MANSLAUGHTER
CHAPTER I
Whenever she and Lydia had a scene Miss Bennett thought of the first scene she had witnessed in the Thorne household. She saw before her a vermillion carpet on a mottled marble stair between high, polished-marble walls. There was gilt in the railing, and tall lanky palms stood about in majolica pots. Up this stairway an angry man was carrying an angrier child. Miss Bennett could see that broad back in its heavy blue overcoat, and his neck, above which the hair was still black, crimsoning with fury and exertion. On one side of him she could see the thin arms and clutching hands of the little girl, and on the other the slender kicking legs, expressing passionate rebellion in every spasmodic motion. The clutching hands caught the tip of a palm in passing, and the china pot went rolling down the stairs and crashed to bits, startling the two immense great Dane puppies which had been the occasion of the whole trouble.
The two figures, swaying and struggling, went on up; for though the man was strong, a writhing child of ten is no light burden; and the stairs, for all their grandeur, were steep, and the carpet so thick that the foot sank into it as into new-fallen snow. Just as they passed out of sight Miss Bennett saw the hands of the child, now clenched fists, begin to beat on the man's arms, and she heard the clear, defiant young voice repeating, "I will keep them! I will!" The man's "You won't" was not spoken, but was none the less understood. Miss Bennett knew that when the heads of the stairs was reached the blows would be returned with interest.
Usually in the long struggle between these two indomitable wills Miss Bennett had been on Joe Thorne's side, coarse, violent man though he was, for she was old-fashioned and believed that children ought to obey. But this night he had alienated her sympathy by being rude to her—for the first and last time. He had come home after one of his long absences to the hideous house in Fifth Avenue in which he took so much pride, and had found these two new pets of Lydia's careening about the hall like young calves. He had turned on Miss Bennett.
"What the hell do you let her do such things for?" he had demanded, and Miss Bennett had answered with unusual spirit.
"Because she's so badly brought up, Mr. Thorne, that no one can do anything with her."
Lydia had stood by defiantly, glancing from one to the other, with a hand in the collar of each of her dogs, her face pale, her jaw set, her head not much above the sleek battleship-gray heads of the great Danes, her small body pulled first one way and then the other by their gambols. All the time she was saying over and over, "I will keep them! I will! I will!"
She hadn't kept them; she had lost that particular skirmish in the long war. Not till some years later did she begin to win; but whether she lost or won, Miss Bennett was always conscious of a rush of pity for the slim, black-eyed little girl thrusting her iron will so fearlessly against that of the man from whom she had inherited it.
And for the Lydia of to-day, now engaged in thrusting her will against the will of the world, Miss Bennett felt the same unreasoning pity—pity which rendered her weak in her own defense when any dispute arose between them. She and Lydia had been having a scene now; only a little scene—hardly more than a discussion.
Morson saw it clearly when he came in after luncheon to get the coffee cups, although a complete and decorous silence greeted his entrance. He saw it in the way in which his young employer was standing, as erect as an Indian, looking slantingly down her cheek at her companion. Miss Bennett was sitting on the sofa with her feet in their high-heeled satin slippers crossed, and she was slipping the rings nervously up and down her fine, thin fingers.
She was a small, well-made woman, to whom prettiness had come with her gray hair. The perfection of all her appointments, which might once have been interpreted as the vanity of youth, turned out to be a settled nicety that stood her in good stead in middle life and differentiated her at fifty-five—a neat, elegant little figure among her contemporaries.
The knowledge that he was interrupting a discussion did not hurry Morson any more than the faintest curiosity delayed him. He brushed up the hearth, turned a displaced chair, collected the cups on his tray and left the room at exactly the same pace at which he had entered it. He had known many scenes in his day.
As soon as the door closed behind him Miss Bennett said: "Of course, if you meant you don't want me to ask my friends to your house you are perfectly within your rights, but I could not stay with you, Lydia."
"You know I don't mean that, Benny," said the girl without either anger or apology in her voice. "I'm delighted to have you have anyone at all when I'm not here and anyone amusing when I am. The point is that those old women were tiresome. They bored you and you knew that they were going to bore me. You sacrificed me to make a Roman holiday for them."
Miss Bennett could not let this pass.
"You should feel it an honor—a woman like Mrs. Galton, whose work among the female prisoners of this"
"Noble women, noble women, I have no doubt, but bores, and it makes me feel sick, literally sick, to be bored."
"Don't be coarse, Lydia."
"Sick—here," said Lydia with a sharp dig of her long fingers on her diaphragm. "Let's be clear about this, Benny. I can't stand having my own tiresome friends about, and I will not put up with having yours."
Lydia had come home after a morning of shopping in town. Disagreeable things had happened, only Benny did not know that. She had bought a hat—a tomato-colored hat—had worn it a block and decided it was a mistake, and had gone back and wanted to change it, and the woman had refused to take it back. There had been little consolation in removing her custom from the shop forever—she had been forced to keep the hat. Then motoring back to Long Island a tire had gone, and she had come in late for luncheon to find Benny amiably entertaining the two old ladies.
The very fact that they were, as she said, noble women, that their minds moved with the ponderous exactitude characteristic of so many good executives, made their society all the more trying to Lydia. She wearied of them, wearied, as Mariana in the Moated Grange. She had so often asked Benny not to do this to her and after all it was her house.
"You're very hard, my dear," said her companion—"very hard and very ignorant and very young. If you could only find an interest in such work as Mrs. Galton is doing"
"Good heavens, was this a benevolent plot on your part to find me an interest?"
Miss Bennett looked dignified and a little stubborn, as if she were accustomed to being misunderstood, as if Lydia ought to have known that she had had a reason for what she did. As a matter of fact, she had no plan; she was not a plotter. That was one of the difficulties between her and Lydia. Lydia arranged her life, controlled her time and her surroundings. Miss Bennett amiably drifted, letting events and her friends control. She could never understand why Lydia held her responsible for situations which it seemed to her simply happened, and yet she could never resist pretending that she had deliberately brought them about. She began to think now that it had been her idea, not Mrs. Galton's, to get Lydia interested in prison reform.
"No one can be happy, Lydia, without an unselfish interest, something outside of themselves."
Lydia smiled. There was something pathetic in poor little ineffective Benny trying to arrange her life for her.
"I contrive to be fairly happy, thank you, Benny. I've got to leave you, because I have an engagement at Eleanor's at four, and it's ten minutes before now."
"Lydia, it's ten miles!"
"Ten miles—ten minutes."
"You'll be killed if you drive so recklessly."
"No Benny, because I drive very well."
"You'll be arrested then."
"Even less."
"How can you be so sure?"
That was something that it was better not to tell, so Lydia went away laughing, leaving Miss Bennett to wonder, as she always did after one of these interviews, how it was possible to feel so superior to Lydia when they were apart and so ineffectual when they were together. She always came to the same conclusion—that she was betrayed by her own fineness; that she was more aware of shades, of traditions than this little daughter of a workingman. Lydia was not little. She was half a foot taller than Adeline Bennett's own modest five-feet-two, but the adjective expressed a latent wish. Miss Bennett often introduced it into her descriptions. A nice little man, a clever little woman, a dear little person were some of her favorite tags. They made her bulk larger in her own vision.
The little daughter of the workingman ran upstairs for her hat. She found her maid, Evans, engaged in polishing her jewels. The rite of polishing Miss Thorne's jewels took place in the bathroom, which was also a dressing room, containing long mirrors, a dressing table, cupboards with glass doors through which Miss Thorne's bright hats and beribboned underclothes showed faintly. It was carpeted and curtained and larger than many a hall bedroom.
Here Evans, a pale, wistful English girl, was spreading out the jewelry as she finished each piece, laying them on a white towel where the rays of the afternoon sun fell upon them—the cabochon ruby like a dome of frozen blood, the flat, clear diamond as blue as ice, and the band of emeralds and diamonds for her hair flashing rays of green and orange lights. Lydia liked her jewelry for the best of all reasons—she had bought most of it herself. She particularly liked the emerald band, which made her look like an Eastern princess in a Russian ballet, and in her opinion exactly fitted her type. But her beauty was not so easily classified as she thought. To describe her in words was to describe a picture by Cabanel of The Star of the Harem—such a picture as the galleries of the second half of the nineteenth century were sure to contain—the oval face, the splendid dark eyes, the fine black eyebrows, the raven hair; but Lydia's skin was not transparently white, and a slight heightening of her cheek bones and a thrust forward of her jaw suggested something more Indian than Eastern, something that made her seem more at home on a mountain trail than on the edge of a marble pool.
As she entered, Evans was brushing the last traces of powder from a little diamond bracelet less modern than the other pieces. Lydia took it in her hand.
"I almost forgot I had that," she said.
Three or four years before, when she had first known Bobby Dorset, when they had been very young, he had given it to her. It had been his mother's, and she had worn it constantly for a year or so. An impulse of tenderness made her slip it on her arm now, and as it clung there like a living pressure the heavy feeling of it faintly revived a whole cycle of old emotions. She thought to herself that she had some human affections after all.
"It ought to be reset, miss," said Evans. "The gold spoils the diamonds."
"You do keep my things beautifully, Evans."
The girl colored at the praise, not often given by her rapidly moving young mistress, and the muscles twitched in her throat.
"A hat—any hat, Evans."
She pulled it on with one quick, level glance in the glass, and was gone with the bracelet, half forgotten, on her arm.
During the few minutes that Lydia had been upstairs a conflict had gone on in the mind of Miss Bennett downstairs. Should she be offended or should she be superior? Was it more dignified to be angry because she really could not allow herself to be treated like that? Or should she forgive because she was obviously so much older and wiser than Lydia?
She decided—as she always did—in favor of forgiveness, and as she heard Lydia's quick light footsteps crossing the hall she called out, "Don't drive the little car too fast!"
"Not over sixty," Lydia's voice answered.
As she sprang into the gray runabout waiting at the door with its front wheels turned invitingly outward, pressed on the self-starter with her foot, slid the gears in without a sound, it looked as if she intended her reply to be taken literally. But the speedometer registered only thirty on her own drive—thirty-five as she straightened out on the highway. As she said, she never drove fast without a good reason.
Like most people of her type and situation, Lydia was habitually late. The reason she gave to herself was that she crowded a little more activity into the twenty-four hours than those who managed to be on time. But the true reason was that she preferred to be waited for rather than to run any risk of waiting herself. It seemed a distinct humiliation to her that she should await anyone else's convenience. To-day, however, she had a motive for being on time—that is to say, not more than twenty minutes late. They were going to play bridge at Eleanor's and Bobby would be there; and for some reason she never understood it fussed Bobby if she were late and everyone began abusing her behind her back; and if Bobby were fussed he lost money, and he couldn't afford to lose it. She hated Bobby to lose money—minded it for him more than he minded it for himself.
One of the facts that she saw most clearly in regard to her own life was that the man she married must be a man of importance, not only because her friends expected that of her but because she needed a purpose, a heightened interest—a great man in her life. Yet strangely enough the only men to whom her heart had ever softened were idle, worthless men, of whom Bobby was only a sample. Among women she liked the positive qualities—courage, brilliance, achievement; but among men she seemed to have selected those who needed a strong controlling hand upon their destiny. Benny said it was the maternal in her, but less friendly critics said it was the boss. Perhaps the two are not so dissociated as is generally thought. Lydia repudiated the maternal explanation without finding another. Only she knew that the very thing that made her fond of men like Bobby prevented her falling in love with them; whereas the men with whom it seemed possible to fall in love were men with whom she always quarreled, so that instead of love there was not even friendship.
Some years before she had been actually engaged to be married—though the engagement had never been announced—to an Englishman, a thin, hawk-faced man, the Marquis of Ilseboro. She was not in love with him, though he was a man with whom women did fall in love. Benny had been crazy about him. He was companionable in a silent sort of way, made love to her with extreme assurance and knew a great deal about life and women.
But from the very first their two wills had clashed in small matters—in questions of invitations, manners, Lydia's dress. Again and again Ilseboro had yielded, but yielded with a deliberation that gave no suggestion of defeat. These struggles which go on out of sight and below consciousness in most relations are never decided by the actual event but by the strength of position in which the combatants are left. Benny, for instance, sometimes did the most rebellious things, but did them in a sort of frenzy of panic, followed by unsought explanations. Ilseboro was just the reverse. He yielded because he had a positive wish to adjust himself, as far as possible, to her wishes. Lydia began to be not afraid of him, for like Cæsar she was not liable to fear, but dimly aware that his was a stronger nature than her own. This means either love or hate. There had been a few hours one evening when she had felt grateful, admiring, eager to give up; when if she had loved him at all she could have worshiped him. But she did not love him, and when she saw that what he was looking forward to was fitting her into a niche which he'd been building for centuries for the wives of the Ilseboros she really hated him.
Ever since her childhood the prospect of laying aside her own will had stirred her to revolt. She could still remember waking herself up with a start in terror at the thought that in sleep she would doff her will for so many hours. Later her father had wished to send her to a fashionable boarding school; but she had made such wild scenes at the idea of being shut up—of being one of a community—that the plan had been given up. She would have married anyone in order to be free, but being already uncommonly free she rebelled at the idea of giving up her individuality by marriage, particularly by marriage with Ilseboro. She broke her engagement. Ilseboro had loved her and made himself disagreeable. She never forgot the parting curse he put upon her.
"The trouble with being such a damned bully as you are, my dear Lydia," he said, "is that you'll always get such second-rate playmates."
She answered that no one ought to know better than he did. His manner to her servants had long secretly shocked her. He spoke to them without one shade of humanity in his tone, yet oddly enough they all liked him except the chauffeur, who was an American and couldn't bear him, feeling the very essence of class superiority in that tone.
A few months later she showed an English illustrated to Miss Bennett.
"A picture of the girl Ilseboro is going to marry."
There was a pause while Miss Bennett read those romantic words: "A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between George Frederick Albert Reade, Marquis of Ilseboro, and"
"She looks like a lady," said Miss Bennett.
"She looks like a rabbit," said Lydia. "Just think how Freddy will order her about!"
It was not in her nature to feel remorse for her well-considered actions, and she soon forgot that Ilseboro had ever existed, except for certain things she had learned from him—a way of being silent while people explained to you you couldn't do something you intended to do, and then doing it instead of arguing about it, as had been her old habit; and an excellent manner with butlers too.
Her foot pressed gently on the accelerator, when the road became straight, holding the car now at forty miles. On either side of the road purple cabbages grew like a tufted carpet to the very edge of the macadam, without fences or hedges to protect them. There was enough mist in the autumn air to magnify the low hills along the Sound to an imposingly vague bulk, and to turn the cloudless sky to a threatening bluish gray. In every other direction the flat, fertile, sandy plains of Long Island stretched uninterruptedly.
It was really a beautiful afternoon—too beautiful to spend playing bridge in a stuffy room. It might be more sensible, she thought, to break up the party, kidnap Bobby and drive him over to sit on the edge of the water and watch the moon rise; only she rather feared the moon was over. Of course she was dining at the Leonard Piers' that evening, but it was a party eminently chuckable—that is to say, she was going to please them rather than herself. Anyhow, she would have Eleanor move the bridge table out on the terrace. Eleanor was so stupid about preferring to play indoors.
A minute figure, smaller than a man's hand, flashed into the little mirror at her left. Was it—no—yes? A bicycle policeman! Well, she would give him a little race for his stupidity in not recognizing her. She loved speed—it made her a little drunk. The needle swung to forty-five—to fifty, and hung there. She passed a governess cart full of children with a sound like "whist" as the wind rushed by. Now there was a straight road, and clear.
The miniature figure kept growing and growing until it seemed to fill the whole circle of the mirror. The sound of the motorcycle drowned the sound of her own car. A voice shouted "Stop!" almost in her ear. Turning her head slightly to the left, she saw a khaki figure was abreast of her. She slowed the car down and stopped it. A sun-burned young face flushed with anger glared at her.
"Here, what do you think this is? A race track?"
Lydia did not answer, staring straight ahead of her. She was thinking that it was a foolish waste of taxpayers' money to keep changing the policemen. Just as you reached a satisfactory arrangement with one of them you found yourself confronted by another. She wasn't in the least alarmed, though he was scolding her roughly—scolding, to be candid, very much as her own father had done. She did not object to his words, but she hated the power of the law behind them—hated the idea that she herself was not the final judge of the rate at which she should drive.
Now he was getting his summons ready. Glancing idly into her mirror, she saw far away, like a little moving picture, the governess cart come into view. She intended to settle the matter before those giggling, goggle-eyed children came abreast. She was a person in whom action followed easily and instantly from the decision to act. Most people, after making a decision, hesitate like a stream above a waterfall, and then plunging too quickly, end in foam and whirlpools. But Lydia's will, for good or evil, flowed with a steady current.
She looked down at the seat beside her for her mesh bag, opened it and found that Evans, who was a good deal of a goose, had forgotten to put her purse in it, although she knew bridge was to be played. Lydia looked up and saw that the officer of the law had followed her gesture with his eyes. She slipped Bobby's bracelet off her arm, and holding her hand well over the edge of the car dropped it on the road. She heard it tinkle on the hard surface.
"You dropped something," he said.
"No."
He swung a gaitered leg from the motorcycle and picked up the bracelet.
"Isn't this yours?"
She smiled very slightly and shook her head, once again in complete mastery of the situation.
"Whose is it then?"
"I think it must be yours," she answered with a sort of sweet contempt, and still looking him straight in the eye she leaned over and put her gear in first. He said nothing, and her car began to move forward. Presently she heard the sound of a motorcycle going in the opposite direction. She smiled to herself. There was always a way.
She found them waiting for her at Eleanor's, and she felt at once that the atmosphere was hostile; but when Lydia really liked people, and she really liked all the three who were waiting, she had command of a wonderfully friendly coöperative sort of gayety that was hard to resist.
She liked Eleanor Bellington better than any woman she knew. They had been friends since their school days. Eleanor had brains and a dry, bitter tongue, usually silent, and she wasn't the least bit afraid of Lydia. She was blond, plain, aristocratic, independent and some years Lydia's senior. Fearless in thought, she was conservative in conduct. All her activity was in the intellectual field, or else vicariously, through the activity of others. There were always two or three interesting men, coming men, men of whom one said on speaking of them "You know, he's the man" who seemed to be intimately woven into Eleanor's everyday life. A never-ending subject of discussion among Miss Bellington's friends was the exact emotional standing of these intimacies of Nellie's.
Lydia liked Tim Andrews too—a young man of universal friendships and no emotions; but most necessary of all to her enjoyment was Bobby Dorset, who came out to meet her, sauntering down the steps with his hands in his pockets. He looked exactly as a young man ought to look—physically fit, masculine. He was young—younger than his twenty-six years. There wasn't a line of any kind in his clean-shaven face, and the time had come—had almost come—when something ought to have been written there. The page was remaining blank too long. That was the only criticism possible of Bobby's appearance, and perhaps only an elderly critic would have thought of making it. Lydia certainly did not. When he smiled at her, showing his regular, handsome teeth, she thought he was the nicest-looking person she knew.
Just as she had expected, the bridge table was set inside the house, and while she was protesting and having it moved to the terrace she mentioned that she was late because she had had a fuss with Miss Bennett.
"Dear little Benny," said Andrews. "She's like a nice brown-eyed animal with gray fur, isn't she?"
"Tim always talks as if he were in love with Benny."
"She's so gentle, Lydia, and you are so ruthless with her," said Dorset.
"I have to be, Bobby," answered Lydia, and perhaps to no one else would she have stooped to offer an explanation. "She's gentle, but marvelously persistent. She gets her own way by slow infiltration. I wish you'd all tell me what to do. Benny is a person on whom what you say in a critical way makes no impression until you say it so as to hurt her feelings, and then it makes no impression because she's so taken up with her feelings being hurt. That's my problem with her."
"It's everybody's problem with everybody," replied Eleanor.
"She likes to ask her dull friends to the house when I'm there to entertain them."
"Entertain them with a blackjack," said Bobby.
"She had two prison reformers there to-day—old women with pear-shaped faces, and I had a perfectly horrid morning in town trying to get some rags to put on my back, and—Nell, will you tell me why you recommended Lurline to me? I never saw such atrocious clothes."
"I didn't recommend her," answered Nellie, unstampeded by the attack. "I told you that pale, pearl-like chorus girl dressed there, and your latent desire to dress like a chorus girl"
"Oh, Lydia doesn't want to dress like a chorus girl!"
"Thank you, Bobby."
"She wants to dress like the savages in Aïda."
"In mauve maillots and chains?"
"In tiger skins and beads, and crouch through the jungle."
"I was so sulky I didn't give a cent to prison reform. Do you think prisons ought to be made too comfortable? I don't want to be cruel, but"
"Well, it's something, my dear, that you don't want to be."
"You mean I am? That's what Benny says. But I'm not. Is this ten cents a point?"
Eleanor, who like many intellectuals found her excitement in fields where chance was eliminated, protested that ten cents a point was too high, but her objections were swept away by Lydia.
"Oh, no, Eleanor; play for beans if you want; but if you are going to gamble at all"
Tim Andrews interrupted.
"My dear Lydia," he said, "I feel it only right to tell you that the Anti-Lydia Club was being organized when you arrived. Its membership consists of all those you have bullied, and its object is to oppose you in all small matters."
"Whether I'm right or not, Tim?"
"Everybody's worst when they're right," murmured Eleanor.
"We decided before you came that we all wished to play five cents a point," Tim continued firmly.
"All right," said Lydia briskly. "Only you know it bores me, and it bores Bobby, too, doesn't it, Bobby?"
"Not particularly," replied Dorset; "but I know if it bores you none of us will have a pleasant time."
Lydia smiled.
"Is that an insult or a tribute?"
Bobby smiled back at her.
"I think it's an insult, but you rather like it."
Half an hour later they were playing for ten cents a point.