He was startled, having forgotten that she was there, forgotten that this was anything but one of the sick, silent evocations which blackened so many hours for him.
"Great Scott! Hetty, you're freezing to death," he cried, helping her roughly to her feet. "Why under the sun didn't you _say_ you were getting cold?"
She did not intimate that she was shaken by anything but a physical chill. Stiff and bent, clinging to his great arm, unable to stop the nervous chattering of her teeth, she hobbled back to the house beside him.
The light from the fire on the hearth set them miles apart, as she had known it would. His face closed shut. He would never mention all this to her again. He was irritated that he had spoken. He blamed her because he had spoken. But she cared less than nothing whether she were blamed or not. As soon as she was able to control the nervous trembling of her hands and lips and head, she asked, "How much does Marise know?"
He said impatiently, "I don't know. I haven't any idea. I thought perhaps _you_ might have. Why _else_ do you suppose I told you about it?"
"What do you think?" she persisted.
"Well, I don't see how she could. That music-teacher had gone directly to be with her, and stayed with her practically every minute I wasn't, and I know she'd never tell her anything, nor let anybody else. But you never know. You never know. There are a million underground ways--in France especially. You find out everything you ever know through the back of your head somehow, or by putting two and two together that nobody meant you to. Servants--gossip--though, thank God, Jeanne had a stroke of paralysis just then, that kept her from saying a word till after we had left Bayonne. If Jeanne had been able to talk, I'd have been _sure_ that Marise had heard forty times more than there was to know. Damn Jeanne! and yet she'd have died to get Marise a new dress or something good to eat, any day! I don't see how Marise _could_ have heard anything. And of course, if she didn't--least said, soonest mended. But if she did, it's a dead sure thing she got it all twisted, and I suppose she ought to have it straightened out."
His old cousin broke in with a rush, "Well, I think you'd better tell her," and felt instantly that this was not at all the answer he had wished for. "You don't want to do it," she said.
"Oh, I never want to do anything," he admitted. "It's always the easiest way."
"The easiest way lands you in some pretty hard places," she observed.
He made no comment on this, but his silence did not save him from her further going on, "Look where it landed you with Flora."
He was stirred to a moment of heat, "What are you talking about, Hetty?
By God, I never refused Flora anything she wanted. If you call _that_ the easiest way!"
She flared up in a momentary impatience at his denseness, but wasted no words on an issue no longer vital.
"Well, I think you'd better tell Marise," she repeated stubbornly.
He set this on one side for a moment as irrelevant, and said, "All I want to know from you is whether you've ever seen a sign in her to make you think she had heard anything. Did you ever notice when she speaks of her mother ... or whether she doesn't speak?"
She scorned, as he knew she would, coloring the truth to win a point, "No, I never did," she stated honestly.
"Well then, that's all I wanted to know. I know you'd have seen it, if it were there, she's been so much with you."
"But I think you ought to tell her," she persisted.
"Why, under the Heavens, _why_?" he asked. "Why put ideas in her head, if she's perfectly all right?"
"I think everybody ought to know about everything," she answered sweepingly, "and they're not perfectly all right unless they do. At least, if she _has_ heard anything, she ought to know that you don't blame Flora, that you don't think there was anything but talk. You could talk it over with her, get it out into the light."
"It would be poisoning her mind against her mother to mention it."
"I don't believe," Cousin Hetty held to her point steadily, pale, very much in earnest, "I don't believe that the truth can poison anybody's mind."
"Well, I believe in using ordinary horse-sense about everything," he said conclusively, with a peremptory accent.
Cousin Hetty fell back from this brute assertion of his authority.
"You'd made up your mind what to do before you ever spoke to me," she told him, not without bitterness.
"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 glass 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 XXXVII
Paris, May, 1905.
"Hola ... p-s-st! Allen!" called Marthe Tollet, as Marise passed through the glass-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 nobody 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 classes. "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 mass 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. Nobody 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 passion of sobbing.
"Why, you poor kid!" said Marise compassionately. She hadn't thought it was as serious as all _that_!