Brentwood (16 page)

“We’ll go to a beauty parlor tomorrow.”

“No, we won’t do that either,” said Betty. “If I had any money for beauty parlors I wouldn’t use it that way. Not with all the things I need.”

Just then came a call from upstairs.

“Betty, your mother thinks she would like to have a little talk with your sister now, if you can spare her,” called the father.

“All right, Father, I’m coming,” called Marjorie. Then she turned to Ted.

“If Mother wants me, perhaps I ought not to go with you this morning. But how about tonight? Do you go at night, too?”

“Sure I do!” said Ted, snapping his jaws together as if he had often had to contend for his right to do so.

“Oh, yes, he goes. You can’t keep him home!” snapped Betty. “You’d think it was a saloon with a pool table they have there the way he’s devoted to it. You can’t pry him loose. Even the long walk doesn’t stop him!”

There was a sneer in the end of Betty’s voice, and Marjorie thought she saw resentment quiver over Ted’s sensitive face, as if Betty’s words were like whiplashes on his bare flesh, but he lifted his head proudly with a kind of defiance in his eyes. If she was going to laugh at him he was ready for her.

But Marjorie smiled warmly, with sympathy in her voice as she said, “That’s a pretty good recommendation for the church, I should say. All right, I’ll go tonight if I find I can’t go this morning. How soon do you start?”

“Ought to get going in half an hour,” said the boy, glancing at the clock.

“All right. If I don’t get downstairs in time, you just start without me.”

Then she went upstairs to her mother.

“Your mother did not sleep at all last night,” said the father, standing at the foot of the bed, looking anxiously toward her. “She has been worrying a lot about you, and I told her it was best to send for you and just talk it out and get it off her mind. This morning she has just a shade of fever again, and I thought if we could only get to the bottom of the trouble and talk it through and have a thorough understanding, Mother could rest and not worry, and maybe get a bit of sleep before the doctor comes.”

“Of course!” said Marjorie eagerly. “But why should there be anything to worry about? I do hope I haven’t made you worse, Mother dear, by coming now when you were sick! I didn’t know, of course, but I guess I should have written first and asked if you were willing I should come.”

“No, no, dear child!” said her father in protest. “I’m glad you didn’t. We probably would have felt it wasn’t fit here for you to come now when we are in such straits. We would have been too proud to let you see to what we had fallen. And your poor little mother would have gone on grieving. No, it isn’t about your coming at all that your mother is worried. Although, of course, she, as well as all of us, are ashamed that you had to find us in great poverty. Your mother has been worrying lest you may have thought that when she came to see you some two years ago you might think she came to try and get money out of your adoptive mother. The thought has fairly obsessed her, until I can do nothing to take it out of her mind. She seems to think it will always be there in your mind when you think of us.”

“Oh, my dear little mother!” said Marjorie, flinging herself down on her knees beside the bed and gathering her mother into her arms, brushing the tears away from the thin cheeks and kissing the trembling lips. “Of course not. How could I? In the first place, I didn’t know a thing before Mrs. Wetherill died. I only knew that you had given me up, and I did feel bad about that. I felt as if I had not been wanted, and I suppose that feeling made me love the Wetherills all the more fiercely. They were lovely to me, Mother, of course, and they did love me. But sometimes my heart would ache, thinking how my birth mother didn’t want me, and wishing I could see you just once to know what you were like. But as for money, I never once thought about it. They told me when I was quite young that you were not in circumstances to bring me up the way you wanted me brought up, and so you gave me to them. I think that was all Mrs. Wetherill knew about it until a short time before Mr. Wetherill died. Then he told her, but I do not know just what he told her. I do not think he told her much, because from her letter written just before she died, she seemed to be very much disturbed at what she had found out from you, and terribly upset that you had returned in full all the money they paid for the privilege of adopting me. No, Mother dear, there wasn’t ever a thing said to make me feel you were after money when you came to see me. I think that was what had made Mrs. Wetherill feel that she must tell me about you before she died. I think she was conscience-stricken when she found you still cared about me, and she felt she ought not to have kept you from seeing me. She rather put it upon me that I ought to come and find you, and she suggested that I would have plenty of money and was free to do what I would with it. I think she knew that she ought in some way to make up to you for her selfishness in keeping your child when you wanted her back. I think she understood herself that you were not the kind of people to whom money could make up for what they loved.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” sighed the sick woman with relief. “Then you didn’t come here just out of pity for us?”

“My dear, I hadn’t the slightest idea of pitying you. I felt that I was the one to be pitied. I was all alone in the world, and I didn’t even know if my own people were still living. You know, it was some time since you had been heard from. You might have all died for all I knew, or moved to another country!”

“You poor little girl!” said her mother softly, gathering Marjorie’s hand into her own frail one and squeezing it gently. “You poor little abandoned baby!”

“No, Mother, don’t say that!” pleaded Marjorie. “I was not abandoned, I was sort of cheated away from you, wasn’t I? The letter makes it very plain that you were sick, and under great strain of worry about Father and my twin sister, and you were too sick to realize what you were doing, and goaded into doing it. At least that was what I read between the lines.”

“Yes,” said her mother, “they came to me when I was too weak to understand it all. They told me your father would not live unless he had certain care and attention. A specialist to watch over him and a year or two in a quiet outdoor place where he would be absolutely free from worry. They said your little sister could not live, or at least she would be a cripple if she didn’t have a certain difficult operation.”

“And wasn’t it true, Mother?” Marjorie was wide-eyed with consternation.

“Partly,” said the mother wearily, as if it were something that she had gone over and over so many times that it hurt her to remember. “But there would have been some other way. Oh, there would have been
something
else we could have done.”

“But who told you all this, Mother? Not the doctor, surely?”

“No, it was Mr. Wetherill. He came to see me several times, till I didn’t know what to do. He kept telling me how his wife loved you and would care for you as her own, and how he would see that Betty had every care that science could give her, and that your father should have a beautiful place to recuperate in and all he needed. And he was as good as his word, too. He did all that, lavished things upon us until we had to protest. He seemed to think that made up for the other. And then the worst of all was that he gave me the impression that your father wanted me to sign the papers, when all the time he was too sick even to be told that you and Betty were born, though I didn’t know that yet. Your father did not know anything about the transaction until it was too late to stop it. He was so sick for months that I did not dare tell him what I had done, and so it wore upon me all the heavier. And then when your father got better and I told him, he was brokenhearted. It seemed to me that he would never smile again. He felt that it was a personal disgrace, even though he hadn’t done it himself, nor known about it, and as soon as he was able to travel he went to see Mr. Wetherill and tried to get you back. But Mr. Wetherill was very determined. He had the papers all iron-clad. We had nothing to go on. We had given you up. He even had the doctor’s statement that your father was not in condition to give consent, and I had the sole authority. He had managed it with witnesses and clever questions he had asked in their presence, so that we could do nothing. Of course, it might have been different if we had had money and influence.”

The mother sighed deeply, and the quiet tears flowed down.

“There, Mother dear,” soothed Marjorie, “it doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s all over, and we are together at last and understand each other.”

“But I feel it was all my fault,” wailed the mother. “Sometimes I wake up from dreaming that I am doing it all over again, and then I scream out. I felt as if I had done something utterly inhuman!”

“There, now, Mother, you are getting all worked up again, and you promised me you wouldn’t if I called Marjorie up here,” the father said.

“I know,” said the mother again, trying to bring out a trembling little sigh.

“Well, Mother,” said Marjorie gently, “I’m terribly sorry you’ve had to suffer so many years. If I knew any way, I would so gladly take it to wipe out the memory of all this from your mind, but since we can’t, suppose we just make the rest of the years so bright they will dim the others out of sight? You see, I was spared all that suffering. I longed to know about you, of course, but I was only a child, and I was happy. They were very good to me. I didn’t suffer in any way. But it is awful to me to know that you did. Why can’t we pretend it never happened? Why can’t we just go on from here?”

The mother looked up with a little trembling smile on her lips as if she dared not quite fling off her burden.

“And you don’t blame me?”

“No, I don’t blame you, dearest Mother. And you mustn’t blame the other mother, either, because I don’t think she ever knew the whole thing, nor had even the slightest realization that you wanted me until you came to see her. I think Mr. Wetherill always protected her from everything. He adored her, and got her anything she asked for. He couldn’t bear to say no to her in anything. I suppose he didn’t scruple to do anything to please her. It was selfish of her, of course, to want me who belonged to another, when there were so many other little babies in the world who had nobody to care. But I don’t believe she realized until just before she died that she was selfish. So, Mother, let’s forgive her and forget all about the pain, and let’s have beautiful times together. Will you?”

“You mean,” said the mother anxiously, “that you are willing to come down to being our child? That you are not ashamed of us?”

“Oh, Mother! Of course not. Of course I’m your child.”

“But you have a different name from ours, and a different position. A position that you would not have had as our child.”

“I can change my name,” said Marjorie eagerly. “There is no one to be hurt by my doing it.”

“No, my dear, you could not legally do that,” said her father gravely. “I think it might affect your inheritance, and that would not be right. That is a small matter, of course. Neither your mother nor I would worry about your name. What Mother wants is merely to know if you really love us and are willing to forgive us for having allowed you to be put out of our lives. I am not saying it was not an advantage to you, at least a worldly advantage, but that does not make our act any less questionable.”

“Oh, Father, I do forgive, if there is anything to forgive, and I do love and honor you, and want to be your child. And as for name and inheritance, why all I care for the inheritance is to use it for you all, to make it more easy and comfortable. And Mrs. Wetherill practically suggested that in her last word to me.”

“But, my dear, we can’t live on your money.”

“Why not, Father? If I had been your child in the home all these years, wouldn’t I have been living on yours? And now that I have come back to you, I have no other way to make up for the lost years except through the money. Why can’t we just be glad in it and call it
ours
?”

“My dear, a man must provide for his family.”

“That’s all right, Father, when you get well and are able to do it, but just now
I
am able, and I’m going to enjoy getting and doing things for you all more than anything I ever did in my life. Please, dear Father! But now, don’t you think Mother is getting a little tired? She looks to me as if she needed to go to sleep right away. Suppose you tell her it’s all right. It will be, you know, and we can settle all these details afterward. We’re just all a family together. If Betty had a legacy left to her, you wouldn’t hesitate to let her put the family on its feet, would you? Or Ted? And wouldn’t they want to right away? Well, then, why not take me clear into the family and trust me just the same as you would them? I’m doing the very thing I want to do with my money, and it’s giving me more pleasure than if I were to buy an airplane and a yacht and three or four estates in different parts of the world, so why not enjoy it with me? Besides, what I have spent so far wouldn’t even make a nick in the estate that has been left me, so why worry? Come, Father, kiss Mother and tell her it’s all right and she positively needn’t worry another bit.”

The father stooped over and kissed his wife.

“She is right,” he said tenderly. “She’s our child, and it’s all forgotten, and it’s all right, and you’re not to worry again, ever, anymore. Will you cast it all away?”

“Oh, yes, I will.”

“And will you go to sleep?”

She nodded, dropped happily back on her pillow, and closed her eyes.

So Marjorie slipped away with a vision of her father sitting by the bed holding her mother’s hand, a long, loving look and smile passing between them.

“Aren’t they sweet?” she said as she came down misty-eyed to where Betty was putting a clean tablecloth on the table.

Betty looked up admiringly.

“I’m so glad you can see that!”

“Why, did you think I wouldn’t?”

“Well, you weren’t brought up with them,” she said evasively.

Marjorie studied her a minute, and then she said, “It doesn’t take long to discover they are sweet. But I suppose Ted’s gone, hasn’t he?”