The Japanese boy bowed again in the door, and Rodney Merriam went out to his lonely dinner.
CHAPTER II
OLD, UNHAPPY, FAR-OFF THINGS
“The cost of living is high, very high.”
“Yes, father; I know that things cost, of course.”
“I have lived on very little while you were away, Zee. With one servant it’s possible to keep down expenses. Servants are ruinous. And I’m not rich, Zee, like your Aunt Julia and Uncle Rodney.”
“I want to do just what you would have me do, in everything. It was kind and generous of you to let me stay away so long. I know my expenses abroad must have been a great tax on you.”
Ezra Dameron looked quickly at his daughter.
“Yes, to be sure, Zee, to be sure. Mariona is a simple place and your sojourn abroad has hardly fitted you for our homely ways. You’ll find that things are done very differently here. But of course you will accommodate yourself to the conditions. And you’ll find the house quite comfortable. It’s a little old-fashioned, but it was your grandfather’s, and it rarely happens nowadays that a girl lives in the same house her mother was born in. Of course any little changes that you want to make will be all right; but you must practise economy.”
They were studying each other with a shrewd sophistication on the father’s side; with anxious wonder on the part of the girl. She knew little of her father. Even the memory of her mother had grown indistinct. The thing that had always impressed her about her father was his seeming age; she remembered him from her childhood as an old man, who came and went on errands which had seemed unrelated to her own life. The house had stood in a large tract when Zelda went away, but this had shrunk gradually as Ezra Dameron divided the original Merriam acres and sold off the lots. The front door of the homestead was now only a few feet from the new cement walk on what was called Merriam Street, in honor of Zelda’s grandfather. Sun and wind had peeled the paint from the brick walls and the green of the blinds had faded to a dull nondescript.
The house, without its original setting of trees and grass, was somber and ugly. A few cedars remained, but they only intensified the gloom of the place. The house had been built like a fortress and was old before the Civil War. It was a large house, or had been considered so, with several levels of floors marking the additions that had been made from time to time by the elder Merriam. There was a small iron balcony in front, opening from the upper windows; but it seemed ridiculous now that it hung over the public walk. At the rear there was a broad wooden gallery with pillars rising to the second story. A high board fence surrounded the back of the lot, as though to guard from further encroachment the few feet of earth that remained of the ampler acres of a bygone day. The house had fallen to Mrs. Dameron in the division of Roger Merriam’s estate, and she had willed it to her daughter, making it part of the property held in trust for Zelda by her father.