Son of the Wind/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
MRS. RADER HAS A WORD TO SAY
DRAWN back a little, they looked at each other with startled eyes—people who have been awake, now in a dream. Like a dream he saw blue iris just beneath his gaze, a dull wave of hair, white hands in the dusk, and felt a hurrying heart. The heavenly interval of wonder was upon him, when even desire halts, abashed at the miracle. Why should she suddenly twist herself from him as if he had become an enemy? She had turned to him willingly, not caught, not yielding, but giving herself. Why shatter the divine, unconscious moment? It was his surprise that released her; his instinct caught at her to keep her, but caught only her dress. The weak stuff tore in his hand. The work-box on the edge of the table overturned. A shower of little objects fell, ringing and scattering on the floor. She slid through his fingers. Her skirt whipped around the door. He trod on needles in the dark, and, cursing, felt some dreadful, soft little thing, which was a pin-cushion, beneath his feet.
The sound of the door behind him closing made him face about. That door had been shut when he came into the room. Now Mrs. Rader was standing just within it, her hand resting on the knob. It had scarcely ceased to vibrate with concussion; her gown still fluttered back with her motion just arrested, but arrested by something that had startled her. In the gloom her face was a mere white shadow, with dark shadows for eyes; no expression to read, but the intense, fixed poise of the head had significance. Carron suffered pure panic. He kept himself standing where he was only by an effort of will. He was ready on the spot for all the condemnation woman, can call down on man's head, ready to commit himself to anything to rescue the unhappy situation. He looked at her and smiled.
"I have upset your daughter's work-basket," he said, and, going down on his knees, began to grope on the dark floor, gathering spools. Mrs. Rader did not speak; and in that horrid little interval while he pricked his fingers, and felt the coursing of the blood in his ears, what reason he had left reasserted itself. She had not seen the kiss—that unpremeditated moment. She had come in too late. She had seen, perhaps, her daughter's flight through the door, heard the crash of the basket, sensed all through the room the feeling of disturbance, of a crisis just past. But at least she had not seen it! His courage rose. His anxiety was less the coward's than it was the instinctive man's to shield the girl in her moment of what might have been her weakness from the severe eye of her own sex. He looked up. Mrs. Rader was standing close to him, leaning on the table, looking down at him with irresolute face.
"I am sorry I couldn't get word to you about last night," he said, rising, speaking as cheerfully as if this was the only question that could be between them. "I am afraid from what Mr. Rader said that not knowing when to expect me has inconvenienced you."
"Oh, no—not inconvenienced! Only we were afraid—" she raised her hand to the hat she wore, the man's hat, which probably she had hastily pulled on when she ran to her neighbors to ask news of him. "Mr. Carron—" she began.
"Never worry over a hunter, even if he doesn't show up for a week," he reassured her, setting the work-box back on the table. "The only thing to consider is what they bring back, and I offer my humble apologies for coming empty-handed." He swung around on his heel.
"Mr. Carron," she was just behind him. Her look was anything but the virago. It was timid, as if she were afraid of him, or else afraid of what she was about to say.
"I present a figure," he explained, "that would never do to show at your dinner table. I have just startled Miss Rader by showing myself in my deplorable state of mud. I've got to hurry, if I'm going to change."
"I must speak to you!" The voice went through his ears. There was no escape after all. He shut his teeth together and turned about to face the situation.
Evidently she had driven herself to a point outside her ordinary capacity. Her eyes were the only brave thing in her, but they commanded her face. "Would it make much difference to you to cut your week here a little short? Would you mind finishing somewhere else?"
This was more definite than he had expected—a delicate way of putting the thing, almost like a man's. He appreciated her reserve, but now there were two reasons which presented to him the awkward necessity of remaining where he was. "Of course, if you ask it, I shall go at once, Mrs. Rader. I understood that it was a special exception to a rule that took me in, and that was very good of you. But there is no use saying it won't make a difference to me. I'm afraid you've rather spoilt me here. I've grown very fond of this place, and I like you—and Mr. Rader." He waited. Her eyes fixed him with distress, but without any relenting. It was a deadlock. "I don't doubt that a man is in the way while women are going over a house," he went on.
She murmured, "O no! You helped us more than I can say! That is one reason why I didn't want you to—on account of what I'm having to ask you. I don't know what you will think of me!"
"I shan't think anything startling," he assured her lightly; but indeed he did not know what to think. Her words declared to him that her state of mind had not been born suddenly of the moment's suspicions. It was the culmination of a feeling which had been hers in the past, an attitude which had been constant toward him from the first, before he saw Blanche Rader, before he even knew Blanche Rader existed. Though his mind might dart and turn, the significance of it was bewildering to fathom. "I knew you were sorry you had taken me in as soon as I was in the house," he said boldly. "I have seen that all along, and I have wondered if there was any special thing I have said or done to make you take a dislike to me."
"It was nothing. I don't dislike you. We all like you very much. You must have noticed how Mr. Rader is. He is quite changed since you came, waked up." She looked at him wistfully, as a child looks at spring. "You have such a way of being young." Her voice dropped as she added below her breath. "That is just the trouble."
Carron stared at this cryptic sentence.
"You are a stranger, and you are a man who has come from out in the world," she continued, looking at him squarely. "Not many such come up here; and as soon as I saw you I felt sure, I knew—" she swallowed abruptly what she had been on the point of speaking. She left an ellipsis to be filled by imagination, by conjecture. "I was just as sure then as I am now. There is no mistaking a thing of that sort. But how could I come to you then—a stranger—and speak of it? I don't see how I can do it now! But you were so kind about helping us day before yesterday, and doing everything that was hard, I saw—at least I thought that, if I asked you, you might not take advantage of it, at least for her sake! That, if I asked you, you might go."
Carron stood amazed, puzzled, floored by these halting, breathless sentences, and the confused suggestions they conveyed to him. He had to reach, to search, to put the thing together to make anything at all; and then he smiled at the sublime egoism of women that supposes each move a man makes to be drawn by the magnet woman. "My dear Mrs. Rader, I have not come here on your daughter's account. I had never seen her before, and I have no wish to thrust my attentions upon her!" Absurd inconsistency this, while his lips were still hot with memories of the girl's! Yet it was true enough, he had had no "intentions" as far as Blanche Rader was concerned. He was aware of none now; but he was aware of agitation, at the very thought of her, and a wish to keep her name out of the talk at any cost. He cemented safety. "I have had no thought except that she was very kind and gracious to me as to a guest, I give you my word!"
Mrs. Rader's face was strange. "I know you have not," she said. "That is just the trouble."
That singular little sentence, a repeated note, rang ominously to his ear. He had a dread lest the woman might sweep him on with her tide of revelation, further than ever man wanted to be carried. "Very well, I will make my arrangements to go to Beckwith to-morrow morning," he said coldly.
At that he heard the sharp intake of her breath. "Won't you go farther away than that? Won't you go quite away, quite out of the county?"
"My dear Mrs. Rader," he burst forth, irritated beyond control by the woman's insistence, and the quandary it placed him in, "don't you expect rather too much of me?"
"What difference will it make to you," she demanded despairingly, "where you hunt, when all through these counties the game is much the same? But it makes all the difference in the world to me—and to her. I have been to her. I have tried to show her, to make her—think! Do you suppose I haven't done everything, wouldn't do anything rather than come to you? But nothing moves her when she gets an idea in her head, when she wants something; and she has only seen the boys hereabouts, and one or two men who come here in the summer. She has always been able to do what she likes with them. You have seen how she twists poor Bert Ferrier. But you are different; you are her match! I'm afraid you're more than that. That is why I have come to you."
Dismayed and scarlet, hearing what man was never meant to hear from the lips of the third person, Carron had an instinct to beat off the woman's words like enemies. "It's absurd, ridiculous! You misjudge her, Mrs. Rader. She's never had a thought. Why, she doesn't care a flip of her finger for me!" Unconsciously he used Bert Ferrier's words.
"If you haven't noticed it," Mrs. Rader said slowly, "you are the only one." The small square of the window was growing grayer behind her. The two of them had become to each other mere voices in the dark; only the woman showed in her intensity, now and then, a gesture against the pale glimmer of glass. "She hasn't been herself quite, since that first morning. Do you suppose she takes as much time for most men? Do you suppose she goes out riding all the morning whenever some one asks her? Do you suppose she makes the rooms so pretty for Bert Ferrier to play whist? She is very cold and very difficult with most. O, she's clever—much cleverer than I with people; and she can keep them at a distance. As long as she isn't interested I know she's safe—and she has never been interested in any one before! But as soon as I saw you, I knew you were—" She was rushing upon it with the appalling passion of women for revealing truths which are intended to remain hidden, which can not bear the light, before which men recoil and quail.
"Mrs. Rader," he broke in, "I can not let you think it. I assure you you're entirely mistaken. Your daughter is—" He paused before the many things Blanche Rader apparently was. Her mother had spoken as if she were a helpless little country girl, the merest mouse in the paws of the cat; but it was plain to him she was very much a person to be reckoned with; a girl of fascinations, a dangerous woman. "She is absolutely disinterested where I'm concerned," he said flatly, and for the moment believed it. "Don't suppose anything else," he added, looking squarely into the woman's face, still skeptical and unconvinced. "I am sure neither she nor I have had any intention that could alarm you."
"I don't think people always know what they intend, or even what they are doing," Mrs. Rader said.
Carron waved exasperated arms. "I promise you I will be off to-morrow morning, if that reassures you at all; but I can not promise to go out of the county. That's nonsense. I can not listen to anything more." He brushed quickly past her, through the door behind her, into the dining-room; here, opening the little outer door, he stepped out on to the piazza. To have stayed in there any longer would have meant losing his temper, and possibly his nerve.
He felt more shaken than if he had been through a fight.
He was turned out emphatically by a timid, resolute woman. For what reason? In the dark the thought made him hot.
Why should she take it for granted that the girl was in such danger from him? What sort of creature did she suppose him—invulnerable, iron, deadly? Did she think he was in no danger himself? He was far from being sure. He was terribly uncertain. He had defended the girl as he had been bound to do by the intolerable circumstance; but now it seemed to him that it had been ill done. Suppose she told her mother of what had happened! It was not probable; but think—if Mrs. Rader rehearsed his words, what a cad she would think him then! And he was to leave to-morrow, without a chance to explain to her. Explain! Good Lord! Something that he could not explain to himself!
He stared into the dark with fiery thoughts. There had been a question he had started to ask about a horse. That would have to wait now until this thing of immediate importance was settled—the wretched uncertainty of what she thought of him. Mrs. Rader's words had sounded impossible when they had been naked and uttered; but they flowed back to his memory now with a sweet resurgence. He was buoyed up and carried off his logical footing, spun around in eddies of emotion, set down suddenly on the hard sand of doubt, cold with the subsidence of his hopes. What difference did it make what she had thought of him before that wonderful moment, when, after it, she had torn herself away from him; when, by the last glance of her eyes, she had hated. him? That seemed unhuman, cruel, when there had been such harmony. A feeling stirred in his heart, equal to that angry look of hers, ready to meet it.
He walked along the side veranda. Behind him the lights looked out of the kitchen windows. He knew them just kindled. The dinner would be late. He went up the outside stair and passed through his room without stopping. He walked a little way down the upper hall, turning his back upon the ascending inner stair. A window at the end showed him the influence of the moon, now beginning to shine and make herself felt above the twilight. The light, diffused and gray, was still enough for him to see the door he wanted. His foot touched a small, dark object crouched in front of it. The dog, Beetles, was pressed against it with his nose flung up to the crack and his tail beating the floor. This little creature was accustomed to run in and out of Blanche's room at all hours, taking liberties with her time and her good nature. Now he snuggled and scratched the obstinate wood and complained. He paid no attention to the man's whistling to him, under breath. He knew no divided mind had one object.
Carron knocked very softly. Not a stir from within. He knocked again, as softly, but repeatedly. This time a smothered voice spoke.
"Who is there?"
The dog went into ecstasies of expectation. Carron did not reply; that would have been the end. He only knocked. This time he heard a step. It came slowly and stopped just on the other side of the panels. She might even have put her mouth to the crack, so plainly the words came.
"What do you want?"
The soft, insistent sound of his knuckles upon the wood, so close to her, evidently had become more than her nerves could bear. Suddenly she flung open the door. The dog sprang, leaping upon her; up, and, falling back, up again with the tireless resurgence of a fountain. Carron stood still. "What do you want?" she repeated, still in that smothered voice, as if some muffling thing was invisibly across her mouth. She looked at him and she did not look at him.
"Come down-stairs," he said.
She made a negative motion of the head.
"Come along," he insisted, "I have something to say to you."
His voice, so calmly taking it for granted that she would; his face, which revealed something of his crisis, seemed to make her obstinacy hesitate. "No. I should have to see people."
"No; you will only see me. We'll go outside." He took her by the hand, drew her through the door and closed it after her. But, alone with him in the hall, she seemed to be taken with a keener, more incoherent alarm.
"I can't go down! I can't go out! I'm afraid that some one will see us!" He looked at her in amazement—she, so independent, so sure of herself, to fall into a panic.
"No one will. We can go through my room and down the outside stair."
"Oh, no!"
"Come, don't be foolish."
"But they can see us from the kitchen windows."
"Very well! Is there any place in the house, then, where they can't, where we can be undisturbed for a little?"
She looked about, hesitated, gave him a glance. "Yes, over here." She started down the hall, toward the window, through which the moonlight came.
He followed, puzzled. Here in the hall there was not a chair to sit in, and all was in plain view from one end to the other. She went on toward the little pane of glass as if she fancied she could float through it like a ghost; but fairly upon it she stopped, took hold of a knob, and what had appeared as a window opened into a door, like the door in his room, with an upper transparent half. They passed out of it into a balcony. It was like coming out upon the edge of the world.
No steps led down from here, no roof was over them. The place hung in air, a poor, little neglected loggia, before the naked eye of night. In front of them were wooden pailings, imitating Italian balustrade. At one end stood a rattan couch, bleached by fronting many winters.
"Sit down here," Carron said.
She took a place near one end, a conscious distance from him, sitting at the other. The dog lay down, pressed against her feet. Above their heads a thin and gauzy fan of clouds was spread in the sky, and the moon looked through it. The balcony faced from the back of the house, and at this point the ground fell away sharply, so that instead of looking into pines, they looked over them and saw a glimpse of distance. There was a wonderful play of silver upon these tree-tops, in hollow and hill of the moving, leafy surface—aisles of floating brightness, sparkling plains which were clearer for lying on the edge of shadow, lovelier because nowhere was the liquid brilliance of bare moonlight. All before them shone as in an enchanted veil.
The mystery was upon the girl's face, too, scarcely beautiful now, yet it was strange how this made no difference to him. He saw the traces of fatigue and of watching, perhaps of tears. What if, as her mother had said, she had watched and waited for him? He leaned forward, elbows on knees. The important thing he had had to say to her was just this—to be with her. But to be with her in perfection of unconsciousness, of confidence, as they had been; not in this silent discord, so cruelly out of key with the beautiful country, the veil of wonder over it, and the wonder within his own heart. If only he could unknit those gathered brows, make bend the guarded line of the lips, open the eyes upon him with the undefensive sweetness they had shown him under the cedars, in the candle light, even in the shadow of the stable that morning when he had been so careless of her that he had scarcely glanced at her! The memory that went yet farther back, of how she had pulled herself from her mother's hand on the day of their ride and come toward him, remained the sweetest, most unhappy thought. Now she was like a door locked against him; like a house, dark. All the strength in her seemed gathered together to exclude him. Each time he stirred he could feel her start, as if, of all things, his touch was what she most dreaded.
"You are making a bad mistake about us, aren't you?" he said. "You seem to think that what happened down-stairs a little while ago was very terrible."
She was silent.
"I thought it was quite beautiful."
"I don't want to talk about it," she said, under her breath.
"Neither do I—but I must. I can't stand the way you look at me—as if I were a beast; and I'm not—to you!" He found himself floundering in speech, choked by a tide of feeling half tender, half angry, which was making him helpless to explain himself. "I didn't mean to frighten you. I only meant—"
"I don't in the least care what you meant," she interrupted, with a hard, dry voice, she seemed to gather from her chest.
"Yes, you do!" Carron said, suddenly fierce. She was trying to build up a wall between them, and he would have it down. "You don't tell me you were playing then, when we—a woman like you wouldn't!"
"I didn't know what I was doing."
"You did." He would not let her off so easily. "We both knew a good deal better then than we do now, when we are talking so much about it. I hadn't seen you for so long—two days—how could I tell how I was going to be? It came—and now it's done. And everything looks different. Can't you understand? I have never felt like this before. I didn't know there was such a feeling!" He broke off, gazing at her. "This isn't the usual thing," he said slowly, "and you know it."
Her eyes, half lifted, took this in with a long, silent regard, without expressing a spark of what she hid, without visible change—glide of iris, or flutter of lashes—gradually a new expression swam up in them, and he understood the fact which he had spoken was accepted between them. "You weren't like this then!" she said.
"Down-stairs? I was."
She shook her head. "You were so strange! All last night, all to-day, I had been afraid that something had happened to you." She jerked out the words in rapid, breathless sentences. "Because, last night, we were to go out to the Witch's Spindle; and I knew something must have happened, or you wouldn't have stayed away. Then, when I saw you—and your head hurt—I knew, of course! And I would have come to you, but you frightened me, you looked so angry. I couldn't understand it; and when you came into the sewing-room, as though you thought I did not hear you, and sat there looking at me so hard, I didn't know—I couldn't think what I had done, but it seemed to me I had done you some injury, some cruel injury! And when you—"
"Never mind that," Carron said gently. For a moment, instead of the girl's face before him, he saw the head of the Sphinx. It rose to his mind like a sign of his failure and his delay. It spoke to him of necessities of times and ways, and haste. He let it sink back beneath memory to await its time.
"Is your head badly hurt?" she asked in a half voice, and he felt five soft, round finger-tips exploring in his hair.
He took the hand and drew it down. "Not a bit. Look here—I have never been angry with you. How could I be? I wouldn't do anything to hurt you or distress you for the world. You know that, don't you?"
This time her head nodded.
He tipped his back to look up into her face, a little humorously. "Then am I forgiven?"
"There is nothing to forgive."
"Ah, you're right about that," he said quickly. "Didn't you know that in the first place?" She became dumb. "Did you think I was an easy sort, was that way with most women?"
"No, no, I didn't! I don't know what I thought! I can't tell you."
"I will tell you anything you want to know," Carron said. "I'll tell you what I'm thinking now." But indeed he was not thinking. He was no more thinking than a swimmer is walking, when, just over his depth in water, he feels his chin buoyed up and his toes scarcely touching the sand. In all his logical, hard-worked life he had never felt any sensation so heavenly as this one—of being set afloat in the warm tide of emotion. His hands glided around hers. He would have set his cheek against the broad, white arch of her forehead.
"Oh, no, no, no," she kept murmuring, a shower of protesting little words, and straining away. "I can't,—to-night!" The last word came out with such force that it had to be answered.
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I can't think!"
He was ready to laugh at such an excuse; but the next moment he was made to listen.
"I will not!" with a sudden passion of resolution.
"Oh!" He clasped his hands together behind him, held them tight, and looked straight before him into an extraordinarily blank future. He knew she was watching him. "To-morrow—" she dropped the little word tentatively, timidly.
The sound of it was a whip to him. "To-morrow I won't be here!" He saw how that struck her. The thought that what became of him could hurt her, gave him pleasure. "I am going away indefinitely," he said. Still she kept looking at him with the same blank face as if she hardly understood. She didn't speak. He could see no change of expression, but he realized a chill in her mood, cold, where a moment before she had been hot.
"You don't suppose I'm going because I want to?" he asked indignantly.
"I hope you are not going for any other reason."
The tone was like snow, blank and pallid; but the thought occurred to him that the film in her bright eyes might be suffering. His rosolution to keep Mrs. Rader's plea to him a secret, and depart, valiantly silent, melted at the sight. "I am going because I've been asked to," he said, and could not resist a grimace.
She gave him a stare, haughty and astonished. A flag of color flew in her cheeks. "What do you mean?"
"Your mother," Carron said. It was wonderful to see how the color failed, and returned again.
"Did she—?"
"No, she didn't see anything—at least anything that matters. But, as perhaps you know, she came in just as you rushed out; and, well, she saw there had been some little disturbance. She's never had any great fancy for me, thinks I'm a poor sort of person to have around, and I believe she found it a good opportunity to make her suggestion."
"What excuse did she give?"
Carron felt the matter was assuming an alarming aspect. "Well, house-cleaning, you know. Men are rather in the way."
"After you'd helped her!"
"You mustn't fly off and say anything about this," he protested, "and make it worse."
"But how could she? What right has she to interfere with us? I'm of age!"
"Very true, and all that, but don't you see I can't argue the point with her? When a woman asks you to get out, you can't ask for reasons."
"But I can," Blanche had got up. The bold spirit, which a few moments ago had seemed to be shaken out of her, was in full possession. ready to storm a city.
This time Carron took her hand too firmly for any denial. "You will not do anything of the sort. I've promised—and there's no getting out of it. Go to her about it, and you'll only make her think me a cad, who has gone to you to get you to beg him off."
"I'm not going to make a scene. It will be all right, you'll see!"
"But I've said everything any human being could, in decency. Do you suppose I haven't?"
She smiled; her hand was on the door. "Yes, but I haven't. Come—hurry!"
"Don't go in!" he begged. "Let's stay out here!"
"No, no!" She gave a quick look around at the little balcony. "Come!" She opened the door hurriedly and fairly pulled him through. He saw she was panting as if in a new fright.
"Were you afraid they would find us?" he asked curiously.
"No," she scorned him. "Why should I mind that?"
"You strange girl, you did. Just a little while ago, I had to coax you to get you to come out at all."
"O, that was different," she said. They were walking together down to the moon-misted hall.
"Different?"
"Yes. I was afraid of them, I was afraid of everything, because, well—"
"Out with it!"
The fire of mischief, and of something bigger, looked through her eyes. "I didn't know then what you thought of me," she said, and ran ahead of him down the stair.
He did not feel certain what trouble she was about to plunge him into, with her headlong determination to bend her mother's resolute mind. He could think of no argument subtle, and appealing to Mrs. Rader's hospitality or vanity which he had not employed himself, and quite in vain. But the girl seemed to entertain no doubts of herself, though she entered the dining-room, just after the laggard scholar was seated, and could not, therefore, have already interviewed her mother, who had been at table when Carron first came in. No word had passed between these two, while they waited for the others. They had gone beyond the banalities, and what they had had to say of importance to one another was finished. Their silence was austere. The girl reflected nothing of this, but kept her excited eyes veiled, and combated the tendency to an upward curl of the corners of her mouth. Except for such Puck-like manifestations she was demure, almost silent, and seemed interested in her dinner. Rader was the one of that curiously mooded quartet who seemed in a fund of talk.
"So you're back!" he said as if, to him, this was the greatest personal satisfaction; and reaching lean, long fingers to Carron, shook hands on the event. Mrs. Rader's eyes were caught by the sight of this, fascinated. Blanche looked down.
"I suppose these women have fussed over you to their heart's content," the scholar continued. "They are very free with the plaster if you've cut nothing but your finger."
"You didn't tell me you were hurt," Mrs. Rader faltered.
"I'm not—nothing but a bit of broken skin." He was immensely annoyed the matter should have come up at all. "I'd forgotten all about it."
"Don't you want some arnica?" His hostess seemed on the point, then and there, of doing her conscience-smitten best.
"A bottle of Burgundy will do more good," Rader determined. "I brought some up to celebrate." He looked a little puzzled by Carron's cynical regard. "It's really very good, '84," he murmured. He hesitated, sent an inquiring glance at his daughter, just darted and withdrawn. She paid no attention to it; didn't seem to see it. "And by the way," he said, still more pointedly to Carron, "if you have any time to-morrow afternoon, won't you come in and see my Spectators? First edition, they are as worth while looking at as anything you can see."
This was awkward. "I should be delighted, but I'm afraid I shall be away."
"O, take a day off between whiles. You're played out. A couple of days ago, the day before you went, you promised me you would."
Carron recalled this. He felt himself cornered. To blurt out the facts here in the face of every one might be the ruin of Blanche's schemes. But to the devil with a woman's schemes! He was sick of them! They never accomplished anything! The fact would be out in the morning anyway. "I mean I expect to leave to-morrow, permanently," he said. "I was only to be here for a week, you know."
Rader exclaimed in astonishment. "But it's not a week; you haven't been here five days! What are you thinking of? Hermione, do you hear that?"
She looked certainly taken aback, much dismayed. She murmured, "Perhaps Mr. Carron would be more comfortable in a house that wasn't so upset."
"He'd be a great deal less comfortable in any of the other places around here. That's no reason at all," Rader declared emphatically. "Why not stay at least till the end of the week?"
For the first time since the subject had been opened Blanche looked up. "Why shouldn't Mr. Carron stay until the end of his vacation?" she remarked casually. "It is only two weeks."
The poor woman looked at her daughter with a defeated eye. She seemed to be conscious of the spirit in the house, the trampling spirit of youth that was conspiring against her, beating her determination down.
"First rate!" Rader acclaimed. "And perhaps if these women are through making you move sofas about, you wouldn't mind looking at my windows and tell me why they stick so. I can't open 'em."
Mrs. Rader made a horrified, protesting sound, while her daughter shook with laughter.
"I could regulate the weights of those before I go in the morning," Carron suggested. He felt that so much was only decent.
"Look here, you mustn't talk like that. Hermione, you make him stay."
Mrs. Rader flushed. The color was bright in her sensitive face, as she opened her mouth to pronounce the required words. Carron was sorry for her—so sorry that it seemed almost easier to refuse the request which went no deeper than the lips. But it would have taken a prig or a saint to perform that part. No man could have done it, with the girl upon the other side of the table, her mouth of such a haughty unconcern, her eyes sending such shining, triumphant, inexplicable glances. It seemed to him they had both been, for the moment, favorites of fate.
The scholar, with the Burgundy, kept him sitting after Mrs. Rader had gone into the kitchen. Her daughter rose to follow her out. Carron tried to catch her eye. She ignored him and he heard the rustle of her passing at his back. Then it paused. That incarnation of Puck was behind his chair.
"Didn't father speak his part beautifully? Didn't I do that nicely?" she whispered. Then went off on tiptoe, unattainable for the rest of the evening.