"I went to a school for colored women," she said, "fitting myself to be
a teacher. But of course it's hard for a colored girl to get a chance,
except with her own race, and I didn't want to go South. Then I got
this place with Miss Fielding."
"I can't imagine any situation more delightful," I said, watching her.
Her eyes burned, smothered in quickening tears, but her voice was calm
enough. "It's lovely here. I don't mind the loneliness a bit. It's
nothing to what I have endured in big cities."
She gave it to me simply, with no apparent bid for sympathy, but I knew
enough of the pathetic isolation of the educated negro, cut off from any
real mental communion with the blacks as well as with the whites, to
interpret the repression of her manner. There was a tragedy in her
words.
"Well," I said, "it strikes me that you're in luck to be here with such
a companion as Miss Fielding. And she's as fortunate, too. I'm sure you
get on beautifully. Still, how she can stand it, away off from every
one, I don't see quite so well."
"Do you think she's--unhappy!" Leah asked after a pause.
"Certainly not to-day, at least. Yesterday I shouldn't have been quite
so sure that she wasn't."
"Oh, she has her moods," Leah admitted. "I do my best to indulge them."
She looked up at me. "So must you, too, Mr. Castle!" She held my eyes
deliberately, as if expecting my promise.
"How could I be so ungrateful as not to, in the circumstances?"
"I mean--you see, she doesn't like to be questioned. I have to be very
careful. She has her fancies, and often seems inconsistent, even a bit
eccentric. It may be her life here alone. You know she sees so few
people. You won't notice it?" Still her eyes appealed to me.
"I shan't at least show that I do."
She seemed dissatisfied.
"Except, perhaps, to you," I added, trying, as I had tried with Miss
Fielding, to get to the bottom of her dread.
"Oh, not to me," she begged. "She's too fine for us to be discussing.
I've said too much already, I'm afraid. I don't know why I did.
Only----"
I said it for her. "Only, I am quartered on you, here, and you can't
get rid of me. You have, in a way, a spy in camp. By an accident, I'm
here, and you're at my mercy. Isn't that it? You don't, I mean, quite
know what I am, and you'd like to be able to trust me, whatever
happens." It was a jump in the dark for me.