Part 21 (2/2)

I _know_ he will, if I ask him.” But really she was not as sure as she said. She did not know Papa so very well, after all. She had very little idea what he would feel or say about anything. And then everything depended on the way things turned out...!

They stood there in the smoky dusk of the station, a long ray of suns.h.i.+ne thick with golden motes striking the ground at their feet.

They still said very little, Marise not daring to talk for fear of making a mistake, for fear that she would not remember just what and how much Mlle. Hasparren knew. The music-teacher held the girl's slim fingers close. Marise answered their pressure with a nervous fervor, inexpressibly grateful to the other, loving everything about her from her steady face and kind, shadowed eyes, to her heavy, badly-cut shoes, dusty now, which would be dustier later after they had trudged along the hot white road at Mida.s.soa. Never, so long as she lived, was she able to forget how Mlle. Hasparren had looked to her, when she came quietly into the salon and lifted her up from Jeanne and said in a plain matter-of-fact way as though nothing were the matter but Jeanne's sickness, that they must get a doctor and probably Jeanne wasn't as sick as she looked. She had just taken Marise by the hand and showed her how to go on living ... when it seemed to Marise that she had come to the end.

They heard the train whistle shriekingly in the distance, and the somnolent porters roused themselves. Marise tightened her hold on the strong fingers which held hers. Her heart ached with longing, with confusion. Suppose Papa did not come ... what _would_ she do? But suppose he did ... wouldn't it be impossible not to make mistakes, not to forget what you were to say and what you weren't?

But when the train came in, and Marise saw at the other end of the long platform her father's ma.s.sive bulk heavily descending from a compartment, and saw his eyes begin to search the crowd for her face, all her confusion melted away in a great burst of relief.... Papa was there, something of her very own in the midst of all those strangers!

Her heart almost broke with its release from tension.

And yet before she ran to meet him, she put her arms around the music-teacher and kissed her hard on both swarthy cheeks.

III

Then she ran with all the speed of her long legs, and flung herself upon Papa's broad chest and tried to put her arms around him, as she had around Mile. Hasparren, and began to cry on Papa's great shoulder. How good it was to feel him, to feel him so entirely as Papa always felt! It would not have seemed like Papa if there were not more of him than she could get her arms around.

Her tears, her agitation gave Papa such a turn that he set his satchels down hastily and looking alarmed, shook her a little, and asked what had happened to Maman.

In the hurry and noise and bustle of the crowd it was easier than Marise had feared to get over that first moment when Papa must be told. It all came out straight, just what she had planned to tell him, that nothing had really happened to Maman, she wasn't sick or anything only she had had a terrible nervous shock, had seen somebody killed right before her eyes, and it had pretty nearly driven her wild.

”Oh!” said Papa, evidently relieved, and caring as little as Marise had about the person who had been killed. He picked up his satchels again (by this time the porters at the Bayonne station were resigned to his strange mania for carrying his own hand-baggage), and said, ”Well, yes, that's too bad! I remember I saw a brakeman killed once, and it made me pretty sick, too.”

They walked out of the station together. Not two minutes had pa.s.sed since his arrival, and already Marise's joy that he had come, had faded to a frightened sense that he had not come at all, that he was still very far away, that he would never really come, as he used to.

And yet Jeanne had been right of course; whatever else she did, she must not tell Papa.

”When did it happen?” asked Papa now, as they turned the corner and were finally escaped from the last of the clamorous cab-drivers, who had not yet accepted, as the porters had, the eccentricities of the American gentleman.

As they crossed the bridge, Marise told him the version she had prepared, the version Jeanne had presented. She had had a good deal of practice in saying something different from what she thought, and she got through this without any hesitation or mistake. But every word of it set her further away from Papa, raised a wall between them, the wall of things she knew and Papa must never know.

”Well, to be sure,” said Papa, when she finished, ”you certainly have had goings-on, for sure.”

”Oh, Papa,” went on Marise earnestly, ”you _will_ have Jeanne taken care of! It was when she was working for us, she got her paralysis. _Don't_ you feel we ought to--for always, for always? It was for us....”

”Oh, as to that,” said Papa, ”anybody of Jeanne's age, who rustles around as Jeanne does, is apt to get a stroke, whether she was working for us or not. It might have happened just as easily in her own home.”

Marise's heart went down.

Papa added, with a change of tone, ”I don't like her lying very well, but the old woman has been awfully good to you, Molly, awfully good, more like your grandmother than the cook, and I guess we'll see that she's taken care of, all right.”

Marise squeezed his arm hard, and said nothing. After all, wall or no wall, Papa was there, good old Papa, so broad and solid, her very own Papa; somebody who, even if he didn't understand much of what went on, would look out for them all, Maman, Jeanne, herself.

IV

Papa went in at once to see Jeanne and told her through Marise--for Jeanne had never learned to understand his brand of French--that he would see that she was well taken care of till she recovered. Jeanne contrived with her one living hand and her eyes, to convey her respectful thanks, and to conceal everything else which Marise knew she must be thinking.

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