He climbed the hill to the bakery, mounted decorously the six steps which led to the door and rang. Josie opened it. She drew back almost behind it, said good-evening in her quick, rather breathless way, and asked him to go through to the sitting-room. The shop was unlighted, but he saw the glimmer of the glass cases and the pallid shapes of a mound of loaves. Fay Palmas and her son were in the sitting-room. Josie passed through a narrow hallway behind and went to her room.
Fay Palmas took Bond’s coat and hat from him. She was as tall as he, and, as their hands touched and their eyes met, a shining net of intimacy was thrown about them. They were caught in it and stared startled into each other’s eyes, scarcely conscious of the presence of Diego.
He lolled on a sofa, smiling calculatingly at them. He said:
“It’s a good thing you’ve come, Purley. We were just beginning to quarrel.”
“What about?”
“You.”
“Oh, we were not!” said Fay Palmas. “We were just—I was just saying that you would come to the rescue—Diego, that you would not.”
“With advice, of course,” said Diego. “We didn’t mean money.”
“Scarcely,” added Fay. “No one in Saltport has any money to spare.”
“But the market is glutted with good advice,” went on Diego. “Everybody that comes into the bakery to buy a loaf hands back a large slab of advice. They all seem to think that Fay and I are going to make fools of ourselves now that Father’s gone.”
Bond stood, with his hand on the back of the chair she had placed for him, looking from one to the other under his frowning yellow brows, trying to understand them. They were so disconcertingly candid, yet, behind the candour, lay something—if not exactly devious, still very different from his own straightforwardness.
“Do sit down,” said Fay Palmas and touched him persuasively on the arm.
He sat down obediently, following her with his eyes as she moved to a seat beside her son.
Though she spent her days indoors she moved beautifully, with a strong swift suppleness unlike Diego’s feline grace. There was something animal about them both, but, in her, it was the strong-boned lightness of the deer; in him the muscular softness of the cat tribe. Yet they were alike, Bond thought, in their swarthiness, the dark flash of their eyes, their concentration on their own needs.
Diego’s needs did not particularly interest him. The desires of Fay Palmas fired his own. He sat staring dumbly at her poised upright on the end of the sofa backed by shelves filled with the books of her schoolmaster father. They were all he had left to her.
“What’s it all about?” Bond got out at last. “Had an offer for the business?”
Diego and Fay Palmas looked at each other, then turned to him smiling. “Yes,” she said, “there was a man here to-day. It’s the first promising offer we’ve had.” There was a bright flicker of excitement in her eyes.
“How much?” Bond’s tone was almost surly. How glad she seemed at escaping from Saltport—her old life!
“When the mortgage is paid off I would have fifteen hundred dollars left.” She looked defiantly at him.
“H’m—and how long do you think that will keep you?”
“It will give us a start—somewhere.”
“But, Mrs. Palmas”—he always called her stiffly by her married name, though he had pulled her black pigtails as a little girl—“you must remember that there are three of you, and that Diego should not throw up his art studies, especially when he is taught for nothing here.”
“I’ll sell some things! Pa’s books, for instance.”
Bond uttered a grim sound. “No one would give you twenty-five dollars for those books.”
“Why, Purley”—she called him by his Christian name, with a sliding caress on the R—“I think I have several first editions!”
“First editions of what?”
“Oh, I don’t know exactly. That Ivanhoe looks old.” She indicated a battered book on the table. Evidently she had been mustering her resources. “There’s a fortune in first editions.”
He picked up the book. “Philadelphia, 1857,” he read from the title-page.
“Well, that’s terribly old, isn’t it?”
He looked at her with irritation and compassion in his blue eyes. “Now, see here, Mrs. Palmas, you’ve got to be more practical. 1857 is young for Ivanhoe. It’s no more old than Diego is old.”
“He’s my first edition,” she laughed, “and a valuable one—to me!” She laid her hand on the boy’s knee. So lightly did she turn from her disappointment. “However, there are other books.”
“I’ll look them over and see if there’s anything promising. But I wish you would tell me just what it is you think of doing when you leave Saltport.”
“Now you’re trying to corner me.”
“How can I advise you when I don’t know what’s in your mind?”
“And we have other means,” she parried. “Josie will be twenty-one in January. She gets a thousand dollars then—inherited from the estate of her grandfather.” She spoke grandiloquently, her bright eyes flickering into his.
“An heiress, eh? Poor little Josie!”
“You needn’t say poor about her,” put in Diego. “She’s able to look after herself.”
“What I mean is,” said Fay Palmas, “she’ll not be dependent. A thousand dollars would keep Josie for a long while.”
“Yes—if she stayed in Saltport! It would keep her for a couple of years. But when the money is gone what can she and you do for a living? You know how to do—only one thing.” He did not like to say “bake bread and cakes.”
“We don’t care!” She got up and began to walk about the room. “We’ve got to get out of this town! Our people have been here for generations. We’re stale! Do you think I want to see these two children stay here and marry here?”
“Not palates enough to go round,” mumbled Diego, and he mimicked—“Pleh I wah a bohhle o’ cahor oil.”
His mother frowned at him. “This is a serious matter. . . . Oh—if only I hadn’t lost my voice! I’d make money for all of us! I’d go out into the world and sing! I’d make a name for myself.”
The two men watched her as she moved with a distraught air in the restricted space—Bond, pitying but embarrassed by the demonstration: Diego with an inscrutable, half-sulky smile.
She stopped in front of Bond. “You know that I had a wonderful voice, Purley! It was a glorious voice, wasn’t it? You’ve heard me sing, haven’t you?” Her brilliant eyes blazed down into his.
He looked steadily back, but his lip quivered. Yes, he had heard her sing in a concert in the Town Hall and at a Presbyterian Social, years ago. He had no music in him. He had known the voice was good—high, clear, passionate—but he remembered only her standing there on the platform, above everyone else, where she always was in his mind.
“Oh, how I could sing!” she went on. “I could sing like a bird. Terazzi, the singing master from Boston, heard me . . . a voice like a lark, he said. He was mad to teach me but—I was a fool. I gave up my young life to baking bread———”
“Oh,