Part 41 (1/2)

She told me I needn't be afraid.” Then he came to his feet with a gesture of surrender. ”Will you let me see her?” he asked John. ”Now. Just for a minute before I go.”

John, by that time, was on his feet, too, staring. ”What do you mean, man? Afraid of what? What is it you're afraid of?”

March didn't answer the question in words, but for a moment he met her father's gaze eye to eye and what John saw was enough.

”Good G.o.d!” he whispered. ”Why--why didn't you ...” Then turning swiftly toward the door. ”Come along.”

”I'm really not afraid,” March panted as he followed him up the stairs, ”because of her promise. It was just a twinge.”

Her door at the foot of the stairs which led to the music room stood wide open, but both men came to an involuntary breathless pause outside it.

Then John went in, looked for a brief moment at the figure that slept so gently in the narrow little bed, gave a rea.s.suring nod to March who had hung back in the doorway, a nod that invited him in; then turned away and covered his face with his hands just for one steadying instant until the shock of that abominable fear should pa.s.s away.

When he looked again March stood at the bedside gazing down into the girl's face. It was as if his presence there were palpable to her. She opened her eyes sleepily, smiled a fleeting contented smile and held up her arms to her lover. He smiled, too, and bent down and kissed her. Then as the arms that had clasped his neck slipped down he straightened, nodded to John and went back to the door. John followed and for a moment, outside the room, they talked in whispers.

”I'm going home now,” March said. ”To my father's house--not the other place. There's a telephone there if she wants me. But I'll call anyhow before I go to Ravina this afternoon.”

It was he, this time, who held out his hand.

”You can trust her with me in the meantime, I think,” John said as he took it, but the irony of that was softened by a smile. March smiled, too, and with no more words went away.

Her eyes turned upon John when he came back into the room, wide open but still full of sleep. When he stood once more beside her bed a pat of her hand invited him to sit down upon the edge of it.

”He really was here, wasn't he?” she asked. ”I wasn't dreaming?”

”No, he was here,” John said.

Her eyelids drooped again. ”I'm having the loveliest dreams,” she told him. ”I suppose I ought to be waking up. What time is it?”

”It's still very early. Only about half past eight. Go back to sleep.”

”Have you had breakfast? Pete's wife, out in the garage, will come in and get it for you.”

”When I feel like breakfast, I'll see to it that I get some,” he said, rising.

Once more she roused herself a little. ”Stay here, then, for a while,”

she said. ”Pull that chair up close.”

When he had planted the easy chair in the place she indicated and seated himself in it she gave him one of her hands to hold. But in another minute she was fast asleep.

And that, you know, was the hottest, most intolerable sting of all. He was sore, of course, all over. He had been badly battered during the last four days. Some of those moments with March down-stairs had been like blows from a bludgeon. But his daughter's sleepy attempt to concern herself about his breakfast and the perfunctory caress of that slack unconscious hand had the effect of the climax of it all.

She'd just been through the crisis of her life. She'd been down chin-deep in the black waters of tragedy (he didn't yet know, he told himself, what the elements of the crisis were nor the poisonous springs of the tragedy) and all her father meant to her was a domestic responsibility, some one that breakfast must be provided for!

He managed to control his release of her hand and his rising from his chair so that these actions should not be so brusk as to waken her again and, leaving the room, went down to his own.

That was the way with children. They remained a part of you but you were never a part of them. Mary having awakened for her lover, smiled at him, been rea.s.sured by his kiss, had been content to drop off to sleep again.

Her father didn't matter. Not even his derelictions mattered.