Manslaughter. Alice Duer Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ pilasters of the front still untouched. Ten years ago her father had bought it—a nice old farmhouse with an ornamental band running round it below the eaves and a perfect little porch before the door. Since then she had been becoming more and more attached to it as it became more and more the work of her own creation. She had added whatever she needed without much regard to the effect of the whole—a large paneled room, English as much as anything, an inner garden suggestive of a Spanish patio, a tiled Italian hall and a long servant's wing that was nothing at all.

      She put her head in the dining room, where Miss Bennett in a stately tea gown was just beginning a solitary dinner.

      "Hello, Benny! Have a good dinner. I forgot to tell you I'm going to the Emmonses for Sunday, so if you want to ask someone down to keep you company, do. I'm going to be late for dinner."

      Miss Bennett smiled and nodded, recognizing this as a peace demonstration. Fourteen years had taught her that Lydia was not without generosity.

      Fourteen years ago this coming winter the Thornes had entered Miss Bennett's life. Old Joe Thorne had come by appointment to her little New York apartment. The appointment had been made by a friend of Miss Bennett's—Miss Bennett's friends were always looking for something desirable for her in those days. Her family, who had been identified with New York for a hundred and fifty years, had gradually declined in fortune until the panic of 1893 had almost wiped out the little fortune of Adeline and her mother, the last of the family. Adeline had been brought up, not in luxury but in a comfortable, unalterable feminine idleness. She had always had all the clothes she needed to go about among the people she knew, and they were the people who had everything. The Bennetts had never kept a carriage, but they had never stinted themselves in cabs. The truth was they had never stinted themselves in anything that they really wanted. And Adeline, when she found herself alone in the world at thirty, with an income of only a few thousand, continued the family tradition of having what she wanted. She took a small apartment, which she contrived to make charming, and she lived nicely by the aid of her old French nurse, who came and cooked for her and dressed her and turned her out as perfectly as ever. She continued to dine out every night, and though nominally she spent her summers in New York as an economy, she was always on somebody's yacht or in somebody's country house. She paid any number of visits and enjoyed life more than most people.

      Her friends, however, for she had the power of creating real attachments, were not so well satisfied. At first they were persuaded that Adeline would marry—it was so obviously the thing for Adeline to do—but she was neither designing nor romantic. She lacked both the reckless emotion which may lead one to marry badly and the cold-blooded determination to marry well.

      She was just past forty the day Joe Thorne came. She could still see him as he entered in his blue overcoat with a velvet collar. A big powerful man with prominent eyes like Bismarck's, and a heavy dark brown mustache bulging over his upper lip. He did not expect to give much time to the interview. He had come to see if Miss Bennett would do to bring up his daughter, who at ten years was giving him trouble. He wanted her prepared for the social opportunities he intended her to have. It seemed strange to him that a person who lived as simply as Miss Bennett could really have these social opportunities in her control, but he had been advised by people whom he trusted that such was the fact, and he accepted it.

      He was the son of a Kansas farmer, had left the farm as a boy and settled in a small town, and had learned the trade of bricklaying. By hard work he gradually amassed a few hundred dollars, and this he invested in a gravel bank just outside the town. It was the only gravel bank in the neighborhood and brought him a high return on the money. Then just as the gravel was exhausted the town began to spread in that direction, and Thorne was arranging to level his property and sell it in building lots, when a still more unexpected development took place. Oil was struck in the neighborhood, and beneath Thorne's gravel lay a well.

      If Fate had intended him to be poor she should never have allowed him to make his first thousand dollars, for from the moment he had any surplus everything he touched did well. In one of his trips to the Louisiana oil district he met and married a local belle, a slim, pale girl with immense dark-circled black eyes and a skin like a gardenia. She followed him meekly about the country from oil wells to financial centers until after the birth of her daughter. Then she settled down in Kansas City and waited his rare visits. The only inconsiderate thing she had ever done to him was to die and leave him with an eight-year-old daughter.

      For several stormy years he tried various solutions—foreign governesses who tried to marry him, American college girls who attempted to make him take his fair share of parental responsibility, an old cousin who had been a school teacher and dared to criticize his manner of life. At last his enlarging affairs brought him to New York and he heard of Miss Bennett. He heard of her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the forties, then attaining preëminence at the bar in New York, had been thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly when his new client applied to him for help.

      The minute Thorne saw Miss Bennett he saw that she would do perfectly. He made her the offer of a good salary. He couldn't believe that she would refuse it. She could hardly believe it herself, for she was unaccustomed to setting up her will against anyone's least of all against a man like Joe Thorne, who had successfully battled his way up against the will of the world. The contest went on for weeks and weeks. Poor Miss Bennett kept consulting her friends, almost agreeing to go when she saw Thorne, and then telephoning him that she had changed her mind, and bringing him round to her apartment—which was just what she didn't want—to argue her into it again.

      Some of her friends opposed her going to the house of a widower whose reputation in regard to women was not spotless. Others thought—though they did not say—that if she went, and succeeded in marrying him, she would be doing better than she had any right to expect. Perhaps if Miss Bennett could have fallen in love with Lydia she might have yielded, but even at ten, Lydia, a black-eyed determined little person, inspired fear more than love.

      Poor Adeline grew pale and thin over the struggle. At last she decided, after due consultation with friends, to end the matter by being a little bit rude, by telling Thorne that she just didn't like the whole prospect; that she preferred her own little place and her own little life.

      "Like it—like this cramped little place?" he said, looking about at the sunshine and chintz and potted daisies of her cherished home. "But I'd make you comfortable, give you what you ought to have—Europe, your friends, your carriage, everything."

      He went on to argue with her that she was wrong, utterly wrong to like her own life. Her last card didn't win. She yielded at last for no better reason than that her powers of resistance were exhausted.

      Thorne was then living in a house on a corner of upper Fifth Avenue, with a pale-pink brocade ballroom running across the front and taking all the morning sunshine, and a living room and library at the back so dark that you couldn't read in it at mid-day, with marble stairs and huge fire-places that didn't draw—a terrible house. Some years later, under Miss Bennett's influence, he had bought the more modest house in the Seventies where Lydia now spent her winters. But it was to the Fifth Avenue house that Miss Bennett came, and found herself plunged into one of the most desperate struggles in the world. Thorne, whose continuous interest was given to business, attempted to rule Lydia in crises—by scenes, scenes of a violence that Miss Bennett had never seen equaled. As it turned out, her coming weakened Thorne's power; not that she wasn't usually on his side—she was—but she was an audience, and Thorne had some sense of shame before an audience, while Lydia had none at all.

      Many a time she had seen him box Lydia's ears and, mild as she was, had been glad to see him do it. But it was his violence that undid him. It was then that Lydia became suddenly dignified and, unbroken, contrived to make him appear like a brute.

      There СКАЧАТЬ