False to Any Man. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ unreasoning gratitude for somebody to care what she did. I sat there wondering how I’d ever been deluded into believing she was grown up and enormously efficient and direct when she was nothing but a hurt heart-hungry little girl. It would take Lilac, with the mother-instinct of her race, to know and understand that.

      After dinner she didn’t go upstairs. She simply sat in front of the fire, staring into it. She didn’t move when the doorbell rang. I don’t think she even heard it, or anything—not until Lilac’s voice came from the hall: “Ah don’ know if she’s in or not.”

      The voice I’d heard on the phone said, “Tell her I’d like to see her. I don’t want to bother her, but——

      “Ah’ll see,” Lilac said.

      I glanced at Jerry. She’d straightened up, her lips parted a little, a faint flush that may have been from the fire or the food Lilac had made her eat on her high pale cheekbones. She looked blankly at me. Then Lilac was in the door, and just behind her, towering considerably over her grey kinky head, were the lean dark face and blue Irish eyes of young Roger Doyle.

      “This gennaman wants to see Miss Jerry,” Lilac said.

      Since he was already in the room, I thought, there wasn’t much anybody could do about it. I got up.

      “Come in, Roger,” I said.

      Jeremy had turned away. Only the top of her burnished head with the firelight on it was visible, but I’d seen her little jaw tighten and the sudden smoldering embers in her eyes as she remembered, I suppose, that there was something about the young man in the door she didn’t like. Which was certainly not the impression I’d got when she first heard his voice.

      Roger Doyle could only see the molten-red-gold top of her head, and then the smoldering yellow gold-flecked eyes as she turned around. His face tightened.

      “I thought I’d come and see if you wouldn’t like to go home, Jerry,” he said stiffly.

      “Thanks—I’m staying all night with Grace.”

      He stood there, baffled and rapidly secreting adrenalin—or whatever it is people do when they start getting mad as hops in spite of all their will to keep cool and dispassionate.

      “As a matter of fact, you’re just being a blasted idiot,” he blurted out angrily.

      Which is a bad way to pour oil on the troubled waters, especially if they have red hair.

      Jeremy Candler straightened up, her eyes blazing.

      “Oh, am I?”

      Roger Doyle groaned. “Oh Lord, Jerry, can’t you see what you’re doing? Why don’t you let her have the filthy stock?”

      I got up.

      “If you two don’t mind,” I said, “I’ve got to see the man who does dogs.”

      But Jerry’s hand flashed out and held mine. “No, don’t go, Grace! Somebody’s got to stick by me!”

      Roger Doyle’s face went a shade darker. He started to speak, but Jerry was quicker.

      “If your father had kept it, or sold it to anybody but my father, it wouldn’t have been given back!” she cried. “It’s all very well for you to say ‘Let her have the filthy stock,’ but you haven’t got a brother to look out for because there’s nobody else to do it, and your father hasn’t been paying her bills for thirteen years the way mine has! You’ve never heard of ‘the solemn obligation of friendship,’ and if you made a promise and found you’d drawn a dud you wouldn’t hesitate five minutes to toss it in the river!”

      She stopped just long enough to catch her breath, but not long enough for Roger to catch his, or me mine, I’m afraid.

      “You don’t know what it is having bills pile up, and staying awake all night trying to decide whether to pay for the coal or take Billy out of school and then have your father send Karen the money because the poor child’s got in debt again!”

      Her eyes were like shooting stars. She was really lovely—a whole blazing shaft of fire. Poor Roger Doyle stood staring at her, utterly transfixed.

      “I didn’t mind—not very much—when she was going to school, but I do now. She’s just as able to get a job as millions of other girls. Even then she’s got no right to want that stock back now. It still doesn’t pay as much as she gets from Father. And why has she waited till now? She’s known it was paying again for over a year. Why has she suddenly made up her mind it belongs to her? She’s got no right to it, and she knows it, and you know it too! I know you’re in love with her—why don’t you marry her? Then she wouldn’t care whether she got the filthy stock or not! Or do you want her and it too? Oh, I hate you, Roger Doyle!”

      He stood there grimly for a moment, his lean jaw working, his blue eyes smoldering under his dark brows drawn together ominously. Then I put my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming as he took two swift steps toward her, and dropped it again when I saw he wasn’t going to strike her. He’d caught her in his arms, her clenched little fists pinioned to her sides, and was pressing his lips passionately to hers, and to her hair, and her eyes. Then just as suddenly he held her off a little ways from him, his hands still holding her arms tight to her sides, his blue eyes looking down at her shocked upturned face.

      “Don’t be a fool, Jerry. It’s you I love. Don’t you know it . . . haven’t you known the last five years?”

      His voice sounded—and his face looked—exactly as if he were about to wring her neck.

      Then he let her go abruptly.

      “Only keep your shirt on, Jerry. Just a few more days—then I’ll tell you about it.”

      He picked up his hat and was gone, without—as Lilac says—saying goodbye or good morning. I heard the front door bang and hurrying feet scrunching the dry snow.

      Jeremy Candler stood there, utterly and completely demolished, and dropped onto the ottoman, her mouth and eyes wide open, staring at the door where he’d gone, her pale face crimson.

      “Dear me,” I said.

      She moistened her lips.

      “He . . . must be out of his mind!” she gasped at last.

      “Definitely, I should say,” I replied. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to bed. Lilac will turn out the lights.”

      4

      The next morning when Lilac brought my breakfast tray she put it down without a word, not even the sort of grunt that usually means that Shiela, my Irish setter, has been sick on the hall rug. She rattled up the Venetian, blind behind my dressing table, banged down the window and demanded darkly, “What’s they done to that chile?”

      I shook my head. Lilac can’t fool me. She knows more about everything that goes on than I do, and long before. I poured a cup of coffee and took a sip of orange juice.

      “She done cry herself to sleep in there all by herself, las’ night.”

      She picked up my shoes and jammed them СКАЧАТЬ