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Book 3Four
The day after Mr. Gayheart`s funeral was Sunday. Harry and his cashier, Milton Chase, met at the bank by appointment, to go for a walk. People looked out of their windows to see them go by.
Everyone is used to the fact that Milton seems older than Harry. When his youthful good looks withered, they left his cheeks thin and his nose too long. He walks jerkily, with short uneven steps, as if he had left some unfinished business behind him. Harry still has the firm, deliberate tread with which he has come and gone about these streets for nearly a lifetime.
The two men are going "out to the Gayhearts`," as people still say. The town has not grown in these twenty-five years, it has shrunk. The old Gayheart place is still half-farm, lying at the extreme west edge of Haverford, where the sidewalk ends. Beyond, there is only country road. It is a walk Gordon often takes on a Sunday afternoon.
When he was a young lad, newly come to Haverford with his father, one summer evening he was riding out that road on his bicycle. The cement gang had been at work there all day, laying this very sidewalk which was never to go any farther. They had finished smoothing the wet slabs, stretched mason`s cord on low stakes all about them as a warning to passers-by to keep off, and gone home for supper. When Harry came along on his wheel, he noticed a slip of a girl in boy`s overalls, barefoot, running about the flower garden, watering it with a length of rubber hose. Instantly he recognized her as the same girl he had seen in the skating-rink, gliding about to the music in her red jersey. He got off his bicycle and walked, pushing it beside him. She had not seen him. Suddenly she dropped the hose, glanced back at the house to make sure no one was observing her, and darted forward. She cleared the mason`s cord and ran over those wet slabs--one, two, three steps, then out into the weeds beside the road, almost in front of Harry. She looked up at him and laughed.
"Don`t tell on me, please!" With that she scampered up the dusty road and into the Gayheart yard by the driveway.
After all these years the three footprints were still there in the sidewalk; the straight, slender foot of a girl of thirteen, delicately and clearly stamped in the grey-white composition. The travel of the years had not made them fainter. To be sure, there was never a great deal of walking out this way; people came out here only when they were going to see the Gayhearts. Gordon had never heard anyone speak of these footprints; perhaps no one knew who made them. They were light, in very low relief; unless one were looking for them, one might not notice them at all. The Gayheart lots had not been well kept for a long while. In summer the wild sunflowers grew up on either side of the walk and hung over it; tufts of alfalfa, escaped from the near-by pasture, encroached upon it, and a wild vetch with sprays of lavender-pink blossoms, like fingers, came up there every year and climbed the sunflower stalks, making a kind of wattle all along the two slabs marked by those swift impressions. For to Harry Gordon they did seem swift: the print of the toes was deeper than the heel; the heel was very faint, as if that part of the living foot had just grazed the surface of the pavement. Was there really some baffling suggestion of quick motion in those impressions, Gordon often wondered, or was it merely because he had seen them made, that to him they always had a look of swiftness, mischief, and lightness? As if the feet had tiny wings on them, like the herald Mercury.
Nothing else seemed to bring her back so vividly into the living world for a moment. Sometimes, when he paused there, he caught for a flash the very feel of her: an urge at his elbow, a breath on his cheek, a sudden lightness and freshness like a shower of spring raindrops.
Gordon and Milton Chase went over the Gayheart place thoroughly that Sunday afternoon, walked through the garden and the orchard, and the pasture beyond. The property now belonged to Gordon, mortgaged to him as surety for the loans the bank had made Mr. Gayheart during the last years of his life. If sold today, it would not bring a third of the amount the bank had advanced on it. Both men knew that. Gordon`s plan was that Milton Chase should take the place over, and occupy the house rent-free, for life.
After they had tramped about through the dry weeds and dead grass, discussing what should be done with the orchard ground, and how the old barn could be made into a garage, they sat down on the porch steps and lit cigars.
"It`s very generous of you, Harry," Milton Chase was saying, "but I`d much prefer that you sold it to me. I`ve lived in a rented house all my life, and now I`d like to own my own home," he ended plaintively.
"I`ll call in Whitney tomorrow, Milton, and have him draw me a new will, leaving the place to you at my death, with no encumbrance. That will beat paying out good money."
Milton took off his hat and smoothed the thin hair about his ears with his hand. He didn`t seem satisfied. He looked cold and tired and mournful.
Harry thought a moment and then said persuasively: "You see, Milton, if you bought the place and should die before me, your sons might sell it to--well, to anybody; to one of these retired farmers, who would make it into a chicken-yard. I`ll never interfere with you; cut down the orchard, pull down the barn, do what you like. All I want is to retain a guardianship interest during my lifetime."
Milton still looked dejected, but Harry took it for granted that he had agreed to his proposition. "By the way, come over here with me a minute. There is just one thing I want you to see to." They walked across the lawn to the cement sidewalk. There Harry stopped. "This is a confidential matter, you understand, you`ll not mention it. Those marks there in the cement were made by Gayheart`s daughter Lucy, when she was a little girl. I`ll just ask you to see that nothing happens to those two slabs of walk--in my time, at least." Gordon raised his voice a trifle and went on in a calculating tone, as if he were talking about alterations in a garage. "The cement seems firm enough. The only thing I can see that might injure it would be a wash-out. Heavy rains might carry the earth out from under one side, or a corner, and the blocks might tip and break. Keep an eye on them."
"I`ll attend to it," Milton replied, just as he did to instructions given him at the bank.
Harry said he guessed he must go into the house now, to clear out the old man`s private papers; he would see Milton at the bank in the morning. Milton walked slowly home. When he got there, he took a drink--a thing he seldom did. But he was cold; a little chilled and uncomfortable in his mind, too. He was unpleasantly reminded that there was, and always had been, something not quite regular about his chief; something fantastic, which he was secretly afraid of. That moment of conversation by the sidewalk had been very depressing, though he could not say just why. It had made him feel older; made life seem terribly short and not very--not very important.
Harry, with some amusement, watched his cashier`s mournful back go down the street. He took a key out of his pocket and went into the silent, darkened house. He ran up the blinds in the living-room and let the four-o`clock afternoon sunlight pour in over the faded carpets and dusty furniture. Then he went upstairs. Mr. Gayheart had once mentioned (indeed the whole town knew it) that Pauline had always kept Lucy`s room just as she left it when she went off to skate that day. After Pauline`s death the old man kept the room locked, and let his housekeeper go in to sweep and dust only when he himself was standing by.
Gordon had all the keys. He took off his hat and opened the locked room. The shades were down, but they did not fit very well, and at the south window streaks of orange sunlight made a glow like candlelight in the dusky chamber. The closet door was kept open (prevention against moths), and dresses and dressing-gowns were hanging in a row. They had better be burned, he supposed. Beside her desk was a bookcase full of books and bound music scores; a chest in his private study at the bank would be the best place for those. He might look at them some time. Her toilet things were laid out on the dresser, and leaning against the mirror, in a tarnished silver frame, was a photograph of Clement Sebastian, with some writing on it, in German. This Gordon put in his pocket. It was the only thing he touched. He closed the door softly behind him, and locked it.
When he came out of the house the last intense light of the winter day was pouring over the town below him, and the bushy tree-tops and the church steeples gleamed like copper. After all, he was thinking, he would never go away from Haverford; he had been through too much here ever to quit the place for good. What was a man`s "home town," anyway, but the place where he had had disappointments and had learned to bear them? As he was leaving the Gayhearts`, he paused mechanically on the sidewalk, as he had done so many thousand times, to look at the three light footprints, running away.
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