Red and Black

by Grace S. Richmond

“Fanny! You’re not—going to him?”

“My beloved Annette, the number of times in the course of my acquaintance with you that you have pronounced the word ‘Fanny!’ in precisely that tone of expostulatory shock couldn’t be numbered!—I am going to him—since I don’t know any way of making him come to me. Cary happened to say that Mr. Black also was liable to be called at any hour, and I dare not delay. I want to have an important—very important—interview with him while my courage is high. I told you, some time ago, that I should find a way, and I’ve found it. Wish me good luck!”

That was all there was to it. Although Nan Lockhart was more than anxious as to what might underlie Fanny’s mystifying language, she could not doubt, when Fanny presently set forth from the house, that she was going, as she had declared, to the manse. It was by now four in the afternoon. Nan had offered to accompany her friend, saying that she thought, if Fanny must go, that she would best not go alone. She had been told that she was a meddling old granny, and that her place was by the fireside. So—with a kiss—Miss Fitch had walked away, and as Nan anxiously watched her go down the street she had been forced to admit to herself, as she had admitted many times before, that there was an unexplainable and irresistible witchery about Fanny, and that there could be little doubt that somebody was in danger. She wondered which of them it was—if any could be in greater danger than Fanny herself.

The master of the manse was at home when his bell rang presently, so it fell out, though ten minutes before he had not been there, nor would have been ten minutes later. He had rushed in for a certain book he wanted, and was just within his own front door when he heard the bell. He opened it, his thoughts upon the book in his hand—it was one on “Minor Tactics,” by the way, and he wanted it for one of his boys. So he confronted his caller with no means of escape—if he had wanted any. Why mortal man should wish to escape from the vision of sad-eyed beauty which awaited him upon his doorstep none who had seen her there could say—certainly not Cary Ray, who had seen her there, and who was now stalking angrily up and down a side street, intent on keeping her somehow within his reach. He knew that Fanny had meant to come—had she not told him so? Why she had not let him come with her——

“I’m sorry to delay you, Mr. Black, but—I need your help very much. Will you let me come in for a very few minutes?”

“Certainly, Miss Fitch, come in.”

What else was there to do? All sorts and classes of people were accustomed to enter the manse doors at all hours, so why not this girl in black with the shadows under her eyes and the note of appeal in her voice, who said she needed his help? What was he there for, except to help? And yet, somehow, Robert Black had never been quite so unwilling to admit a visitor. Something within him seemed to warn him that if ever he had been on his guard, he must be on it now.

If Nan could have seen Fanny, as she took her seat in the chair Black placed for her, she would have wondered if she knew her friend, after all. This the girl with the glitter in her eyes, the reckless note in her voice, the captivating ways which Cary Ray knew so well? This was a girl of another sort altogether; one in deep trouble, who presented to the man before her a face so sadly sweet, lifted to him eyes in which lay such depths of anxiety, that he might well summon his best resources to her aid. If ever sincerity looked out between lifted lashes, it showed between those heavily shadowing ones which were among Fanny’s most conscious and cherished possessions.

So then Fanny told Black her story. It was a touching story, bravely told. Whenever the lines of it began to verge too decidedly upon the pathetic she brought herself up, as she caught her red lips between her teeth, said softly, “Oh, never mind that part—it’s no different from thousands of others,” and went quietly and clearly on. She told him of the invalid mother, so dear and so helpless—of the uncle who had died, the one man left in the bereaved family, for whom she obviously wore her mourning—“though he would have told me not, wonderful old man, who wanted nobody to grieve for him.” She spoke of the future, so obscure, and what it was best to do; and now, suddenly, when she least expected it—she hesitated, then came frankly out with it—here was this suitor besieging her, whom she must answer. And with it all—she was suffering a great longing for something which she had not—a sense that there was a God who cared, which she found it, oh! so difficult to believe. This last was the greatest, much the greatest, need of all. She had come to him because she knew no one else who could point the way....

Here she rested her case, and sat silently looking down at her hands clasped tightly in her lap, her face paling with the stress of her repressed emotion. Yes, it did pale, as well it might. When one dares to play with sacred things, small wonder if the blood seeps away from the capillaries, and the pulse beats fast and small. And Fanny knew—who could know better?—that she was playing, playing a desperate game, with the last cards she held.