OLD MR. WELLES AND YOUNG MR. MARSH
_An Hour in the Life of Mr. Ormsby Welles, aet. 67_
March 15, 1920.
3:00 P.M.
Having lifted the knocker and let it fall, the two men stood gazing with
varying degrees of attention at the closed white-painted old door. The
younger, the one with the round dark head and quick dark eyes, seemed
extremely interested in the door, and examined it competently, its
harmoniously disposed wide panels, the shapely fan-light over it, the
small panes of greenish old glass on each side. "Beautiful old bits you
get occasionally in these out-of-the-way holes," he remarked. But the
older man was aware of nothing so concrete and material. He saw the door
as he saw everything else that day, through a haze. Chiefly he was
concerned as to what lay behind the door. . . . "My neighbors," he thought,
"the first I ever had."
The sun shone down through the bare, beautiful twigs of the leafless
elms, in a still air, transparent and colorless.
The handle of the door turned, the door opened. The older man was too
astonished by what he saw to speak, but after an instant's pause the
younger one asked if Mr. and Mrs. Crittenden were at home and could see
callers. The lean, aged, leather-colored woman, with shiny opaque black
eyes, opened the door wider and silently ushered them into the house.
As long as she was in sight they preserved a prudent silence as profound
as hers, but when she had left them seated, and disappeared, they turned
to each other with lifted eyebrows. "Well, what was _that_, do you
suppose?" exclaimed the Younger. He seemed extremely interested and
amused. "I'm not so sure, Mr. Welles, about your being safe in never
locking your doors at night, as they all tell you, up here. With that
for a neighbor!"
The older man had a friendly smile for the facetious intention of this.
"I guess I won't have anything that'd be worth locking doors on," he
said. He looked about him still smiling, his pleasant old eyes full of a
fresh satisfaction in what he saw. The room was charming to his gaze,
cheerful and homey. "I don't believe I'm going to have anything to
complain of, with the folks that live in this house," he said, "any more
than with any of the rest of it."
The other nodded. "Yes, it's a very good room," he agreed. After a
longer inspection, he added with a slight accent of surprise, "An oddly
good room; stunning! Look at the color in those curtains and the walls,
and the arrangement of those prints over that Chippendale sewing-table.
I wonder if it's accidental. You wouldn't think you'd find anybody up
here who could achieve it consciously."
He got to his feet with a vigorous precision of movement which the other
admired. "Well, he's grown to be considerable of a man," he thought to
himself. "A pity his father couldn't have lived to see it, all that
aliveness that had bothered them so much, down at last where he's got
his grip on it. And enough of it, plenty of it, oceans of it, left so
that he is still about forty times more alive than anybody else." He
looked tolerantly with his tired elderly amusement at the other,
stepping about, surveying the room and every object in it.
The younger brought himself up short in front of a framed photograph.
"Why, here's a château-fort I don't know!" he said with an abrupt
accent. He added, with some vehemence, "I never even heard of it, I'm
sure. And it's authentic, evidently."
The older man sat perfectly still. He did not know what a shatto four
was, nor had he the slightest desire to ask and bring the information
down on him, given as the other would give it, pressingly, vividly, so
that you had to listen whether you wanted to or not. Heaven knew he did
not want to know about whatever it was, this time. Not about that, nor
anything else. He only wanted to rest and have a little life before it
was too late. It was already too late for any but the quietest sort. But
that was no matter. He wouldn't have liked the other kind very well
probably. He certainly had detested the sort of "life" he'd experienced
in business. The quietest sort was what he had always wanted and never
got. And now it really seemed as though he was going to have it. For all
his fatigued pose in the old arm-chair, his heart beat faster at the
idea. He hadn't got used to being free yet. He'd heard people say that
when you were first married it was like that, you couldn't realize it.
He'd heard one of the men at the office say that for a long time, every
time he heard his bride's skirts rustle, he had to turn his head to make
sure she was really there. Well, he would like now to get up and look
out of that window and see if his garden was really there. _His garden!_
He thought with a secret feeling, half pity and half shame, of those
yellowed old seed catalogues which had come, varnished and brilliant and
new, year after year, so long ago, which he'd looked at so hard and so
long, in the evenings, and put away to get yellow and sallow like his
face . . . and his hopes. It must be almost time to "make garden," he
thought. He had heard them saying at the store that the sap was
beginning to run in the maple-trees. He would have just time to get
himself settled in his house . . . he felt an absurd young flush come up
under his grizzled beard at this phrase . . . "his house," his own house,
with bookshelves, and a garden. How he loved it all already! He sat very
still, feeling those savagely lopped-off tendrils put out their curling
fingers once more, this time unafraid. He sat there in the comfortable
old arm-chair at rest as never before. He thought, "This is the way I'm
going to feel right along, every day, all the time," and closed his
eyes.
He opened them again in a moment, moved subconsciously by the life-time
habit of making sure what Vincent was up to. He smiled at the keen look
of alert, prick-eared attention which the other was still giving to that
room! Lord, how Vincent did love to get things all figured out! He
probably had, by this time, an exact diagram of the owners of the house
all drawn up in his mind and would probably spend the hour of their
call, seeing if it fitted. Not that _they_ would have any notion he was
doing anything but talk a blue streak, or was thinking of anything but
introducing an old friend.
One thing he wanted in his garden was plenty of gladioli. Those poor,
spindling, watery ones he had tried to grow in the window-box, he'd
forget that failure in a whole big row all along the terrace, tall and
strong, standing up straight in the country sunshine. What was the
address of that man who made a specialty of gladioli? He ought to have
noted it down. "Vincent," he asked, "do you remember the address of that
Mr. Schwatzkummerer who grew nothing but gladioli?" Vincent was looking
with an expression of extreme astonishment at the sheet of music on the
piano. He started at the question, stared, recollected himself, laughed,
and said, "Heavens, no, Mr. Welles!" and went back into his own world.
There were lots of things, Mr. Welles reflected, that Vincent did _not_
care about just as hard as he cared about others.
In a moment the younger man came and sat down on the short, high-armed
sofa. Mr. Welles thought he looked puzzled, a very unusual expression on
that face. Maybe, after all, he hadn't got the owners of the house so
well-plotted out as he thought he ought to. He himself, going on with
his own concerns, remarked, "Well, the name must be in the Long Island
telephone directory. When you go back you could look it up and send me
word."
"Whose name?" asked Vincent blankly.
"Schwatzkummerer," said the other.
"_What_!" cried Vincent incredulously, and then, "Oh yes," and then,
"Sure, yes, I'll look it up. I'm going back Thursday on the night train.
I won't leave the Grand Central without going to a telephone booth,
looking it up, and sending it to you on a postcard, mailed there. It
ought to be here on the morning mail Saturday."
The older man knew perfectly well that he was being a little laughed at,
for his absorption in gladioli, and not minding it at all, laughed
himself, peaceably. "It would take a great deal more than a little of
Vincent's fun," he thought, "to make me feel anything but peaceable
here." He was quite used to having people set him down as a harmless,
worn-out old duffer, and he did not object to this conception of his
character. It made a convenient screen behind which he could carry on
his own observation and meditation uninterrupted.
"Here comes somebody," said Vincent and turned his quick eyes toward the
door, with an eager expression of attention. He really _must_ have been
stumped by something in the room, thought Mr. Welles, and meant to
figure it out from the owners of the house themselves.
The tall, quiet-looking lady with the long dark eyes, who now came in
alone, excusing herself for keeping them waiting, must of course be Mrs.
Crittenden, Mr. Welles knew. He wished he could get to his feet as
Vincent did, looking as though he had got there by a bound or a spring
and were ready for another. He lifted himself out of his arm-chair with
a heaviness he knew seemed all the heavier by contrast, took the slim
hand Mrs. Crittenden offered him, looked at her as hard as he dared, and
sank again into the arm-chair, as she motioned him to do. He had had a
long experience in judging people quickly by the expression of their
faces, and in that short length of time he had decided thankfully that
he was really, just as he had hoped, going to like his new neighbor as
much as all the rest of it. He gave her a propitiatory smile, hoping she
might like him a little, too, and hoping also that she would not mind
Vincent. Sometimes people did, especially nice ladies such as evidently
Mrs. Crittenden was. He observed that as usual Vincent had cut in ahead
of everybody else, had mentioned their names, both of them, and was
talking with that . . . well, the way he _did_, which people either liked
very much or couldn't abide. He looked at Vincent as he talked. He was
not a great talker himself, which gave him a great deal of practice in
watching people who did. He often felt that he _saw_ more than he heard,
so much more did people's faces express than their words.
He noticed that the younger man was smiling a good deal, showing those
fine teeth of his, and he had one of those instantaneously-gone,
flash-light reminiscences of elderly people, . . . the day when Mr. Marsh
had been called away from the office and had asked him to go with little
Vincent to keep an appointment with the dentist. Heavens! How the kid
had roared and kicked! And now he sat there, smiling, "making a call,"
probably with that very filling in his tooth, grown-up, not even so very
young any more, with a little gray in his thick hair, what people often
called a good-looking man. How life did run between your fingers! Well,
he would close his hand tight upon what was left to him. He noticed
further that as Vincent talked, his eyes fixed on his interlocutor, his
vigorous hands caressed with a slow circular motion the rounded arms of
his chair. "What a three-ringed circus that fellow is," he thought. "I
bet that the lady thinks he hasn't another idea in his head but
introducing an old friend, and all the time he's taking her in, every
inch of her, and three to one, what he'll talk about most afterwards is
the smooth hard feeling of those polished arm-chairs." Vincent was
saying, ". . . and so, we heard in a round-about way too long to bother
you with, about the small old house next door being for sale, and how
very quiet and peaceful a spot this is, and the Company bought it for
Mr. Welles for a permanent home, now he has retired."
"Pretty fine of them!" murmured the older man dutifully, to the lady.
Vincent went on, "Oh, it's only the smallest way for them to show their
sense of his life-time devotion to their interests. There's no
estimating what we all owe him, for his steadiness and loyalty and good
judgment, especially during that hard period, near the beginning. _You_
know, when all electrical businesses were so entirely on trial still.
Nobody knew whether they were going to succeed or not. My father was one
of the Directors from the first and I've been brought up in the
tradition of how much the small beginning Company is indebted to Mr.
Welles, during the years when they went down so near the edge of ruin
that they could see the receiver looking in through the open door."
Welles moved protestingly. He never had liked the business and he didn't
like reminders that he owed his present comfort to it. Besides this was
reading his own epitaph. He thought he must be looking very foolish to
Mrs. Crittenden. Vincent continued, "But of course that's of no great
importance up here. What's more to the purpose is that Mr. Welles is a
great lover of country life and growing things, and he's been forced to
keep his nose on a city grindstone all his life until just now. I think
I can guarantee that you'll find him a very appreciative neighbor,
especially if you have plenty of gladioli in your garden."
This last was one of what Welles called "Vincent's sidewipes," which he
could inlay so deftly that they seemed an integral part of the
conversation. He wondered what Mrs. Crittenden would say, if Vincent
ever got through his gabble and gave her a chance. She was turning to
him now, smiling, and beginning to speak. What a nice voice she had! How
nice that she should have such a voice!
"I'm more than glad to have you both come in to see me, and I'm
delighted that Mr. Welles is going to settle here. But Mr. . . ." she
hesitated an instant, recalled the name, and went on, "Mr. Marsh doesn't
need to explain you any more. It's evident that you don't know Ashley,
or you'd realize that I've already heard a great deal more about you
than Mr. Marsh would be likely to tell me, very likely a good deal more
than is true. I know for instance, . . ." she laughed and corrected
herself, ". . . at least I've been told, what the purchase price of the
house was. I know how Harry Wood's sister-in-law's friend told you about
Ashley and the house in the first place. I know how many years you were
in the service of the Company, and how your pension was voted
unanimously by the Directors, and about the silver loving-cup your
fellow employees in the office gave you when you retired; and indeed
every single thing about you, except the exact relation of the elderly
invalid to whose care you gave up so generously so much of your life;
I'm not sure whether I she was an aunt or a second-cousin." She paused
an instant to give them a chance to comment on this, but finding them
still quite speechless, she went on. "And now I know another thing, that
you like gladioli, and that is a real bond."
She was interrupted here by a great explosive laugh from Vincent. It was
his comment on her speech to them, and for a time he made no other,
eyeing her appreciatively as she and Mr. Welles talked garden together,
and from time to time chuckling to himself. She gave him once a sidelong
amused glance, evidently liking his capacity to laugh at seeing the
ground cut away from under his feet, evidently quite aware that he was
still thinking about that, and not at all about Mr. Welles and
tulip-beds. Welles was relieved at this. Apparently she was going to
"take" Vincent the right way. Some ladies were frightfully rubbed the
wrong way by that strange great laugh of Vincent's. And what she knew
about gardening! And not only about gardening in general, but about his
own garden. He was astounded at her knowledge apparently of every inch
of the quadrangle of soil back of his house, and at the revelations she
made to him of what could lie sleeping under a mysterious blank surface
of earth. Why, a piece of old ground was like a person. You had to know
it, to have any idea of all that was hidden in its bosom, good and bad.
"There never was such a place for pigweed as the lower end of your
vegetable lot," she told him; "you'll have to get up nights to fight it
if there is plenty of rain this summer." And again, "Be careful about
not digging too close to the east wall of your terrace. There is a
border of peonies there, splendid pink ones, and you're likely to break
off the shoots. They don't show so early as the red ones near the walk,
that get more sun."
"Did you ever use to _live_ in that house?" he asked her, respectful of
her mastery of its secrets.
She laughed. "No, oh no. We've lived right here all the eleven years of
our life in Vermont. But there's another side to the local wireless
information-bureau that let me know all about you before you ever got
here. We all know all about everybody and everything, you know. If you
live in the country you're really married to humanity, for better or for
worse, not just on speaking terms with it, as you are in the city. Why,
I know about your garden because I have stood a thousand, thousand times
leaning on my hoe in my own garden, discussing those peonies with old
Mrs. Belham who lived there before you." This seemed to bring up some
picture into her mind at which she looked for a moment, turning from it
to the man beside her, with a warmth in her voice which went to his
heart. "It's been forlorn having that dear little old house empty and
cold. I can't _tell_ you how glad I am you have come to warm it, and
live in it."
The wonder of it overcame Mr. Welles like a wave. "I can't believe I'm
really going to!" he cried desperately. "It doesn't seem _possible_!" He
felt shamed, knowing that he had burst out too violently. What could she
know of what lay back of him, that he was escaped from! What could she
think of him, but that he was a foolish, bitter old man?
She did not seem to think that, looking at him attentively as though she
wanted to make out just what he meant. Perhaps she did make out, for she
now said gently, "I believe you are going to like it, Mr. Welles. I
believe you are going to find here what, . . . what you deserve to find."
She said quietly, "I hope we shall be good neighbors to you."
She spoke so kindly, her look on him was so humane that he felt the
water coming to his eyes. He was in a foolishly emotional state, these
first days. The least little thing threw him off the track. It really
_did_ seem hardly possible that it was all true. That the long grind at
the office was over, the business he had always hated and detested, and
the long, hateful slavery at the flat finished at last, and that he had
come to live out what was left to him in this lovely, peaceful valley,
in that quiet welcoming little house, with this sweet woman next door!
He swallowed. The corners of his mouth twitched. What an old lunatic he
was. But he did not dare trust himself to speak again.
Now Vincent's voice rose. What a length of time Vincent had been
silent,--he who never took a back seat for anybody! What had he been
doing all this time, sitting there and staring at them with those
awfully brilliant eyes of his? Very likely he had seen the silly weak
tears so near the surface, had caught the sentimental twitch of the
mouth. Yes, quite certainly, for, now he was showing his tact by
changing the subject, changing it with a vengeance. "Mrs. Crittenden,"
he was saying, "my curiosity has been touched by that very fine
photograph over there. I don't recognize the castle it shows."
"That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on
him.
"No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New
Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her
laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as
Pau, but never went into the Basque country."
"Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression
that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information.
Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a
very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little
nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he
said briefly, looking again at the photograph.
"Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it
really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with
Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you
know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held
that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and
both the château and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the
southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only
because of early associations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a
little girl."
This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people
who have been "abroad." To tell the truth they always sounded to him
more or less "showing-off," though he humbly tried to think it was only
because he could never take any part in such talk. He certainly did not
see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his
jaw dropped. He himself paid little attention to what she was now
saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet
intonations of her voice. What difference did it make where she had
lived as a little girl? She was going to live next door to him now; what
an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with
a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course. How
old could she be? Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn't
tell where. His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers. But
you didn't notice that when she smiled. He liked the way she did her
black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head. It looked
as though she'd really combed and brushed it, and most women's hair
didn't.
She turned to him now, again, and said, "Is this your very first call in
Ashley? Because if it is, I mustn't miss the opportunity to cut in ahead
of all the other gossips, and give you a great deal of information. You
might just as well have it all in one piece now, and get it straight, as
take it in little snippets from old Mrs. Powers, when she comes to bring
your milk, this evening. You see I know that you are to get your milk of
the Powers, and that they have plucked up courage to ask you eight cents
a quart although the price around here has been, till now, six cents.
You'll be obliged to listen to a great many more details from Mrs.
Powers than from me, even those she knows nothing about. But of course
you must be introduced to the Powers, _in toto_ too. Old Mrs. Powers, a
very lively old widow, lives on her farm nearly at the foot of Deer
Hollow. Her married son and his family live with her. In this house,
there is first of all my husband. I'm so sorry he is away in Canada just
now, on lumbering business. He is Neale Crittenden, a Williams man, who
in his youth had thoughts of exploring the world but who has turned out
head of the 'Crittenden Manufacturing Company,' which is the
high-sounding name of a smallish wood-working business on the other side
of the field next our house. You can see the buildings and probably hear
the saws from your garden. Properly speaking, you know, you don't live
in Ashley but in 'Crittenden's' and your house constitutes one quarter
of all the residences in that settlement. There are yours, and ours, the
mill-buildings, the house where an old cousin of mine lives, and the
Powers' house, although that is so far away, nearly half a mile, that it
is really only a farm-house in the country. _We_, you see, are the
suburb of Ashley."
Marsh laughed out again at this, and she laughed with him, their eyes,
shining with amusement, meeting in a friendly glance.
"The mill is the most important member of Crittenden's, of course. Part
of the mill-building is pre-Revolutionary, and very picturesque. In the
life-time of my husband's uncle, it still ran by water-power with a
beautiful, enormous old mossy water-wheel. But since we took it over,
we've had to put in modern machinery very prosaically and run it on its
waste of slabs, mostly. All sorts of small, unimportant objects are
manufactured there, things you never heard of probably. Backs of
hair-brushes, wooden casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for
cotton mills. As soon as my husband returns, I'll ask him to take you
through it. That and the old church are the only historic monuments in
town."
She stopped and asked him meditatively, "What else do you suppose I need
to forestall old Mrs. Powers on? My old Cousin Hetty perhaps. She has a
last name, Allen--yes, some connection with Ethan Allen. I am, myself.
But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember
that she has another name. She was born there in the old house below
'the Burning,' and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all
her saga. You can't see her house from here, but it is part of
Crittenden's all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road
as you go towards the Dug-Way. But you can reach it in six or seven
minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods."
"What nice names!" Mr. Welles luxuriated in them. "The Eagle Rock woods.
The Dug-Way. The Burning. Deer Hollow."
"I bet you don't know what they mean," Vincent challenged him. Vincent
was always throwing challenges, at everything. But by this time he had
learned how to dodge them. "No, I don't know, and I don't care if I
don't," he answered happily.
It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she
looked at him laughing. How her eyes glistened when she laughed. It made
you laugh back. He risked another small attempt at facetiousness. "Go on
with the census of Crittenden's," he told her. "I want to know all about
my future fellow-citizens. You haven't even finished up this house,
anybody but your husband."
"There is myself. You see me. There is nothing more to that. And there
are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, . . ." She paused here
rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery
disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite
different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out
the expression which very passingly had flickered across her eyes with a
smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she
looked somehow scared,--but of course that was preposterous.
"Your call," she told them both, "happens to fall on a day which marks a
turning-point in our family life. This is the very first day in ten
years, since Paul's birth, that I have not had at least one of the
children beside me. Today is the opening of spring term in our country
school, and my little Mark went off this morning, for the first time,
with his brother and sister. I have been alone until you came." She
stopped for a moment. Mr. Welles wished that Vincent could get over his
habit of staring at people so. She went on, "I have felt very queer
indeed, all day. It's as though . . . you know, when you have been walking
up and up a long flight of stairs, and you go automatically putting one
foot up and then the other, and then suddenly . . . your upraised foot
falls back with a jar. You've come to the top, and, for an instant, you
have a gone feeling without your stairs to climb."
It occurred to Mr. Welles that really perhaps the reason why some nice
ladies did not like Vincent was just because of his habit of looking at
them so hard. He could have no idea how piercingly bright his eyes
looked when he fixed them on a speaker like that. And now Mrs.
Crittenden was looking back at him, and would notice it. _He_ could
understand how a refined lady would feel as though somebody were almost
trying to find a key-hole to look in at her,--to have anybody pounce on
her so, with his eyes, as Vincent did. She couldn't know, of course,
that Vincent went pouncing on ladies and baggagemen and office boys, and
old friends, just the same way. He bestirred himself to think of
something to say. "I wish I could get up my nerve to ask you, Mrs.
Crittenden, about one other person in this house," he ventured, "the old
woman . . . the old lady . . . who let us in the door."
At the sound of his voice Mrs. Crittenden looked away from Vincent
quickly and looked at him for a perceptible moment before she heard what
he had said. Then she explained, smiling, "Oh, she would object very
much to being labeled with the finicky title of 'lady.' That was Touclé,
our queer old Indian woman,--all that is left of old America here. She
belongs to our house, or perhaps I should say it belongs to her. She was
born here, a million years ago, more or less, when there were still a
few basket-making Indians left in the valley. Her father and mother both
died, and she was brought up by the old Great-uncle Crittenden's family.
Then my husband's Uncle Burton inherited the house and brought his bride
here, and Touclé just stayed on. She always makes herself useful enough
to pay for her food and lodging. And when his wife died an elderly
woman, Touclé still just stayed on, till he died, and then she went
right on staying here in the empty house, till my husband and I got
here. We were married in Rome, and made the long trip here without
stopping at all. It was dawn, a June morning, when we arrived. We walked
all the way from the station at Ashley out to the old house, here at
Crittenden's. And . . . I'll never forget the astounded expression on my
husband's face when Touclé rose up out of the long grass in the front
yard and bade me welcome. She'd known me as a little girl when I used to
visit here. She will outlive all of us, Touclé will, and be watching
from her room in the woodshed chamber on the dawn of Judgment Day when
the stars begin to fall."
Mr. Welles felt a trifle bewildered by this, and showed it. She
explained further, "But seriously, I must tell you that she is a
perfectly harmless and quite uninteresting old herb-gatherer, although
the children in the village are a little afraid of her, because she is
an Indian, the only one they have ever seen. She really _is_ an Indian
too. She knows every inch of our valley and the mountains better than
any lumberman or hunter or fisherman in Ashley. She often goes off and
doesn't come back for days. I haven't the least idea where she stays.
But she's very good to our children when she's here, and I like her
capacity for monumental silence. It gives her very occasional remarks an
oracular air, even though you know it's only because she doesn't often
open her lips. She helps a little with the house-work, too, although she
always looks so absent-minded, as though she were thinking of something
very far away. She's quite capable of preparing a good meal, for all she
never seems to notice what she's up to. And she's the last member of our
family except the very coming-and-going little maids I get once in a
while. Ashley is unlike the rest of the world in that it is hard to get
domestic servants here.
"Now let me see, whom next to introduce to you. You know all your
immediate neighbors now. I shall have to begin on Ashley itself. Perhaps
our minister and his wife. They live in the high-porticoed,
tall-pillared white old house next door to the church in the village, on
the opposite side from the church-yard. They are Ashleyans of the oldest
rock. Both of them were born here, and have always lived here. Mr.
Bayweather is seventy-five years old and has never had any other parish.
I do believe the very best thing I can do for you is to send you
straight to them, this minute. There's nothing Mr. Bayweather doesn't
know about the place or the people. He has a collection of Ashleyana of
all sorts, records, deeds, titles, old letters, family trees. And for
the last forty years he has been very busy writing a history of Ashley."
"A history of _Ashley_?" exclaimed Vincent.
"A history of Ashley," she answered, level-browed.
Mr. Welles had the impression that a "side-wipe" had been exchanged in
which he had not shared.
Vincent now asked irrelevantly, "Do you go to church yourself?"
"Oh yes," she answered, "I go, I like to go. And I take the children."
She turned her head so that she looked down at her long hands in her
lap, as she added, "I think going to church is a _refining_ influence in
children's lives, don't you?"
To Mr. Welles' horror this provoked from Vincent one of his great
laughs. And this time he was sure that Mrs. Crittenden would take
offense, for she looked up, distinctly startled, really quite as though
he _had_ looked in through the key-hole. But Vincent went on laughing.
He even said, impudently, "Ah, now I've caught you, Mrs. Crittenden;
you're too used to keeping your jokes to yourself. And they're much too
good for that."
She looked at him hard, with a certain wonder in her eyes.
"Oh, there's no necromancy about it," he told her. "I've been reading
the titles of your books and glancing over your music before you came
in. And I can put two and two together. Who are you making fun of to
yourself? Who first got off that lovely speech about the refining
influence of church?"
She laughed a little, half-uneasily, a brighter color mounting to her
smooth oval cheeks. "That's one of Mrs. Bayweather's favorite maxims,"
she admitted. She added, "But I really _do_ like to go to church."
Mr. Welles felt an apprehension about the turn things were taking.
Vincent, he felt sure, was on the verge of being up to something. And he
did not want to risk offending Mrs. Crittenden. He stood up. "Thank you
very much for telling us about the minister and his wife, Mrs.
Crittenden. I think we'll go right along down to the village now, and
pay a call on them. There'll be time enough before dinner." Vincent of
course got up too, at this, saying, "He's the most perfect old
housekeeper, you know. He's kept the neatest flat for himself and that
aged aunt of his for seventy years."
"_Seventy!_" cried Mr. Welles, scandalized at the exaggeration.
"Oh, more or less," said Vincent, laughing. Mr. Welles noticed with no
enthusiasm that his eyes were extremely bright, that he smiled almost
incessantly, that he stepped with an excess of his usual bounce.
Evidently something had set him off into one of his fits of wild high
spirits. You could almost feel the electricity sparkle from him, as it
does from a cat on a cold day. Personally, Mr. Welles preferred not to
touch cats when they were like that.
"When are you going back to the city, Mr. Marsh?" asked Mrs. Crittenden,
as they said good-bye at the door.
Vincent was standing below her on the marble step. He looked up at her
now, and something about his expression made Mr. Welles think again of
glossy fur emitting sparks. He said, "I'll lay you a wager, Mrs.
Crittenden, that there is one thing your Ashley underground news-service
has not told you about us, and that is, that I've come up not only to
help Mr. Welles install himself in his new home, but to take a somewhat
prolonged rest-cure myself. I've always meant to see more of this
picturesque part of Vermont. I've a notion that the air of this lovely
spot will do me a world of good."
As Mr. Welles opened his mouth, perhaps rather wide, in the beginning of
a remark, he cut in briskly with, "You're worrying about
Schwatzkummerer, I know. Never you fear. I'll get hold of his address,
all right." He explained briefly to Mrs. Crittenden, startled by the
portentous name. "Just a specialist in gladiolus seeds."
"_Bulbs!_" cried Mr. Welles, in involuntary correction, and knew as he
spoke that he had been switched off to a side-track.
"Oh well, bulbs be it," Vincent conceded the point indulgently. He took
off his hat in a final salutation to Mrs. Crittenden, and grasping his
elderly friend by the arm, moved with him down the flag-paved path.