Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

She judged Yvonne, too, in a spirit of fairness that was amazing, considering the lack of perspective that must have been hers to contend with. Despite a natural feeling of antagonism, present even before she saw the new wife of James Brood, and long before her influence affected Brood's son, Lydia found herself confronted by a curious faith in Yvonne's goodness of heart. It never entered the girl's mind to question the honour of this woman—no more than she would have questioned her own.

Vanity, love of admiration, the inherent fear of retrogression, greed for attention—any one of these might have been responsible for her conduct covering the past three months. There was certainly a reckless disregard for consequences on her part so far as others—notably Frederic—were concerned. She could not be blind to his plight, and yet it was her pleasure to drag him out beyond his depth where he might struggle or drown while she, sirenlike, looked on for the moment and then turned calmly to the more serious business of combing her hair.

Her mother saw the suffering in the girl's eyes, but saw also the proud spirit that would have resented sympathy from one even so close as she. Down in the heart of that quiet, reserved mother smouldered a hatred for Yvonne Brood that would have stopped at nothing had it been in her power to inflict punishment for the wrong that was being done. She, too, saw tragedy ahead, but her vision was broader than Lydia's. It included the figure of James Brood.

Lydia worked steadily, almost doggedly, at the task she had undertaken to complete for the elder Brood. Every afternoon found her seated at the desk in the study opposite the stern-faced man who laboured with her over the seemingly endless story of his life. Something told her that there were secret chapters which she was not to write. She wrote those that were to endure; the others were to die with him.

He watched her as she wrote, and his eyes were often hard. He saw the growing haggardness in her gentle, girlish face; the wistful, puzzled expression in her dark eyes. A note of tenderness crept into his voice and remained there through all the hours they spent together. The old-time brusqueness disappeared from his speech; the sharp, authoritative tone was gone. He watched her with pity in his heart, for he knew it was ordained that one day he, too, was to hurt this loyal, pure-hearted creature even as the others were wounding her now.

He frequently went out of his way to perform quaint little acts of courtesy and kindness that would have surprised him only a short time before. He sent theatre and opera tickets to Lydia and her mother. He placed bouquets of flowers at the girl's end of the desk, obviously for her alone. He sent her home—just around the corner—in the automobile on rainy or blizzardy days.

But he never allowed her an instant's rest when it came to the work in hand, and therein lay the gentle shrewdness of the man. She was better off busy. There were times when he studied the face of Lydia's mother for signs that might show how her thoughts ran in relation to the conditions that were confronting all of them. But more often he searched the features of the boy who called him father.

Not one of them knew that there were solemn hours in all the days when Yvonne sat shivering in her room and stared, dry-eyed and bleak, at the walls which surrounded her, seeing not them, but something far beyond. Often she sat before her long cheval-glass, either with lowering eyes or in a sort of wistful wonder, never removing her steady gaze from the face reflected there. There were other times when she stood before the striking photograph of her husband on the dressing-table, studying the face through narrowed lids, as if she searched for something that baffled, yet impressed her.

Always, always there was music in the house. Behind the closed doors of his distant study James Brood listened in spite of himself to the persistent thrumming of the piano downstairs. Always were the airs light and seductive; the dreamy, plaintive compositions of Strauss, Ziehrer, and others of their kind and place.

Frederic, with uncanny fidelity to the preferences of the mother he had never seen, but whose influence directed him, affected the same general class of music that had appealed to her moods and temperament. Times there were, and often, when he played the very airs that she had loved, and then, despite his profound antipathy, James Brood's thoughts leaped back a quarter of a century and fixed themselves on love-scenes and love-times that would not be denied.