Tomorrow About This Time (8 page)

She flashed him an appreciative glance and asked thoughtfully: “Have you known my father long?”

“Well, not so very long—” the minister answered, “that is—you know he has only recently returned, but we are wonderfully good friends considering the short time. I—you—” He hesitated. There was something he wanted to tell her for her reassurance, to answer the question in her eyes that he felt sure she was too loyal to her father to ask, but his lips were sealed. And after all, what was there to say even if they had not been? What reassurance had he himself that the man he had left raving at Fate in the old library would give any sort of an adequate welcome to this pearl of a girl? He felt as if he wanted to tell her that if her father wasn’t glad to see her he would take him by the neck and shake him till he was. But one couldn’t tell a strange girl things like that about her father.

“This is the Presbyterian church we are coming to now, the one on the left. The main part was built in sixteen hundred and seventeen. Hasn’t it nobly simple lines? The stones have weathered to as fine a color as any cathedral in the old world. I love to see it against the sky with the sunset behind it. That spire is a thing of beauty, don’t you think? And those doves in the belfry are a continual delight. Do you know Aldrich’s bit of a verse, ‘And on the belfry sits a dove with purple ripples on her neck?’ There goes one now swooping down to the pavement. Did you see the silver flash on her wings? And now we’re coming to the part of the cemetery where your ancestors are buried. See that big gray granite column? No, the plain one just beyond. That is the old Silver lot. All the Silvers are lying there. Your grandfather and great-grandfather and their wives in that center plot, and those side plots are for the sons and their wives and children. It was a peculiar arrangement and forethought of the first Silver settler and carried out by each succeeding one in turn. There, those two gray stones are for Standish Silver and his sister Lavinia, the last of the family who bore the Silver name.”

“Aunt Lavinia and Uncle Standish. I have their pictures,” said the girl softly as if doing homage to their memory. “They brought up my father.”

She lifted shy friendly eyes: “Silver is my name, too. It’s an odd name for a girl, isn’t it? But I like it. I like to think I’m a Silver, too.”

“It is a beautiful name,” said the young man, doing homage with his eyes.

“They were a wonderful people from all I hear. I would like to have known them.”

And now all too soon they were at the Silver door and he was helping her out of the car.

He found his heart pounding strangely with anticipation for the girl at his side. How would she be received? He felt as if he must stay by her till he was sure, although delicacy dictated that he disappear as soon as his errand was done.

Blink, with nonchalant foresight, was idly flipping pebbles at a toad in the meadow from his perch on the fence, his back to the road. At his feet, attentive to each motion, apparently approving and aiding and abetting the game, barked a big yellow collie. The dog bounded jealously across the road at sight of the car and up to the minister with a wag and a glad grin of recognition then gave a friendly snuff to the girl’s hands, looked up, and smiled a dog greeting with open cordiality.

“What a dear dog!” exclaimed the girl. “What a beauty!” She was bending over him with the enthusiasm of a true dog lover, and Blink sauntered idly over and leaned against the car, pleased at her demonstration, eyeing her furtively, appraisingly. “May I introduce his master Barry Lincoln, otherwise ‘Blink’ to his intimate friends?” said Bannard.

The girl lifted frank eyes to Blink’s embarrassed ones and liked him at once. She put out her hand warmly and grasped his rough shy one as she might have done to an older man, and the boy’s heart warmed toward her.

“What a very interesting name!” she said cheerfully, “If I stay here long I am sure I shall try to qualify to use it. Is the dog’s name Link?”

The boy grinned.

“He’s Buddie,” he admitted shyly.

“Well, Buddie, I hope I meet you again,” she said, with another flash of warmth in her eyes for the boy whose own were now filled with open admiration. She passed into the white gate, and Blink looked after her with a new stirring in his heart, call it loyalty if you like; Blink had no idea what it was. He lifted his glance to the minister’s smile and found the same thing in his friend’s eyes, and an unspoken covenant flashed between them to protect her if ever she needed their protection. Blink would have expressed it in words: “She’s a good sport.” Blink and the dog stood by the car, Buddie wagging his plume of a tail vigorously, and watched the man and the girl go up the flower-boarded walk to the big mullioned door.

From inside the library Patterson Greeves watched the two figures arrive.

Joe Quinn watched from the shelter of the smoke bush close to the lilac hedge where he was digging about the tulip beds, and Molly the cook, having seen the car from her pantry window, had hurried up to the front hall window on pretext of looking for the housekeeper and was gazing down curiously on the two, wondering what next was coming to the old house.

At the extreme dark end of the back hall, Anne Truesdale, in hiding, could glimpse the minister’s hat through the side lights of the hall door and a snatch now and then of the lady’s feather, and she stood with hand involuntarily on her heart, waiting, not daring to come out till “that huzzy,” as she thought of Athalie, had gone upstairs. But Athalie, one foot on the lower step, had turned back to look at her irate father, perfectly aware that he was disturbed by the sight of something out of the window, and herself caught a glimpse of the minister returning. Ah! So that was why she was being sent upstairs! A good-looking young man and she bundled away! This was no part of Miss Athalie’s plan of life, so she whirled around on the lowest step and waited also.

Then the fine old knocker reverberated through the long silent house. Patterson Greeves retreated hastily in panic to his library, and Anne Truesdale, chained to duty by an inexorable conscience, was forced to come out and open the door.

The stage was set, and the actors came on as the door was timidly opened by Anne.

Chapter 7

A
thalie Greeves came noiselessly forward to the library door, a look of expectancy on her round pink face, a cat-and-cream expression about her lips. As noiselessly Patterson Greeves forced himself to step to the doorway again, a heavy frown upon his brow, a look of extreme suffering—one would almost have said dread—in his eyes. Anne with frightened eyes peered bravely round the door, and the two on the wide flagging stones of the porch waited, the girl with wistful, eager, yet courageous eyes, ready for either love or renunciation, whichever the indications showed; the minister hovering tall above her, a look almost of defiance on his strong face, an air of championship and protection about him.

Nobody spoke for the first instant, which seemed almost like an eternity. The two girls saw each other first, for Patterson Greeves stood within the library door.

The girl on the steps was dressed in a blue-gray tweed suit, well fitted and tailored, and a trim little soft blue straw hat with a sharp black wing piquantly stabbing the folds of the straw. Her hair was golden in the sunlight and as she stood seemed like a halo around her face. The light of the morning was in her eyes as she peered into the shadows of the hall then suddenly grayed with chill and reserve as she met the eyes of the other girl.

Athalie’s plump face grew suddenly hard, her lips drooped, her eyes glared, her head went slightly forward with a look of stealth and jealousy, and her hand went instinctively out to catch the door frame. Her whole form seemed to crouch with a catlike motion, and green lights danced in her eyes, though they might have been reflected from her dress. The minister lifted amazed eyes and saw her. He put out an involuntary hand of protection toward the girl by his side.

Then Patterson Greeves stepped into the hall sternly, his back to Athalie, and came toward the door. He looked and stopped short, his hands suddenly stretched out and then drawn back to his eyes with a quick hysterical motion as if he would brush a fantasm from his vision. “Alice!” came from his lips in a low, broken tone of agony, as if the torture and mistakes of the years were summed up in the word.

During that instant while he stood with his fingers pressing his eyes Athalie began stealthily to step back and across the hall to the wide arched doorway of the stately old parlor that ran the depth of the house on the other side of the hall from the library. Her eyes, wide and round, were fixed on her father. An instant later there was only left the swaying of the old silk cord tassel that held the heavy maroon curtains of the doorway.

Then the girl on the doorstep came to vivid life and stepped up quickly toward her father with eager light in her face.

“Father!” She said the word with a world of reverence and stored-up love, tender, caressing sound, so genuine, so wistful, it could not fail to reach the heart of any man who was not utterly dead to his fatherhood. They were clasping hands now, looking earnestly, eagerly into one another’s eyes.

Anne Truesdale, behind the door, averting her loyal gaze; the minister with anxious attitude upon the doorstep; the alien daughter behind the heavy curtain, one eye applied to a loophole close to the door frame, were breathless witnesses of the moment. Then Patterson Greeves drew his daughter within the library door with the one word “Come,” and closed the door behind them. The minister came to himself, murmuring that he would return or telephone later, and departed. Anne Truesdale closed the front door, and with an anxious glance as she tiptoed by the library door, vanished up the stairs. A soft stirring at the end of the back hall where Molly listened, a cautiously closed latch, and all was still.

Athalie in the big dim parlor held her breath, listening, peered cautiously and then drew back and gazed around her with a leisurely air.

The room was wide and very long, with windows heavily curtained in the old-fashioned stately way. The ceilings high, the walls hung with dim old portraits in heavy gilt frames. The floor was covered with heavy velvet carpet, rich and thick in scrolls and roses, bright with care, though the years had passed many times over it. The furniture was rare and old and comfortable, and would have graced many a finer mansion. One or two chairs done in fine handmade tapestry softly faded with the years, tables and cabinets that had come down from the masters in woodwork. A rosewood piano of a make some thirty years back, whose name was still dignified and honored. Athalie stood and gazed around, half contemptuously. The chairs, yes—but the carpet! How funny! She would have to see that it was taken up at once and a hardwood floor—of
course
—this would be a grand room for a dance. She gave an experimental whirl on a cautious toe. Those curtains were gloomy! She slid a sleek hand into a well-camouflaged silken pocket and brought out chocolates to fortify herself. Her mouth comfortingly filled with the creamy velvet of Dutch creams, she started on a tour of inspection, pausing first before an ancestral portrait hanging above a curiously carved sofa with handwrought tapestry upholstery. The picture frame, tarnished with the years, seemed like an open doorway to the past. From it looked out a woman plain of face, smooth of hair, with a carved high black comb towering above her sleek head and bearing a bird on her finger. The eyes were so expressionless and the face so somber that it was impossible not to connect it with a monotonous existence. A woman satisfied with a pet bird! Athalie paused and took in the thought. A lift of her well-rounded shoulders, a contemptuous smile, that was her reaction to the woman of long ago. She meant little to the girl modern in all her thoughts and feelings. There was hardly a shadow of conception of that sheltered, sweet, strong life that had given much to the world in her passing. The girl passed to the portrait of the man in military uniform hanging between the two long front windows, and her jaws paused in their slow rhythmic manipulation of the chocolates to study him a moment. This must be old General Silver. Her mother had told her about him. Not much, only that he had been something—made some great mark in the Civil War, or was it the war before that? Athalie’s ideas of history were most vague. She knew only that it was very long ago if one might judge by the old-fashioned haircut, the high collar, the strange insignia, not in the least like a modern soldier. He had bushy eyebrows, from beneath which his piercing eyes looked over her head straight out to some far-seen enemy, keen, cutting, stern—the girl shuddered. There had been that look in the eye of this newfound father of hers, not at all fatherly, not “dadish” as she expressed it to herself, purely official. He was like his ancestor, she decided, as she stood and watched the picture. Disappointing. Quite as Lilla had said he would be. Hard as stone. Flint in his eye. No yielding to coaxing. No weakness anywhere that one could probe. Was the bird lady his wife or daughter? She looked back and studied the first portrait critically, deciding she must have been his wife. No wonder she looked as if she had dragged out a drab existence! And yet—she looked back to the soldier’s face. There was a fascination about him somewhere. What was it? The molding of the firm lips? The arch of the heavy brow? The curve of the wavy hair, brushed fiercely forward from either side of the head and focusing over the forehead in a high standing brush? Well—somehow that made you long to conquer, to draw a smile to those stern lips, a soft light to the eyes—it must have been that something that made Lilla marry her father. It couldn’t have all been money or position for Athalie had heard her mother tell many times of other lovers, far more famed and wealthy. There was something about her father she had come to conquer, and she hardened her own willful lips in determination and passed on to the next wall opposite the bird lady.

A stately dame with soft white hair and a cap looked out from the next frame with a smile, more human than the others, the girl felt; her stiff black silk seemed almost to rustle from its frame with dignity and kindliness, and the painted hands held primly a wide, gracious fan of rare old lace. And beside this picture hung the portrait of her husband apparently, a fine old gentleman with silvered hair, high stock, and courtly manner, fitting mate for the dear old lady, both portraits so lifelike that Athalie paused almost abashed for an instant as if someone unexpectedly had entered the room. It gave her a feeling of unaccustomed awe, these strong, painted personalities all about her, past history caught and imprisoned on the canvas for another age to know intimately. They looked down at her with kindly gracious eyes, and she turned away awkwardly, uncomfortable, and swept the room with another glance.