BEATRICE GIVES AN OPTION
It was not until Johnnie had laid the case before Miss Whitford and
restated it under the impression that she could not have understood
that his confidence ebbed. Even then he felt that he must have bungled
it in the telling and began to marshal his facts a third time. He had
expected an eager interest, a quick enthusiasm. Instead, he found in
his young mistress a spirit beyond his understanding. Her manner had a
touch of cool disdain, almost of contempt, while she listened to his
tale. This was not at all in the picture he had planned.
She asked no questions and made no comments. What he had to tell met
with chill silence. Johnnie's guileless narrative had made clear to
her that Clay had brought Kitty home about midnight, had mixed a drink
for her, and had given her his own clothes to replace her wet ones.
Somehow the cattleman's robe, pajamas, and bedroom slippers obtruded
unduly from his friend's story. Even the Runt felt this. He began to
perceive himself a helpless medium of wrong impressions. When he tried
to explain he made matters worse.
"I suppose you know that when the manager of your apartment house finds
out she's there he'll send her packing." So Beatrice summed up when
she spoke at last.
"No, ma'am, I reckon not. You see we done told him she is Clay's
sister jes' got in from the West," the puncher explained.
"Oh, I see." The girl's lip curled and her clean-cut chin lifted a
trifle. "You don't seem to have overlooked anything. No, I don't
think I care to have anything to do with your arrangements."
"She's an awful pretty cute little thing," the puncher added, hoping to
modify her judgment.
"Indeed!"
Beatrice turned and walked swiftly into the house. A pulse of anger
was beating in her soft throat. She felt a sense of outrage. To Clay
Lindsay she had given herself generously in spirit. She had risked
something in introducing him to her friends. They might have laughed
at him for his slight social lapses. They might have rejected him for
his lack of background. They had done neither. He was so genuinely a
man that he had won his way instantly. In this City of Bluff, as O.
Henry dubs New York, his simplicity had rung true as steel. Still, she
had taken a chance and felt she deserved some recognition of it on his
part. This he had never given. He had based their friendship on
equality simply. She liked it in him, though her vanity had resented
it a little. But this was different. She was still young enough,
still so little a woman of the world, that she set a rigid standard
which she expected her friends to meet. She had believed in Clay, and
now he was failing her.
Pacing up and down her room, little fists clenched, her soul in
passionate turmoil, Beatrice went over it all again as she had done
through a sleepless night. She had given him so much, and he had
seemed to give her even more. Hours filled with a keen-edged delight
jumped to her memory, hours that had carried her away from the
falseness of social fribble to clean, wind-swept, open spaces of the
mind. And after this--after he had tacitly recognized her claim on
him--he had insulted her before her friends by deserting his guests to
go off with this hussy he had been spending weeks to search for.
Now his little henchman had the imbecility to ask her help while this
girl was living at Clay Lindsay's apartment, passing herself off as his
sister, and proposing to stay there ostensibly as the housekeeper. She
felt degraded, humiliated, she told herself. Not for a moment did she
admit, perhaps she did not know, that an insane jealousy was flooding
her being, that her indignation was based on personal as well as moral
grounds.
Something primitive stirred in her--a flare of feminine ferocity. She
felt hot to the touch, an active volcano ready for eruption. If only
she could get a chance to strike back in a way that would hurt, to
wound him as deeply as he had her!
Pat to her desire came the opportunity. Clay's card was brought in to
her by Jenkins.
"Tell Mr. Lindsay I'll see him in a few minutes," she told the man.
The few minutes stretched to a long quarter of an hour before she
descended. To the outward eye at least Miss Whitford looked a woman of
the world, sheathed in a plate armor of conventionality. As soon as
his eyes fell on her Clay knew that this pale, slim girl in the
close-fitting gown was a stranger to him. Her eyes, star-bright and
burning like live coals, warned him that the friend whose youth had run
out so eagerly to meet his was hidden deep in her to-day.
"I reckon I owe you and Mr. Whitford an apology," he said. "No need to
tell you how I happened to leave last night. I expect you know."
"I know why you left--yes."
"I'd like to explain it to you so you'll understand."
"Why take the trouble? I think I understand." She spoke in an even,
schooled voice that set him at a distance.
"Still, I want you to know how I feel."
"Is that important? I see what you do. That is enough. Your friend
Mr. Green has carefully brought me the details I didn't know."
Clay flushed. Her clear voice carried an edge of scorn. "You mustn't
judge by appearances. I know you wouldn't be unfair. I had to take
her home and look after her."
"I don't quite see why--unless, of course, you wanted to," the girl
answered, tapping the arm of her chair with impatient finger-tips, eyes
on the clock. "But of course it isn't necessary I should see."
Her cavalier treatment of him did not affect the gentle
imperturbability of the Westerner.
"Because I'm a white man, because she's a little girl who came from my
country and can't hold her own here, because she was sick and chilled
and starving. Do you see now?"
"No, but it doesn't matter. I'm not the keeper of your conscience, Mr.
Lindsay," she countered, with hard lightness.
"You're judging me just the same."
Her eyes attacked him. "Am I?"
"Yes." The level gaze of the man met hers calmly. "What have I done
that you don't like?"
She lost some of her debonair insolence that expressed itself in
indifference.
"I'd ask that if I were you," she cried scornfully. "Can you tell me
that this--friend of yours--is a good girl?"
"I think so. She's been up against it. Whatever she may have done
she's been forced to do."
"Excuses," she murmured.
"If you'd ever known what it was to be starving--"
Her smoldering anger broke into a flame. "Good of you to compare me
with her! That's the last straw!"
"I'm not comparing you. I'm merely saying that you can't judge her.
How could you, when your life has been so different?"
"Thank Heaven for that."
"If you'd let me bring her here to see you--"
"No, thanks."
"You're unjust."
"You think so?"
"And unkind. That's not like the little friend I've come to--like so
much."
"You're kind enough for two, Mr. Lindsay. She really doesn't need
another friend so long as she has you," she retorted with a flash of
contemptuous eyes. "In New York we're not used to being so kind to
people of her sort."
Clay lifted a hand. "Stop right there, Miss Beatrice. You don't want
to say anything you'll be sorry for."
"I'll say this," she cut back. "The men I know wouldn't invite a woman
to their rooms at midnight and pass her off as their sister--and then
expect people to know her. They would be kinder to themselves--and to
their own reputations."
She was striking out savagely, relentlessly, in spite of the better
judgment that whispered restraint. She wanted desperately to hurt him,
as he had hurt her, even though she had to behave badly to do it.
"Will you tell me what else there was to do? Where could I have taken
her at that time of night? Are reputable hotels open at midnight to
lone women, wet and ragged, who come without baggage either alone or
escorted by a man?"
"I'm not telling you what you ought to have done, Mr. Lindsay," she
answered with a touch of hauteur. "But since you ask me--why couldn't
you have given her money and let her find a place for herself?"
"Because that wouldn't have saved her."
"Oh, wouldn't it?" she retorted dryly.
He walked over to the fireplace and put an elbow on the corner of the
mantel. The blood leaped in the veins of the girl as she looked at
him, a man strong as tested steel, quiet and forceful, carrying his
splendid body with the sinuous grace that comes only from perfectly
synchronized muscles. At that moment she hated him because she could
not put him in the wrong.
"Lemme tell you a story, Miss Beatrice," he said presently. "Mebbe
it'll show you what I mean. I was runnin' cattle in the Galiuros five
years ago and I got caught in a storm 'way up in the hills. When it
rains in my part of Arizona, which ain't often, it sure does come down
in sheets. The clay below the rubble on the slopes got slick as ice.
My hawss, a young one, slipped and fell on me, clawed back to its feet,
and bolted. Well, there I was with my laig busted, forty miles from
even a whistlin' post in the desert, gettin' wetter and colder every
blessed minute. Heaps of times in my life I've felt more comfortable
than I did right then. I was hogtied to that shale ledge with my
broken ankle, as you might say. And the weather and my game laig and
things generally kept gettin' no better right along hour after hour.
"There wasn't a chance in a million that anybody would hear, but I kept
firin' off my forty-five on the off hope. And just before night a girl
on a _pinto_ came down the side of that uncurried hill round a bend and
got me. She took me to a cabin hidden in the bottom of a canon and
looked after me four days. Her father, a prospector, had gone into
Tucson for supplies and we were alone there. She fed me, nursed me,
and waited on me. We divided a one-room twelve-by-sixteen cabin.
Understand, we were four days alone together before her dad came back,
and all the time the sky was lettin' down a terrible lot of water.
When her father showed up he grinned and said, 'Lucky for you Myrtle
heard that six-gun of yore's pop!' He never thought one evil thing
about either of us. He just accepted the situation as necessary. Now
the question is, what ought she to have done? Left me to die on that
hillside?"
"Of course not. That's different," protested Beatrice indignantly.
"I don't see it. What she did was more embarrassing for her than what
I did for Kitty. At least it would have been mightily so if she hadn't
used her good hawss sense and forgot that she was a lone young female
and I was a man. That's what I did the other night. Just because
there are seven or eight million human beings here the obligation to
look out for Kitty was no less."
"New York isn't Arizona."
"You bet it ain't. We don't sit roostin' on a fence when folks need
our help out there. We go to it."
"You can't do that sort of thing here. People talk."
"Sure, and hens cackle. Let 'em!"
"There are some things men don't understand," she told him with an acid
little smile of superiority. "When a girl cries a little they think
she's heartbroken. Very likely she's laughing at them up her sleeve.
This girl's making a fool of you, if you want the straight truth."
"I don't think so."
His voice was so quietly confident it nettled her.
"I suppose, then, you think I'm ungenerous," she charged.
The deep-set gray-blue eyes looked at her steadily. There was a wise
little smile in them.
"Is that what you think?" she charged.
"I think you'll be sorry when you think it over."
She was annoyed at her inability to shake him, at the steadfastness
with which he held to his point of view.
"You're trying to put me in the wrong," she flamed. "Well, I won't
have it. That's all. You may take your choice, Mr. Lindsay. Either
send that girl away--give her up--have nothing to do with her, or--"
"Or--?"
"Or please don't come here to see me any more."
He waited, his eyes steadily on her. "Do you sure enough mean that,
Miss Beatrice?"
Her heart sank. She knew she had gone too far, but she was too
imperious to draw back now.
"Yes, that's just what I mean."
"I'm sorry. You're leavin' me no option. I'm not a yellow dog.
Sometimes I'm 'most a man. I'm goin' to do what I think is right."
"Of course," she responded lightly. "If our ideas of what that is
differ--"
"They do."
"It's because we've been brought up differently, I suppose." She
achieved a stifled little yawn behind her hand.
"You've said it." He gave it to her straight from the shoulder. "All
yore life you've been pampered. When you wanted a thing all you had to
do was to reach out a hand for it. Folks were born to wait on you, by
yore way of it. You're a spoiled kid. You keep these manicured
lah-de-dah New York lads steppin'. Good enough. Be as high-heeled as
you're a mind to. I'll step some too for you--when you smile at me
right. But it's time to serve notice that in my country folks grow
man-size. You ask me to climb up the side of a house to pick you a bit
of ivy from under the eaves, and I reckon I'll take a whirl at it. But
you ask me to turn my back on a friend, and I've got to say, 'Nothin'
doin'.' And if you was just a few years younger I'd advise yore pa to
put you in yore room and feed you bread and water for askin' it."
The angry color poured into her cheeks. She clenched her hands till
the nails bit her palms. "I think you're the most hateful man I ever
met," she cried passionately.
His easy smile taunted her. "Oh, no, you don't. You just think you
think it. Now, I'm goin' to light a shuck. I'll be sayin' good-bye,
Miss Beatrice, until you send for me."
"And that will be never," she flung at him.
He rose, bowed, and walked out of the room.
The street door closed behind him. Beatrice bit her lip to keep from
breaking down before she reached her room.