Part 3

“Really! It’s years since I’ve even looked into it. I should love to read some of ‘Marius’ with you, sometime, Petra. Why don’t we? I’ll take it to bed with me to-night, skim through as far as you have gone to refresh my memory, and then, to-morrow, we will go on with it together. Petra, yes! You come to my church with me to-morrow morning, early, and we’ll read ‘Marius.’ Where did you leave the book?”

Wild color flaming in Petra’s cheeks took Lewis by surprise. Again that hesitation before answering her stepmother’s simple question. “I’m afraid I left it in the woods—somewhere. I’ll find it before people begin coming to-night. I might go and look now?”

“Oh, no. Not now. Of course not. At least, it depends on what copy you took. Was it your father’s specially bound copy?”

“No.—I don’t think so.”

“My darling! You must know what your book looked like! If it was my Modern Library edition, of course it doesn’t matter a bit,—though it has my notes in it! Where did you find the one you used? In the library or my sitting room?”

Petra’s eyes met Lewis’. She found his look completely, absorbedly hers. She took a grip on that absorption, steadied herself by it, and answered Clare. “I don’t remember where I found it, but it hasn’t your notes. It’s not your copy. And it’s not Father’s. It’s my own.”

“But it must be your father’s or mine. There are only those two copies of Pater in the house. I don’t see—”

But suddenly Clare did appear to see and broke off. Indeed, an expression of seeing all too well had passed wavelike over her quicksilver face. She turned to Lewis as if to distract attention from what she had suddenly seen, and perhaps, too, from Petra’s hot cheeks, and asked him whether he had read her husband’s latest novel. He had and began talking about it. But he wanted to take Petra’s hand, where it lay on her chair arm, and close his down on it with strength. He did not care about what he surmised was a mere silly schoolgirl fib. If she wanted to impress Clare and Dick—even himself—with the seriousness of her reading, what of it! At least, she did not lie subtly, through the medium of fleeting quicksilver changes of facial expression. Hardly. The cheek he barely allowed himself to see was one flame—as if an angel had lied.

Tea and a protracted discussion of Lowell Farwell’s novels came to an end in time, and Lewis at last could turn to Petra with: “I want to hear something about Teresa. Or must I say Miss Kerr?—But I’m not going to ‘Miss’ you, Petra, if you don’t mind. Until to-day I have never thought of one of you girls without the other. Shall I meet her too, again? I hope so.”

But something was wrong, terribly wrong. This, surely, was not a question Petra would need to make up an answer for! But she was not even trying to make up an answer. She was looking, almost wildly, toward Clare.

Clare laughed. “Why, Petra! You never told me you and Doctor Pryne had mutual friends! Teresa—?”

“Yes. Teresa Kerr.” Lewis spoke shortly, dryly, because of his complete astonishment at Petra’s ill-concealed panic.

“Oh!” Clare remembered. Suddenly, it seemed. “That must have been the maid. Petra, I wonder what has become of Teresa? You were David and Jonathan once, you two. You were a funny child, my dear, when I first knew you in Cambridge—and so beautifully democratic! But I’m afraid we can’t tell you anything about the girl, Doctor Pryne. The whereabouts of vanished domestics is as much a problem as that of all safety pins. Richard! Do you remember Felix Fairfax, our inimitable butler! I wonder what has become of him! My husband made me get rid of him, Doctor Pryne, because he helped himself to one of my photographs and had it in his room. I wrote him a recommendation that was a marvel, though. Anybody who couldn’t read between the lines deserved what they got....”

Petra, who until this moment had tasted nothing, now took up her cold cup of tea and drank thirstily, while Dick and Clare became mildly hilarious over a growing volume of anecdotes concerning the inimitable Felix Fairfax, the flirtatious, vanished and banished butler, whom Lewis’ question about Teresa had brought to mind.

Lewis was silent. He was not looking at Petra, but he knew instinctively when she lost her strange, inexplicable fear, and relaxed. A baby, with a pretty young nurse in its wake, was running down the lawn, toward the tea table. Petra had been the first to notice the invasion and welcomed the diversion it brought. Then Clare, following Petra’s eyes, saw the baby.

“Little Sophia!” she cried, quickly on her feet, while anecdotes of Felix Fairfax hung broken off in mid-air. She ran forward a few steps and knelt on the grass, her arms spread wide to receive her little daughter. In that gracious moment Clare was like nothing in the world but a dancing Greek figure on some lovely old vase—all quicksilver, grace and charm. Dick’s face glowed appreciatively. Even Lewis, for that minute, was aware of Clare’s loveliness.

The baby, however, made a swooping detour to avoid the wide-flung, slender arms of the kneeling mother and plunged straight for Petra, her big half-sister. Petra held her off, at arm’s length. “You’ve been in the brook. You’re dirty. You’re muddy. Don’t touch my dress. No!”

The rebuffed cherub commenced to wail but Petra did not relent and draw her into her arms. “No! No!” She repeated it. “Mustn’t spoil Petra’s beautiful, clean dress. No. _I’m not going to pick you up._”

Then Clare swept down upon them and snatched the baby up. Two muddy palms immediately made their mark on the shoulders of her white frock. But she lifted the delicious little hands and kissed them, one after the other, gravely—delicately. Her eyes, over the baby’s golden head, looked at Petra now with healthy, open accusation, and she held the delicious little body more and more tightly to her, while small wet shoes muddied her skirt.

Clare, looking away from Petra at last, met Doctor Pryne’s puzzled eyes. “I’m going to take little Sophia up to the nursery, if you’ll excuse me for only a few minutes,” she said. “Anyway, I wanted you to see our guest house—the view at its back. You get the river there. Petra will show you. And this is a good time—before Lowell comes along.—Richard, you may come up with us and see what a nice supper a nice cook has sent up to a nice nursery for an adorable baby! Only first we’ll help a nice nurse to wash these precious, dirty paws.... No, Richard, I want to carry her myself. Truly. You don’t mind, Doctor? I always run up to the nursery at little Sophia’s supper time, even in the middle of quite formal parties. But it only takes a few minutes.”

Her eyes, on Lewis’, were replete with meaning. “Now is your time,” they said. “Do make a beginning at helping me understand this strange girl. You can’t deny she is lacking in normal responses. Help me!”

“Good-by, sister,” Petra murmured, and went near enough to lay her cheek for just a breath against her little sister’s hair. “I couldn’t let you spoil my pretty dress, honey. But I do love you!”

At this belated gesture, Clare’s beseeching look at Lewis transformed itself to one of ironic amusement.

“If you are really interested in the view, Doctor Pryne, it’s across the road. We can go through the kitchen garden. That is shorter than going back through the house.”

The kitchen garden, through which Petra led him, was a jungle of drooping, white-starred blackberry canes. They came out of it through a little wicket gate and crossed the intimate, idle road to the guest house opposite.

“Clare won’t let them cut the grass here,” Petra explained. “Any objection to wading?” Lewis had none and followed the girl around the side of the little house and came to an uncovered piazza at the back. Ignoring the several chairs arranged with an eye to the view there, they sat down side by side on the edge of the piazza boards. From under their feet wide sweeps of June fields surged away in many-colored rippling waves. White and yellow daisies, red and white clovers, golden buttercups, orange devil’s-paintbrush, and sparkling sun-soaked grass dazzled Lewis’ eyes against the view of river and blue hills beyond.

“Paradise will be a June field like this,” he thought, “with the saints reunioning while the angels dance.” He was thinking of Fra Angelico’s “Last Judgment,” the detail of the left corner.—“Petra and I seem to have arrived somewhat ahead of time, though,—and, God knows, without our crowns! This girl! She is a breaker of promises, a vain poser, a liar, a traitor to friendship, and a repulser of innocent babyhood. Clare made her do her paces. Just didn’t she, though!”

But his next thought was more like shock than thought. “Why need her hands be as lovely as her face? Or _is_ this Paradise!” They were clasped about her knees, strong, sun-tanned hands, with long, squarish-tipped fingers. Angelic hands!

Lewis remarked, “It’s nice here.”

Petra agreed, “Yes, isn’t it!”

Lewis lighted a cigarette and Petra pulled a grass blade to make a bracelet, bending forward from lithe hips.

“You thought I was horrid to my baby sister, didn’t you, Doctor Pryne?” she asked bluntly. “I wasn’t, not really. But I couldn’t let her spoil my dress, could I? This is the first time I’ve worn it. It would have to be dry-cleaned if I had picked her up. And things are never so nice again after they are dry-cleaned. Besides, I can’t afford it.”

The dress she had so ruthlessly protected against a bewitching baby was smooth silk, the color of heavy cream. Its only decoration was a flight of embroidered gold and brown bees. They flew up one full sleeve from wristband to shoulder, across the back of the neck and down the other body-side of the frock to the lower edge of the hem. It was—taken by itself—a lovely frock, and if it had not been so utterly Petra’s own, belonged so completely to her shapely young body and coloring, even Lewis—no connoisseur in women’s clothes—would have noticed its lovely detail before this.

Petra dropped her grass bracelet—half made—into the grass and picked up the hem of her skirt, folding it back. “Look,” she said, “how beautifully finished it is.”

The flight of bees had been carried on, in all its careful perfection, to the upper edge of the hem on its inner side, where it would never show. It was as if the embroiderer had loved her work too well to realize when she had done enough.

“Clare’s dress was nothing at all,” Petra was saying. “It didn’t matter what little Sophia did to it. Besides, if Clare ruined a dozen dresses, it wouldn’t matter. She could buy dozens more.... So it wasn’t fair, was it?”

“No. It was hardly fair,” Lewis agreed absently.

Petra jumped up. The bee-embroidered hem of her skirt brushed through the flowers in the deep grass. She came closer to Lewis, stood there before him in the long grass.

“Could you spare me a cigarette?” she asked.

She had not smoked at the tea table and Lewis had taken it for granted she was that rare thing, a modern girl who did not smoke. Apologetically, he offered her his opened cigarette case and struck a match for her on the piazza boards. (The grateful patient should have given Lewis a lighter along with the case!) But he might as well have kissed her as have held the light for her,—with his face like that. Even before the girl saw Lewis’ face, she felt what was there for her to see. Her eyelids swept up, to verify her suddenly alert instinct, and for just that instant blue reticence, under Lewis’ own startled eyes, leapt into blue flame.... Petra drew a little away, trying to smile and utterly failing. Lewis lighted a fresh cigarette for himself.

Petra puffed at hers for a minute only and then it went the way the bracelet had gone, only she bent to press out the spark—firmly, securely—into damp grass roots. Returning to her place, she clasped her hands around her knees again and explained.

“Really I don’t know how to smoke, not gracefully. You shouldn’t have watched me! You made me feel hypocritical, watching me like that. But I do smoke, sometimes. Almost every night. One or two cigarettes after dinner with Father. So I wasn’t pretending, you see....”

She went on, after a minute, “You asked me about Teresa, remember? I’ll tell you now. I couldn’t say a word with Clare listening. But Clare lied about her. She knows perfectly well that Teresa wasn’t our maid—not in the sense that that Fairfax person was Clare’s butler, I mean. Teresa was nothing in the world but our guardian angel,—father’s, Marian’s, and mine. And she is my best friend.”

Lewis said coolly, “Yes, of course! I knew that. I saw that it was so, that afternoon in Cambridge. And when Mrs. Farwell said that Teresa was gone out of your life like a lost safety pin I knew it couldn’t be true. But _why_ did she say it? And why did you let her say it?”

“Oh, Clare wasn’t lying when she said that. She thought, I mean, that it was true enough. It was in saying Teresa was our maid, putting her with Felix Fairfax,—that was the lie. But so far as Clare knows, Teresa is gone—just as absolutely as any disappearing safety pin. I wish I were as elusive,—that Clare had mislaid me too. But she has a use for me. She thinks she has, anyway, and she actually pays me a wage of two thousand dollars a year to live here at Green Doors and be a model stepdaughter.”—Petra flashed a defiant look at Lewis and added, “I’m different from Clare’s other servants, you see. I don’t adore her!”

The girl’s hands, Lewis noticed, were no longer clasping her knees. They were gripping them. But he gave no sign that he was conscious of her anger and her rebellion.

“Will you just listen to that bird,” he said. “Bobolinks are usually cheerful, of course. But this fellow is carrying it beyond reason, it seems to me! He might have a peephole into heaven,—the way he sounds.” For a bobolink, apparently beside himself with rapture, was circling and swooping, swooping and circling, singing his jetty little throat to bursting. His nest must be hidden somewhere in the grass not a dozen yards from where they sat on the piazza’s edge.

Petra tilted her head to see the speck of song against the sunlight. She stayed silent until the rapture ended and the heaven-glimpser sank home. She even waited a minute or two beyond that sudden silence before she said, but calmly now, her twined fingers relaxing their grip, “My friend, Teresa, is like that bobolink’s song. At least, she’s as happy as that. Jolly as that. I’ll tell you about her, Doctor Pryne. I am glad that you think of us together. I adore her, of course. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she lived there till she was fifteen. Her father and mother kept a day school for boys. But Teresa had four sisters and they all went to the boys’ school. There were three brothers. Eight children in Teresa’s family, you see....”

_Chapter Five_

Lewis listened, without looking at Petra. As she told him about Teresa, they were both watching for another flight of the bobolink, their eyes focused on the delicately waving tide of grass above the hidden nest. Hearing Petra’s voice, this way, without looking at her, Lewis learned as much about her as she was telling him about Teresa; for her voice had none of the reticence of her gentian eyes nor the stubborn power of her rounded chin. It was a gentle voice, clipped and ingenuous. Above all ingenuous. What her face had lost with childhood her voice had strangely taken on. It had a listening, attentive quality. Lewis, in the practice of his profession, had gradually acquired a habit of separating voices from their possessors. He had discovered that while the face and the very pose and carriage of a person may deceive, the human voice simply cannot. It is the materialization of personality into sound waves.

“... Eight children. Teresa’s mother had taught the fifth grade in a public school in Cambridge. Teresa’s father was Scotch. They met when Mr. Kerr was over here working for a doctor’s degree at Harvard. He came from Edinburgh. They fell so much in love that they couldn’t wait for the degree but got married and went to Edinburgh and started the day school. But it didn’t pay except just in the beginning. By the time all eight children were there in the Kerr family, they began to be really poor. The Kerr children themselves were half the school, you see. Teresa was the oldest. When Teresa was fifteen, they gave up the school in Edinburgh and returned to Cambridge. Teresa’s father got all the tutoring he could do. He was a magnificent teacher. They lived in a five-room apartment on Lawrence Street, all crowded in, but soon they moved to Boston and had a bigger place, in the top floor of a tenement on Bates Street.

“Teresa’s mother and father taught the children as they had done in Scotland. Only her mother did most of it, of course, because her father was away tutoring all day. But the Kerrs had their own ideas about education and didn’t want the children to go to public school. They wanted them to learn Greek and Latin, you see, almost in their cradles. But Teresa did go to High School. She was fifteen when they came to America and her father let her go into the Senior Class in the High School just so she could get a diploma that June. After school she helped with the housework and helped with the children’s lessons too.

“That January two of Teresa’s sisters died, the two who came next her in age. They had T B anyway, the doctor said, but they actually died of pneumonia. Very suddenly. They had been Teresa’s playmates. The rest of the children were more like her babies, she took so much care of them. But Teresa stayed out of school only one week when they died. She needed her diploma, you see, because she was going to go on through college and become a teacher.

“... Well, but when spring came ... something terrible happened.... It is too terrible to tell. But if Teresa bore it, I guess you can bear hearing it, Doctor Pryne. Shall I tell you?”

“Yes,” Lewis urged. “I want to hear,” but added with quick compunction, “if it doesn’t hurt you too much, Petra,”—and was utterly astonished by the devastating look Petra gave him. But her scorn was for herself.

“Hurt me too much!” she exclaimed. “I only wish it could hurt me! Really hurt me! It is too terrible that one person had to bear it all alone. And Teresa, of all people! When she is so happy, so jolly—and loves God more than all the rest of the people I know put together love Him! It was to her it happened. _All I’m doing is tell it!_

“The twenty-third of April, the Principal of the High School sent for Teresa to come to his office before she went home. He told her that she was to graduate with very highest honors and that he had got a Radcliffe scholarship for her. It was Teresa’s birthday. She was sixteen. Teresa could hardly wait to get home to tell her mother all the Principal had said. It would be Teresa giving a birthday present to her mother, you see. Mothers should have presents even more than the children they have borne should have them, Teresa thinks. For the mothers remember the birthdays and the children can’t.... She ran as fast as she could, the minute she got out of the subway. She didn’t care if people stared at a grown-up girl racing through the streets. She wanted so to get there with the wonderful news. There was a crowd of people at the end of her street held back by ropes. The air was full of smoke....”

Again the bobolink soared, cascading rapture. Petra stopped telling about Teresa’s sixteenth birthday and listened and watched with Lewis. But this time she did not wait for the music to sink and fall away home; after a breath or two she went on, her voice of necessity raised a little, indenting itself through the bobolink’s Gloria.

“The whole building where the Kerr family lived was burned down to the pavement. Somebody told Teresa that everybody had escaped except a woman who lived in the top-story corner tenement and her six children. They had all been burned alive. They came to the windows too late for the fire ladders to reach them. They must have been asleep when the fire started and waked too late. The alarm was sounded a little after eight. Yes ... Teresa had left her mother and all the children sleeping deeply. She and her father had got breakfast together and gone out with infinite care not to wake them,—she to school, he to his work in Cambridge. The baby had had croup during the night, you see, and the whole family had been disturbed by it. Even the younger children. Teresa’s mother had made a tent with sheets over the crib, and boiled a kettle in it, and toward dawn it was over and the baby was sleeping. The police had learned there were six children in the family and that was why they said six were burned. But Teresa, you see, had gotten up early. She and her father. They had been at infinite pains—I told you that—not to wake the others. _Infinite pains._ The baby was sleeping naturally, breathing softly when they stole out.

“It was a policeman who told Teresa about how the mother and ‘six’ children had come to the window. He had seen them himself.... But a priest shoved him one side. That was Father Donovan. He was their parish priest. The Kerrs were Catholic. Teresa is a Catholic. Teresa couldn’t pray. But Father Donovan’s praying was really hers. He said, ‘_My_ mother, _my_ brothers and sisters, _my_ baby brother. May perpetual light shine upon them.’ ... They gave Teresa brandy. In the rectory. They put it in hot tea. The housekeeper rubbed her feet and hands, while Father Donovan called up all the places her father might be. Father Donovan had thought the police had made certain when they said that all _six_ Kerr children had come to the window, and until Teresa got there, you see, he had no way of tracing her father. But now Teresa gave the names and addresses. Finally somebody said yes—Mr. Kerr was there. Father Donovan said, ‘Then keep him and don’t let him know anything until I come. I must tell him. Nobody else.’ But the people didn’t wait,—or something happened. I don’t know what. I can’t ask Teresa. Perhaps she doesn’t know. Whether he died of the shock or whether he killed himself—thinking all were burned.... All that Teresa said was ‘Father Donovan was in time to give him absolution.’

“Father Donovan boarded Teresa with his housekeeper’s sister. And she went on and got her diploma and graduated from High School with very highest honors in June. Nobody came to her graduation for by then Father Donovan was dying of cancer. He had not told Teresa until he had to. When he found he couldn’t go to the graduation, you see, he told her. She took her diploma right to him. She ran to the rectory the minute she was out. He blessed her and was as delighted and proud as her mother would have been, Teresa says, and her father, and her brothers and sisters. He told her that his death would not be even an interruption to his prayers for her goodness and happiness, and he asked her to pray for him always, all her life. He died early the next morning....