Lewis said coolly, “Yes, of course! I knew that. I saw that it was so, that afternoon in Cambridge. And when Mrs. Farwell said that Teresa was gone out of your life like a lost safety pin I knew it couldn’t be true. But why did she say it? And why did you let her say it?”
“Oh, Clare wasn’t lying when she said that. She thought, I mean, that it was true enough. It was in saying Teresa was our maid, putting her with Felix Fairfax,—that was the lie. But so far as Clare knows, Teresa is gone—just as absolutely as any disappearing safety pin. I wish I were as elusive,—that Clare had mislaid me too. But she has a use for me. She thinks she has, anyway, and she actually pays me a wage of two thousand dollars a year to live here at Green Doors and be a model stepdaughter.”—Petra flashed a defiant look at Lewis and added, “I’m different from Clare’s other servants, you see. I don’t adore her!”
The girl’s hands, Lewis noticed, were no longer clasping her knees. They were gripping them. But he gave no sign that he was conscious of her anger and her rebellion.
“Will you just listen to that bird,” he said. “Bobolinks are usually cheerful, of course. But this fellow is carrying it beyond reason, it seems to me! He might have a peephole into heaven,—the way he sounds.” For a bobolink, apparently beside himself with rapture, was circling and swooping, swooping and circling, singing his jetty little throat to bursting. His nest must be hidden somewhere in the grass not a dozen yards from where they sat on the piazza’s edge.
Petra tilted her head to see the speck of song against the sunlight. She stayed silent until the rapture ended and the heaven-glimpser sank home. She even waited a minute or two beyond that sudden silence before she said, but calmly now, her twined fingers relaxing their grip, “My friend, Teresa, is like that bobolink’s song. At least, she’s as happy as that. Jolly as that. I’ll tell you about her, Doctor Pryne. I am glad that you think of us together. I adore her, of course. She was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and she lived there till she was fifteen. Her father and mother kept a day school for boys. But Teresa had four sisters and they all went to the boys’ school. There were three brothers. Eight children in Teresa’s family, you see....”
Chapter Five
Lewis listened, without looking at Petra. As she told him about Teresa, they were both watching for another flight of the bobolink, their eyes focused on the delicately waving tide of grass above the hidden nest. Hearing Petra’s voice, this way, without looking at her, Lewis learned as much about her as she was telling him about Teresa; for her voice had none of the reticence of her gentian eyes nor the stubborn power of her rounded chin. It was a gentle voice, clipped and ingenuous. Above all ingenuous. What her face had lost with childhood her voice had strangely taken on. It had a listening, attentive quality. Lewis, in the practice of his profession, had gradually acquired a habit of separating voices from their possessors. He had discovered that while the face and the very pose and carriage of a person may deceive, the human voice simply cannot. It is the materialization of personality into sound waves.
“... Eight children. Teresa’s mother had taught the fifth grade in a public school in Cambridge. Teresa’s father was Scotch. They met when Mr. Kerr was over here working for a doctor’s degree at Harvard. He came from Edinburgh. They fell so much in love that they couldn’t wait for the degree but got married and went to Edinburgh and started the day school. But it didn’t pay except just in the beginning. By the time all eight children were there in the Kerr family, they began to be really poor. The Kerr children themselves were half the school, you see. Teresa was the oldest. When Teresa was fifteen, they gave up the school in Edinburgh and returned to Cambridge. Teresa’s father got all the tutoring he could do. He was a magnificent teacher. They lived in a five-room apartment on Lawrence Street, all crowded in, but soon they moved to Boston and had a bigger place, in the top floor of a tenement on Bates Street.
“Teresa’s mother and father taught the children as they had done in Scotland. Only her mother did most of it, of course, because her father was away tutoring all day. But the Kerrs had their own ideas about education and didn’t want the children to go to public school. They wanted them to learn Greek and Latin, you see, almost in their cradles. But Teresa did go to High School. She was fifteen when they came to America and her father let her go into the Senior Class in the High School just so she could get a diploma that June. After school she helped with the housework and helped with the children’s lessons too.