John Gault’s eyes passed over this with slow disgust. What might not the constant sight of such naked poverty breed in the most sensitive soul! Day after day Viola must have passed this way, must have seen the human spiders waiting in their dark web, perhaps might have chaffered with them, or recognized her own jewelry among the tarnished relics in the pawnbroker’s window.
He turned into the wider avenue, where gentility had once dwelt in its bulky palaces. They seemed to stare with wide, unshuttered windows, drearily speculating on the desolation of the street and their own decay. Around them gardens stretched unkempt and parched, here and there an aloe or some vigorously growing shrub striking a note of color in the uniform grayness. High iron gates, richly wrought, but eaten into by rust, hung open from broken hinges, or were tied together with ravelings of rope. One of the most imposing, still standing upright, was held ajar with a piece of broken brick. It gave entrance to a circular sweep of driveway and a large garden full of rankly growing shrubs and vines and headless statues, with a rusty fountain-basin in the center, and urns still showing the corpses of geraniums. Inside Gault saw some of the children of the neighborhood playing games, and realized that the broken brick was evidently of their introduction. This was the house which had been built by Jerry McCormick thirty-odd years before. It had the appearance of having been deserted for a century.
A few turns down narrower streets brought the wayfarer to the Reeds’ home. He had only seen it once before by daylight, and now eyed it with curiosity. Though age and poverty showed in its peeling stucco walls, in the untended vines that hung about the bay-window, in the rotting woodwork of the old gate, it still had the air of a place that is lived in and cared for. Inside the gate the pathway of black-and-white marble was clean and bright. Round the root of the dracæna there was a flower-bed planted with mignonette. On the other side of the flagged walk fuchsias and heliotrope were trained against the high fence which separated the house from its next-door neighbor.
In answer to his ring Viola opened the door. She was dressed in a blue-and-white gingham dress, the sleeves of which were rolled up to the elbows, and showed arms slightly rounded and white as milk. She wore an apron and had a pair of scissors in her hand. When she saw who it was the color of joy ran in a beautiful flush over her face.
“You never came at this time before,” she said in the hall, hastily pulling down her sleeves. “I never thought for a moment it was you, or I shouldn’t have come to the door with my sleeves this way.”
Then they passed into the drawing-room. The afternoon light streamed through the bare emptiness of this once stately apartment, revealing the long crack that zigzagged across the mirror, and the rents in the colonel’s arm-chair. In the rear half of the room there were only one or two pieces of furniture, evidently seldom used, and pushed back into the corners. The double doors leading from here were open, and vouchsafed the visitor a view of one of those long and spacious dining-rooms, with an outer wall of glass, often seen in old San Francisco houses. Fronting this glass wall were tiers of plants, some mounted on rough boxes, some on tables. They were of many sizes and sorts, but the feathery foliage of the maidenhair was most in evidence. It seemed to be growing in every kind of receptacle, from the ordinary flower-pot to a tomato-can on one side and a huge kerosene-oil tin on the other. Near the dining-table was a chair, and the table itself was littered with brown paper, cut neatly into circular pieces about three inches in diameter.
Viola moved forward to close the doors, but was arrested by her visitor.
“Why, you’ve a regular conservatory in there. What beautiful plants!”
She held the door open and let him look in, though apparently not quite at her ease.