A SERIOUS PREDICAMENT
After nearly three months of suppressed curiosity, the revelation so
calmly made by Squire Hanaford all but stunned Gloria.
“The children were right,” she pondered. “Their father’s time was put in
on the fancy house and he never got paid for it. He expected to have a
share in the big speculation.”
Somehow the children’s attempt at revenge carried a clear claim. They
had been wronged. Their mother, Gloria learned, was a delicate woman who
expected to have had hospital treatment when the big money would come
in. Their father was a plain but indignant man. He made threats against
the Towers, and when Charley Towers learned the true state of affaire he
promptly undertook to pay back what he could of the debt contracted by
his wife. He had been sending money weekly, but it was a small payment
for the great loss. This mason was to have shared in the promised profit
on the entire venture, and so had put into it, besides his own and his
men’s time, quantities of material. Squire Hanaford had explained that
Echo Park was the dream of a young man with noble ambitions. The place,
like many other beauty spots, had been overlooked until the young
discovered it. His name, the squire told Gloria, was Sherwood Graves,
and his ambition reached the point of a fine piece of development with
one of the model cottages completed. This was bought by Mrs. Harriet
Towers, with the money due Gloria in time for her to go to boarding
school. But before that time the land became mysteriously flooded, the
eager but unscientific Board of Health condemned it, and the young man,
cruelly disappointed, lost his health so completely, he was promptly
ordered to a foreign clime or threatened with mental and physical
fatality.
“What a romantic name, Sherwood Graves?” Gloria repeated, “and how noble
for a young man to dream of beautiful parks and model cottages!” she
sighed deeply. Why had her money been such an unfortunate agent?
In those first few days after Squire Hanaford’s revelations, Gloria had
longed so for Jane that only Trixy’s comforting reassurance saved her
from leaving Sandford and going out to the faithful friend at Logan
Center. Twice Jane had promised to come in to see Gloria, but some
sudden illness of one or more of the many children, caused a
postponement fortunate for Gloria, as she had not yet told Jane the
entire story of her stay in Sandford.
“Visiting with her aunt for a while” was a sufficiently reasonable
excuse, and that Aunt Hattie was “so fussy” perhaps influenced Jane in
her prolonged separation from Gloria, for Jane was at all times
considerate.
Now it was clear to Gloria that Sandford girls had purposely avoided
her. Those who sought her companionship were not such as she would have
chosen, and only Trixy, the independent, was really her chum.
“And that’s why the girls have been avoiding me,” she mused bitterly.
“The folks around here—are shunned—for being—in debt.” All the
narrowness of a place like Sandford suddenly confronted her. Trixy, the
brave and lovable, had been her friend, while the others turned their
heads away scornfully. Suspicion painfully confirmed, brought to the
little girl from Barbend a sense of something very like shame. She who
had never known the blight of contempt, now felt the full blast of its
venom. And being a girl, like a fragile human flower, the hidden thing
was magnified. She suspected all Sandford as her enemy, she brooded over
the disgrace until it seemed unbearable. Debt! How she had always pitied
those in debt! But to owe a poor workman with a sick wife and a family
of small children!
“I must see those children,” she determined. “Perhaps I can do
something.” It was just before Thanksgiving and during a long damp spell
of weather that so often proceeds the onset of heavy frost. For two days
Gloria watched in vain for the Gorman children, then she learned from
the boy in the drug store, that their mother was dangerously ill.
Her first impulse was to ask Trixy to drive her out to this place,
wherever it might be, but that was discarded in the face of its
consequent revelations. She could not let even Trixy know that money,
which should have been hers, had been used with such disastrous
consequences. She must find the children alone.
Second River, that section where the Gormans lived, according to the
drug clerk, was too far away to admit of ordinary foot travel. It was
well enough for the children who, no doubt, knew many short cuts, but
not for Gloria. A bicycle was the most practical means of making the
trip, and, fortunately, Mona Sheehan was friendly enough to lend Gloria
her wheel for a few hours on this Saturday morning.
Each new development in her tangle added more to the already
overwhelming weight of suspicious disgrace. And of all dreadful things
possible, that of public censure seemed to the high-strung Gloria the
most dreadful.
“If I could ride away from it all—and go to Jane,” she sighed as the
borrowed wheel rolled over the country road out toward Second River. The
roads were heavy with mud, and as Gloria pedaled along, her spirits
became imbued with the unhealthy conditions surrounding her.
“I don’t blame them one bit,” she told herself. “They always have to
live in the worst places, these poor hard working folks, and if any one
has to wait for their money it’s the poorest. Jane always said so.”
One more long pull up a hill and a coast down another, then the house
with the red barn out front, described as Gorman’s, hove into view.
Confronting it Gloria felt a surge of apprehension sweep over her.
Suppose the mother should be very cross and unreasonable? Or worse yet,
suppose the father were home and should scold—oh, she never could stand
any one scolding, especially a stranger! Even Jane respected Gloria’s
fear and hatred of a wordy war.
Fiercely she pumped the wheel. She would never stop until she pulled
right up to the old gate post, and then she would have to go in, for the
cottage looked directly into the road and, no doubt, some of the
numerous children would espy her coming.
But just as she guided herself carefully over a rough spot and was
taking a necessarily long breath after the exertion, a shout came from
somewhere.
She knew the voice. It was Marty’s!
“Hey! Wait a minute!” came the appeal. “Stop! I want to ask you—”
So abruptly did Gloria back pedal she almost fell to the ground.
“What is it, Marty?” she asked, noting the agitation of the child and
his tear stained features.
“Oh, come quick! I think she’s dyin’!”
Dropping the wheel to the gutter bank, Gloria silently followed the
frightened child to the cottage. He kept moaning and murmuring but his
words were strangled in fright. “She’s dyin’,” he repeated.
A chill of terror seized Gloria at the word dying.
“Oh, no,” she cried. “She must not die, and leave all you babies—”
The boy darted ahead and Gloria quickly followed. She saw nothing of
disorder as she went through the briar path, nor did she notice the
other signs of neglect that confronted her as she hurried to get into
the dingy old house.
But within! What a sight!
“She’s dyin’! She’s dyin’!” moaned Ellen, the oldest girl, who, with a
tiny baby huddled in her arms, was wailing and swaying up and down
against the disordered bed upon which Gloria now saw the afflicted
mother.
“Oh!” gasped Gloria. “You poor—poor creature!”
Gasping for breath and uttering choking gasps the woman lay there, and
even in her agony she seemed to be trying to quiet her panic-stricken
little ones. Now she fastened her eyes upon the stranger and tossed her
head from side to side, struggling to say something, but only biting
back the attempt with colorless lips.
“What is it?” demanded Gloria, from Ellen.
“She—she took another—dose!”
“Of what?”
“The—medicine,” gasped the frightened girl. “He told her not to take any
more, but—she couldn’t stand the pain! Oh, don’t let her die until
father comes!”
“Where is he?”
“Away—workin’. He won’t be home till Saturday night!”
As if the hand of death would wait for time, this overwrought girl could
think of nothing but the terror of her mother dying with the father not
there to know. Her helplessness was pitiful. How they depended upon that
father!
“Was the medicine poison?” demanded Gloria watching with terror the
twitching of the sick woman’s face.
“Two doses was. And the doctor warned her—”
“Never mind that,” ordered Gloria, “and stop crying. We must do
something. What do you give if she is—weak?”
“Coffee,” replied Marty promptly. “It’s on the stove.”
Following Gloria’s lead Ellen got to her feet, lay the baby in its
cradle in spite of violent protests, and although the crying still kept
up, its intensity was quickly lessened by something stuck in the
infant’s mouth.
In a few moments Gloria had the coffee hot and was trying to make the
woman drink some of it.
“Here, please,” she begged, with an arm under the frail shoulders,
“drink a few mouthfuls—”
How she held the woman up Gloria did not stop to consider. She simply
realized that something must be done promptly, and reasoned that the
medicine must have been of a sort to relieve pain, therefore a sedative.
For this, Gloria knew, coffee might act as a reacting stimulant.
Quite as if she had performed a miracle, the children gathered around
the bed, wide eyed and wondering. Ellen stared so that her eyes fairly
bulged out in glaring balls. She had been the most terrified, probably
having a keener understanding of the fate that hung over them, and
perhaps, feeling somewhat responsible for her mother’s accident.
“I put it on the chair,” she protested, “and ma was asleep. When she
woke—” She clenched her hands and still stared at the figure on the bed
as if trying to realize that it breathed and was not dead.
“Don’t be so excited,” cautioned Gloria, although her own heart beat so
she could scarcely keep her arm under the shoulders, while the sick
woman sipped and gasped. Finally, after taking perhaps two
tablespoonsful of the reviving liquid, the heavy burden shifted itself
from Gloria’s support, back to the pillow with a collapsing sigh.
“Better?” asked Gloria, with a sense of liberation.
“Yes,” came the word faintly spoken. Then the fluttering eyes closed and
the woman’s breathing seemed less gasping.
“Now?” asked Gloria glancing around for the first time at the children
who seemed huddled all over the place. “What shall we do?”
“Mrs. Berg ain’t home,” spoke up Marty, who appeared to have the most
sense of any of the panic stricken brood. He seemed like Tommy in his
self reliance.
“She’s the woman who comes in,” explained Ellen.
“She lives by the canal,” added another child, whom Ellen called May.
“I’ll jump on my wheel and get a doctor,” Gloria volunteered.
“Oh, please don’t go away!” begged Ellen, terror again straining her
young face.
“But we must get a doctor,” insisted Gloria, anxiously.
“I’ll go,” spoke up Marty. “I can ride your wheel if y’u don’ mind.”
“Certainly, take it and hurry,” begged Gloria. “And, can you telephone,
Marty?”
“Sure.”
Then she gave him Trixy Travers’ number and asked him to summon her
friend with her car. The next moment Marty was off.
Gloria was deciding quickly that the sick woman should not die if the
doctor would agree to her transference to the Marie Hospital.
“We’ll manage to get her there somehow,” she was deciding, but no hint
of her intention was given to the hysterical Ellen, or to the other
terrified little ones.
While Marty sped off Gloria heated more coffee and again undertook the
difficult task of forcing the half conscious woman to drink some of it.
But even the seriousness of this did not blot out the memory of her real
mission there. Perhaps pride is a tyrant, yet it must be reckoned as
inspiring, when the best that is in one responds to its call. Gloria was
determined to see about that ill-fated little park with its fairy house,
planned by the young man whose dreams failed him.
“Ben Hardy!” thought Gloria suddenly. “He ought to know. He is a student
of nature and this seems to be entirely Nature’s fault.”