Businessmen -- Virginia -- Fiction; Upper class -- Virginia -- Fiction; Women dancers -- France -- Fiction
She stopped. Fanchon had lifted her veil with a tragic gesture and
looked at Mrs. Carter, passionate scorn in her beautiful eyes. For a
moment she said nothing. Her whole form seemed to quiver from head to
foot; then her pale lips moved at first without words.
“I didn’t do it for you,” she said bitterly at last, “nor for your son,
nor for any of you--only for Leigh! _Adieu, madame!_”
She turned with a gesture at once tragic and beautiful, the gesture of
an actress, made passionate by the bitterness of a woman.
A bailiff held the door open for her, looking after her admiringly
and curiously, but without deference. Daniel and his mother, watching
her, saw the small black figure disappear down the long corridor, saw
it silhouetted a moment against the daylight at some distant door, and
then it was gone.
“Oh, Dan, take me home!” gasped Mrs. Carter. “I haven’t done anything
wrong, but I--I feel like a pickpocket. She makes me feel that way!”
Daniel made no reply. He was aware, at the moment, that his father,
bent on getting Leigh home, was fighting his way out with the boy.
Judge Jessup had ’phoned for two taxis, as one would not hold the
reunited Carters.
“The jury couldn’t agree at first,” the judge explained joyfully;
“but Fanchon’s story did it. When they talked it over, they agreed on
acquittal. Good thing, eh?”
He tried to be jovial, for he saw the strain, and he was glad when the
two loaded taxis disappeared in the dust of the highroad. It seemed to
him that, as a family, they were not joyful.
“Willie looks like a death’s head at the feast,” the old man thought,
and turned to shake hands with Colonel Denbigh. “I didn’t do it. No,
sir, Daniel Carter did. He’s the coming man. You watch him, Colonel.”
Colonel Denbigh nodded thoughtfully.
“I’ll back Dan,” he said. “But how about that poor girl, Jessup?”
The judge pursed his lips.
“William’s going to get a divorce. Do you reckon he realizes that she
gave up everything to save his brother? He’s turning her out for it,
eh? Looks that way, far as I can see.”
“By gum!” said the colonel softly, and he averted his eyes.
There was a pause, and then the two old friends went silently over to
the club for luncheon.
Meanwhile the Carters had taken Leigh home. Distributed in two taxicabs
they arrived in a state of suppressed emotion difficult to describe;
but, once in the house, the ice thawed. For the second time Mrs. Carter
became hysterical, Emily wept on his neck, and Miranda started in on a
wild effort to make preserved cherry tarts in time for luncheon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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