Part 37 (2/2)
”That isn't fair, I didn't know enough to make up my mind. You told me what I needed to know,” he answered.
”I wish I _could_ tell you what you need to know,” she flamed out at him.
But she evidently found it useless to try any longer, and sank again huddled in her low chair. He got up carelessly and shook himself to start the blood through his great frame, numbed by immobility. His eye was caught by the expression of the old woman's face as she looked up at him. He stood still, considering her, ”You're going to miss Marise,” he said.
She turned back hastily towards the fire, to hide the sudden trembling of her lips, and presently said in a dry voice, ”All I want is for her to have what is best for her.”
He agreed to this with relief, ”Sure! So do I. Poor kid. _She_ never asked to be born.”
Later, as he started up the stairs, his gla.s.s kerosene lamp in his hand, he said, ”You know, Hetty, as well as I do that it doesn't make any difference what we do, or don't do for her. She's got to take what's coming to her just like everybody else.”
His cousin looked down at the steady, commonplace little flame of her own lamp, ”I don't suppose I'll ever see her again,” she said in a low tone of profound sadness. But she added stoically, as she began to climb the stairs after him, ”Not that that makes any difference to anybody but me.”
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
Paris, May, 1905.
”Hola ... p-s-st! Allen!” called Marthe Tollet, as Marise pa.s.sed through the gla.s.s-covered verandah, on her way to the street door. In her haste to stop Marise, she used the abrupt surname hail which the girls thought so very chic and truly English, which the older teachers forbade as rude and barbarous, a typical manifestation of the crumbling down of civilized French ways under the onslaught of modern Anglo-Saxon roughness.
”Eh bien, the little Tollet, what is it?” asked Marise in the same vernacular, pausing in front of the concierge's door. Marthe left the Swedish ladder, where she was twisting her flexible young body in and out of the rungs, and coming up to Marise remarked casually, ”Oh, I just thought maybe you'd like to go to the dormitory and see that little compatriot of yours. She's crying like everything, la pauvre, and n.o.body can do a thing with her.”
”The pretty little girl with blonde hair?” asked Marise, somewhat vague as to the younger girls in the lower cla.s.ses. ”What's the matter with her?”
”A perfectly horrible attack of homesickness, they say. The English teacher is up there--she's the only one who can talk to her; but you know how likely the MacMurray will be to put balm on a sore heart, eh?
And you could make a wooden man split his sides laughing, once you get started. _You_ could cheer her up.”
Marise hesitated, looked in at the clock in the concierge's loge, and nodded. She started towards the door of the dormitory building, stopped and called back, ”O la, the little Tollet, what's her name?
”Eugenie,” said the other, ”Eugenie Mille.”
As she climbed the dark, winding, well-waxed stairs, Marise reflected that that didn't sound like an American name, and made a guess that, as had happened to her before, she would find that the ”American girl” was from Martinque, or Peru or Sa Paulo.
But it was English, sure enough, that Miss MacMurray was talking, as she bent over the sobbing blue-serge heap, on the narrow iron bed. She was saying helplessly, ”There now, it's verra har-rd, I know, I'm far from home, mysel',” patting the heaving shoulders with one hand, and anxiously looking at her watch. She was due at a private lesson in ten minutes, and a private lesson meant five irreplaceable francs.
She welcomed the tall American girl with relief, ”Ah, that's right, that's right, you'll know how to get her quieted down,” and fled before Marise could protest that she did not even know the homesick child.
Rather at a loss, and very unenthusiastically, Marise stood looking down on the crumpled, untidy bed, and the ma.s.s of disordered golden hair, noting the fineness of the tailored blue serge, and the excellently made small shoes. They were unmistakably North American in their shapeliness.
Nothing Peruvian or Brazilian about them!
What could you do for somebody who was homesick? She certainly did not know from experience. n.o.body had ever done anything for her. She sat down on the edge of the bed, laid her arm over the narrow shoulders, and said cheerfully, ”Hallo there, what's the matter? You'll run out of tears, if you aren't careful!”
At the sound of her voice the sobbing stopped abruptly. The girl on the bed started, dashed the floating brilliant hair from her face, and turned on Marise, blue eyes dimmed with tears. She looked exhausted by her pa.s.sion of sobbing.
”Why, you poor kid!” said Marise compa.s.sionately. She hadn't thought it was as serious as all _that_!
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