II
For years the house at 93 Sloan Street had displayed a sign announcing that it was “to let or for sale,” and these words might as well have been followed by “take it or leave it,” for that was the owner’s attitude.
It was a hopeless house, dark, damp, and badly arranged, standing in a garden where enormous old trees cast so dense a shade over the front lawn that not even grass would thrive. As for the back garden, only the queerest, most obstinate, ancient shrubs were there, huddled against the side fence, because anything less tenacious was inevitably carried away by the river in its annual spring flood.
Just now the river was low, dolloping along dejectedly between its brown and uninteresting banks. Everything was brown—the water, the bare trees, the fields, the road in front, and No. 93 itself. Altogether the breath of life had gone out of Sloan Street, and to any one coming down from the sunny, breezy hilltop it seemed a sorry spectacle.
Some one had come down from the hilltop this morning—a brisk, neat little red-haired lady. She came smartly along the road to No. 93, pushed open the gate, and walked up the garden path. She saw the portly, white-haired lady standing on the veranda, looking down the road.
“Good morning!” said the visitor. “I’m your neighbor, Mrs. Aldrich.”
She waited at the foot of the steps, because she thought she would not go up on the veranda until she was invited. Well, she never was invited.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked, with honest and neighborly good will.
The portly lady looked down at her as if doubtful whether such a creature could really exist.
“Thank you, there is not,” she said.
Mrs. Aldrich was greatly taken aback.
“I thought perhaps—” she began, in a tone not quite so neighborly, but the other interrupted.
“Very good of you, I’m sure; but I shall do very well, thank you.”
That last “thank you” seemed capable of lifting Mrs. Aldrich out of the garden all by itself.
“I wouldn’t set foot in that place again,” she declared, “if she begged me on her knees!”
This declaration was addressed to her nephew, Jerry Sargent. She had made it before, to her husband and to a neighbor or so, but she found special pleasure in telling things to Jerry, for the strange reason that he never agreed with her. She was a shrewd, sensible, rather peppery little woman. She had been his guardian when he was younger, and she still interfered[Pg 173] pretty considerably in his affairs—which he good-humoredly permitted.
“If you could have seen the way she looked at me!” she went on. “As if I were a—a toad!”
“I know,” replied Jerry. “I didn’t see her, but I heard her, and I know the sort of look that would go with that tone. ‘Who is that impossible person?’ She told me she didn’t encourage chance acquaintances, and it looks as if she meant it!”
“I should have made her get out of that taxi and walk—in the rain!” cried Mrs. Aldrich, who had been informed of the episode of the previous night.
“Of course you would,” her nephew agreed, with a grin. “I know you! And you’d have called her names out of the window as you passed her, wouldn’t you? But I’m much milder. I was ashamed of being a chance acquaintance, anyhow. It didn’t seem respectable.”
“I wish you wouldn’t take everything so lightly!” complained Mrs. Aldrich, but she didn’t mean it. The thing she loved best in her nephew was his careless and generous good humor, his utter lack of malice or resentment. “You ought to have more pride, Gerald, than to allow yourself to be trampled on.”
He rose to his feet, and stood looking down at her with an expression of great severity; and though his aunt knew it to be assumed, she thought it very becoming to his face. A big, handsome fellow he was, with the gray eyes and black hair and all the wit and charm and grace of his blessed mother, and all the energy and practical good sense of his father. A good man of business he was, but into the dullest matter of routine, into the most trifling details of everyday life, he brought his own sort of laughing romance.
“Very well, madam!” said he. “You’re disappointed in me because I’ve let myself be trampled on. Now you’ll see what I can do when my pride is roused!”
“Jerry, you ridiculous boy! Where are you going?”
“Down to No. 93,” said he. “The turning worm! Good-by!”
And off he went, down the hill, whistling as he walked.