II
The sound of a car coming along the road made Bess draw to one side. Very few cars came here, and she was a little curious about it. She glanced up as it passed, and then stared after it, amazed.
It was what looked like the wreck of a fine touring car, battered and scarred, but with an engine that took the steep hill superbly. It was piled high with household goods. A man was driving it, on the running board crouched another man, and, perilously balanced upon a table wedged into the tonneau, there sat a woman. She was laughing, and the brightness of her face lingered in the girl’s mind.
As they disappeared over the crest of the hill, a lamp shade fell out of the car. Bess was hastening forward to retrieve it, but, before she got there, one of the men appeared. He picked it up, and then something arrested his attention.
“Hi! Just come here!” he called, and the two others joined him.
They all stood there, as if entranced with the view; and Bess, as she passed them, heard the woman say something about “the austere charm of all this.” She was somewhat surprised, and very much impressed, to learn that any one could find charm of any sort in these barren fields, where great billboards stood, declaring them to be highly desirable building lots. She felt that she herself should have discovered this charm in the six weeks she had been here.
But now she observed something which the others had not seen. They had their backs turned to the car, which stood halfway down the slope, and they did not know that it had begun to slip. Bess called an anxious warning, but they were talking, and did not hear; and the top-heavy car was slowly gathering momentum.
“Oh, do look out!” she cried. “It’s running away!”
It was. Oblivious of brakes, it went careering down the hill, faster and faster, bumping over the ruts, and flinging out all sorts of things as it went. The others had heard her, now, and turned, and they all began rushing after it.
Too late! Going at great speed, the car smashed squarely into the stump of a tree, stood up on its hind feet, and threw a great part of its load over its head. Then it stood still and waited.
Bess was the first to reach the scene of disaster, and she was dismayed. There was a little red lacquer cabinet in splinters; there were books with the pages fluttering away; a china clock was shattered to pieces; the ground was strewn with wreckage.
“Oh, what a pity!” she cried. “I’m so sorry! Such pretty things!”
“Never mind!” said the woman, cheerfully. “Some of them were broken, anyhow; and I don’t believe in caring too much about things, do you?”
Struck by this philosophic point of view, Bess turned toward the speaker, and found her still smiling. She was not a pretty woman. She was small and pale and freckled, and her reddish hair was growing gray; but that smile offers was a thing rarer than youth or beauty.
“I like her!” thought Bess.
The two men had begun to stow the débris into the car in a way that caused anguish to the girl’s orderly spirit.
“Have you much farther to go?” she asked anxiously. “Because, if the things are packed like that, I’m afraid they’ll fall out.”
“My dear,” said the woman, “I don’t know how far it is. I took the place, in blind faith, from an agent. It’s No. 9 Edgely Road.”
“Oh, but that’s right there!” cried Bess, pointing. “That house, where I live!”
“A two-family house, isn’t it? Well, my dear, we’re the second family, then!” said the woman, very much pleased, and she called out joyously: “Tom Tench! Alan! I’ve found the place!”
The two men approached. They also seemed surprised and pleased.
“As if she’d done something very clever,” thought Bess. “Didn’t they ever expect to find their house?”
“My dear,” said the woman, “I’m Angelina Smith. This is my brother Alan, and my cousin, Tom Tench. Boys, im[Pg 496]agine! This is the young lady who lives in the house!”
Both the men took off their hats and smiled at her.
“Shall we move the things in now?” asked the cousin, a somewhat portly young man, in horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Or will it bother you?” asked Miss Smith.
Bess was disconcerted to see that they regarded her as a sort of hostess.
“Just as you like, of course,” she said. “I—can’t I help you?”
“No!” replied the brother, promptly. “We can get along all right.”
Bess glanced at him, but looked away again, hastily. There was something in his steady, smiling gaze that confused her. He did not look much like his sister. She was little, and he was tall. Her hair was reddish, and his was black. He had the same wide, good-humored smile, but somehow it was different.
“It’s getting dark,” he said, “and it’s cold. You’d better run home.”
Bess might have felt a little annoyed by his rather masterful manner, if she had not noticed, as he moved to pick up a book, that he walked with a limp; but that disarmed her. She liked him; she liked all of them; there was something charming and a little pathetic about them.
“Won’t you all come in and have a cup of tea with us first?” she asked, strictly upon impulse.
“My dear!” cried Miss Smith. “How kind of you! We will!”
And they all followed her to the house, leaving the hapless car just where it was.
Bess knocked upon the door, to warn her father. He opened it with the distressed air of a disturbed hermit.
“Father,” said Bess, “these are our new neighbors. Miss Smith, my father, Professor Gayle.”
Miss Smith held out her hand, and the professor took it. She presented her cousin and her brother, and they all shook hands gravely.
“But how cozy!” she exclaimed, looking about her.
“Ah! Yes! Yes! Yes!” said Professor Gayle.
“Cozy” seemed a tactful word for that sitting room. When Bess and her father left their old home, they had brought with them what they had regarded, at the time, as just a few pieces of their old furniture; but in this room the things had become too many and too large.
Bess knew that the crowded room hurt her father not only æsthetically, but physically. He was a big, gaunt man, very near-sighted, and almost every time he moved his shins struck some sharp angle, or something bumped him under the knees. When he made one of his fine, sweeping gestures—sweeping, it truly was—it carried to the floor all sorts of things from near-by tables.
But Miss Smith was entranced.
“Really a home!” said she. “You know, we all suddenly felt the need of a home, ourselves, last week. It was at breakfast in the studio. Alan said, ‘Christmas will soon be here.’ ‘What does Christmas mean to us, who have no home?’ Tom Tench inquired. ‘Boys,’ I said, ‘you shall have a home!’ So, you see!”
“Ah, yes!” said the professor, vaguely. Bess had gone off to make tea, and he was obliged to entertain the party alone. He scarcely felt equal to it. “You said ‘studio’?” he continued. “Am I to understand that you are—er—an artist, Miss Smith?”
“All of us! I paint, and Tom Tench writes, and Alan designs. We’re very quiet people,” she assured him. “We shan’t disturb you in the least.”
“I’m sure,” said the professor, gallantly.
And he really did feel that, if he must have neighbors, these were remarkably unobjectionable ones—no children, no dogs, and he fancied that they were not the sort to possess a loud speaker.
He was still further encouraged when Tom Tench pulled a book from one of the shelves, and gave a stern and loud opinion upon it. That was the kind of thing the professor was accustomed to, and he immediately pronounced a loud and scholarly contradiction. Then he and Miss Smith and Tom Tench all began to talk about books. No one of them had any use for the books praised by the others, but that made it all the more interesting.
They did not miss the brother. He had followed Bess into the kitchen, and he said he wished to help her. She told him that there was really nothing that he could do, but still he stayed there. He sat on the end of the table, and talked to her.
His conversation was not scholarly. He did not talk about books. He talked about plays, and Bess had never seen anything except a few Shakespearean dramas. He[Pg 497] talked about dancing, and Bess had never danced, except at school. Her particular friends had been very serious girls, and her father was invariably serious; she was not accustomed to frivolous conversation, and she could not answer Mr. Smith. After awhile he gave up and fell silent.
That night, after she had gone to bed, Bess lay awake for a time in the dark. She endeavored to think of the future, and to decide whether she could study shorthand by mail; but her thinking was unaccountably disturbed by the memory of that young man, with his steady, smiling glance and his very insignificant conversation. Somehow, it made her unhappy.