Chapter 18
Beau Ferris came up the lane on a tired horse and saw a yellow light in his kitchen window and a lamp in the cottage and his daughter on the porch with her shawl over her shoulders, watching for him.
He had ridden home slowly.
He swung off the bay. Quint came out of the barn for her without speaking.
Beau climbed the porch steps slowly. Lydia stood out of her chair and put her hand against his cheek without saying anything.
Then she stood aside. "She's in the parlor, Pa.
" She went down to the cottage and shut the door behind her.
He took his hat off.
He went in.
Florence was in the parlor on the small straight chair by the dresser, with the lamp turned low.
She had a piece of mending in her lap. She had put it down when she heard the door.
She didn't stand. Her hands rested on the cloth in her lap as if she had been keeping them very still for a count of breaths.
Her right thumb had gone white at the knuckle.
"Florence."
"Beau."
He sat. He sat opposite her on the settee that had been his wife's, with his hat in his hand. He set the hat on the floor at his feet. He looked at her face. She had been crying. She was not crying now. There was a kind of clean stillness on her that had not been there in the dooryard at two.
"There's something I have to say to you," he said.
"All right."
"It isn't about you."
"All right."
He drew a breath.
"I think it would be better if you left."
She did not move.
"I think it would be better if I had Quint drive you in tomorrow and put you on the eastbound on Saturday. I'll cover the fare, any class you choose.”
She stayed silent, waiting for him to explain himself.
"I'm not the man you wrote to. Not now. I can't ask you to walk into what I'm walking into. I cannot, in any conscience, marry a woman into a house that will belong to another man by next week. That's the truth. It isn't about you. I'm sorry."
She set the mending down on the small table beside her. She set it carefully, with both hands.
"Lydia told me about your brother."
His head jerked, just once, like a horse's. He set his palms on his knees.
"She shouldn't have."
“Well, she did."
"That wasn't hers to tell."
"It was, Beau. It was hers as much as it was yours. She is twelve and she watched a man on a porch tell her father her uncle was dead, and she was carrying it like a stone, and she set it down because she trusted me, and you ought to be glad. You ought to be glad she did."
She held his eyes and said it one more time.
"You ought to be glad."
He looked at the lamp, which burned steady, and felt a trickle of shame. He had crossed his own kitchen at her over a question about wood while she sat with this all afternoon.
"Florence."
"Yes."
"I cannot have you here. Not because of you. Because the house I asked you out to live in is no longer mine to ask you into. I will not be… I will not marry a woman into my trouble and call it love. I will not."
She stood up, crossed the parlor and set her hand briefly on the back of his neck, very lightly, as a person did to a horse to settle it, and then she took the hand back, and went to the door.
"I'm going to the cottage. I'll think tonight. We'll speak in the morning."
“Florence…"
"In the morning, Beau."
She went out. The door shut. Through the parlor window he watched her cross the yard.
She stopped at the gate to the cottage path and set both hands against the post and stood there in the dark, head bowed, before she went in.
The parlor was yellow with a low lamp and a piece of mending on a small table and a hat at his feet.
He sat with his palms on his knees and didn't move.
Lydia came in some minutes later.
She didn't sit. She stood in front of him with her hands clasped in front of her apron. She had been crying again, and she didn't bother to wipe her face.
"Pa."
"Lyddie."
"You're being foolish."
"Lydia. Listen…”
"No, Pa, you listen. You didn't have to send her away. You didn't have to. She would have stayed. She told me at this table this afternoon. She said she loved the bread and the linen and the jar of sprigs, and you sent her down the path."
"Lydia, I don’t have a ranch to give her."
The room went small around the sentence.
He had said it. He had said it in his own parlor to his own daughter, after a week of carrying it in his teeth, and the saying didn't relieve him. It only let the thing into the room.
Lydia's face cracked.
“Does that matter?”
"Yes, Lyddie. I haven't the money. I can't make it in a week. There's not a man in this county who'll lend it against the herd, and there's no way out of this paper. Henson said so. The ranch will not be ours by Saturday."
She crossed the room and put her face against his shirt and wept, and he held the back of her head. The lamp burned. The mending lay on the small table where Florence had left it.
"Pa."
"Yes."
"You should have let her decide."
He didn't answer her. He held the back of her head. He sat that way until she had stopped, and after she had stopped, and the lamp burned down a quarter inch, and at last she stepped back and wiped her face on her sleeve and went up the stairs to her bed without telling him goodnight.
He sat on alone, in the parlor that had been his wife's, with his hat on the floor. He went up when the lamp gave out.