Chapter XIV

To 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 gate posts, 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 like unto it.

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 wise detracted from his dignity. He seems 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 any one 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 call. 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 _go_, 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 call, “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 call upon was still in bed asleep. Mary had been up for two hours, had practised 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 saved. Mary glanced back at the Silver place and felt a warm spot around her heart. It was going to be nice to have a girl friend 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 scroll work 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 fret work of ancient wood, faded brown like the rest, which had somehow, either in a storm or in consequence 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 cock-eyed. 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 and wore a false front over 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 sombre 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 but about five minutes so she thought nothing of it. But this was startling.

Lizette hastened to get an old field glass which she kept handy and wherewith she had often settled uncertainties in the neighborhood in time 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 glass 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 fathers! 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 stores 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 took down 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?”

“Dear knows! John says she might be most anybody. You know Patterson Greeves got a divorce! Maybe she’s his typewriter. That’s the way they do things nowadays. Isn’t it the limit? Say, I smell my other loaf of bread burning. Excuse me a minute please. You hold the wire. I want to ask you about what happened at the sewing circle the other day. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Mrs. Weldon took no nap that afternoon. She was too excited. She felt it her bounden duty to keep a watch and find out if there were “doings” going on in the old house, and if she ought to do something about it. What else should a good neighbor do when the respectable dwelling of an old neighbor was threatened with modernism?

The hedge was too high for her to see the terrace and the scene in the garden, but later when Athalie, having cried out her brief wrath, attired herself in a gay little suit of pajamas with lace ruffles around the ankles, and having turned on all the lights proceeded to practise a little æsthetic dancing in front of the window, Lizette was there, glass and all, with her fat husband behind her staring over his spectacles and laughing coarsely in her ear. This was a good joke, a good joke to tell down at the hotel. Those religious Silvers come to this!

The next morning when she slipped through the garden and under the back fence across lots to the garden of Aunt Katie Barnes’s neat little place on the side street where the minister boarded, to get a cup of sour milk, she paused with her apron over her head and said:

“Oh, have you heard what’s happened over at the Silver place? They do say Pat Greeves has come back and brought a _woman_ along! I’ve been told she was his secretary or typewriter or something. But she’s very ordinary. I saw her go by myself and I was shocked! Painted and powdered, her hair all kind of wild, the queerest hat, and _pants_, mind you, in the middle of the afternoon! I feel so sorry for poor Miss Lavinia. She set such store by that boy! But it never pays to bring up other people’s children does it? I can mind how she used to sit out there in the garden by the hour playing with him and reading to him. A waste of time I say—but aren’t you surprised that he should do this? It seems as if he might have managed to stay respectable even if he is divorced.”

Aunt Katie looked up from the potatoes she was frying for the minister’s breakfast and smiled.

“Oh, didn’t you know who that was? It’s one of his daughters. He has two, but this must have been the younger one. She’s only a child, fourteen I think Mr. Bannard said, and she’s been off at boarding school—I suppose you must expect some craziness from little girls nowadays, there is so much more freedom in the world, especially in New York. But isn’t it nice Mr. Greeves has two daughters to keep him from being lonely? The other one is a little older. Her name is Silver. Mr. Bannard says she is the perfect picture of her mother’s portrait hanging over the mantel in the drawing room. Do you remember it, that lovely Sargent painting?”

“No,” said Lizette coldly eyeing her adversary, “I don’t go over there. That Mrs. Truesdale doesn’t show herself very friendly. I think she takes on airs. _Daughters_, you think then? Are you _quite sure_? Well, I suppose the minister ought to know.” She surrendered the bit of scandal reluctantly, “it certainly is strange we never heard of them before. Daughters! Well, he better keep a little control of them then. One of ’em was having carryings on in her room last night, I’ll tell you! Dancing, that’s what she was doing, in her underwear! A great big girl like a full grown woman, and all her shades up! I never did approve of those pajamas for men even. They don’t seem, well, Christian you know. And when a woman takes up with such outlandish fashions it’s time she was stopped by law, I say.”

“Well,” said Aunt Katie soothingly, “we don’t all have the same taste in dress you know—”

“Dress!” sniffed Mrs. Weldon, “_un_dress I should say! However, as you say, it takes all kinds to make a world. Well, I just ran over to see if you could let me have a cup of sour milk. Mine got too sour and I had to throw it out.”

Aunt Katie always seemed to have whatever was needed by anyone and the sour milk was immediately forthcoming.

There being no further excuse for lingering, the neighbor lingered anyway.

“The minister told you! So he’s been over to the Silver place _already_! He’s a good deal younger than Pat Greeves. He must be nearer the age of one of the daughters. Curious he should run after a man like that right off the first day! I thought he set up not to be a tody-er, but I suppose they’re all alike. They know which side their bread is buttered when a rich man comes along.”

“Oh, they met at the fire down at Frogtown night before last. Mr. Greeves ran across the meadow as soon as he heard the alarm and got into the thick of it helping with the best of them. Then they came home together and took to each other right away. It’s going to be grand having the old Silver place open again, young people in it, and folks going back and forth visiting.” Aunt Katie’s face was innocent as a lamb. The guest eyed her keenly, but could detect no hidden sign that Aunt Katie realized she had ignored the criticism.

“Oh, well, if you take it that way of course. Some might feel they wanted to wait and be sure all was as it should be. But time will tell. Well, I must run home and stir up my batter cakes. Uri’ll be waiting.”

Down at the fire house where Uri spent much of his time when he was not sitting in the lobby of the hotel, it was discussed that morning. There was always a knot of conversation around the fire house door even in early morning. It was just across from the blacksmith’s shop, and the hotel, and “handy-by” from the market and post office. When any frequenters came down to the business portion of Silver Sands, morning, noon or night, they always dropped around for a minute, or an hour, to wait for whatever errand had brought them to mature, it might be the mail to be distributed, the horseshoe to be set, or the drummer to arrive at the hotel for their appointment with him, and there paused for a bit of gossip. It was a kind of distributing agency for the private affairs of the town and now and then the outlying districts. It was the country club for the so-inclined of the town, and stood in place of golf for the men who did not aspire to athletics. The good old fire engine was athletic enough for them, and between fires they stood around and polished it and worshipped it, and told tales of their own valor.

Uri Weldon hastened early to the rendezvous that morning with an air of mysterious importance, and felt gravely the responsibility of so choice a bit of news as he carried.

Back in the dim shadows of a windowless apartment under the stairs where the oiling and polishing rags were kept, a tramp awoke at the first scraping of the first armchair on the cement floor. Awoke to the dismal necessity of another day, and the immediate problem of getting out of his concealment before he was discovered. His hairy, dirty face appeared weirdly in brief relief on the doorway, as Uri Weldon settled back with his feet on an old soap box, and his pipe tilted at the right angle for conversation. Ted Loundes and Flip Haines lounged up to the doorway, and leaning up against the door frame, one either side of the door like a couple of bronze figures personifying Ease and Relaxation.

Uri Weldon started in on his tale with many an embellishment, interrupted by loud haw haws on the part of the younger men. The tramp frowned and ventured another look, scouting for a back exit and finding none. The tale went on. The tramp was not interested. He could not help hearing, but he took no heed till Ted, helping himself to a long sliver from the batten door behind him and cautiously picking his teeth therewith remarked:

“I hear that guy Greeves has a pile of dough.”

Uri Weldon nodded, importantly.

“Well, yes, he’s got a pile. Them Silvers was always well off. Course they owned the beach and the sand business, and all that ground the fact’ries were built on, and then the right of way where the railroad went, and stocks, and so on. But now you know a lot of land they had somewhere out in Oklahoma has begun to produce oil. They say the money is rolling in from that. And besides all that he writes books! Everybody knows they charge a turrible price for books. It always beat me how they got it. Just a little paper and ink, and words—just _words_! And getting paid for it! They tell me he’s written a book about _bugs_ that they charge three dollars and seventy-five cents for, and the people in the colleges are buying ’em like hot cakes! It beats me how with all that learning they can be so easily fooled! But so it is, and Pat Greeves is profiting by it. Well, I suppose his pretty little brats of daughters will inherit a coupla millions apiece or more when he kicks off. Seems queer though. You boys don’t remember, but Pat Greeves and I used to be in a fight in school pretty near every day when we was kids—Hi, there boys! Look up the street there! I bet that’s her coming down this way now!”

Uri’s feet and the front legs of his chair came down to the cement pavement with a crash simultaneously, and the two younger men came about face with alertness and looked in the direction of Uri’s finger.

“Gosh!” ejaculated Flip, “she’s some winner, isn’t she?” “Get onto that epidermis, Ted? Some heft to her too.”

All three men with casual manner sauntered eagerly nearer the street and the tramp, peered earnestly out, stealing across the open space with catlike celerity, then drifting hastily behind the offset at the side of the fire house, paused to take his own observation. This then was the daughter of the rich oil magnate who wrote books about bugs.

He had once been a city tramp and he flattered himself he knew style when he saw it. The cut of a garment, the hang of a fold that bespoke quality, the deep blue flash of a jewel, the peculiar dash of the whole makeup that spoke of lavish purse. The tramp watched and listened to the comments of his companions unaware of his very existence, and thought within himself how might he turn this accident of knowledge to his own account. But when the three friends returned to their former attitudes in the doorway of the fire house the tramp had melted away like the shadows and was seen no more.