Bret Harte - Clarence

She had alternately flushed and paled, although still keeping her scornful attitude as he went on, but there was no mistaking the genuineness of her vague wonderment at his concluding words.

“I don’t understand you,” she said, lifting her eyes to his in a moment of cold curiosity. “What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? What did Judge Beeswinger mean when he called Captain Pinckney a double traitor?” he said roughly.

She sprang to her feet with flashing eyes. “And you—YOU! dare to repeat the cowardly lie of a confessed spy. This, then, is what you wished to tell me—this the insult for which you have kept me here; because you are incapable of understanding unselfish patriotism or devotion—even to your own cause—you dare to judge me by your own base, Yankee-trading standards. Yes, it is worthy of you!” She walked rapidly up and down, and then suddenly faced him. “I understand it all; I appreciate your magnanimity now. You are willing I should join the company of these chivalrous gentlemen in order to give color to your calumnies! Say at once that it was you who put up this spy to correspond with me—to come here—in order to entrap me. Yes entrap me—I—who a moment ago stood up for you before these gentlemen, and said you could not lie. Bah!”

Struck only by the wild extravagance of her speech and temper, Clarence did not know that when women are most illogical they are apt to be most sincere, and from a man’s standpoint her unreasoning deductions appeared to him only as an affectation to gain time for thought, or a theatrical display, like Susy’s. And he was turning half contemptuously away, when she again faced him with flashing eyes.

“Well, hear me! I accept; I leave here at once, to join my own people, my own friends—those who understand me—put what construction on it that you choose. Do your worst; you cannot do more to separate us than you have done just now.”

She left him, and ran up the steps with a singular return of her old occasional nymph-like nimbleness—the movement of a woman who had never borne children—and a swish of her long skirts that he remembered for many a day after, as she disappeared in the corridor. He remained looking after her—indignant, outraged, and unconvinced. There was a rattling at the gate.

He remembered he had locked it. He opened it to the flushed pink cheeks and dancing eyes of Susy. The rain was still dripping from her wet cloak as she swung it from her shoulders.

“I know it all!—all that’s happened,” she burst out with half-girlish exuberance and half the actress’s declamation. “We met them all in the road—posse and prisoners. Chief Thompson knew me and told me all. And so you’ve done it—and you’re master in your old house again. Clarence, old boy! Jim said you wouldn’t do it—said you’d weaken on account of her! But I said ‘No.’ I knew you better, old Clarence, and I saw it in your face, for all your stiffness! ha! But for all that I was mighty nervous and uneasy, and I just made Jim send an excuse to the theatre and we rushed it down here! Lordy! but it looks natural to see the old house again! And she—you packed her off with the others—didn’t you? Tell me, Clarence,” in her old appealing voice, “you shook her, too!”

Dazed and astounded, and yet experiencing a vague sense of relief with something like his old tenderness towards the willful woman before him, he had silently regarded her until her allusion to his wife recalled him to himself.

“Hush!” he said quickly, with a glance towards the corridor.

“Ah!” said Susy, with a malicious smile, “then that’s why Captain Pinckney was lingering in the rear with the deputy.”

“Silence!” repeated Clarence sternly. “Go in there,” pointing to the garden room below the balcony, “and wait there with your husband.”

He half led, half pushed her into the room which had been his business office, and returned to the patio. A hesitating voice from the balcony said, “Clarence!”

It was his wife’s voice, but modified and gentler—more like her voice as he had first heard it, or as if it had been chastened by some reminiscence of those days. It was his wife’s face, too, that looked down on his—paler than he had seen it since he entered the house. She was shawled and hooded, carrying a traveling-bag in her hand.

“I am going, Clarence,” she said, pausing before him, with gentle gravity, “but not in anger. I even ask you to forgive me for the foolish words that I think your still more foolish accusation”—she smiled faintly—“dragged from me. I am going because I know that I have brought—and that while I am here I shall always be bringing—upon you the imputation and even the responsibility of my own faith! While I am proud to own it,—and if needs be suffer for it,—I have no right to ruin your prospects, or even make you the victim of the slurs that others may cast upon me. Let us part as friends—separated only by our different political faiths, but keeping all other faiths together—until God shall settle the right of this struggle. Perhaps it may be soon—I sometimes think it may be years of agony for all; but until then, good-by.”

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