Four days of agonized suspense, during which--at Lary’s urgent
request--David abstained from replying to either of the letters ...
and Lavinia Trench came home. She walked into the house, a tottering
old woman. Theo and her father were in the dining-room, trying to
choke down Drusilla’s tempting dinner, and they started from the table
as if an apparition from the dead had confronted them. She was dusty
and disheveled. The close travelling hat hung limp over one eye,
and through the greenish-gray of her cheeks the bones were modelled
remorselessly.
“What--what has happened to you, Vine? Have you been in a wreck?”
“A wreck? Oh, yes, a wreck. Everything is a wreck.”
She sank into a chair and sat staring at the floor. After a moment she
collected herself to ask: “Has Sylvia written?” And then: “_What_ has
Sylvia written?”
“Nothing--except the letter she sent before you got there. She wanted
you to wait until she was through with her housecleaning--”
“I know all about that! David Trench, if you ever speak to that
unprincipled girl, I’ll....” Lavinia glared, her heart pounding
visibly. “She ... I might have known what to expect, after the letter
she wrote when Syd and Eileen were married. She’s worse than Eileen,
a hundred times worse. She’s capable--of lying--about her own mother.
She’ll try to lie out of this thing. You can’t depend on a word she
says. And Oliver’s as unprincipled as she is.”
In times of stress it had always been a source of relief to Lavinia to
talk--to abuse some one. More often than not, David was the victim.
Now she was hardly conscious of his presence. Theodora she did not
see at all. She was sunk in the morass of her own misery, a misery so
devastating that her worst enemy must have pitied her.
“Was Sylvia unkind to you?”
“Unkind? I like the way you pick your words!”
“I’m so sorry, Vine. You must make allowances for the hot weather--and
Oliver’s uncertain temper. Sylvia had enough to upset her.”
“That’s no excuse for treating her mother in such a shameful way.”
She went up to her room and shut herself in. From behind a curtain
she watched while David went to the cottage to consult his son. There
was no train arriving from Detroit at that hour of the day. It later
developed that Lavinia had left the train at Littlefield, and that her
travel-stained appearance was the result of a rough ride in a service
car. David had often come home that way, when he had contracts in Pana
and Sullivan. He knew, too, that it was the Chicago train; but the fact
was without significance for him.
When the woman had calmed herself somewhat, she told a more or less
coherent story. She had foolishly tried to surprise Sylvia--had
pictured her daughter’s delight, when she should walk in, unannounced,
on the heels of the letter that deferred her coming until Tuesday. She
went to the apartment in a cab and rang the bell. There was no one at
home. She returned to the station and wrote the letter to David--she
would not have told him for the world that she was greeted by locked
doors.
“Why didn’t you go right to the janitor, my dear?” David asked,
tenderly. “You know Oliver and Sylvia often go out on the lake,
Sundays, when it’s hot. And--it just occurs to me--are you sure you
went to the right place?”
Judith, watching the unfoldment of the story from a vantage point that
was not David’s, thought the woman clutched eagerly at a plank she had
hitherto not seen. She gained a precious interval of thought, while her
lips retorted:
“I should think I ought to know Sylvia’s address.”
“Yes, but those great apartment houses all look alike. You might not
even have been on the right street. You know, once when you went to St.
Louis--”
“Yes, but that time I took the wrong car line. It was the fault of the
policeman who directed me. I’d think a cabman would know the streets.”
“What did Sylvia say--when you finally--”
“What did she say? She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t let me in. I
tried to telephone her from the hotel, Monday morning--and I’m morally
certain it was Oliver who answered the ’phone. When I said it was
mother, he said I had the wrong number, and hung up. I tried again, and
they wouldn’t answer.”
“But when you went back to the house--”
“I went three times--and once I know I saw Sylvia peeping through
the curtain at the apartment door. She didn’t want me there, and she
wouldn’t let me in.”
“I’m going to call Sylvia up and ask her what she means by--”
Lavinia leaped across the room and fell upon her husband, forcing him
roughly into his chair.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. Haven’t I been humiliated enough
already?”