Read Ebook: Don't Marry; or Advice on How When and Who to Marry by Donovan James W

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Ebook has 58 lines and 2441 words, and 2 pages

Illustrator: F. R. Gruger

MANSLAUGHTER

BY ALICE DUER MILLER

ILLUSTRATED BY F. R. GRUGER AND WITH SCENES PROM THE PHOTOPLAY A PARAMOUNT PICTURE

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

First Printing, Oct., 1921 Second Printing, Oct., 1921 Third Printing, Nov., 1921 Fourth Printing, Nov., 1921 Fifth Printing, Dec., 1921 Sixth Printing, Jan., 1922 Seventh Printing, Feb., 1922

SHE FELT HIS HAND, FIRM AND CONFIDENT ON HER SHOULDER.

LYDIA LITTLE REALIZES WHAT A TEMPTATION SHE IS PLACING BEFORE EVANS.

O'BANNON BEGINS HIS INVESTIGATION OF THE THEFT.

IT WAS A VERY TERRIFYING MOMENT FOR LYDIA.

LYDIA HAD SEEN THE BRACELET AND SHRUNK FROM IT.

SHE FLUNG HERSELF FACE DOWNWARD ON THE SOFA AND SOBBED.

MANSLAUGHTER

Whenever she and Lydia had a scene Miss Bennett thought of the first scene she had witnessed in the Thorne household. She saw before her a vermillion carpet on a mottled marble stair between high, polished-marble walls. There was gilt in the railing, and tall lanky palms stood about in majolica pots. Up this stairway an angry man was carrying an angrier child. Miss Bennett could see that broad back in its heavy blue overcoat, and his neck, above which the hair was still black, crimsoning with fury and exertion. On one side of him she could see the thin arms and clutching hands of the little girl, and on the other the slender kicking legs, expressing passionate rebellion in every spasmodic motion. The clutching hands caught the tip of a palm in passing, and the china pot went rolling down the stairs and crashed to bits, startling the two immense great Dane puppies which had been the occasion of the whole trouble.

The two figures, swaying and struggling, went on up; for though the man was strong, a writhing child of ten is no light burden; and the stairs, for all their grandeur, were steep, and the carpet so thick that the foot sank into it as into new-fallen snow. Just as they passed out of sight Miss Bennett saw the hands of the child, now clenched fists, begin to beat on the man's arms, and she heard the clear, defiant young voice repeating, "I will keep them! I will!" The man's "You won't" was not spoken, but was none the less understood. Miss Bennett knew that when the heads of the stairs was reached the blows would be returned with interest.

Usually in the long struggle between these two indomitable wills Miss Bennett had been on Joe Thorne's side, coarse, violent man though he was, for she was old-fashioned and believed that children ought to obey. But this night he had alienated her sympathy by being rude to her--for the first and last time. He had come home after one of his long absences to the hideous house in Fifth Avenue in which he took so much pride, and had found these two new pets of Lydia's careening about the hall like young calves. He had turned on Miss Bennett.

"What the hell do you let her do such things for?" he had demanded, and Miss Bennett had answered with unusual spirit.

"Because she's so badly brought up, Mr. Thorne, that no one can do anything with her."

Lydia had stood by defiantly, glancing from one to the other, with a hand in the collar of each of her dogs, her face pale, her jaw set, her head not much above the sleek battleship-gray heads of the great Danes, her small body pulled first one way and then the other by their gambols. All the time she was saying over and over, "I will keep them! I will! I will!"

She hadn't kept them; she had lost that particular skirmish in the long war. Not till some years later did she begin to win; but whether she lost or won, Miss Bennett was always conscious of a rush of pity for the slim, black-eyed little girl thrusting her iron will so fearlessly against that of the man from whom she had inherited it.

And for the Lydia of to-day, now engaged in thrusting her will against the will of the world, Miss Bennett felt the same unreasoning pity--pity which rendered her weak in her own defense when any dispute arose between them. She and Lydia had been having a scene now; only a little scene--hardly more than a discussion.

Morson saw it clearly when he came in after luncheon to get the coffee cups, although a complete and decorous silence greeted his entrance. He saw it in the way in which his young employer was standing, as erect as an Indian, looking slantingly down her cheek at her companion. Miss Bennett was sitting on the sofa with her feet in their high-heeled satin slippers crossed, and she was slipping the rings nervously up and down her fine, thin fingers.

She was a small, well-made woman, to whom prettiness had come with her gray hair. The perfection of all her appointments, which might once have been interpreted as the vanity of youth, turned out to be a settled nicety that stood her in good stead in middle life and differentiated her at fifty-five--a neat, elegant little figure among her contemporaries.

The knowledge that he was interrupting a discussion did not hurry Morson any more than the faintest curiosity delayed him. He brushed up the hearth, turned a displaced chair, collected the cups on his tray and left the room at exactly the same pace at which he had entered it. He had known many scenes in his day.

As soon as the door closed behind him Miss Bennett said: "Of course, if you meant you don't want me to ask my friends to your house you are perfectly within your rights, but I could not stay with you, Lydia."

"You know I don't mean that, Benny," said the girl without either anger or apology in her voice. "I'm delighted to have you have anyone at all when I'm not here and anyone amusing when I am. The point is that those old women were tiresome. They bored you and you knew that they were going to bore me. You sacrificed me to make a Roman holiday for them."

Miss Bennett could not let this pass.

"Noble women, noble women, I have no doubt, but bores, and it makes me feel sick, literally sick, to be bored."

"Don't be coarse, Lydia."

"Sick--here," said Lydia with a sharp dig of her long fingers on her diaphragm. "Let's be clear about this, Benny. I can't stand having my own tiresome friends about, and I will not put up with having yours."

Lydia had come home after a morning of shopping in town. Disagreeable things had happened, only Benny did not know that. She had bought a hat--a tomato-colored hat--had worn it a block and decided it was a mistake, and had gone back and wanted to change it, and the woman had refused to take it back. There had been little consolation in removing her custom from the shop forever--she had been forced to keep the hat. Then motoring back to Long Island a tire had gone, and she had come in late for luncheon to find Benny amiably entertaining the two old ladies.

The very fact that they were, as she said, noble women, that their minds moved with the ponderous exactitude characteristic of so many good executives, made their society all the more trying to Lydia. She wearied of them, wearied, as Mariana in the Moated Grange. She had so often asked Benny not to do this to her and after all it was her house.

"Good heavens, was this a benevolent plot on your part to find me an interest?"

Miss Bennett looked dignified and a little stubborn, as if she were accustomed to being misunderstood, as if Lydia ought to have known that she had had a reason for what she did. As a matter of fact, she had no plan; she was not a plotter. That was one of the difficulties between her and Lydia. Lydia arranged her life, controlled her time and her surroundings. Miss Bennett amiably drifted, letting events and her friends control. She could never understand why Lydia held her responsible for situations which it seemed to her simply happened, and yet she could never resist pretending that she had deliberately brought them about. She began to think now that it had been her idea, not Mrs. Galton's, to get Lydia interested in prison reform.

"No one can be happy, Lydia, without an unselfish interest, something outside of themselves."

Lydia smiled. There was something pathetic in poor little ineffective Benny trying to arrange her life for her.

"I contrive to be fairly happy, thank you, Benny. I've got to leave you, because I have an engagement at Eleanor's at four, and it's ten minutes before now."

"Lydia, it's ten miles!"

"Ten miles--ten minutes."

"You'll be killed if you drive so recklessly."

"No Benny, because I drive very well."

"You'll be arrested then."

"Even less."

"How can you be so sure?"

That was something that it was better not to tell, so Lydia went away laughing, leaving Miss Bennett to wonder, as she always did after one of these interviews, how it was possible to feel so superior to Lydia when they were apart and so ineffectual when they were together. She always came to the same conclusion--that she was betrayed by her own fineness; that she was more aware of shades, of traditions than this little daughter of a workingman. Lydia was not little. She was half a foot taller than Adeline Bennett's own modest five-feet-two, but the adjective expressed a latent wish. Miss Bennett often introduced it into her descriptions. A nice little man, a clever little woman, a dear little person were some of her favorite tags. They made her bulk larger in her own vision.

The little daughter of the workingman ran upstairs for her hat. She found her maid, Evans, engaged in polishing her jewels. The rite of polishing Miss Thorne's jewels took place in the bathroom, which was also a dressing room, containing long mirrors, a dressing table, cupboards with glass doors through which Miss Thorne's bright hats and beribboned underclothes showed faintly. It was carpeted and curtained and larger than many a hall bedroom.

Here Evans, a pale, wistful English girl, was spreading out the jewelry as she finished each piece, laying them on a white towel where the rays of the afternoon sun fell upon them--the cabochon ruby like a dome of frozen blood, the flat, clear diamond as blue as ice, and the band of emeralds and diamonds for her hair flashing rays of green and orange lights. Lydia liked her jewelry for the best of all reasons--she had bought most of it herself. She particularly liked the emerald band, which made her look like an Eastern princess in a Russian ballet, and in her opinion exactly fitted her type. But her beauty was not so easily classified as she thought. To describe her in words was to describe a picture by Cabanel of The Star of the Harem--such a picture as the galleries of the second half of the nineteenth century were sure to contain--the oval face, the splendid dark eyes, the fine black eyebrows, the raven hair; but Lydia's skin was not transparently white, and a slight heightening of her cheek bones and a thrust forward of her jaw suggested something more Indian than Eastern, something that made her seem more at home on a mountain trail than on the edge of a marble pool.

As she entered, Evans was brushing the last traces of powder from a little diamond bracelet less modern than the other pieces. Lydia took it in her hand.

"I almost forgot I had that," she said.

Three or four years before, when she had first known Bobby Dorset, when they had been very young, he had given it to her. It had been his mother's, and she had worn it constantly for a year or so. An impulse of tenderness made her slip it on her arm now, and as it clung there like a living pressure the heavy feeling of it faintly revived a whole cycle of old emotions. She thought to herself that she had some human affections after all.

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