One Man in His Time | Page 5

fault--even the fact that I was
born!"

Shocked out of his conventional manner, he stared at her in silence, and
the pigeon, feeling the strain of his grasp, fluttered softly against his
overcoat. What was there indeed for him to do except stare at a lack of
reticence, of good-breeding, which he felt to be deplorable? His fine
young face, with its characteristic note of reserve, hardened into
sternness as he remembered having heard somewhere that the girl's
mother had been killed or injured when she was performing some
dangerous act at a country fair. Well, one might expect anything, he
supposed, from such an inheritance.
"May I help you?" he asked with distant and chilly politeness.
"Oh, can't you wait a minute?" She impatiently thrust aside his offer. "I
must get my breath again."
It was plain that she was very angry, that she was in the clutch of a
smothered yet violent resentment, which, he inferred with reason, was
directed less against himself than against some abstract and impersonal
law of life. Her rage was not merely temper against a single human
being; it was, he realized, a passionate rebellion against Fate or Nature,
or whatever she personified as the instrument of the injustice from
which she suffered. Her eyes were gleaming through the web of light
and shadow; her mouth was trembling; and there was the moisture of
tears--or was it only the glitter of ice?--on her round young cheek. And
while he looked, chilled, disapproving, unsympathetic, at the vivid
flower-like bloom of her face, there seemed to flow from her and
envelop him the spirit of youth itself--of youth adventurous, intrepid,
and defiant; of youth rejecting the expedient and demanding the
impossible; of youth eternally desirable, enchanting, and elusive. It was
as if his orderly, complacent, and tranquil soul had plunged suddenly
into a bath of golden air. Vaguely disturbed, he drew back and tried to
appear dignified in spite of the fluttering pigeon. He had no inclination
for a flirtation with the Governor's daughter--intuitively he felt that
such an adventure would not be a safe one; but if a flirtation were what
she wanted, he told himself, with a sense of impending doom, "there
might be trouble." He didn't know what she meant, but whatever it was,
she evidently meant it with determination. Already she had impressed

him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as
"wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly,
alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of
unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held
his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt. He felt vaguely
troubled. Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was
winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought. The
noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable
distance of empty space. Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores
the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes. And both the empty
space and the ashen sky seemed to be not outside of himself, but a part
of the hidden country within his mind.
"You were at the ball," she burst out suddenly, as if she had been
holding back the charge from the beginning.
"At the ball?" he repeated, and the words were spoken with his lips
merely in that objective world of routine and habit. "Yes, I was there. It
was a dull business."
She laughed again with the lack of merriment he had noticed before.
Though her face was made for laughter, there was an oddly conflicting
note of tragedy in her voice. "Was it dull? I didn't notice."
"Then you must have enjoyed it?"
"But you were there. You saw what happened. Every one must have
seen." Her savage candour brushed away the flimsy amenities. He
knew now that she would say whatever she pleased, and, with the
pigeon clasped tightly in his arms, he waited for anything that might
come.
"You pretend that you don't know, that you didn't see!" she asked
indignantly.
As she looked at him he thought--or it may have been the effect of the
shifting light--that her eyes diffused soft green rays beneath her black
eyelashes. Was there really the mist of tears in her sparkling glance?

"I am sorry," he said simply, being a young man of few words when the
need of speech was obvious. The last thing he wanted, he told himself,
was to receive the confidences of the Governor's daughter.
At this declaration, so characteristic of his amiable temperament, her
anger flashed over him. "You were not sorry. You know you were not,
or you would have made them kinder!"
"Kinder? But how could I?" He felt that her