On the whole, she was rather docile about going to school the next morning when her father suggested that she enter high school and finish out the spring term. She remembered what Barry had said about athletics and resolved not to eat any more chocolates for a week after this last box was gone.
So she polished her nails to a delicate point and took herself languidly to school to see how she liked it. She was astonished to see how little impression she made on the wholesome atmosphere of high school. The teacher, a placid-faced elderly woman with a firm chin, said to be the finest school principal in the county, smiled at her pleasantly and put her in the front seat directly in front of the desk. None of the boys gave her a glance, except Barry who showed mere recognition. The girls she had met smiled politely and went on with study. Whenever she looked up she was met with that pleasant challenge of a smile. There was absolutely no opportunity to get away with anything unless one first crossed that friendly smile, and Athalie wasn’t just exactly ready to do that yet until she had tried things out. There had not been too many smiles in her life. She took the book that was handed to her to read, until the principal should have time to examine her and place her in the classes where she fit, and was surprised to find it was an interesting novel. The teacher explained it was the book the English class was reading for review and discussion that week.
Her father glanced into the study hall half an hour later, after an inspection of the building led by an old friend who was the Latin teacher, and saw her absorbed in the book. He went home with a sigh of relief, comforted.
But that very night Athalie wrote eleven invitations to six boys and five girls for a house party that weekend and mailed them early in the morning before she went to school. But that no one in her family knew.
Chapter 24
The tramp had found work as a laborer in the glass factory through the efforts of some of the good Presbyterian women whose woodpiles had been supplying his breakfasts and dinners for some time. He worked feebly and with great effort and managed to maintain his role of semi-elderly invalid who was doing his best.
He was working with a gang of other men shoveling sand into a cart when Silver Greeves came by with a basket of broth and oranges and a lovely dolly for the little Mary who was now on the high road to recovery.
The tramp paused in the monotony of his service. He put in regularly one shovelful to the other men’s two. He always paused longest for interruptions and rested his weary back. The other men paused also and watched the progress of the lithe girl as she stepped down the roughly cobbled path and entered the cottage.
“That’s that girl from the Silver family,” said one of the men. “Take notice of her? She’s been comin’ down to that wop’s house every day. She’s been takin’ care of the sick kid.”
“Well, they’d oughta do things like that. They got plenty, ain’t they? Don’t we keep ‘em in cash with our labor? They couldn’t sell this sand if we didn’t shovel it, could they? She’d make a pretty hand shovelin’ sand, now, wouldn’t she? How would she live if we didn’t shovel her sand fer her? I ask you.”
“Oh, they got plenty else ‘thout sand. Anymore. They got stacks and stacks of money. I heard they got sompin’ like a million fer the railroad right of way. She’d oughta take notice of the poor folks. I guess that family wasn’t named Silver fer nothin’.”
The tramp gazed steadily at the door where Silver had disappeared and began to turn around what he heard in his cunning old brain. He let his companions heave five shovelfuls before he started in again at a rapidly diminishing sandpile, and his face wore a thoughtful look. Whenever he stopped to rest he eyed the house where Silver had entered. When she finally came out, lingering on the doorstep to talk with the smiling dark-eyed mother he took another break and studied the scene carefully, talking in details of dress and height and coloring. Then his cunning eyes dropped to his task again and lifted for an instant to meet hers only when Silver passed opposite him, as she smiled and greeted them all in a friendly way.
“Some gurrul!” remarked a short burly man with red curls and a brogue. “The master must be proud o’ her. I guess he’d not take all his millions for the likes of her!”
“Yes, she’s a fine lady! But it’ll take plenty of millions to keep her in all she’ll want,” grouched the other man.
“Well, what’s a lady!” said the tramp as he lifted another shovelful of sand.
Down by the bridge Silver met Bannard and lingered there to watch the little fishes darting in the stream. She had much to tell him of the condition of some of the families she had visited. Sam was bringing his wife over from Italy, and Carmen was having trouble getting his citizenship papers. Something about his questionnaire during the war. He had not understood enough English to make out what they were asking him, and he couldn’t write it himself, so some absurd mistake had been made. Could he see the county judge and straighten it out?
Bannard finally turned and walked back with her through Sweetbriar Lane, into Aunt Katie’s for a moment to get a taste of the honey cakes she was baking, and so on through the hedge into the sweet old Silver garden. They lingered talking beside the sundial, tracing the quaint figures on its face, watching the slow, sure march of the sun from point to point.
There was powdered gold in the air and sunshine, powdered fire shimmering over the tulip bed. The birds sang with joyous abandon as though they would split their throats. Greeves looked out of his window from his work, and his heart was at rest. That was a nice fellow. A bit wrong in his head knowledge, and his beliefs, but all right in his heart and living. And after all, if one could believe in the old legends they were a wonderful safeguard. Far be it for him to disturb such saintly faith. He would be careful what he said about unbelief. It almost seemed as if what the minister had said had been true. Things had settled down into a pleasanter way. The siege was lifting, but of course God had nothing to do with it. It was merely the adjusting of all elements to the environment. It was sound philosophy anyway, to be patient and wait for things to adjust themselves. Then he went back to his preface, which he was writing with great care.
“If the present advance of science—” How was it he had meant to phrase that sentence?
And down in the garden the two had sauntered into the summerhouse and were telling each other about their early life. It is a beautiful stage of friendship when two who admire one another reach that point. It is the building of a foundation for something deeper and truer.
Well for them that the garden was located behind the house, with tall hedges surrounding, and that neither the Weldons nor Vandemeeters could penetrate, and only the kindly eye of Aunt Katie knew where they were, or the whole town would have been agog. They found so much to talk about that the minister forgot to go back to the Flats until the lunch bell rang in the Silver house, and then he made his sudden apologies and departed hastily over the fence. Silver went in with flushed cheeks and bright eyes thinking how wonderfully life was opening out for her who had been only such a short time before bereft and alone.
Athalie came home from school quite pleasant and tractable. She had an armful of books, and she seemed interested in them. Her father looked the books over and talked with her a little about them, gave her a few hints how to concentrate on studying, and went away to his library again entirely satisfied that he was doing the father-part as well as could be expected. Perhaps after he got used to it it wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Meantime Athalie up in her room was working with needle and thread and scissors to transform several of her new frocks for Friday evening, while her books lay in a heap on the floor not to be touched until the next morning, and her thoughts were wandering in daydreams.
About half a mile below the bridge at the lower end of Silver Sands, to the left of the road where it curves around to go to Frogtown, there rises a little hill. On its top, set in a thick grove of maples, birches, and oaks with plenty of undergrowth, there stands a little one-roomed hut. It had been built of fi
eld stones a long time ago, when the grove was a big woods of sugar maples, perhaps for a shelter at sugaring time. There was a fireplace at one end, a little prisonlike window, and a sagging wooden door. The window was boarded up and the door had stood ajar for years. The boys of the town used to use it for a rendezvous but had long since deserted it for newer quarters below the bridge where some enterprising seniors in high school had built a camp among the pines.
The tramp had sighted this empty dwelling, and after watching it for several days and sampling its hospitality at night, he took up his abode there, repaired the door, unnoticeably, left the window boarded up, and built his meager fires at night when no one would see the smoke. There was plenty of wood around for the taking.
The floor was the bare earth, and in one corner a pile of leaves and moss made a bed, with an old blanket he had taken from somebody’s clothesline down in the village. In a big packing box that he had found behind the cannery quite early one morning, he kept his frugal stores: eggs, butter, bread, tobacco, half a ham, and a big black bottle. The top of the box served as his table.
Here he crept at evening when his shoveling was done, taking care to arrive by a circuitous route and to close the door before lighting his bit of a candle. Here at evening he sat with his pipe and pondered many a scheme or went over and over the various mistakes and failures of his life, which had landed him in confinement within stone walls for a time, and searched how he might carry something through yet again.
That same night he crept to his lair and sat on the sheltered side looking away toward the village thinking. Through its nest of trees he could see the white pillars of the Silver house standing as it did at the top of the street, lifting its head just a trifle above the other houses. As the twilight deepened and darkness gave opportunity for Sin to walk abroad unrecognized, he loitered down the hill and crept by unused paths into the town where he had a few patrons who kept their little odd jobs for him at night. They talked about him in their sewing circle and said he was a self-respecting man, and one had given him a shirt, and one some pairs of much darned socks and they talked about helping him to find a place to board where he could look after the furnace for his keep when winter came on. Drab he was as he walked along in the shadow side of the moonlit street, and drab he faded into space when he came to a high hedge. Carefully he stole around the old Silver place, and felt out the garden paths, and peered in cautiously at all the windows. He studied the lines of Patterson Greeves’s thoughtful face as he sat at his desk working on that preface, and judged it cannily with the eye of a specialist. He put his ugly mask to the very pane of glass beside Silver’s head as she sat reading in the big easy chair at the other end of the library. He cautiously searched the darkened drawing room with a pocket flashlight, and he took in the dining room, especially the silver on the sideboard, while Anne and Molly were setting the table for the next morning’s breakfast. The kitchen was not so easy, but he managed it while Joe and Molly and Anne sat eating their dinner.
“I thought I saw a face at the window, Joe. Go out and see if someone is looking for you,” said Anne in her calm voice, and Joe shoved back his chair noisily and went out but came back presently and reported that Anne was “seein’ things.”
“It must be the young huzzy upstairs is gettin’ on yer nerves, Anne.”
“The young lady’s all right the last two days,” said Anne complacently. Athalie’s church going and willingness to go to school had done much toward mollifying Anne. “And I saw a face at the window. It was likely Jock Miller brought back that sickle you lent him. I’m not so old that I can’t tell a face at the window when I see it.”
Back in the lilac bushes among the lilies-of-the-valley a drab shape huddled, listened, and presently shrunk away, puzzling. That wasn’t the young lady he saw pass the firehouse that day. Were there two?
For the rest of that week life settled down into the grooves of what a well-regulated family life should be, and Patterson Greeves took heart and plunged into his book. Athalie had been regular at school, late only once, and seemed to be giving actual attention to her studies. She professed to be deeply interested in education for the first time in her life and took her books upstairs to her room immediately after dinner at night. Her father began to hope that perhaps she had inherited his love of study. Several times she came to him with some question about her lessons. Usually some unusual question. She was sharp as a needle. Would he ever learn to be proud of her?
Friday morning as Athalie was about to start for school she stepped into the dining room where Anne was crumbing the table, preparatory to taking off the breakfast cloth and said loftily: “Oh, Truesdale! Have plenty of cake ready this afternoon. I’m bringing guests.”
“There’s always plenty of cake in the house,” said Anne stiffly. She wasn’t sure she cared for being called Truesdale. Of course it was English, but she had an inking that in this case it was intended for patronage.
“I mean—lots!” said Athalie. “There’ll be about twelve of us altogether.”
“There’s always cake enough in the house for twenty if need be!” Anne froze.
“They’ll all be here for dinner, I think,” added Athalie as she closed the door and ran down the steps. “I told Dad about it.”
Now it happened that “Dad” had gone to the city on the seven o’clock train to consult a book in the library.
“It’s strange he said nothing to me about it. He’s always that particular about making trouble,” said Anne as she reported the invasion to Molly.
“Aw, that’s all right, Anne,” said Molly cheerfully. “You’d oughta be glad she’s going to be friendly with the townspeople. We’ll just get up a real dinner, Anne. He seems real satisfied with the way she’s took to school.”
“Yes,” agreed Anne grudgingly, “but I’d a been better satisfied if the master had a spoke to me hisself!”
The house was always spic-and-span. Anne saw to it that there were flowers in the vases and the best doilies as if for a company of ladies.
“Because them children has eyes and tongues in their heads,” she explained to Molly who came in to consult her as to whether she should make hard sauce or boiled sauce for the bread pudding that was destined for lunch.
Athalie telephoned at noon that she was not coming home for lunch.
“She’ll be taking it with some of the girls!” Anne said happily. “It’s nice to think of her gettin’ in and bein’ like other girls. Mebbe she’ll get rid of her strange hair and eyebrows someday. I think she might be passable lookin’ if she didn’t dress so strange! Now them dresses he bought her. They looked real simple, but when she gets um on they somehow look diffrunt. But I’m sorry she didn’t come home, I wanted to ask her more about who’s coming? How’ll we know to set table?”
“Oh, there’ll be time when she comes! Half past three is plenty.” So they set about the delightful task of getting up a young dinner party again in the old house, which had not happened since Master Pat’s twenty-first birthday.
It was nearing three o’clock when a taxi from the city drew up at the door causing great sensation over at the Vandemeeter’s. They could not figure out who this might be.
A young woman got out and paid the driver, preceding him up the walk to the house as he carried two armfuls of luggage.
“She’s all tails around her feet,” said Grandma Vandemeeter, “and I can see myself without any glasses that she’s got a painted face even if she has got a mosquito netting over her hat.”
“This is Marcella Mason,” announced the stranger as Anne opened the door. “I suppose you’re expecting me. I’ll just have my bags carried up to my room at once. I’m frightfully dusty. Hot water, please. I suppose you have plenty of it here in the country? If not, please heat it at once. I’m accustomed to a hot bath.”
A silver dollar, skillfully manipulated, slid into Anne’s astonished hand and out again to the floor quicker than it went in. She stepped back indignantly, with blazing cheeks
and snapping eyes.
“Is that your money, miss? You dropped it!” she said crisply.
“Why, that’s your tip!” laughed the girl. “Don’t you want it?”
“Tip?” repeated Anne with her chin aloft. “Tip? I don’t understand you. You’d best pick it up, miss, or it’ll get lost. You can step this way.” She led the way up the wide stair, thinking rapidly. It was not in the possibility that this upstart should occupy one of the best rooms. Anne led her down the back hall to a little bedroom off the sewing room where a seamstress sometimes stayed. Neat and trim it was with a single iron bed, a bit of a bureau and a stationary washstand. The Silver house was not behind the times in the matter of conveniences.
“You can put your things down on the chair,” said Anne indifferently.
The stranger advanced and surveyed the room. “Oh, I’m afraid this room won’t do for me!” she looked around. “No mirror. And don’t you have private baths? What other rooms have you? I came first to make my choice. This seems to be a large house.”
“This is the only one, miss. You can take it or leave it, as you like. I’m busy just now. You’ll have to excuse me. Miss Athalie will be home from school in a short while.”
“School! You don’t mean to tell me she goes to school! That’s rich! She swore she’d never enter a schoolroom again!”