The Return of the Prodigal Part 33

"I thought I could afford a rose or two. But it seems I couldn't."

"You? You can afford anything--anything. All the same----"

"Well, if I can afford to sit with you, out here, at a quarter past ten, on this old heathenish piazza, I suppose I can."

"All the same----" he insisted.

She meditated again.

"All the same, if it wasn't those roses, I can't think what it was."

"Dear lady, it wasn't the roses. You are so deadly innocent I think I ought to tell you what it was."

"Do," she said.

"It was, really, it was seeing you here, walking by yourself. It's so jolly late, you know."

She drew herself up. "An American woman can walk anywhere, at any time."

"Oh, yes, of course, of course. But for ordinary people, and in Latin countries, it's considered--well, a trifle singular."

She smiled.

"You puzzle me," he said. "Just now you seemed perfectly aware of it. And yet----"

"_And_ yet?" she raised her eyebrows.

"And yet, well--here you are, you know."

"Here I am, and here I've got to stay, it seems. Well--before that?"

"Before that?"

"Before this?" She tapped her foot, impatient at the slow movement of his thought. "Up there in the hotel?"

"Oh, in the hotel. I suppose it was seeing you with----"

It was positively terrible, the look with which she faced him now.

But his idea was that he had got to help her (hadn't she helped him?), and he was going through with it. It was permissible; it was even imperative, seeing the lengths, the depths, rather, of intimacy that they had gone to.

"Those two," he said. "They don't seem exactly your sort."

"You mean," said she, "they are not exactly yours."

She felt the shudder of his unspoken "Heaven forbid!"

"I suppose," she continued, "if a European man sees any woman alone in a hotel with two men whom he can't size up right away as her blood relations, he's apt to think things. Well, for all you know, Mr. Tarbuck might be my uncle and Mr. Bingham-Booker my half-brother."

"But they aren't."

"No. As far as blood goes, they aren't any more to me than Adam. You have me there."

There was a long pause which Thesiger, for the life of him, could not fill.

"Well," she reverted, "Mr. Whoever-you-are, I don't know that I owe you an explanation----"

"You don't owe me anything."

"All the same I'm going to give you one, so that next time you'll think twice before you make any more of your venerable European mistakes. It isn't every woman who'd know how to turn them to your advantage. Perhaps you've seen what's wrong with Mr.

Bingham-Booker?"

He intimated that it was not practicable not to see. "If I may say so, that makes it all the more unfitting----"

"That's all you know about it, Mr.----"

"Thesiger," he supplied.

"Mr. Thesiger. That boy had to be taken care of. He was killing himself with drink before we came away. He'd had a shock to his nerves, that's what brought it on. He was ordered to Europe as his one chance. Somebody had to go with him, somebody he'd mind, and there wasn't anybody he _did_ mind but me. I've known him since he was a little thing in knickerbockers, that high. So we fixed it that I was to go out and look after Binky, and Binky's mother--he's her only son--was coming out too, to look after me. We cared for appearances as much as you do. Well, the day before we sailed her married daughter was taken sick, in the inconsiderate way that married daughters have, and she couldn't go. And, do you know, there wasn't a woman that could take her place. They were afraid, every one of them, because they knew." She lowered her voice to utter it.

"It makes him mad."

"My dear lady, it was a job for a trained nurse."

"Trained nurse? They couldn't afford one. And we didn't want a uniform hanging around and rubbing it into the poor boy and everybody else that he was an incurable dipsomaniac."

"But you--_you_?"

"It was my job. You don't suppose I was going back on them?"

She faced him with it, and as he looked at her he took the measure of her magnificence, her brilliant bravery.

"Going back on _him_? Poor Binky, he was so good and dear--except for that. You never saw anything so cute. Up to all sorts of monkey-shines and beautiful surprises. And then"--she smiled with a tender irony--"he gave us _this_ surprise." From her face you could not have gathered how far from beautiful his last had been. "I was going to see that boy through if I had to go with him alone. I said to myself there are always people around who'll think things, whatever you do, but it doesn't matter what people who don't matter think. And then--Mr. Tarbuck wouldn't let me go alone. He said I'd have to have a man with me. A strong man. He'd known me--never mind how long--so it was all right. I don't know what I'd have done without Mr. Tarbuck."

She paused on him.

"That man, whom you don't think fit for me to have around, is--well--he's the finest man I've ever known or want to know. He does the dearest things."

She paused again, remembering them. And Thesiger, though her admiration of Tarbuck was obscurely hateful to him, owned that, fine as she was, she was at her finest as she praised him.

"Why," she went on, "just because Binky couldn't afford a good room he gave him his. He said the view of the sea would set him up better than anything, and the garage was all the view _he_ wanted, because he's just crazy on motors. And he's been like that all through.

Never thought of himself once."

"Oh, didn't he?" said Thesiger.

"Not once. Do you know, Mr. Tarbuck is a very big man. He runs one of the biggest businesses in the States; and at twenty-four hours'

notice he left his big business to take care of itself, and came right away on this trip to take care of me."

"Is he taking care of you now?"

"What do you mean?"