“A letter for you, dear Nancy.”
Mrs. Winters gestures at it refinedly--she never points--as Nancy comes
in to breakfast looking as if whatever sleep she had had not done her
very much good.
“From your dear, dear mother, I should imagine,” she adds in sugared
watery tones.
Nancy opens it without much interest--Mother, oh, yes, Mother. Six
crossed pages of St. Louis gossip and wanderingly fluent advice. She
sets herself to read it, though, dutifully enough--she is under Mrs.
Winters' eyes.
Father's usual September cold. The evil ways of friends' servants.
Good wishes to Mrs. Winters. “Heart's Gold--such a really _inspiring_
moving-picture.” Advice. Advice. Then, half-way down the next to last
page Nancy stops puzzledly. She doesn't quite understand.
“And hope, my daughter, that now you are really cured though you may
have passed through bitter waters but all such things are but God's
divine will to chasten us. And when the young man told me of his
_escapade_ I felt that even over the telephone he might have”
She sets herself wearily to decode some sort of definite meaning out
of Mother's elliptic style. An escapade. Of Oliver? and over the
telephone--what was that? Mother hadn't said anything--
She finishes the letter and then rereads all the parts of it that seem
to have any bearing on the cryptogram, and finally near the end, and
evidently connected with the “telephone,” she comes upon the phrase
“that day.”
There is only one day that Mother alludes to as “That Day” now. Before
her broken engagement “That Day” was when Father failed.
But Oliver _hadn't_ telephoned--she'd asked Mother _particularly_ if
he had, and he hadn't. But surely if he had telephoned, surely, surely,
Mother would have told her about it--Mother would have known that there
were a few things where she really hadn't any right to interfere.
Mother had never liked Oliver, though she'd pretended. Never.
Nancy remembers back and with fatally clear vision. It is fortunate
that Mrs. Ellicott cannot turn over with Nancy that little shelf-full
of memories--all the small places where she was not quite truthful
with Nancy, where she was not quite fair, where she “kept things from
her”--Mrs. Ellicott has always been the kind of woman who believes in
“keeping things from” people as long as possible and then “breaking them
gently.” Almost any sort of things.
It is still more fortunate that Mrs. Ellicott cannot see Nancy's eyes as
she reviews all the tiny deceptions, all the petty affairs about which
she was never told or trusted--and all for her own best interests, my
dear, Mrs. Ellicott would most believingly assure her--but when parents
stand so much in Loco Dei to nearly all children--and when the children
have long ago found out that their God is not only a jealous God but one
that must be wheedled and propitiated like an early Jehovah because that
is the only thing to be done with Gods you can't trust--
Nancy doesn't _want_ to believe. She keeps telling herself that she
won't, she absolutely won't unless she absolutely has to. But she is
lucky or unlucky enough to be a person of some intuition--she knows
Oliver, and, also, she knows her mother--though now she is beginning to
think with an empty feeling that she really doesn't know the latter at
all.
What facts there are are rather like Mrs. Ellicott's handwriting--vague
and crossed and illegibly hard to read. But Nancy stares at them all
the time that she is eating her breakfast and responding mechanically to
Mrs. Winters' questions. And then, suddenly, she _knows_.
Mrs. Ellicott like many inexperienced criminals, has committed the
deadly error of letting her mind dwell too long on the _mise-en-scene_
of her crime. And her pen--that tell-tale pen that all her life she has
taken a delight almost sensual in letting run on from unwieldy sentence
to pious formless sentence, has at last betrayed her completely. There
is genuine tragedy in store for Mrs. Ellicott--Nancy in spite of being
modern, is Nancy and will forgive her--but Nancy, for all her trying,
will never quite be able to respect her again.
Nancy doesn't finish her breakfast as neatly as Mrs. Winters would have
wished. She goes into the next room to telephone.
“Business, dear?” says Mrs. Winters brightly from the midst of a last
piece of toast and “Yes--something Mother wants me to do” from Nancy,
unfairly.
Then she gives the number--it is still the same number she and Oliver
used when they used to talk after he had caught the last train back to
Melgrove and both by all principles that make for the Life Efficient
should have gone to bed--though to Nancy's mind that seems a great while
ago. “Can I speak to Mrs. Crowe, please?” The explaining can be as awful
as it likes, Nancy doesn't care any more. An agitated rustle comes to
her ears--that must be Mrs. Winters listening.
“Mrs. Crowe? This--is--Nancy--Ellicott.”
She says it very loudly and distinctly and for Mrs. Winters to hear.