The Emigrant Trail Part 22

CHAPTER III

The next morning Susan could not help stealing inquiring looks at Lucy.

Surely the partic.i.p.ant in such a nocturnal adventure must bear some signs of it upon her face. Lucy had suddenly become a disturbing and incomprehensible problem. In trying to readjust her conception of the practical and energetic girl, Susan found herself confronted with the artifices of a world-old, feminine duplicity that she had never before encountered, and knew no more of than she did of the tumult that had possession of poor Lucy's tormented soul. Here was the heroine of a midnight rendezvous going about her work with her habitual nervous capability, dressing the children, preparing the breakfast, seeing that Bella was comfortably disposed on her mattress in the wagon. She had not a glance for Zavier. Could a girl steal out to meet and kiss a man in the moonlight and the next morning look at him with a limpid, undrooping eye as devoid of consciousness as the eye of a preoccupied cat?

The standards of the doctor's daughter were comparative and their range limited. All she had to measure by was herself. Her imagination in trying to compa.s.s such a situation with Susan Gillespie as the heroine, could picture nothing as her portion but complete abas.e.m.e.nt and, of course, a confession to her father. And how dreadful that would have been! She could feel humiliation stealing on her at the thought of the doctor's frowning displeasure. But Lucy had evidently told no one.

Why had she not? Why had she pretended not to like Zavier? Why? Why?

Susan found her thoughts trailing off into a perspective of questions that brought up against a wall of incomprehension above which Lucy's clear eyes looked at her with baffling secretiveness.

It was a warm morning, and the two girls sat in the doctor's wagon.

Lucy was knitting one of the everlasting stockings. In the heat she had unfastened the neck of her blouse and turned the edges in, a triangle of snowy skin visible below her sunburned throat. She looked thin, her arms showing no curve from wrist to elbow, the lines of her body delicately angular under the skimpy dress of faded lilac cotton.

The sun blazing through the canvas cast a tempered yellow light over her that toned harmoniously with the brown coating of freckles and the copper burnish of her hair. Her hands, vibrating over her work with little hovering movements like birds about to light, now and then flashing out a needle which she stabbed into her coiffure, were large-boned and dexterous, the strong, unresting hands of the frontierswoman.

Susan was lazy, leaning back on the up-piled sacks, watching the quick, competent movements and the darts of light that leaped along the needles. Before they had entered the wagon she had decided to speak to Lucy of what she had overseen. In the first place she felt guilty and wanted to confess. Besides that the need to give advice was strong upon her, and the natural desire to interfere in a matter of the heart was another impelling impulse. So she had determined to speak for conscience, for friendship, for duty, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility, for curiosity.

But it was a hard subject to approach, and she was uncomfortable.

Diplomacy had not been one of the gifts the fairies gave her when they gathered at her cradle. Looking at the quivering needles she tried to think of a good beginning, and like most direct and candid people concluded there was no better one than that of the initial fact, before the complicating intrusion of inference:

"I woke up in the middle of the night last night."

Lucy knit unmoved.

"The moonlight was as bright as day. Out beyond the shadow where my tent was I could see the weeds and little bunches of gra.s.s."

"How could you see them when you were in your tent?" This without stopping her work or raising her head.

Susan, feeling more uncomfortable than ever, answered, her voice instinctively dropping, "I got up and looked out of my tent."

She kept her eyes on the busy hands and saw that the speed of their movements slackened.

"Got up and looked out? What did you do that for?"

The time for revelation had come. Susan was a little breathless.

"I heard people whispering," she said.

The hands came to a stop. But the knitter continued to hold them in the same position, a suspended, waiting expectancy in their att.i.tude.

"Whispering?" she said. "Who was it?"

"Oh, Lucy, you know."

There was a pause. Then Lucy dropped her knitting and, raising her head, looked at the anxious face opposite. Her eyes were quiet and steady, but their look was changed from its usual frankness by a new defiance, hard and wary.

"No, I don't know. How should I?"

"Why, why"--Susan now was not only breathless but pleading--"it was you."

"Who was me?"

"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."