Manslaughter. Alice Duer Miller
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her through Wiley, his lawyer. Wiley, a man in the forties, then attaining preëminence at the bar in New York, had been thought by many people to be an ideal husband for Adeline. They were old friends. He admired her, wished her well, and thought of her instantly when his new client applied to him for help.
The minute Thorne saw Miss Bennett he saw that she would do perfectly. He made her the offer of a good salary. He couldn't believe that she would refuse it. She could hardly believe it herself, for she was unaccustomed to setting up her will against anyone's least of all against a man like Joe Thorne, who had successfully battled his way up against the will of the world. The contest went on for weeks and weeks. Poor Miss Bennett kept consulting her friends, almost agreeing to go when she saw Thorne, and then telephoning him that she had changed her mind, and bringing him round to her apartment—which was just what she didn't want—to argue her into it again.
Some of her friends opposed her going to the house of a widower whose reputation in regard to women was not spotless. Others thought—though they did not say—that if she went, and succeeded in marrying him, she would be doing better than she had any right to expect. Perhaps if Miss Bennett could have fallen in love with Lydia she might have yielded, but even at ten, Lydia, a black-eyed determined little person, inspired fear more than love.
Poor Adeline grew pale and thin over the struggle. At last she decided, after due consultation with friends, to end the matter by being a little bit rude, by telling Thorne that she just didn't like the whole prospect; that she preferred her own little place and her own little life.
"Like it—like this cramped little place?" he said, looking about at the sunshine and chintz and potted daisies of her cherished home. "But I'd make you comfortable, give you what you ought to have—Europe, your friends, your carriage, everything."
He went on to argue with her that she was wrong, utterly wrong to like her own life. Her last card didn't win. She yielded at last for no better reason than that her powers of resistance were exhausted.
Thorne was then living in a house on a corner of upper Fifth Avenue, with a pale-pink brocade ballroom running across the front and taking all the morning sunshine, and a living room and library at the back so dark that you couldn't read in it at mid-day, with marble stairs and huge fire-places that didn't draw—a terrible house. Some years later, under Miss Bennett's influence, he had bought the more modest house in the Seventies where Lydia now spent her winters. But it was to the Fifth Avenue house that Miss Bennett came, and found herself plunged into one of the most desperate struggles in the world. Thorne, whose continuous interest was given to business, attempted to rule Lydia in crises—by scenes, scenes of a violence that Miss Bennett had never seen equaled. As it turned out, her coming weakened Thorne's power; not that she wasn't usually on his side—she was—but she was an audience, and Thorne had some sense of shame before an audience, while Lydia had none at all.
Many a time she had seen him box Lydia's ears and, mild as she was, had been glad to see him do it. But it was his violence that undid him. It was then that Lydia became suddenly dignified and, unbroken, contrived to make him appear like a brute.
There is nothing really more unbreakable than a child who considers neither her physical well-being nor public opinion. An older person, however violent, has learned that he must consider such questions, and it is a weakness in a campaign of violence to consider anything but the desired end.
And on the whole Thorne lost. He could make Lydia do or refrain from doing specific acts—at least he could when he was at home. He had not permitted her at ten to keep her great Danes nor at thirteen to drive a high-stepping hackney in a red-wheeled cart which she ordered for herself without consultation with anyone.
The evening after that struggle was over he had asked Miss Bennett to marry him. She knew why he did it. Lydia in the course of the row had referred to her as a paid companion. He had long been considering it as a sensible arrangement, particularly in case of his death. Miss Bennett refused him. She tried to think that she had been tempted by his offer, but she was not. To her he seemed a violent man who had been a bricklayer, and she always breathed a sigh of relief when he was out of the house. She was glad that he did not press the point, but in after years it was a solid comfort to her to remember that she might have been Lydia's stepmother if she had chosen.
But it was in the long-drawn-out contest that Thorne failed. He could not make Lydia keep governesses that she didn't like. Her method was simple—she made their lives so disagreeable that nothing could make them stay. He never succeeded in getting her to boarding school, though he and Miss Bennett, after a long conference, decided that that was the thing to do. But that failure was partly due to his failing health.
That was their last great struggle. He died in 1912. In his will he left Miss Bennett ten thousand a year, with the request that she stay with his daughter until her marriage. It touched Miss Bennett that he should have seen that she could not have stayed if she had been dependent on Lydia's capricious will. It was this that made her position possible—the fact that they both knew she could go in an instant if she wanted; not that she ever doubted that Lydia was sincerely attached to her.
CHAPTER III
When Lydia ran upstairs to dress everything was waiting for her—the lights lit, the fires crackling, her bath drawn, her underclothes and stockings folded on a chair, her green-and-gold dress spread out upon the bed, her narrow gold slippers standing exactly parallel on the floor beside it, and in the midst Evans, like a priestess waiting to serve the altar of a goddess, was standing with her eyes on the clock.
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