Glory of Youth | Page 2

you asked her to stay with me after mother died. She loves our old things, the mahogany and the banjo clock, and the embroidered peacocks, and the Venetian heirlooms that belonged to Dad's family. But I hate them."
"Hate them--why?"
"Because, oh, you know, because Dad treated mother so dreadfully. He broke her heart."
His practiced eye saw that she was speaking tensely.
"I wish you'd get me a cup of tea," he said, suddenly. "I'm just from the sanatorium. I operated on a bad case--and, well, that's sufficient excuse, isn't it, for me to want to drink a cup of tea with you?"
She was busy in a moment with her hospitality.
"Oh, why didn't you tell me? And you're wet." Her hand touched his coat lightly as she passed him.
"The rain came so suddenly that I couldn't get the window of my car closed; it's an awful storm.
"And now," he said, when she had brought the tea on an old Sheffield tray, and had set it on a little folding table which he placed between them on the hearth, "and now let's talk about it."
"Please don't try to make me stay----"
"Why not?"
"Because, oh, because you can't know what I suffer here; it isn't just because I've lost mother, but the people--they all know about her and about Dad, and they aren't nice to me."
"My dear child!"
"Perhaps it's because father was a singer and an Italian, and mother came of good old Puritan stock. They seem to think she lowered herself by marrying him. They can't understand that though he was unkind to her, he belonged to an aristocratic Venetian family----"
"It's from those wonderful women of Venice, then, that you get that hair. Do you remember Browning's:
"'Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old.'"
There was no response to his thought in her young eyes.
"I've never read Browning," she said, negligently, "and I hate to think of 'dear dead women.' I want to think of live things, of bright things, of gay things. It seems sometimes as if I should die here among the shadows."
She was sobbing now, with her head on the table.
"Bettina," the doctor bent over her, "poor child, poor little child."
"Please let me go," she whispered.
"I can't keep you, of course. I wish I knew what to do. I wish Diana were here."
"Diana?"
"I forgot that you did not know her. She has been away for two years. She's rather wonderful, Bettina."
The girl raised her head. The man was gazing straight into the fire. All the eager light that had made his face seem young had gone, and he looked worn and tired. Bettina had no worldly intuitions to teach her the reason for the change a woman's name had wrought, and so absorbed was she in her own trouble that she viewed the transformation with unseeing eyes.
"What could she do if she were here?" she asked with childish directness.
"She would find some way out of it--she is very wise." He spoke with some hesitation, as a man speaks who holds a subject sacred. "She has had to decide things for herself all her life--her father and mother died when she was a little girl; now she is over thirty and the mistress of a large fortune. She spends her winters in the city and her summers down here by the sea--but for the past two years she has been staying in Europe with a widowed friend who was a schoolmate of hers in Berlin."
"When is she coming back?"
Out of a long silence, he answered, "I am not sure that she will come back. Her engagement was announced last fall--to a German, Ulric Van Rosen--she is to be married in June."
The fact, to him so pregnant of woeful possibilities, meant little to Bettina.
"Of course if she's not here, she can't do anything--and anyhow most people don't care to do practical things to help, do they?"
She looked so childish, so appealing, so altogether exquisite and young in her black-robed slenderness, that he answered her as he would have answered a child.
"It's too bad that the world should hurt you."
"But I'm going to do wonderful things in the city."
"Wonderful things--poor little girl----"
As he brought his eyes back from the fire to her face, he seemed to bring his thoughts back from an uneasy reverie.
"You ought," he said, "to marry----"
The color flamed into the girl's cheeks. "Mother was always saying that, in those last days. But I hated to have her; it seemed so dreadful to talk of marriage--without love. I know she didn't mean it that way, poor darling! She married for love and her life was such a failure. But I couldn't--not just to get married, could I--not just to have some one take care of me?"
He stood