Amnesiacs -- Fiction; New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Trials -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Her father did not move from beside her in the seat and Sard dared not
press by him out of the driver's seat. She sat, her straight figure
dilating, her hands clenched, the red stain on her face seeming to burn
down into her body and to make another sort of woman of her--What sort?
She could see what sort her father thought she was. The piteous eyes
were dense with shame.
At first she thought she could not, must not speak, then a man's kind
eyes, understanding, compassionate, rallying, looked again into hers.
"Courage!" came Watts' voice. He must have known. The lawyer with his
priest's habit of the confessional of reading storm and stress back of
faces must have read the new strange agony back of hers.
To do honor to Shipman's belief in her, she must meet this thing calmly
and without disrespect or passion. The girl swallowed once; with lifted
face, turned on her father a look that might, had he noted it, made him
wonder. For the uplifted features were swept clean of resentment. Sard
was recognizing the parent's claim on her, trying reasonably to meet
it, but the Judge saw only one thing; his hard, old eyes told him he
had made his decision just in time and that he must act quickly.
"You--you're letting yourself care for this man." The tones, though not
loud, lashed on her; the Judge was deliberately making her ashamed. "I
should have thought as my daughter, even if not for yourself, you would
have had more pride."
Sard, slowly turning the watch on her wrist round and round, listened.
There was only one thing to do, to try to meet the eyes, to meet the
accusation with respect. But--but where was the respect due her, to her
motives and actions? Had not this man, her own father, been willing to
degrade her in her own estimation without hearing her, taking counsel
with her?
"Dad," she gave a little helpless shiver, "I don't think you know; you
don't understand, or you couldn't say such a thing--as--as that!"
But Bogart, taking out the cigar, smiled at it with a shrewd squint.
Well, of course, he did know, and she, this untutored young thing,
didn't, that was all!
Sard's father knew what would be the plans of a ne'er-do-well who could
make an ardent, indulged young person fall in love with him. "Pah!" The
Judge's gorge rose at it, also at what he called Sard's "deceit," it
being the means of having him employ this man, rose up and condemned
her.
He saw her bowed head in the dusk, the girl's cheek white on her blue
scarf, and cleared his throat. "It isn't pleasant," he admitted; then
with a rasp, "I never expected to speak to you like this any more than
I should expect to thrash Dunstan, but," went on the Judge grimly,
"under some circumstances I should take pleasure in doing that very
thing. Now stop all this nonsense," he assumed that Sard was crying.
"I've had a hard morning," the Judge always saw himself as unnerved by
his court-room experiences, "but I'm going to be obeyed."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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