“Darling! You should have called up from the station. I’d have sent a car for you. I suppose you came in a taxi. I didn’t hear it. I was beginning to worry, really. Here’s Elise with punch. You’re just in time, Elise. We are famished. Petra, you do look tired. Pass them to Miss Farwell first, Elise. Darling, you don’t look tired, you look exhausted.”
Clare was justified in the observation. Petra’s face was shadowed by obvious weariness, and Lewis thought that her long, sun-burned fingers held the stem of her goblet of punch with a counterfeit steadiness. Sheer will was keeping her steady—and hard. He was certain of it.
Lewis himself did not sit down again. He said that he must go. It would be midnight as it was when he got to his rooms, and work would be piled sky-high to-morrow after his absence. But he did not say this. They were not to know that he had been away and not seen his office for several days, since Petra had not told them. And if the child was fearful that he had already explained that he had never kept her working over hours, he would relieve her mind at once. But how?
He said, as casually as he could, “No need to be on time to-morrow, Petra. Mrs. Farwell thinks I’m a slave driver and it will be true unless we call a halt. After this, your hours are to be from nine till four, as we first agreed, and an hour out for lunch.”
Petra was quick to understand. So they had told him! He knew about her lies! But he had not given her away and was not doing so now. That was strange. Why? And it seemed almost as if he were promising her, indirectly, that he had no intention of giving her away at all. At the same time, he was laying a command on her: she must not use this particular excuse ever again to gain her private ends, whatever they were. Oh, yes, Petra thought she understood, and humiliation drowned what might have been gratitude.
As for Lewis, he had never known that young eyes could hold such dumb, repressed misery as he saw in those that Petra slowly raised to his own, when she returned his formal “good night” with one more formal. But he had only meant to reassure her. Did she think he was taunting or judging? It was intolerable that she should have any such idea. It was intolerable that he should have wounded her and that he could not explain himself to her to-night, before she slept. But could he explain himself to her to-morrow? Could he explain himself to himself, if it came to that? Did he know why he was not appalled by this girl’s deceit and why he was not angry with her for having put him in an unfair position by her lies? If he had only been self-disciplined enough, sensible enough, to have waited until morning to see Petra! Now the night was going to be much longer than it would have been had he never come out here at all. And he had thought to have shortened it by coming!
Lowell Farwell accompanied Lewis out to the street door, insisting again, as they crossed the spaces of the great hall, that he would never know all about morbid psychology until he had made a thorough study of the Russian novelist, Dostoevsky,—and, possibly, a few other even more modern writers of psychological novels. For your novelist knew intuitively what your psychologist only came at through experiment, and he knew it first.
“Yes, read the great novelists,” Farwell advised Lewis, with an almost passionate insistence. “Read Thomas Mann. Read Hardy. And above all read Dostoevsky. Then you might even read some Americans. There are one—or two—you know—”
Lewis got away quickly without admitting the fact that he knew his Dostoevsky practically by heart. Somehow, he hoped he would never have to hear Farwell patronizing that master or comparing his novels to his own, even by implication. Lewis wanted not to detest Petra’s father.