One Man in His Time Part 14

The woman looked at her darkly. "There are some places that children don't go to."

"How long ago did she die?"

Patty waited patiently for an answer; but when at last the neighbour raised her head again from the tub, it appeared that her reticence had extended from her speech to her expression which looked as if it had closed over something. "You'll have to ask your father that," she returned in a phrase as cryptic as the preceding one. "I ain't here to tell you things."

After this the child set her lips firmly together, and asked no more questions. Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like a mountain everything else on her horizon. In the beginning they had been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order to buy her toys. Until she went to the little village school, she had always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their circ.u.mstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim, gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.

There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to live with her.

Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered restlessly to the pile of fas.h.i.+on magazines and festively decorated "books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered couch. "They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously. How hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futile study appeared to her wasted! At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes that had cost so much--as much as a box of chocolates every day for a week. "I don't care," she said aloud, with sullen resolution. "I am going to let them see that I don't want any favours."

The next afternoon she went out early in order to escape Gershom; but when she came in, after a restless wandering in shops and a short drive, she met him just as he was turning away from the door.

"Something told me I'd find you at this hour," he remarked with unfailing good humour. "Come out and walk about in the Square. It will do you good."

She shook her head impatiently. "I'm tired. I don't like walking."

"Well, I reckon it's easier to sit anyway. We'll go inside."

"No, if I've got to talk to you I'd rather do it out of doors," she replied, turning back toward the gate.

"That's right. The air's fine. I shouldn't wonder if the bad weather ain't all over."

"I don't mind the bad weather," she retorted pettishly because it was the only remark she could think of that sounded disagreeable.

They pa.s.sed through the gate, and walked rapidly in the direction of the Was.h.i.+ngton monument, which lifted a splendid silhouette against a deep blue background of sky. It was one of those soft, opal-tinted February days which fall like a lyric interlude in the gray procession of winter.

The suns.h.i.+ne lay like flowing gold on the pavement; and the breeze that stirred now and then in the leafless boughs of the trees was as roving and provocative as the air of spring. In the winding brick walks of the Square children were at play with the squirrels and pigeons; and old men, with gnarled hands and patient hopeless faces, sat warming themselves in the suns.h.i.+ne on the benches. "Life!" she thought. "That's life. You can't get away from it." Then one of the old men broke into a cackle of cheerful laughter, and she added: "After all n.o.body is ever pathetic to himself."

"I believe I'll go in," she said, turning to Gershom. "I want to take off my hat."

He laughed. "Your hat's all right, ain't it? It looks pretty good to me."

A s.h.i.+ver of aversion ran through her. If only he wouldn't try to be funny! If only he had been born without that dreadful sense of humour, she felt that she might have been able to tolerate him.

"Please don't," she replied fretfully.

"Well, I won't, if you'll walk a little slower. I told you I had something to say to you."

"I don't want to hear it. There's no use talking about it. I'll say the same thing if you ask me for a hundred years."

A chuckle broke from him while he stood jauntily fingering the diamond in his tie, as if it were some talisman which imparted fresh confidence.

Oh, it was useless to try to put a man like that in his place--for his place seemed to be everywhere!

"Well, it won't do any harm," he said at last. "As long as I like to listen to it."

"I wish you would leave me alone."

"But suppose I can't?" He was still chaffing. He would continue to chaff, she was convinced, if he were dying. "Suppose I ain't made that way?"

"I don't care how you're made. You may talk to Father if you like; but I'm going upstairs to take off my hat."

His chuckle swelled into a roar of laughter. "Talk to Father! Haven't I been talking to Father over at the Capitol for the last three hours?"

They had reached the gate beyond the monument, and swinging suddenly round, she started back toward the house. As she pa.s.sed him he touched the end of her fur stole with a gesture that was almost imperative. His eyes had dropped their veil of pleasantry, and she was aware, with a troubled mind, that he was holding back something as a last resource if she continued to prove intractable. Again and again she had this feeling when she was with him--an uneasy intuition that his good humour was not entirely una.s.sumed, that he was concealing a dangerous weapon beneath his offensive familiarity.

"After all I may be going to surprise you," he said lightly enough, yet with this disturbing implication of some meaning that she could not discern. "What if I tell you that I've no intention of making love to you?"

"You mean there is something else you want to see me about?" She breathed a sigh of relief, and her light steps fell gradually into the measure of his. Her conscience p.r.i.c.ked her unpleasantly when she remembered that there had been a time when she would have spoken less curtly. Well, what of that? It was characteristic of her energetic mind that past mistakes were dismissed as soon as they were discovered. When one started out in life knowing nothing, one had to learn as best one could, that was all! Every day was a new one, so why bother about yesterday? There was trouble enough in the world as it was, without dragging back what was over.

"Please tell me what it is," she said impatiently.

He looked at her with curious intentness. "It is about an aunt of yours--Mrs. Green. I met her when I was in California."

Her surprise was so complete that he must have been gratified.

"An aunt of mine? I haven't any aunt."

For a minute he hesitated. Now that he had come to practical matters his careless jocularity had given place to a manner of serious deliberation.

"Then your father hasn't told you?" he asked.

"Is she his sister?" Her distrust of Gershom was so strong that she could not bring herself to a direct reply.

"So he hasn't?" After all she might as well have answered his question.

"No, she isn't his sister." His smile was full of meaning.

"Then she must be"--there was a change in her voice which he was quick to detect--"she must be the sister of my mother."

"Didn't you know that she had one?" he enquired. "Don't you remember seeing her when you were a child?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't remember her, and Father has never spoken of her."

At this he glanced at her sharply, and then looked away over the tops of the trees to the political mausoleum of the City Hall. "We take that as a sort of joke now," he remarked irrelevantly, "but the time was--and not so long ago either--when we boasted of it more than of the Lee monument. Cost a lot too, they say! Queer, ain't it, the way we spend a million dollars or more on a thing one year, and the next want to kick it out on the junk heap? I reckon it's the same way about behaviour too.

It ain't so much what you do as the time you do it in that seems to make the difference." As she showed no inclination to follow this train of moralizing, he asked suddenly, "Do you remember your mother?"

"Only once. I remember seeing her once." He had not imagined that her voice could become so gentle.

"Did they ever tell you what became of her?"

"Yes, I know that. She lost her mind. They told me that she died in the asylum."

He was still watching her closely, as if he were observing the effect on her nerves of each word he uttered. "Did they tell you the cause of it?"

She shook her head. "That was all they ever told me."

"You mean your father never mentioned it to you? Are you sure he never spoke of Mrs. Green?"

"I shouldn't have forgotten. But, if she is my mother's sister, why has she never written to me?"

"Ah, that's just it! She was afraid your father wouldn't like it. There was a difference of some kind. I don't know what it was about--but they didn't get on--and--and--"