One Man in His Time | Page 5

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 rage was making her unreasonable. "I didn't know you. I hadn't even been introduced to you." It was on the tip of his tongue to add, "and I haven't been yet--" but he checked himself in fear of unchaining the lightning. It was all perfectly true. He had not even been introduced to the girl, and here she was, as crude as life and as intemperate, accusing him of indifference and falsehood. And after all, what had