What! Silver tree? She hadn't realized how the time had been flying. But
there was the sawmill. She could hear the whir and buzz! And there was
the old livery-stable, and the place where farm implements were sold,
and the little harness shop jammed in between;--and there, to convince
her no mistake had been made, was the lozenge of grass with "Silvertree"
on it in white stones. Then, in a second, the station appeared with the
busses backed up against it, and beyond them the familiar surrey with a
woman in it with yearning eyes.
Kate, the specialized student of psychology, the graduate with honors,
who had learned to note contrasts and weigh values, forgot everything
(even her umbrella) and leaped from the train while it was still in
motion. Forgotten the honors and degrees; the majors were mere minor
affairs; and there remained only the things which were from the
beginning.
She and her mother sat very close together as they drove through the
familiar village streets. When they did speak, it was incoherently.
There was an odor of brier roses in the air and the sun was setting in a
"bed of daffodil sky." Kate felt waves of beauty and tenderness breaking
over her and wanted to cry. Her mother wanted to and did. Neither
trusted herself to speak, but when they were in the house Mrs.
Barrington pulled the pins out of Kate's hat and then Kate took the
faded, gentle woman in her strong arms and crushed her to her.
"Your father was afraid he wouldn't be home in time to meet you," said
Mrs. Barrington when they were in the parlor, where the Dresden vases
stood on the marble mantel and the rose-jar decorated the three-sided
table in the corner. "It was just his luck to be called into the
country. If it had been a really sick person who wanted him, I wouldn't
have minded, but it was only Venie Sampson."
"Still having fits?" asked Kate cheerfully, as one glad to recognize
even the chronic ailments of a familiar community.
"Well, she thinks she has them," said Mrs. Barrington in an easy,
gossiping tone; "but my opinion is that she wouldn't be troubled with
them if only there were some other way in which she could call attention
to herself. You see, Venie was a very pretty girl."
"Has that made her an invalid, mummy?"
"Well, it's had something to do with it. When she was young she received
no end of attention, but some way she went through the woods and didn't
even pick up a crooked stick. But she got so used to being the center of
interest that when she found herself growing old and plain, she couldn't
think of any way to keep attention fixed on her except by having these
collapses. You know you mustn't call the attacks 'fits.' Venie's far too
refined for that."
Kate smiled broadly at her mother's distinctive brand of humor. She
loved it all--Miss Sampson's fits, her mother's jokes; even the fact
that when they went out to supper she sat where she used in the old days
when she had worn a bib beneath her chin.
"Oh, the plates, the cups, the everything!" cried Kate, ridiculously
lifting a piece of the "best china" to her lips and kissing it.
"Absurdity!" reproved her mother, but she adored the girl's
extravagances just the same.
"Everything's glorious," Kate insisted. "Cream cheese and parsley! Did
you make it, mummy? Currant rolls--oh, the wonders! Martha Underwood,
don't dare to die without showing me how to make those currant rolls.
Veal loaf--now, what do you think of that? Why, at Foster we went hungry
sometimes--not for lack of quantity, of course, but because of the
quality. I used to be dreadfully ashamed of the fact that there we were,
dozens of us women in that fine hall, and not one of us with enough
domestic initiative to secure a really good table. I tried to head an
insurrection and to have now one girl and now another supervise the
table, but the girls said they hadn't come to college to keep house."
"Yes, yes," chimed in her mother excitedly; "that's where the whole
trouble with college for women comes in. They not only don't go to
college to keep house, but most of them mean not to keep it when they
come out. We allowed you to go merely because you overbore us. You used
to be a terrible little tyrant, Katie,--almost as bad as--"
She brought herself up suddenly.
"As bad as whom, mummy?"
There was a step on the front porch and Mrs. Barrington was spared the
need for answering.
"There's your father," she said, signaling Kate to meet him.
* * * * *
Dr. Barrington was tall, spare, and grizzled. The torpor of the little
town had taken the light from his eyes and reduced the tempo of his
movements, but, in spite of all, he had preserved certain vivid features
of his personality. He had the long, educated hands of the surgeon and
the tyrannical aspect of the physician who has struggled all his life
with disobedience and perversity. He returned Kate's ardent little storm
of kisses with some embarrassment, but he was unfeignedly pleased at her
appearance, and as the three of them sat about the table in their old
juxtaposition, his face relaxed. However, Kate had seen her mother look
up wistfully as her husband passed her, as if she longed for some
affectionate recognition of the occasion, but the man missed his
opportunity and let it sink into the limbo of unimproved moments.
"Well, father, we have our girl home again," Mrs. Barrington said with
pardonable sentiment.
"Well, we've been expecting her, haven't we?" Dr. Barrington replied,
not ill-naturedly but with a marked determination to make the episode
matter-of-fact.
"Indeed we have," smiled Mrs. Barrington. "But of course it couldn't
mean to you, Frederick, what it does to me. A mother's--"
Dr. Barrington raised his hand.
"Never mind about a mother's love," he said decisively. "If you had seen
it fail as often as I have, you'd think the less said on the subject the
better. Women are mammal, I admit; maternal they are not, save in a
proportion of cases. Did you have a pleasant journey down, Kate?"
He had the effect of shutting his wife out of the conversation; of
definitely snubbing and discountenancing her. Kate knew it had always
been like that, though when she had been young and more passionately
determined to believe her home the best and dearest in the world, as
children will, she had overlooked the fact--had pretended that what was
a habit was only a mood, and that if "father was cross" to-day, he would
be pleasant to-morrow. Now he began questioning Kate about college, her
instructors and her friends. There was conversation enough, but the
man's wife sat silent, and she knew that Kate knew that he expected
her to do so.
Custard was brought on and Mrs. Barrington diffidently served it. Her
husband gave one glance at it.
"Curdled!" he said succinctly, pushing his plate from him. "It's a pity
it couldn't have been right Kate's first night home."
Kate thought there had been so much that was not right her first night
home, that a spoiled confection was hardly worth comment.
"I'm dreadfully sorry," Mrs. Barrington said. "I suppose I should have
made it myself, but I went down to the train--"
"That didn't take all the afternoon, did it?" the doctor asked.
"I was doing things around the house--"
"Putting flowers in my room, I know, mummy," broke in Kate, "and
polishing up the silver toilet bottles, the beauties. You're one of
those women who pet a home, and it shows, I can tell you. You don't see
many homes like this, do you, dad,--so ladylike and brier-rosy?"
She leaned smilingly across the table as she addressed her father,
offering him not the ingratiating and seductive smile which he was
accustomed to see women--his wife among the rest--employ when they
wished to placate him. Kate's was the bright smile of a comradely fellow
creature who asked him to play a straight game. It made him take fresh
stock of his girl. He noted her high oval brow around which the dark
hair clustered engagingly; her flexible, rather large mouth, with lips
well but not seductively arched, and her clear skin with its uniform
tinting. Such beauty as she had, and it was far from negligible, would
endure. She was quite five feet ten inches, he estimated, with a good
chest development and capable shoulders. Her gestures were free and
suggestive of strength, and her long body had the grace of flexibility
and perfect unconsciousness. All of this was good; but what of the
spirit that looked out of her eyes? It was a glance to which the man was
not accustomed--feminine yet unafraid, beautiful but not related to sex.
The physician was not able to analyze it, though where women were
concerned he was a merciless analyst. Gratified, yet unaccountably
disturbed, he turned to his wife.
"Martha has forgotten to light up the parlor," he said testily. "Can't
you impress on her that she's to have the room ready for us when we've
finished inhere?"
"She's so excited over Kate's coming home," said Mrs. Barrington with a
placatory smile. "Perhaps you'll light up to-night, Frederick."
"No, I won't. I began work at five this morning and I've been going all
day. It's up to you and Martha to run the house."
"The truth is," said Mrs. Barrington, "neither Martha nor I can reach
the gasolier."
Dr. Barrington had the effect of pouncing on this statement.
"That's what's the matter, then," he said. "You forgot to get the
tapers. I heard Martha telling you last night that they were out."
A flush spread over Mrs. Barrington's delicate face as she cast about
her for the usual subterfuge and failed to find it. In that moment Kate
realized that it had been a long programme of subterfuges with her
mother--subterfuges designed to protect her from the onslaughts of the
irritable man who dominated her.
"I'll light the gas, mummy," she said gently. "Let that be one of my
fixed duties from now on."
"You'll spoil your mother, Kate," said the doctor with a whimsical
intonation.
His jesting about what had so marred the hour of reunion brought a surge
of anger to Kate's brain.
"That's precisely what I came home to do, sir," she said significantly.
"What other reason could I have for coming back to Silvertree? The town
certainly isn't enticing. You've been doctoring here for forty years,
but you havn't been able to cure the local sleeping-sickness yet."
It stung and she had meant it to. To insult Silvertree was to hurt the
doctor in his most tender vanity. It was one of his most fervid beliefs
that he had selected a growing town, conspicuous for its enterprise. In
his young manhood he had meant to do fine things. He was
public-spirited, charitable, a death-fighter of courage and persistence.
Though not a religious man, he had one holy passion, that of the
physician. He respected himself and loved his wife, but he had from
boyhood confused the ideas of masculinity and tyranny. He believed that
women needed discipline, and he had little by little destroyed the
integrity of the woman he would have most wished to venerate. That she
could, in spite of her manifest cowardice and moral circumventions,
still pray nightly and read the book that had been the light to
countless faltering feet, furnished him with food for acrid sarcasm. He
saw in this only the essential furtiveness, inconsistency, and
superstition of the female.
The evening dragged. The neighbors who would have liked to visit them
refrained from doing so because they thought the reunited family would
prefer to be alone that first evening. Kate did her best to preserve
some tattered fragments of the amenities. She told college stories,
talked of Lena Vroom and of beautiful Honora Fulham,--hinted even at Ray
McCrea,--and by dint of much ingenuity wore the evening away.
"In the morning," she said to her father as she bade him good-night,
"we'll both be rested." She had meant it for an apology, not for herself
any more than for him, but he assumed no share in it.
Up in her room her mother saw her bedded, and in kissing her
whispered,--
"Don't oppose your father, Kate. You'll only make me unhappy. Anything
for peace, that's what I say."