A Young Man's Heart by Cornell Woolrich Read Free Book Online

there a little while longer. Then we will have a new dish for breakfast. Maybe you would turn out quite delicious—with a little lemon sauce, quien sabe?”
    “Cannibal,” stormed the old woman, “feed the baby!”
    The following night the process was repeated, but a folded serape, or native blanket, was given him as a mattress in place of his clothes. He began to find the arrangement quite tolerable. The third night, however, sounds of discord, penetrating to his senses even before he was awake, dragged him over the borderland of consciousness in spite of himself. At the moment of his awakening Estelle had come distractedly into the room.
    “. . . in the presence of your own son,” she had just finished saying. She found the light-cord, hanging downward in the center of the room, and pulled it, like a person clutching at salvation. In the dark Blair could see the whiteness of her arm as she did it. She pulled it twice too often, so that the light went up, out again, and finally remained up. Her pink wrapper, pulled down at the shoulder in disorder and with a rent in it, had finally at the end of its frivolous career achieved a tragic dignity.
    Blair descended lightly from the stove. She stood facing the door but her hand fluttered about at her side until it had found and clasped his, as though something tangible were needed to reassure her. Giraldy was looking in at them from the doorway, his face flushed with something more than mere anger. “Estelle, don’t make a fool out of yourself,” he said, “this is my house.”
    Her answer, when it came, was so unlike anything Blair had ever heard anyone say before now, that he stared at her fascinatedly, almost doubting he had heard her speak. “I belong to God,” she said, and her hand quitted Blair’s to toss a coil of hair triumphantly back from her eyes. And with the statement and the gesture that went with it she seemed to regain all self-possession, all authority of presence, and whatever fear had been haunting her flickered out in her eyes and left her standing there with no need, it seemed, for Blair’s hand any more.
    But Giraldy’s reaction to the utterance was much like what Blair’s had been. Incredulity, a momentary inability to grasp her meaning, and a slight awe of what must have appeared to him as her hysteria. Then wounded vanity, toning down the color in his face to a pasty sallowness more in keeping with the lateness of the hour. There it ended.
    “You do?” he said ironically. “Since when, Joan of Arc?” And scalding her from head to foot, through narrowed lids, with a contemptuous glance that no longer had any love in it, he turned his back to the both of them and withdrew to his own room.
    The closing of the door at the far end of the corridor put an end to the tension Blair and Estelle had unconsciously been sharing together, though what his stake in it was he could not have told. She dropped down upon the unpainted stool that Mariquita made use of at less dramatic times in feeding the baby. (Propping it up upon it and kneeling before it with a bowl of corn-mash in one hand and a spoon in the other.) Now Estelle was there instead, pinning her wrapper to one shoulder by holding her hand to it.
    “What was the matter?” Blair ventured to ask presently, never expecting her to condescend to an explanation. But Estelle, within the last few days, appeared to subscribe no longer to the old tenets. It was as though all maintenance of reserve, all consideration of the fitnesses of questions and answers, of differences in age, all awareness of personal entity, alike no longer existed nor mattered to her.
    “He wanted me to—to go back to our old room,” she said.
    This, in its turn, puzzled Blair. What was all this, this sudden shifting and contesting of rooms, inanimate things that had never mattered before as far as he knew, this haggling over sleeping-places, this altogether unaccountable behavior, descending as suddenly into their midst