John Moore had not crossed Grace’s vision since the afternoon of
Christmas day, when his unexpected appearance in the highway near The
Shack proved so disconcerting. She suspected that he was avoiding
her, probably from a generous wish to spare her the embarrassment of
explaining herself.
When she left Shipley’s at the closing hour of a day early in April she
was surprised to see him waiting at the door.
“Good evening, Grace! Hope you don’t mind being held up, but I wanted
to see you and this seemed the easiest way. Got time to walk home?”
Grace had meant to take the car but she decided instantly that in view
of the glimpse he had got of her in Trenton’s arms on the memorable
day at The Shack it would be poor diplomacy to refuse.
“Of course, I’ll walk, John,” she replied cordially. “I’ve been wanting
to see you.” She waited till they were out of the crowd, then said with
a preluding laugh:
“You must be thinking the awfulest things of me, and that’s why you’ve
given me the go-by. That was an awful fib I told you Christmas about
going to a matinee. The truth of the matter was that I had promised
to go with some people into the country for the afternoon and didn’t
want the family to know; and I couldn’t explain over the telephone. And
out there we all got to cutting up and well--you saw me! I’m terribly
ashamed of myself!”
“Oh, pshaw, you needn’t be! I didn’t think anything about it. I always
know you’re all right. I’m for you, Grace--you know that. I’ve been
so busy since I moved to town that I’ve kept my nose right on the
grindstone.”
His words lacked the usual John Moore flavor, and in spite of his
protest she guiltily attributed his unusual restraint to reservations
as to the Christmas day episode. But his next speech quickly shifted
the ground of her apprehensions.
“I’ve just been down to Bloomington to see Roy,” he said, doggedly
blurting out the sentences. “The boy sent for me; he’d got into a bad
scrape--about a girl. You can guess the rest of it.”
“Oh!” she gasped, feeling the earth whirling. “Not that!”
“Roy was in a blue funk and threatened to run away but I talked him out
of that. The girl’s name is Sadie Denton; she’s not really a bad girl.
I had a talk with her and went down to Louisville with them yesterday
and saw them married. Her folks live there and they’ll look out for
her till Roy finishes at the law school. I guess that’s about all. He
didn’t want any of you to know about it just yet; but I sat down on
that and he agreed I should tell you. I was sure you’d handle it right
at home.”
“Oh, it will break mother’s heart! She’s counted everything on Roy.”
“Well, everything isn’t lost yet,” he replied. “I hope you think I did
right.”
“It was the only thing, of course, John. It was just like you to see it
straight and do the right thing.”
She wormed from him the fact that he had given Roy a hundred dollars,
and that certain payments for the support of Roy’s wife had been agreed
on.
“You’re certainly a friend, John. We’ll return the money at once;
that’s the least we can do.”
When he protested that he did not need the money immediately she
explained that her father’s affairs were looking brighter and that the
return of the sum advanced would work no hardship.
The bad news having been delivered, Moore exerted himself to cheer her,
but a vast gloom had settled upon her. As he shook hands at the gate
her sense of his tolerance, kindness and wisdom brought tears to her
eyes but, left alone, her only emotion was one of fury against Roy.
She stood on the doorstep pondering. Again, as after Roy’s appeal for
money to cover his share of the expense of his automobile escapade, she
thought of her own weakness in yielding to temptation. But for John’s
advice that it would be better for the rest of the family to know at
once of Roy’s tragedy--this being the only word that fitly described
this new and discouraging blight upon her brother’s future--she
would have lacked the courage to communicate the evil tidings to the
household.
It was not until they had all settled in the living room after supper
that she broke the news. Her father sat at the table, reading a
technical journal, with Ethel near by preparing her Sunday-school
lesson. Mrs. Durland had established herself by the grate with
the family darning in her lap. Since Durland’s removal to Kemp’s
establishment a new cheer and hope had lightened the atmosphere of the
home, and Grace, moving restlessly about the room, dreaded to launch
her thunderbolt upon the tranquil scene.
“I have something to tell you; please listen,--you too, father,” she
began quietly.
She used much the same blunt phrases in which Moore had condensed the
story, watching with a kind of fascination a long black stocking slip
from her mother’s hand, pause at her knee and then crawl in a slow
serpentine fashion down her apron to her feet.
“Oh, Roy!” Mrs. Durland moaned, her face white.
Mr. Durland coughed, took off his glasses, breathed on the lenses and
began slowly rubbing them with the corner of the linen table cover.
He desisted suddenly, remembering that Ethel had once rebuked him for
mussing the cover.
“I guess that’s all there is to say about it,” Grace concluded when she
had told everything, not omitting their financial obligation to Moore.
“We’ve all got to make the best of it.”
Grace picked up the fallen stocking and handed it to her mother, who
made a pretense of carefully inspecting a hole in the heel.
“What time’s the first train down in the morning?” she asked. “I must
see Roy--and----”
Ethel, who had sunk back helplessly in her chair, jumped to her feet,
her eyes blazing.
“You shan’t go one step mother! It’s enough that Roy’s brought this
disgrace on the family without you going down there to pet him. It’s
your spoiling him that’s made him what he is. John Moore had no
business meddling in our affairs. What Roy should have done was to
go away and never show his face to any of us again. Father, you tell
mother to keep away from Roy!”
The appeal to Durland, who had so rarely found himself a court of last
resort in the whole course of his life, was not without its humor and
Grace smiled bitterly as she watched her sister, who stood before her,
white, her lips set in hard lines, her hands clenched at her sides.
Durland cleared his throat and recrossed his legs.
“I guess your mother’ll do the right thing, Ethel,” he said.
“I think you’re all crazy!” Ethel flared. “What will Osgood think of
me, with my brother forced to marry a girl off the street.”
“I didn’t say she was off the street,” Grace corrected her. “I’d show
the girl a little mercy if I were you, and I wouldn’t make it any
harder than necessary for father and mother. You’re not the only one of
us who has feelings.”
“I’ll leave! The rest of you may do as you please, but I’ll not let
Osgood think I don’t feel the _shame_ of my brother’s sin.”
“If Osgood reads his Testament he may not see it in quite that light.”
Ethel breathed hard in the effort to think of some withering retort.
The best she could do, however, was not especially brilliant.
“Osgood,” she announced grandly, “is a gentleman!”
“He might be that and still be a Christian,” Grace replied tartly.
“What did you say about trains, Grace,” asked Mrs. Durland, who, deep
in thought, had scarcely heard the colloquy between her daughters.
“I’ll call the station and find out. And I’ll get Irene on the ’phone
and tell her I won’t be at the store tomorrow. I’m going with you,
mother.”
“Irene!”
Ethel caught up and flung back the name as though it were some hateful
and obscene thing.
“Ethel,” said Mrs. Durland serenely, “If you’ve got nothing better to
do you might help me with the darning. I don’t like to go away without
clearing it up.”
V
The visit to Bloomington was not particularly heartening. Roy was in a
sullen humor when they talked to him in the hotel parlor. He wanted to
drop the law course and go West, and they argued the matter most of the
day, Grace alternating between despair at Roy’s stubborn indifference
to every attempt to arouse his pride and ambition and admiration for
her mother’s courage and forbearance in the most poignant sorrow of her
life.
Grace finally left them together and took a walk that led her far
from the campus. She had no heart for looking upon the familiar
scenes or meeting the friends she had left there only a few months
earlier. When she returned to the hotel Roy had been won to a
more tractable humor; and when he left them it was in a spirit of
submission, at least, to what he considered an ungenerous ordering
of fate. Mrs. Durland insisted on carrying out the plan, with which
she had left Indianapolis, of visiting the young woman who was now her
daughter-in-law.
“She’s Roy’s wife,” she said when Grace tried to dissuade her. “I’ll
feel better to see her. And it’s only right I should.”
She took the train for Louisville and Grace went home.
Grace’s thoughts were given a new direction early the next morning when
Miss Beulah Reynolds appeared at Shipley’s shortly after the doors were
opened.
“My dear child, the most astounding thing has happened!” the little
woman declared immediately.
“Your house hasn’t burned down!” exclaimed Grace, amused by the little
woman’s agitation.
“Worse! I’m to have a visitor,--that Mary Graham Trenton whose book we
once talked about. I’ve just had a letter from an old friend in Boston
warning me of the lady’s approach, and asking me to see the Indians
don’t get her. I’ve wired her at Cleveland asking her to stay at my
house--I could hardly do less.”
“I suppose not,” said Grace faintly, wondering why Miss Reynolds had
come to her with the news.
“I’m asking some people to dinner the night the lady
lectures--Tuesday--and I want you to come. Don’t look so scared! She
may not be as terrible as she writes but I’m going to invite Dr.
Ridgely, and my doctor and my lawyer with the hope that they’ll all get
a shock. And I want you to come; you’ve read her stuff, and I’ll count
on you to help keep the talk going.”
“Why, I don’t know--” Grace began, her mind in a whirl of conjecture.
“Come! That’s a dear child. Don’t go back on me; I need your moral
support. At six thirty, then? We have to dine early on account of the
lecture.”
“Why, yes; Miss Reynolds,” Grace answered faintly.
“By the little pink ear of Venus!” exclaimed Irene, coming upon Grace
just as Miss Reynolds left. “What’s Little Old Ready-Money done to you?”
“Nothing,” Grace replied, her mind still in confusion. “She was just
asking me to dinner.”
“From your looks I’d have guessed it was a funeral,” Irene replied, and
Grace, pulling herself together, hurried away to meet an approaching
customer.
Of late she had given little thought to Mrs. Trenton, and it had never
occurred to her in her wildest dreams that she might meet Ward’s wife
in the intimate contact of a dinner table. The prospect kept her in
a state of excitement all day and at times she was strongly impelled
to trump up some excuse for refusing to go to Miss Reynolds’s. But
her earlier curiosity as to what manner of woman it was who bore Ward
Trenton’s name was rekindled by the thought of meeting her. Trenton was
in Syracuse and might not reach Indianapolis for a week or more. He
had said that he had not, in the letter he had written to Mrs. Trenton
from St. Louis, revealed the identity of the woman who had so strongly
appealed to him. Mrs. Trenton would hardly suspect that a girl she met
at a dinner party was the person her husband had described only vaguely
and without indicating her habitat.
Grace decided against writing Trenton of the impending meeting till it
was over. Having quieted her apprehensions she began dramatizing the
scene at Miss Reynolds’s table and she reread “Clues to a New Social
Order” against the possibility that Mrs. Trenton’s book might become a
subject of discussion at the dinner. The thought of seeing her lover’s
wife in this fashion while she herself remained unknown and unsuspected
laid powerful hold upon her imagination.