"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 title of 'lady.' That was Touclé, 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 Touclé just stayed on. She always makes herself useful enough to pay for her food and lodging. And when his wife died an elderly woman, Touclé 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 Touclé rose up out of the long grass 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, Touclé 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, titles, 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 titles 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?"
She laughed a little, half-uneasily, a brighter color mounting to her smooth oval cheeks. "That's one of Mrs. Bayweather's favorite maxims," she admitted. She added, "But I really do like to go to church."
Mr. Welles felt an apprehension about the turn things were taking. Vincent, he felt sure, was on the verge of being up to something. And he did not want to risk offending Mrs. Crittenden. He stood up. "Thank you very much for telling us about the minister and his wife, Mrs. Crittenden. I think we'll go right along down to the village now, and pay a call on them. There'll be time enough before dinner." Vincent of course got up too, at this, saying, "He's the most perfect old housekeeper, you know. He's kept the neatest flat for himself and that aged aunt of his for seventy years."
"Seventy!" cried Mr. Welles, scandalized at the exaggeration.
"Oh, more or less," said Vincent, laughing. Mr. Welles noticed with no enthusiasm that his eyes were extremely bright, that he smiled almost incessantly, that he stepped with an excess of his usual bounce. Evidently something had set him off into one of his fits of wild high spirits. You could almost feel the electricity sparkle from him, as it does from a cat on a cold day. Personally, Mr. Welles preferred not to touch cats when they were like that.
"When are you going back to the city, Mr. Marsh?" asked Mrs. Crittenden, as they said good-bye at the door.
Vincent was standing below her on the marble step. He looked up at her now, and something about his expression made Mr. Welles think again of glossy fur emitting sparks. He said, "I'll lay you a wager, Mrs. Crittenden, that there is one thing your Ashley underground news-service has not told you about us, and that is, that I've come up not only to help Mr. Welles install himself in his new home, but to take a somewhat prolonged rest-cure myself. I've always meant to see more of this picturesque part of Vermont. I've a notion that the air of this lovely spot will do me a world of good."
As Mr. Welles opened his mouth, perhaps rather wide, in the beginning of a remark, he cut in briskly with, "You're worrying about Schwatzkummerer, I know. Never you fear.