Judith reflected, on the way home that morning, that if she wanted to
get on with Mrs. Trench, she must guard her own questionable past with
double zeal. It came to her, with a curious feeling of separation,
that she might care what Mrs. Trench thought. The concept was a
new one, and she inspected it with interest. But then ... she had
been so desperately lonely, so remote from everything she had known
in the past. And she was, as Griff Ramsay suggested, a gregarious
animal--recognizing only in its absence her need of the herd. For the
sake of Griff and Laura she would endure her exile to the end, and she
was, it seemed, dependent on the morally austere woman in the great
Colonial house for such human contact as Springdale might offer--human
contact which for the first time in her life she craved with poignant
longing.
Nanny met her at the door, her face red with laughter, her ample sides
shaking. There had been a gravel fight between Jeff Dutton and one of
the Trench children. It appeared to be one of the regular institutions
of Vine Cottage.
“You must hurry with your luncheon, Miss Judith, so as not to miss the
next round. The little girl was furious. She said Dutton muffed his
play, and that was against the rules. She’s coming back to settle with
him.”
Nanny had prepared an unusually tempting repast, in the tiny breakfast
room that looked out, with many windows, on the stretch of lawn
that separated the two houses, on the little wicket gate in the low
stone wall, and the ample kitchen garden beyond the wall, brown and
scarred with the first spring spading. The lonely woman viewed, with
chill apprehension, the imposing façade of the house, the crisp
white curtains that served, with their thin opacity, to conceal all
the activity of the Trench home life. A sugar-coated sphinx, that
house, guarding its secret soul with a subtle reticence that belied
its seeming candour. Larimore Trench had drawn the plans for the new
home. Was he that sort of man--or was this another expression of the
ubiquitous Lavinia, whom Dutton had characterized as “running the hull
ranch”?
There was a commotion in the hall that led from the kitchen to the
breakfast room, and Nanny opened the door. She was plainly perplexed.
Miss Judith was still a child to her, but she was too instinctively a
servant to venture upon the prerogative of her mistress.
“You let me by,” a shrill voice piped. “I’m going to tell her, myself.”
The housekeeper yielded to a vicious pinch in the rotund cushion of her
thigh, and a small parcel of humanity slid adroitly into Mrs. Ascott’s
field of vision. Her head was set defiantly on one side, but the dark
eyes were inscrutable. A moment only she faltered, tucking in her long
under lip and shifting her slight bulk from one foot to the other.
“I broke a window in your garage. It was Jeff’s fault. He had no
business ducking. How did he know I had a rock in that handful of
gravel? Just gravel wouldn’t have broken the window. I’m willing to
shoulder the blame, and pay for the glass out of my allowance--if
you’ll make Jeff put it in. I can swipe that much putty from my papa’s
shop. And--and don’t let Jeff Dutton snitch on me--to Lary.”
She finished with an excited gasp, and stood awaiting the inevitable.
“Come here, little girl. Don’t mind about the pane. Are you Eileen
Trench?”
“Me? Mercy, no!” Astonishment dissolved into mirth, mirth that savoured
of derision. The next instant the laugh died and the high forehead was
puckered in a frown of swift displeasure. She came a step nearer, her
thin brown hand plucking at her skirt. “I shouldn’t have laughed that
way, as if you’d said something silly. It goes hard with me to say
I’m sorry--because--usually I’m not. I hate lying, just to be polite.
Eileen’ll take a lickin’ any day, before she’ll say she’s sorry. But
Sylvia says it’s better to apologize and be done with it. And I guess
it does save time.”
The ideas appeared chaotic, as if the child were in the throes of a
mighty change in ethical standards. Judith looked at her, a whimsical
fancy taking possession of her mind that she was watching some
fantastic mime--that this was no flesh-and-blood child, but an owl
masquerading in wren’s attire.
“My dear old doctor mentioned Sylvia and Lary and Eileen. Would you
mind telling me your name?”
“Theodora.”
“Theodora--the gift of God.”
“Yes, and it was a rummy gift. Jeff Dutton says the Lord hung a lemon
on my mother’s Christmas tree. I was supposed to come a boy--there’d
been too many girls already--and they were going to name me after my
uncle Theodore. Jeff thinks I cried so much because I was disappointed
at being just a girl. I guess I cried, all right. My brother, Bob,
named me ‘Schubert’s Serenade’ because he and Lary had me ’neath their
casement every night till two o’clock. Mamma’s room was where your
library is now. I like this house lots better than ours.”
“Do you remember this one? I thought the new house was built five years
ago.”
Theodora turned questioning eyes upon her. Then, in a flash, she
understood.
“Dear me, you have an idea I’m about six years old. Strangers always
do. I can’t help it that I never grow any bigger. I was twelve last
Christmas, and I’m first year Prep. It’s horrid to be so little. People
never have any respect for you. Eileen’s tall as a broom--but nobody
has much respect for her, either.”
“Tell me about Eileen. Dr. Schubert is fond of her, I believe.”
“Yes, he sees good in her. He’s about the only one who does. She was
sixteen last Sunday, and she’s third year Prep. Goes into college next
fall, if she don’t flunk again. She’s getting too big for mamma’s
slipper, and I don’t know what is going to become of her. She’s been
ugly as sin, ever since mamma heard a Chautauqua lecturer say you had
to go in for technique. You know, Eileen plays the violin. And when
mamma shuts her up and makes her practice--she gets even by making her
fiddle swear. It says ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ and some worse ones, just as
plain. And when she’s mad, her eyes get as yellow as cat’s eyes. You
never saw yellow eyes, did you?”
“My own look that way, at times--when I’m ill or out of sorts.”
“But they’re the loveliest--like gray violets!” She looked deep into
Mrs. Ascott’s eyes, and her own kindled with admiration. “Dr. Schubert
told us yours were like Lary’s. But they aren’t, a bit. His are light
brown. That barely saves him from being a Trench.”
Manifestly Lavinia had impressed on her family the advantage of looking
like the Larimores. And yet, Judith thought she had never seen a finer
looking man than David Trench--not so well groomed as his son, and with
the gait of a man perennially tired, but with a face that Fra Angelico
would have loved to paint.
V
When the elfin child had gone, in response to the ringing of a great
bell on the distant campus, Mrs. Ascott sat a long while in smiling
silence. Not in years had she been so entertained. Bit by bit she
added the child’s revelations to the broken comments of her garrulous
gardener. The Duttons had been neighbours of the Trenches in Olive
Hill, when Jeff and Dave were fellow workmen, and before Jeff’s baleful
visit to the “Jag Institoot” that robbed him of his prowess as a brick
mason, along with the appetite for undiluted whiskey. Mrs. Dutton
“wasn’t very friendly” because her fortunes had declined until she
was compelled to serve as laundress and house-maid to Mrs. Trench’s
tenants. But there was a time when she and her husband were glad of
a refuge in the rooms above the garage. This small brick structure,
it transpired, had been David’s work shop, and here Lary had made his
first architectural drawings.
Theodora’s prattle fairly bristled with Lary. Whatever his mother might
think of him, in his little sister’s eyes he was the one flawless
being. It was he who had supervised the furnishing of Vine Cottage,
for a certain Professor Ferguson, a testy little Scot in charge of
the department of biology at the college. And Lary and his mother had
almost broken heads over some of the details.
Everything about the house was exquisite. Judith thought she knew what
Lary would be like--the man who could limit himself to a single dull
blue and yellow vase for the library mantel. The external appearance
of the cottage had promised fustian ... the fish-scale ornament above
the bay-window, the elaborate carvings between the veranda pillars, the
somewhat fussy pergola that covered the gravel walk from the kitchen to
the garage.
Bare vines were everywhere, swelling with sap and viridescent with
eager buds that strove with their armour of winter scales, although it
was not yet the end of March. Beds of narcissus and tulips gave promise
of early bloom, and already the yellow and white crocus blossoms were
starring the withered bluegrass of the front lawns. There was an
unwritten law that the lattice which screened the vegetable garden must
never carry anything but cypress and Japanese morning glories, and
that potatoes must be planted east of the pergola. There were other
unwritten “musts” that came to light, day by day, all of them having
to do with the garden, over which apparently Mrs. Trench had retained
control.
“But, Lordee, you don’t have to pay no attention to her,” Dutton
sniffed, when a rather arbitrary ruling was undergoing vicarious
transmission. “Treat her like Ferguson did, the fust time she butted
in. It’s _your_ house.”
Between Dutton and Theodora, it would not be long until all the
Trench skeletons had been dragged from their closets and set dancing
in hilarious abandon, for the amusement of the new tenant. They were
not real people, the Duttons and the Trenches, with their unfamiliar
life-experience. She had never envisaged anyone like them. It was all
a part of the dream she had cherished--a place she had never heard of,
where she could lose herself ... and forget....