The semi-daily passings of Cissie Dildine before the old Renfrew manor on her way to and from the Arkwright home upset Peter Siner's working schedule to an extraordinary degree.
After watching for two or three days, Peter worked out a sort of time- table for Cissie. She passed up early in the morning, at about five forty-five. He could barely see her then, and somehow she looked very pathetic hurrying along in the cold, dim light of dawn. After she had cooked the Arkwright breakfast, swept the Arkwright floors, dusted the Arkwright furniture, she passed back toward Niggertown, somewhere near nine. About eleven o'clock she went up to cook dinner, and returned at one or two in the afternoon. Occasionally, she made a third trip to get supper.
This was as exactly as Peter could predict the arrivals and departures of Cissie, and the schedule involved a large margin of uncertainty. For half an hour before Cissie passed she kept Peter watching the clock at nervous intervals, wondering if, after all, she had gone by unobserved. Invariably, he would move his work to a window where he had the whole street under his observation. Then he would proceed with his indexing with more and more difficulty. At first the paragraphs would lose connection, and he would be forced to reread them. Then the sentences would drop apart. Immediately before the girl arrived, the words themselves grew anarchic. They stared him in the eye, each a complete entity, self-sufficient, individual, bearing no relation to any other words except that of mere proximity,—like a spelling lesson. Only by an effort could Peter enforce a temporary cohesion among them, and they dropped apart at the first slackening of the strain.
Strange to say, when the octoroon actually was walking past, Peter did not look at her steadily. On the contrary, he would think to himself: "How little I care for such a woman! My ideal is thus and so—" He would look at her until she glanced across the yard and saw him sitting in the window; then immediately he bent over his books, as if his stray glance had lighted on her purely by chance, as if she were nothing more to him than a passing dray or a fluttering leaf. Indeed, he told himself during these crises that he had no earthly interest in the girl, that she was not the sort of woman he desired,—while his heart hammered, and the lines of print under his eyes blurred into gray streaks across the page.
One afternoon Peter saw Cissie pass his gate, hurrying, almost running, apparently in flight from something. It sent a queer shock through him. He stared after her, then up and down the street. He wondered why she ran. Even when he went to bed that night the strangeness of Cissie's flight kept him awake inventing explanations.
None of Peter's preoccupations was lost upon Captain Renfrew. None is so suspicious as a credulous man aroused. After Rose had struck her blow at the secretary, the old gentleman noted all of Peter's permutations and misconstrued a dozen quite innocent actions on Peter's part into signs of bad faith.
By a little observation he identified Cissie Dildine and what he saw did not reëstablish his peace of mind. On the contrary, it became more than probable that the cream-colored negress would lure Peter away. This possibility aroused in the old lawyer a grim, voiceless rancor against Cissie. In his thoughts he linked the girl with every manner of evil design against Peter. She was an adventuress, a Cyprian, a seductress attempting to snare Peter in the brazen web of her comeliness. For to the old gentleman's eyes there was an abiding impudicity about Cissie's very charms. The passionate repose of her face was immodest; the possession of a torso such as a sculptor might have carved was brazen. The girl was shamefully well appointed.
One morning as Captain Renfrew came home from town, he chanced to walk just behind the octoroon, and quite unconsciously the girl delivered an added fillip to the old gentleman's uneasiness.
Just before Cissie passed in front of the Renfrew manor, womanlike, she paused to make some slight improvements in her appearance before walking under the eyes of her lover. She adjusted some strands of hair which had blown loose in the autumn wind, looked at herself in a purse mirror, retouched her nose with her greenish powder; then she picked a little sprig of sumac leaves that burned in the corner of a lawn and pinned its flame on the unashamed loveliness of her bosom.