves was still on his knees, his face buried in his hands. Bannard stepped over and put his hand upon the man’s shoulder.

“Silver is found,” he said gently. “She’s coming right home on the next train. I’m to meet her at the junction. Will you go with me?”

He had forgotten for the moment that Athalie was gone.

Greeves roused and stood up, his face white and deeply marked. There were tears upon his cheeks.

“I must go and find my other girl,” he said hurriedly. “My poor wronged child!”

Chapter 30

I
t
was growing light enough to see the way around her room when Athalie Greeves, dressing in whatever garments she found lying around the room, and not stopping to even wash her poor swollen face, climbed softly from her window and swung herself down the pergola trellis and to the ground.

She hadn’t an idea of where she was going or what she was going to do. Her one thought was to find her sister. It had come to her in the long sobbing hours of the night that that was one thing she could do before she died to atone for all her misdeeds. She could find and give Silver back to her father and so show him that she was going to die.

This strange, wild emptiness that filled her being, this utter weakness and collapse was unlike anything she ever remembered before, except once when she was a very little child with the measles and had cried herself to sleep because Lilla was afraid to kiss her good night. Lilla had gone to a party and left her with the nurse. Lilla was afraid of catching the measles.

She stumbled down the gray morning street like a wraith in her rubber-soled shoes. There was only one way to go, the way she had always gone on her pilgrimages, out through the town, the long sleeping silent street, and down the empty road to the bridge. She was a little afraid of the sound of the water under the bridge in the dark that way, but what did it matter? She would be dead pretty soon, and there would be plenty of things down there to be afraid of. This one thing she must do. Perhaps if she could get to the city she might find Silver somehow. She hadn’t an idea what a walk to the city would mean. And there were no trains so early.

So she walked on through the lifting night into the gray of the morning hardly able to see out of her swollen eyes, drawing each breath like a sob, stumbling and hurting her feet, crying out with the pain without knowing it.

She did not notice two shadowy figures a little way up the hill in the bushes nor hear a suddenly hushed whisper. She was walking as in a dream with only one thought in mind: to find Silver.

Suddenly as she swerved unsteadily around the curve of the road something large and solid and soft like a bag of sand seemed to come from somewhere up in the air and struck her on the side of the head. She crumpled like a lily and went down in the road, with everything growing suddenly dark again around her.

When she roused again she was lying on a hard place like the ground, only with stone walls all around her and a match flaring in her face. She saw two ugly faces above her, one old and lined, with grayish hair and sagging features, the other round and hairy and wicked looking, and she heard the old one say: “It ain’t her at all. It’s the other one!”

“I’ve come to find my sister,” she piped up feebly and then was gone again.

A long time after, she seemed to see the two men sitting by a box with about an inch of flaring candle between them, and one was writing with a stump of pencil.

“Say they must put the money under the stone and go away back up to town and stay there or the girl won’t ever turn up. Say that, Jerry, and better make it twelve, it’s no use havin’ all the trouble without some returns. Seein’ we missed out on the other gal, make it twelve thousand. Not a cent less.”

Later they stumbled out together, and a rush of air brought a breath to her lips. She heard one say to the other as they went out: “It beats me, Jerry, where the other one went. She must a ben a spirit fer I had her shut in an’ padlocked and not a stone is touched. Nobody couldn’t a come an’ let her out fer the lock wasn’t hurt. I don’t know what to make of it.”

Far off a dog was barking. It made her think of cool water with little darting fins and a bank with mosses on it. Nuts falling down and red branches. A dog barking, coming nearer. Rushing feet, a heavy body falling. The dog barking wildly. Sounds of a struggling down the hillside and then a wild, piercing whistle sweet as thrushes. Where had she heard that whistle before? Ah! Now she knew. The day they went to the baseball game, and Barry—it was Barry! If she only could call, perhaps Barry would help her find Silver, but the sound stuck in her throat and came out a sob. There it was again, that sweet whistle, and the sound of an automobile horn down on the road. Voices. Someone coming on. Voices again!

“Mr. Bannard, come and help me tie up this guy. It’s the old tramp that’s been going around for several weeks. Got a handkerchief? Sure, that’ll do. Here, you hold his hands. Buddie’s got the other fellow by the seat of the pants. I guess he’ll keep all right. They were sneaking round here looking mighty suspicious. I wanta see what they’ve got in that hut. Chief has been looking for a hooch still round these parts. It might be in there!”

Oh, why couldn’t she cry out? They would go away pretty soon. There. The dog was coming nearer. He seemed to be just outside the wall. “Buddie, Buddie!”

Ah! The air again! The door had been broken open! She opened her eyes, gave a long shuddering sob, and closed them again. It didn’t seem to matter now that they had come. She hadn’t found Silver, and she heard her father’s voice! She had failed!