"I know it's serious, Uncle Ranny!" and her voice was like the muted strings of a violin. "But don't you think I understand? Please don't be afraid of me—won't you trust me—please?" And she left her chair and made a step toward me with an imploring gesture of the hands.
"I am not a designing woman," she declared, with a half smile, and then she ran on more vehemently, "I know that Randolph is younger than I. He can tire of me a hundred times before he is ready to marry. Oh, we are a long way from marrying. But he—he begged me to—to be engaged to him and—and for certain reasons that I can't tell any one, I agreed. And I'll keep my word if he keeps—" and there she paused.
A solemn, quite maternal tenderness in her face as she uttered those words so fascinated me that suddenly I saw her anew—a new Alicia—and with a strange tug at the heartstrings I marveled at the miracle.
I saw her suddenly not as a woman, but as Woman—the mother of mankind, the nurse, the nourisher of all the generations. There was in her eyes a something rapt and sybilline—she was the eternal maternal principle in nature, the keeper of man's destiny, older than I, as old as the race—the spirit of motherhood!
And she was engaged to Randolph!
Then, as though emerging from a maze, I blurted out, "You are not in love with him, then?" ...
"Of course I love him!" she returned with fire. "I love everybody in this house. This has been home—heaven to me. Why shouldn't I?—Oh, you Randolph Byrd!—why are men so blind? I've trusted you all my life as if you were God—and you can't let me manage—but you've got to trust me!—I can help—I must—I can't tell you—but you'll never regret it!—Oh, please, Uncle Ranny, don't press me any more," she added more plaintively, her force suddenly leaving her as though she had come to herself with a shock. A gush of tears filled her eyes. "Don't be—too hard on me," she faltered. Her hand groped for the chair behind her, and she sank weeping into it.
"Alicia! My God!" I cried out, choking. Flesh and blood could not bear it. I leaped toward her with a wild impulse to take her in my arms, to comfort her, to pour out against her lips the truth that I trusted her and loved her more than any human being on earth.... My arms went out and all but engulfed her. But—strangely—I checked myself. A powerful inhibition suddenly held me arrested as in a vise. Both the curse and the blessing of middle age were inherent in that inhibition. If I had so much as touched her then, I knew in a flash of quivering intuition that the truth I had perforce so carefully guarded would be spilled like water. If I touched her then, I was lost!
Hastily I retreated a step or two. For a space of intense charged silence Alicia sat drying her eyes, a little crumpled Niobe, the while I with trembling fingers of the hand that was on my table fumbled stupidly in the cigarette box.
"Trust you, Alicia!" I muttered, with an immense effort to control my voice. "I trust you beyond any one. You are mistress in this house. Do whatever you think best. I didn't mean to make you cry, child, forgive me. You—you have answered my question. Now don't let's have any more tears—please!"