Little Athalie had never meant anything to him but a reproach. Somehow her round, blank stare had always sent his thoughts back to the first little one whom he had given away; and he felt a reproach in spite of the fact that he always reasoned it out within himself that he had done well in so doing.
So, at war with himself, he had grown more and more morose, living to himself whenever he was at home, scarcely ever even a figurehead in his own house at the functions that his wife delighted to give to her own frivolous set. As he grew to understand the true character of his second wife, his mind reverted to his old bitterness against a God—if there was a God—who had thrust this hard fate upon him.
So, bitterly and haughtily, he had lifted his proud head and taken the blows of life without comfort. And now he had come home.
He had arrived in the late afternoon and found the town of Silver Sands much as he left it years ago. There was a new thrifty little stucco station in place of the grimy one of clapboards of the old days, but the old barns and blacksmith shop were there just as he left them, a trifle more weather-beaten and dilapidated but doing a thriving business in automobile tires and truck repairs.
The old stone church where as a child he went to Sunday school and sat beside Aunt Lavinia in the dim pew afterward, with Uncle Standish next to the aisle, and squirmed or slept through a long service, looked just the same, except that the ivy on the tower grew thicker and higher. The graveyard sloping down the hill behind, the Baptist church across the corner—redbrick with aspen trees in front and chalk marks where the children played hopscotch during the week on the brick walk up to the steps—were unchanged. A little farther on he could see the redbrick schoolhouse where he went to school glimmering through the trees, and the old bare playground where he used to play baseball. Here he had somehow bluffed his way into high school and finally prepared for college. He had heard rumors of a new high school up in the new part of town, but the old part where he had lived his young life seemed almost unchanged.
He had gone into the old house expecting to find the chill of the long-closed place about it, but the door had swung open, and the old servant, Joe Quinn, with his wife Molly, the cook, had stood smiling at the end of the hall a little wrinkled and gray, rounder as to form, more bent; and there in the parlor door quite ceremoniously had stood Anne Truesdale, an Englishwoman whom his aunt Lavinia had befriended when her husband died and who had been housekeeper since his aunt’s death. Her hair was white, and she had lost her rosy cheeks, but her eyes were bright and her thin form as erect as ever in its black silk and thin white cuffs and collar. She put out a ceremonious hand to welcome the boy she used to chide, with a deference to his years and station that showed her reverence for him.
“Well, Master Pat,” she said, using the old name he had not heard for years. “So yer come again. Welcome home! It’s right glad we are to see ye!”
For the moment it almost seemed as if he were a boy again, coming home for vacation.
He went up to his room and found it unchanged with the years. He spent a happy moment glancing over the old pictures of high school teams that were framed on his walls. Then he came down to the dining room and sat at the wide table alone eating a supper as similar to those of his childhood as the same cook could make it: stewed chicken with little biscuits, currant jelly from the bushes in the garden, prune jam and cherry delight from the trees he had helped to plant, mashed potatoes as smooth as cream, peas that were incredibly sweet, little white onions smothered in cream, cherry pie that would melt in your mouth for flakiness, and coffee like ambrosia.
Shades of the starving Russians! Was he dreaming? Where was Siberia? Had the war ever been? Was he perhaps a boy again?
But no! Those empty places across the table! That ivy-covered church down the street surrounded by its white gravestones showing in the dusk! A world of horror in France between! Other gravestones, too, and an empty sinful world! Ah! No, he was not a boy again!
He opened the door of the dear old library half expecting to see the kindly face of his Uncle Standish sitting at the desk, and instead there was the letter!
He had come home for rest and peace, and this had met him! He seemed to hear Lilla’s mocking laugh ringing clearly through the distant halls as if her spirit had lingered to watch over her letter and enjoy its reception. It was like Lilla to prepare the setting of a musical comedy for anything she had to do. Why couldn’t she have written to ask him what he wanted her to do about the child?
His anger rose. Lilla should not make a laughingstock of him in any such way. He glanced at the date of the letter and angrily reached for the telephone.
“Give me Western Union!” he demanded sternly, and dictated his telegram crisply:
ON NO ACCOUNT SEND THE CHILD HERE. WILL MAKE IMMEDIATE ARRANGEMENTS FOR HER ELSEWHERE. LETTER FOLLOWS BY FIRST MAIL. P.S.G.
He hung up the receiver with a click of relief as if he had averted some terrible calamity and sank wearily back in his chair, beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead. It was almost as if he had had a personal encounter with Lilla. Any crossing of swords between them had always left him with a sense of defeat.
He tried to rally and busy himself with the other letters. Two from his publishers demanding copy at once; an invitation from an exclusive scientific society to speak before their next national convention; a call from a western college to occupy the chair of sciences; a proposition from a lecture bureau to place his name on their list in a course of brilliant speakers. He threw them down aimlessly and took up the last letter without glancing at the address. They all seemed so trivial. What was fame to an empty life?
Then he brought back his wandering gaze and read: “Dear Father—”
He started. Not for several years had he read a letter beginning that way. Athalie had never written to him. He had not expected it. She was Lilla’s child.
But this was from Alice’s child. The writing was so exactly like her girl-mother’s that it gave his heart a wrench to look at it. Well, it had not mattered. She did not belong to him—never had. He had given her away. He had always felt her childish little letters full of stilted gratitude, for the gifts he sent were merely perfunctory. Why should she care for him? She could not remember him. He had been rather relieved than otherwise because he had a troubled feeling that they entailed more than a mere check at Christmas and birthdays. And now after several years’ silence she had written again! Strange that both his children should have been suddenly thrust upon his notice on this same day! He read on:
I suppose you received the word I sent while you were abroad that Grandfather died of influenza last November right in the midst of his work. Grandmother has been slipping away ever since, though she tried to rally for my sake. But two weeks ago she left me, and now I am alone. I sent a letter to your foreign address, but I saw in the papers today that you had landed and were going to Silver Sands, and a great longing has come over me to see my father once before I go to work. I am not going to be a burden to you. Grandfather had saved enough to keep
me comfortably even if I did nothing, but I have also secured a good position with a very good salary for a beginner, and I shall be able to care for myself, I think, without at present touching the money that was left me.
Grandmother said something a few days before she died that has given me courage to write this letter. I have always felt, and especially since you married again, that you did not want me or you would not have given me to Grandmother, and of course I don’t want to intrude upon you, although I’ve always been very proud of you and have read everything I could find in the papers about you. But one day two weeks ago Grandmother said: “Silver”—they always called me Silver, you know, because they wanted to keep the Alice for Mother—“Silver, I’ve been thinking that perhaps your father might need you now. After I’m gone perhaps you’d better go and see.”
So, Father, I’m coming! I hope you won’t mind—
Patterson Greeves suddenly dropped the letter
and buried his face in his hands with a groan that was half anguish, half anger, at a Fate that had suddenly decided to make him a puppet in the comedy of life. He was like one under mortal anguish. He kicked the heavy desk chair savagely back from under him and strode to the window like a caged animal. Staring out with unseeing eyes at the calm dusk of the evening sky across the meadow, he tried to realize that this was really himself, Patterson Greeves, to whom all this incredible thing was happening. Horrible! Impossible!
He sensed that somewhere deep in his soul was a large engulfing contempt for himself. This was no attitude, of course, for a father to have toward his children. But then they had never really been his children in the strict sense of the word, and nothing had ever been right in his life. Why should he try to be? It was all God’s fault, if there was a God—taking Alice away! None of these unnatural things would ever have happened if Alice had lived! And now God was trying to force him back to the blackness of his ruined life again after he had in a measure gained a certain hard kind of peace.
He flung his head up defiantly toward the evening sky, as if he would vow that God should make nothing from him by treating him so. He was master of his fate no matter how “charged with punishments the scroll.” God! To dare to be a God and yet to treat him so!
Chapter 2
The old Silver place stood back from the street just far enough for privacy and not far enough to seem exclusive.
The General Silver who built it in Revolutionary times had been a democratic soul, and his sons who had followed him were of like mind. The last grandson, Standish Silver, now sleeping in the quiet churchyard just below the bend of the hill, was the friend and counselor of everyone in the village, his home the rendezvous and refuge alike of all classes. Perhaps it was the habit of the house through the long years that had given it that genial attitude, widespread and welcoming as it stood among its trees and old-fashioned shrubs, with the same dignity and gentleness of bearing it had worn in the days when its owners were living within, as if it had a character to maintain in the name of the family, though all its immediate members were gone.
There were many newer houses in Silver Sands that boasted modern architecture and in their ornate and pretentious decorations made claim to be the finest houses in town, but still the old Silver place held its own with dignity and gentle grace, as if it had no need for pretension. Like a strong, handsome old man of high birth, it lifted its distinguished head among all the others of the place. There was something classic about its simple lines, its lofty columns reaching to the roof, its ample windows with wide-drawn snowy curtains giving of old a glimpse of companionable firelight blazing on a generous hearth. It had a homelike, friendly look that drew the eye of a visitor as home draws the soul. It had always been kept in perfect repair, and the well-made bricks of which it was built had been painted every year a clear cream-white, always white with myrtle-green blinds, so that old age had only mellowed it and made the color a part of the material. It had the air of well-preserved age, like an old, old person with beautiful white hair who still cared to keep himself fine and distinguished.
About its feet the myrtle crept, with blue starry blossoms in summer, and lush beds of lilies-of-the-valley, generation after generation of them, clustering, occupied the spaces between the front walk and the end verandas, giving forth their delicate fragrance even as far as the dusty street. A tall wall of old lilacs made a background behind the verandas at each end. A gnarled wisteria draped a pergola at one end while a rich blooming trumpet vine flared at the other, miraculously preserved from the devastation of painters each year. A row of rare peonies bordered the walk down to the box hedge in front, and the grass was fine and velvety, broken here and there by maples, a couple of lacy hemlock trees, and the soft blending plumes of the smoke bush. In the backyard there were roses and honeysuckle, snowballs and bridal wreath, bittersweet vines, mountain-ash trees, and a quaint corner with walks and borders where sweet williams, Johnny-jump-ups, Canterbury bells, and phlox still held sway, with heliotrope, mignonette, and clove pinks cloying the air with their sweetness, and in their midst an old-fashioned sundial marking the marching of the quiet hours. Almost hidden in the rose vines was a rustic arbor of retreat, where one might go to read and be undisturbed except by the birds who dared to nest above it and sing their lullabies unafraid. One would scarcely have dreamed that there was left a spot so sweet, so quaint, so true and peaceful in the rushing world.
Across the road a meadow stretched far down to misty vapors rising from the little stream, whose sand, of a peculiar fine and white variety, suitable for use in manufacturing fine grades of sandpaper, had given to the Silver family its prosperity and helped to give a name to the place started by the first old family—”Silver Sands.”
The meadow was rimmed with trees, and here and there a group of them broke the smoothness of its green, but for the most part the view was kept open, down across its rippling smoothness of close-cropped grass in summer, or glistening whiteness of deep-laid snow in winter, open down to the gleaming “river” as they sometimes dignified the little stream. And one looked back to the owners of that strip of land with gratitude that they had done this thing for the house and for all who should sojourn there, to give this wide stretch of beauty untouched, with room for souls who had vision to grow.
Down beyond the meadow, off to the right, camouflaged now and again by a random tree or a cropping of rocks, huddled the heterogeneous group of buildings that had come to be known as Frogtown. It was really originally called “the Flats” of Silver Sands, but since the factories had gone up—the iron foundry, the glassworks, the silk mill—and like mushrooms, a swarm of little “overnight houses” filled with a motley population, it had somehow grown into the name of Frogtown, and one felt that if the original Silver, who had owned the land and planned the view across the long misty meadow, could have looked ahead far enough he would have planted a row of tall elms or maples like a wall to shut in his view as well as out. For Frogtown in winter lifted stark, grim chimneys of redbrick and belched forth volumes of soft black smoke, which, when it got into the picture, was enough to spoil any view.
But in summer the kindly trees had spread more and more to shut out the ugliness of the dirty little tenements and stark red chimneys, and the tall grass reached up and blended the town till one could almost forget it was there. Especially at evening, one could look out from the windows of the dignified old Silver mansion and see the river winding smoothly like a silver ribbon just beyond the stretch of misty green without a thought of dirty laborers, blazing furnaces, flaring pots of molten glass and metal. It was like a vision of Peaceful Valley in its still natural beauty.
But it was most mysterious just after the sun had set, and the “trailing clouds of glory” left behind were lying in lovely tatters across a field of jade, above the pearly shadows where the river pulsed in dusk, and a single star stood out like a living thing and winked to show the night alive.
For the last fifteen years, since the death of Standish Silver, few had looked at this particular view from the angle of the Silver house for the reason that there had seldom during that period been anyone occupying the house except the three old servants, who lived in the back part and went “front” only to clean and air it. They cared little for views. For this reason it was all the more wonderful that the house had kept its atmosphere of home and its air of alert friendliness, its miracle of distinction from all other houses of the town.
But on this night, after all the years, the old house seemed to smile with content as the evening settled down upon it and nestled among its shrubbery with an air of satisfaction. Back in the inner rooms soft lights began to glow under quiet shades, and there seemed a warmth and life about the place as if it had awoke because the owner had come home.
As Patterson Greeves stood at the window surrounded by this sweetness of the night, this peace of home, his raging soul could not help but feel the calm of it all, the balm, the beauty. The sweet air
stole in upon his troubled senses, and his soul cried out for comfort. Why couldn’t they have left him in peace to get what inspiration there was in this quiet old spot for the hard work that he had before him?
The spell of the meadow came upon him, the mist stealing up from the river in wreaths till he felt the blue eyes of the violets from their hiding places as if they were greeting him, sensed the folded wings of a butterfly poised for the night on a dandelion, began to gather up and single out and identify all the delicate smells and sounds and stirrings in the meadow that he used to know so long ago. Even without going he seemed to know where a big flat stone could be lifted up to show the scurrying sow bugs surprised from early sleep. His anger began to slip from him, his bitterness of soul to be forgotten. A desire stirred in him to steal out and find the particular tree toad that was chirping above his mates and to watch him. He drank in the night with its clear jade sky, littered with tatters of pink and gold. He answered the wink of the single star, his old friend from boyhood, and then he remembered!
Out there was the meadow and the mist and the silver sand in the starlight, but off down the street in the quiet churchyard were two graves! Out the other way was a dead schoolhouse where other boys played ball and bluffed their way through lessons. He was not a boy. He had no part in this old village life. He had been a fool to come. His life was dead. He had thought he could come to this old refuge for inspiration to write a book that would add to the world’s store of wisdom and then pass on—out—Where? How different it all was from what he had dreamed in those happy boyhood days!
Even the old church with its faith in God, in love, in humanity and life, in death and resurrection! What were they now but dead fallacies? Poor Aunt Lavinia with her beautiful trust! How hard she strove to teach him lies! Poor Uncle Standish, clean, kind, loving, severe, but fatherly and Christian—always Christian! How far he had gone from all that now! It seemed as different—the life he had been living since Alice died—as a windswept, arid desert of sand in the pitch-dark would be from this living, dusky, mysterious, pulsing meadow under the quiet evening sky. And yet—! Well, he believed in the meadow of course, because he knew it, had lived with the bugs and butterflies and bits of growing things. If he had only read about it or been taught of it he might perhaps think the earth all arid. He had a passing wish that he might again believe in the old faith that seemed to his world-weary heart like an old couch where one might lie at peace and really rest. But of course that was out of the question. He had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and he could not go back into Eden. Poor credulous Uncle Standish, poor Aunt Lavinia! Strong and fine and good but woefully ignorant and gullible! How little they knew of life! How pleasant to have been like them! And yet, they stagnated in the old town, walking in grooves their forbearers had carved for them, thinking the thoughts that had been taught them. That was not life.
Tomorrow About This Time Page 2
