CHAPTER XXXVI
I
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 near-by 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 eye-brows 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 eye-brows 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 Floral You know she had no more harm in her than a kitten."
Cousin Hetty felt a long, rigorous tremor rim 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 up-shot 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 Préfet, 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 bad 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 I 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."