Then she ran with all the speed of her long legs, and flung herself upon
Papa's broad chest and tried to put her arms around him, as she had
around Mile. Hasparren, and began to cry on Papa's great shoulder. How
good it was to feel him, to feel him so entirely as Papa always felt! It
would not have seemed like Papa if there were not more of him than she
could get her arms around.
Her tears, her agitation gave Papa such a turn that he set his satchels
down hastily and looking alarmed, shook her a little, and asked what had
happened to Maman.
In the hurry and noise and bustle of the crowd it was easier than Marise
had feared to get over that first moment when Papa must be told. It all
came out straight, just what she had planned to tell him, that nothing
had really happened to Maman, she wasn't sick or anything only she had
had a terrible nervous shock, had seen somebody killed right before her
eyes, and it had pretty nearly driven her wild.
"Oh!" said Papa, evidently relieved, and caring as little as Marise had
about the person who had been killed. He picked up his satchels again
(by this time the porters at the Bayonne station were resigned to his
strange mania for carrying his own hand-baggage), and said, "Well, yes,
that's too bad! I remember I saw a brakeman killed once, and it made me
pretty sick, too."
They walked out of the station together. Not two minutes had passed
since his arrival, and already Marise's joy that he had come, had faded
to a frightened sense that he had not come at all, that he was still
very far away, that he would never really come, as he used to.
And yet Jeanne had been right of course; whatever else she did, she must
not tell Papa.
"When did it happen?" asked Papa now, as they turned the corner and were
finally escaped from the last of the clamorous cab-drivers, who had not
yet accepted, as the porters had, the eccentricities of the American
gentleman.
As they crossed the bridge, Marise told him the version she had
prepared, the version Jeanne had presented. She had had a good deal of
practice in saying something different from what she thought, and she
got through this without any hesitation or mistake. But every word of it
set her further away from Papa, raised a wall between them, the wall of
things she knew and Papa must never know.
"Well, to be sure," said Papa, when she finished, "you certainly have
had goings-on, for sure."
"Oh, Papa," went on Marise earnestly, "you _will_ have Jeanne taken care
of! It was when she was working for us, she got her paralysis. _Don't_
you feel we ought to--for always, for always? It was for us...."
"Oh, as to that," said Papa, "anybody of Jeanne's age, who rustles
around as Jeanne does, is apt to get a stroke, whether she was working
for us or not. It might have happened just as easily in her own home."
Marise's heart went down.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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