Part 35 (2/2)

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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 workmans.h.i.+p 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 d.a.m.n 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.”

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