With the words and the acceptance of their meaning which Jeanne's
passionate eyes thrust upon her, Marise sank for many years into another
plane of feeling and saw all the world in another perspective, very ugly
and grim. That was the way Jeanne saw things. With all her immature
personality, with the pitiably insufficient weapons of a little girl,
Marise had fought not to accept Jeanne's way of seeing things. That had
been the real cause of their quarrels. But now the weapons were struck
from her hands. Jeanne had been right all the time it seemed. That was
the way things really were. Now she knew. With a long breath she
admitted her defeat.
"No, _specially_ not Papa," she whispered.
II
It was four o'clock that afternoon. They had had something to eat,
talking quietly about indifferent things, and they had found Papa's
address in Bordeaux and sent a telegram to him, before Marise thought to
ask, "But, Mademoiselle, how is it you can be out of your class-room
to-day?" She had often known the teacher to drag herself to work when
she was scarcely able to stand, and knew how the stern discipline of her
profession frowned on an absence from duty.
"Oh, I arranged this morning to have a substitute come. I heard--I heard
your maman was not well, and I knew your papa was not here, and I wasn't
sure that any of your maman's friends might be able to come to look out
for you."
As a matter of fact, Marise never saw one of her mother's callers again.
That evening, Anna brought up a blue telegram from Papa, which since it
had been sent in English, as Papa always insisted on doing, was
perfectly unintelligible, reading:
"Com inga nmorninjtrain ta kigo adca rof Maman."
Papa.
Marise who had with Maman puzzled over many other similar telegrams from
Papa, made out "morning-train" and that was enough.
The doctor had sent in a nursing sister to take care of Jeanne during
the night, and Isabelle had gone off to a tenement near the Porte
d'Espagne where some relations of hers lived and had brought back an old
cousin to help her with the work and marketing and to sleep with her in
the other apartment.
Mlle. Hasparren slept in the folding-bed beside Marise's so that every
time Marise, with a great scared start, realized anew that what had
happened was not a bad dream, she felt the other's hand reaching for
hers in the dark, and holding firm. She said very little and Marise was
glad of that, but the clasp of her muscular musician's hand pulled
Marise out of the black pit many times that night.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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