Chapter III

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.