"Now sleep," she murmured. "There's nobody in the house and you can get a good long rest."
Keegan shut his eyes. A blissful enervation stole over him. His heart felt grateful. She was like a mother might be. Everyone had a mother except him.
"You're so kind," he sighed.
He had known Fanny for several months only and had never talked to her alone before. But now it seemed to him she was his oldest and most intimate friend. Because she understood. He thought of her as a companion of his better self. The warmth of her lap soothed him.
Unaware, he dropped into a half doze.
The man's head lying heavily against her body began to stir her senses.
She made certain first that he was not pressing himself against her. No, he was merely lying naturally. A tenderness grew in her heart. She murmured to herself, "Poor boy, poor boy."
This wasn't quite as it had been in the kitchen that evening. The murmur continued as her face grew flushed and she breathed unevenly. She wanted to stretch and sigh.
Keegan stirred. A fear came that he realized her sensations. He was playing possum. No. She watched his eyes open and noted their stare of filmy tenderness.
"You're so sweet," he whispered.
She smiled pitifully at him and said, "Rest. Just rest. I feel so sorry for you."
In fact, imposed upon the excitement which the pressure of his head against her aroused, was a feeling of Samaritan pity. However, she wondered without displacing this emotion of altruistic concern for the young man, how far she dared go. She wished that his hands would touch her but they would have to stand up for that.
"Oh!"
She moved Keegan's head gently away.
"I thought I heard someone."
Slipping to her feet she stared eagerly toward the door. Keegan straightened himself. He looked at her drowsily.
"It's no one," she smiled. Her eyes covered him with tender interest. He thought of some picture of a saint--Saint Cecelia or someone like that.
"Why don't you go up in George's room?" she asked.
She gave him her hand as if to assist him in a comradely way to rise. He stood up slowly.
"You don't know what you've done for me," he began, "you're so different ... so good."
She smiled and made a pretense of assisting him further by passing her arm gently around him.
"I don't know what it is," he murmured. He stopped. His heart was hurting him with longing. He was unclean. But this beautiful saint would cleanse him, purify him. She was a part of life he desired--the clean things. But he was afraid. How could he after last night, how could he dare? She would certainly misunderstand if he touched her. She would think he was a scoundrel.
"Fanny," he whispered.
She looked at him with intensely tender eyes as a mother might regard a forgiven child. He embraced her, his hands resting only lightly on her back.
"Forgive me," he mumbled. "But everything's so rotten. I feel like such a cad after what I've done. You ... you make me almost happy again."
His mind was pleasantly fogged. He was thinking of himself as a despicable sinner receiving mysterious absolution.
She said nothing but let herself come closer. She was adroit and he remained unaware that she had pressed herself tautly against him. He was concerned entirely with the purity of his caress. He read in her eyes and flushed face a forgiveness, an absolution. Her grip on him that had grown firm was the grip of a woman raising him out of the Hell in which he had wallowed. His senses, deadened by debauch, failed to detect the pressure of her clinging.
She could dare. An intensity came slowly into her nerves. She would like to move, to crush herself against him. But she managed to restrain herself. She began to weep.
"Don't," he whispered. "You mustn't. I'm ... I'm not as bad as all that."
She managed to say, "Oh ... I feel so sorry for you. It just hurts me to ... to think of you like that. Promise me you'll never again....
Please.... Promise me.... Promise me...."
Her words, despite her, grew wild. She raised her eyes feverishly and, tightening her arms, pressed herself to him. The man's harmlessness had betrayed her. She continued to weep, "Promise me ... you'll never ... be bad like that again...."
Her emotion reaching its depth sent a delicious sense through her. She embraced him for a moment. In the receding fog of her satisfied impulse she heard him answering, tears in his voice.
"You're so sweet.... So wonderful. Oh, forgive me.... I'll never be bad again.... Forgive me...."
4
Judge Percival Smith was a fastidious gentleman who boasted of his age as a contrast to his virility.
"Sixty-two," he pronounced impressively. And he would wait for people to look at him in amazement, fortunately unaware of the fact that they had thought him at least seventy.
His wife had died when he was forty-six. She had never managed to understand him, chiefly because he had remained polite to her through eighteen years of marriage. She had grown to regard him with awe.
Her friends always referred to him as a gentleman--a gentleman of the old school. This was because he had a deep voice and enunciated clearly and professed a consistent preference for the days when men were men and women were women.
His friends mistook the clarity of his enunciation for a clarity of thought--an error which found social vindication in the fact that he had been on the bench nine years. Aside from his consistent preference, his views on current issues were also those of a gentleman. Why, it was difficult to determine. But he supplied their identity himself by clinching his arguments with the question, "I don't see, sir, how a gentleman can think otherwise."
He was often considered old fashioned. But he was admired for this. In discussing religion he would say:
"I am not one to quibble with my Maker or with any of His holy decisions. I believe absolutely in the gospel of infant damnation. A religion with loopholes is not a religion. Either there is a God or there isn't. If there is and you accept Him then you accept Him. You do not argue with Him. I don't see, sir, how a gentleman can think otherwise."
Concerning women he would say:
"Women represent the finer things of life. Not for them the turmoil and strife of economic battle. Their function in the scheme of things is obvious, sir. They were placed in the world by a wise Maker in order to bring sweetness, purity and light to bear upon the strivings of man. A woman's hearthstone is her altar. No, they are not the equal of man.
They are his complement. Man is gross. Woman is fine and sweet. I do not believe in any of these disgusting ideas which seek to lower her from the altar she now occupies in the eyes of all gentlemen."
When he delivered himself of these utterances he managed always to give to them the certainty of a man who was pronouncing judgments. He was admired for this certainty. People who felt doubts in their minds were always pleased to hear the Judge make pronouncements. They felt that it was impossible that a man who spoke so clearly, whose eye looked so unflinchingly at one and whose manners were so perfect, could be wrong.
He might not be quite as modern as some folks but he knew what he was talking about. He was the stentorian and impressive interpreter to them of a world they understood. The ideas which flourished in this world were in the main dead or dying. But this fact only lent a further impressiveness to them and to him.
People who sought to argue with Judge Smith usually ended by stuttering and growing red-faced. They felt as they talked and watched his blue eyes narrowing and his lips tightening, that they were talking themselves outside of the pale. His silence became an excommunication.
They read ostracism in his frown and began to fumble for words, trying to propitiate him in one breath while presenting their side of the case to him in another. But he was not to be deceived by this ruse. He would sit poised and grimly attentive like a man judiciously enduring the presence of blasphemy but under great emotional strain. When they concluded, it was frequently unnecessary for him to offer counter arguments. His opponents felt their defeat in the knowledge of his superiority, not as a thinker, but his superiority as a man of inviolable standards, his superiority as a gentleman.
In eighteen years of close contact his wife had never penetrated the shell of certitude and personal elegance within which the judge moved.
During their hours of intimacy he revealed himself as a man of normal passions. But even during these he was solicitous, unbending and a gentleman.