He lingered for a moment to look at the border of dahlias and salvia, wondering how long the frost would spare their brightness. They needed more sun. But he could not bring himself to have the hedge cut.
He unlocked the door and went into the hall. A thick quietness shrouded the house and it had an unused smell, though the Finnish woman who came in to work for him kept it clean and in order. She had left his evening meal on the table—cold corned beef, pickles, catsup, potato salad, a covered dish of corn on the cob and a large slice of pumpkin pie with a mound of whipped cream on it. The coffee percolator was bubbling on the side table.
He was not at all intimidated by the sight of this repast. His New England digestion was enured to such ordeals, quite able to cope with them. To-night, however, he did not know what he ate. He left half the food untouched. His stomach must go unfilled because his mind was overflowing with the problems of those who lived at the bakery. Diego had said that his mother was ready for a nervous breakdown. And no wonder! To have kept the business going, with only the help of Josie, through the tourist season, after the long months of nursing, after the years of disappointment, was enough to wear down the nerves of any woman. Even a strong woman like Fay Palmas.
He thought of what her life had been. A disappointment. A bitter disappointment. How old was she now? She must be thirty-eight. Thirty-eight—and the mother of that big fellow of nineteen! Close work, that! She had been the only child of John Elwood, the Principal of the High School. He was the close friend of Doctor Bond, and, like him, a member of one of Saltport’s most respected families. Religious, expecting others to be as high-minded, as honourable as themselves. Yet the Elwoods were not quite the equal of the Bonds. They had something to live down. The Bonds might have washed all their linen in public and not even clouded the water. For their ancestor, who had crossed the Atlantic from Yorkshire, was a Presbyterian minister, and his descendants had lived, without noticeable deviation, according to the precepts of the Shorter Catechism.
But it was said that the first Elwood had been nothing more or less than an old pirate. He had owned a sloop, and in it he had harried foreign vessels up and down the coast. He had thought as little of taking their lives as their gold. He had lived, with his half-naked family, in a log house on a rocky promontory. Retribution had never touched him. He had buried his spoils under the house, and, when he had acquired what was in those days a fortune, he had clothed his children, bought respectable black for himself (his wife had died from the strain of being the wife of a pirate), and become a Baptist. Something picturesque and adventurous in that faith had attracted him. The Baptist minister of the day had immersed him in the water of a nearby creek and he had emerged a new man. He had educated his youngest son for the ministry, and, before he died, had sat in a front pew—a rugged, weather-beaten figure—and heard his son preach his first sermon, the text being the tenth commandment. It was through the bounty of this son that the present Baptist church had been built, the prettiest church in Saltport, surrounded by a garden and ornamental trees. But the son of this minister had given a jolt to the family’s upward progress. He had been a missionary, and, on a mission to the Indians of Hudson’s Bay, he had fallen in love with and married a handsome Indian girl. All Saltport had been shocked when he brought her home, but he had reared an exemplary family from her. Fay Palmas, his great-granddaughter, was the last of the Elwoods in the district. She had been the darling of her father, the schoolmaster. His own school had not been good enough for her and he had sent her to Boston to a young ladies’ seminary, where she would not only get a refined education but a training for her lovely voice. She had just returned from there—eighteen years old and striking-looking—when she met young Palmas, ten years her senior, a civil engineer. They had fallen in love and been married that summer. Through his profession she had hoped to escape from Salt-port and see something of the world, but her hopes came to nothing. Within the year she gave birth to Diego (she had named him Diego against the will of both families), and, before he could run about, Palmas had been taken with inflammation of the lungs, from exposure, and forced to give up his profession. Her father could not help them for he had lost all his money by investing in the Saltport fisheries, already doomed by Gloucester’s ascendancy. The civil engineer had become a baker, and there she had been caught, a prisoner in the bakery, for seventeen years.
Purley Bond and she had played together as children, but they had seen little of each other in the years following. He had been installed in his drug store for two years before he had given her a second thought. Then one night he had himself taken some medicine to the Palmas house for Diego, ill of a serious complaint. He and she had talked together in the sitting-room behind the shop. They had not sat. He had watched her swaying up and down the tiny room—lithe, swarthy, anguished for her child. She magnified his sufferings, thought him dying. Bond had tried unsuccessfully to soothe her.
The next evening he had called to ask after the child. She had taken him into the sitting-room again. This time she had caught his hand and led him. She was wild with joy and gratitude. Her darling was better. He was almost well. She gave Bond—not his father, the doctor—the credit. From the moment he had entered the house Diego had improved. Virtue had gone from him into the child. From him into her. There was a kind of noble simplicity in her—as in a primitive Indian. Anything seemed possible to her. From that time she gave him a sort of proud homage. She went often to the drug store to ask his advice—to get strength from him, she said.
Strength she took from him—the strength to resist her. During the years since he had thought of no other woman. He did not know what were her feelings toward him. Not a word of love had passed between them.
He, the lonely druggist, living alone. . . . She, the widow of a bookish baker, Indian blood arching her nose, her nostrils, her eyelids, making her hair black and strong, though her father and her father’s father had shown no trace of its sultry flow. . . . Diego, her dark son, with his chaotic talent, his dramatic face that exaggerated his indolent emotions, his Portuguese blood that crept out of the past to mingle with her Indian. . . . Josie Froward, her cousin on her mother’s side—pure blood of the Pilgrim Fathers there—with her bright changing colour, her secrecy, her ironic devotion to mother and son. Purley Bond brooded on this group of four, their intermingled relations that were drawing closer together, as he bit the yellow kernels of corn from the cob with his strong teeth.
He walked about the parlour, furnished just as his mother had left it. She had kept to the style of the old New England parlours. There were ladder-backed chairs, a mahogany secretary, old glass bottles on the mantelpiece and a spinning-wheel by the unused hearth. He walked through his father’s surgery, kept just as he had left it, still retaining its smell of a surgery, lined with out-of-date medical books. He climbed the stair, with its spindled bannister, and wandered through the bedrooms. Faintly musty, spotlessly clean, with framed texts on the walls. He tried to picture Fay Palmas in this house and could not. Strange that the heat, the sweet sticky smell of the bakery, was a more convincing background for her than the old-fashioned austerity of this house.
He looked at his father’s large gold watch which he carried and saw that it was time to go to the bakery.
He felt excited and nervous, as he always did when he knew that he was going to be with her. Yet once in her presence he was reserved, almost irritatingly stolid towards her.
A large bright moon hung above the whiteness of the street. The houses in the best streets were all clearly white, the intense, delicate shadows of elm boughs laid against their whiteness. Dead leaves had been burned in the gardens that day and the teasing odour of smoke still hung in the air. The air was so clear with coming frost that it seemed to crackle in the moonlight.
His steps rang out, for he was the only one on the street.