Having diligently enquired what time the night express from the East
reached the near-by city, and finding that it was scheduled to arrive
fifteen minutes after the early morning train left for Silver Sands, and
that there was not another local train that could bring his unwelcome
daughter before eleven o’clock, Patterson Greeves ate his carefully
prepared breakfast with a degree of comfort and lingered over his
morning paper.
He had in a long-distance call for the principal of a well-known and
exclusive girls’ school in New England, and he was quite prepared to
take the child there at once without even bringing her to the house. He
had already secured by telephone the service of an automobile to convey
them at once back to the city, that she might be placed on the first
train possible for Boston. It remained but to arrange the preliminaries
with the principal, who was well known to him. He anticipated no
difficulty in entering his daughter even though it was late in the
spring, for he knew that it was likely that a personally conducted tour
of some sort, or a summer camp, could possibly be arranged through this
school. These plans were the result of a night of vigil. So he read his
paper at ease with himself and the world. For the moment he had
forgotten the possible advent of his elder daughter.
His breakfast finished, he adjourned to the library to await the
long-distance call. The scattered mail on the desk at once recalled
Silver and her suggestion that she would like to visit him. He frowned
and sat down at the desk, drawing pen and paper toward him. That must be
stopped at once. He had not time nor desire to break the strangeness
between them at present. In fact his very soul shrank from seeing
Alice’s child, the more so since he had become so aware of Lilla’s
child’s approach.
He wrote a kind if somewhat brusque note to Silver saying that she had
better defer her visit to some indefinite period for the present, as he
was suddenly called away on business—his half intention to take Athalie
to her school served as excuse for that statement to his dulled
conscience—and that he was deeply immersed in important literary work
in which he could not be disturbed. It sounded well as he read it over
and he felt decidedly pleased with himself for having worded it so
tactfully. He resolved to send it by special delivery to make sure that
it reached her before she started. And by the way—what was it she said
about taking a position? Of course that must not be allowed. He was
fully able and willing to support her. And she could not be too old to
go to school. He would arrange for that—not in the school where Athalie
was to be, however! Perhaps she herself would have a preference. He
would ask her. He reached his hand for her letter, which lay on the top
of the pile where he had dropped it the night before, for both Molly and
Anne had been well trained by the former master that the papers on that
desk were sacred and never to be touched.
As he drew the letter toward him and his eyes fell again upon those
unaccustomed words: “Dear Father,” something sad and sweet like a
forgotten thrill of tenderness went through him, and the face of his
beautiful young wife came up before his vision as it had not come now in
years.
But before he could read further, or even realize that he had not
finished reading the letter the day before, the telephone rang out
sharply in the prolonged titillation that proclaims a long-distance
call, and he dropped the paper and reached for the receiver.
It was the distant school, and the principal for whom they had been
searching; but she did not fall in with Patterson Greeves’ plans with
readiness, as he had expected, although she at once recognized him.
Instead, her voice was anxious and distraught and she vetoed his
arrangements emphatically. An epidemic of measles had broken out in the
school in most virulent form. The school was under strict quarantine,
and it was even doubtful, as it was now so late in the spring, whether
they would open again until fall. They could not possibly accept his
daughter under the circumstances.
In the midst of his dismay there came an excited tapping at the door,
following certain disturbing sounds of commotion in the hall, which had
not yet been fully analyzed in his consciousness, but which rushed in
now to his perturbed mind as if they had been penned up while he
telephoned and lost none of their annoying element by the fact that they
were but memories.
He called “Come in,” and Anne Truesdale in her immaculate morning alpaca
and stiff white apron and cuffs stood before him, a bright spot of color
in her already rosy cheeks, and a look of indignant excitement in her
dignified blue eyes.
“If you please, Master Pat—” she began hurriedly, with a furtive glance
over her shoulder, “there’s a strange young woman at the front door—”
“Hello! Daddy Pat!” blared out a hoydenish young voice insolently, and
the young woman, who had stayed not on the order of her going, appeared
behind the horrified back of the housekeeper.
For Athalie Greeves, never at a loss for a way to carry out her designs
and get all the fun there was going, had not waited decorously at the
city station for the train which should have brought her to Silver
Sands, but had called from his early morning slumbers a one-time lover
of her mother whose address she looked up in the telephone book, and
made him bring her out in his automobile. In his luxurious car he was
even now disappearing cityward having an innate conviction that he and
her father would not be congenial.
Patterson Greeves swung around sharply, his hand still on the telephone,
his mind a startled blank, and stared.
Anne Truesdale stiffened into indignant reproof, her hands clasped
tightly at her white-aproned waist, her chin drawn in like a balky
horse, her nostrils spread in almost a snort, as the youngest daughter
of the house sauntered nonchalantly into the dignified old library and
cast a quick, appraising glance about, levelling her gaze on her father
with a half-indifferent impudence.
“Bring my luggage right in here, Quinn! Didn’t you say your name was
Quinn?” she ordered imperiously. “I want to show dad some things I’ve
brought. Bring them in _here_ I said! Didn’t you hear me?”
The old servitor hovered anxiously in the offing, a pallor in his
humble, intelligent face, a troubled eye on his master’s form in the dim
shadow of the book-lined room. He turned a deprecatory glance on Anne
Truesdale, as he entered with two bags, a shiny suitcase, a hat-box, a
tennis-racket, and a bag of golf-sticks, looking for an unobtrusive
corner in which to deposit them and thereby stop the noisy young tongue
which seemed to him to be committing irretrievable indignities to the
very atmosphere of the beloved old house.
“Take them out, Joe,” said Anne Truesdale in her quiet voice of command.
“No, you _shan’t_ take them out!” screamed Athalie, stamping her heavy
young foot indignantly. “I want them here! Put them right down there!
_She_ has nothing to say about it!”
Joe vibrated from the library to the hall and back again uncertainly and
looked pitifully toward his master.
“Put the things in the hall, Joe, and then go out and shut the door!”
ordered the master with something in his controlled voice that caused
his daughter to look at him with surprise. Joe obeyed, Anne Truesdale
thankfully melted away, and Patterson Greeves found himself in the
library alone with his child.
Athalie faced him with storm in her face.
“I think you are a perfectly horrid old thing!” she declared
hysterically with a look in her eyes that at once reminded him of her
mother. “I said I wanted those things in here and _I’m going to have
them_! I guess they are _my_ things, aren’t they?” She faced him a
second defiantly and then opened the door swiftly, thereby causing a
scuttling sound in the back hall near the kitchen entrance. Vehemently
she recovered her property, banging each piece down with unnecessary
force and slamming the door shut with a comical grimace of triumph
toward the departed servants.
“Now, we’re ready to talk!” she declared, with suddenly returning good
humor, as she dropped to the edge of a large leather chair and faced her
father again.
Patterson Greeves was terribly shaken and furiously angry, yet he
realized fully that he had the worst of the argument with this child as
he had nearly always had with her mother, and he felt the utter futility
of attempting further discipline until he had a better grasp of the
situation. As he sat in his uncle’s comfortable leather chair,
entrenched as it were in this fine old dignified castle, it seemed
absurd that a mere child could rout him, could so put his courage to
flight and torment his quiet world. He turned his attention upon her as
he might have turned it upon some new specimen of viper that had crossed
his path and become annoying; and once having looked, he stared and
studied her again.
There was no denying that Athalie Greeves was pretty so far as the
modern world counts prettiness. Some of the girls in her set called her
“simply stunning,” and the young men with whom she was contemporary
called her a “winner.” She was fair and fat and fourteen with handsome
teeth and large, bold, dark eyes. But the lips around the teeth were too
red, and the lashes around the eyes overladen, I might almost have said
_beaded_. Her fairness had been accentuated to the point of ghastliness,
with a hectic point in each cheek which gave her the appearance of an
amateur pastel portrait.
She wore a cloth suit of bright tan, absurdly short and narrow for her
size. A dashing little jade-green suède hat beaded in black and white
sat jauntily on a bushy head of bobbed and extraordinarily electrified
black hair, and whatever kind of eyebrows she had possessed had been
effectually plucked and obliterated, their substitutes being so finely
pencilled and so far up under the overshadowing hat-brim as to be
practically out of the running. She wore flesh-colored silk stockings
and tall, unbuckled, flapping galoshes with astrakhan tops, out of which
her plump silken ankles rose sturdily. Her father sat and stared at her
for a full minute. No biological specimen had ever so startled or
puzzled him. Was this then his child? His and Lilla’s? How unexpected!
How impossible! How terrible!
It wasn’t as if she were just Lilla, made young again, pretty and wily
and sly, with a delicate feminine charm and an underlying falseness.
That was what he had expected. That was what he was prepared for. That
he could have borne. But this creature was gross—coarse—openly brazen,
almost as if she had reverted to primeval type, and yet—vile thought!
he could see all the worst traits of himself stamped upon that plump,
painted young face.
Athalie gave a self-conscious tilt to her head and enquired in a
preening voice:
“Well, how do you like me?”
The man started, an unconscious moan coming to his lips, and dropped his
head into his hands; then swung himself up angrily and strode back and
forth across the far end of the room, glaring at her as he walked and
making no reply. It was obvious that he was forcing himself to study her
in detail, and as his eyes dropped to her feet he paused in front of her
and enquired harshly:
“Haven’t you any—any _hosiery_?”
Perhaps the good attendant angels smothered a hysterical laugh, but
Athalie, quite wrought upon in her nerves by this time and not a little
hurt, stretched out a plump silken limb indignantly.
“I should like to know what fault you have to find with my stockings?”
she blazed angrily. “They cost four dollars and a half a pair and are
imported, with hand-embroidered clocks—”
He looked down at the smooth silk ankles helplessly.
“You are too stout to wear things like that!” he said coldly, and let
his glance travel up again to her face. “How did they let you get so
stout anyway? It can’t be natural at your age!”
The full painted lips trembled for an instant and real red flared under
the powder of the cheek, then she gave her head a haughty toss.
“You aren’t very polite, are you? Lilla said I’d find you that way, but
I thought maybe you had changed since she saw you. She told me—”
“You needn’t trouble to mention anything that your mother said about me.
I shouldn’t care to hear it,” he said coldly.
“Well, Lilla’s my mother, if I have come to live with you, and I shall
mention what I like. You can’t stop me!”
There was defiance in the tone and in her glance that swept remindingly
toward the pile of luggage at her feet, and he veered away from another
encounter.
“Do you always call your mother by her first name? It doesn’t sound very
respectful.”
“Oh, bother respect! Why should I respect her? Certainly, I call her
Lilla! I had it in mind to call you Pat too, if I liked you well enough,
but if you keep on like this I’ll call you Old Greeves! So there! Oh,
heck! This isn’t beginning very well—” she pouted, “Let’s start over
again. Here Pat, let’s sit down and be real friendly. Have a cigarette?”
and she held forth a gay little gold case with a delightfully friendly
woman-of-the-world air, much as her mother might have done. As she stood
thus poised with the golden bauble held in her exquisitely manicured
rose-leaf hands she seemed the epitome of all that was insolent and
sensual to her horrified and disgusted father. He felt like striking her
down. He wanted to curse her mother for allowing her to grow up into
this, but most of all he felt a loathing for himself that he had made
himself responsible for this abnormal specimen of womanhood. Scarcely
more than a child and yet wearing the charm of the serpent with ease.
Then suddenly the shades of all the Silvers looking down upon him from
the painted canvasses on the wall, the sweetly highborn gentlewomen and
gentlemen of strong, fine character, seemed to rise in audience on the
scene and bring him back to the things he had been taught and had always
deep down in his heart believed, no matter how far he had wandered from
their practice. And here was this child, scarcely turned toward
womanhood, daring to offer her father a cigarette, daring to strike a
match pertly and light one for herself; here in this old Silver house,
where grandmothers of four generations had been _ladies_, and where dear
Aunt Lavinia had taught him his golden texts every Sunday
morning—taught him about purity and righteousness. Oh! it was all her
sweet, blind innocence—her ignorance of the world, of course, yet sweet
and wonderful. And to have this child—_his child_ transgressing the old
order in her playful, brazen way! It was too terrible! His child! Flesh
of his flesh!
“Athalie!”
“Oh, don’t you _smoke_? I thought all real _men_ smoked. Lilla
said”—she pursed her lips and lifted her cigarette prettily.
“Athalie!” he thundered, “Never mind what your mother said! Don’t you
dare to smoke in this house! Don’t you ever let me see you—”
“Oh, very well! Shall I go outside? Perhaps you’ll take a little walk
down the street with me—”
The child was roused. There were sparks in her dark eyes. She looked
very much like the old Lilla he knew so well. This was not the way to
handle her. He was bungling everything. What should he do? He must
establish his authority. The court had handed her over to his charge.
What a mistake! He should have had her when she was young if he was ever
to hope to do anything with her. But he must do _something_. He reached
out a sudden hand and took possession of the cigarette and case before
the surprised girl had time to protest.
“Those are not fit things for a young girl to have,” he said sternly.
“While you are under my protection it must not happen again. Do you
understand?”
She pouted.
“You wouldn’t talk!”
“I can’t talk to you while you look like that,” he said with a note of
desperation in his voice, “Go upstairs and wash your face. And haven’t
you got some less outlandish clothes? You look like a circus child. I’m
ashamed to look at you!”
He stepped to the wall and rang a bell while Athalie, after staring at
him in utter dismay burst into sudden and appalling tears. Almost
simultaneously Anne Truesdale appeared at the door with a white,
frightened face looking from one to the other. Patterson Greeves
registered a distinct wish that a portion of the floor might open and
swallow him forever, but he endeavored to face the situation like a
Silver and a master in his own house.
“This is my daughter Athalie, Mrs. Truesdale, and she wishes to wash her
face and change her apparel. Will you kindly show her to a room and see
that her bags are brought up and that she has everything she needs? I
did not expect her to arrive so soon or I would have given you warning.
It was my intention to keep her in school—”
“Oh-h-h-h!” moaned Athalie into a scrap of a green and black bordered
handkerchief—“O—hhhhh!”
Anne Truesdale looked at the plump tailored shoulders as she might have
looked at a stray cat whom she was told to put out of the room, and then
rose to the occasion. She slid a firm but polite arm around the
reluctant guest and drew her from the room, and Patterson Greeves shut
the library door and dropped with a groan into his chair, burying his
face in his hands and wishing he had never been born. Somehow the sight
of his daughter weeping, with her foolish frizzled hair and her fat,
flesh-colored silk legs in their flapping galoshes, being led away by
“Trudie,” as he always used to call the housekeeper, made him suddenly
recognize her species. She was a flapper! The most despicable thing
known to girlhood, according to his bred and inherited standards. The
thing that all the newspapers and magazines held in scorn and dread; the
thing that all noted people were writing about and trying to eradicate;
the thing they were afraid of and bowed to, and let be; and his child
was a _flapper_!
Just as after long and careful study a new specimen would at last
unexpectedly reveal some trait by which he could place it, so now his
child had shown forth her true character.
It was terrible enough to acknowledge; it was easy enough to understand
how it had come about; but the thing to consider was, what was he going
to do about it? How could he do anything? It was too late! And God
thought men would believe in Him when He let things like this happen!
Somehow all his bitterness of the years seemed to have focussed on this
one morning. All that he called in scorn the “outraged faith of his
childhood” seemed to rise and protest against his fate, proving that he
still had some faith lurking in his soul, else how could he blame a God
who did not exist?
He rose and paced his study back and forth, dashing his rumpled hair
from his forehead, glaring about on the familiar old room that had
always spoken to him of things righteous and orderly, as if in some way
it too, with God, were to blame for what had befallen him. He had taken
perhaps three turns back and forth in his wrath and perplexity when he
was aware that a light tapping on the door had been going on for perhaps
several seconds. He swung to the door and jerked it angrily open. Had
that girl concluded her toilet so soon, before he had thought what to do
about her? Well, he would tell her exactly what she was, what a disgrace
to a fine old family; what a—mistake—what a—!
In the hall stood Anne Truesdale with deprecatory air, her fingers
working nervously with the corner of her apron, which she held as if to
keep her balance. Her beloved Master Pat had turned into an inscrutable
old ogre whom she loved, but scarcely dared to brave. She felt assured,
in view of the modern young specimen upstairs, that he had reason to be
in this mood, and she but adored and feared him the more, after the
old-fashioned feminine way, that he had it in him to storm around in
this fashion; but she was frightened to death to have to deal with him
while it lasted. Behind her, smiling quite assured, and splendid to look
upon this morning with the soot washed from his face, and his big body
attired fittingly, stood the minister, a book in his hand and a look of
pleasant anticipation in his face.
Then Patterson Greeves remembered as in a dream of something far past
that he had invited the minister to take a hike with him this morning
and afterwards lunch with him. The boy Blink was to have gone along. How
fair and innocent the prospect compared to what had now befallen him! He
looked as one who was about to tear his hair, so helpless and tragic his
eyes.