A stately dame with soft white hair and a cap looked out from the next frame with a smile, more human than the others, the girl felt; her stiff black silk seemed almost to rustle from its frame with dignity and kindliness, and the painted hands held primly a wide, gracious fan of rare old lace. And beside this picture hung the portrait of her husband apparently, a fine old gentleman with silvered hair, high stock, and courtly manner, fitting mate for the dear old lady, both portraits so lifelike that Athalie paused almost abashed for an instant as if someone unexpectedly had entered the room. It gave her a feeling of unaccustomed awe, these strong, painted personalities all about her, past history caught and imprisoned on the canvas for another age to know intimately. They looked down at her with kindly gracious eyes, and she turned away awkwardly, uncomfortable, and swept the room with another glance.
On the back wall Uncle Standish Silver in more modern business garb and his sister Lavinia in her Sunday best silk, long sleeved, high necked, fastened with a great cameo at the throat, and pretty crimped hair drawn back and up from her ears in a knot on top of her shapely head, were too modern to excite her curiosity, too old-fashioned to hold her interest. Her eyes wandered to the frame opposite the side window, half in shadow of the heavy curtain, a picture of a young man, a mere boy he was. She walked the length of the room eagerly to inspect it and stopped in admiration. A boy a little older than herself, only slim and tall, and with eyes—yes with eyes like the soldier—and—yes—eyes like her father’s! It must be her father when he was a boy!
She stood a long time looking at it with mingled feelings, admiring, jealous, determined, studying him as he had been when almost her age. She felt if she knew him then, she would be more able to understand and influence him now. Finally, with a sigh of impatience she turned and was about to slip out of the room when she suddenly saw for the first time—how had it escaped her?—the portrait of a young and beautiful woman, fresh, vivid, smiling, from a great oval frame over the white marble mantel. The eyes were wonderful, large, loving, innocent, deeply intelligent, and with a look of life about them that made the girl uneasy. Those eyes seemed suddenly to have been watching her all the time, to have followed her around the room, to be searching her down to the depths of her mean, selfish little soul. They were maddening eyes to a girl like Athalie. They belied every purpose of her life, every standard and ideal dear to her soul, every act of which she was conscious. They were like an angel’s eyes come down to earth for judgment.
Slowly, with gathering storm in her own dark eyes, she approached, and the two eyes seemed to meet. Who was this young girl dressed in misty white like a bride, fashioned not so long ago either? And was that a veil on her head? And orange blossoms—a spray? What bride of recent years had a right there, in the center of the great room, the place of honor? It must be—! It was her father’s first wife! Here in the house where she had come to live! Watching her with searching angel eyes like that! Clean eyes that made her conscious of herself! Assured eyes that claimed their right to be there!
And who was it she resembled? Where had she seen that face before, those true clear eyes?
It suddenly flashed over her, and she trembled from head to toe with rage and ground her teeth in quick fury. That girl out on the doorstep! Was that the girl of the portrait? Or had her father married another wife, a young girl like that? Had he dared and not let them know? Could he do that? Or—wait! There had been a child. Lilla had always said that it died—but perhaps!
Suddenly, Athalie, in a burst of rage, took a long step toward the portrait, a spring up, and spit out a great mouthful of well-chewed, sticky chocolate straight into the lovely painted face, covering eyes and nose and smiling lips and dripping in ugly brown courses down cheeks and chin. The girl surveyed her work of desecration with satisfaction and a lifted chin and stuck out tongue as any naughty child of three might have done. Then lifting her hands in a hateful defiant gesture she darted from the room and went lightly upstairs.
In a moment more after rummaging in her suitcase, she came out with a large framed photograph hidden in the folds of her skirt and slipped down to the parlor again, going straight to the mantel and putting her picture directly under the picture of the girl bride.
It was a recent picture of Lilla taken in a tremendously gauzy dressing gown, one of the expensive ones of velvet and chiffon and fur she loved to wear, an intimate picture not meant for public gaze, a bold-eyed, challenging, still beautiful woman, with amazing hair falling over bare shoulders and down upon the silk pillows of her chaise longue, on which she was half reclining. It was framed in an exquisite silver frame and intended for Athalie to show her former husband that he might see how lovely she still remained in spite of his indifference.
Athalie stood back and surveyed with jealous eye the picture smiling defiantly beneath the defaced one, made another grimace of hate and flew up the stairs again to her room, leaving her mother’s picture to hold its own with the other portraits of the family.
Chapter 8
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 heartstrings 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—” 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 only babbling. He could not grasp 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 nestled in it, 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 to know 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 like 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 that 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 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 around 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 burned 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 around 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 to 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 around him and made him unfit 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 pauses than words, tender silences. The grafting process had begun in what 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 cookie 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 Silver mounted the stairs looking with eager eyes around, not seeing the glitter of an evil black eye at the keyhole as she passed down the upper hall.
“This was Miss Lavinia’s room,” said Anne swinging wide the paneled mahogany door and revealing quaint rare furniture, rich faded carpet, a glimpse of a pineapple-carved four-poster bed, 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 embroidered 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 around the sweet old room, and went quickly downstairs 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 see 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 leaned 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. 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.
Tomorrow About This Time Page 7
