The tall, quiet-looking lady with the long dark eyes, who now came in alone, excusing herself for keeping them waiting, must of course be Mrs.

Crittenden, Mr. Welles knew. He wished he could get to his feet as Vincent did, looking as though he had got there by a bound or a spring and were ready for another. He lifted himself out of his arm-chair with a heaviness he knew seemed all the heavier by contrast, took the slim hand Mrs. Crittenden offered him, looked at her as hard as he dared, and sank again into the arm-chair, as she motioned him to do. He had had a long experience in judging people quickly by the expression of their faces, and in that short length of time he had decided thankfully that he was really, just as he had hoped, going to like his new neighbor as much as all the rest of it. He gave her a propitiatory smile, hoping she might like him a little, too, and hoping also that she would not mind Vincent. Sometimes people did, especially nice ladies such as evidently Mrs. Crittenden was. He observed that as usual Vincent had cut in ahead of everybody else, had mentioned their names, both of them, and was talking with that ... well, the way he _did_, which people either liked very much or couldn't abide. He looked at Vincent as he talked. He was not a great talker himself, which gave him a great deal of practice in watching people who did. He often felt that he _saw_ more than he heard, so much more did people's faces express than their words.

He noticed that the younger man was smiling a good deal, showing those fine teeth of his, and he had one of those instantaneously-gone, flash-light reminiscences of elderly people, ... the day when Mr. Marsh had been called away from the office and had asked him to go with little Vincent to keep an appointment with the dentist. Heavens! How the kid had roared and kicked! And now he sat there, smiling, "making a call,"

probably with that very filling in his tooth, grown-up, not even so very young any more, with a little gray in his thick hair, what people often called a good-looking man. How life did run between your fingers! Well, he would close his hand tight upon what was left to him. He noticed further that as Vincent talked, his eyes fixed on his interlocutor, his vigorous hands caressed with a slow circular motion the rounded arms of his chair. "What a three-ringed circus that fellow is," he thought. "I bet that the lady thinks he hasn't another idea in his head but introducing an old friend, and all the time he's taking her in, every inch of her, and three to one, what he'll talk about most afterwards is the smooth hard feeling of those polished arm-chairs." Vincent was saying, "... and so, we heard in a round-about way too long to bother you with, about the small old house next door being for sale, and how very quiet and peaceful a spot this is, and the Company bought it for Mr. Welles for a permanent home, now he has retired."

"Pretty fine of them!" murmured the older man dutifully, to the lady.

Vincent went on, "Oh, it's only the smallest way for them to show their sense of his life-time devotion to their interests. There's no estimating what we all owe him, for his steadiness and loyalty and good judgment, especially during that hard period, near the beginning. _You_ know, when all electrical businesses were so entirely on trial still.

n.o.body knew whether they were going to succeed or not. My father was one of the Directors from the first and I've been brought up in the tradition of how much the small beginning Company is indebted to Mr.

Welles, during the years when they went down so near the edge of ruin that they could see the receiver looking in through the open door."

Welles moved protestingly. He never had liked the business and he didn't like reminders that he owed his present comfort to it. Besides this was reading his own epitaph. He thought he must be looking very foolish to Mrs. Crittenden. Vincent continued, "But of course that's of no great importance up here. What's more to the purpose is that Mr. Welles is a great lover of country life and growing things, and he's been forced to keep his nose on a city grindstone all his life until just now. I think I can guarantee that you'll find him a very appreciative neighbor, especially if you have plenty of gladioli in your garden."

This last was one of what Welles called "Vincent's sidewipes," which he could inlay so deftly that they seemed an integral part of the conversation. He wondered what Mrs. Crittenden would say, if Vincent ever got through his gabble and gave her a chance. She was turning to him now, smiling, and beginning to speak. What a nice voice she had! How nice that she should have such a voice!

"I'm more than glad to have you both come in to see me, and I'm delighted that Mr. Welles is going to settle here. But Mr... ." she hesitated an instant, recalled the name, and went on, "Mr. Marsh doesn't need to explain you any more. It's evident that you don't know Ashley, or you'd realize that I've already heard a great deal more about you than Mr. Marsh would be likely to tell me, very likely a good deal more than is true. I know for instance, ..." she laughed and corrected herself, "... at least I've been told, what the purchase price of the house was. I know how Harry Wood's sister-in-law's friend told you about Ashley and the house in the first place. I know how many years you were in the service of the Company, and how your pension was voted unanimously by the Directors, and about the silver loving-cup your fellow employees in the office gave you when you retired; and indeed every single thing about you, except the exact relation of the elderly invalid to whose care you gave up so generously so much of your life; I'm not sure whether I she was an aunt or a second-cousin." She paused an instant to give them a chance to comment on this, but finding them still quite speechless, she went on. "And now I know another thing, that you like gladioli, and that is a real bond."

She was interrupted here by a great explosive laugh from Vincent. It was his comment on her speech to them, and for a time he made no other, eyeing her appreciatively as she and Mr. Welles talked garden together, and from time to time chuckling to himself. She gave him once a sidelong amused glance, evidently liking his capacity to laugh at seeing the ground cut away from under his feet, evidently quite aware that he was still thinking about that, and not at all about Mr. Welles and tulip-beds. Welles was relieved at this. Apparently she was going to "take" Vincent the right way. Some ladies were frightfully rubbed the wrong way by that strange great laugh of Vincent's. And what she knew about gardening! And not only about gardening in general, but about his own garden. He was astounded at her knowledge apparently of every inch of the quadrangle of soil back of his house, and at the revelations she made to him of what could lie sleeping under a mysterious blank surface of earth. Why, a piece of old ground was like a person. You had to know it, to have any idea of all that was hidden in its bosom, good and bad.

"There never was such a place for pigweed as the lower end of your vegetable lot," she told him; "you'll have to get up nights to fight it if there is plenty of rain this summer." And again, "Be careful about not digging too close to the east wall of your terrace. There is a border of peonies there, splendid pink ones, and you're likely to break off the shoots. They don't show so early as the red ones near the walk, that get more sun."

"Did you ever use to _live_ in that house?" he asked her, respectful of her mastery of its secrets.

She laughed. "No, oh no. We've lived right here all the eleven years of our life in Vermont. But there's another side to the local wireless information-bureau that let me know all about you before you ever got here. We all know all about everybody and everything, you know. If you live in the country you're really married to humanity, for better or for worse, not just on speaking terms with it, as you are in the city. Why, I know about your garden because I have stood a thousand, thousand times leaning on my hoe in my own garden, discussing those peonies with old Mrs. Belham who lived there before you." This seemed to bring up some picture into her mind at which she looked for a moment, turning from it to the man beside her, with a warmth in her voice which went to his heart. "It's been forlorn having that dear little old house empty and cold. I can't _tell_ you how glad I am you have come to warm it, and live in it."

The wonder of it overcame Mr. Welles like a wave. "I can't believe I'm really going to!" he cried desperately. "It doesn't seem _possible_!" He felt shamed, knowing that he had burst out too violently. What could she know of what lay back of him, that he was escaped from! What could she think of him, but that he was a foolish, bitter old man?

She did not seem to think that, looking at him attentively as though she wanted to make out just what he meant. Perhaps she did make out, for she now said gently, "I believe you are going to like it, Mr. Welles. I believe you are going to find here what, ... what you deserve to find."

She said quietly, "I hope we shall be good neighbors to you."

She spoke so kindly, her look on him was so humane that he felt the water coming to his eyes. He was in a foolishly emotional state, these first days. The least little thing threw him off the track. It really _did_ seem hardly possible that it was all true. That the long grind at the office was over, the business he had always hated and detested, and the long, hateful slavery at the flat finished at last, and that he had come to live out what was left to him in this lovely, peaceful valley, in that quiet welcoming little house, with this sweet woman next door!

He swallowed. The corners of his mouth twitched. What an old lunatic he was. But he did not dare trust himself to speak again.

Now Vincent's voice rose. What a length of time Vincent had been silent,--he who never took a back seat for anybody! What had he been doing all this time, sitting there and staring at them with those awfully brilliant eyes of his? Very likely he had seen the silly weak tears so near the surface, had caught the sentimental twitch of the mouth. Yes, quite certainly, for, now he was showing his tact by changing the subject, changing it with a vengeance. "Mrs. Crittenden,"

he was saying, "my curiosity has been touched by that very fine photograph over there. I don't recognize the castle it shows."

"That's in Bayonne," she said, and paused, her eyes speculatively on him.

"No, Heavens no! You don't need to tell me that it's not Bayonne, New Jersey!" he answered her unspoken question violently. This made her laugh, opening her long eyes a little. He went on, "I've been as far as Pau, but never went into the Basque country."

"Oh, Pau." She said no more than this, but Welles had the impression that these words somehow had made a comment on Vincent's information.

Vincent seemed to think so too, and curiously enough not to think it a very favorable comment. He looked, what he almost never looked, a little nettled, and spoke a little stiffly. "It's a very fine specimen," he said briefly, looking again at the photograph.

"Oh, it looks very much finer and bigger in the photograph than it really is," she told them. "It's only a bandbox of a thing compared with Coucy or Pierrefonds or any of the northern ones. It was built, you know, like the Cathedral at Bayonne, when the Plantagenets still held that country, but after they were practically pretty near English, and both the chateau and the Gothic cathedral seem queer aliens among the southern natives. I have the photograph up there on the wall only because of early a.s.sociations. I lived opposite it long ago when I was a little girl."

This, to Mr. Welles, was indistinguishable from the usual talk of people who have been "abroad." To tell the truth they always sounded to him more or less "showing-off," though he humbly tried to think it was only because he could never take any part in such talk. He certainly did not see anything in the speech to make Vincent look at her, almost with his jaw dropped. He himself paid little attention to what she was now saying, because he could not keep his mind from the lingering sweet intonations of her voice. What difference did it make where she had lived as a little girl? She was going to live next door to him now; what an awfully nice woman she was, and quite a good-looking woman too, with a very nice figure, although not in her very first youth, of course. How old could she be? Between thirty and forty of course, but You couldn't tell where. His personal taste was not for such a long face as hers. But you didn't notice that when she smiled. He liked the way she did her black hair, too, so smooth and shining and close to her head. It looked as though she'd really combed and brushed it, and most women's hair didn't.

She turned to him now, again, and said, "Is this your very first call in Ashley? Because if it is, I mustn't miss the opportunity to cut in ahead of all the other gossips, and give you a great deal of information. You might just as well have it all in one piece now, and get it straight, as take it in little snippets from old Mrs. Powers, when she comes to bring your milk, this evening. You see I know that you are to get your milk of the Powers, and that they have plucked up courage to ask you eight cents a quart although the price around here has been, till now, six cents.

You'll be obliged to listen to a great many more details from Mrs.

Powers than from me, even those she knows nothing about. But of course you must be introduced to the Powers, _in toto_ too. Old Mrs. Powers, a very lively old widow, lives on her farm nearly at the foot of Deer Hollow. Her married son and his family live with her. In this house, there is first of all my husband. I'm so sorry he is away in Canada just now, on lumbering business. He is Neale Crittenden, a Williams man, who in his youth had thoughts of exploring the world but who has turned out head of the 'Crittenden Manufacturing Company,' which is the high-sounding name of a smallish wood-working business on the other side of the field next our house. You can see the buildings and probably hear the saws from your garden. Properly speaking, you know, you don't live in Ashley but in 'Crittenden's' and your house const.i.tutes one quarter of all the residences in that settlement. There are yours, and ours, the mill-buildings, the house where an old cousin of mine lives, and the Powers' house, although that is so far away, nearly half a mile, that it is really only a farm-house in the country. _We_, you see, are the suburb of Ashley."

Marsh laughed out again at this, and she laughed with him, their eyes, shining with amus.e.m.e.nt, meeting in a friendly glance.

"The mill is the most important member of Crittenden's, of course. Part of the mill-building is pre-Revolutionary, and very picturesque. In the life-time of my husband's uncle, it still ran by water-power with a beautiful, enormous old mossy water-wheel. But since we took it over, we've had to put in modern machinery very prosaically and run it on its waste of slabs, mostly. All sorts of small, unimportant objects are manufactured there, things you never heard of probably. Backs of hair-brushes, wooden casters to put under beds and chairs, rollers for cotton mills. As soon as my husband returns, I'll ask him to take you through it. That and the old church are the only historic monuments in town."

She stopped and asked him meditatively, "What else do you suppose I need to forestall old Mrs. Powers on? My old Cousin Hetty perhaps. She has a last name, Allen--yes, some connection with Ethan Allen. I am, myself.

But everybody has always called her Miss Hetty till few people remember that she has another name. She was born there in the old house below 'the Burning,' and she has lived there for eighty years, and that is all her saga. You can't see her house from here, but it is part of Crittenden's all the same, although it is a mile away by the main road as you go towards the Dug-Way. But you can reach it in six or seven minutes from here by a back lane, through the Eagle Rock woods."

"What nice names!" Mr. Welles luxuriated in them. "The Eagle Rock woods.

The Dug-Way. The Burning. Deer Hollow."

"I bet you don't know what they mean," Vincent challenged him. Vincent was always throwing challenges, at everything. But by this time he had learned how to dodge them. "No, I don't know, and I don't care if I don't," he answered happily.

It pleased him that Mrs. Crittenden found this amusing, so that she looked at him laughing. How her eyes glistened when she laughed. It made you laugh back. He risked another small attempt at facetiousness. "Go on with the census of Crittenden's," he told her. "I want to know all about my future fellow-citizens. You haven't even finished up this house, anybody but your husband."

"There is myself. You see me. There is nothing more to that. And there are the three children, Paul, Elly, and Mark, ..." She paused here rather abruptly, and the whimsical accent of good-humored mockery disappeared. For an instant her face changed into something quite different from what they had seen. Mr. Welles could not at all make out the expression which very pa.s.singly had flickered across her eyes with a smoke-like vagueness and rapidity. He had the queerest fancy that she looked somehow scared,--but of course that was preposterous.

"Your call," she told them both, "happens to fall on a day which marks a turning-point in our family life. This is the very first day in ten years, since Paul's birth, that I have not had at least one of the children beside me. Today is the opening of spring term in our country school, and my little Mark went off this morning, for the first time, with his brother and sister. I have been alone until you came." She stopped for a moment. Mr. Welles wished that Vincent could get over his habit of staring at people so. She went on, "I have felt very queer indeed, all day. It's as though ... you know, when you have been walking up and up a long flight of stairs, and you go automatically putting one foot up and then the other, and then suddenly ... your upraised foot falls back with a jar. You've come to the top, and, for an instant, you have a gone feeling without your stairs to climb."

It occurred to Mr. Welles that really perhaps the reason why some nice ladies did not like Vincent was just because of his habit of looking at them so hard. He could have no idea how piercingly bright his eyes looked when he fixed them on a speaker like that. And now Mrs.

Crittenden was looking back at him, and would notice it. _He_ could understand how a refined lady would feel as though somebody were almost trying to find a key-hole to look in at her,--to have anybody pounce on her so, with his eyes, as Vincent did. She couldn't know, of course, that Vincent went pouncing on ladies and baggagemen and office boys, and old friends, just the same way. He bestirred himself to think of something to say. "I wish I could get up my nerve to ask you, Mrs.

Crittenden, about one other person in this house," he ventured, "the old woman ... the old lady ... who let us in the door."

At the sound of his voice Mrs. Crittenden looked away from Vincent quickly and looked at him for a perceptible moment before she heard what he had said. Then she explained, smiling, "Oh, she would object very much to being labeled with the finicky t.i.tle of 'lady.' That was Toucle, our queer old Indian woman,--all that is left of old America here. She belongs to our house, or perhaps I should say it belongs to her. She was born here, a million years ago, more or less, when there were still a few basket-making Indians left in the valley. Her father and mother both died, and she was brought up by the old Great-uncle Crittenden's family.

Then my husband's Uncle Burton inherited the house and brought his bride here, and Toucle just stayed on. She always makes herself useful enough to pay for her food and lodging. And when his wife died an elderly woman, Toucle still just stayed on, till he died, and then she went right on staying here in the empty house, till my husband and I got here. We were married in Rome, and made the long trip here without stopping at all. It was dawn, a June morning, when we arrived. We walked all the way from the station at Ashley out to the old house, here at Crittenden's. And ... I'll never forget the astounded expression on my husband's face when Toucle rose up out of the long gra.s.s in the front yard and bade me welcome. She'd known me as a little girl when I used to visit here. She will outlive all of us, Toucle will, and be watching from her room in the woodshed chamber on the dawn of Judgment Day when the stars begin to fall."

Mr. Welles felt a trifle bewildered by this, and showed it. She explained further, "But seriously, I must tell you that she is a perfectly harmless and quite uninteresting old herb-gatherer, although the children in the village are a little afraid of her, because she is an Indian, the only one they have ever seen. She really _is_ an Indian too. She knows every inch of our valley and the mountains better than any lumberman or hunter or fisherman in Ashley. She often goes off and doesn't come back for days. I haven't the least idea where she stays.

But she's very good to our children when she's here, and I like her capacity for monumental silence. It gives her very occasional remarks an oracular air, even though you know it's only because she doesn't often open her lips. She helps a little with the house-work, too, although she always looks so absent-minded, as though she were thinking of something very far away. She's quite capable of preparing a good meal, for all she never seems to notice what she's up to. And she's the last member of our family except the very coming-and-going little maids I get once in a while. Ashley is unlike the rest of the world in that it is hard to get domestic servants here.

"Now let me see, whom next to introduce to you. You know all your immediate neighbors now. I shall have to begin on Ashley itself. Perhaps our minister and his wife. They live in the high-porticoed, tall-pillared white old house next door to the church in the village, on the opposite side from the church-yard. They are Ashleyans of the oldest rock. Both of them were born here, and have always lived here. Mr.

Bayweather is seventy-five years old and has never had any other parish.

I do believe the very best thing I can do for you is to send you straight to them, this minute. There's nothing Mr. Bayweather doesn't know about the place or the people. He has a collection of Ashleyana of all sorts, records, deeds, t.i.tles, old letters, family trees. And for the last forty years he has been very busy writing a history of Ashley."

"A history of _Ashley_?" exclaimed Vincent.

"A history of Ashley," she answered, level-browed.

Mr. Welles had the impression that a "side-wipe" had been exchanged in which he had not shared.

Vincent now asked irrelevantly, "Do you go to church yourself?"

"Oh yes," she answered, "I go, I like to go. And I take the children."

She turned her head so that she looked down at her long hands in her lap, as she added, "I think going to church is a _refining_ influence in children's lives, don't you?"

To Mr. Welles' horror this provoked from Vincent one of his great laughs. And this time he was sure that Mrs. Crittenden would take offense, for she looked up, distinctly startled, really quite as though he _had_ looked in through the key-hole. But Vincent went on laughing.

He even said, impudently, "Ah, now I've caught you, Mrs. Crittenden; you're too used to keeping your jokes to yourself. And they're much too good for that."

She looked at him hard, with a certain wonder in her eyes.

"Oh, there's no necromancy about it," he told her. "I've been reading the t.i.tles of your books and glancing over your music before you came in. And I can put two and two together. Who are you making fun of to yourself? Who first got off that lovely speech about the refining influence of church?"