Rough-Hewn Part 36

"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 cla.s.s. 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, soph.o.m.oric 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.sed out of the p.r.i.c.kly 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.

"h.e.l.l, 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 G.o.d! 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, G.o.d 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 d.a.m.nedest 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, h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sed 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.