‘Especially as locking him up wouldn’t undo the deed,’ his uncle said. ‘I agree with you: much better to lock him up before.’
She looked at his uncle. ‘Before?’ she said. ‘Before what?’
‘Before he does what he might be locked up for having done,’ his uncle said in that bland immediate quick fantastic voice which lent not only a perspicacity but a sort of solid reasonableness to the most fantastic inconsequence.
‘Oh,’ she said. She looked at his uncle. ‘Lock him up how?’ she said. ‘I know that much about law, myself: that you cant keep anybody locked up just because of what they are planning to do. Besides, he’d just give some Memphis lawyer two or three hundred dollars and be out again the next day. Isn’t that true?’
‘Isn’t it?’ his uncle said. ‘Remarkable how hard a lawyer will work for three hundred dollars.’
‘So that wouldn’t do any good at all, would it?’ she said. ‘Deport him.’
‘Deport your brother?’ his uncle said. Where? What for?’
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop it. Don’t you know that if I had anyone else to go to, I wouldn’t be here? Deport Seb — Captain Gualdres.’
‘Ah,’ his uncle said. ‘Captain Gualdres. I’m afraid immigration authorities lack not only the will-to-succeed but the scope of movement too, of Memphis or three-hundred-dollar lawyers. It would take weeks, maybe months, to deport him, when if there is food for your fears, two days would be too much. Because what would your brother be doing all that time?’
‘Do you mean that you, a lawyer, couldn’t keep him locked up somewhere until Sebastian is out of the country?’
‘Keep who?’ his uncle said. ‘Locked up where?’
She stopped looking at his uncle, though she hadn’t moved. ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ she said.
His uncle gave her one from the box on the table and held the match and she sat back again, puffing rapidly at it and talking through the puffs, still not looking at his uncle.
‘All right,’ she said. When things finally got so bad between Max and him, when I finally realised that Max hated him so much that something bad was going to happen, I persuaded Max to agree to—’
‘ — to save your mother’s fiancé,’ his uncle said. ‘Your prospective new father.’
‘All right,’ she said through the rapid smoke, holding the cigarette between two fingers with pointed painted nails. ‘Because there was nothing really settled between him and Mother — if there ever had been anything to settle. And so at least it wasn’t Mother who wanted anything settled about it because… And he would have had the horses or at least the money to buy new ones, no matter which one of us.. She puffed rapidly at the cigarette, not looking at his uncle nor at anything. ‘So when I found out that sooner or later Max was going to kill him if something wasn’t done about it, I made a trade with Max that if he would wait twenty-four hours, I would come with him to you and persuade you to have him deported, back to the Argentine—’
‘ — where he wouldn’t have anything but his captain’s pay,’ his uncle said. ‘And then you would follow him.’
‘All right,’ she said. ‘Yes. So we came to you, and then I saw that you didn’t believe us and were not going to do anything about it and so the only thing I could think to do was to let Max see with you watching that I loved him too, so that Max would do something to make you believe that at least Max meant what he was saying. And he did it and he does mean it and he’s dangerous and you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to.’
‘And you’ve got to do something too,’ his uncle said. ‘You’ve got to start telling the truth.’
‘I have. I am.’
‘But not all of it. What’s wrong between your brother and Captain Gualdres. Not — as they say — chewing gum this time.’ She watched his uncle for just a second through the rapid smoke. The cigarette was almost gone now, right down to the painted finger-tips.
‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s not the money. He doesn’t care anything about money. There’s plenty of that for Se — all of us. It wasn’t even because of Mother. It was because Sebastian always beat him. At everything. Sebastian came without even a horse of his own, and Max rides well too but Sebastian beat him, beat him on Max’s own horses, the very horses that Max knew Sebastian was going to be the owner of as soon as Mother came to taw and said Yes. And Max had been the best pupil Paoli had had in years and one day Sebastian took a hearth-broom and parried through two ripostes until Max jerked the button off and went at him with the bare point and Sebastian used the hearth-broom like a sabre and beat down the lunge until somebody grabbed Max—’
She was breathing, not hard so much as fast, rapid, panting almost, still trying to draw on the cigarette which would have been too short to smoke even if her hand had been steady enough to hold it steady, sitting huddled in the chair in a kind of cloud of white tulle and satin and the rich dark heavy sheen of little slain animals, looking not wan so much as delicate and fragile and not even fragile so much as cold, evanescent, like one of the stalked white early spring flowers bloomed ahead of its time into the snow and the ice and doomed before your eyes without even knowing that it was dying, feeling not even any pain.
‘That was afterward,’ his uncle said.
‘What? After what?’
‘That happened,’ his uncle said. ‘But it was afterward. You don’t want a man dead just because he beat you, on a horse or with a rapier either. At least, you don’t take actual steps to make the wish a fact’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘No,’ his uncle said.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
She leaned and put the cigarette stub into the ashtray as carefully as if it was an egg or maybe a capsule of nitroglycerin, and sat again, her hands not even shut now but lying open on her lap.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I was afraid of this. I told — knew you wouldn’t be satisfied. It’s a woman.’
‘Ah,’ his uncle said.
‘I thought you would,’ she said, and now her voice had changed again, for the third time since she entered the room not ten minutes ago yet. Out there, about two miles from our back door. A farmer’s daughter. — Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know that one too: Scott or Hardy or somebody else three hundred years ago: the young lord of the manor and the villeins: DROIT DU SEIGNEUR and all the rest of it. Only this time it wasn’t. Because Max gave her a ring.’ Now her hands were lying on the chair arms, clenched again, and she wasn’t looking at his uncle now either. ‘A good deal different this time. Better than Hardy or Shakespeare either thought of.
Because there were two city lads this time: not only just the rich young earl but the young earl’s foreign friend or anyway house-guest: the dark romantic foreign knight that heat the young earl riding the young earl’s own horses and then took the young earl’s sword away from him with a hearth-broom. Until at last all he had to do was ride at night up to the young earl’s girl friend’s window, and whistle — . Wait,’ she said.
She got up. She was already walking before she got onto her feet. She crossed the room and jerked the door open before he could even move, her heels clapping hard and fast in the hall. Then the front door banged. And still his uncle just stood there looking at the open door.
‘What?’ he said. What?’
But his uncle didn’t answer; his uncle was still watching the door and then almost before his uncle could have answered, they heard the front door again and then the hard brittle girl-heels in the hall, two pairs of them now, and the Harriss girl came in fast and crossed the room and flipped one hand backward behind her and said, There she is,’ and went on and swirled down into the chair again while he and his uncle looked at the other girl — a country girl, because he had seen her face before in town on Saturday, but that was the only way you could tell them now because their mouths and faces were painted too and sometimes their fingernails and the Sears, Roebuck clothes didn’t look like Sears, Roebuck now and sometimes they were not even Sears, Roebuck even if they were not trimmed off in thousand-dollar mink; — a girl about the same age as the Harriss girl but not quite as tall, slender yet solid too, as country-bred girls can look, with dark hair and black eyes, looking at him for a second and then at his uncle.
‘Come in,’ his uncle said. ‘I’m Mr. Stevens. Your name is Mossop.’
‘I know it,’ the girl said. ‘No, sir. My mother was a Mossop. My father is Hence Cayley.’
‘She’s got the ring too,’ the Harriss girl said. ‘I asked her to bring it because I knew you wouldn’t believe it any more than I did when I heard it. I don’t blame her for not wearing it. I wouldn’t wear anybody’s ring either that said to me what Max said to her.’
The Cayley girl looked at the
