IV
"'GO TO BED, I TELL YOU,' HE SCREAMED, AND HALF ROSE"
In the kitchen, Zaira Mary Smith was getting supper ready, as it appeared. I followed her out passively, and sat down in a sort of maze. It seemed incredible that, amid the shabby tragedy of this household, there should be time or thought for the kindly business of spreading a meal. The girl marched briskly to and fro, stooping to the oven door, tinkling softly among her spoons and bowls, evidently taking a timid zest in her labors. It made her seem the most sane, assured, and stable person among us, spite of her position. I could have imagined her singing as she went, had it not been for my presence. She was desperately conscious of me, watching me askant
with the curiously commingled fear and trustfulness of a child. Nor, notwithstanding the untruths or half-truths she had told me, could her connection with the abominable rogue-fool in the next room appear other than an enormity—as if she might be the enchanted heroine of some fairy-tale, condemned to the service of a monster. At last, when she came and laid a board and pan on the table beside me, and, rolling up the sleeves about her capable, round little arms, began a severe maltreatment of a batch of dough, I could keep silence no longer; curiosity crowded every other feeling out of me.
"Mary Smith!" I burst out, "for God's sake, tell me all about it!"
She rested her hands on the edge of the bowl an instant. "About us?" she said, with a quick glance at me. She gave the dough one or two perfunctory pats and punches, biting her lips; and then suddenly, with a rush of color, her face puckered together, she clapped her befloured hands over it, and fell on the nearest bench in a perfect whirlwind of sobs.
"I—I—I w-w-wanted to be respectable!" was all I could make out between gasps—but that was staggering enough news, I thought. She wanted to be respectable!
She went on: "I didn't come here of my own free will, Mr. Pendarves, truly I didn't; but when we came, and I saw how nice I could make it,—and I never had a home before,—I knew, if you ever came back, that would end it all, and I did so hope you wouldn't!"
"It seemed a pity not to make hay while the sun shone?" I suggested.
She nodded, a little doubtfully. "I didn't think of it just that way," she said. "But—yes, I suppose any one would put it so. Only—I haven't hurt anything, Mr. Pendarves; I—I only scrubbed—and cooked—and cleaned a little. I was so happy: there was no harm, it seemed to me. And when I pretended to be the housekeeper, that—that was just a little game I played with myself; it was silly, I dare say, but, after all, it did no harm, either. It was like another game I play by myself sometimes—of having a birthday, you know? I put little things I've made beside the bed, and when I wake up in the morning, I make believe it's my birthday, and I'm so surprised at all the presents I've got! It's silly, isn't it?' I knew you'd laugh."
"I never felt less like it," I said. "Don't you know your real birthday?"
She shook her head. No, she did not know that. She had never known anything about her father and mother. She was not even certain of her own name. "He calls me Zaira," she said, with a scornful jerk of her auburn head toward the other room; "but that's a stupid name, and I hate it. I tell every one my name's Mary Smith. Why not? I might as well call myself what I like—nobody cares. I think Mary Smith's beautiful, don't you? It's so respectable, isn't it?" she added wistfully.
Of her childhood she could remember nothing but being in some sort of school or institution (a home for foundlings, most likely) governed by nuns, or at least by women who went about in black stuff dresses and white caps, and whom one called ma sœur—for this was in southern France, she thought. The life was clean, decorous, and peaceful, and she might have grown up to wear a white cap herself, and herd little waifs into chapel; but when she was probably ten or eleven years old, the fat man came and took her away, and they had been wandering up and down the world ever since. He said he was her uncle, but she was no more sure of that than of anything else concerning herself.
When they had been in Chepstow a time, she said, her uncle came into their fortune-telling booth one day with Captain Pendarves, whose name she did not then know. He talked a great deal in an excited way about finding some treasure——"money I think he said his father or grandfather had hidden a long while ago. He kept saying it would all be in 'doubloons, doubloons,' because it was got in the Spanish Main and brought here in a ship. And he said there was treasure, heaps of it, in the bottom of the Cat's Mouth, where ships had sunk, gold pieces all in amongst the ribs of dead men. Mr. Pendarves,"—she looked at me with a shy, awed sympathy,—"I saw your grandfather was—was——"
"He is crazy, or nearly so," said I. "Plain talk is best."
"I'm afraid so. I thought shame to beguile a poor old man that way, but, sir, I could not stop it. He came every day, and they looked in the crystal—just as they were doing this afternoon, you know. He's worse now; I think he forgets betweenwhiles what was said the last time they looked. Then, one day, he told me we were to come here to live. It was wrong—I knew it; but when I saw it, and thought what I could do—and I did so want to have a home and—and be respectable—and I thought, too, if I worked hard and made it nice, it would be a—a kind of payment, wouldn't it? I couldn't help longing to——"
"Don't cry that way," I said. "I can't bear to see you cry."
"I can't help it," she sobbed. "It's so hard to leave it all."
"Well, then, why leave it?" said I. "He has to, surely; but that need make no difference to you. We must have a housekeeper, you know."
She gave me a woeful glance; and I understood that, according to her poor little code, it would be more "respectable" to resume her journeyings with the fat crystal-gazer than to stay in the house with Nick Pendarves as his grandfather's housekeeper. Here was a ticklish point to argue with her; and, for all her tears, there was a firmness in the set of her chin (it was dented with a dimple) that warned me such argument would be a waste of time. She had made up her mind, and would stand to it at all costs. It was martyrdom in an eminently feminine style; women deliver themselves up to it day by day, and contrive to be perfectly unreasonable, yet somehow in the right. She wiped her eyes presently, shut her mouth on a sob, and went resolutely about her work. We had, after all, a tolerably cheerful evening in the kitchen. It seemed wisest for me not to show myself again before Captain Pendarves, but I am afraid I did not repine greatly at the banishment. As the door swung to and fro behind Mary carrying their dishes, I caught glimpses of the gloomy parlor, my grandfather huddled in his chair by the table, with bright, roving eyes; the sorcerer surprisingly busy about the food for a person of his ethereal habits; and, on the wall beyond, old Admiral Pendarves simpering eternally over his private fun.