Chapter VIII

Within the quiet library the father and daughter were coming to their own. The alienation of the years like a great wall of ice was slowly melting between them and they were groping for phantom ends of heart ties broken long ago.

He had seated his daughter in one chair and drawn another opposite her. He was unnerved with the events of the night and morning. He seemed to find it hard to control his faculties and adjust himself to the present circumstances. He hardly seemed to hear her voice or the words she was speaking. It was his dead wife’s voice that he heard. And there was no reproach in it, but it rebuked him. It rebuked him so that he could scarcely speak.

“I have wanted to see you so long—father—I have wanted to know you—!” she was saying.

He groaned as he dropped his head for an instant and put his hands up to his eyes:

“You—are—_Alice_!” he said hoarsely.

She smiled. That smile he had loved so well! Was ever man tortured like this man? To have the dead come back in such perfection, yet in another body—and with another soul? “His daughter! His _daughter_!” he tried to say to himself, yet it was as babbling. He could not get its meaning. This was Alice come to rebuke him. Alice as when he first knew her.

“They always have called me Silver,” she said wistfully. “Grandmother couldn’t quite bear to call me Alice. But—I shall be glad to have you call me what you like—”

He looked at her as in a dream. He could not think what to say to her. He wanted to reach out and touch that lock of hair that was drooping over her ear, the one with the sunbeam netted in it, it was brushing against her cheek, that cheek rounded with the same contour as his lost Alice.

What a fool he had been not to know Alice would leave him her image in her child. How he had given it away, this dear growing vision of the lost one! Given it away without a thought, actually been glad to be rid of the responsibility! And now he had lost it! Lost the right! It was like giving light to a blind man, bread to a dead man, to give her to him now. He could never get in touch with her after these years. He had carved out his life in a different line, a line where she did not fit. He could never learn to speak her language, nor teach her his. He would not have her learn his. He shuddered at the thought. He could only look at her and watch her as she talked, scarcely hearing anything she said.

Afterward some of her sentences came back, stored up by his subconscious mind perhaps; details of her life, where she had been at school, how she had occupied her time, sweet incidents of the last years of those she loved. He understood enough to be rebuked again, seeing how he had failed in what might have been a pleasant duty toward the beloved of his beloved.

“You are not—_angry_—with me for coming?” she asked at last lifting her eyes anxiously to his silent staring face.

A swift contortion as of sudden pain darted over his face. It seemed as if he might be trying to smile in unaccustomed lines. It hurt him that she should ask such a thing. He had not thought that would hurt! It hurt him that he could not answer her with the right cordial words! What were the right words? Why could he not get hold of them? What a complex thing this life was anyway that one could go on for years according to a certain plan and standard, and then suddenly be confronted by unsuspected emotions which upset the whole universe! He became aware that she was still awaiting an answer, with sorrow gathering in those dear blue eyes.

“Angry? Oh, no! Why should I be angry?” he found himself saying in a cold distant tone. It was as if he were dead trying to call to the living, so strange and far away his own voice seemed to him.

A slow flush rose in her cheeks and her troubled eyes searched his face for sign of welcome.

He struggled once more for words:

“I am glad you have come.” The words had not been formed in his intention. He found to his wonder that they were nevertheless true.

“I wish you had come before!”

“But you were not here!”

“Of course!” he said foolishly. “Then I wish I had come sooner. I wish I had never gone—from you!”

“Oh, father, do you really? How many times I have wished that!” The blue eyes were full of wistful eagerness now. It had meant a great deal to her! Why had it? Was that her mother looking at him through her eyes? Was he going stark staring crazy? It was Alice’s look. Alice was looking through those eyes of her daughter’s as one might look through a window!

He was not gazing at the girl now, only at Alice looking through her eyes. Alice was trying to signal to him, to make him understand something. What was that the lips so like hers were saying?

“When I was a little, little child grandmother used to tell me all about you, how you first came to see mother—” Ah! she called her “_Mother_”!—“How you looked, how you used to sing, and play football and baseball—how handsome you were—”

Ah! He had lost the thread for a moment and now she was speaking of her first little baby thoughts of him, how grandmother had taught her lisping lips to pray “Dod bess favver!” Suddenly the thought of rosy baby fingers about his neck—where had he seen rosy baby fingers? Not Lilla’s baby! That had seemed too much a part of Lilla to be pleasant to him. He had never made much or seen much of Lilla’s baby. He shuddered at the thought of that other girl upstairs. How should he tell this girl about her?

“I used to wonder how it would be to have a father, a _young_ father, like other children, to carry me upstairs at night—grandfather was dear, but you know he had that accident—oh, didn’t you know about that? I was only two years old when it happened. He was knocked down by a heavy truck in trying to cross the city street on his way to Presbytery. He was always lame after that and had to be very careful about lifting. I used to so long to be lifted up and carried in strong arms—!”

The man wondered at the exquisite thrill that came to him. After all these years of dreary living, his heart burnt out to ashes, that the thought of a little child, _his_ little child being carried in his arms should so stir him! The thought of a rosy cheek cuddling in his neck, moist lips dropping furtive kisses, soft breath coming and going against his cheek, golden curls spreading on his shoulder—she would have had golden curls he knew by the curl of the sunshine in the tendrils about her forehead. His baby! _Alice’s_ baby! Alice’s gift to him to comfort him through the lonely years! And _he had let her go_! Was that what the eyes had been trying to signal him? It was as if Alice stood there behind the windows of her daughter’s eyes and held out her baby to him with a smile; and suddenly he understood and reached out the arms of his heart to gather her to his life. Fool that he had been that he had not known it sooner, before the mistakes of his life had thickened about him and unfitted him for caring for her! Suddenly he dropped his face into his hands again and groaned.

“Father! Dear father! What is it? Did I hurt you somehow?”

“Too late! Too late!” he moaned. “What a fool I have been!”

And there somehow he told her all that she needed to know of the years that had separated them, broken sentences, more reserves than words, tender silences. The grafting process had begun in that which had been so long severed.

When Anne Truesdale, after long lingering and listening to the low murmur of voices, finally brought herself to tap on the door and announce lunch, their faces were like the clear shining after rain.

“Come in Anne!” His voice was more like himself than it had been since his arrival. Anne entered bravely, suppressing her own excitement.

“I’m afraid, Anne, we’ve been upsetting all your arrangements,” he began penitently as he used to do when as a boy he took all the cookies in the cooky jar to feed a hungry horde of boys.

“Don’t speak of it, Master Pat. Yer not to apologize to me. This is yer own house. I and the rest are but here to do yer bidding. It is the pleasure of us all to have things as you’ll be wanting them.”

The woman held her hands tightly clasped at her waist and made a low courtesy of respect. The master’s face softened with affection.

“Thank you, Trudie,” he said, using the old childhood name. Then turning toward the girl he said:

“Trudie, this is Alice’s child! My daughter—Silver! _Silver—Alice!_”

He turned quickly away, his voice husky with feeling, but wheeled as suddenly back again:

“Could she have Aunt Lavinia’s room? I’d like to have her there—!”

Anne gave the girl one swift sifting glance and rendered instant homage:

“Indeed she could, Master Pat,” she said heartily, satisfaction in her eyes, “and right pleased would Miss Lavinia be to have such a successor. Shall I show the way at once? Lunch is putting on the table.”

“Why, I’ll only be a moment,” said the girl beginning to remove her gloves. “How beautiful to have Aunt Lavinia’s room!”

Anne Truesdale stepped back as Silver advanced to the stairs and spoke in a guarded voice:

“And what about the young Miss upstairs? Must I speak to her to come down?”

The man looked as though she had struck him, and the light of shining went suddenly out of his eyes:

“Oh, why! Yes—I suppose you’ll have to—tell her to come down please!” he finished with an attempt at ease, and bracing himself made one of his quick turns and went and stood staring out of the long narrow window that framed the front doorway.

Silver had paused, glancing back, and caught the low words, felt the pain in his voice and the sudden dashing of his spirit. It seemed that a cloud must have just passed over the sun. “The young Miss upstairs!” That would be the flapper-looking child she saw when she first entered. Who was she? What right had she here in her father’s house?

But Anne Truesdale’s black silk was rustling close behind and she mounted the stairs looking with eager eyes around, nor saw the glitter of an evil black eye at the keyhole as she passed down the upper hall.

“This was Miss Silver’s room,” said Anne swinging wide the panelled mahogany door, and revealing quaint rare furniture, rich faded carpet, a glimpse of a pineapple carved fourposter, and the depths of a flowered wing-chair by the window, with a little sewing table drawn up and even a work basket with a bit of white linen tidily folded atop.

Anne bustled about, setting straight a chair, patting a pillow, and smoothing a dent out of the wing-chair cushion where she had but just been kneeling. Then she slipped away down the hall and tapped at a door nearer the head of the stairs on the other side.

Silver took off her hat, ran her fingers through her hair, washed her face and hands in the great blue and white china bowl, dried them on a fine linen towel fragrant with rose leaves and exquisitely wrought with a great S at one end. Then she fluffed up her hair a bit more, gave a glance into the mirror, and another lingering one about the sweet old room and went quickly down stairs arriving just in time to hear Anne’s low murmured:

“She says she’ll not come down. She’s not feeling so good,” and to vision her father’s relief at the message.

At the head of the stairs, Athalie with velvet tread had crept to the railing to listen, and peer over from the shadows of the upper hall as they went to the old stately dining room, father and daughter, for their first meal together. As they disappeared and the heavy door closed silently behind them the girl learned far over the baluster and made an ugly face ending in a hiss. Then as stealthily as she had come she crept back to her room, closed the door, locked it, rummaged among her luggage for a five pound box of chocolates and a novel and established herself amid pillows on the foot of the big old bed.

Anne Truesdale came up presently with a laden tray of good things, but Athalie with her face smothered in the pillow and her chocolates and book hid out of sight declined any sustenance. Whereupon Anne, pausing thoughtfully in the hall, finally scuttled down the dark narrow back stairs and whisked the tray out of sight, deciding that the master should not know of this hunger strike yet.

After lunch Silver and her father went back to the library for a time, and their low voices in steady cheerful conversation were not soothing to the other daughter’s nerves. She tiptoed to the open window to see if she could hear any words, but found she could not on account of a family of sparrows who were nesting in the honeysuckle below and seemed to have been retained for the purpose of chattering.

About half past two Silver and her father went out together down the street. Athalie watched them from the shelter of the window curtain frowning and noting the amicable footing on which they seemed to be.

They went to the station and reclaimed the girl’s suitcase. On the way back they stopped at the old church and walked slowly through the graveyard, the father pointing out the names on the white stones, of those who would be of interest to her among her unknown kin, the girl’s face kindling with tender emotions as she read the records mossy with age.

While they were gone the village expressman arrived with four immense trunks and three wooden boxes. Athalie arose with alacrity from her couch of pain and superintended their installment in the house.

“You can bring the two wardrobe trunks right in here and unpack them at once,” she informed Anne Truesdale haughtily. “I shall need more closet room. I think I’ll take that room across the hall. You might put the other two trunks and the boxes there till we get them unpacked. I shall probably use that for my boudoir.”

“That is the spare bedroom,” said Anne coldly but firmly. “There’s a trunk room in the attic where your trunks can be stored.” Athalie gave her a withering look, but such looks had no effect on Anne. She went her way and called the faithful servitor. He managed an extra hand from the street, to help the expressman, and Athalie’s mammoth trunks were carried slowly up the stairs. Nothing so huge in the way of a trunk had ever entered that house before, and Anne stood aghast as the first one hove in sight and cast a quick and calculating eye toward the attic stairs. But when she saw how heavy they all were she changed her mind. They should go no farther until they were unpacked. So the first was placed in the back hall for further consideration, while the remaining three proved to be so enormous that Anne demanded the key and down in the wide old front hall Athalie’s frivolous possessions were brought to light and carried up in the abashed and indignant arms of the three old-fashioned servants, who looked upon the trifles of lingerie with averted gaze and felt that the daring evening frocks of scarlet and silver and turquoise were little short of blasphemies. They hastened them up to the oblivion of the second floor before the master should return, and Anne stood for a full minute gazing out of the hall window across the sunny meadow and pondering whether she ought not perhaps to have left them all down on the back porch where the boxes had been remanded, until the return of the master. Such doings! And a young girl who ought to be in leading strings yet. Four trunks! What would Miss Lavinia have said!

Athalie meanwhile was rummaging among her brilliant raiment, pulling out this and that, deciding what she would wear next after she had sufficiently cowed that hard-hearted father of hers, and finally burrowed her way among silks and organdies to her chocolates and her pillow again, deciding not to put anything away until that objectionable “Anne” person came to do her bidding. She felt she must make it understood from the start that she would be waited upon. Anne wasn’t much like her mother’s maid, but such as she was she must be reduced to obedience. Perhaps she could coax her father to let her have a French maid all her own, a young girl about her own age. That would be rather fun.