Hills of Han 24

Hills of Han 24

“Are you unwilling to answer them?”

 

“Such personal questions as that last one--yes.”

 

“Why?”

 

“You have no right to ask it.”

 

“Oh!” Mrs. Boatwright considered. “Hmm!” She controlled her temper and

framed her next remark with care. This slip of a girl was unexpectedly

in fiber like Griggsby Doane. There was no weakness in her quiet

resistance, no yielding. Perhaps she was strong, after all. Though she

looked soft enough; gentle like her mother. Perhaps, even, she was

a person, of herself. This was a new thought. Mrs. Boatwright drew a

parallelogram, then painstakingly shaded the lines.

 

“We mustn’t misunderstand each other, Betty,” she said. “In your

father’s absence, I am responsible for you. This man has appeared

rather mysteriously. His business is not clear. The tao-tai asked Mr.

Boatwright to look him up, for it seems he hasn’t even an interpreter.

He has just been here. They’ve gone for an audience with the provincial

judge. Mr. Boatwright has asked him to come back here for tiffin. Which

was rather impulsive, I’m afraid....” She paused; started outlining

an octagon. “I may as well come out with it. Mr. Boatwright told me a

little of what happened last evening--”

 

“Of what happened But nothing--”

 

“If you please! Mr. Boatwright is not a particularly observant man

in these matters, but he couldn’t help seeing that there is something

between you and this Mr. Brachey.... Now, since you see what is in my

mind, will you tell me why he is here?”

 

During this speech Betty stopped fingering the crimson fringe. She stood

motionless, holding the portfolio still against her side. A slow color

crept into her cheeks. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak.

 

“Very well, if you won’t answer that question, will you at least tell me

something of what you do know about him?”

 

“I know very little about him,” said Betty now, in a low but clear

voice, without emphasis.

 

“I must try to make you understand this, my dear. Here the man is.

Within the hour we are to sit down at tiffin with him. It is growing

clearer every minute that Mr. Boatwright’s suspicion was correct--

 

“You have no right to use that word!”

 

“Well, then, his surmise, say. There _is_ something between you and this

man. Don’t you think you’d better tell me what it is?”

 

“There is nothing--nothing at all--that I need tell you.”

 

“Is there nothing that you ought to tell your father?”

 

“You can not speak for him.”

 

“I stand in his place, while he’s away It is a responsibility I must

accept. You say you know very little about the man?”

 

Betty bowed.

 

“You met him on the ship, by chance?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Do you know any of his friends?”

 

“No.”

 

“Anything of his past?”

 

Betty hesitated. Then, as the woman glanced keenly up, she replied:

 

“Only what he has told me.”

 

“Do you know, even, whether he is a married man?”

 

Another long silence fell. Betty stood as quietly as before, looking out

of frank brown eyes at the sunlit courtyard and the gate house beyond

where old Sun Shao-i, seated on a stool, was having the inside of his

eyelids scraped by an itinerant barber.

 

“Yes,” Betty replied.

 

“You mean--?”

 

“I know that he _is_ married.”

 

2

 

Betty, as she threw out this bit of uncompromising truth, was stirred

with a thrill of wilder adventure than had hitherto entered her somewhat

untrammeled young life. The situation had outrun her experience; she was

acting on instinct. There was a sense of shock, too; and of hurt--hurt

that Mrs. Boatwright could look, feel, so forbidding. Her firm face,

now pressed together from chin to forehead, wrinkled across, squinting

unutterable suspicions, stirred a resistance in Betty’s breast that for

a little time flared into anger.

 

There was no telling what Mrs. Boatwright felt. Her frown even relaxed,

after a moment. The outbreak of moral superiority that Betty looked for

didn’t come. Instead she said:

 

“How did you learn this?”

 

“He told me.”

 

“Oh, he told you?”

 

“Well, he wrote a letter before he--went away.”

 

“Oh. he went away!”

 

“Yes. He went. Without a word. I didn’t know where he was.”

 

“When was that?”

 

“When we landed at Shanghai.”

 

“Hardly three weeks ago. He’s here now. Tell me--he wouldn’t have gone

off like that, of course, leaving such an intimate letter, unless a

pretty definite situation had arisen.”

 

Betty was silent.

 

“Will you tell me what it was?”

 

“No.”

 

“Then--I really have a right to ask this of you--will you give me your

word not to see him until your father returns, and then not until you

have laid it before him?”

 

Silence again. The fringed lids fluttered. A small hand reached for the

crimson fringe, slim fingers clung there.

 

Betty’s thoughts were running away. She felt the situation now as a form

of torture. That grim experienced woman must be partly right, of course;

Betty was still so young as to defer mechanically to her elders, and

she had no great opinion of herself, of her strength of character or her

judgment. She thought of the boys at home, who had been fond of her.

... She thought of Harold Apgar, over there in Korea. He was clean,

likable, prosperous; and he wanted to marry her. It really would

solve her problems, could she only feel toward him so much as a faint

reflection of the glow that Jonathan Brachey had aroused in her. But

nothing in her nature answered Harold Apgar. For that matter--and this

was the deeply confusing thing--she could not formulate her feeling for

Brachey. She couldn’t admit that she loved him. The thought of giving

her life into his keeping--one day, should he come to her with clean

hands; should he ask--was not to be entertained at all. But she couldn’t

think of him without excitement; and that excitement, last night and

to-day, was the dominant fact in her life. She had no plans in which he

figured. She was vaguely bent on forgetting him. During the night she

had regretted her promise to meet him once more alone. Yet she had given

that promise. Given the same situation she would--she knew with a touch

of bewilderment that this was so--promise again.

 

Betty looked appealingly at Mr. Boatwright. Then, meeting with no

sympathy, she drew up her little figure.

 

“You said he was coming here for tiffin, Mrs. Boatwright?”

 

“Yes.” The woman glanced out at the courtyard. “Any moment.”

 

“Then I shan’t come into the dining-room.” And Betty turned to leave the

room.

 

“Just a moment! Am I to take that as an answer? Are you promising?”

 

Hetty turned; hesitated; then, suddenly, impulsively, came across the

room.

 

“Mrs. Boatwright,” she said unsteadily--her eyes were filling--“would

it do any good for me to talk right out with you? Probably I do need

advice.” She faltered momentarily, shocked by the __EXPRESSION__ on that

nearly square face. “Oh, it isn’t a terribly serious situation. It

really isn’t. But that man is honest. He has led an unhappy, solitary

life...”

 

Her voice died out.

 

“But you said he was _married!_” cried Mrs. Boatwright explosively.

 

“Yes, but--”

 

“‘But! But!’ Child, what are you talking about?”

 

There was nothing in Betty’s experience of life that could interpret to

her mind such a point of view as that really held by the woman before

her. She had no means of knowing that they were speaking across a

gulf wider and deeper perhaps than has ever before existed between two

generations; and that each of them, quite unconsciously, was an extreme

example of her type. She turned again.

 

It was a commotion out at the gate house that arrested her this time.

She felt that curious excitement rising up in her heart and brain. Old

Sun was springing up from the barber’s stool, with his always great

dignity brushing that public servitor aside. Then Brachey appeared,

followed by Mr. Boatwright.