“He will kill me, Mother. I’m afraid of him, afraid.”
“Julie, I have no strength to fight for you. Marry Floyd; he is a simple honest boy. He has always loved you.”
To her mother’s great amazement Julie answered in slow deliberate tones—
“That will be the only way to save myself—but it must be at once. I mustn’t have time to think about it—or I couldn’t do it.”
10
Floyd went home early that afternoon, stopping before the little gate. He had taken great pains with his garden. The lawn was velvety smooth; beds of flowers were banked up against the porch; geraniums bloomed in boxes at the windows. The polished brass knocker, the soft white curtain, gave the little house an atmosphere of purity, cleanliness. Passers stopped to admire it; they felt that “nice” people lived there.
Floyd shook off a sick feeling; anger nauseated him. The knocker gave out a musical call. The door was opened by a bright little Japanese boy—the old servants had gradually left during the lonely year of mourning. There was nothing changed in the house—the wood fire lit, the candles on the table set for two; he saw his father at the head of it. After dinner the boy brought his slippers and velvet house jacket. He stretched himself in a big chair and lit his pipe. He loved his pipe—that was the Knickerbocker strain in him; he smoked it with reverence as the old Dutchmen did—in the days when pipes were longer and tobacco better. He loved to sit before the wood fire, and listen to its hissing, crackling, singing; he thought of his mother’s ancestors, those sturdy Pioneers in their cabins, piling on the logs, bolting their iron shutters against the howling wolves outside, who devoured the bodies and cracked the bones of men. The Puritans are gone, but the wolves are still with us; they eat the soul and sow wolf seed.
Then he thought how his father had planned his life for him, just as he had laid out his garden. It had not occurred to him that his son’s life must be different from his own. His father’s time was far away. Today things change with a flash—there is no more “slow development”—a fire!—a storm, lightning, ruins! He was a fool to be so sure of Julie; she had been very sympathetic in his year of mourning. He took it for love—Martin, that vulgarian, with his family history! He never had the slightest suspicion of what was going on between them. He’d been a blind fool.
He jumped to his feet; the clock struck ten. Twenty-four hours to prepare her mother. Why hadn’t she said “No” at once and put an end to it? She couldn’t want to marry him; it was unthinkable, but he never knew quite what she did think. When he said, “A penny for your thoughts,” she grew very serious.
“My thoughts are only for myself.”