Rough-Hewn Part 21

"No one--no one at all?" asked Marise, and then with a gasp, "Not even Papa?"

At this Jeanne's eyes leaped up to a hotter flame of intensity.

"No! no! no!" they cried to Marise. "No!"

Marise thought she understood, and hanging her head she said in a low shamed voice, "Oh, no, of course, I see."

With the words and the acceptance of their meaning which Jeanne's pa.s.sionate eyes thrust upon her, Marise sank for many years into another plane of feeling and saw all the world in another perspective, very ugly and grim. That was the way Jeanne saw things. With all her immature personality, with the pitiably insufficient weapons of a little girl, Marise had fought not to accept Jeanne's way of seeing things. That had been the real cause of their quarrels. But now the weapons were struck from her hands. Jeanne had been right all the time it seemed. That was the way things really were. Now she knew. With a long breath she admitted her defeat.

"No, _specially_ not Papa," she whispered.

II

It was four o'clock that afternoon. They had had something to eat, talking quietly about indifferent things, and they had found Papa's address in Bordeaux and sent a telegram to him, before Marise thought to ask, "But, Mademoiselle, how is it you can be out of your cla.s.s-room to-day?" She had often known the teacher to drag herself to work when she was scarcely able to stand, and knew how the stern discipline of her profession frowned on an absence from duty.

"Oh, I arranged this morning to have a subst.i.tute come. I heard--I heard your maman was not well, and I knew your papa was not here, and I wasn't sure that any of your maman's friends might be able to come to look out for you."

As a matter of fact, Marise never saw one of her mother's callers again.

That evening, Anna brought up a blue telegram from Papa, which since it had been sent in English, as Papa always insisted on doing, was perfectly unintelligible, reading:

"Com inga nmorninjtrain ta kigo adca rof Maman."

Papa.

Marise who had with Maman puzzled over many other similar telegrams from Papa, made out "morning-train" and that was enough.

The doctor had sent in a nursing sister to take care of Jeanne during the night, and Isabelle had gone off to a tenement near the Porte d'Espagne where some relations of hers lived and had brought back an old cousin to help her with the work and marketing and to sleep with her in the other apartment.

Mlle. Hasparren slept in the folding-bed beside Marise's so that every time Marise, with a great scared start, realized anew that what had happened was not a bad dream, she felt the other's hand reaching for hers in the dark, and holding firm. She said very little and Marise was glad of that, but the clasp of her muscular musician's hand pulled Marise out of the black pit many times that night.

Later on Marise fell into a real sleep, deep and unbroken, and when she woke up, much later than usual, to find Mlle. Hasparren all dressed, the folding-bed put away, the window open and the sunshine coming in, she found that she seemed to have grown stronger since yesterday, that the black pit was not so fathomless. She felt infinitely older and as though she would never laugh again. She lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling, thinking fixedly about what had happened, and found that she could endure it now without crying out or bursting into tears as she had done yesterday. She could stand up under her burden, because there was no other way. But she felt her shoulders bowed and aching with the weight.

Mlle. Hasparren heard her stir in bed, and sensed the awakened quality of the movement. She came to look anxiously down at her. Marise looked back and remembering that, so far as she knew, Mlle. Hasparren knew nothing beyond the surface of the happenings of yesterday and so might expect her to be able to smile, she produced a faint smile.

"I overslept," she said, in order to say something. "Has somebody brought your breakfast?"

"No, I waited for you," answered Mlle. Hasparren. "I'll ring for Isabelle now."

When Isabelle came, very self-important at taking Jeanne's place, she reported that the Sister said Jeanne had pa.s.sed a very good night and was perfectly comfortable, with no complications. "She says Jeanne may get all over it and be as good as ever. All old people have these seizures, she says," chattered Isabelle, setting down the tray and pouring out Marise's cafe-au-lait. She was full of her new dignity, and bustled off to give orders to her a.s.sistant, leaving Marise and Mlle.

Hasparren to eat their breakfast. Mlle. Hasparren did not seem to feel like talking much, and neither did Marise. She was trying to think what it was she was to tell Papa. She must remember now just what it was that everybody was to be told.

An hour later, as they went down the hall, on their way to the station to meet the morning train, they saw the salon as usual at that hour, the chairs pushed about, the rugs hanging over the window-sills, the fresh, clean, new morning sun streaming in through the wide-open windows on the familiar spectacle of Isabelle on her knees, a brush-broom in her hand reaching under the piano for dust. The alcove curtains were drawn back, the cheerful sunshine poured in, glittering on the dark polished wood of the desk, on the yellow-covered books, on the pretty little inlaid chair which stood beside the desk.

Was it only yesterday that Jeanne had flung her into that chair? She stood in the door, as she put on her hat, looking steadily at the alcove. No, that had been somebody else ... a little girl, a lucky, lucky little girl, who had no idea what things were like.

"Come, dear," said Mlle. Hasparren, looking at her watch.

It had been agreed since there were so few trains in and out of Bayonne and since as yet no news had been sent to Jeanne's family, that if Marise's father did come on the train from the north, Mlle. Hasparren would board it as he left it, and go on down to Mida.s.soa to tell the Amigorenas about their mother's illness. "But do tell them, Mademoiselle," Marise said over and over, anxiously, "that we will take care of Jeanne, that we will do everything for her that anybody could, that they needn't worry. I know Papa will see that she's taken care of.

I _know_ he will, if I ask him." But really she was not as sure as she said. She did not know Papa so very well, after all. She had very little idea what he would feel or say about anything. And then everything depended on the way things turned out...!

They stood there in the smoky dusk of the station, a long ray of sunshine thick with golden motes striking the ground at their feet.

They still said very little, Marise not daring to talk for fear of making a mistake, for fear that she would not remember just what and how much Mlle. Hasparren knew. The music-teacher held the girl's slim fingers close. Marise answered their pressure with a nervous fervor, inexpressibly grateful to the other, loving everything about her from her steady face and kind, shadowed eyes, to her heavy, badly-cut shoes, dusty now, which would be dustier later after they had trudged along the hot white road at Mida.s.soa. Never, so long as she lived, was she able to forget how Mlle. Hasparren had looked to her, when she came quietly into the salon and lifted her up from Jeanne and said in a plain matter-of-fact way as though nothing were the matter but Jeanne's sickness, that they must get a doctor and probably Jeanne wasn't as sick as she looked. She had just taken Marise by the hand and showed her how to go on living ... when it seemed to Marise that she had come to the end.

They heard the train whistle shriekingly in the distance, and the somnolent porters roused themselves. Marise tightened her hold on the strong fingers which held hers. Her heart ached with longing, with confusion. Suppose Papa did not come ... what _would_ she do? But suppose he did ... wouldn't it be impossible not to make mistakes, not to forget what you were to say and what you weren't?

But when the train came in, and Marise saw at the other end of the long platform her father's ma.s.sive bulk heavily descending from a compartment, and saw his eyes begin to search the crowd for her face, all her confusion melted away in a great burst of relief.... Papa was there, something of her very own in the midst of all those strangers!

Her heart almost broke with its release from tension.

And yet before she ran to meet him, she put her arms around the music-teacher and kissed her hard on both swarthy cheeks.

III

Then she ran with all the speed of her long legs, and flung herself upon Papa's broad chest and tried to put her arms around him, as she had around Mile. Hasparren, and began to cry on Papa's great shoulder. How good it was to feel him, to feel him so entirely as Papa always felt! It would not have seemed like Papa if there were not more of him than she could get her arms around.

Her tears, her agitation gave Papa such a turn that he set his satchels down hastily and looking alarmed, shook her a little, and asked what had happened to Maman.

In the hurry and noise and bustle of the crowd it was easier than Marise had feared to get over that first moment when Papa must be told. It all came out straight, just what she had planned to tell him, that nothing had really happened to Maman, she wasn't sick or anything only she had had a terrible nervous shock, had seen somebody killed right before her eyes, and it had pretty nearly driven her wild.

"Oh!" said Papa, evidently relieved, and caring as little as Marise had about the person who had been killed. He picked up his satchels again (by this time the porters at the Bayonne station were resigned to his strange mania for carrying his own hand-baggage), and said, "Well, yes, that's too bad! I remember I saw a brakeman killed once, and it made me pretty sick, too."

They walked out of the station together. Not two minutes had pa.s.sed since his arrival, and already Marise's joy that he had come, had faded to a frightened sense that he had not come at all, that he was still very far away, that he would never really come, as he used to.

And yet Jeanne had been right of course; whatever else she did, she must not tell Papa.

"When did it happen?" asked Papa now, as they turned the corner and were finally escaped from the last of the clamorous cab-drivers, who had not yet accepted, as the porters had, the eccentricities of the American gentleman.

As they crossed the bridge, Marise told him the version she had prepared, the version Jeanne had presented. She had had a good deal of practice in saying something different from what she thought, and she got through this without any hesitation or mistake. But every word of it set her further away from Papa, raised a wall between them, the wall of things she knew and Papa must never know.

"Well, to be sure," said Papa, when she finished, "you certainly have had goings-on, for sure."

"Oh, Papa," went on Marise earnestly, "you _will_ have Jeanne taken care of! It was when she was working for us, she got her paralysis. _Don't_ you feel we ought to--for always, for always? It was for us...."

"Oh, as to that," said Papa, "anybody of Jeanne's age, who rustles around as Jeanne does, is apt to get a stroke, whether she was working for us or not. It might have happened just as easily in her own home."

Marise's heart went down.

Papa added, with a change of tone, "I don't like her lying very well, but the old woman has been awfully good to you, Molly, awfully good, more like your grandmother than the cook, and I guess we'll see that she's taken care of, all right."

Marise squeezed his arm hard, and said nothing. After all, wall or no wall, Papa was there, good old Papa, so broad and solid, her very own Papa; somebody who, even if he didn't understand much of what went on, would look out for them all, Maman, Jeanne, herself.

IV

Papa went in at once to see Jeanne and told her through Marise--for Jeanne had never learned to understand his brand of French--that he would see that she was well taken care of till she recovered. Jeanne contrived with her one living hand and her eyes, to convey her respectful thanks, and to conceal everything else which Marise knew she must be thinking.