I
Lavinia was finding her tenant increasingly useful--the wicket gate
an open sesame to many of the difficult problems for which she had
been wont to search in vain the pages of the Self Culture Magazine.
A development watched by her son with incredulous wonder. Hitherto
Lavinia Trench had believed nothing that was conveyed to her by word of
mouth. “She’s a pure visuel,” Dr. Schubert had sought to explain. “She
gets her mental concepts through her eyes.” But Lary knew that that
was not all of it. His mother held an enormous respect for the printed
word. She wanted one of her sons to be a writer. That would reflect
real credit on the family. Her own inability to form fluid sentences
only increased her admiration for those unseen masters whose thoughts
and experiences had received the accolade of printer’s ink. True,
she had many times appeared over her own signature, in the clumsily
edited columns of the Bromfield Sentinel--when there was a chance to
weave into the story some reference to Larimore’s triumphs at Cornell,
Sylvia’s social conquests or Bob’s athletic achievements. But to get
things published ... and paid for.... This last comment always sent
Lary flying from the room. She would probably not take any stock in
the things he wrote, even if she read them in print. They were so at
variance with all her established convictions.
On a certain Thursday morning she made occasion to call on Mrs.
Ascott, the newly arrived copy of the Sentinel in her hand. Her dark
sallow cheeks showed hectic splotches, and her eyes flared and dimmed
with the emotion she was trying to conceal. She had not written the
story on the front page of the Bromfield paper. Her fancy’s most
ingenious flight could not have fabricated anything one half so ...
gratifying. So terrible, she amended, to her own soul. But the real,
the usually submerged Lavinia, knew that the former word was the right
one.
“You remember the boy, Fournier Stone, that you used to play with when
you were a little girl in Rochester,” she began tensely. “Read that.”
The story was told with all the crass vulgarity and offensiveness of
small town journalism. The bank examiner had paid an unexpected visit
to the Bromfield National bank--because of certain stories that had
been circulated concerning young Stone’s extravagance in Rochester and
Buffalo. It was found that a large gap between the bank’s records and
the actual cash on hand had been bridged by spurious paper that implied
the additional crime of forgery. This, it transpired, was not Fournier
Stone’s first offence. In the past he had fled to his mother for
assistance; but now Mrs. Stone was critically ill, and he had not dared
to tell her of his dilemma.
“To think of a mother shielding her son in such rascality!” to which
Lavinia added, with snapping satisfaction, “But what could you expect
of such a mother?”
The account closed with the statement that Mrs. Stone had suffered a
relapse, because of the shock of her son’s arrest, and for several
hours her life was despaired of. The culprit was released, under heavy
bond, and was constantly at his mother’s bedside.