CHAPTER XXIV
There are some things not required of human nature to stand. Elizabeth Hamilton Carter is one of them. I was glad to give her back her beau. I felt truly Virginian in doing it, for Virginians always say, when giving you something, that they don't want it; I certainly didn't want Whythe. I wouldn't have known what to do with him after the summer was over, and I was conscious of great relief in getting him off my hands without further loss or trouble. I couldn't tell Elizabeth this, of course, though there were times when it took a good deal of something I did not know I had to keep from doing so. Also, it took more strength to keep several other things to myself than I knew I possessed. It took praying and the end of the sheet to do it, but I did it, and I'm getting encouraged about K. C.
What encourages me is this: Two nights after the picnic Elizabeth came to my room and asked if she might have a little talk with me, as she felt she ought to. I told her she could, and she sat down and began. Miss Susanna was back in her own quarters, the people from Florida having gone, and I had just finished saying my prayers and was ready to hop into bed when Elizabeth knocked at my door. I knew what was coming from the look on her face and her manner of walking, and the way she held her head.
If ever I write that book I am always thinking about I am going to put Elizabeth in it as well as Miss Araminta Armstrong, and if I could get some men to match them I would have some corking characters to begin with. But no kind of pen-and-ink picture of Elizabeth would do her justice. Her sweetness of speech when she is particularly nasty is beyond the power of human portrayal. I got in bed quick when she said she wanted to talk, because I was afraid I might have to hit something, and the pillow was the only thing I could manage without sound. I put it where I could give it a dig when politeness required control, and told her to go ahead.
In her last sleep Elizabeth will pose. She took her seat near the window where the moonlight could shine on her (she looked very pretty in her pink-silk kimono, a hand-over from her rich aunt, and shabby but becoming in color), and for a moment she didn't say anything, just fooled with the pink ribbon on her hair. And then she said she had a secret to tell me; said it so soft, with her head on the side, that I had to ask her to speak louder please, and I got nearer the edge of the bed. Elbow on it and chin in the palm of one hand, I prayed hard to be polite in my own room, and reached out for an end of the sheet with the other. Again I told her to go ahead. After a minute she went.
"You and Whythe have been such friends that I think you should be the first to know that—"
"Have you and Whythe made up?" I stuck my bare foot over the edge of the bed and wriggled it. "If you have you had better be married quick and not take any more chances. I'm awfully glad if things are settled. Have you bounced the other fellow yet?"
It was cruel in me to take out of her mouth what she was moistening her lips to say, but I was sleepy and I didn't want details. She had no idea of being cut out of saying what it was her determination to say, however, considering I had been responsible for some unhappy days during the past two months, and before she got through she had said all she wanted me to hear. If it hadn't been for the pillow I would have rolled out of bed. The nerve of her! The belief of her! And, oh, my granny! the punishment, as she imagined, of me!
Before she left the room she told me she could no longer hold out against Whythe's pleadings. Told me he had suffered so during the summer she was uneasy about him, and, though he had tried to forget, it had been useless, and, unable to endure it any longer, he had come to her and told her he could stand no more, and if she did not promise to marry him at once he would—he would— Her voice trailed, but I said nothing, the end of the sheet being stuffed into my mouth for politeness' sake, and when her tears had been wiped away she began again.
"It is hard to forgive Whythe, because you are so young, and he knows how fascinating he is and how little experience you have had with young men, but his father was a flirt before him" (poor Father! I thought of the retribution that had come to him in Mother, and I pushed in more sheet), "and it is natural in a man to seek amusement and entertainment when he is suffering as Whythe was. I hope you will forgive him. It is because he may have made you imagine things that were not so, and because you have been so nice to him, that I thought you should be the first to know."
I rolled back to the side of the bed facing her, from which I had rolled the other way for safety, and took the end of the sheet out of my mouth. "Have you told IT?" I asked. "It doesn't make any difference about my knowing as I knew before you did, but something is due that which you brought back with you. Have you told IT, Elizabeth?"
"Told who? I don't understand." She sat up. "I don't know who you are talking about."
"Don't you?" I too sat up and swung my bare feet over the side of the bed. "I am talking about the person to whom I read in the Twickenham Town Sentinel that you were engaged. He dresses like a man, and he may be one, but even if he isn't he deserves to be treated decently by the lady who had promised to marry him. I suppose he knows." I nodded to her hand, on which was the ring he had given her and which she had been twirling as she talked. "That is, if you have had time to tell him."
"That is entirely my affair!" When not hurt or injured Elizabeth is superior, and she added scorn to the tone of her voice, but stopped fooling with the ring, which I know she hated to send back. "I see you do not appreciate the confidence I am putting in you or the compliment I am paying you by telling you first, and if that is the case I will go." She made movement as if to get up, but she had no idea of going, so I didn't notice it, but kept on swinging my feet, and then I asked her if she had told Miss Susanna, and if she hadn't she ought to at once, Miss Susanna being closely related and I nothing but a summer boarder. And I said I hoped she would be married right away, as I would love to be at the wedding, and if she would ask me to be one of the bridesmaids I would be one with pleasure. But she wouldn't answer me. Seeing she still had something to say, and wouldn't leave until she said it, I put my feet back in bed and lay flat with my hands under my head and my eyes shut, and when at last I was fixed and quiet she began for a third time.
I don't remember a thing after that except a sort of monotone voice and something about people talking about me because I had accepted Whythe's attentions when everybody knew—I didn't hear what everybody knew, and not until I did hear a sound at the door did I wake up good, and then I jumped as if shot and asked her, half-asleep, if she were going to live with Mother and Sister and Sister Edwina and Miss Lily Lou when she was married, but she answered not. And since her midnight confession she hath not opened her mouth unto me and her little lips get together when she sees me coming, and from her friends I have learned that she is deeply distressed at my treatment of her. And to her friends I have said Rats! and so endeth the efforts at friendship which she imagined she had made. I am never going to pretend to be friends with a person who is not truthful, and whom I understand as I understand Elizabeth Hamilton Carter. I don't like her, and though it is not necessary to say so unless occasion requires, neither is it necessary to appear to be what I am not. I like Whythe, and when I saw him a few days after Elizabeth gave herself the satisfaction of communicating to me the return of his tempted affections, I shook hands with him good and hard and wished him all the happiness I knew there was little chance of his getting. If I were a man and had to live in the house with a female who shut her mouth tight every time she got mad and was continually hurt and always sensitive, there would likely be in that house battle, murder, or sudden death. Any kind of outspokenness is better to be endured than silent offense.