Chapter XVI

Whenever Silver came anew 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 “blest” 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 so 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 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 what you are thinking. I’m not being driven away nor anything. I am simply going away because I feel that it 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 borne 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 wherewith 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 which 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 against going.

Athalie came slowly down with a gloomy air. Her eyes looked heavy and her mouth slouched at the corners. She carried her bag of sticks slung over her shoulder and she had taken care to wear a bright skirt in place of the knickers which 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.

“Pristina!” called grandma from the sitting room, “come here quick and tell me which one this is.”

Pristina hurried from the kitchen where she was making cake, a flour sifter in her hand.

“That’s number one,” said Pristina assuredly, “she was the fat one with the painted face. I wonder why the other one didn’t go too. They are going to play golf.”

“Seems to me that’s rather frivolous to begin with—golf,” said grandma. “Seems as if for a man of his years he ought to be getting settled and getting out his work. If he’s really so great as they say, writing books and all, why don’t he write ’em? I have no patience with people trying to keep from growing up. Golf! H’mmph!” sniffed grandma.

“All great people do it nowadays, grandma,” assured Pristina, “they talk in the magazines about it’s keeping you in condition.”

“Condition! Fiddlesticks! If he’d get out and do a little digging in his own garden it would keep him in condition enough. What was that Pristina, that your Uncle Ned said the last time he came down from New York? It was something very fitting about this golf.”

“Oh, uncle said he had no time for knocking a pill around a ten-acre lot. But grandma, that wasn’t original. I’ve heard it since, and read it in the joke column.”

“Very likely they got it from your Uncle Edward,” said grandma reprovingly. “You have a way of discounting your relatives that is very disappointing, Pristina. Your own family are as good as any you’ll find anywhere. Don’t go yet, Pristina. Who is that coming up from the post office? She’s met them. Perhaps she’ll be coming here. She’ll be able to tell us something and then we shall know what to think. I declare it’s very embarrassing not knowing what to think, nor how to act.”

“That’s Lizette Weldon, grandma, and she’s bringing back the cup of yeast she borrowed last week. I see a cup in her hand.”

Lizette had seen Greeves and his daughter start out.

“My soul!” said Lizette and hastened to grab her brown cape and get the cup of yeast that she might not miss this so great opportunity. She met them as they were passing the gate.

“Yes, that’s the one! My, ain’t she coarse!” she commented inwardly. “Now, does he think he’s going to pretend he don’t know me? Well, I rather guess not. Good morning, Mr. Greeves. We’re pleased to see the old house lighted up!”

“There, now!” she said to herself, “that’ll make that fat thing understand that I saw her last night and perhaps she’ll be more careful when she cuts up her antics.”

Patterson Greeves startled into recognition lifted a belated hat.

“Oh, yes, good morning. It is a long time since it was lighted. Thank you. I hope you are quite well!”

“He didn’t know me from the man in the moon,” she told herself as she hastened up the street with the yeast. “What a man! I don’t wonder she divorced him. Mercy, but that girl is fat! And her clothes looked like my patchwork quilt with the rising sun pattern. I wonder he lets her go out that way. He knows what’s expected in this town, he lived here long enough, goodness knows. But perhaps he doesn’t care what we think.”

Pristina hastened to the door. Ordinarily Lizette was not overly welcomed, but a common cause does a great deal to bring folks down to a common level.

“Well, what do you think of Patterson Greeves’ daughters?” she asked almost before she had her breath from coming up the steps.

“Daughters?” chorused the Vandemeeter girls, all present but Harriet who was hastening down from the third story as fast as possible, having left a pillow in midair as she was making the bed, when she heard Lizette’s voice at the front door.

“_Daughters!_” reiterated Lizette sitting down complacently with the cup of yeast still in hand, “sort of startling ain’t it. I never heard of them before, did you? Strange that Mrs. Truesdale or someone never let it out, but land! she’s as close mouthed as Miss Lavinia Silver was, every bit, and a thousand times more aristocratic. Well, I met one of ’em face to face and I don’t think much of her. She’s fat and coarse and dresses outlandish. I was just thinking on my way down she looked as if she had on my rising sun bed quilt, all queer stripes and stitches over her skirt and sweater.”

“Daughters!” echoed the Vandemeeters again and looked at one another. “We must tell Arden’s wife!”

“What’s her name?” asked Pristina.

“Well, he didn’t name her when he introduced her,” evaded Lizette. “Perhaps that’s the fashion now. But the fact is I don’t believe he remembered my name, although he pretended he was awful pleased to see me.”

“Well—it’s only natural—after all these years—” said mother comfortably.

“No tain’t natural, you know tain’t. Why, I’ve spanked him for stealing my cherries!”

“That’s probably the reason,” said Pristina, “one can’t be dignified in the face of a spanking. How old is that girl anyway?”

“Well, I hardly know, Pristeen, she looked older, an younger, ’n she oughtta be. I couldn’t quite describe it. Kind of as if she was an old woman that hadn’t growed up, or a baby that had lived a hundred years. One thing I know, she had smut under her eyes, and them lips never grew red like that. It ain’t natur’.”

“Is she the oldest or the youngest?” asked mother, biting off her thread and holding up her needle to the light.

“Well, ’deed I can’t really tell you Mis’ Vandemeeter, but I shud judge she might be the youngest. But then I ain’t seen the other so you can’t tell. This one wears pants, regular pants like the boys, if that’ll tell you anything. But laws! The other one may too for all I know. She keeps herself mighty close.”

“She went out with Pat—with her father I mean—yesterday afternoon,” contributed Harriet. “She looked to me like a real modest appearing girl. She has pink cheeks, not too pink, and light hair, a real girl. I liked her looks.”

“I’m sure I don’t see how you could tell at that distance, Aunt Harriet,” said Pristina coldly.

“Well, her dress seemed quiet,” defended Harriet.

“Well, they may wear dresses that scream for all me,” said Pristina crossly, “I’m going back to my angel cake.”

Lizette’s languidly alert eyes followed her mournfully, and when the click of the flour sifter could be heard she lowered her voice sepulchrally:

“Wasn’t Pristina rather interested in Mr. Greeves at one time?”

“Mercy, no!” clamored mother so audibly that her voice could be heard in the kitchen, “Pristina was a babe in arms when he went away from here. Just because she did her duty by honoring a fellow citizen in her essay at the club everybody has jumped to the conclusion that she’s in love with him. I wish to pity’s sake you’d turn your attention to someone else, Lizette, and not carry gossip around about my child.”

“Well, now Lucy, I certainly think you’ll have to take that back. I don’t know what you mean. I only asked a simple question, didn’t I? And I don’t originate all the questions in this town do I? If I give you a little hint of what’s passing isn’t that only kindness?”

Mrs. Vandemeeter pursed her lips around a pin and looked angry.

“Well, all I’ve got to say,” said Lizette rising offendedly, “is, if you don’t ever find any worse things said about you than I say you can count yourself well off. There’s your yeast. Don’t trouble to get up. I’ve got to run right back. I thought you’d be interested to know, but of course if you’re not I’ll keep the rest to myself. Good-bye.”

She shut the door with a slam and swished down the front walk.

“Cat!” said Pristina from behind the pantry door.

“There, now Lucy, I’m afraid you’ve done it. She’ll tell something a great deal worse. It never does to make an enemy mad, especially if she’s got a tongue, let sleeping dogs lie, the saying is, and it’s very true,” said grandma. “Something about it being better to have even a dog your friend, too, what is it? Don’t any of you know? It bothers me so to have something like that I can’t remember. Now I shall lie awake all night tonight thinking of that, and it will worry me like anything that you gave her a chance to talk about Pristina, Lucy. She’ll talk, I know she will.”

“Let her talk!” said mother with her head in the air, “I guess Pristina can stand it. Pristina’s a lady.”

“Well,” said Pristina, “I’d like to know what those girls are named. You can tell a whole lot by names.”

“You’ll know soon enough,” said grandma, “get back to your cake. I wonder if Arden’s wife knows about their being daughters! Well, I must say it’s a relief to know they’re daughters. The neighborhood has always been so respectable.”

Athalie was a different creature on the golf course, alert, strong, skillful, full of eagerness, like a boy. She whistled and talked slang and patronized her father till he began to feel like a small boy himself, and all the time as he walked silently from point to point studying his amazing child, he was seeing himself in all her actions, and then seeing Lilla in her waywardness between, and realizing more and more that he was responsible for this queer tantalizing creature. Part of the time also he was wondering why he had been persuaded to come out on the golf course with this child whom he disapproved, whom he did not want to be with, and why he was trying with all his might to control his temper and make her have a good time. It was all Silver’s doings, “Silver-Alice!” he said it over and over to himself. “Silver-Alice! Silver-Alice! Silver-Alice!” and the name sounded sweet to his soul. Why had he not known what sweetness there was in fatherhood?

On the way home it almost appeared from something Athalie said that she had been trying to make him have a pleasant time. He felt strangely touched and chagrined. Not that he liked to have her put herself out for him. It went against the grain to find her doing such a thing. But the justice in his soul cried out for her due. He found himself promising that the morning should be repeated and then groaning within himself over the interruption to his life this was going to be.

But when they reached the house and Anne told him that the minister had called up to ask if they would like to take a drive that afternoon he found himself entirely willing to be interrupted still further.

There was a struggle in his mind about taking Athalie along on the drive. He felt she would be a disturbing element. But when he asked her finally if she would like to go she asked suspiciously:

“Is _she_ going?” and when he answered in the affirmative she shrugged her shoulders and said, “thank you, no. I told you how I felt about that. You can’t expect me to come when you take her.”

He was relieved. It made things easier. He felt sure Bannard would be better pleased.

Silver too was relieved. He could see that. Yet there was a cloud in her eyes, a weight upon her heart. Her conscience was over active. It troubled her that there should be enmity between her father’s daughter and herself.

But the day was gorgeous, one of those caressing days in spring when June seems to have anticipated herself and earth’s tuning has begun. Little warm scents flitted about, and tiny melodies of living creatures moving, the whir of a bee’s wings, the grumble as he worked, the stir of things growing, budding, blossoming, grass blades like rockets shooting everywhere, sharp emerald sounds broadcasting only to those whose ears attuned to their pitch, a meadow lark’s note, high, clear above it all.

And then the three seemed so congenial. There was so much to see and talk about, so much in which all were interested.

Bannard was the guide, Greeves the historian, Silver the audience, eager, questioning.

They started up the road past the schoolhouse where Greeves had been a student, out the old Pike, across the covered bridge and curving back of the village along the beach of silver beside the sparkling stream, down toward Frogtown. Bannard wanted to show them his mission, and to point out a good location for the proposed building.

They drew up in front of a row of old stone hovels crazily jostling each other facing the road and the creek. Bannard pointed to a vacant lot not far away, and he and Greeves were discussing whether it would be better farther up the hill. Silver sat watching the children playing on the path, dirty little things, yet beautiful beneath the dirt. Wonderful starry black eyes set in faces that might have been the models for some of the angel faces in the paintings of great masters, tumbled curls, and rosy cheeks, tiny earrings glittering sharply under the dirt and tousle, little bodies scantily clad, little savages unaware of their soil and nakedness. Clamoring, fighting, throwing mud, the older girls carrying babies too large sizes for their backs, the younger babies huddled to watch the automobile.

A woman hurried out from one of the houses, a curious three-corner shawl of bright colors thrown over her head and folded back like a head dress. She had an air of excitement. Bannard called to her:

“Good morning, Nuncie, all well at your house?”

“Oh, it’s the maister!” cried the woman, her voice full of agitation, her dark lined face working with emotion.

“It’s the baby, little Mary, Angelo’s Mary. Vary seek. I go for the doctor. He come two times yesterday. I tink she got the pneumonias. She turn all black. Her heart stop—”

Before the account was finished Bannard was out of the car. “Will you excuse me a moment?” he said hurriedly, “I must go in and see. This is the beautiful baby I told you about,” he finished, looking at Silver.

“Oh, please let me come too. Perhaps there is something I can do. I have had a course in nursing.”

“Come then,” said Bannard and hurried into the house without knocking.

Greeves put out his hand to stop her, but Silver was gone before he realized. Pneumonia! Didn’t the child know that was contagious. What did Bannard mean by letting her go? Suppose she should take it and die, now when he had just got her, leave him as her mother had done! He shuddered and sprang out of the car, resolved to bring her back again into the clean air and sunshine, away from germs and contamination. What was the use of being a specialist on germs if one couldn’t save one’s own from danger? So he stumbled up the steps and into a deserted room.

There was no squalor nor dirt. The walls were grimy with age and use, and the bare floor was worn in hollows by many feet, but both were clean as soap and water could make them. He stared about. There was nothing in the room but a cookstove neatly blacked with a pot of stew simmering away, a wooden table covered with oilcloth, two chairs and an old sofa with lumpy springs. A painted dresser held a few cheap dishes, some spoons and forks; and a pair of rude steps shallow almost as a ladder led up through an open door, winding out of sight. He could just see the flash of Silver’s gray-blue tweed skirt as she disappeared up those impossible stairs.

“Silver!” he called and then without knowing it, “Alice!” but no one answered him. The sound of the factory near by kept up a monotonous clatter in regular rhythm, and there were subdued voices overhead. He stepped to the door and looked up. Such stairs! He never had seen their like. They were like carvings in a sheer wall. They went winding up in the shallow space like pictured stairs, like the stairs in a nightmare. How did anybody ever climb them? How had Silver and Bannard climbed them? Didn’t Bannard know any better than to let a girl go up a place like that? He put a tentative foot on the first step and perceived that it was hollowed out in bowl shape by many feet that had gone before. He groped with his hand to the wall that seemed to advance and slap him in the face. He lifted another foot to another step, and went winding and groping up in the dark and uncertainty. A woman appeared at the head of the stairs weeping. She had wonderful dark hair and her eyes were piteous.

“I have come for my daughter. She ought not to be in here,” he shouted at her. The woman chattered some jargon at him that had a tang of French, or was it Italian? But he could understand nothing but the words “doctor” and “little ba—bee” and then more tears. She passed beyond his vision.

He lifted himself another step, and yet another and stood head and shoulders in a room light and clean with whitewash, a large framed picture of the painted Christ on the cross hung on the wall opposite him over the head of a big brass bed made up with white draperies trimmed with hand knit lace, and on the clean pillow lay a little face, the most beautiful baby face Greeves had ever looked upon, short black curls tumbled on the pillow, long curling lashes dark upon the rounded cheek, beautiful baby lips gasping for breath, treacherous blue shadows deepening about the eyes and nose.

“These windows ought to be up if it’s pneumonia,” Bannard explained in a whisper. He stretched out a strong arm and threw up both windows. Silver was leaning over the baby feeling of her forehead touching the pulse of the little fluttering restless hand.

“She ought to have oxygen, Mr. Bannard. Can’t you get some quick?” Silver looked up.

“I’ll get it,” said the minister. “Can you stay here till I come?”

She nodded. “Quick!” she was down on her knees beside the bed, putting the spoon which the mother handed her to the little tight-shut lips.

“She ought not to be here!” repeated Greeves wildly, but Bannard swept him along down the stairs with a strong arm.

“Greeves, just run over to that grocery and ring up Doctor Carr. Tell him I said to come instantly to Angelo’s house. I must go for oxygen. You stand by till I come. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

Before the dazed professor of bacteriology knew what was happening or could put in a protest Bannard’s car had given a lurch and darted down the road, and Greeves found himself walking across that squalid street, entering the grimy unsanitary grocery and asking if he might telephone for the doctor. It reminded him of France. But is was very different from sitting in an office and telling other officers where to go and what to do. He had done reconstruction work, yes, by proxy. It was not the same. He had been an executive. But this was close contact. He hurried back with the idea of carrying Silver bodily out of the infected air, and found himself once more standing at the top of those ladderlike stairs in that white airy room, gazing at the little blackening face, listening to the gasping of the baby, the mother’s tears, and his daughter’s voice praying in low gentle tones:

“Oh, Jesus, you know how this mother loves her baby. Come and help us if it be your will, save this little darling’s life. For Jesus’ sake we ask it,” and the mother bowed and crossed herself, hushing her sobs.

Someone brushed roughly by Greeves on the stairs almost upsetting his balance. To think these people lived every day on stairs like this. Incredible! A tall man, young, splendidly built came quickly to the bed and knelt on the other side from the mother and Silver. He took the little fluttering hand in his big rough one. His face was tender and there were tears raining down his cheeks but he paid no heed to them.

“Poppie come, Mary, poppie come! You hear poppie, Mary? Poppie come home from his work to stay with Mary!”

Greeves stood and gazed transfixed at the face of the rough man before him, transformed by love, tender and sweet with fatherhood! So this was what it meant to be a father!

This was the way he would have felt if he had let himself! This was what he threw away carelessly when he took himself out of the reach of his first little child, and brought another carelessly into the world to leave to any Fate that came her way.

“Let poppie hold it Mary. Let poppie hold it!” the strong hand grasped the weak restless fingers, and the little hand relaxed. For an instant the great dark eyes opened wide in recognition of the beloved face, and the dark head that had kept up its restless motion back and forth, from side to side on the pillow rested. The parched lips that had murmured hoarsely—“No! No! No!” were quieted. Then the blessed oxygen in the hands of Silver and Bannard reached her nostrils and she drew a long deep breath. The gasping ceased little by little and another breath came. A sigh of relief. The fluttering lids drooped and the long lashes lay on the white cheeks again. A restful natural sleep was coming upon the little one.

The doctor came in quietly, laid a practiced finger on the fluttering pulse. The child started and opened her eyes once more. Her glance rested on the doctor in frightened question, then turned to the father and was content, dropping off to sleep again. The doctor nodded to Silver in answer to some question about the oxygen, opened his case and prepared some drops which he handed to Angelo. The father took it and held it to the little lips with as much skill as one trained to such service could have rendered. Greeves stood there watching him with almost jealous eyes, seeing as in a vista a long line of tender services he might have rendered had his heart been right to his own. Where did this rough untaught man learn such angelic gentleness? Here in this bare little house with an environment of the plainest necessities, the father had fenced in a little piece of the kingdom of heaven for his child. Greeves suddenly realized that he was envying this rough untaught working man. With all his knowledge and culture he had missed the blessedness of living which this other man had found, and even his sorrow was sacred because of the love that was between him and his child.

Bannard had gone out again and now returned bringing with him the district nurse. She quietly took things in her capable hands and the minister’s group was no longer needed.

As he stumbled shakily toward the treacherous stair Greeves caught hold of the rude railing and gave one more glance back at the big brass bed with the exquisitely knitted white spread, and the wee white face framed in dark curls on the big pillow. The madonna mother was standing at the head on one side, the tender father kneeling at the other, tears raining unchecked down their sorrowful faces, and the face of the painted Christ overhead looked on with yearning eyes. It was a sight he never would forget.

He felt his way down the dark chute, for it was little else, groping with his feet for the shallow steps, and stumbled out into the sunshine, silent and thoughtful. He forgot how it was that he came to go into that house of sorrow, forgot that he had let his child stay as long as she was needed, forgot the words of criticism he had prepared for Bannard for letting her go into the infectious atmosphere. For the first time in years he had become a part of a great suffering universe. He forgot his own individuality, and his grievances, and his heart was throbbing with sorrow for another.

Meantime, Athalie at home, was preparing an elaborate toilet for her evening with Bobs in the city.