A strange thing, a word: and stranger, the terror of it. Stranger
still, the things everybody knows that must never be named. Strangest
of all, that the mind sees most vividly what is not mentioned, what
cannot be told.
Immy, for all her rebellious modernness and impatience of old-fashioned
pruderies, was a slave of the word.
And now she must make clear to a young man of even greater nicety
than she, an adventure it would have sobered a physician to describe
to another. She gasped and groped and filled her story with the
pervividness of eloquent silences:
“It was when I was a little girl—a very little girl. There was a
big terrible boy—a young man, rather—who lived down the road—ugly
and horrible as a hyena. And one day—when Papa was gone—and I was
playing—he came along and he spoke to me with a grin and a—a funny look
in his eyes. And he took hold of me—it was like a snake! and I tried to
break loose—and my little brother fought him. But he knocked and kicked
Keith down—and took me up and carried me away. I fought and screamed
but he put his hand over my mouth and almost smothered me—and kept on
running—then—then——”
Then there was a hush so deep that RoBards felt he could hear his tears
where they struck the carpet under his feet. His eyelids were locked
in woe, but he seemed to see what she thought of; he seemed to see the
frightened eyes of Ernest Chirnside trying not to understand.
Immy went on:
“Then Jud Lasher heard Papa coming and he ran. Papa caught him and
beat him almost to death—but it was too late to save me. I didn’t
understand much, then. But now—! Papa made me promise never to speak of
it; but you have a higher right than anybody, Ernest—that is, if you
still—unless you—oh, tell me!—speak!—say something!”
The boy spoke with an unimaginable wolfishness in his throat:
“Where is the man?—where is that man?”
“I don’t know. I never saw him after that—oh, yes, he came back again
once. But Papa was watching and saved me from him—and after that I
never heard of him. Yes, I did hear someone say he went to sea.”
Another hush and then Ernest’s voice, pinched with emotion:
“I believe if I could find that villain I could almost kill him. My
soul is full of murder. God forgive me!”
He thought of his own soul first.
Poor Immy suffered the desolation of a girl who finds her hero common
clay; her saint a prig. But with apology she said:
“I ought never to have told you.”
He dazed her by his reply:
“Oh, I won’t tell anybody; never fear! But don’t tell me any more just
now. I must think it out.”
He wanted to think!—at a time when thinking was poltroon; when only
feeling and impulsive action were decent! Immy waited while he thought.
At length he said:
“If that man still lives he’ll come back again!”
“No! no!”
“He’ll come back and get you.”
“You wouldn’t let him, would you?”
“You belong to him, in a way. It is the Lord’s will.”
He could say that and believe it! The young zealot could worship a
god who could doom, ten thousand years before its birth, a child to a
thousand, thousand years of fiery torment because of an Adam likewise
doomed to his disobedience.
The young man’s own agony had benumbed him perhaps, but RoBards could
have leapt from the window and strangled him as a more loathsome,
a clammier reptile than Jud Lasher. But he, too, was numb with
astonishment.
Then the boy went human all at once and began to sob, to wail, “Oh,
Immy, Immy! my poor Immy!”
RoBards stepped forward to the window in a rush of happiness, and saw
Immy put out her hands to her lover. He pushed them away and rose
and moved blindly across the grass. But there was a heavy dew and he
stepped back to the walk to keep his feet from getting wet.
He stumbled along the path to the gate and leaned there a moment,
sobbing. Then he swung it wide as he ran out to where his horse was
tied. And the gate beat back and forth, creaking, like a rusty heart.
RoBards stood gazing down at his daughter, eerily beautiful in the
moonlight through the rose leaves. He saw her dim hands twitching each
at the other. Then they fell still in her lap and she sat as a worn-out
farm-wife sits whose back is broken with overlong grubbing in the soil
and with too heavy a load home.
For a long time he sorrowed over her, then he went stealthily across
his library into the hall, and out to the porch where he looked at the
night a moment. He discovered Immy as if by accident, and exclaimed,
“Who’s that?”
“It’s only me, Papa, only me!”
“Only you? Why you’re all there is. You’re the most precious thing on
earth.”
He put his arm about her, but she sprang to her feet and snapped at him:
“Don’t! If you please, Papa, don’t touch me. I—I’m not fit to be
touched.”
She stood away from him, bracing herself with a kind of pride. Then
she broke into a maudlin giggle, such as RoBards had heard from the
besotted girls in the Five Points. And she walked into the house.
He followed her, and knocked on her door. But she would not answer, and
when he tried it, it was locked.