The Dust Flower Part 47

"Like yourself, Aunt Marion."

"Very well; like myself, if you will; but to a clear-thinking woman it's as obvious as daylight that her married sisters are partially demented. They may not know it; the partially demented never do. And it's no good telling them, because they don't believe you. I'm only saying it to you to warn you in advance. If you part with your reason, it's something to know that you do it of your own free will."

Once more Barbara confined herself to the case in hand. "Still, I don't believe every man is as trying as Rash Allerton."

"Not in his particular way, perhaps. But if it's not in one way then it's in another."

"Even he wouldn't be so bad if he could control himself. At the minute when he's tearing down the house he wants you to tell him that he's calm."

"If he didn't want you to tell him that it would be something equally preposterous. There's little to choose between men."

Barbara grew thoughtful. "Still, if people didn't marry the human race would die out."

"And would there be any harm in that? It's not a danger, of course; but if it was, would anyone in his senses want to stop it? Looking round on the human race to-day one can hardly help saying that the sooner it dies out the better. Since we can't kill it off, it's well to remember----"

"To remember what, Aunt Marion?"

Miss Walbrook reflected as to how to express herself cautiously.

"To remember that--in marrying--and having children--children who will have to face the highly probable miseries of the next generation--Well, I'm glad there'll be no one to reproach me with his being in the world, either as his mother or his ancestress."

"They say Rash's father and mother didn't want _him_ in the world, and I sometimes wish they'd had their way. If he wasn't here--or if he was dead--I believe I could be happier. I shouldn't be forever worrying about him. I shouldn't have him on my mind. I often wonder if it's--if it's love I feel for him--or only an agonizing sense of responsibility."

The door being open Walter Wildgoose waddled to the threshold, where he stood with his right hand clasped in his left. "Mr. Steptoe at Mr.

Allerton's to speak to Miss Barbara on the telyphone, please."

Barbara gasped. "Oh, Lord! I wonder what it is now!"

Left to herself Miss Walbrook resumed her scanning of the paper, but she resumed it with the faintest quiver of a smile on her thin, cleanly-cut lips. It was the kind of smile which indicates patient hope, or the antic.i.p.ation of something satisfactory.

"Oh!"

The exclamation was so loud as to be heard all the way from the telephone, which was in another part of the house. Miss Walbrook let the paper fall, sat bolt upright, and listened.

"Oh! Oh!"

It was like a second, and repeated, explosion. Miss Walbrook rose to her feet; the paper rustled to the floor.

"Oh! Oh!"

The sound was that which human beings make when the thing told them is more than they can bear. Barbara cried out as if someone was beating her with clubs, and she was coming to her knees.

She was not coming to her knees. When her aunt reached her she was still standing by the little table in the hall which held the telephone, on which she had hung up the receiver. She supported herself with one hand on the table, as a woman does when all she can do is not to fall senseless.

"It's--it's Rash," she panted, as she saw her aunt appear. "Somebody has--has killed him."

Miss Walbrook stood with hands clasped, like one transfixed. "He's dead?--after all?"

Barbara nodded, tearlessly. She could stammer out the words, but no more. "Yes--all but!"

In the flat at Red Point there was another and dissimilar breakfast scene. For the first time in her life Letty was having coffee and toast in bed. The window was open, and between the muslin curtains, which puffed in the soft May wind, she could see the ocean with steamers and ships on it.

The room was tiny, but it was spotless. Everything was white, except where here and there it was tied up with a baby-blue ribbon. Anything that could be tied with a baby-blue ribbon was so tied.

Letty thought she had never seen anything so dainty, though her experienced eye could detect the fact that nothing had really cost money. As an opening to the career on which she had embarked the setting was unexpected, while the method of her treatment was bewildering. In the black recesses of her heart Miss Henrietta Towell might be hiding all those feline machinations which Mrs. Judson Flack had led Letty to believe a part of the great world's stock-in-trade; but it couldn't be denied that she hid them well. Letty didn't know what to make of it. "There's quite a trick to it," Steptoe had warned her; but the explanation seemed inadequate to the phenomena.

Sipping her coffee and crunching her toast she was driven to ponder on the ways of wickedness. She had expected them to be more obvious. All her information was to the effect that an unprotected girl in a world of males was a lamb among lions, a victim with no way of escape. That she was a lamb among lions, and a victim with no way of escape, she was still prepared to believe; only the preliminaries puzzled her.

Instead of being crude, direct, indelicate, they were subtle and misleading. After twenty-four hours in Miss Towell's spare room there was still no hint of anything but coddling.

"You see, my dear," Miss Towell had said, "if I don't nurse you back to real 'ealth, him that gave you the thimble might be displeased with me."

It was not often that Miss Towell dropped an _h_ or added one; but in moments of emotion early habit was too strong for her.

Coming into the room now, on some ermine's errand of neatness, she threw a glance at Letty, and said: "You don't _look_ like a Rashleigh, do you, dear? But then you never can tell anything about families from looks, can you?"

It was her nearest approach as yet to the personal, and Letty considered as to how she was to meet it. "I'm not a Rashleigh--not really--only by--by marriage. Rashleigh isn't my real name.

It's--it's the name I'm going by in pictures."

"Oh!"

Miss Towell's exclamation was the subdued one of acquiescence. She knew that ladies in pictures often preferred names other than their own, and if Letty was not a Rashleigh it "explained things." That is, it explained how anyone called Rashleigh could be wandering about in this friendless way, though it made 'Enery Steptoe's intervention the more mysterious. It was conceivable that he might act on behalf of a genuine Rashleigh, however out at elbow; but that he should take such pains for a spurious one, and go to the length of sending the sacred silver thimble as a pledge, rendered the situation puzzling.

Schooled by her religious precepts to taking her duties as those of a minute at a time Miss Towell made no effort to force the girl's confidence, and especially since Letty, like most young people in trouble, was on her guard against giving it. So long as she preferred to be shut up within herself, shut up within herself she should remain. Miss Towell felt that, for the moment at least, her own responsibility was limited to making the child feel that someone cared for her.

At the same time she couldn't have been a lonely woman with a love-story behind her without the impulse to dwell a little longingly on the one romantic incident in her experience. Though it had never come to anything, the fact that it had once opened its shy little flower made a sweet bright place to which her thoughts could retire.

The references came spasmodically and without context, as the little white lady busied herself in waiting on Letty or in the care of her room.

"I haven't seen him since a short time after the mistress went away."

Letty felt herself coloring. Though not prudish there were words she couldn't get used to. Besides which she had never thought that Steptoe.... But Miss Towell pursued her memories.

"It always worried him that I should hold views different from his but I couldn't submit to dictation, now, could I, dear?"

Once more Letty felt herself awkwardly placed. The only interpretation she could put on Miss Towell's words referring to moral reformation on her hostess's part she said, as non-committally as might be: "He's a good deal of a stickler."

"He's been so long in a high position that he becomes--well, I won't be 'arsh--but he becomes a little harbitrary. That's where it was. He was a little harbitrary. With a mistress who allowed him a great deal of his own way--well, you can hardly blame him, can you, dear?"

Letty forced herself to accept the linguistic standard of the world.

"I suppose if she hadn't allowed him a great deal of his own way he'd have looked somewhere else."

"That he could easily have done. He had temptations enough--a man like him. Why, dear, there was a lady in Park Avenue did everything she could that wasn't positively dishonorable to win him away----"

"He must have been younger and better looking than he is now," Letty hazarded, bluntly.

"Oh, it wasn't a question of looks. Of course if she'd considered that, why, any foolish young fellow--but she knew what she would have got."