Under the Law

by Edwina Stanton Babcock

The girl stood there aghast. Then she smiled a little disdainfully and turned to her brother. "Will you drive us, Dunce?" she asked, "or shall we call a taxi?"

"I had a dance with Cinny," said Dunce, "but she's sitting under the trees with that fellow with the spook glimmers; she's vamping him for his new tennis racket. I'll drive you. But," Dunce shut his teeth hard, "when I leave this bunch I leave it for good and all, you understand; you do too, Sard? You do too, Minga?"

All the way home the three young things were silent. They saw the dark trees slide by, half piteously, wanting to run to them and hide their heads in their soft branches and tell them things. All the kind earth, the hills and the river, seemed maternal, strong to their hot hearts, burning with scorn and contempt. Dunstan knew painfully his own part in the miserable intrigue. Tawny and Gertrude merely revenged themselves, and they had taken it out on little, jolly, happy Minga. As the girls got out, Dunstan stopped his car in a kind of blare of cut-out and racing engine; it was like getting off the blast of his own feelings. The boy groaned "good-bye" and was gone.

Sard undressed in the moonlight. There was no other light in her room, and so she had not pulled the shades down. The trees towered into the white moonlit sky and she saw the orange-colored glow over the garage where Colter sat reading. The man's curious calm life of books and plants, the way he kept aloof yet was ready and effective, above all his patient helplessness before the awful dark of his memory, swept over the girl. Sard looked at her bed. "I can't sleep to-night," she said. "I want to talk, to talk to someone—I want——" Sard went slowly and looked up at the mountain where the organ builder's house loomed back of the sky. She thought of Shipman and smiled a little but lightly shook her head. "No," she said, "he's kind, kind, wonderfully kind and strong, but——" The girl, a white crepe wrapper over her nightgown, looked long and solemnly at Colter's light; suddenly the orange square darkened.... The man was lying now on his narrow bed, the sweep of hair off that forehead Sard knew so well, the long, fine hands lying careless and relaxed, the fine sensitive face swept with its look of suffering, perhaps already drowned in the great black waves of sleep. Did sleep ever bring back to Colter his birthright, did he ever see in dreams familiar faces or hear voices? Sard found herself kneeling at the window watching the dark window, her face flushed. "I wonder, who he is," breathed the girl, "oh, if I could only tell him who he is. If I could bring Light to him!" Sard knelt, staring out into the dark, her face hot, her heart pounding.

"I can't stand this," she muttered. "I—I feel desperate, queer to-night. I might run out into the night, anywhere, to anyone. I wonder! oh, I wonder——"

Suddenly she got up from her crouching position; with tawny hair falling, tossing back from her forehead, she caught up a little pocket flash and holding it before her carefully felt her way down the tower-room stairs to Minga's room. Sard knocked softly. "May I come in? You aren't asleep?"

There was no answer. The older girl gently turned the knob and looked in. The room was in moonlit whiteness. There, still in her rumpled blue and orange, the little butterfly back bare, the arms tossed frantically out, she lay, the whole figure prey to sweeping and tearing things. Minga was curled up on the bed. There was no doubt about the little shivers and shakes, she was sobbing.

"Minga—precious!" Something big and devastating tore through the older girl's senses. She felt suddenly old, like Minga's mother. This motherliness, though Sard did not know it, was a keystone to her being; it was the thing Shipman had half seen, it was the beautiful balance of the Winged Victory. The girl sat quietly down on the bed; so this was another Law for her then; she must know keenly and helplessly the sorrow of others, she must blindly strive to learn how to help. Dora, Colter, and now little gay Minga.

"Minga," urged the girl, pitifully, "don't cry like that—why, it's not that silly Bunch, is it? We don't care for them, we have other friends. Watts Shipman and—and—-" Sard went a little vaguely over a possible list of "other friends." There was no answer, and she leaned down, trying to raise the buried face. "Honey, can't I know?" then urgently, "Minga, don't cry like that, it's—it's self-pity, isn't it?" Sard groped about to give expression to a thought that was hardly formed in her. "I suppose self-pity's one thing we must never, never let ourselves have," the girl said softly.

There was a sudden cessation of sobs, and Minga slowly raising on her elbows turned up in the half light a broken face.