I
Ashley, Vermont, May, 1904.
Horace Allen's cousin was astonished to the limit of astonishment by the
news, and cried out accusingly, "Why, I thought the other time it was
only because Flora wanted to go. I thought you thought it would put you
on the shelf altogether. I thought you hated it."
Horace considered this, sitting heavily on a bench while cousin Hetty
pruned a nearby rose-bush, rigorously. Although she did not break in on
his silence with a, "Well?" or, "Did you hear what I said?" she made him
quite aware that she was relentlessly waiting for his answer.
"Well, I did," he admitted finally, "and I do yet. And it did put me on
the shelf. That's all I'm good for now. It's because of my experience in
Bayonne they want me to take charge of the Paris office."
"You don't have to go if they do," she pointed out; and this as she
expected, brought out the real reason.
"Those four years in France have spoiled me for living here," he said
and awaited doggedly her inevitable cry of amazement.
"_You!_" She stood up from her shorn rose-bush, her huge shears in one
clumsily-gloved hand, a large thorned spray in the other, "Well for
goodness' sake, _how_?"
He was in no haste to answer this either, meditating silently, the
spring sun pouring an incongruous flood of golden young light on the
sagging heaviness of his middle-aged face. Cousin Hetty let him alone
again, and went on with the ruthless snip! clash! of her great shears.
When he rose again to the surface, it was with a two-fold explanation.
"Everybody that's worth anything over there has learned how to do his
job. No slap-dash business. And there's plenty of cheap slave-labor.
You're waited on! You're made comfortable. You've heard people talk of
the charm of European life. What they mean is cheap labor. There's
nothing more charming for the employer."
"Well!" commented Cousin Hetty. After a time she remarked, resolutely
gathering up the villainously prickly shoots she had been cutting off,
"I should think you'd be sort of ashamed of the slave-labor part of it.
An American!"
She was not one to hesitate, either to handle thorns herself, or to
thrust them upon others.
"Oh, I am," admitted Marise's father casually, and then as though it
gave him a faint amusement to shock her, "I forgot to mention their
cooking and good wines."
She scorned to take any notice of this, going on, "And I _should_
think," she stayed her steps for a moment, as she turned away to carry
the pruned-off trash to the spot where the spring bon-fire with its
exquisite coils of blue smoke faintly dimmed the exquisite clarity of
the mountain air, "I should think that if you found good workmanship
such a fine thing, you might try to do something towards getting more of
it in your own country, instead of just going off where it grows
already."
"Oh, heavens! you don't see me trying to 'make the world a better place
to live in,' do you? What sort of Harold-the-Uplifter do you take me
for?" he protested, with a yawn.
Cousin Hetty stepped off to the smoldering bon-fire, threw her armful of
rejected life on the flames, and came back, her wasted elderly face
looking stern.
"How about Marise? Will it be the best thing for her?"
"Oh, the best thing...." her father disavowed any pretentious claims to
ideas on that subject.
"Horace, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. Right in the middle
of her college course!"
"Shucks for her college course!" he said. "How much good does anybody's
college course amount to? Her music is worth forty times that to her.
Besides she can keep on going to school in Paris, can't she? What's to
hinder?"
The reference to music seemed to give her a new idea as to his plans, an
idea which she challenged with suspicion, "What do you expect she's
going to do with her music, anyhow? What do you _want_ her to do?"
"What do I expect her to do with her music? Oh, what does anybody do
with music? Use it to get what she wants. I expect her to succeed on the
concert platform. And get a lot of applause. And marry one foreign
monkey after another. And hate every other musically gifted woman, like
poison. And get so dependent on flattery that she can't live twenty-four
hours without a big swig of it from no matter whose flask. And die of
wounded vanity because a younger woman is beginning to be applauded.
That's what I expect, of course. What else is there to expect?"
At the end of this prophecy which he had brought out slowly and coldly,
with long pauses between the sentences, he closed his eyes and relapsed
into silence as though it were all a matter of no consequence.
His cousin made no comment but waited patiently for what he had not
said. He turned his bulky body sideways on the bench, his shoulder to
her, like a sulky boy, to indicate that he had no intention of adding
anything.
But presently her persistent, silent demand for what was really in his
mind brought out, "Marise's music-teacher in Bayonne was pretty near the
only human being in the whole damn town that didn't make me tired. She
was pretty nearly the only human being I ever saw anywhere who had
enough sense to come in out of the rain. She was an old-maid
school-teacher, ugly enough to stop a clock. But she was all right. She
didn't want anything for herself. She was safe. Her music had put her
where nothing could touch her."
Cousin Hetty was struck by the quality of this statement. She looked at
him softly.
"That is what you want for Marise," she said, and continued to stand
before him, looking down at him.
He was as much annoyed as though she had cried out emotionally, "Oh, you
_do_ love her! You _do_ think of how to be a good father to her!" and he
cut short her sickly, sentimental display of feeling by affirming
stolidly, "Well, I won't get it."
"But you don't see any other chance for her."
He felt that she was taking an unfair advantage of a chance lapse on his
part and, dismayed and disgusted by the pious color of their talk, was
pointedly silent, conveying the impression that he was trying to command
his patience till she should consent to stop talking foolishly.
"Marise isn't a bit old," she pointed out, half to herself, half to him.
"She's just seventeen to-day. And she's not plain, either."
"You bet your life she's not. That's why I know what her music is going
to do to _her_."
"Well, for goodness' sakes, why take her out of college to go on with
it?"
He evidently felt that he had more than explained this, for he made no
answer. She said then, a very plain, human anxiety wrinkling her old
face, "Do you honestly think, Horace, that you are the right person to
bring up a pretty, seventeen-year-old girl?"
"As good as anybody else," he said drily, averring the complete
incompetence of all the world for that task.
"But she is getting on so well at college--she stands so high--and the
youngest in her class. She is so bright."
"Oh, that hasn't anything to do with her being bright. That comes from
the schooling she's had in France. She learned to keep at whatever she
was doing till she got it right.--Lord--the sloshy work in an American
college--as easy as sliding down hill for her. She may or she may not
have a good mind. She's learned to work, that's all."
"That's what you're going back for, because of good work," stated Cousin
Hetty.
"Oh, I'm not expecting to do any of it myself," he enjoyed his usual
satisfaction in making no pretense to virtue, "but I like being able to
hire other folks for a nickel or two, to work like that. And I like
being able to hire other folks to make it their business to keep me
comfortable. And don't forget the cooking. And the wine. And the beds.
There's not a decent bed in America."
She made him feel by a lift of the eyebrows that she considered this a
rather self-conscious, sophomoric continuance of the pose of knowing
sophistication. At this he looked nettled and cross.
A little later, as she stopped in front of him, with an armful of
pruned-off shoots, on her way to the bon-fire, she asked, "But will
Marise have a good time over there? Young folks here do have such good
times."
In his turn he showed her by a lift of the eyebrows that he considered
this too unimportant to answer. She stood looking down at her shears,
cruel, steel-bright and keen, "Oh, well ... I don't suppose I let my
roses have such a good time," she said to herself.
II
After supper they went out on the bench while he smoked his cigar.
Cousin Hetty did not mind tobacco smoke inside the house, but her
elderly hired girl did. They were both still under the impression of the
tepid warmth of the afternoon sunshine, and were surprised to find the
evening air so cold.
"Feels as though there were still snow on the mountains," he remarked,
recognizing the peculiar, raw, penetrating chill.
"There is," she told him, drawing her shawl about her.
By his tone he had intimated that he had passed out of the prickly
irritation of his afternoon mood. By hers, she had told him that she
would, as usual, meet him half-way, in any mood he chose to feel.
They sat down together on the wooden bench; he began silently to smoke,
and she to think.
"My visit's over. I must take the noon train to-morrow," he said, "and
I've half a notion to ask your advice about something."
She refrained from any expression of the astonishment and skepticism she
felt and said briefly with a friendly accent, "All right."
"About Marise," he said.
"Oh, yes, of course. What is it?" she asked in an altered tone of
quickened interest.
But for a time he said nothing more. He waited, drawing on his cigar. He
drew so hard that it began to gleam redly through the dusk. At this, he
took it from his lips and held it down, his fingers out-curved at his
side, where he did not see the raging coal at its tip. He had never
thought consciously about this gesture, but it was an invariable one
with him. There was something distasteful to him about the naked, raw
hotness of a newly-lighted cigar-tip. He preferred it later on when all
you could see was the ghost-form of the burned-out tobacco, the long,
fine ash held together by nothing at all, ready to be shattered at a
breath into floating particles of nothingness.
"About Flora, Flora's death," he added presently, knowing although she
had given no sign, that she was listening intently, "I never told you.
It wasn't just pneumonia...."
He was silent as if he did not know just how to get on with what he
wanted to say, and finally said, irritably, "There's nothing to
it--nothing! But I can't ask you what I want to, unless you know
something about it."
She divined that he would not have told her if they had not come out
where it was dark, where he could not see her.
She made herself small, cowering under her shawl, and listened
forebodingly, as he went on, his intense distaste for every word
coloring his rough, abrupt statements.
"I was up in Bordeaux on business and one morning didn't I see Flora's
name in the headlines of the nasty little local paper from Bayonne! An
accident at Saint Sauveur--that's a kind of Hot Springs where Flora went
sometimes for sulphur-baths. A young man had fallen into the river, or
had jumped in. It was in flood, with melting snow. And he was drowned.
And because Flora happened to know him and be there, the reporter who'd
written up the accident jumped to the conclusion that he and Flora ...
to the conclusion they always jump to about everybody."
Cousin Hetty did not stir, allowed herself no inward comment lest she
color the impersonal attention she was giving, which, she understood
well enough was, with the darkness, the only condition on which he could
go on speaking.
"Hell, wasn't it?" he said briefly before continuing. "I didn't know
anything about French inquests, but I could make a guess they would take
care to make this one as uncomfortable for Flora as they could. Sounded
like a good chance for blackmail too. So I telegraphed back to the house
that I'd be back on the next train. I found out afterwards that Marise
had wired me, but I never got her telegram. Then before the train
started, I beat it to the office of a French lawyer in Bordeaux, and
found out all I wanted to about French inquests. I found out then, that
there wasn't any real danger, that they couldn't do a thing except talk
about it. But, Heavens! their talk was apt to be a-plenty. It was up to
me to get back and look out for Flora. Poor Flora! You know she had no
more harm in her than a kitten."
Cousin Hetty felt a long, rigorous tremor run through her, partly the
cold of the mountain evening, partly an inner chill.
"Poor _Flora_!" she said now in a trembling voice. It was the only word
she spoke, the only comment she made on what he had told her, on what he
was to tell her.
"Well, when my train pulled into Bayonne the next morning, there was
Marise to meet me, and great Scott! she almost scared the life out of
me, crying and hanging on to me. I didn't know what _had_ happened,
besides what was in the paper, what she had heard! But in a minute, she
got over that enough to tell me what _she_ thought the matter was ...
her mother all shaken up from the nervous shock of seeing somebody
killed, all upset, gone to a convent for a rest-cure. Lots of folks do
that in France, instead of going to a hospital or sanitarium, as they do
here. I didn't think from the way she spoke she even knew who it was who
had been killed. You'd better believe _I_ didn't say anything about who
it was, either! I wanted to go easy and find out how things were. I kept
my ears and eyes open: but I didn't get anything that would give me a
lead from Marise, except that I found that her music-teacher had piled
right in and stayed by her till I got there. And I was pretty sure she
wouldn't have told Marise anything, and would have kept anybody's else
mouth shut. It came out casually, for one thing, that she had
sequestered that newspaper I saw, before Marise had a chance to look at
it. Well, it looked as though the first thing was to get Flora home
where I could stand guard over her, till the thing blew over." He burst
out savagely, "Good God! How was I to dream that she was so sick!" He
made some violent gesture which his old kinswoman felt, but could not
see in the darkness.
"But she was. When we went to see her that afternoon, the doctor was
there with her, and told me there wasn't a chance in a thousand for her.
Double pneumonia. We saw her for a moment that afternoon, and the minute
Marise went to bed that evening, I went back. But I was too late. Hetty,
you never saw anything like how young she looked ... like a little girl,
as if she'd died without having lived. The nice old Sister who had taken
care of her had put flowers around her, white roses. And she was crying.
She was about the only friend Flora had, the only one of them who didn't
want something out of her."
Cousin Hetty's face was wet with tears, but she let them fall silently,
not stirring a hand to wipe them away.
Her cousin stirred a great deal, moving restlessly on the bench, folding
and refolding his arms impatiently.
"The next three days--I never went through such a crazy
performance--enough to drive a man out of his mind. The music-teacher I
told you about took Marise off with her, up to the mountains somewhere
where her old home was, until the day of the funeral. I don't know how I
could have managed without that. I _couldn't_ have had Marise around,
while I was trying to hush up the coroner's men, or whoever they were.
"As soon as I got in touch with the dead boy's family, I found out where
a lot of the trouble came from. The police had come down from Saint
Sauveur, just as a matter of routine, to go through the motions of an
investigation and had gone to where we lived, because they thought Flora
was there. But she'd gone to the convent, so they saw our old cook and
asked her a lot of questions. And Jeanne, instead of telling the truth,
which was that she didn't know a thing about it, saw a chance for some
tall and fancy lying such as she made a specialty of. She got off a long
story about how she'd met the boy on his way to the train, and he'd told
her he was going on business, and Marise had asked him to take a message
to her mother, and he'd said her mother didn't know him by sight--oh,
God knows what! I take it she thought she was safe-guarding the family
honor, by making out that Flora didn't know the young man, but she
certainly got everything tied up into knots. She'd beat it off to tell
the dead boy's family what she'd told the police, so their lies would be
of the same color as hers. Oh, it was the damnedest mix-up! Of course
they were all set to do their share of lying. They wanted as much as I
did to keep the police out of it. Jeanne had beat them to it, and so
they repeated her version rather than start something new. But
naturally, rattled as they were with the suddenness of it, they didn't
get it exactly straight, and that started the police off on an idea they
hadn't had before, that maybe there was something more in it than met
the eye. They asked some other questions around in Bayonne, and then it
was all up.
"Of course Jeanne's story couldn't hold water for a minute. They found
out first that he hadn't any business that could possibly have taken him
up to the mountains. And the old hag that kept a flower-stand on our
street said he had sat all the evening before Flora went away, on the
bench across the street from our house, that she'd sold him some flowers
at eight when she shut her stall, and when she came back at six the next
morning he was there again. And our concierge said--oh, hell, you don't
need to know all the details. Everybody was lying and everybody sure
that everybody else was, and those fool police inspectors were sure
they'd unearth something if they only kept on. Inside twenty-four hours,
I saw there was no sort of chance of getting anything straightened out
by getting down to the facts, which didn't amount to a whoop anyhow. So
we did what you always do in France when you want to get anything done.
We used a pull. Garnier, this boy's father, was a business acquaintance
of mine, and quite a level-headed man. We got together, away from his
wife. She was just crazy over her son's death. From one day to the next
she looked twenty years older. And the way she cursed us all for ever
coming to Bayonne--not that I cared. She was out of her mind, anyhow.
All the same, the things she said ... and poor Flora in her coffin...."
He drew a long breath, and cast his dead cigar from him with a vivid
gesture of disgust.
"The upshot was, that Garnier got busy the right way. He furnished the
political pull, and I furnished the money. We stopped fooling with the
police and went straight to the Prefet, and they passed the order down
quick from one office to another, to have that inquest settled at once,
with no more noise. When that hit the police who'd been bothering us,
they curled up and dropped off. I bribed a reporter and the editor of
the local newspaper, and when the music-teacher brought Marise back to
the funeral, the whole mess was buried."
In the momentary silence which followed, as he drew breath again, Cousin
Hetty's self-control gave way. He could feel that she was shaking
uncontrollably and hear that her teeth were chattering.
He was startled, having forgotten that she was there, forgotten that
this was anything but one of the sick, silent evocations which blackened
so many hours for him.
"Great Scott! Hetty, you're freezing to death," he cried, helping her
roughly to her feet. "Why under the sun didn't you _say_ you were
getting cold?"
She did not intimate that she was shaken by anything but a physical
chill. Stiff and bent, clinging to his great arm, unable to stop the
nervous chattering of her teeth, she hobbled back to the house beside
him.
The light from the fire on the hearth set them miles apart, as she had
known it would. His face closed shut. He would never mention all this to
her again. He was irritated that he had spoken. He blamed her because
he had spoken. But she cared less than nothing whether she were blamed
or not. As soon as she was able to control the nervous trembling of her
hands and lips and head, she asked, "How much does Marise know?"
He said impatiently, "I don't know. I haven't any idea. I thought
perhaps _you_ might have. Why _else_ do you suppose I told you about
it?"
"What do you think?" she persisted.
"Well, I don't see how she could. That music-teacher had gone directly
to be with her, and stayed with her practically every minute I wasn't,
and I know she'd never tell her anything, nor let anybody else. But you
never know. You never know. There are a million underground ways--in
France especially. You find out everything you ever know through the
back of your head somehow, or by putting two and two together that
nobody meant you to. Servants--gossip--though, thank God, Jeanne had a
stroke of paralysis just then, that kept her from saying a word till
after we had left Bayonne. If Jeanne had been able to talk, I'd have
been _sure_ that Marise had heard forty times more than there was to
know. Damn Jeanne! and yet she'd have died to get Marise a new dress or
something good to eat, any day! I don't see how Marise _could_ have
heard anything. And of course, if she didn't--least said, soonest
mended. But if she did, it's a dead sure thing she got it all twisted,
and I suppose she ought to have it straightened out."
His old cousin broke in with a rush, "Well, I think you'd better tell
her," and felt instantly that this was not at all the answer he had
wished for. "You don't want to do it," she said.
"Oh, I never want to do anything," he admitted. "It's always the easiest
way."
"The easiest way lands you in some pretty hard places," she observed.
He made no comment on this, but his silence did not save him from her
further going on, "Look where it landed you with Flora."
He was stirred to a moment of heat, "What are you talking about, Hetty?
By God, I never refused Flora anything she wanted. If you call _that_
the easiest way!"
She flared up in a momentary impatience at his denseness, but wasted no
words on an issue no longer vital.
"Well, I think you'd better tell Marise," she repeated stubbornly.
He set this on one side for a moment as irrelevant, and said, "All I
want to know from you is whether you've ever seen a sign in her to make
you think she had heard anything. Did you ever notice when she speaks of
her mother ... or whether she doesn't speak?"
She scorned, as he knew she would, coloring the truth to win a point,
"No, I never did," she stated honestly.
"Well then, that's all I wanted to know. I know you'd have seen it, if
it were there, she's been so much with you."
"But I think you ought to tell her," she persisted.
"Why, under the Heavens, _why_?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head,
if she's perfectly all right?"
"I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered
sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At
least, if she _has_ heard anything, she ought to know that you don't
blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could
talk it over with her, get it out into the light."
"It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it."
"I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very
much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's
mind."
"Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he
said conclusively, with a peremptory accent.
Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority.
"You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she
told him, not without bitterness.
"That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me
what I needed to know," he answered.
"I wish I _could_ tell you what you need to know," she flamed out at
him.
But she evidently found it useless to try any longer, and sank again
huddled in her low chair. He got up carelessly and shook himself to
start the blood through his great frame, numbed by immobility. His eye
was caught by the expression of the old woman's face as she looked up at
him. He stood still, considering her, "You're going to miss Marise," he
said.
She turned back hastily towards the fire, to hide the sudden trembling
of her lips, and presently said in a dry voice, "All I want is for her
to have what is best for her."
He agreed to this with relief, "Sure! So do I. Poor kid. _She_ never
asked to be born."
Later, as he started up the stairs, his glass kerosene lamp in his hand,
he said, "You know, Hetty, as well as I do that it doesn't make any
difference what we do, or don't do for her. She's got to take what's
coming to her just like everybody else."
His cousin looked down at the steady, commonplace little flame of her
own lamp, "I don't suppose I'll ever see her again," she said in a low
tone of profound sadness. But she added stoically, as she began to climb
the stairs after him, "Not that that makes any difference to anybody but
me."