Part 22 (2/2)
”The woman--Lucy don't look at me like that, as if you didn't understand. I saw you, you and Zavier, wrapped in the blanket. You walked out into the moonlight and I _saw_.”
Lucy's gaze continued unfaltering and growing harder. Under the freckles she paled, but she stood her ground.
”What do you mean? Saw me and Zavier? Where?”
”Under the trees first and then you went out into the moonlight with the blanket wrapped round your shoulders.”
”You didn't see me,” the hardness was now in her voice. ”It was some one else.”
A feeling of alarm rose in the other girl. It was not the lie alone, it was the force behind it, the force that made it possible, that gave the teller will to hold her glance steady and deny the truth. A scaring sense of desperate powers in Lucy that were carrying her outside the familiar and established, seized her friend. It was all different from her expectations. Her personal repugnance and fastidiousness were swept aside in the menace of larger things. She leaned forward and clasped Lucy's knee.
”Don't say that. I saw you. Lucy, don't say I didn't. Don't bother to tell me a lie. What did it mean? Why did you meet him? What are you doing?”
Lucy jerked her knee away. Her hands were trembling. She took up the knitting, tried to direct the needles, but they shook and she dropped them. She made a sharp movement with her head in an effort to avert her face, but the light was merciless, there was no shade to hide in.
”Oh, don't bother me,” she said angrily. ”It's not your affair.”
Susan's dread rose higher. In a flash of vision she had a glimpse into the storm-driven depths. It was as if a child brought up in a garden had unexpectedly looked into a darkling mountain abyss.
”What are you going to do?” she almost whispered. ”You mustn't. You must stop. I thought you didn't care about him. You only laughed and everybody thought it was a joke. Don't go on that way. Something dreadful will happen.”
Lucy did not answer. With her back pressed against the roof arch and her hands clinched in her lap--she sat rigid, looking down. She seemed gripped in a pain that stiffened her body and made her face pinched and haggard. Under the light cotton covering her breast rose and fell.
She was an embodiment of tortured indecision.
Susan urged: ”Let me tell my father and he'll send Zavier away.”
Lucy raised her eyes and tried to laugh. The unnatural sound fell with a metallic harshness on the silence. Her mouth quivered, and putting an unsteady hand against it, she said brokenly,
”Oh, Missy, don't torment me. I feel bad enough already.”
There was a longer pause. Susan broke it in a low voice:
”Then you're going to marry him?”
”No,” loudly, ”no. What a question!”
She made a grab at her knitting and started feverishly to work, the needles clicking, st.i.tches dropping, the stocking leg trembling as it hung.
”Why, he's an Indian,” she cried suddenly in a high, derisive key.
”But”--the questioner had lost her moment of vision and was once again floundering between ignorance and intuition--”Why did you kiss him then?”
”I didn't. He kissed me.”
”You let him. Isn't that the same thing?”
”No, no. You're so silly. You don't know anything.” She gave a hysterical laugh and the bonds of her pride broke in a smothered cry: ”I couldn't help it. I didn't want to. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to go out and meet him and I went. I--” she gathered up the stocking and, needles and all, buried her face in it. It was the only thing she could find to hide behind. ”I'm so miserable,” she sobbed.
”You don't know. It's such a terrible thing first feeling one way and then the other. I'm so mixed up I don't know what I feel. I wish I was dead.”
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