The room was very still after she had spoken. Her father did not start or look directly at her, but, after an interval of silence, he lifted his eyes slowly until they met hers.
“You have lied to me,” Zelda repeated in the same passionless voice, speaking as though she were saying some commonplace thing. “I understand perfectly well why you wish to continue this trusteeship. I shall be very glad to do what you ask; only we must understand each other frankly. You must tell me the truth.”
He shrank down slowly into his chair, but his eyes did not leave her face. His hands had ceased trembling, and he was quite himself.
“You don’t know,—you can’t know the enormity of what you are saying, Zee. It must be some horrible joke.” He drew his hand across his eyes as though to dispel a vision. “I have dealt with you generously, considerately,—and this—you can not mean what you say.”
He waited as though he expected some word of contrition; but she still stood with her eyes fastened on him, and there was no kindness in them.
“I have sought your own good. I have supposed you would be gratified to continue—the trust—reposed in me—by your mother.”
“If you speak to me of my mother again I shall find some way of punishing you,” she said, and there was still no passion in her voice.
“I suppose that when you are ready you will tell me what this means—why you have turned against me in this way,” he began with a simulation of anger. And then changing to a conciliatory tone: “Tell me what it is that troubles you, Zee. I had hoped that you were very happy here. I had flattered myself through the summer that ours was a happy home. But if there is any way in which I have erred I am heartily sorry.”
He bowed his head as though from the weight of his penitence, but he was glad to escape her eyes. When he looked up again, he found her gaze still bent upon him. He picked up the fallen pen and placed it on the table beside the paper which he had asked her to sign.
“You are a tremendous fraud,” she said, with a smile in which there was no mirth or pity. “You are immensely clever, and I suppose that because I have some of your evil blood in me, I am a little bit clever, too.”
He rose in real anger and cried hoarsely:
“Zee! You forget yourself; you must be mad!”
“I am growing sane,” she answered. “I have been mad for a year, but my reason has come back to me. I do not forget myself or that you are my father; but I remember, too, that you are an evil man and that you drove my mother into her grave. You killed her, with your pettiness and your hypocrisy; you are just as much her murderer as though you had slain her with a knife. But I beg of you, do not think that you can play the same tactics with me. I don’t ask for the money that you have squandered. It isn’t your being a thief that I hate; it’s your failure to be a man! It’s the thought that you would betray the trust of the dead—of my dead mother—that’s what I hate you for!”
He took a step toward her menacingly.
“You are either a fool or mad. You shall not talk to me so! You have been listening to lies—infamous lies. Rodney Merriam has been poisoning your mind against me. I shall hold him responsible; I shall make him suffer. He has gone too far, too far. I shall have the law upon him.”
She had rested her arm on the mantel-shelf, and she now leaned upon it, but did not draw away from him as his eyes blazed into hers.
“You had better sit down,” she said without flinching. “I suppose you used to talk to my mother this way and that you succeeded in frightening her. But I am not afraid of you, Ezra Dameron. If you think you can browbeat me into signing your deed, you have mistaken me. I was never less scared in my life.”
When she spoke his name it slipped from her tongue lingeringly, and fell upon him like a lash. In addressing him so, she cast off the idea of kinship utterly; there was no tie of blood between them; and he was simply a mean old man, despicable and contemptible, standing on the brink of a pit that he had dug for himself, and feeling the earth crumbling beneath his feet.
She went on, with no break in the impersonal tone to which her words had been pitched in the beginning.
“You have so little sense of honor,—you are so utterly devoid of anything that approaches honor and decency,—the hypocrisy in you is so deep, that you can’t imagine that a man like my uncle would never seek to prejudice me against you—my own father. Neither my uncle nor my aunt has ever said a single unkind word to me of you. My aunt asked me to go to live with her when we came home; but I refused to do it. And I’m glad I did. This closer acquaintance has given me an opportunity that was—in one of your hypocritical phrases—quite providential, of learning you as though you were a child’s primer. You have been a very bitter lesson, Ezra Dameron! My mother never rebelled, never lifted her voice against you, and you supposed I should prove quite as easy; but you see how mistaken you are!”
“This is a game—a plot to trap me. But it shall fail. My own child shall not mock me.”
His old eyes gleamed angrily and his bent shoulders straightened; but his hands were tremulous. He rested one of them on the mantel and drew close to her again; but she went on relentlessly.
“Please sit down. I have something more to say to you. I have gone over it in my heart a thousand times in this year of deceit. I believe I have grown a good deal like you. It has been a positive pleasure for me to act a part,—shielding you from the eyes of people who were anxious for a breach between us. I know as I walk the streets and people say, ‘There is Ezra Dameron’s daughter,’ that they all pity me. They have expected me to leave you. They have wondered that I should go on living with you when every child in the community sneers at the sight of you or the mention of your name.”
“Shame on you! Shame on you! This is beyond the pardon of God!”
“I suppose it is a shameless thing to be saying to you; but I haven’t finished yet. And you had better sit down. You are an old man and I respect your years even though you are Ezra Dameron.”
His hand that lay on the mantel was trembling so that it beat the black slate shelf uncontrollably. She waited, with the patience of a parent in dealing with an erring child, until he turned and sat down.
“There was some one that told me—that warned me against you. I had hoped that it would never be necessary to tell you; but it gives me a keener happiness than I dare try to express to tell you now.”
“Yes; yes; some liar,—an infamous liar,” he muttered, and he looked at her with a sudden hope in his face. When he should learn who had come between him and this girl he would exhaust the possibilities of revenge.
Zelda read the meaning of his look and she smiled a little, and stepped to the table and turned up the lamp, and put his glasses within reach of his hand.
“I shall not trust myself to tell you. I shall let you read for yourself a few words, written by one who was not a liar.”
He watched her as she drew out the little red book, her talisman and her guide. He turned it over curiously and then read, at the place where she had opened:
“They have told me to-day that I am going to die; but I have known it for a long time. * * * Do for her what you would have done for me. Do not let him kill the sweetness and gentleness in her. Keep her away from him if you can; but do not let her know what I have suffered from him. I have arranged for him to care for the property I have to leave her, so that she may never feel that I did not trust him. He will surely guard what belongs to her safely. * * * Perhaps I was unjust to him; it may have been my fault; but if she can respect or love him I wish it to be so.”
“You see there is no question of lying here. I found this—in a trunk of mother’s, in the garret—quite accidentally, a few days after I came home. It was intended for Uncle Rodney or Aunt Julia and not for me.”
He was silent for a moment, staring at the page before him and refusing to meet her eyes.
She sat down and watched him across the table. Suddenly he laughed shrilly, and slapped his hands together in glee.
“I might have known it; I might have known it! This is delightful; this is rich beyond anything!” His mirth increased, and he rocked back and forth, chuckling and beating his knees with his hands.
“Zee, Zee, my child,” he began amiably; “I am glad this has happened. I am glad that there is an opportunity for me to right myself in your eyes. I could not have asked anything better.”
He began to nod his head as was his way when pleased by the thought of something he was about to say.
“Zee, the animus of this is clear. Your mother hated me,—”
“You needn’t tell me that! Her own testimony is enough, pitiful enough.”
“But the reason, the reason! I should never have told you. I have hoped to keep it in my own bosom,—my lifelong shame and grief. But your mother, your mother played me a base trick, the basest a woman can play. She married me, loving another man. And I suffered, O God, how I suffered for it!”
He lifted his head and raised his hands to heaven.
A sob leaped in her throat and tears sprang in her eyes as she rose and bent toward him over the table.
“If you mention her again I shall punish you, Ezra Dameron.”
He did not heed her, but began speaking with a haste his tongue had rarely known. The smile that forever haunted his lips vanished.
“She loved another man when she married me. I knew it well enough; but I was glad to marry her on any terms. She was a beautiful woman,—a very beautiful woman;” and the anger died suddenly from his eyes and voice. Zelda wondered whether he was really touched by the thought of her mother or whether the little flame of passion had merely burned out. As he continued speaking she listened, as though he had been an actor impersonating a part, and doing it ill, so that he presented no illusion to her eyes. She was thinking, too, of her own future; of the morrow in which she must plan her life anew. She thought of Morris Leighton now, and with an intenseness that made her start when her father spoke his name.
“You have been a better daughter to me than I could have asked. An inscrutable Providence has ordered things strangely, but—” and he chuckled and wagged his head, “but,—very wisely and satisfactorily. I suppose your Uncle Rodney thought a marriage between you and his young friend Leighton would be an admirable arrangement; but you have done as I would have you do in rejecting him. Ah, I understood,—I was watching you—I knew that you were leading him on to destroy him.”
“I should like to know what right you have to speak to me of such a matter in such a tone. He is a gentleman.”
“He is; he is, indeed;” and Dameron laughed harshly. “He is a gentleman beyond any doubt; but you refused him, just as I knew you would. The force of heredity is very strong. You are a dutiful daughter; you even anticipated my wishes. Your conduct is exemplary. I am delighted.”
“I think you are mad,” said Zelda, looking at him wonderingly. She had begun to feel the strain of events of the few hours since she had gone to her uncle’s house; she was utterly weary and her father’s strange manner had awakened a fear in her. Perhaps he was really mad. She walked toward the door; but he was timing his climax with a shrewd cunning.
“When your mother was engaged to Morris Leighton, the elder,”—and he paused, knowing that she had turned quickly and was staring at him with wonder and dread in her eyes,—“when your mother was engaged to this young man’s father,” he repeated, “your uncle was greatly pleased. But she was not so easily caught!”
“You ought to know that I believe nothing you say,—not a word!” But in her heart she felt a foreboding that this might be true.
“You should ask your uncle; or your Aunt Julia. Possibly we three are the only people that remember. I should like to have you quite sure about it, now that you have decided not to marry the son,”—and he laughed with ugly glee.
The front door-bell rang out harshly, and the old man sprang up:
“You are not at home; you must see no one.”
Polly’s step was heard in the back hall.
“Never mind, Polly. I’ll answer the door,” said Zelda. The sight of any other face than that of her father would be a relief; but it was nine o’clock, an hour at which no one ever called. She expected nothing more than a brief parley with a messenger boy.
“Pardon me, Miss Dameron—”
Leighton stood on the step with his hat in his hand. He had been wandering about the streets since he left her, afraid to return to report to Rodney Merriam. He had passed the Dameron house a dozen times, held to the neighborhood by a feeling that Zelda might need his protection; and he finally stopped and rang in a tumult of hope that he might see her again and reassure himself of her safety. As he stepped into the hall, he saw Ezra Dameron peering at him from the living-room door.
“Good evening, Mr. Dameron,” said Leighton. The old man turned back to the table and his papers without reply; but he listened intently.
“I was passing,” said Leighton, truthfully, “and I remembered a message that Mrs. Copeland gave me for you this afternoon, and I’m sorry to say I forgot about it until now.”
He looked at her, smiling; she understood well enough why he had come.
“Please put off your coat and come in. We are alone, father and I, having a quiet evening at home!”
“Thank you; I can’t stop; but Mrs. Copeland wished me to ask you to come in to-morrow afternoon. She has an unexpected guest,—a friend from Boston,—and you know she likes everybody to appreciate her friends!”
“Thank you, very much. I shall come if I possibly can.”
She knew that Mrs. Copeland had intrusted Leighton with no such message, for she was on telephonic terms with Zelda, and Morris Leighton was of rather heroic proportions for an errand boy.
“Mrs. Copeland would never forgive me if I forgot,” said Morris, wishing to prolong his moment at the door.
“I shall come if I can,” said Zelda, raising her voice slightly, so that her father might hear.
“And I apologize again for disturbing you. But I feared Mrs. Copeland’s wrath;” and Morris grinned rather foolishly.
“You are a faithful messenger, and I thank you very much,” said Zelda, formally; but when the door closed on him and she heard his step on the walk the tears sprang to her eyes in her joy at the thought that he had remembered!
When she went back to her father he was poring over his papers at the table.
“It was that Leighton fellow,” he said, looking up.
“Yes; it was Mr. Leighton,” said Zelda.
“I don’t like him,” said Dameron, sharply.
“I’m very sorry,” said Zelda.
“I don’t like him,” the old man repeated; and he did not raise his eyes, but kept them upon the papers.
“What dreadful liars we are, you and I, Ezra Dameron,” she said, going back to her old post by the mantel.
“You have used language to me that is infamous, blasphemous, from a child to a father.”
“Very likely,” she said; “but I can’t discuss these things with you any further.”
Leighton’s appearance had broken the spell; it had given her new courage and assurance, though it had not lifted the burden from her heart. Her father was loath to part with her; there was the extension of the trusteeship to be effected; he was about to make an appeal to her, to throw himself on her mercy, when she said, half-turning to go:
“You need not be afraid—I will sign your deed. And I have not the slightest idea of holding you to account for any of your acts. Only,—only,”—and her eyes filled and her voice broke,—“only you must never speak my mother’s name to me again!”
“Yes; yes; I understand,” he said absently; though it was clear that he did not know what she meant.
She turned and looked at him musingly, with a composure that was complete; but a barrier in her heart broke down suddenly.
“My girlhood, the beautiful ignorance of life, has all gone now. It began to go as soon as I came home to live with you; but I wish—I wish—it had not gone—so wretchedly, so cruelly. Good night.”
She spoke with difficulty, and he saw that she was deeply moved; and even after the rustle of her skirts had died away in the hall above he stood looking after her, and listening and wondering. Then he opened a bundle of papers containing his computations and bent over them in deep absorption.
“She will sign it; she will sign it,” he repeated, though he did not raise his head.
When twelve o’clock struck he went to the front doorstep and looked up through the boughs of the cedars to the great host of stars. He gazed long, muttering as though at prayer, while the night wind blew upon him until he was chilled.
“The frost, the frost, it will cut it down, the corn, the corn, the beautiful corn! But it is too late, too late!”
He went in and closed the door, muttering, “The corn! the corn!”